Guild Wars 2

How old is the video? Remember that Elementalists took heavy damage nerfs between beta and now. If it’s sufficiently old, that could explain the damage.

Also, as an aside, if you pop tornado while meteor shower is going, it greatly increases the damage, though I don’t remember if it’s 2x or 3×. You probably won’t see 20k per hit, but 10k is not out of the question.

Conjured weapons are currently the only way to (albeit temporarily) get around the range lock problem we have during combat.

Also, ice bow 3 is good for brief CC (chill), 4 is good for spike AoE damage, and 5 is an excellent stun.

Maybe Traeherne is like Moridin. That would be a happy ending for all.

Zelyhn.8069:

But hey at least they didn’t break our class more! If you look at how broken this patch is you will come to think this is a huge success!!

Don’t speak too soon. Last night in fractals, I had vapor form fail to activate (but happily go on CD) every other time I went down. I was also unable to ever get Glyph of Renewal (earth or water) to successfully revive anyone.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

got the impression ele is a favored class in this game.

What ever gave you that impression? Patch history and current game balance suggests otherwise.

Xae Isareth.1364:

That’s the problem, you don’t ever hear ’you’re a great DD’. If you play a DD character, be prepared to wait in line for hours, then get treated like expendable trash.

Also, the problem extends further. Since every class ends up being so entrenched into their group-play roles, you have severe problems playing them in a non-group setting, especially the healers.

It gets even worse. Invariably, there is a sub-set of a game’s classes which are only capable of DD. Game balance always shifts over time to make the DPS of those classes with alternate roles equal to those which are DD only, eventually making the classes which can only DD less valuable overall.

Qaelyn.7612:

Funny how in this thread everyone’s talking about how OP thieves are, but in the profession-specific forum everyone’s complaining about how weak the class is becoming and speculating over how many people will stop playing thief after the December 10th patch.

General consensus seems to be that getting rid of permastealth is a good thing, but that every time some “OP” ability of thieves is removed, it’s not balanced with anything new they can do instead.

After playing a thief for a couple of weeks, IMO the thieves who can dominate in combat are that way because they’re incredibly good players. On my warrior I can be effective with little effort or experience. On my thief I get my butt handed to me all the time and probably will for the next 6 months until I get better at it.

Given that everywhere I look these days I see warriorwarriorwarriorwarriorwarriorwarriorwarriorwarriorwarriorwarriorwarrior I don’t think it’s thieves that need even more restraining. They’ve already been subjected to a lot of it, and at least when a thief is really good it’s because the player is really good.

Bottom line: if you want to nerf stealth into utter uselessness, then what do you replace it with? If all you’re going to do is say to remove it, then I guess you might as well remove the whole class.

That’s easy. Like most other games which have thief-like classes/professions, make stealth something that’s only useful for openers (with perhaps a skill to re-stealth on a long CD). Then, make the rest of their combat ability based upon some sort of evasion mechanic. In GW2, that could be tied to giving thieves a much larger vigor pool or regeneration rate, for example. You could even make it something affected by traits – one line might increase vigor while another increases passive miss/block chance.

The idea should be to reduce the Thief’s reliance upon stealth for survival and then make stealth a much smaller aspect of its play style.

NinjaEd.3946:

There should be a REAL fighting chance when downed, and it should be balanced across all professions. No downed state should be better than the next, and this means the #2’s and #3’s should match in power.

I agree with this sentiment, though I think you would be real surprised at who would be better or worse off after doing the balancing.

Protoavis.9107:

Paulytnz.7619:

For warrior I have noticed that their heals are a lot worse than other classes, this is probably to offset the extra armour they get. So in the end I think it all balances out.

It’s the larger health pool and the fact they can have 4 simultaneous regens going at the same time.

It doesn’t help that players like to frame their healing in terms of HP ratio. I rarely see a warrior talk about their “bad heals” in terms of raw healing numbers – it’s always about how their heals only refill 1/4-1/3 HP versus 1/2-2/3 that of their thief or ele alt, completely ignoring the HP disparity.

Farzo.8410:

ArenaNet released this milestone infographic at their anniversary which was August 27 this year

OP stated that this was in the starting area, representing new characters which would not have been counted 3 months ago. That said, it’s anecdotal, subjective evidence, so it’s not particularly useful.

You should probably read the sigil wiki page. It explains the sigil groupings, so you can pick one from each group.

Female asura has the best line in the game:
“You’re dumb, you’ll die, and leave a dumb corpse.”

An Siorai Tharian.4516:

Okay…

A.) A Profession (aka Proficiency) is a Crafting Skill, like Artifice.

B.) A Class, is what your character actually does in Combat, i.e. a Guardian.

C.) A Race is the species of the Character which can augment the characters abilities in combat to some extent.

Get those terms right. They were defined this way long before Guild Wars was even conceived of. Heck, they were defined this way long before Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Games were even dreamt about.

Guild Wars 2 defines them differently. I can accept that you would rather use the term Class for Guild Wars 2 Professions, but if you want to be a pedantic jerk about it, at least get your pedantry right for this game.

If you don’t like that classes are called professions in this game, then take it up with ANET, not me.

An Siorai Tharian.4516:

As for your assertion that the Classes aren’t all that hard to get a basic handle on. Sure, maybe not. That doesn’t change the fact that if you want an advanced knowledge of how the class works on an indepth level, your going to need to level it from the ground up, in a combat friendly environment. Preferably against both Player and A.I. opponents. Theory alone will not suffice. Nor will simply a few weeks of practice.

I know from personal experience that I did not understand the dodge mechanikittenil I had gone through a little over 80 levels. I haven’t actually leveled any one character up to level 70 yet, but between 2 characters that I leveled to 33 and 35 each, and another that is in it’s early 20’s, I have a little over 80 cumulative levels worth of experience at my disposal, and it took almost all of them for me to completely comprehend how to use the dodge mechanic to its fullest capabilities. I would not expect a person who has leveled all of their characters exclusively through Crafting to be capable of understanding that particular mechanikittenil they are forced to, because most MMO’s do not have that type of a mechanic.

I am sorry to hear that it took so long for you to grasp the game mechanics. Dodging was reasonably natural in the first few hours for me – the only difficulty I ever had with it came from the default keybinding.

Class mechanics themselves are pretty straightforward, particularly if you pick a forgiving profession like Warrior or Guardian. It doesn’t take more than an hour or two to figure them out to the extent required to tackle most dungeons, particularly if you are used to MMOs or even gaming in general.

An Siorai Tharian.4516:

Then can you honestly expect that player to know the first thing about how to actually play their chosen class when they get their first character or for that matter ANY character to level 80, and proceed to leave the confines of the crafting district in whatever their starting city was and attempt to join a Fractals Run or whatever the End Game Content of choice that they choose to undertake happens to be?

Why not? The professions aren’t that hard to get a basic handle on, and story dungeons/the early levels of fractals are cake. You can’t go 15 minutes in LA without a guild invite, so they can even cut their teeth with guildmates.

You can also purchase them with laurels, though the 2:1 exchange rate is rather terrible.

Currently, elementalists are really poor at sPvP, to the extent that none are brought to high-level competitions. However, Dec. 10’s patch is promised to entail a large number of balance changes, so that could change a month from now.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

With the karma nerf obsid shards will feel like they take forever to amass.

You do know that you can get obsidian shards by other means than just karma, right? I highly suggest you look at the Obsidian Shard wiki page

The idea that melee is in more danger is a popular perception, but I have rarely found it to be true, both because fight mechanics in most MMO boss fights try to even out danger and because melee also inevitably get additional defenses to mitigate damage. Sure, there are particular fights here and there which favor ranged, but there are also fights which favor or even require melee.

There is even less of an excuse to favor melee in this game because of weapon swapping allowing every profession (except elementalist) to switch between melee and ranged fighting mid-battle.

If this was implemented, it would eliminate staff elementalists and necromancers from PvE without a redesign of their skills.

My ele is an asura. When making her, I carefully compared the options between male and female asura, and to me, the males just look dull. Every aspect of them are shades of gray or brown. Females have more color to them, particularly in the eyes.

We’re the only range locked profession.

For better or worse, the expectation from the devs appears to be that we will use conjured weapons to fill in the gap.

There is nothing inherent to the trinity system which allows for more difficult/complex boss fights. The only thing a trinity system gives you is a long queue for dungeons and a bunch of self-important tanks and healers.

Long queue times and self-important, primadonna tanks and healers complaining about how hard they have it? No thanks.

Normalize the behavior of conditions first. Make them all stack in intensity or all stack in duration. I don’t see why it is such a tragedy that bleeds cannot stack past 25 when few people seem to care that burning and poison only stack in duration.

ChillyChinaman.6057:

Is Tornado that bad? you gain Vitality CC and Stability. Seems decent to me.

Unless it’s been fixed, even a single stack of confusion will come close to an instant-kill against someone who’s using Tornado.

Depending on the scenario, I would still use FGS, the elemental, and even tornado (to max meteor damage). However, it would be nice if I could use other utilities in that slot, for those cases where the above three are not useful.

Kain Francois.4328:

If a camera crew is filming a movie, would you intentionally stand in front of their camera? Would you tell them just to film elsewhere? Would you complain if they were mad at you?

That depends on where they were filming. If a film crew decided to set up in my neighborhood suddenly, particularly without my consent, I might.

No one here has considered that perhaps some of the favorite champ train maps were also favorite maps for others, and now the experience of fighting most champions (rather than AFK auto attacking) on those maps has been taken away.

I used to have fun soling the troll and norn in Frostgorge with my staff ele just to have the satisfaction of doing it. Now, I can’t, because the train generally shows up by the time I get one of them to half health, if not earlier. I normally just shrug my shoulders and collect the loot, but I could see how some people would get upset.

Given how attunement swaps are considered weapon swaps, which grant effects based upon sigils, and the fact that we have traits which give us boons upon swap, you aren’t likely to see the CD removed. With that in mind, the simpler fix is to normalize the CD at a good value and then change the arcane trait line to impact something other than the attunement CD.

Take that link with a grain of salt. While much of what it says is true, it’s also wrong in some aspects. For example, it points out mobility as a positive for elementalist (which is actually middle-of-the-pack or lower now after nerfs), but ignores mobility for warrior (which is the most mobile class with GS).

Make it a Gunblade. Then you get a pistol and a sword

What I would like most are forge recipes to convert between ore, shards, and dust. I don’t care how terrible the conversion rate is.

Alternatively, I wouldn’t mind breaking down T7 materials into T6 materials.

Lopez.7369:

Burning and poison are limited because of balance; bleeds are limited because of a technical limitation.

I found this a curious double standard. For some reason, the argument seems to be that it’s OK to put 2500 stacks of bleeds on a boss, but having multiple stacks of burning and poison isn’t?

Your opponent has to be an NPC or AFK to get hit with it.

Kodiak.3281:

Arena Net is now in the bargaining phase with Elementalists.

When do they enter the “playing phase”, where someone from the balance team actually plays the class? Because no useful changes will ever happen to the class until that occurs.

Daywolf.2630:

The human eye can only process 12 frames a second. 24fps is smooth and a standard in TV/movies.

Citation needed.

You may be mistaking the eye’s capability to recognize unique images with the eye’s capability to recognize stutter in motion.

I can quite easily notice stutter in movies, and it drives me crazy that we’re still using frame rates tied to limitations of 35mm film. I cringe every time I see the camera pan in a movie because it only exacerbates the effect.

Kite.2510:

Especially when fighting dragons that are considered structures…

I would happily drop a treb or catapault if I could Anything to ease the overflow situation… As it stands now, even with a highly organized group, it still only takes one person AFK on a turret to ensure failure.

Amadan.9451:

the healer role was far more stressfull, i had to pay attention who i had to heal, kite mobs because nobody cares to keep the healer alive or safe, be blamed if you die because the tanker never cared about you, and be blamed if anybody else died.

What game were you playing? I’ve played plenty of MMOs, and most times my healer characters were the most boring to play. Once you got any decent set of gear, it was a yawn fest in every dungeon you played short of the top-tier raids. WoW was particularly bad with this, though it was hardly the only example.

Amadan.9451:

oh and from an healer perspective i never had to wait for a dungeon run, i was begged for a dungeon run, here i can be even muted in map chat when i try to form a group

And there we have it. This is the real reason we have a vocal minority clamoring for the trinity. Healers and tanks are a pampered aristocracy in most MMOs. Play one, and the peasant DPS classes have to grovel at your feet to form a party and complete a dungeon/raid.

I’ve actually gotten to participate in the event maybe one third of the time I have attempted it. It is a bit frustrating. I don’t play that often much anymore, so when it happens, I just sign off and go play something else.

Some of our characters have cat allergies. Vote Kiel.

Bismuth.3165:

true… you get most of the achievement points from doing very random stuff, dungeons and wvw give almost no achievement points even though most of the players in this game do them.

Perhaps the point was to encourage players to experience less well known aspects of the game by assigning greater achievement point values to those things that people wouldn’t get by playing normally.

It sounds like many people expect to trip and fall and find themselves covered in points, chests, and titles.

Gisei.5749:

I don’t particularly like the way it is now, but I also cannot think of any other method more suitable for making an item extremely Rare than extreme grind. A lot of people complain about this without offering solutions, which as far as I am concern, it a complaint without any merit. Any skill based challenges would not work for obvious reasons, so what is there besides grind?

WoW had a few legendaries which came as the result of large quest lines. A good example was the only player-accessible legendary mount in the game, which came from participating in the AQ gate opening event. To open the gates, there was an extremely long chain of quests you had to perform, leading you all around the world and into some of the raid instances.

Now, in that particular case, you had to either be the person opening the gates for the first time or turn in the last quest within 10 hours of the event, but the idea of a long chain of events like that would be perfect for something like a legendary here, rather than just a legendary grind of gold and materials.

Vol.5241:

No JP is hard.

Except Griffonhook

Gives me nightmares to this day.

I did Griffinrook with my ele before we had a fall damage trait.

Get off my lawn

The worst I’ve seen is elementalist tornado skill versus someone with retaliation. The ele generally dies before they can cancel the skill.

Healix.5819:

Although everyone being able to get loot can be nice, it really just promotes abuse. Why try when you can just hit the mob once, get credit and let everyone else do the work.

The original loot style let you hit the mob once, pull it to someone else who then is stuck doing 99% of the work, and not only do you get the loot, but they don’t.

There have been plenty of times in other MMOs that a jerk player would follow me around using a class with fast, ranged attacks (usually a hunter/ranger type) who would wait for me to start casting a spell, tag my target real quick, and the result of my more powerful spell landing meant I had to tank and kill the enemy without getting either XP or loot for it.

The crafty ones would tag the mob while my spell was in flight, leaving me no other choice but to leave the area until they stopped.

I have several for you:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flame_Barrier
*only triggers in fire attune
*only triggers when you are hit (fire is glass cannon trait line)
*low-chance
*causes burning, which only stacks duration (your target is pretty much already perma-burning if you put points in fire)
*only burns for 1 second

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/One_with_Fire
*only affects Flame Barrier
*only increases the chance if you stay in one attunement for a long period of time, which is against the entire design of the class
*20-point trait

Scyte.2801:

- Teamwork. With the loss of the trinity its really each man for themselves. I miss the depth of teamwork from other games, especially GW1, where every individual had its own purpose and responsibility, where if 1 person failed to fulfill its purpose, the consequences for the entire team would be immense.

I agree on teamwork, but I disagree that it’s the lack of the cookie-cutter trinity roles that prevents teamwork from happening. People need to think outside the box a little.

That somewhat leads me back to another thing I liked about CoH that someone else mentioned above – spec variety. Some of the power sets, while fitting quite nicely with the superhero theme, were pretty new for me in the scope of a MMO.

For example, I remember going out a few times with parties consisting of no healers or tanks – we did well because we instead brought a frost controller and a force field defender. Rather than worrying about tanking to hold aggro or healing to keep people alive, the frost controller would lock-down groups of enemies in various ways and the force field defender would prevent us from taking damage by layering on the bubbles while the rest of us would clean-up.

WoW: LFG. Having a third-party website to coordinate parties is and should only ever be considered a stopgap.

GW1: primary/secondary professions

CoH: free aesthetic costume changes

RO: element strengths/weaknesses (e.g. fire elements weak to water but strong against fire/earth)

I’m sure I’ll come up with a dozen other things after I post this -_-

One thing I don’t miss, though, is the trinity. The game playing favorites with healers and especially tanks is no fun when the class you prefer cannot perform either role. Making some classes inherently inferior from an overall game experience standpoint is evil (WoW especially).

LTBK.1024:

elementalist’s 2, that lets them escape easily from you many many times.

For completeness, it is worth noting that it was nerfed pretty heavily. The HP no longer resets when used, so it’s only really good in WvW where you can stay close to a portal so mist form can help you escape properly. If you are caught in the open, it only saves you from the first stomp attempt.

Amos.8760:

Glad to hear you had such an easy time of it! Fact is, I walked up and down the path probably ten times over 2-3 different days and never saw anything. Even after resorting to the wiki, I checked the places it suggested (well away from the path), and they weren’t even there either…

This. I tried for several days, visiting every spot in Diessa which was listed on Dulfy and found nothing. After that, I gave up, rather than let myself continue to get trolled. The prospect of spending the entire event looking for the items daily, with a decent chance at failing because the last item or two I’d need was never there just didn’t seem too appealing.

I didn’t even have the worst of it. There would me multiple people each day in map chat complaining that they’d even gone so far as to get guested on other servers to check for artifacts and still find nothing.

I think all nerf requests should be in haiku format.

See the big kitty
Healing bleeds underwater
Nerf the ranger now