Guild Wars 2

TheGuy.3568:

In the long run it becomes this.

DD Ele
-Can’t chase
-Can’t run
-Can’t burst
-Can bunker

they want us to be the Joke of all trades

simply epic, I loved the cinematic scene and had fun in the MKD. Thanks A.Net!!!

ErraticFaith.9142:

Mastered their class lol? This isnt Aion or Gw1, classes here take zero skill. If you struggle with a few buttons id really hate to see you play any serious sort of complex pvp game with 30-40+ active abilities and no trait system.

So Chess doesn’t requires skills, because your adversary has the same pieces you have?
You really believe that being a pianist and pressing buttons makes you skilled? cute

AoE is a tactic highlighted by the design flaws within the game, its become class specific because yet again only some classes were built around aoe as we know. Once anet decides all classes need aoe and guardians are rocking firestorm to make the game more homogenized maybe that wont be an issue lol :p

the only “flaws” I can see is that AoE are not powerful enough to be a REAL threat and at the same time there isn’t an effective counter-mechanics.

Seriously though I dont really see a possible fix without a complete overhaul to class design.

now now, just a few tweaks here and there and everything would be okay. The one that want to be protected from AoE should make the same effort of the ones who wants to be mass-destructive (no insta-win buttons, no insta-save-me buttons: mechanics….)

The reason this debate is just going to keep spinning though is because their isnt really a solution until you overhaul aoe dependent classes.

this is completely wrong: AoE classes are nearly fine as they are, just add some combo field for protection for the other classes and problem solved.

the choice is easy when choosing between mages in GW2:

Easy Mode: Mesmer

Nightmare Mode: Elementalist

the answer is easy: no love for Ele, that’s all

Proposal Overview
Introduce Guild Specializations

Goal of Proposal
adding End Game content, restoring the importance of being in a specific guild rather than a generic one, therefore strengthening bonds between players and greatly improving the gaming experience.

Proposal Functionality

Upon reaching a certain amount of influence (low, to put on equal foot guilds of all sizes) the founder can select a path of specialization for his guild (something like “merchant”, “assassin”, “gatherer”, “scout”, “crafting” ecc) and the more the guild perform that specific activity, the more efficient it becomes in doing so, until it is able to unlock new abilities, that might go on the like of:
- merchant: either be able to buy for less or sell for more (but not both)
- assassin: may get exclusive offensive buffs of various kind
- gatherer: see nodes on map with increasing range, or bonus to gathering certain materials (but not both)
- scout: detect enemies on map with increasing range the higher your specialization (at very high levels you may even tell which class and the exact position)
- crafting: enchant gear/items (but not both), create UNIQUE (only available from THAT guild and never to be seen anywhere else) things ecc

the focus is on making each guild an unique element, therefore having the players feel they are part of something special, unique, rewarding.
A core foundation of fantasy genre is the feeling of epicness that imbues everything, and it’s that very key element that allow the players to feel like heroes.

Associated Risks
it’s important to prevent “numbers” getting the edge on specialization, so if – say – someone is fond of crafting the best shoes in the game for the rest of his life, and gather – say – only five guildies, well, they should still be able to achieve that goal. In order to do so, Guild Influence should not be taken into consideration as value to increase the rank of specialization, but rather something like an average index of the majority of guildies performing the same activity in the same place at the same moment (or a balanced average per day).
I’d like to summon the math guys to calculate how many unique guilds could specialize into creating a single unique type of item in the game (say, an armor with slightly better VIT than the best drop VIT in the game, or with a specific enchant that reaches the same goal ecc) considering all the possible combinations and types of items present in the game. Yeah, that would be a big number, but it’s a positive thing…

Safari.3021:

PROPOSAL OVERVIEW

Guild halls? no. Guild Airships!!!!!!

GOAL OF PROPOSAL

To give the idea of guild halls more functionality than just a meeting place

PROPOSAL FUNCTIONALITY

GvG airship battles with characters jumping accross to each other, Pirates of the carribean style, siege cannons blasting, mid flight battles through clouds, the epicness we all hoped for when we first saw airships in the trailer.

Upgrade and kit your Guild airship out with siege, repair crews, medical crews, pilots and the like to ready yourselves to set sail!

Take your guild on an airship journy through the mists to discover new undiscovered lands and dungeons! Explore the mysteries and dangers within as a guild group! Beware enemy guilds also discovering these pockets of reality!

Possibilities for expansion are pretty awesome.

ASSOCIATED RISKS

I might explode.

I must admit, this sounds amazing
guilds not rich/powerful enough to access airships, should be able to access at least normal ships (well, I’d expect some to not be able to go past a simple row boat xD )… but talk about end game content, that’s awesome

upcoming changes to Ele Elite Skill: “turns you into a Warrior for 60 secs” CD 240 secs.

HikariNoTen.1402:

Cantrip elementalists are too strong, the cantrip build is really too well synergised, so I don’t really care if it is nerfed.

you said it well but you lost on the way: cantrips are not too strong, they are simply well thought and implemented by developers.
Instead of nerfing what’s well done, just make everything else on par with this.

nice thread
I would underline that the worst thing so far is the lack of direct feedback from developers. Any problem can be fixed if we talk: problems will just grow either in numbers or size if we don’t talk.

Aether McLoud.1975:

“Travel in pack so there is someone who can kill thieves/mesmers” isn’t really a “class counter”. It just shows how insanely, brokenly, overpowered thief really is.

fixed for ya ^^

this issue has emerged already in a previous CDI and has been deemed important by devs who really liked the idea. Although there are no hints about scheduled release date of such a nice feature, there are chances that we will see it implemented someday.

this is disappointing: none of my questions were answered and there is no trace at all of discussing the true problems of this class.

John Corpening.9847:

Hi Guys,

Just wanted to clarify that we did indeed change our plans based on your feedback. What was said during the interviews at Gamescom was correct at the time but after listening to what you had to say we decided to make a change to the feature be in line with what you felt was a more balanced approach to the change.

Thank you very much for your feedback and we hope that you enjoy this upcoming change.

Thanks,
John

thanks for listening to our feedback!

I never understood why a.net doesn’t incentive defending objectives (it would be so easy to do so…), but that’s why EoTM fell this low.

although I am not against romanticism, and I do appreciate the design of the new gear, I also feel that it somehow undermines the overall epic atmosphere of the battle for survival against Dragons

Panteri.4073:

This bug almost hits me everyday. I teleport to kill someone,

I can already foresee the result of this topic: “you are overpowered! you can even kill yourself with your own skill!!!!” —→ next patch: “lightning flash: when this skill is used, you now enter downed state automatically”.

If only all those self-kills counted toward points for my team in pvp -,-

it’s a shy step forward, although fractals continue to somehow be “more efficient” (and imho this is wrong, no place in the game should’ve higher chances to get better stuff or content, and everything should be left to what players like to do) and has but one solid point: you can choose exactly which ring/amulet get, a thing you can’t do by crossing fingers and opening Fractal’s chest.

ThiBash.5634:

I reject your reality and substitute it with my own

oh well, at least I appreciate you finally admit being in denial.
Sadly, objective reality do exists despite you acknowledging it or not….

what I fail to understand is why in the world devs want to penalize those who mastered their class in favor of newcomers. This is what I would like to know from them, really.

Caffynated.5713:

Warriors, rangers, mesmers, and thieves can still disengage at will. It’s mysteriously not OP for them, but was for ele.

I’ve been wondering about this for months, and I still can’t understand why they are crippling our class this much.

ThiBash.5634:

What I’m saying is that we’re already doing massive damage, we’re just not hitting things with it.

punching the air won’t make you win any war. A single warrior can output way more damage than you can ever dream with your Elementalist WHILE having up to 41k HP and over 4k armor AND more than 600hp regen per second.
I repeat: go and duel some competent players, that will teach you reality.

DiogoSilva.7089:

EDIT: The sarcastic buff to LH mentioned in a few posts above is actually a real buff. Blind almost never works on bosses, and LH is used against bosses, for its high damage and spammable blast finishers. If you remove blind for a 5% chance-on-critical to deal extra 2-5k damage, it’s a pve buff.

nice post. Personally, I would never trade a blind for crit chance, but I am curious to see which changes will be implemented for conjured weapons (especially the underdog magnetic shield). It wouldn’t bother me to see some condition build running either, but the mechanic of Elementalist’s gameplay favor direct damage (unless they want to completely rework staff and/or give us another ranged weapon to avoid contact…).
And yes, I agree that in pvp the biggest problem is to tone down other classes/build rather than merely boost Elementalist.
WvW is even worse to balance, cause of a widest variety of gear combinations and – more than can be believed – food. Still, it shouldn’t be too hard to create in a test environment “extreme cases” (i.e: the burstiest Ele vs tankiest Warr, burst warr vs bunker Ele ecc for all classes) and start balancing from there.
Also, let’s see if they can free the class from being stuck in water/arcana to be viable.
Lastly, what about some love for glyphs?

DiogoSilva.7089:

Renewing Stamina is one of the strongest traits in the entire game. Perma vigor is almost twice the survival in pve.

PvE, lol.
I only WvW, can tell you that Renewing Stamina is good only if you have high (above 60%) crit ratio, still any competent player will have the edge over you with any other class.

The trait that decreases the cooldown reduction on arcanes is also decent if you go for 30 arcane.

yeah, decent it is, nothing to scream about tho

Regardless, Elemental Attunement is insanely strong. 5-8s of protection to you and to your allies every 10-12s is a lot by itself. Everything else is just an extra to make it even better, and this trait can even remove conditions if you spec 30 in water.

it’s not that insane, roll other classes to 80 and watch their traits. Your eyes will bleed.

Karl McLain.5604:

We’ll be adding a bit more functionality to this trait in the near future for the earth portion of the ability (this time, associated with the skill’s cooldown), to keep it in line with our general policy of not having a blast finisher in the same weapon set you have a combo field.
Additionally, we’re looking at traits across the board, for all professions, and will be doing some improvements in that aspect as well. We hope to be able to get some of these in for our next balance patch and open up more build possibilities!
-Karl

it’s extremely positive to see you partecipating in our threads
I am crossing fingers and looking forward the upcoming changes to see what happen…

Eicherjw.3926:

that’s my arguement, Elementalists don’t do the damage for how squishy they are.

^ this.

Although I am pretty satisfied that Devs started to tweak Elementalist, I will never cease to underline that true balance means:

“I can be oneshotted? fine, then I must be able to oneshot…”

Also, if the Holy Trinity is TRULY gone, then the word “support class” should be banned for good.

Damage: we lack the “punch” in sheer numbers. Devs want us to perform the madness dance with 750+ keys to remember to get that? it’s ok, but at least reward us with an HUGE explosion which truly nukes foes.

Elementalist is fun, very fun, it gives a fast paced experience in almost every moment, but it is not rewarding

I don’t think all these posts are generalized whining, I’ve read posts of good players stating the same, although underlining how the class is still fun to play and far far away from being “broken”.

TL;DR: Elementalist class is fun and not broken, but is not rewarding.

Elbegast.6970:

For a Living World, we need:
Seasons
Better Weather Effects
Dark Nights (no, not Christian Bale)
Purchasable Real Estate
Player Owned Shops
Player Owned Farms (for Livestock and Produce)
Fishing, Hunting & Farming Professions
Player-Generated Dynamic Events

For a Living Story, we need:
An In-Game Calendar that lists recurring festival events and distinguishes them apart from the Living Story releases.
Shorter story arcs, more zone-by-zone storytelling and less focus on larger player-funneling zerg events.

this is very nice stuff

Dasboba.1652:

I agree with Zaxares, and to take it a step further, let us buy vials/glob with high numbers of badges so WVW players have a path to ascended.

this is so good and logical that A.Net will never do that /facepalm

my 2cents:

- D/D is nowhere near where it should be. The tiny -but constant- boosts received in the past weeks are proof that even A.Net agree on this.
- Staff: people didn’t yet realize how it is meant to play and expect each set of weapons to accomplish the same task.

You want raw destructive power? you have to tradeoff by staying in melee with foes
You want to stay away in a secure place, maybe cuddled by allies? less “direct” damage output, slow casting time (who cares? you are far anyway and someone is protecting you while you cast…) but the vastest amount of combo fields and support a party can wish for.

This has been very obvious to me since when I started doing dungeons (I waited until lv80 for full traits and decent equip). I mainly use D/D and glass cannon build (always between 14k and 16k HP), and have been able to outlast any party member I met so far, often avoiding full party wipe by staying alive and soloing for minutes ’till all other members come back from WP in dungeon; nonetheless some Boss forced me to run away and use staff, either because of its damage could oneshot me or I was not efficient by just dealing massive damage: SUPPORT was mandatory, range was mandatory.

In the end: d/d requires more fine tuning, especially more damage output (bring back the “cannon” to glass cannon) and S/F – Staff both require more correct meta. I say correct meta because ppl is still struggling to use them as they were meant to reach the same goal of D/D, that won’t help understanding what’s missing.

I actually do not understand why should I set foot in PvE to get my legendary: they should give different legendary weapons for different areas of the game.

in most cases I defended A.Net’s choices , but I can’t do the same in this case: Guild Missions current state is the worst scenario possible, where numbers are rewarded over quality.
Why in the world Influence cost/gain isn’t scaled on the number of members?
With the actual system and the lack of an Alliance mechanic, you are just favouring elitism through sheer numbers which is a really bad bad bad BAD move especially for someone who claim to care about quality.
My communication skills aren’t enough to express how much I am disappointed by this trend.

they will say something on this line: “it was displaying wrong values before. Now it has been normalized to display the correct values”

Jski.6180:

Cant you now take your badges and make them into wvw weapons and sell them?

so what? where are the chests? the achievements points? the variety? I suppose I don’t have to explain you how many golds a CoF/Fractal run can give you, but you may want to check how much gold can you make with the same amount of time spent in the Mists. /roll

morrolan.9608:

Grevender.9235:

You are going to severely nerf AoE? well then just remove the double dagger weapons setup for Elementalist, as it will be totally useless after the nerf.

What about staff eles, its even more aoe oriented. How are we meant to attack single mobs with anything but aoe when our better abilities are all aoes.

nah, consider how much more screwed will D/D Ele be compared with Staff one due to the fact he is a melee PBAoE paper armored attunements dancer amongst heavy armored single target boosted brutes with nothing to protect us other than our AoEs.
At least with Staff, you are supposed to be far enough to be somehow safe.
D/D Ele will be dug six feet under.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Regeneration and protection are the reason people pick e. attunement,

wrong: I pick e.attunement because all other traits in that tier are almost useless.
If A.Net would give us eight VIABLE options (so good that you would take days hitting your head on a wall crying whyyyyy they are all sooo goooood oohhh I can’t choooose ecc ecc) you would probably see 90% less people using that trait.

Ohoni.6057

:Go play a different game

I don’t think Chris made this thread with the purpose of driving away paying customers…

I play both classes and here is my 2cents:
- thief has mobility, stealth, very high single target spike and can easily reset the fight
- elementalist has nice animations

I am not much into bunker playstyle (“battle of attrition”, where you actually wait for your enemy to make a wrong step), so if I feel like going thieves-busting I will just go with s/d or s/f, full zerker, 30/30/x/x/x and thieves die like flies.
Killing Ele with Thief is way easier than the contrary (just stealth, poke it to have him waste its best burst, cloack again, go behind…222 loot)

Zelyhn.8069:

But what very few people saw is that fresh air is actually even better for daggers’ sustained damage

as long as developers don’t give us back our mobility, d/d is going to be useful in a very limited number of scenarios.

@OP: actually what you describe in the second paradigm is exactly what devs planned to happen (as it is the only way to “balance” an otherwise clearly unbalanced war).
Unfortunately, exactly in the same way that would apply to “real life”, the two minor forces are unable to understand the very simple concept of “united in victory” and instead battle each other giving even more advantage to the already superior third opponent.

Kaleban.9834:

Again, just to reiterate, to survive Eles must be at the top of their game, using all their skills at just the right time, with maximum efficiency, with very little margin for error. They have many tools, but all must be used just to reach the effectiveness of, say a Guardian or Ranger just spamming auto-attacks. Hardly overpowered.

it’s sad that such statements supported by solid argumentation will be wasted against a wall of “it’s OP ’cause I said so, deal!” -,-
On my thief I can spam dagger 2 endlessly, backroll to recharge initiative rinse and repeat: this seems legit, but 50% healing nerf, crippled boon duration and insanely high RTL cooldown on Elementalist is “perfectly logical”

dear Chris, I think that having prompt feedback from A.Net saying why they didn’t implement what we players requested or “yes we will add this because it’s a great idea” ecc would immediately solve 90% of the buzz in the community.
Every player is playing through a class, yet the class forums are the rarest to be seen with devs tag actively talking: this is counterproductive for both parts.
When you see people in anger, ask yourself why they are in anger: probably, those people used to be your number one supporters.
Customers are all alike, people aren’t: no great challenge can be accomplished through customers only, if you are looking for greater things you have to deal with people.
And people want communication above anything else, something that is lacking in the way we need it.

@DiogoSilva: it is lack of class balancing. “Balancing” means every class can do THE SAME, just in a different way. Well, we cannot change range and that is unique, not “balance”. Try seeing the other way around: imagine Elementalist gets a new elite skill “click here to nuke whole map” and everyone else just stare to the void we create: would you call that “balance”? Certainly not. Then why all other classes can change range whenever they want and how many times they want, and Elementalist and only Elementalist cannot?
I already gave my 2 cents on how it would be easy to implement the swap on elementalist without making it game-breaking, and will repeat it here: just add a swap cooldown timer which is longer than the duration of boon stack.
Eventually, they can either opt for that or getting rid of the timer but canceling ALL the boon at each swap: no boon overlap, no game breaking, only balance giving us the range adaptability we lack

showatt.9413:

which will take them probably a few years to do since elementalist is so blatantly overpowered atm

what class do you play dude? I ask just to enjoy better the laugh…

I think the most important talk is the one with the Grawl Chieftain in LA.
I wouldn’t be much surprised if Karkaland’s event is somehow connected to the living story we are currently seeing.

ThiBash.5634:

Grevender.9235:

oh well, at least I appreciate you finally admit being in denial.
Sadly, objective reality do exists despite you acknowledging it or not….

You mean your reality, which consists of nothing but 1v1 duels?

nice attempt, but I am feeling genererous: “a reality in which Elementalist is the less efficient fighting class in a combat-based game, which requires more efforts to get inferior results and is surpassed in everything by everyone else”.

Shademehr.1397:

Yamato Shinobi.4378:

1. Is Anet aware of the ‘Rubber-Banding’ that has started to occur after their latest monthly patch? (where for example you fall off a cliff, don’t take any damage, run a little ways and fall flat on your face and take damage)

I’ve had a slightly different problem: I’ll run off a cliff (heading to the NW supply camp for example in our BL) and hit the ground. Get up and run for about a half of a second, then fall of the same cliff again. Get up and run for about a half a second, then fall of the cliff AGAIN. I’ve had it happen up to four times, before I can actually make it into the supply camp.

exactly this is happening to me after the latest patch

actually, if classes are balanced 1vs1 your zergfest would be more efficient (currently Ele is heavily underpowered, and you can understand this ONLY with class vs class comparison), so it’s not true that it would not contribute to the scenario, on the contrary, it’s the best way to achieve true balance.

Zerg wins in WvW? search “zerg busting” videos, you may be surprised.

yup, this is urgent. So far, stealth is the only ability without counters…

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

And also to tone down our mobility!

Bugfix: if RTL hits a target in dodge/aegis then it properly goes on quadruple cooldown.
New: Lightning flash damages you if you do not hit a target.
New: burning speed now goes backward.

New: your healing skills now properly heals your foe instead of you
New: attunements will now trigger randomly
New: summoned elementals AI and speed slightly reduced* for balance purposes

1vs1 is by far the oldest and most important form of fight, it really puzzles me that a game of this level was launched without strongly focusing on it.