Guild Wars 2

You may want to take a look at the combo fields wiki page. Combos are extremely important for elementalists.

Sadly, online games attract trolls, and PvP concentrates them further. I wish I could say I never encountered someone doing this. Look at the bright side, OP: it was worse when you could deploy siege in OS.

To sum up about staff: the heals are weak because they are water fields. The expectation is that someone will blast them.

With guyser or healing rain, dropping the water field and then hitting arcane wave and arcane brilliance will top off your HP in most scenarios, especially if you use eruption beforehand.

Martrim.1078:

I do not mind RNG but i can understand some people that dislike it.
Wat i do not understand is the counter argument about a “set amount of effort” to obtain something while at the same time they do not want “grind”

Grind = A set amount of effort

So in order for Anet to take out RNG completely they would have to add a huge amount of grind to keep people from getting everything within a few days.

Imho: Legendaries should be a grind and not RNG or partial RNG or bought with gold.(Grind can be fun if done right).

RNG should be used for stuff like Minis, tonics, etc etc

Many gamers will accept a certain level of grind for certain items which are considered particularly precious and unlikely for a character to have, such as legendary weapons, particularly if that grind is an alternative to an extremely low-chance RNG drop-rate.

The complaints about grind usually center around a game implementing a grindy system to obtain items you are expected to have.

For example, ascended armor is such a big drag because in every MMO, players are expected to have BIS items, and having a full set of ascended requires a time grind, ascended material grind, crafting profession grind (need 500), laurel grind (trinkets), and fractal grind (rings and back). You can bypass some of those, but only with a gold grind.

It would not have been such a big deal if ascended armor was merely exotic armor stats + infusion slots, and the acquisition of said armor could be done entirely in fractals, as that would be the only place the armor was necessary.

They would also need to remove the visual effects around your character’s wrists for attunements.

I’m not sure I agree, though. As an attunement for elementalists is roughly equivalent to a weapon set, it seems unbalanced to hide it when it’s quite visually obvious what weapon set other professions are using, particularly with how many weapons have flashy effects.

I Am Dansker.7105:

True, i’v myself have done that a lot, but that doesn’t explain why the other spells don’t get fixed that has the same problem.

That depends on what the problem is. It is quite possible that the fix for Meteor Shower ends up adding proper circles to every AoE in the game.

Asura.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/lore/asura/What-is-my-Asura-saying

I usually go staff. The range allows you to easily dodge most of the fire arrows, and magnetic aura allows you to reflect some of them for extra damage.

Meteor storm and/or ice storm on bow break the bubble pretty quickly and take out a fair number of the grubs. If neither is up, you still have frozen ground and shockwave to buy time before the boss reaches a captive.

Add red circles to all AoEs that lack them. Giving some circles and letting others get by without is broken.

As far as worrying about the nerf as a result of fixing the bug – I would much rather the ele stand on its own than have to rely on a series of bugs to prop it up. Besides, with the size of the ring and the AoE cap, most zergs will likely ignore it anyways.

The problem with ele staff is not damage, but projectile speed. I could send my projectiles by mail and they would get to the enemy faster than they do now.

Clumsy.6257:

That was posted over half a year ago. This survey is fairly recent.

The survey data is about most appreciated class, not about most played. One would hope that the two are strongly-correlated, but they are still different data sets.

Because many people base their self worth upon the value of their possessions.

Silinsar.6298:

Be careful what you ask for, making attunement swaps act like weapon swaps will most likely make them interrupt casts (just like weapon swaps do). If not, other classes will probably cry out because eles would get the good things of it being a usual swap without the downsides.

Elementalists have their own downsides with attunements, though. For example, it is the only profession which is range-locked in combat.

Why not compare Orb of Wrath with Blood Curse instead?

That’s perhaps biased too much in the opposite direction.

The only fair way to compare condition damage versus direct damage is to take every skill available to a DD build and stack it up against every skill available to a CD build.

In big, group events, it is highly distracting when a Warrior places a banner right in the middle of a spawn area. I’m thankful for the buff it provides, but it forces everyone to hold down CTRL or spend a few extra moments reading the F text before pressing, and then each player has to be extra careful not to press F too many times, or risk picking up the banner.

It would be far better for everyone if only the warrior who placed a banner can interact with it. The cases where someone else needs to pick it up are few and far between.

I know it frustrates me when I accidentally pick one up, and I’m sure the Warriors out there are frustrated with people picking them up, too.

The sections with infinite spawns are aggravating, and they are the primary cause for how long it takes to complete the fractal. The manner in which they respawn doesn’t help – even changing how they (re)spawn could make a big difference.

For example, if you made the dredge respawns for the first section outside the caged room so they have to stream in through the door, giving groups the chance to coordinate a bottleneck at the door.

Similarly, when doing bomb runs, if the dredge were to send reinforcements from below, you could clear the ramp up to the door, then hold the incoming dredge back (or at least slow them down) while one or two players handle the bombs.

In both cases, if the group doesn’t have enough DPS, they could focus on CCs and still manage it.

As they are now, the spawns in the first section force people to leave some dredge alive to cheese the respawn mechanic. In the bomb run hall, it guarantees that groups without stealth available have to do suicide runs.

MonMalthias.4763:

In a bygone age when 0 10 0 30 30 tanky DPS bunker Elementalist was still dominating, people also said that putting a 5 second ICD on Cleansing Water would not be enough to limit the build’s efficacy against conditions sticking. Developer response was that it was a significant change in their internal testing.

The community wanted more to be done, and in subsequent patches, more was done. Yet the end result was that Elementalist was over-nerfed and is now too squishy to conditions.

Adding an ICD to something that did not have one previously is a far larger nerf than an 8% reduction in effect. With that said, we’ll never know if the nerf to cleansing water was going to be sufficient (or too much) by itself.

Ashen.2907:

Just out of curiosity, how long does your average fractal run take ?

Sadly, that’s not an easy question to answer. There’s a huge variance between the fractals. Swamp can take less than 10 minutes, even in the 40s. Dredge can take a half hour (very generous – requires skilled group with the right class composition) to well over an hour.

When you consider that a full fractal run is 3 fractals plus the boss, an unlucky string of fractals and poor boss choice can push the whole thing over 2 hours. If you get lucky, the entire run takes 45 minutes or less.

Of course, even at 45 minutes, the rewards for the instance are generally poor when compared against the explorable dungeons. I haven’t gotten a fractal skin since the fractal patch, and I haven’t seen an ascended chest drop. I’ve gotten a handful of (mostly non-infused) rings, and even those only drop maybe 15% of the time.

MIrra.3604:

Each time I hit an ele, it locks a random attunement for X secs

Does dying count as locking attunements?

1. Elementalist (survivability/mobility buff)
2. Ranger (buff)
3. Warrior (nerf)

The feature build balance preview is where you need to look.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Feature-Build-Balance-Preview/first

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

With Rush you still take damage while RTL was invincible.

Where did you get this idea?

0/10/0/30/30 with full zerker gear works just fine in upper 40s fractals with my staff. I haven’t tried above 49 yet, though, since I can’t bring myself to spend/grind my way to more AR.

I will reiterate: apply an immobilize immediately prior to vapor form and the ele will go nowhere.

Or perhaps stop killing them right next to portals.

You can certainly argue the merits of allowing a vapor form ele to pass through a portal, but there is a counter to vapor form like there is to every other downed #2.

If you apply an immobilize before they hit mist form, they’ll go nowhere and be a free target.

If the goal was really to get people to switch gear sets, the Ferocity change should have occurred before ascended armor came out.

The RTL nerf, like so many other ele balance decisions, makes a lot more sense when taken in the context of someone who has only played against eles.

I would be sufficiently happy if projectile speeds on ele were doubled or tripled. The current speeds are so low, my character is poor from having to pay for postage on each projectile :/

Aberrant.6749:

Agreed. There should be some penalty for using a gap closer as an escape tool.

Then make the treatment equal and add the penalty to all gap closers.

Carighan.6758:

The idea is thematically important ofc. Necromancers having very high health fits well, especially compared to the pure powerhouses fantasy lore displays for elementalism-wielding mages, who in turn are rather frail.

The underlying problem with trying to build mage classes based on lore is that in every MMO I’ve played, the mage classes usually get balanced to keep the frailty without the superior damage, even if they start out matching lore. This is even done to the point that they always re-brand the mage classes at some point (or even multiple points), and in many cases, render the classes inferior.

Necromancers usually stick closer to lore, but only because it balances the fact that they generally also follow lore by sacrificing health to cast many of their spells. This is not the case in GW2, so there is no particular reason why they need so much HP relative to others, particularly considering they get death shroud.

That’s an interesting question. Embers make my normal and elite fire elementals look rather useless. Then again, fire-field-dropping summons did strike me as stupidly OP.

I agree. While we’re addressing disparities between professions, we should bring warriors down to 10k base HP and switch them to light armor. And we need to remove warriors’ ability to swap between melee and range mid-fight. And we need to remove warriors’ passive healing. And we need to nerf warriors’ mobility.

And we need to realize that different professions are different and stop making balance suggestions without considering the whole picture.

Show us on the doll where the ele touched you, Burnfall.

Mixchimmer.7230:

I think people from the side of keeping the current DPS meta really truly enjoy the high risk / high skill but very high reward feeling of it. Currently It’s true that you take as much defensive gear as you need, and if you’ve gotten really experienced and feel you’ve reached a high skill level within the game, you no longer need any defensive stats. In this situation your reward for being really good is that you get to put out more DPS than anyone else (and why shouldn’t it be?). Once it was discovered that all DPS on all players in the party is one of the most optimal ways to run through content, it is what everyone started running, (which again, why shouldn’t they?). In this scenario, if everyone in your group is extremely skilled and running full zerker because of it, you are rewarded with very fast rewards for such skilled play.

I actually like the idea of a high-risk, high-reward style of play. Unfortunately, not all professions are equal. Rather, some professions lend themselves to zerker play without much risk due to naturally baked-in survivability.

A full glass elementalist or thief pales in comparison with a full zerker warrior. I would just assume the devs fix those types of imbalances first.

Efficiency = joy. Human\\animal speech is irrelevant\\unnecessary. Cease//desist immediately.

mysticsicness.7598:

I do not understand why the devs can’t see the problem with eles.

None of them play elementalist characters. Every balance change made to the profession has been made from the perspective of an outsider looking in, and it shows.

TooBz.3065:

Mireles Lore.5942:

I don’t understand why

Common -> Fine -> Masterwork -> Rare -> Exotic -> Legendary….
is not a gear treadmill, but..

Common -> Fine -> Masterwork -> Rare -> Exotic -> Ascended -> Legendary
is a gear treadmill?

Why? because it takes more than a handful of hours to get?

I don’t understand the logic of that… Treadmill implies never ending, they planned on adding ascended gear very early in the game and are not adding anymore tiers.

Its just seems people like to complain when they can’t be instantly gratified and might have to actually put some time into something. Then proceed to make inflated claims to try to get their way.

Ascended gear is a new addition, the other tiers existed at launch.

You can’t tell if you’re on a path or a treadmill until the ground starts to move. Adding any additional tier may be a lengthening of the path or the start of a treadmill. And really, what’s the difference.

There’s more to it than that.

In the original scheme of things, once you hit 80, you could craft an entire set of exotics for a handful of gold, spend a little more on the TP for it. If that didn’t suit you, you could use karma and get temple exotics, use badges and get wvw exotics, run dungeons and get dungeon exotics, play spvp and use glory for exotics, or even mix and match. You could get the gear in any number of ways, often times quite quickly, and after that, you were done.

There was nothing you were forced to do personally to get exotics, and it did not take long to scrape together the resources to get them. Sure, there were more expensive exotics out there, but they were for looks only, providing no additional stats when compared with cheaply-crafted exotics.

Similarly, legendaries were nothing more than expensive (but in some cases gorgeous) weapon skins. They had no better stats than exotic weapons, and in many cases, they did not have the stats you wanted anyways, so they were transmuted.

Now, it’s different. Ascended gear cannot be bought. You cannot get it with badges, dungeon tokens, karma, or glory.

• You have to craft your armor, so you’re forced to grid your respective crafting profession.
• With weapons, you might get lucky with a drop, but let’s be honest about your chances to get an ascended weapon with the stats you want. Effectively, you have to craft it.
• You have to use laurels for trinkets and amulet.
• You have to run fractals for rings and your back piece.

There is no choice. The materials required are much more expensive and/or time consuming to put together. It’s a grind.

In addition, legendary weapons received stat boots, which now makes them BIS items rather than shiny weapon skins.

And, as TooBz said: ascended gear was the only tier added after release. Originally, there were no plans for anything beyond exotic gear. That changed. There is every reason to expect that additional levels of gear will be added in the future.

A large part of the reason that there’s little depth to PvE is that the game is balanced entirely around PvP, so you have a couple stupidly overpowered PvE builds which trivialize the already relatively easy content.

Swagger.1459:

then you missed out on one of the best profession, ability, combat and teamwork systems ever created in the history of mmos.

I miss my ice controller, bubble defender and fire blaster groups

Ayrilana.1396:

All I’m going to say is google them. I believe someone from DnT had a good video showing how to do it instead of kamikazing the door.

Out of curiosity, I looked up said video. I don’t know if it’s because it’s just level 30 in the video or because of the changes, but there are a lot more dredge now, and they respawn much faster. That strat doesn’t work except on lower levels.

A person with the money to buy gems and convert to gold could have had a legendary and a full set of ascended armor the day the Dec 10 patch hit. If they had time under their belt beforehand, they could have easily had ascended or better items in every slot.

Now you have a player with something like 10-15% better stats in both offense and defense until everyone else caught up because they dropped a wad of cash on the game.

This wouldn’t be possible if every ascended material was account bound.

It’s certainly less of a problem for heavy classes, since you could stockpile deldrimor ingots, though this demonstrates an unfortunate preference for the aforementioned classes, since light and medium armor classes had to start from scratch.

BeoErgon.9107:

I don’t see a reason to keep track of individual damage. on single cyclic data buffer for the next X damage ticks for a given condition and it works fine.
Ticks for first player : 100dgm 100dmg 100dmg 100dmg 0 0 0 0
A player puts 3 ticks of bleed one second later
Ticks for second player :100dmg 100 dmg 100dmg 0 0 0

BeoErgon.9107:

It is simple, clean, and lighter on processing.

Of course, you lose (sorry, pet peeve) the might effect on previous conditions, but it is so much better than losing your overall conditions.

The problem with the above is actually the same problem WoW had – synchronization. It is pretty rare that player 2 will apply their condition exactly on a 1 second boundary after the first player does. What happens when player 2 applies his or her condition 1.01s later? Do the ticks wait until the 2 second mark?

Actually, bleeds are a little too easy, because they do damage on an interval basis. Let’s try confusion. The damage resolves at the moment that the enemy performs a skill. Using the above system, how do you simply calculate the correct number of stacks for an arbitrary time, given confusion stacks which may all have different timers? Remember, each confusion application can have different durations and damage per tick, and the goal is to remove the cap on stacks globally and per player.

We should actually step back a moment and look at our base assumptions, because I can see a problem with calculating the damage only upon initial application (also an issue in WoW’s system). It’s trivial to game the system to get massively overpowered damage.

Right now, if you have 1 second of 25 might, you get 1 second of benefit to your damage. With the proposed system, the best way to game the system is to align large stacks of buffs with the cooldown timers of the skills which produce the longest duration conditions. Instead of getting 1 second of benefit from that 25 stack of might, you now get 10 seconds for skill A, 20 seconds for skill B, and 5 seconds for skill C.

Power builds still get 1 second of benefit. Condition builds get between 1 and N seconds of benefit, where N is some calculation based upon the optimal condition skill rotation one can pull off in a 1 second interval.

But there’s more! You also have to consider fields and how quickly they can apply stacks when you consider what removing a cap on stacks would do. If someone tosses up any of several mesmer fields, you now have to add a condition stack of several seconds for every projectile fired while the field is up. The confusion stacks given by the projectile finishers can be set up to game might stacks as well.

It is not quite as simple a problem as it seems.

Leamas.5803:

ANet has no excuse for not addressing a problem that Blizzard solved on comparatively ancient hardware years ago.

I don’t know what game you were playing, but as a former fire mage, I can assure you that there were all kinds of problems with WoW’s condition system even after they assigned unique slots to players. The calculations for burn damage were horribly broken, resulting in a soft nerf to fire mage damage due to things like delayed damage ticks (re-applying a burn reset the DoT timer) and swallowed ignites (burn applications in quick succession could cause smaller burns to over-write larger ones).

GW2 addressed the above issues by applying stacks of finite amounts of damage, but this requires each stack have its own timer. Rather than having one application of burn for a given player with a single timer, we now have 1-25 stacks of bleed, where every stack has its own timer.

• Soothing Wave (10 water): only useful when crit, and then, only provides a miniscule heal via regeneration (which is useless against spike damage)
• Arcane Resurrection (20 arcane): the revive speed boost is only 10%, and the effect is essentially dependent upon other players’ failures
• Ember’s Might (10 fire): increase the duration of burning, which very nearly has 100% uptime anyways
• One With Fire (20 fire): it’s a percent chance modifier based upon sticking to one attunement which acts on another worthless trait (see below)
• Flame Barrier (5 fire): only triggers when you are hit (and only in melee)… on the lowest HP/armor class in the game, only damages enemies in melee range, and only does so through a status effect which only stacks duration and is generally up 100% of the time

Yes, I felt the need to re-mention One With Fire and Flame Barrier because they are that bad.

Given the frequency in which the individual fractals seemed to pop up, you shouldn’t be surprised if quite a few people were unable to complete it. I was unable to get volcanic the entire 2 weeks, for example, though I had no shortage of dredge.

Player Character.9467:

Ok now you’re just not making any sense, your izerker does 3-4k and you think that’s more than 90% of an ele’s hp? Where are these eles with 4200hp? And what does that have to do with 30k eles?

I think you misread the trait. It stops working if your health drops below 90%, not 10%.

If you have 30k hp, he only needs to hit you for 3,001 to bypass diamond skin. The 30k came up because he was working backwards from the low-end of the 3-4k damage to see how high the ele’s starting HP needs to be in order for diamond skin to remain active after taking the hit.

I’ve killed myself a few times using RTL down a slight slope.

I’ve seen several people now say the bomb run is easy enough they can solo it. I’m curious – how?

I have basically resigned myself to the fact that I have to strip off my armor and accept death every time I run a bomb up because I have to stand around near the bomb to keep aggro or it gets picked up. This is especially true at 30+, where you’re facing no fewer than 50 dredge.

Sure, if there’s a thief/mesmer and guardian on the team, it’s relatively easy – you stealth up to the door and have the guardian drop a bubble at the top. However, it’s pretty rare I get that combination from LFG.

If there’s a better way that isn’t profession-specific, I would love to hear it. Anything to make that section less painful is appreciated :|

Underwater and Ascalon are not difficult or particularly long fractals. You spend more time waiting to roll swamp and completing it than you would simply accepting the tier 1 fractal you get.

I want to hate on the dredge fractal, but my asura looks so sexy running around naked.