Guild Wars 2

“Endgame” might not literally mean “what happens at the end of the game”, but instead be thought as a form of progression (not only for rewards, but for difficulty or content unlock) that functions like a climax: everything you’ve learned until that point is put to test, for a satisfying and rewarding resolution. It makes players feel like they’ve acchieved something, but then they’ll ask for more, so “endgame” never ends up being truly “the end”.

This description might contrast with the idea that endgame is the place where you get the bet rewards, or where you fight the hardest battles, but that’s actually what I meant when I called it a “climax”.

The problem with GW2’s endgame, is that at some point early in the game, after you get the hang of the battle system, it stops challenging you. So, after the initial shock, the game becomes predictably easy until the very end, few exceptions aside. This removes a sense of “difficulty progression”, and prevents casual or “bad” players from ever becoming “better”. There are other problems, like how easy it is to break PvE, which teaches bad habits that are highly rewarding, and also with how random rewards are in this game, to the point where everything is only consistently obtained from the TP, which in turn means that all you need to do is farming gold wherever it is easier and faster to farm.

This means that, when anet adds endgame content, it comes at the risk of having many faults: being easy to break, due to innate problems with pve’s design; being unrewarding, due to the rewards in GW2 being heavily (and negatively) influenced by the existence of the TP; the community not being able to handle it, because it comes at the risk of being too hard in a game that is too easy, with no proper middleground inbetween.

For GW2 to have proper endgame, Anet must do the following:

• Gradually increase the difficulty of content anywhere first. The concept of more challenging acchievements in LS2 is cool, and hopefully, the new maps will also have some zones that are harder than others;
• Creating a reward system that works outside of TP, by being consistent, reliable and unique;
• Finally, at some point, make sure the difficulty is high enough for some content, tie it to an improved reward system, and make sure it offers excellent rewards in exchange of player’s effort <- this will be GW2’s endgame until a new endgame content is introduced in this never-ending cycle;

I also think Anet should just choose the next topic in the list, and start the new round right after. I’m personally anxious for the next discussion topic, so I wouldn’t like to see it delayed for the sake of resetting the votes.

sMihaly.1492:

I have no right or intention to convince you about saying no to mounts, however the majority of players think it is a bad idea. It’s your wishlist, none shall tell you not to wish this and that.

I wouldn’t call “majority” to the forums’ vocal minority that is willing to defend everything that Anet says.

Mounts are an extremely popular feature in the genre, and there’s a reason for that. Mounts have been requested over and over in these forums, and there’s a reason for that too.

I’m not defending mounts or anything, but I fail to see what’s so bad about them.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

This idea makes me excited, it could also tie into nearly every Horizontal Progression idea that has been put forward in this CDI.

It is just a good global ongoing goal to have, and one I think we have been doing but dependent on priorities could do a lot more of, especially from the point of view of using/evolving the Map Completion Meta Game system.

Chris

Hey Chris,

I think filling existing zones with new content and new systems (or expanded old systems) should be a higher priority than adding completely new zones.

The reason for this is that most of the current existing zones play the same way, where you collect map completion, do some cycling events, get 100%, go to a new zone, repeat, and repeat once again. Many of those zones have beautiful locations and a lot of potential for lore. But players have to do the same kind of gameplay, usually at the same level of difficulty, and it gets, you know… a bit monotonous after a time, considering how many zones there are. And then players also have no reason to go back to them, which means they end up forgetting most of the locations they have explored, or many times, they didn’t even fully enjoyed it in the midst of WP rush or event rush.

I feel that many of those already existing zones would still feel very fresh – almost as fresh as completely new zones – if you added unique content and unique rewards to them. I have 100% map completion, but if something new was done to existing locations, most of them would still feel fresh to me.

Quality and immersion over quantity. I think that GW2 has waaay too many zones, but it does very little with them.

Black Box.9312:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Anything can happen at this point. It seems like people are criticizing the entire elite spec simply because they can’t handle its creative guardian/ ranger combo.

That’s what bothers me: It’s NOT creative. It’s not new. It’s plastering something we already have from another class onto this one. I mean I get that maybe it’d be hard to match something as unique as the chronomancer, but this just makes me feel like they didn’t even attempt to do so.

I don’t understand this.

Chronomancer is using Necromancer’s wells. Are they anything alike? No.

Dragonhunter has a shield arrow that absorbs arrows, winged leaps, revenant’s absorb wall, condition damage, support effects and no pets. This is completely unlike the longbow ranger. Yes, the teaser showed a barrage-like skill, and we know they’ll get traps, but it is unknown at this point of their actual effects.

Dragonhunter is quite a creative spec so far, imo, except its mediocre name. I mean, we’re talking about a leaping angel that shoots shield arrows. That’s not a ranger. That’s at chronomancer-level of awesome.

I think the teaser and the spec’s name are giving it a worse impression than what it deservers.

DarcShriek.5829:

War is hell. Heroes die.

Usually, a good story would make a hero’s death more meaningful, either by giving us a proper character arc for that hero before their death, or making the consequences of their death major.

You can have a story that is both realistic and cruel, while being satisfying and rewarding to the reader/ audience. One of the reasons for why Game of Thrones is so popular is because it can do both pretty well.

Eir’s death felt kinda of empty to me.

To be honest, Justin’s confirmation doesn’t even comes as a real surprise to me.

The moment the wardrobe and the new dye systems were announced, I immediatly understood why the removal of the old pvp rewards came as soon as they came. It would have made pvp very exploitable by the farming community.

It might seem a bit bad to us fellow pvp players, but I believe this “sacrifice” will ultimately be better for us reward-wise: the day the feature patch comes, it will be us, the pvp players, that will have half or more of the wardrobe filled. No pve player will ever come close to how many skins unlocked, except the odd few that have unlocked plenty of bank slots for the sake of storing their skins. This will give us an edge, especially when it comes to rare skins. While the pve community will have to spend hundreds of gold to get some of their favourite skins, chances are, some of those have already been unlocked by us.

It would be unfair if, the month before the patch hits, pvers were to flood pvp just for the sake of easy skin/ dye farming, and end up with as many – or almost as many – skins and dyes unlocked as we have gathered over the year and a half playing pvp.

So ultimately, this change will allow us to preserve our edge on wardrobe completion, which is the only thing we have, reward-wise, over what pvers (crazy exceptions aside) have. Even if it comes at the cost of a month without rewards.

TL;DR
By locking us out of meaningful rewards for a month, the value of our old rewards will actually increase and become a lot more meaningful, due to the fact that pvers can’t just come to pvp now and get what we already have.

So I can say that, ironically, we are being rewarded better by being less rewarded.

By itself, I think this last patch was decent. Small steps (mostly) in the right direction. It reminds me of the monthly balancing patches we used to have before the big powercreep storm, except with more QoL changes this time. And to be honest, the game’s balance was getting slightly better before june’s/july’s (?) patch, and will pobably get slightly better with this one.

What I think was -and still is- Anet’s big mistake, is their extremely slow reaction to the other big patch before this one. The game went crazy with powercreep, and the pvp’s community pretty much broke. Anet should have hotfixed it with deeper changes, yet, for every single excuse, they’ve been delaying it, and delaying it, and now that a new patch is out, not enough was done because they only want to “shave” it.

Here’s the thing: I like Anet’s shaving approach, but if a single patch bursts the pvp down with negative consequences, Anet should fight fire with fire. Which they didn’t, they let – and are still letting – those negative consequences to exist out there and slowly tarnish the state of pvp.

Also, in a slightly unrelated way, I don’t think their shaving balance process works very well in a 3-month schedule, because it means too little for too long. I don’t mind bigger patches dealing with underpowered stuff and new build options, but serious balance problems should be “shaved” every two weeks and not every month and a half or more.

My recommendation to Anet: adding counters is cool, but unless you want to make this game a rock-paper-scissors game, seriously consider toning down or upping the skill floor/ ceiling of some of the current troublesome builds. Every two weeks. It can be little changes at a time, it doesn’t matters. But don’t make whatever remains of this community to wait three more months for a small shaving of a monstrous meta.

I would like to see better placement of waypoints too. Getting to svanir is annoying.

There are a number of flaws in the personal story. Let’s list them for ANet. Feel free to add to this list.
-No dialogue choices
-Dialogue cutscenes look bland and unrealistic. Make it cinematic!
-Quality>Quantity. Too many boring subplots and uninteresting characters.
-Voice acting needs better directing, as a poster above me put.
Anything else? Add to the list. Let’s make this easy on ANet so that they know what they can do to make the game even better than it already is.

Yeah, I think people in this topic have made it quite clear of the biggest and the lesser problems with personal storyline. I’ll add a bit to your list, based on my observations:

Top Priorities (The issues that really need to be improved):

• Dialogue
• Voice Acting
• Character Development

Lesser Issues (Problematic, but not as much as the issues above):

• Cutscene cinematics.
• Players have a choice on the actions to take, but not any (meaningful) choice on the reactions their characters should have.
• Subplots should be unified by/ within the main plot, instead of being completely unrelated to each other and unrelated to the plot at hand. + (More on that bellow).

Things to consider

• One or two extra plot twists in the main story.

I wanted to add “more grey morality” and “less ego flattering” in there, I really wanted, but I believe those are necessary ingredients for better dialogue, for better character development, and can even function as fuel for more twists in the main plot and more interesting options the player’s avatar can make. Naturally, quality > quantity is also an important factor to achieve most of that.

+ Example for one of the points above: When you create an human, there’s this really awesome cinematic about the centaurs, and feels like something epic and important is going to build from that. But then the human storylines ignores it most of the time, and only the background story and the hearts/ events of the game are left to narrate the war with the centaurs. What if all the subplots were part of the bigger treat, and what if all of them helped to build up for a big climax against the centaurs? That would have been more exciting, and would have made each subplot more interesting.

Asgaeroth.6427:

To be honest GW2 doesn’t play like an MMORPG. It plays a lot more like a traditional ARPG like Path of Exile, Torchlight, or Diablo 2. It’s just not isometic. People might come here looking for that next big MMORPG fix they’ve been looking for after being bored of WoW, EQ2, and other traditional MMORPGs. They won’t really get it here because it’s designed as an ARPG at it’s core with MMORPG mechanics tacked on. That’s not a bad thing, it’s really fun if you understand what they’re trying to do. It’s just not WoW HD.

I’m a bit disappointed with the direction(less) that GW2 took after launch, and I was never expecting it to be a WoW clone. In fact, I have never played WoW nor any other subscription-based mmo.

Even if you compare GW2 to other games like, say, Diablo II (this one I’ve played), DII has two fundamental game design pillars that GW2 does not: 1) It has plenty of challenging content; 2) It’s a highly rewarding game – in fact, it’s a masterpiece in this regard. DII is an example of how addicting a game can be based on loot/ rewards alone.

Anet wants to be innovative, but there’s a difference between innovation that is desired, and innovation that is hipster.

Desired innovation is the one that comes out of necessity or evolution, like the dynamic events or the concept of horizontal progression, for example. Many players want to see the old archaic formula to change, either because they’re bored of it, or because it was built on outdated hardward restrictions. Seamless and dynamic quests, or the removal of gear grinding, is an answer to that.

Hipster innovation (hipster word used as a metaphor – not trying to judge hipster people here) is to change or to be different for the sake of it. It’s certainly an interesting experience, but it might come at the cost of desired content. The refusal by Anet to bring many features (like raids), only for them to implement similar-but-worse content for the sake of “being different than what other mmos do” does not helps this game much. More times than not, this kind of innovation is unnecessary, gimmicky, and ultimately does not priotizes quality because it undervalues that some estabilished mmo content is loved and desired by the fanbase for a reason.

But the biggest problem really is the direction that the game has taken (or didn’t take). Suddenly, Anet went against their manifesto and added gear grinding. I’m not sure if it was some kind of panic button, a desperate attempt to grab other mmo players, or something. But it was, among many other decisions, contradictory to many estabilished gameplay elements or design philosophy.

Anet’s attempt to try to appeal to everyone is not working either. Ascended gear is once again a good example. Its existence annoys those who wish for a bigger focus on horizontal progression. In order to not annoy those players too much, Anet made it so that the stat difference between ascended and exotic gear is very small – which in turn, is very unsatisfying reward for those who love vertical progression. In the end, both sides of the playerbase might find content like this underwhelming.

Finally, anet’s execution on several concepts is very mechanically cold. Tyria feels more and more like a gemstore service or a material-grinding cycle than a living world. This is because Anet is very careless of lore, flavor, immersion and storytelling when they add new stuff, like, again, ascended gear. Instead of enhancing exploration, making challenging and exciting adventures, and telling stories around ascended and legendary gear, all those items are instead “thrown” into the world, gated under massive, generic grinding, and feel flavorless and cold in the end.

Dand.8231:

The pros greatly outweigh the cons

Quoting this for emphasis.

For some reason, I thought adventures were going to be like quests, aka, an improved version of Hearts. Perhaps with even some storytelling there. But it turns out that they are nothing more than jumping puzzles/ mini-games. In the future, I would like to see some adventures use the game’s battle system. And by “some”, I mean, most of them.

I also like the concept of mastery points, it’s there so you explore as much as you can. But it gets bad when it is disruptive to your playing experience. When a player must force themselves to stop doing map events and practice adventure mini-games against their will, so that they get enough points to not have their experience earned go to waste, then something is wrong.

Talyn.3295:

HELLruler.4820:

This game failed to beat the trinity, now we suffer the consequences

The people who failed to let go of the old trinity are suffering, the rest of us are having quite alot of fun with the new one.

I find the old trinity boring. GW2’s failed attempt at changing it just happens to be even more so.

When we resort to arguments like “people are stuck to the past”, then that is proof enough how the new failed to convince the playerbase. When something is good, it should be convincing by itself. If people are “failing to let go of the old trinity”, it’s because the new one isn’t convincing enough.

Anyways, there exist a lot of objective arguments that pretty much point out at GW2’s failed attempt of changing the trinity. Defiance, condition stacking, lack of party support mechanics and an archaic stat system fine-tuned for a trinity game in a non-trinity game. Yes, what a masterpiece.

I like this game’s pvp, but I certainly agree with most points in this thread. Let me add my $2 cent:

- GW2 has its own trinity: damage, control, support. But it… kinda doesn’t makes use of it. Support builds are extremely restricted, both for mechanical reasons and skill diversity. And there’s no such thing as control builds: most of the control co-exists in burst or bunker builds.

Does a d/d bunker ele or a ward/ bubble guardian get to choose between more control or more defense? No, they get both. Does a shatter mesmer get to choose between unique party support, control or extreme burst? Nope, it gets all of them. Etc.

In GW2, every build can do a little too much of everything, and usually, what separates builds from each other, are at how extreme they can be. Which lead us to another problem:

- Extreme condition spamming from some builds. Extreme boon spamming from others. Extreme burst damage from some others, although thankfull, this has been getting nerfed. Extreme aoe effects from pretty much most builds, but thankfully, this will also get nerfed someday.

There’s almost never a tactical reason to use a specific condition or boon at the right time. Usually, you spam most of them as early as you can do so, and stack them high, because doing them as quickly as possible can make the difference between life and death. I feel that this is a problem with the lack of an energy management resource, whose existence usually allows to slow down the pace of a game; and too many sources that trivialize that stuff, especially from traits (like traits that let you spam clones, spam shatters, spam boons, spam conditions, whatever else).

Finally, traits are also problematic to me:

- Is the trait system really needed? No, really, what does it contribute to this game?

So far, the trait system only exists to dumb down classes (massive generation of clones, no clone management needed to use shatters, lots of passive condition cleansing, etc, etc), or lead to extreme builds (the condition/ boon/ etc spam, boring stacks of +X stats, etc), or make utility skills even stronger at what they do (cantrips being even more defensive than how defensive they already are) by overloading those skills with.. guess what… boons, boons, boons, conditions, conditions, conditions, cleansing, cleansing, cleansing, damage stacking, damage stacking, damage stacking…

GW1 had a very elegant system where with only 8 slots and some equipment runes, you could create countless builds. GW2’s system is the opposite. And I don’t even mind the restrictive weapon skillset system – I actually enjoy it, it gives personality to each weapon for each profession. But in addition to skills and equipment’s bonus, GW2 has an extremely convoluted trait system, that more often than not, it restricts your builds instead of expanding them, and trivializes a lot of GW2’s combat, by offering countless, unneeded and so-many-that-the-devs-don’t-have-time-to-balance bonus that unneedely stack into extreme amounts. Besides that, the placement of stats, all the tiny minor traits that don’t work or are not good enough (or are poorly placed) only restrict more and more building options.

The trait system should be revamped in a future expansion, and be made much simpler and elegant, much like GW1’s skill system was. Remove the minor traits, remove the stat allocations, remove the +stat traits. Streamline it to a bunch of slots, let us choose between a single elite (grandmaster) trait, two master traits and maybe three or four normal traits, and let it be. Maybe let us improve the effectiveness of our favourite weapons, by improving or modifying their skills, much like how traits were originally designed to do so before they were revamped mid-development.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Rocky launch

Difficulty spikes

Inadequate rewards

Can’t farm

Also, I’m bad at the maths.

Time Spent Farming Ascended.

Seriously, I still haven’t touched SAB because I use my available time for ascended and for dailies. I feel this is the biggest problem with the return of sab: it came at the wrong time. It came at a time where the comunity is priotizing the new ascended shinies over anything else. But to be honest, I think it would greatly help if sab had a daily associated to it, like the last few patches, if the final acchievement award offered more acchiv. points, and maybe if it was a viable way to invest for ascended gear.

Well, yes, let’s wait for the blog posts related to the april’s patch, and see how it goes. Hopefully, they’ll be online in one or two weeks.

I do agree they should make an official commentary. So far, they have only talked about the state of the professions in one of the boards: the necromancer.

Unlike “normal” festivals, queen’s gauntlet (challenging content) and the bazaar (unique, extremely fun, gorgeous explorable map) offer some things that the game, as a whole, is lacking at – or is not as good at. For this reason, those two maps are better as permanent content than temporary, because as long as they exist, they make the game as a whole more interesting.

The only exception is queen’s farming place. Highly desired farming spots are fine as temporary “festival” content.

I’ve said it before in this thread, and I’ll say it again: (an evolution of the) dynamic events are still the future of GW2, but for them to not degenerate into laggy, unfun zergfests, Anet will have to create anti-zerg mechanisms. They’ll have to create and polish mechanics that make (force) zergs to spread, especially with event scaling, so as to make sure that each dynamic encounter can be as interesting as a dungeon/ instance/ queen’s gauntlet encounter could be.

The meta event in southsun proves that in an unfortunate way. It’s hard, yes, but is it strategical? Every time I used to go there, when it was still populated, it was nothing more but a giant zergfest of hard-to-see one-hit kills.

Dynamic events just don’t work with zergs. Making them challenging, interesting or fun, while keeping the zerg there, will never work. As someone else said, it’ll either be too easy, or so hard that every player must play perfectly.

A scaling system that forces players to spread into many small groups of 5-ish would be great. Even better if some of those meta events happened at the same time as other meta events do somewhere else in another map, to further spread out the population. An event could spawn several mini-events across a large area of the map, demanding players to go to any of those points to complete an event – or even to initiate it.

Because it would be so much easier to create interesting content if the system can make sure there’s only 2-8 players doing a specific task, and not 25+.

One of the biggest obstacles to this, however, would be (the lack of) pre-planning. A zerg is an unorganized mess, but there’s certainly many organized players within it. Having an event requiring pre-planning before initiating could be a good idea, as long as it could “hand-hold” those player’s organization a bit. Incentivate players to form parties before an event starts. Warn them that they’ll have to spread. Guide each party to different sections of the area. This might seem crazy, but there could be a system that would mark the place of the map where each party would have to go, but no other players outside of that party or outside of a small group would be able to see it. Anyone could still contribute and help, but generally, instead of an universal “go there” orange circle on the map, the system could generate several personal orange circles, guiding the zergs to all sorts of different directions. Before an event starts, players would be able to choose where they would want to go.

“Should I prevent the assassin from reaching the NPC with crowd control, or should I defeat their boss near the cliff? The assassins will only stop spawing if the boss is killed, but the event will fail if the assassins kill the NPC.” After choosing one of the options, each player would be “guided” to their respective place with an orange circle marked on the map, but they could always change their “path” if they wished to. If both sides were successful, the event as a whole would universally reward all players. And if tehre were 15 players, or 20, or 35? The system would scale to create more “paths” to spread the zerg further, in addition to making each one harder with more champions.

And then, in situations where each small group of players could complete their own “personal” mini-event, they could help other players nearby to do the same, until all mini-events were finished. Then, again, the event as a whole would be successful, and it would reward all players involved, and spawn an universal chest, create a new event chain/ sequence, whatever.

Dynamic events need zerg-control mechanics.

@HikariNoTen

Your idea has been suggested several times in the elementalist forum, and I agree.

Arcana: nerf attunement cooldown rate to 30% (from 60%).
All grandmaster minor traits: reduces their respective attunement’s cooldown by half.

This would be extremely interesting for players that want to “specialize” in one or two specific attunements, and also create new synergies with -20% cooldown traits and other “while in X attunement” traits.

It would also have the extra advantage of allowing builds to be less dependent on arcana.

Evans.6347:

The problem isn’t that we don’t have any options, the problem is that we have to consider them.

Paying €45 and not even getting access to the new class is terrible marketing no matter what. Sneaky, shady and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I’m sad of all those normal, less informed players that will buy HoT to play with the revenant, only to find out that they can’t because they have used all of their original character slots.

Ohoni.6057:

Do I think it’d be nice of them to give us a free character slot? Sure, free things are always nice.

If you are paying $50 to play with a revenant, then the character slot required to play the revenant is not a “free thing”. It’s a required mechanism for you to be able to use the very class you just paid for.

Also, having 1+ choices to pick a class and having 0 choices are not the same thing.

People “missing” include the original director (Eric Flannum?), writers, among others. The living world team’s size also happens to be around 20-30 people, only. So they are clearly working on something big in the background. Even NCSoft has talked about it several times.

Many people loves swords, the idea of an elemental swordsmaster is pretty cool, and there’s some iconic examples from other gaming series with similar classes (think of Red Mage from final fantasy). I, personally, would love to wield a Bolt with my Elementalist. In fact, I absolutely love swords. And elementalists.

Because we know the current weaponry is going to be expanded for all professions in the future, here’s my wishlist for a possible mh sword for the elementalists:

So, what do Elementalists lack?

Dedicated condition-damage weapons. Elementalists already have plenty of party support, especially from Staff; Scepter already focuses on “single-targetting” bursting, daggers already fulfill the “melee mage” role, and focus is defensive.

How would this work?

Elementalists have plenty of access to burning, and decent access to bleeding. Taking inspiration from the warrior’s sword, our bladed weapon is going to bring in easier access to bleeding.

What makes it different from other condition damage builds?

Necromancers and engineers have access to poison, and can inflict a lot of aoe, ranged condition damage. Engineers can almost even “burst” with it. An elementalist with mh sword would have a more rigid range (600, inbetween dagger and scepter), rely only on two conditions to deal damage, but be able to cover the with several other, more defensive conditions (weakness, cripple, etc).

So let’s formulate a skillset at last!

Fire Attunement

1. Fire Trail

• Slash your sword into the air, sending a scorching trail your opponent and anyone inbetween you and them.
• 600 range, piercing, direct damage only;

2. Flame Wave, 6c

• Swing your sword, spreading a wave of flames to all foes around you;
• Mechanically similar to guardian’s staff auto-attack, 600 range, 3-4s of aoe burning;

3. Call of Fire, 15c

• Thrust your sword into the air, filling it with flames. You burn foes for 1 second for every third attack;
• 15 seconds.

Water Attunement

1. Healing Slice

• Attack at melee (130) range. Each strike spashes water around you, healing you and nearby allies at that range.

2. Spring Swing, 12c

• Swing your sword, spreading water waves that apply regen to you and all allies around you.
• 4-6s of regen, 600 range.

3. Ice Block, 15c

• Block the next incoming attack with a frozen blade. The ice is shattered by the impact, bleeding foes and making them vulnerable.
• 5 stacks of vulnerability for 6s, 5 stacks of bleeding for 6 second.

(Sequence) Icy Summoning

• Manifest the ice in your blade into a chilling beam against your foe.
• 2s chill.

Air Attunement

1. Lightning Slash (Chain Sequence)

• Two quick hits for low damage, at 600 range thanks to lightning’s aid, followed by a much slower hit that summons a random sequence of lightning bolts within the radius of the target.

2. Blade Storm, 10c

• Leap to your foe with the aid of lightning, striking them fast with a flurry of strikes.
• 8x (low) damage, melee range (130), leap finisher.

3. Call of Thunder, 15c

• Thrust your sword into the air, calling into it a lightning bolt. You inflict 3s weakness to struck foes every fifth attack;
• 15 seconds.

Earth Attunement

1. Magnetic Strike

• Wave your sword through the air with magnetic power, striking and bleeding your foe at range.
• 600 range, 2 hits, 1 stack of bleeding for 6s for each hit.

2. Rocking Blade, 6c

• Throw your sword into the foe like a rock-weighted spear, and bring it back with magnetic power.
• 600 range, slow but strong attack, 3 stacks of bleeding for 12 seconds, 100% projectile finisher.

3. Counter Quake, 15c

• Block the next incoming attack. If an attack is blocked, target foe and foes around you are knocked down by a groundshacking impact.
• Blast Finisher.

(Sequence) Ground’s Summoning

• Manifest your blade’s the shacking power around your ground, crippling nearby foes.
• Blast Finisher.

So, whats the playstyle?

This MH Sword elementalist has a few key details to note: It can spread several conditions to cover burning and bleeding, one of which is reliable; it has one source of bleeding outside earth (in water) and two sources of burning outside fire (fire’s #3 passive effect, earth’s projectile finisher on a fire field). Fire and air offer more aoe and/ or multi-hits to make use of their passive third skills, while earth focuses on applying bleeding through slower means. The two truly melee-range attacks are either supported by a leap (air) or are meant only as a defensive tool (water’s auto-attack). The counter skills allow for an interesting duelist/ riposting flavor.

Thanks for reading!

EDIT 1
Improved the skillset based on feedback. Call of Fire activation was changed to every third attack (instead of every fifth), and bleeding skills were improved.

Except that there is no such thing as “good power creep”. Power Creep is already and deliberately a word with negative conotations.

Power creep is the consequence of continuously buffing strong options or strong builds (that do not need to be buffed) to be on par with even stronger (= overpowered) options. There’s a limit that, once crossed, game balance goes crazy and everything becomes mindlessly overpowered, and power creep pushes towards that direction. PvP turns into a shallow and unfun instagib game, and PvE’s content becomes trivialized.

Besides, buffing can be equally frustrating as nerfing on a reversed scenario. You’ll get happy when it happens to your profession, but you’ll “start crying” when other professions get buffed enough to make them generally stronger than the profession you play with.

Vagrant.7206:

What the heck is with ArenaNet’s armor design team? It’s like they have no conception of simplicity or elegance. Please bring back the Guild Wars 1 armor design team!

GW1 also had a LOT of terrible reskins with random, ugly details added in. That’s Anet’s armor design for you. They’ve already proven for years and years that they can rarely design a good armor set without overdesigning it with useless crap.

The thing that GW1 had for it, though, was that it was easier to create armor back then. This meant there was more diversity and that we would get more sets more frequently, so the chances of getting something that actually looks good were higher.

Even so, let me remind you that male elementalists had to wait until Factions to have a gray armor that did not look ridiculous, and they had to wait until Nightfall to get non-grey armor.

Ultimately, bad armor is merely a Guild Wars franchise tradition. To this day, I still ask myself how can a company with some of the greatest artists in the industry be so incredibly bad at designing armor sets.

24h decay is too much. Unless it was a conditional decay. For example, if you have less than 20-30 tournaments played, you decay every 24h. If you have less than 100, you decay weekly. If you have over 100-200, you decay every two weeks, because by that point, your score should be stable and reliable enough, and not require a fast decay.

About stun warriors (and interrupt mesmers, if they are ever to pop up someday in the future), I think stability is too available at the moment. Some of its skills should have their cooldown increased, and other compete with alternative viable options. That beid said, I think warriors can stun-lock for way too long. This makes the game unfun unless you’re overloaded with stun breakers, at which point they trivialize the warrior. I feel balance here still needs to be fine-tuned a slight bit. I don’t think such a build should range from unfunly dominating to completely pointless just because of the abudance of stun-breakers and stability.

Seisus.6591:

Knox.8962:

As it stands right now, a revenant using the maximum DPS setup can’t even out damage a Phalanx Strength warrior (who provides a ton of group utility that the revenant can’t come close to matching) in an organized group.

Where are you getting your information. The Revenant hasn’t even been tested yet since the buffs/Shiro were added.

He probably did some math.

Valento.9852:

Now that Jon Peters told us he plans to change one of the guardian tomes, namely one of the tome’s most powerful skill, Light of Deliverance, may become a signet, it just shows how they don’t care about elementalist elites…

It shows that in the stream, Karl unintentionally leaked the new elite icons, and JPeters then went on to explain them.

Tomes are probably being changed so they can fit in the currently existing skill types. We don’t know if elites like Tornado or others will get similar changes or not.

Perhaps we should wait until Tempest’s reveal to find out anything about it.

Flissy.4093:

I think the main issue with D/D bunkers is their damage potential was too strong for a bunker.

Look at bunker Guardians, they can really never kill. Can’t say the same about Ele’s.

One of the best things about ele bunker nerfs, is that their damage isn’t being nerfed. To be honest, I like the idea of bunkers with some damage. It fits the elementalist’s flavor of destruction, and makes them different from guardians. Besides, professions that can’t kill or be killed is boring to the game, imo.

Rerroll.9083:

Most top 50qp dont play anyway

How do you know that? Regardless, I’m sure most of them will play it for this patch, and with 25-50 custom servers for the beta, it seems good enough for me.

Besides, the devs did say they wold reward the qp players somehow. So it’s fair.

And then you learn to dodge, and then you learn to attunement-swap, and then you learn to burst, and then you realize that the elementalists are still not quite there up with other professions.

Why did they decide to nerf it? What was the problem that they were trying to fix? Knowing this answer would help us understand why they nerfed the skill the way they did.

Had they found the skill to be too strong in every single scenario, they would have increased its energy cost or nerfed its effect. Simple, and it would solve the problem, right? But they didn’t do any of that, which implies that was not the problem in the first place.

The added CD implies that they decided to nerf this skill because of how strong it was when used several times consecutively. Because that’s exactly what a CD is meant to do. If that is true, than the addition of the cooldown makes perfect sense and I can’t of anything better that they could have done.

Most people that are upset by this change do not understand that the more tools that a developer has to balance a skill, the easier it will be to target and fix the main problems without creating secondary consequences. Balancing skills around cooldowns and energy costs gives to developers much more freedom to make better balance decisions than simply balancing around one or the other exclusively. Some people believe that the Revenant should be balanced exclusively through energy costs, regardless of when that might be appropriate or not. We have to be careful of that, because while it may make sense for some skills, it may not make sense for others.

You probably didn’t pay much attention. The new DPS traits shown were so OP, that Jon Peters had to comment that their numbers would probably be toned down.

I mean, 20% damage increase on enemies standing on symbols. Think about it. That’s absolutely god tier in PvE.

Oh yes, this lack of party-driven content also leads to a lot of support builds becoming pointless. Most of pve’s builds have degenerated into DPS + some defense, or DPS + Magic Find, because there’s no reason to pick anything else unless you want to grind or explore at a slower pace.

Angel McCoy.1832:

Tell me this. Why, in your opinion, are folks so enamored with the Mursaat?

Hello Angel McCoy,

There’s much to say about this, so I hope I can find the best and simplest words.

Mursaat were a successful acchievement from all angles:

• Interesting story concepts behind them (like the “false gods” arc in GW1: Prophecies);
• As ancient beings, they are a rich source of Tyrian lore, and much of their lore is very appealing by itself too;
• Despite being great sources of lore, they have the right degree of mystery and mysticism to keep the player teased and anxious for more;
• Their mystery and mysticism were coupled with other attributes that fit in well, like some sort of arrogance, sense of superiority and alien-ish behaviour;
• Their aesthethics are absolutely excellent. They look like majestic, floating monuments. What better way to design a race that is both grand and powerful, ancient but mystic? It’s all very poetic, McCoy.
• The way the story presented them was also very effective. They didn’t talk much in the presence of the player, yet it was clear how impactful their actions were in the history of Tyria. Their scarce words were enough to define them while preserving their mystery.
• They were an effective faction. Organized and powerful, they were both very fantasy-driven while still feeling believable, unlike the cartoon-ish take for Scarlet (of a single individual with evil laughs and evil intentions that suddenly conceives more technology than the entire world and suddenly gathers unknown factions out of nowhere). Players can understand how strong Mursaat are as individuals and as a faction, while Scarlet’s acchievements remain too exaggerated for a single person in a short amount of time.
• Their attempt to protect Tyria from the Titans or they running away from the dragons. This makes them multi-layered: not totally evil, not totally all-mighty. Signs of cowarding behaviour or good will.
• The gameplay. This should not be overlooked. Mursaat were also behind interesting gameplay mechanics that made the player feel respect for them, like everyone’s memory of jumping into the first squad of Mursaat and being completely wrecked while those superior floating beings passed through their corpses. This also lead to another interesting marriage between story and gameplay, through the story quest to get infused armor. Meanwhile, GW2’s version of ascension, agony and infusion is completely cold and poor: no story behind it, no interesting gameplay quests, nothing: those words, in GW2, are just the face of a grinding mechanic.

Let’s say that Mursaat were very successful from many angles. Writers, artists, gameplay designers, all of them contributed to make Mursaat what they are. It’s not like Mursaat are the only interesting beings in all of Tyria – but they were some of the most well developed, and that has pushed them to higher popularity.

Also, Mursaat feel more unique to GW. While dragons, evil gods and evil liches are commonly seen in the fantasy landscape, and rightful so, as they make for iconic, memorable and marketable villains, anet has managed to acchieve the same with some more unique concepts, like the Mursaat. They are to Tyria kind of like what the Nazgul are to Middle-Earth – aesthetically stylish, having the right balance between mystery and lore, impactful and respectful, and ultimately very iconic.

When Anet decides to introduce Mursaat again, make sure that everything is in their favor again: their presentation, their dialogue, their artistic vision, the musical themes for them, and even – and specially – the GAMEPLAY! The gameplay itself should be an artistic tool.

You don’t need to sit in earth to make use of Stone Heart.

You only need to switch to earth while under pressure, use Ether Renewal while running in circles/ running away, switch to another attunement, and come back. If you’re still under pressure, every other MH dagger attunement has a defense now – use burning speed, shocking aura, updraft or your heals immediatly. Perhaps a lightning flash is good too. And all else you have to do, is to put heavy pressure on your target – make them go defensive. This should give you some room to breath, to finish them or delay their offensive skills until you get back to earth for another ether renewal.

It works specially well with celestial and with sigil of doom (plus battle + strength combo), because the pressure you put on your target is higher, you make better use of condition damage due to earth investment, and you’re ticking your opponent’s health decently with 2-3 conditions while “wasting your time” casting ether renewal.

I’m using 6 points in earth and 4 in water for cantrip traits and healing. So far, I’ve been equally successful with 4 in fire or 4 in arcana. With arcana, the protection you get, in addition to stone heart, offers you massive defense, and unlike stone heart, it overlaps into other attunements. It also frees you to use stone splinters in 2 earth. But if you invest in fire, you’d go with earth’s embrace in 2 earth, and pick spell slinger and burning fire, which should give you most of the vigor and regen you need, situational protection, and generally higher might/ damage/ condition control/ pressure.

And if you slot armor of earth on your utility, or have elemental attunement, churning + stone heart + rock solid is surprisingly effective as long as you aren’t being pressured by conditions.

Solo queueing is currently unfair to leaderboard, so yeah…

That being said, the devs have plans to separate solo queue from premades in the future.

Better rewards, more game modes and the like all add up to make the game more satisfying or addicting.

But ultimately, GW2 needs fixing in some of its core mechanics, and most of it is linked to the lack of risk vs reward, skillful playing or counter-play behind some key skills, traits or other effects. When we look at the biggest problems with GW2’s combat, we’ll notice that there is an excess of everything: too much aoe, too many pets, too many passive procs, etc. Although a traditional energy system would help out to give more weight to skill usage and set up the pace of combat a little better, by not having one, something has to compensate for it, and cooldowns are not enough. Thus why telegraphed attacks, counter-play, risky skills and the like should exist more often.

GW2’s pvp will be taken a lot more seriously once the core problems that lead to skill’s spam are fixed or greatly toned down.

Ray.2640:

Why is it that when changing something in the Elementalist you always accompany it with huge nerfs to avoid “power creep” and when buffing other classes it’s just a flat out buff with no strings attached?

Nerfs for the meta stun-lock warriors.
Nerfs for the meta burst necromancers.
Nerfs for the meta s/d evade-spam thieves.
Nerfs for the meta spirit evade-spam rangers.

Pretty much the entire OP pvp meta is going to be nerfed.

Elementalists might “lose” the protection from elemental attunement or the vigor from renewing stamina (or both), but all the builds they have to fight against will get their damage nerfed, and many of them will get less vigor as well.

zell.3051:

If they turn gw2 into yet another korean anime fanboy game I am out of here.

Because having flying swords in a fantasy setting automatically turns it into korean anime, right?

LSD.4673:

Not sure how people managed to be disappointed. GW2’s armour design as a whole is pretty awful.

That’s what I’ve been saying.

Anet’s never been that great at armor sets. By marketing and hyping legendary armors as much as they did, they only ended up exposing one of their biggest weaknesses.

It’s actually quite amusing to watch, in a sad way. I rarely see a company working so hard to structure an entire game’s reward system around something that they’re not very good at delivering. It’s sad to see that the very same game that is driven by cosmetics is also one of the games with the worst cosmetics in its genre.

But what truly annoys me as a fan is how Anet’s been dead silent on this, whilst repeating the same mistakes over and over.

The Hall of Monuments map already exists in GW2. Expand upon it, bring it back to its former glory. It would add more charm to the acchievement system.

It would be very sweet if it could create a statue of our former hero in GW1, but that would probably be very hard to acchieve due to different graphical engines.

Also, give us a customisable “home” in the home instance district, and allow us to warp to the Hall of Monuments from there and vice-versa, perhaps through a magical mirror or a magical closet. It would feel very magical, surely, but also very personal.

Expanding upon the skin locket idea, many of the low/ mid game skins could be sold (= unlock) through karma merchants. This would give a new point to those NPCs, make exploration more interesting to completionists and cosmetic-seekers, and make newer players more exciting to try those skins out, especially under my suggestion that crafting and skin collecting should be tied to each other. It would create that exciting feeling of finding how the new skin looks like, and knowing that, once unlocked, you would be ble to use/ craft it anytime you wanted to any item regardless of level or rarity. Completionists wouls feel more satisfied by filling in their skin locket, and cosmetic seekers would have more motivation to plan their long-term goals for their looks thanks to a more streamlined and addicting cosmetic system.

So, what’s the solution?

• The easiest/ simplest one, would be to swap each profession’s health, fixing the lack of defenses of one and fixing the huge amount of defenses for the other. But being the easiest/ simplest solution might not necessarily mean it would be the best one, of course.
• The alternative solution, and probably the one that Anet wants us elementalists to discuss for, is to improve all the current underwhelming survival skills (lightning touch, gust and shockwave have unreliable functionality, dust devil, fire shield and freezing gust are underwhelming), improve our access to chill (suggestion: add chill in shatterstone’s effect, dare to buff freezing gust’s chill duration to 5 seconds aoe, consider making frost burst adding 1 second extra of chill, add good chill traits), rethink our access to mobility effects, add more defensive traits in our offensive traitlines, and consider improving our access to other defensive conditions. And then hope that the sum of all parts would fix this profession’s base survival. Will that be enough? Which chill traits could exist outside of water and arcane traitlines? Probably none. Is Anet willing to revert the mobility nerfs? Is Anet willing to make us closer to the mesmer’s or necromancer’s active defenses? Will Anet simply fill all our traitlines with defensive options? How should it be?

EDIT About mobility, with easier/ stronger access to chill effects in our weapon skills, elementalists would have an easier time escaping with a combination of chill + swiftness. It’s mechanically important for us, it’s flavorful, and allows us to escape without getting the old RTL back. Yes, speed + chill is already possible in current builds, but clearly not effective enough, is it? Besides, skills like dragon’s Tooth, Flamewall, Lava Font, etc, want and demand more anti-movement skills. I definitely think our access to chill should be stronger.

Nova Stiker.8396:

Yes, the game would be better if ArenaNet goes in and improves on a lot of combat design and mechanics. But they can’t even get combat balance right, let alone ‘improve’ combat.

No company can get balance right if the core balance mechanics are not balance-friendly in the first place. That’s why Anet has been walking in circles for so many balance patches.

How do you “balance” so much condition/ evasion/ on-cd-skill-use/ passive proccing/ AI spam in this game? How can you make bland and uninteractive skillsets strong without ruining pvp? If you buff them, they’ll become cheese because of their design flaws. if you don’t, they will be underpowered instead and no one will pick them.

Raziel.4216:

In the context of GW2 “play how you want” means you can reach your goal thru different means, that’s something that Anet did well by providing progression thru WvW and SPVP. I don’t see how that justifies a mediocre design choice.

The “play how you want” philosophy is interesting, it just does not always works well in practice, especially when it comes to estabilishing a good reward structure. Generic you-can-get-everything-anywhere rewards have not been very successful, while unique rewards for dungeons, unique rewards for specific maps, unique rewards for pvp, etc, are a lot more satisfying to obtain. Also, if you can get all your skill points by spamming consumables, then hunting for skill challenges in the world map will feel unrewarding – why would you bother to do them when you already have all the skill points you need?

The new change is following a more traditional RPG model: you explore the world, battle, unlock skills, and while you experiment with those new skills you have just obtained, you keep unlocking more of them.

I agree, game-changing traits should by of the highest tier to make builds as distinct from each other as possible.

This trait is clearly specialized for high healing power builds, and perhaps to be taken with aquamancer’s alacrity trait as well.

As long as the elementalist has good sources of condition removal from their skills, and sturdy defense, a 1200-ish healing power ele (in pvp) can get around 300-ish more healing power from this with cleric’s amulet.

If I’m not wrong, doing 4 heal skills in a row (say, evasive arcana’s heal, healing ripple trait, water trident and cleansing water or geyser and healing rain) would be more or less worth an extra heal. With aoe regen from elemental attunement, and possibly revamped healing sigils and healing runes, and we would probably get almost 2 extra heal skills worth of this.

The effectiveness of this trait will probably rely on how much healing and heal effects you can stack in a single builds.

And for those who don’t like that role, of course, there’s still 4 other gm traits to be revealed.

Anet learned from their mistakes in GW1, Anet created the foundations to make a game superior to GW1, but then Anet completely undervalued and left forgotten the best that GW1 had to offer.