Guild Wars 2

Dog.1472:

It was not a huge nerf in the least. It was an incredibly insignificant change that still left an Elementalist at being more mobile than any other class in the game.

Please stop over dramatizing things. You guys act like Elementalists are suddenly useless.

Thieves are, and have always been, the most mobile class.

A D/D ele was close over a short distance, but quickly falls behind over an extended run. The 33% increase on RTL made the difference even greater. Thief also has a lot of ledges that it can teleport onto which an ele can’t, allowing them to bypass barriers that an ele has to go around. There are places that a thief can instantly jump to with SB 5 that an ele would have to run halfway around the map to reach (30+ seconds).

Warriors are now more mobile than eles while out of combat, and even more so in closed in areas where RTL can’t move its full distance. The warrior’s large number of shorter burst movement skills allow them to maneuver through difficult terraikittenpeeds that an ele can’t match, and their sword leap allows them to jump across gaps that an ele can’t.

Ele mobility basically shines in one instance: jetting out of combat with RTL because it isn’t affected by movement modifiers (positive or negative), and if you happen to get hit with immob just as you activate it, GG hit respawn because you just slapped yourself with a 3 second unbreakable stun.

*edit – why is “terrain——at——-speeds” censored?

Incinerator looks like a blow torch with an animal head stuck to it. Who thought that looked legendary?

Bifrost has rainbows coming out of it. RAINBOWS kitten That is anti-awesome

The same thing seems to happen every patch with a lot of skins. Emberglow seems to magically jump up to 40+ gold after every patch and then fall back below its normal level as the market manipulators desperately try to dump their mistake.

So if Hot Join Heroes click on a different NPC to join the game, their opinions suddenly matter even if they stay exactly the same?

It isn’t as if tPvP has some sort of barrier to entry. There’s no qualifying round or prelims to separate the wheat from the chaff. You’re a tPvPer… because you click submit roster instead of play now. It really has nothing to do with being good or not.

It’s essentially a hot join mode with the opportunity to join as a group. MMR makes it a little better, but with the tiny population and no premade/solo queue split, it’s not by much.

S/D is very popular among tournament eles. It has a high skill cap, while D/D is more user friendly.

Dragon’s Tooth is very powerful in the conquest meta because it forces your opponent to leave a point, burn a dodge against a short cooldown attack or take the big hit (5k+) and burning damage.

Phoenix does more damage than fire grab, but is worthless beyond melee range. It needs to move a lot faster. Vigor is one of the best boons and getting it from phoenix lets you drop arcana VI.

Rock Barrier is 250 armor. It essentially turns an ele into a heavy armor class for 30 seconds. It’s a fantastic ability.

Shatter stone is pretty sad, but if you’re waiting on cooldowns why not throw it out there. You’re not going to kill them with water auto attack. Faster activation and more damage would be much welcomed.

The air and fire auto attacks are bad on scepter, and focus needs a major overhaul to be a competitive weapon choice.

They mentioned warrior as a prime candidate for this. I don’t really see how it helps them.

Warriors already maul eles when they can get a hold of them, it’s just nearly impossible for a warrior to get his damage on target against skilled opponents with their cooldowns up. This is basically going to make warrior miss x% harder.

They can put it in and see how it goes, but I don’t think it’s going to change anything.

Oni.5429:

The burst of Mesmer is mirror image and mindwrack. In my case that’s mouse4 and f1 at the exact same time, it’s even easier.

Are you going to claim that Mesmer is easier than ele because of that too?

Playing a mesmer is easier than ele.

One of my primary burst combos is 4, mouse 9, t, ground target, 4, mouse 11, mouse 13, 5 in the space of about a second. Even slightly mistiming anything completely ruins the entire attack. Just slightly more difficult to pull off than “mouse4 and f1 at the same time” or “make fist, punch numpad.”

Playing a thief during a competitive game is much harder than playing a bunker ele. End of story. And it’s MILES in difference.

Making decisions about when and where to engage is more difficult on any glass cannon. More so on a glassy ele or warrior than a thief or mesmer. Glass has little room for error by default. That has little to do with how difficult actually playing the class is.

There are tankeles that are by every single sense of the word worthless in temrs of skill in the top circuit that don’t know how to play the game, they don’t call a single thing during teamfights, make stupid choices. Some do NOTHING but push far all game. Despite this they pose an immense threat. Take a thief of equal caliber and we have a freewin on our hands.

Not being a good team member isn’t the same as not being skilled at playing your character in combat.

This seems primarily target at the ability to initiate CnD → midcast steal → backstab from stealth.

Now thieves will be visible when they start popping their cooldowns and good players will be able to anticipate and avoid the burst if they’re paying attention. Bad players are still going to be a free kill.

Oni.5429:

backstab is a million times harder to play than a bunker ele in competitive play.

Is that why Lowell described playing a backstab thief as:

Lowellollipop.5817:

Drop the mouse, punch the numpad, profit.

Lowellollipop.5817:

I don’t think it should be possible, there is no skill in punching my numpad.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The worst I have ever seen was a warrior in heavy armor with every section of that armor dyed bright pink. No variation at all, just monotone bright pink.

What’s wrong with all pink?

You always want to know more, but I thought we got a lot of good info today on what to expect in the not too distant future (SOOONN™). Some people were never going to be happy.

Psycho.8217:

First of alI, i would like to thank you all for taking the time to comment and voice your personal opinion.
I am currently playing scepter-dagger zerker equipment, just like on the past paid tournaments. However, on pve none of you mentioned smthn about s/d. Why?
Thanks again.

I use D/D, S/D, and staff about equally. They all have their strengths and shine in certain situations. The gear and build don’t vary much for any of them.

I use S/D in situations where I can’t stay close because of heavy PBAoE or multiple hard hitting mobs that you can’t reliably dodge, or in medium sized WvW fights. D/D is great for most open world and dungeon content as long as you pay attention to positioning and in WvW is best for solo/small group or HAM zerg diving. Staff is great in any situation where you don’t care who you hit and just want to start knocking HP off a blob. The DPS on staff is generally too low for any sort of serious dungeon content.

I usually run all berserker gear unless I’m going zerg diving/dueling in WvW or fighting large numbers of veteran mobs.

The survivability that you get from the standard cantrip build is generally enough against most people. The only real threats are high burst builds and tanky DPS ele/guardian. I just scraped myself off the ground after a heartseeker hero hit me for 10.8k. 120% crit damage means pain.

I’ve yet to find PvE content where I felt like I needed more survivability. High level fractals are dodge or die no matter what you wear.

aaron.7850:

The best classes in 1v1 have always been the most desirable in teams in just about any MMORPG.

Plenty of games have had poor 1v1 classes that were dominant group classes.

Look at Shadowbane. Warrior, priest and bard were poor 1v1 duelists. But they were the core of most groups for much of the game’s existence. Six warrior, two priests, a bard and an assassin could easily beat 2-3 times their number of the strong duelist classes.

The problem with GW2 balancing around group vs. group, is that they designed their maps in a way that splits everyone up and forces a lot of 1v1 fights. They need to go back and look at WAR to see how they designed the maps to keep groups together.

When I get tired of exploiting rangers spamming quick shot with no cooldown.

It would be fine if he used darker shades of blue/yellow. That’s just a little too… fabulous.

Glass cannons eles are still underpowered. Balanced and bunker were crazy OP at launch, but have been mostly brought into line.

I miss you staff bunker. Come back to me.

PinCushion.7390:

I found it funny, and an example of us not doing “crap damage.”

The build is laughably bad and the damage isn’t that good to compensate. It’s worthless against anything besides a poorly played glass cannon or an upleveled newb.

Defense beats offense.

Defense is a personal stat that affects only the person who is survivable. Offense stacks with everyone else around you to help take down a target.

Also, don’t play glass cannon ele. It was underpowered before the last patch and it’s worse off now. Choose a different class if that’s the role you want to fill.

I would give a lightning field to engis, but they have to transform into Ming and scream “CHARGE THE LIGHTNING FIELD!”

At 2000 power, 3 stacks of might is basically the same as 5% direct damage, but with the added benefit of also increasing condition damage. The higher your power goes, the better 5% damage becomes, but if you swap often enough to keep 6 might up from sigil of battle, you’re coming out ahead.

You don’t need a ton of crit damage to hit for 12k+ with fire grab. You can do that much with a 30 20 0 0 20 build, 48% crit damage and scholar runes.

Burning speed still works the way it’s supposed to for most people. This has been a recurring issue that affects a small percentage of eles.

If you look through some of the older threads, somebody might have found a solution.

TheGreatA.4192:

Every class in glass cannon gear does nice damage. Thing is people made it out to be as if an ele can only be either extremely glassy or do no damage. You’re not forced to be a full bunker build in order to be survivable.

I was responding to your claim that eles could be tanky and do viable damage. You then used that video as an example of an ele doing “viable” damage. That guy’s damage is negligible. He wins fights by being unkillable and wearing down players who don’t know how to dodge over the course of minutes.

TheGreatA.4192:

Spec out a little toughness and vitality while retaining a viable damage output, and you are a beast.

We have eles in our server that nobody will fight in a 1on1 because they will destroy you, likely even if you have a couple of teammates with you.

It seems like you only know two builds, glass cannon and full bunker. There is middle ground.

Let’s take for example Rizadon from Unity, he’s certainly not glass is he but his damage output isn’t exactly negligible, is it?

That is not a middle ground. It’s a bunker and the damage would shame a level 2 staff ele.

TheGreatA.4192:

his damage output isn’t exactly negligible, is it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s0EbWDWcQo

I made it as far as the 2619 damage fire grab crit, before going “YUP!”

A glass ele hits for 12-15k with fire grab.

Scepter auto attacks are abysmal. Once everything is on cooldown, you’re shooting BBs at a freight train. Lightning whip can do more damage in 1 second than 3 1/2 seconds of arc lightning. Scepter autos are also single target. The fire auto attack is laughable on a power build. It’s very slow casting and only hits for ~500 damage. It exists to put burning on a target for fire grab and is useless otherwise.

Auras are an ele class mechanic and a lot of what we do is built around them. Dagger has two more auras to triple your Zephyr’s Boon procs giving you more fury and swiftness.

Scepter has no burst damage outside of fire. Once you leave fire, you’ve essentially conceded that you’re not a threat to anyone for the next 10+ seconds.

Phoenix is worthless beyond point blank range because it moves slower than a running player.

I use it in sPvP as a specialist burst weapon, and occasionally in dungeons to keep everyone with capped might. Otherwise, dagger or staff is better in every other scenario.

GW2 uses a skill coefficient.

Power * weapon damage * coefficient / target armor

For example:

Fire grab is 1.75/2.8 vs. burning

DiogoSilva.7089:

The strongest ele builds were the 0/10/0/30/30 bunkers, and close to them and with similar traits, the auramancers. Both builds were godlike at stacking boons, being able to have as much as 20-30s of boons at once, the former with ridiculous sustain, the later with very strong party support.

Let’s look at the patch notes, excluding the buffs to focus and to staff:
Renewing Stamina: Offensive critical builds can still maintain vigor. Boon builds can no longer stack vigor to ridiculous amounts. Nerf to boon builds, like bunkers and auramancers.
Soothing Disruption: Significant nerf to cantrip builds and to boon builds. That means bunkers and auramancers.
Zephyr’s Boon: Less fury and swiftness for MH Dagger elementalists. A nerf to all MH dagger builds, be them either burst or boon oriented. A significant nerf to all auramancers.
Evasive Arcana: Only affects the healing scale. A nerf to builds with healing power, like bunkers.
Glyph of Elemental Harmony: Three stacks of might instead of one. A buff to burst builds.
Ride the Lightning: General nerf to all OH Dagger builds, be them either burst or boon.
Frost Aura: Less chill, more defense. Neutral. Won’t count this one.

Bunkers: 5 nerfs (most of them being significant)
Auramancers: 4 or 5 nerfs (most of them being significant)
Burst builds: 2 nerfs (none being significant), 1 buff

Renewing stamina: You now don’t have vigor when you’re not attacking. That means, when you’re being pressed and have to be defensive, you don’t have the energy to dodge.

Huge nerf to burst builds.

Zephyr’s Boon: the nerf to fury duration means you have big gaps in your fury uptime unless you’re 30 arcana and constantly swap attunements even when you would be better served sitting in air and auto attacking.

Big nerf to burst builds.

Glyph heal: Why would you ever use this outside of water/earth? Maybe air for swiftness when you’re running around in PvE? Eles gain might every time they turn around. This isn’t a change that anyone is ever going to actually notice while fighting.

Frost aura: 10% damage mitigation for a few seconds isn’t much compensation for the huge nerf frost aura just took. A warrior isn’t going to stop and ask himself if he should whirlwind through an ele with frost aura up, because 2 seconds of chill isn’t going to matter. If anything, he probably wants to be chilled for a second because it will slow down his whirlwind and get more hits in. It went from a serious defense that people wanted to avoid hitting, to a mild annoyance.

Huge nerf to burst eles.

Ride the lightning: Nerf to any x/D ele

leashmaygoss.2140:

Shut the kitten up and be glad they didnt go hard on your kitten as much as engineer for 4 patches in a row september-december.

Everytime you press a button you still heal for 280hp, nothings new except EA cleansing wave & they even buffed your god kitten auras now get off my map.

Ele is easy.

Sincerely, the whole community.

An ele with 780 healing power isn’t a glass ele.

They nerfed frost aura so that it doesn’t stack anywhere near as much chill. It is no longer an ability that makes people stop attacking you or be severely penalized. 10% damage reduction for a few seconds is a kitten joke as a trade off. They also nerfed the boon duration for zephyr’s boon/shocking aura.

Now get off my map.

1. A+ Mesmer
A Guardian
A- Ele

2. There are currently no underpowered classes unless you’re trying to compare them to overpowered ones.

3. WvW

4. 3

5. 5

6. WvW

7. 3

freaktong.8169:

golantrevize.2394:

@freaktong
The problem is that not everybody runs d/d defensively, and this patch hurts this minority even more.

I do feel concern for those who don’t play d/d bunker build (aka daphoenix build). Though the problem is that most eles I’ve encountered are indeed d/d bunkers and they’re almost impossible for my warrior, engineer and necro.

Necro and Engi both have strong counters to the D/D bunker build.

Warriors lose to anything that can spam conditions (especially cripple and chill) and avoid their burst. It has nothing to do with ele.

Inscription is still 1 stack of might. So terrible.

Burst eles have effectively gone from a C+ build to an F in one patch.

Bunkers went from A+ to A-.

Good work ANet. You’ve really done a lot for balance and build diversity.

I would like to at least have the option to show my rating. They can have an opt in feature for people who want it hidden.

waka.9826:

I actually have a printed out picture of you on my ceiling and I fall asleep staring at it every night because one day I want to have beautiful hair like you. That is my goal.

That’s not creepy at all. O.O

I love undercutters. They just drove the price down on one of my markets so that the sell orders are lower than where I usually place my buy orders.

It’s so much easier when I don’t even have to wait for my buy orders to fill before relisting and heading out for the evening.

I’ve been noticing a lot of unexplained lag in sPvP. I run ping plotter in the background to track my connection and it rarely has lag spikes or packet loss, but I often have stretches where abilities take 30 seconds to activate.

I never used to have bad lag spikes like that outside of Stonemist three way zerg fights.

*before anyone asks, type /ip in the chat window to get your server’s IP address.

Sarmach.1547:

Zerging is the main problem in this game.

Not really. Gates of Ekrund in WAR was a tiny section of wall with 3 cap points fought over in a 12v12. It was one of the the community’s favorite maps and had a battle space no larger than sPvP maps. The actual area fought over in a non-spawncamping situation was even smaller.

The biggest problem in this game is terrible map design. They’re even terrible for a 5v5, unless the game mode is deathmatch. There doesn’t seem to have been any thought put into how the maps should control the flow of a battle. All of the capture points are open and completely indefensible leading to a chaotic mess. There are few, if any, strategic points on a map that you would want to fight at besides the actual capture points themselves. There’s nothing to create battle lines.

If the maps were better designed, there would be less of a gap between high mobility classes and low mobility classes, because it wouldn’t be about moving from one circle to the next quickly. Instead, you would have a game built around controlling the flow of people through the map and preventing enemies from being able to reach your points at all. It would also kill the generally disliked bunker mentality without having to change the game mode.

Team fights are (at least for me) the most entertaining PvP type. 1v1 almost always boils down to who has the better counter comp/OP build. Team fights (what you want to call “zerging”) generally mask the weaknesses of particular builds and it becomes a game of skill and coordination.

The devs need to be working on the problems this game has, not masking them with duct tape and bandaids.

Or they could let people play what they want to play instead of forcing them into the game size that you want. If people actually wanted 5v5 instead of 8v8, the 8v8 servers wouldn’t be the only ones consistently full.

redhare.9210:

If you identify them you can sell them for lots more than the few copper for unidentified ones.

Few copper? Unidentified dyes are currently 18s78c.

It was pretty much preordained that I would be wearing armor with fire shooting out of it when I named my ele Rapid Oxidation. I even painted it with red and black for the full “kitten you hipsters” look.

I don’t wear the full set though. The chest/legs look like a homeless person wearing a burlap sack with scrap metal draped around the waist.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

Using a blast finisher (earth 2 or arcane wave):
- in a fire field (fire 2 or 4) will grant AoE 3 stacks of might
- in a water field (water 3 and 5) will give a large AoE burst heal
- in an ice field (water 4) will give AoE frost aura
- in a lightning field (air 5) will grant AoE swiftness
Using a projectile finisher (earth 1, 5, arcane blast):
- in a fire field (F2,F4) will cause projectile finisher passing through the field to cause burning
- in a water field (W3, W5) will grant regeneration to the person firing through the field
- in a lightning field (A5) will cause vulnerability on the target
- in an ice field (W4) will cause chilled on the target

You can get other finisher types from your conjures, but they’re generally not worth it.

No one has reached the skill ceiling for any class, so it’s impossible to determine which class has the highest skill ceiling.

Those wonderful people who claim supply camps and put up 15 supply buffs.

You deserve a medal, or maybe a Real Men of Genius tribute song.

Mufa.1326:

So here is a design principle for MMOs that ANET designers failed hard:
You cannot let AOE class/build to be comparable or stronger than single target class/build in 1v1 and then let AOE dmg scale linearly (5x dmg on 5 targets) for team fights.
AOE class/build needs to be slightly weaker than single target class/build in 1v1 and slightly stronger in team fights (only achievable through diminishing returns on multiple targets of AOE dmg).

/discuss

According to who? Horrible PvP MMOs like WoW?

AoE has drawbacks like delays before activation (compare Dragon’s Tooth to Newb Seeker), aiming (skillshots), longer cooldowns, and they already do less damage than zero skill newb classes like thief.

If anything, AoE is weaker than it should be in GW2 because of the sPvP game design focusing on holding tiny little shoe box sized capture points.

Dat leg specialist. O.O

Ostricheggs.3742:

Frost aura has infinite range broski. You hit them, you get chilled.

Yes, I was thinking of shocking aura.

The point is the same though. If you don’t want a big stack of chill, don’t attack people with frost aura. It’s like people who complain about taking damage from confusion.

If it’s a bunker ele, it’s not like he’s going to kill you during that time. If it’s a burst ele, you can probably still kill him faster than he can kill you even while chilled.

Batmang.5421:

stuff

hharry.1967:

Who uses the healing signet? When you have a 15s heal that heals a lot and strips all your conditions?

Almost everyone.

Ether Renewal is a PvE heal.

Arpheus.6918:

Their answer would be no. With rush they would have alot less survivability. Armor is worth like nothing. Escapes are worth alot more and RTL is the best escape in the game after stealth.
It also has nothing to do with speed. Ranger Swoop has exactly the same speed as RTL but still RTL goes for 1500 range while Swoop goes for 1100 range.
1500 is ridiculous really and an escape win button.

291 armor is almost 14% damage mitigation. That’t a lot better than “like nothing.”

1. My warrior found some magic grass and decided to pray to it for luck with loot drops.
2. bringing home a new family pet after the last one was mysteriously hugged to death.