Guild Wars 2

Electro.4173:

I’m not seeing how it has to be a binary choice of one or the other. They could easily accomplish both without too drastically increasing the amount of time needed for the overall process.

This is how I see it. As far as mechanical work goes, it’s plausible that you could distribute a new weapon to multiple core classes for the same level of effort as a single elite spec, while every elite spec that you add it to is no additional work. The only mechanical change required outside of the weapon skills when adding it to core would be replacing a trait with the new weapon’s trait. This isn’t really a big issue since every class has so many useless traits that there would be plenty of candidates for replacement. This means you could likely add a new weapon to the game at the same time as new elite specs for only a moderate increase in design workload.

The real difficulty would be in creating the visual effects, since you’d probably need at least 50 skins to launch with.

Elite specs, as defined by Anet, are supposed to change the way the core class plays, not replace it. It is entirely expected that changing the way the class plays will make the elite spec better at some things than core, but tempest does not do this. Tempest is the same elementalist we’ve been playing since launch, but with a heaping serve of power creep.

Just because they failed to accomplish their stated goal for essentially every elite spec doesn’t mean I won’t hold them to it.

Jski.6180:

As ppl seem to only look at tempest base off of it has a wh and it has overloade then yes it looks bad but tempest added soo much more to ele things that ele had no way of doing before adding in tempest that fits the ele class well. Aura healing support is a very specialized type of playing for ele that at best before was just a few boons. Now its a type that is able to truly keep ppl alive and give them good boons. The specialization should not be able to do it all and tempest is the support line. The next may be dmg or tank or something else but to call tempest bad at this point seeing what ppl have done with it is a bit silly.

If tempest hadn’t gotten invigorating torrents at the last second it would’ve been objectively worse than regular ele; since it did get invigorating torrents it’s objectively better than regular ele.

That’s why tempest sucks. The way it was designed was simply wrong and now it can never be anything other than ele+ or ele-. People were saying this since the very first bwe and Anet did nothing about it.

No matter what weapon ele gets with its next elite I have zero faith in it. It’s either going to be utter trash that should never be used like the majority of ele options, or its going to be power creep insanity that invalidates everything else in the class.

At the end of the day we can sit here as long as we want coming up with contrived reasons why the next ele elite weapon should be X but the only question that really matters is:

What weapon does Karl want to ruin next?

Btw: if it was up to me, I’d choose pistol because it’s obvious by now that scepter will never be good, so the only way we’re ever getting a good single target ranged weapon is if one gets added in an elite and benefits from dat power creep.

Ohoni.6057:

It’s also worth keeping in mind that Water 1 is a piercing attack that can also hit multiple targets, it’s it’s basically a cleave with a longer reach, and Fire 1 shoots three blasts that can often hit multiple nearby enemies.

You heard it here first, folks: dragon’s claw and vapor blade are good now. The meta is changing at an alarming rate.

Focus solves most problems.

Ohoni.6057:

Again,. that’s my argument. They have done it with other classes, which is why they have no reason to also do it with the Ele. If you want to wandsword, pick one of the wandswords.

So then your actual position must therefore be ‘never add anything, because something like it has already been done’, right?

That’s also completely against what you said about following Anet’s pattern. 6 out of 9 of the first generation of elite specs all gained a skill type that another class already has. From what Anet has already done it would appear that their idea was ’we’ve already done it with this class, but how could we do it with that class?’.

Ohoni.6057:

I take my queues from how ANet designs. They seem to follow certain patterns.

That pattern gave us tempest. I’m going to take cues from patterns that aren’t terrible.

OutOfMana.7168:

I can see it now. The inevitable two hundred blades.

Why not just go the whole hog and strap 2 more to your feet, then hold a 5th in your teeth for 500 blades?

Ohoni.6057:

So i see sword or GS more of pure melee weapons with less conidl then dagger and maybe more def and less healing.

So, a Warrior, basically?

What i turly want is a hammer and a pure field class with good cc ok tank ability but needs other ppl to get the max out of its effects.

Have you met Scrapper?

So having all the fields in the game some finnisher and a number of added effects to though field types and finnishing.

As for ALL the fields, that’s unlikely. ANet likes to spread things around, they don’t like giving all the fields to a single class, you basically only get more than 2-3 if you’re lucky. Engis and Rangers are your best bet though, not Ele.

Are you just completely averse to the concept of classes being able to do multiple things, including things that other classes can do and different approaches to the same thing within a class?

And we can’t forget: an elite spec is way, wayyyyy more than just a weapon.

> be in well known raid guild
> make serious post about how to adjust a boss
> get told ‘git gud scrub’

Never change, GW2 forum.

Four years of play has shown that this ‘trade-off’ is bad.

Ele gets to use 20 weapon skills, but almost all of them are bad. Take a look at scepter for the most obvious extreme. The skills can be divided into two categories: phoenix and filler. It’s not as bad for dagger but dagger also suffers pretty heavily from this.

The utilities are nearly all bad as well. If it wasn’t for the hilariously op sustain that traits give them ele would’ve been permanently in the trash tier.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, it can’t be great at both range and melee, because that’s too many things.

Other classes can use a weapon that’s great at range then swap to another weapon that’s great at melee. Why shouldn’t the """""king of versatility""""" be allowed to have some actual versatility for once?

At this point I’d say the real problem isn’t massive boon spam or SoI, it’s just the fact that resistance exists at all.

Also lines getting a target cap would’ve been fair if stability stayed with no cd on stack removal, but not doing both just makes it rather difficult to do any more than inconvenience enemy melee with range.

Obtena.7952:

Rev’s don’t have as many skills as eles. Ele’s have diversity … make the connection. I mean … ANY class has diversity if they have as many skills and ways to mix them as an Ele does.

The class that’s been running minute variations on the exact same build since beta has diversity?

The point of this thread, as I see it, is that Mallyx, Jalis, Ventari, Corruption, Salvation, Invocation, Mace, Axe, Offhand Sword and Hammer are all F-tier choices that should never even be considered when building for pvp. They’re not merely not as good and therefore only don’t get taken because they’re not optimal; there is simply no way for any of these choices to contribute meaningfully to a build.

Jski.6180:

Stop trying to make ele classes into a war wantable.

Tell that to Anet ‘cause that’s all ele has ever been since launch.

Don’t forget signets and glyphs either.

With LS season 3 underway it seems likely that an expansion won’t be far behind, which means new elite specs with with a bunch of new mechanics to play around with. What I’d like to do here is think about how existing tech in the engine could be applied in new and interesting ways, as well as what kinds of new tech could be brought into the game.

To start off, here’s some of the things I’ve been thinking about previously.

Endurance loss
Back in ye olde days thieves would lose all of their endurance when using haste, as a drawback to the power that doubling attack speed brought. Since that got taken out there haven’t been any other skills that cause endurance loss in any way, so I have to wonder: what if endurance loss returned both as an offensive effect and as a potential cost to using certain skills.

Having it as an offensive effect would result in a new kind of offence support by allowing players to reduce the number of dodges available to the enemy and help their allies line up slower attacks. As a skill cost it could be an interesting risk management mechanic, allowing a player to use a powerful skill without a recharge of any kind but sacrificing their precious dodges for it.

Chain skills
The chain mechanic is mostly used on autoattacks and a few other skills that are meant to have some sort of follow up after the initial use. What I thought could be interesting is if some skills could transform into entirely different skills based on the circumstances.

One kind of attack that’s very common in Warhammer 40k is large weapons having access to different firing profiles for ‘focused’ or ‘dispersed’ modes, allowing the unit to fire either a single target shot that’s good at taking out heroes and tanks or an aoe or rapid fire attack for infantry squads. A similar type of move could exist here by having it act as dispersed when you don’t have a target and focused when you do, letting the user get some versatility.

Boon duration manipulation
This got added with HoT and I think there’s a lot more that could be done with it. Right now the only form that exists is to add 2 seconds to the duration of every boon on affected allies. Some obvious things that could also happen with this would be decreasing the duration of boons on enemies, increasing or decreasing the duration of conditions and focusing the effect on one or more specific boons or conditions.

Boon and condition play aren’t very interesting as things stand. With boons they’re essentially free except in some niche circumstances or against a necro, while condis will either turn you into a punching bag for your enemies or do nothing at all depending on how much condi application your enemies have and how much removal your allies have. Being able to manipulate them might be able to make things more interesting.

Tethers
Tethers aren’t very widely used but they bring in an interesting play dynamic that isn’t present with most effects. Usually once a tether is attached there’s no way to prevent its effects unless you move outside of tether range.

Tethers could make for some interesting active area denial if they were a bit more widely available. Another possibility is having short ranged tethers that benefit your allies in some way, with the downside being that the tether could easily be broken if your enemies can separate you.

Targeting allies
Support abilities in GW2 have all generally been aoes of some sort to make it unnecessary to target allies during combat, but I’m not entirely sure that it was for the best. Support tends to be almost entirely incidental during combat; you either fight the enemy and your support just happens on its own as has generally been the case for ele, or you bring a skill to use its effect for your own self defence and it just happens to help your allies as well.

The main reason why I think being able to target allies could be a good thing is that it would then allow for single target support, making things like picking out and changing focus fire targets more important. Also this could potentially raise the viability of squishier builds by supplementing their weaker self defence with stronger single target support and by the need to overcome single target support when focus firing instead of the generalised, weaker aoe support that’s currently used.

In general if this change was made I would expect to see aoe support somewhat weakened as well as some support skills being retooled to work as single target instead of aoe. Some high value skills could even borrow the focused/dispersed style I mentioned before.

If anyone else has some thoughts on mechanics changes post them here.

Ancient Ranger.3276:

They should never be balancing on ESL level. They should be balancing all classes around the average player skill level. If they are balancing on ESL level that would mean that lower skill cap classes are much more effective than higher skill cap classes when played at average skill levels.

The mere possibility that balance would change based on the level of play is already a problem that needs to be solved. Difficulty in competitive games must come from opposing players, not the mechanics.

Mbelch.9028:

Obviously, there should still be a cooldown on the boon/effect on attunement swaps to keep it in line. Otherwise, I think this could be implemented right now to make it a viable class for both staff, d/d, d/f and s/f, s/d.

There’s an extra possible benefit from a design point of view that you sorta touched on here; putting cds on attunement swap based traits lets you balance them with individual cds instead of them all having to be balanced around a 10s/8.5s attunement cd.

That could let some of them be way more potent but at the cost of a longer cd and others more spammable but weaker.

Goatjugsoup.8637:

i dont know what is with this perception that pve has to be single player content.

Precedent.

Map completion has been single player content since launch.

Remember when dailies were good?

Varezenem.2813:

The tablet mechanic is a major characteristic that distinguishes Ventari support from other supports. It promotes a more active play style based around positioning , predicting and micromanaging which is fun to most that stuck with it.

Being strictly worse than all other sources of support isn’t a good distinguishing characteristic.

Diovid.9506:

So… just don’t do it?

Game would’ve died years ago if people did that.

Ditch the tablet. It may be ‘unique’, but it’s uniquely terrible.

‘Fixed a bug that made someone slot this glyph for the first time since beta’.

Top kek Anet.

If anything self selection would bias the polls towards the people that are most serious about wvw.

ITT: people pretend that siege wars involves actual strategy.

I like the part in the Nevermore ‘story’ where the brave adventurer sits around tabbed for 3 hours waiting for ghosts to appear in Barradin’s vault.

Truly gripping storytelling that is.

Straegen.2938:

Keep in mind crit chance has a big drop off on DPS after 40 percent or so. The DPS difference between 45 and 50 is minimal.

wat

It’s linear…

Gizmo confirmed #1 thread necromancer worldwide.

There will always be a 100% optimal way to complete any pve content and that way will always be the way that clears it the fastest. No matter what Anet does to change the meta the result will be exactly as ‘stagnant’ as what we have now.

I voted for rebalancing points that aren’t in ppt because it was closest to what I really want, which is to change scoring so that playing for fights and playing for score are the same thing.

Making it fair and encouraging that we play for score won’t improve anything if we can’t have fun playing for score.

Changing how avoiding fights and pvd adds to score won’t make playing for score any less boring.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

1. How do you feel about this stability change?
2. Is there something else you would like to see done to stability instead?

1. I think a revert to duration stacking and a rebalance of anti-boon mechanics would be better.

The specific reason why I think stability should use duration stacking has to do with its interaction with stun lines like static field or line of warding. Under vanilla rules any number of people could spam all the lines they want but they’d be wasting their time if you had stability, but only one line was needed to stun an entire zerg if they didn’t have stability. This created a mechanic that operated independently of numbers; whether you were going 15v50 or 50v15 your ability to stun/resist stuns was the same.

With HoT stability that changed to make numbers matter to an even greater extent than usual. The current version is decent since you can rely on stability to block stuns but there are some problems.

a. AoE capped stun lines tip the balance in favour of melee being nigh immune to stuns.

b. Only multiple stack stability skills can be counted on, forcing a reliance on guardians for melee.

2. What I would like to see with stability is that both it and stun lines be reverted to their vanilla functionality and a rebalance to emphasise boon strips as being a way to limit enemy stability access. Some ideas for accomplishing this are:

a. Reinstate a priority system for boon corruption that has defensive boons rated highest. Stability itself shouldn’t be at the top, since that would make it too unreliable again, but it should be plausible that a coordinated necro bomb would be able to break stability.

b. Revenant’s dismantle defences trait would not function in its current form and could be changed to allow jade winds and chaotic release to remove stability before hitting on a relatively long cd.

c. There is a new effect in HoT that adds to the duration of all current boons for allies; what about something that cuts time off the duration of current boons on enemies?

Good balancing of anti boon mechanics would go a long way towards reducing the potential strength of duration stacking stability with the crazy high boon durations we can now get, but there’s also another benefit to making long duration stability not necessarily the best option. Some classes have access to some short duration, short cd AoE stability that’s currently useless due to only applying one stack. If short pulses of stability can be useful then these could see viability in melee trains and reduce dependence on guardians.

The high chance of matches being decided on day 1 will always occur because wvw is a 3 team free for all played 24/7. It’s not just difficult to change this, it’s actually impossible.

nsleep.7839:

Except that Mushroom under Rata Novus, that one is hard.

No.

Anyandrell.6238:

For goodness sakes, HP in HoT give TEN points, and you want them to be as easy as the ones in Tyria?!?

They are as easy as vanilla hero points, but with the completely unnecessary logistics ‘challenge’ of waiting for a group.

Sitting outside Barradin’s vault for three hours doing absolutely nothing while waiting for the event to start was a very fun journey…

You would prefer the pve farmers clogged up real wvw?

More combinations =/= more viable options.

Edit: honestly even now we have way too many combinations of build options, which is the number 1 reason for classes having 1-2 useful builds and everything else being trash.

DeceiverX.8361:

If you had to pick between a thief or a chronomancer, in a mutually-exclusive choice for a raid, if you’re playing properly, you take the chrono. The same is said about a druid, warrior, etc. Sorry, selfish DPS is pointless up to the point where you’re capped on big-hitter modifiers. Since meters do not measure this data, the meters themselves are pointless and add a layer of negativity to the game that is unnecessary.

So, since some players will use it incorrectly the players that will use it correctly shouldn’t be allowed to have it? Some people use chat to abuse and harass; should we take away chat for all the people that don’t then?

Player weapon skills can kill catas faster than ACs.

Leo G.4501:

My point is you don’t need a DPS meter to play to win.

Do you know how the best dps builds were proven?

You don’t ‘need’ anything to play to win but when you are playing to win you use everything. If it can get you a better result then you should use it, no questions asked. That’s why I don’t care about weak statements like ‘discrimination’ or ‘toxicity’. The people that would do these things already are. A group that would kick you based on a dps meter would kick you without one and you likely would not have wanted to play with that group regardless.

Leo G.4501:

Coldtart.4785:

Dps meters are useful to people that care about winning. Given that raids are supposed to be for players that care about winning I don’t see why there’s a problem.

Perhaps this is why we don’t have them. Players should care about having fun overall. You can still care about winning and still win without a DPS meter.

The only thing a DPS meter will do is let you win faster. That’s only fun until it’s routine.

Why is it so hard to understand that for some people playing to win is playing to have fun?

It’s already as easy as it could possibly be to discriminate. If you lose a fight in pve it’s because someone was playing incorrectly. There’s always someone to blame. The only difference a dps meter would bring to a discriminating player is more accurate discrimination.

Answer this: do you think it’s wrong to discriminate against players that are not pulling their weight? Should we not tell such players to either play correctly or make way for someone who will?

Objections to dps meters are classic examples of the no-perfect-solution fallacy. Just because players that are already idiotic will find a new way to be idiots if given a tool beyond their intelligence doesn’t mean it’s a bad tool. The very same people that would supposedly become ‘toxic’ when given dps meters are already being ‘toxic’.

Dps meters are useful to people that care about winning. Given that raids are supposed to be for players that care about winning I don’t see why there’s a problem.

Anhomedog.7968:

Am I the only one that enjoys supporting a team? Maybe this is just cause I mained a healer in my WoW days, but whatever it may be I thoroughly enjoy supporting and healing. And a lot of people complain that you cant kill people 1v1… Well to begin with if you are 1v1ing someone you aren’t exactly where you need to be. Ele’s in pvp are for team fights and supporting in those team fights, all of you probably know this. I know getting into 1v1s isn’t avoidable, but if you happen to find yourself into one then your team should see that and rotate to help.

It’s perfectly fine that bunker ele exists; the problem that most people have with it though is that it’s been the only viable way to play ele since pre-launch.

The blurb for ele on the GW2 homepage says “Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.” but in reality the only way to play ele is to jack up its physical toughness, abandon all versatility and never do noticeable damage at all.

People just want to be able to play the class they were sold.

At this point I very much doubt that anything could make wvw great again.

lil devils x.6071:

snip

My point is that stability being fixed is more important than going from a terrible map to a slightly less terrible map.

The DBL would probably be bearable with fixed stability.