Guild Wars 2

I also think Anet should just choose the next topic in the list, and start the new round right after. I’m personally anxious for the next discussion topic, so I wouldn’t like to see it delayed for the sake of resetting the votes.

Well, the lava tomb build is surprisingly devastating at times, which makes for some good laughs. Also depends on the map. In Khylo, for example, you can place yourself on the clocktower’s roof and rain fire from then. 2-3k a tick per lava font, plus any meteor or fireball. It is devastating. Ice Storm from Frost Bow is also really strong in those situations. And if all else fails, or if you just want some extra fun, you can always just jump and automatically down yourself.

EDIT
Now imagine two or three elementalits with that build. Aviators dropping lava tombs from the skies, one at a time! Is that a bird? Is that a plane? No, it’s the Flying Suicidal Bombing Squad.

Haha, zerker staff ele with lava tomb and persisting flames ia a pretty funny troll build. You’ll be mostly useless whenever you get caught in a duel (and even then, it’s surprising how many fall to your 8 second lava tomb), but you can always position yourself safely and spam meteors, lava fonts and fireballs into a capture point and watch everyone die. Or just put yourself in the middle of the point and watch everyone get lava tomb’d. I’ve won several battles by geting downed over and over again. :P Someone called me useless (a warrior that was spending his entire time rezzing me), while everyone around was having a hard time surviving two lava fonts without forcing themselves to leave the capture points.

My apologies to whoever was in my team at that time! But if I have to die so fast, let me die with style.

As I suspected.

@ the suggestion to auras per attunement swap,

I hope you can understand why that would be extremely overpowered. I’m not being hyperbolic here. Even without fresh air, and even without any arcana investment, a 13s shocking aura on demand, or a 13s magnetic aura on demand, would be crazy powerful. And I’m talking about potential grandmaster traits that only add a single aura on swap. If a single trait offered the four auras, or if coupled with 30 arcana, or with fresh air, or with aura traits, this already OP setup would skyrocket, and if you sum all of it in a single build, it would perhaps create the most overpowered build in pvp history. :P

Just imagine d/d elementalists with perma fury, perma swiftness, perma protection, perma-auras, that can make entire armies reflect projectiles, stun melees, chill everyone, while giving perma protection, perma fury and perma swiftness to allies.

No, don’t imagine it. :P Glorious, yes, but not a good thing.

Chasind.3128:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Elementalists will get more build diversity in this patch, not less. Cleansing Water and Elemental Attunement on higher tiers will barely affect current builds.

How will they get more builds?
Looks to be it will still be the old set-up of
0, 10, 0, 30, 30

Moving the traits from Grandmaster to lower tiers instead of higher would actually help imo.

But not many play with the 0-10-0-30-30 bunker build anymore. PvP eles have been using air burst builds, or going with rock solid. PvE eles almost always go with 30 in fire and fresh air or other damage modifiers. Maybe that’s the build used in WvW? I don’t know that, as I don’t play it much.

If anything, the nerfs to other professions might bring the 0-10-0-30-30 d/d build back to pvp.

Any ele build that invests on arcana and earth traitlines is going to get buffed, based on what is known so far. This is because of the bug fix to lingering elements, which currently doesn’t works with the earth minor trait, and with the buff to the earth minor itself. This means that d/d rock solid builds, and fresh air builds with the rock solid trait variant, are going to get 40 extra toughness in earth and 120 extra toughness in other attunements for a few seconds after leaving earth.

Meanwhile, warriors, rangers, necros, s/d thieves, pretty much most of the current pvp meta is going to be nerfed. And do not forget that that elementalists used to be a top pvp profession before the current meta.

Anything can happen, but elementalists will surely end up in a better position.

I’m not a fractals player, yet I agree with this.

I understand why Anet is doing this reset, but they should not disrespect their dedicated fractals fanbase. If the reset needs to be done, high-leveled fractal players should be compensated.

Something simple, like gold per each fractals level lost, would go a long way.

@ Xernth

I agree with your post, although my main point was, how many current viable builds get affected by the changes? Not many. So build diversity will not get that much worse with the 10th dec patch as it is now. Those changes can, however, prevent potential new builds at becoming viable, which is where I agree with you, but we’ll have to wait first and see what the playerbase will come with the new traits and the new attunement’s base cooldowns.

florence.1674:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Elementalists will get more build diversity in this patch, not less. Cleansing Water and Elemental Attunement on higher tiers will barely affect current builds.

There will be more build diversity? There has always been build diversity! Question is which builds are viable?

All glass cannon builds that either don’t spec in arcana or put in 10 points for renewing stamina, and most of the 20+ arcana and 20+ water will remain unchanged, perhaps only losing one variation in water. That’s pretty much most of the viable ele builds in this game, right?

Neko.9021:

Is there even that much in the December Patch that changes the D/F builds though? We managed to successfully QQ enough to save Renewing Stamina so I thought the build was more or less the same even post-December patch.

Faster attunement rotations, adept slot of choice in fire magic, and slightly higher toughness from earth magic.

Elementalists will get more build diversity in this patch, not less. Cleansing Water and Elemental Attunement on higher tiers will barely affect current builds.

Iksargo.2640:

Here is the correct link for my d/d build NO OFFENSE TO YOUR GLORIOUS ELE PLAY OSTRICH.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k33;2BJ-U0v4-N-Z0;9;5JJ-T;159-57;245A5w0;3CoF2CoF26BW

I’d like to try out your build, especially as it’ll get slightly buffed with upcomming bug fixes/ balance changes. Could I ask for some tips? How should I play with it, as in, should I burst and run, or try to overlast my opponent, and should I favor team playing or dueling, etc.

Condition → boon coversion is entering necro/ mesmer/ guardian ground, and there was a time where Jon Peters said, in gw2’s pvptv streaming, that adding more cc to elementalists would make them too strong.

I’ll suggest instead that Signet of Water should heal on its active effect. Pretty much as a second water trident, with ground targetted party healing too. Coupled that with stronger condition removal on passive (would 2 conditions every 10 seconds be too strong?), and that can compensate for some lack of investment on water and/ or arcana.

I would add a 1.25 second of evasion to Signet of Air instead of the blind. Wouldn’t touch it any further at the moment.

The buff to tempest defense in the dec 10 patch means that a third “share-able” aura will be available every 25 seconds or so. So it’ll be a buff, especially to offensive auramancer builds, which were required to invest on arcana for attunement cooldown before, and will now get stronger burst.

If the build will be truly viable, it remains to be seen, though.

Zerg-wide water fields!

Zerg-wide aegis!

Zerg-wide weakness!

AR will be moved for the sake of Renewing Stamina to stay at adept tier in the meantime. They simply took a trait that is barely used, and moved up a tier not because it deserves that tier, but because they would be destroying build diversity by moving renewing stamina instead.

It does not works with combo fields and runes, but it should work with all traits, tempest defense included.

Elementalist is a viable option in PvE thanks to LH, and it’ll apparently get further buffed in the upcoming patch with the buff to fire #25, earth #5 and lower base attunement cooldowns.

In my opinion, auto-attacks (= sustain damage) is the third big issue with elementalists, behind base survival and base attunement cooldowns. Arc Lightning, Lightning Whip and Fireball are the only good auto-attacks we have, and the first one is underwhelming to built around it in PvE. Meanwhile, LH has a godlike auto-atack against the AI.

Protection is an anti-burst boon and fury a burst boon. By their very own nature, they don’t need extra boon duration, they only need to be applied at the right time. Swiftness is not very important here.

You won’t be able to control tempest defense’se aura, true. But whenever you get disabled, chances are, the auto-protection proc will always be helpful. Thieves, Mesmers, Warriors, Elementalists, all of them will unload their burst sequence the moment they disable you, and 3 seconds should be enough to last their burst sequence duration (if they don’t get stunned in the meantime).

If you are in a crowded area, you might not make use of that fury while on the ground, but your allies will, and the aoe protection + fury + swiftness might change the tides of the battle to your favor. It’s your team that is chasing harder and bursting harder, and their team that is bursting softer, for 3-5 seconds. That’s the difference between your opponents escaping or not, or your allies being bursted to downed status or not.

Now, I don’t know if that build will be any good or not, but I do see potential in it, and I do believe there’s more synergy between those traits than what you think. Take a look at the stat bonus with Valkyrie Amulet and Berserker Jewel:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k3c;0J0B2-P0w4gM-Z0;9;5T9T;205A4;049B;14N0;0N;0sV2DsV2D4Bu

I’m using focus here, but it could very well go for oh dagger. Focus because it has more condition removal, anti-projectiles, an aura that can be used during a fire burst, a ranged KD, and invulnerability to compensate for the offensive utility skills.

We’re talking about a build with a lot of power and critical damage, 30% base critical chance that goes to 50% with fury, decent healing power, decent health and a nice amount of toughness. Getting bursted down means an automatic 3s self regen, and aoe shocking aura, protection, fury and swiftness. You can unload between 2 and 5 instant attacks, two of them which will automatically critically hit, for a near instant burst that can go up to 6-12k damage by itself, while excluding your other skills. I’m talking about a sequence where you are caught in earth, and shocking aura activates. That’s two arcane skills, magnetic wave, sigil of fire, and switching to air, but it might be hard to do it in a whole second for the bonus damage from tempest defense.

OH dagger would offer more burst, though, so I’m unsure which off-hand weapon would be the best. I do like the idea of aoe shocking aura + swirling winds in the same build.

If you want to improve staff, take a look at its air magic skillset, and at how slow or underwhelming its survival skills are. I don’t mind staff being a slow weapon for damage, utility or party support, but it shouldn’t be that slow for survival. If any duelist build can beat a staff ele, fine, but at least the staff ele should be able to hold their ground for a while longer than they do now.

Meteor Shower is fine. Staff elementalists still have many issues. Fire magic isn’t one of them. It also happens that one of the best survival skills for staff is… in fire magic!

If allied mesmers clutter the screen (I don’t know, haven’t had the opportunity to check it out yet), they shouldn’t. Likewise, dead opponents should instantly disappear from the UI. I agree that the icons could be slightly smaller, at least for the opponents, but one thing that confuses me, is the colors. Sometimes I forget which team color I’m in, and in the slight second I take to watch the mini-map, I have some difficulty reading it. If anything, I would prefer if all opponents had a neutral icon color (grey?), and only our allies had the color of their team.

Pyriall.5027:

Tyler Chapman.1832:

…the way I see it is that this change helps lessen the gap we have in player skill level.

That’s a pretty sad comment to make. With a game that has to much auto play and very few ways to distinguish yourself as more skilled than the next, the last thing you should be doing is lessening the gap between skill levels.

I think what Tyler meant, is that this feature lessens the skill gap between VoIP users and non-VoIP users.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

:D Good find.

Thanks for the submission. Going to move this to game bugs forum.

Now, why would the skill bug like this? :P

Oni Link.4621:

PS: If you are not using a VoIP program for team queue then you are playing in a soloqueue-like environment. So what is the point of playing team queue? The biggest advantage is the higher communication between members.

Team Queue is currently the only rated queue that allows you to play with friends. Also, in addition to this, there are foreign players who might shy away from speaking and trying to understand english speakers in VOIP, but enjoy a good organized team match nonetheless.

For those reasons, I’d say team queue should offer as many features to compensate for the lack of VOIP as solo queue does. And for those who use VOIP: nothing will change for them, so outside of UI cluterring, why complain? :P

From my experience, the new system is much better. I’ve been reliably having close matches about half the time or more, where most of them used to be lop-sided before the patch. Made pvp much funnier. I can understand how it might be frustrating for veterans to get matched with newbies, though. It certainly still needs to get some tweaks.

Oblivion.8307:

you could generally tell who was fighting where by looking at player health bars/conditions and positions of friendly players on map.

It was always a bit vague, though.

An example out of my head:
Player’s A health is being depleted quickly. Is he being bursted down by a thief? Being targetted by two opponents? Or three? Should I go there help him out, or would that be suicide and be a waste of my time? With VOIP, that player could simply tell me, “there’s a thief here” or “I’m getting gang banged”, and I could either help them our, or approach carefully or run to another point. This new UI change will be important for that.

Another example:
Player A is fighting against a burst thief, Player B is fighting against a burst warrior. My build happens to be good against the thief, but bad against the warrior. I would probably want to avoid the warrior through the match, especially in a 1v1 situation. The best way to know the position of both, without any playing telling me with a voice program, is to use this new UI feature. Both my allies could be close to death, perhaps defeated by the time I reached the point, but I would know beforehand that I would have an higher advantage holding or getting back one point and would probably suffer a defeat at the other point.

Oraith.1732:

I say keep in SoloQ/Hotjoin, remove from TeamQ.

I also disagree with this.

Not all team queue parties will want to use VOIP, especially randomly organized ones. Sure, top players must use it, but those who use it won’t need this new UI addition in the first place. Meanwhile, this change adds more incentive for less serious teams to join team queue, as they’ll be at a less severe disadvantage now. Keep in mind that team queue is not only for the elite players. More incentives for other players to join = better.

This new feature has some cluttering problems, and there have been some nice suggestions made to fix it. But other than that, this is positive to the game.

I really don’t see how it dumbs down the game either. Part of the strategy in conquest mode is knowing where and when to go to a certain place, and that demands communication. That communication can be done through VOIP, or through other means, like pre-made chat commands, which do not yet exist, or this UI feature, which was finally added to the game.

This doesn’t dumbs down the game. Quite the contrary, all non-VOIP conquest matches have been “dumbed down” until this feature finally came. Reacting to your opponent’s position adds a new layer of depth that hasn’t been present in non-VOIP matches.

Tempest Defense’s shocking aura effect is pretty much like the grandmaster Powerful Auras trait. You’ll need to build around it.

Tempest Defense can offer you swiftness, fury and – especially – protection on cc. This will not only allow you to better survive against a sudden burst, but also strike back harder or escape more efficiently. If coupled with Powerful Auras, that’ll be a free shocking aura/ protection/ fury/ swiftness to everyone around you, which can be devastating at times. That’ll also be the best time to take advantage of the damage boost, as opposing players can get stunned by hitting your allies.

I can see this working in a 30 water build with valkyrie amulet and berserker jewel setup. You’ll have enough toughness (+ from 10 points in earth), decent vitality, nice access to protection, and still high power, critical damage, and decent enough precision with 30 in air, fury and perhaps sigil of accuracy. Can have decent survival, some nice burst potencial, and will certainly offer great party support.

However, I agree that it’s hard to synergy both trait’s effects with one and the other. Would be much better if shcoking aura’s stun lasted two seconds, but then it could be way too strong. Alternatively, I agree that Tempest Defense should work versus all disabled targets, to that it can work with updraft and underwater.

Using arcane utility skills can perhaps do the trick. Load both at the time someone gets stunned, and that’s worth an extra 40% damage. If your arcane spells would normally hit for, say 2k each, that’s 800 extra damage from the burst. If you happen to not be in air, you can always switch to it, but it’ll probably be very hard to time out everything. And of course, add sigil of fire to it.

This is a great change, but I don’t like switching between tools between characters every single time I want to play with an Alt, neither.

If Anet is reading this, I suggest making those tools “unlockable by account”, similar to the acchievement’s skins, where each character can create a copy of they whenever they want from a menu option.

Warriors are currently overpowered across all formats of the game. Anet acknowledges this, and have said that they don’t want warriors to dps, cc and have high survival all in a single build. Dec 10 patch will see changes to tone that down.

Outside of that, Warriors have always been overpowered in PvE. This is because some of their main weaknesses, like slower and more telegraphed animations, or required party support to burst someone or cleanse conditions, are not very important to PvE, due to the enemy design and AI. This makes more straight forward classes, like the warrior, naturally favored by PvE’s design. It’s unfair, yes.

I don’t know what Anet is planning to fix this one, but if we take a look at an upcoming game with similar battle design philosophies, EverQuest Next, its developers have been insisting that the enemy’s AI will be good enough to prevent situations like that. In comparison, we know GW2’s AI is almost non-existent.

EDIT
If the AI could do some of the core actions that this battle system is balanced around, like dodging and strafing, applying conditions and boons more often, and auto-attacking, then PvE would be so much better. Movement effects and cc would be desired to hit anyone, predictable bursts could be evaded by the AI sometimes, condition cleansing and boon stripping would be more valuable, and so would defensive stats.

It certainly feels better now.

I see some interesting new details. Gotta try it out.

Is the map hotfix already on? There was a small update not too long ago.

To be honest, I haven’t had cluttering problems yet.

tichorum.2415:

This is a horrible QoL improvement. Team coordination? That’s PART OF THE GAME that you have to communicate. You’re just making it easier for teams to NOT talk and call out numbers because you see it on the map yourself now.

Teams almost never communicate in solo queue. This feature is a better than nothing QoL improvement that adds more strategical depth to solo queue matches.

The thing I don’t like about Trading Post, is how it has been killing one of the most fundamental RPG features – exciting looting.

Almost every single reward in GW2 revolves around currencies, generic materials or generic salvage fodder. The exciting exceptions are heavily driven by very low RNG values, for the sake of the “in-game economy”.

It’s very satisfying to work for and get, from a loot, a specific skin or a specific weapon that is statistically stronger than what we have, and get to equip it and say to ourselves, “this is the weapon I’ve gotten from finishing this kind of content”. But that barely exists in GW2. Most of the stuff you get is fodder to salvage kits, with generic skins, that can drop pretty much from anywhere and everywhere. Even the rare drops are easily gotten by predictable world boss patterns, and have no purpose but to salvage as well, or to sell for other players to salvage.

In earth attunement, earthquake and churning earth also count as blast finishers.

So a simple sequence could be: Fire #2 > Fire #4 > Fire #3 > Earth#4 > Earth#5.
12 stacks of might right there.
If you have the utility skill Arcane Wave unlocked, you can also cast it instantly for 3 more, up to 15.

Sigil of Battle will give you 3 stacks on attunement switch (every 9 seconds minimum, but you can easily maintain 6 stacks with it), your healing glyph skill grants 3 more if used in fire, and for 10 points in fire magic traits, you can pick a trait that gives further 3 for each cantrip utility skill you use (lightning flash, cleansing fire, armor of earth, mist form).

Taldren.7523:

Fire has nothing that I can see on the surface that is worth anything other than the new cleanse. However, that is more of an addon for other builds … not something to make a build around.

The cleanse is a cantrip, and fire magic has an adept trait that adds 3 stacks of might (15s) each time you activate a cantrip. You can make a cantrip might-stacking build with 20 in fire, 20 in water and 10 in earth for the automatic armor of earth too.

In a scepter build, you could push for 30 in fire for persisting flames, and get plenty of might/ fury/ regen/ vigor from cantrips and combo finishers.

Assuming that in a normal pvp fight, your armor of earth and cleansing fire traits activate normally, and you start the fight with a lightning flash burst, that’s 9 stacks of might right there without any extra effort, plus regen, vigor, protection, stability and condition removal coming at a free cost.

Can lead to some potentially sturdy glass cannon valkyrie (or even zerker) elementalists, or to more balanced or bunker builds (with soldier or cleric amulet) with good damage sustain.

Still has 10 free points which don’t even demand any arcana investment. Can go for water’s cleansing water, and get even more condition removal, perhaps with the healing glyph for 3 extra stacks of might, regen + condition removal, more protection, and swiftness inbetween battles, or just Signet of Restoration for even more passive defense.

I absolutely love this feature. I don’t see how it dumbs down the game, at least in solo queue. It does the opposite to me. It raises the level of depth in an uncoordenated game closer to the level expected in a coordenated game.

Coordenation and comunication are core to winning a game in Conquest Mode. Okay, that’s important across any game mode, but Conquest is all about being in the right place at the right time. However, in solo queue, this is nearly impossible to acchieve because teams can’t properly communicate with each other. Thankfully, the UI now compensates for that.

Exclusively from a solo queuer point of view, saying that this change dumbs down the game is like, to me, saying that team queue is more dumbed down than solo queue just because there exists better means of communication. It isn’t, but the opposite instead.

More communication = Better Conquest matches.

From my experience, Ice Bow doesn’t works in 1v1. It can be crazy devastating, though, when Ice Storm is used in a DPS build agaisnt a crowded point.

Okay, time to suggest more specific changes. I’m only going to address our poor base survival, not every single underpowered skill we have (like most of our auto-attacks).

Based on my reflections:

1. We need more stat-neutral active defenses. Can’t be too close to what other professions (especially mesmer) already have to offer.

• How: mesmer is naturally poor at mobility, and elementalists have the flavor of air and thunder to go for them. Evasion also fits that flavor, but needs restrictions to not overshadow thieves, rangers, etc.

2. We need more stat-driven active defenses that don’t rely on boon/ healing/ defense

• How: Chill is part of our flavor, and it so happens that it synergies well when alongside mobility. Torment could be a possible addition to earth (or outside of it!) not only to make our condition builds more viable, but so that the condition damage stat can also be used with defensive purposes. Finally, retaliation relies on power, and even though we’re tapping into guardian’s/ mesmer’s ground here, it fits with fire aura.

3. We need defensive traits in our offensive traitlines

4. We need our underwhelming survival skills to be made stronger

Mobility, evasion and more defensive air traits

• Ride the Lightning shouldn’t have twice the cooldown if the hit is blocked or evaded. The cooldown nerf was meant to hit it as an escape skill, not as a leap skill, but this detail nerfs the skill in both ways, and makes escaping more unreliable after using it as a leap.
• Ride the Lightning shouldn’t auto-target if the auto-targetting option is on.
• One with Air: Buff super speed’s duration to 2 seconds or 2.5 seconds. Make super speed ignore the speed cap restrictions outside of combat.
• Aeromancer’s Alacrity or new trait: Add evasion to Ride the Lightning, Swirling Winds and Windborne Speed (aka, all #4 air skills). The former would last RTL’s duration, the later two would be a passive 1 second of evasion party wide. Alternatively, add evasion to RTL in Windborne Dagger.
• Zephyr’s Speed: Revamp to add 33% passive endurance regen while in air instead.

Higher access to chill, and possibilities for torment

• Make Fire Magic add condition damage instead of duration. Make Earth Magic add condition duration instead of damage.
• Freezing Gust: Add torment in addition to chill (inspired by GW1’s skill Winter’s embrance) or improve chill duration. Add a radius effect.
• New trait, Winter’s Embrance (inspired by the skill of the same name in GW1), or just a revamped Piercing shards (sorry, Lightning Hammer users): whenever you apply chill, inflict torment.
• Shatterstone: Increase cooldown to 6s, add chill on the effect. Also helps dragon’s Tooth hitting. I might as well as suggest 2 extra stacks of vulnerability, from 4s to 6s, but that’s another matter.
• Shard of Ice trait: signets and arcane skills also inflict 1 second of chill.
• Stop, Drop and Roll: chills foes at the end of dodge roll, or:
• Revamp Stop, Drop and Roll to new trait (Winter’s Embrace name could also be used here): Chill lasts 25% longer.
• Comet to apply torment instead of, or in addition to, dazing. Ground-targetted.
• Hurl from Rock Barrier with slower animation, but applying low-duration torment per hit.

Improving other underwhelming skills

• Lightning Touch (and fire Grab for that matter) with improved functionality to hit more often.
• Dust Devil revamped. Perhaps in order to compensate for its cast time, which makes it impossible to time blind effectively, have the sandstorm move much slower, but apply blind each half a second. So enemies within it wouldn’t be able to hit anything while within the animation.
• Water Blast: have it heal self.
• Gust/ Shockwave: leave the speed, it’s the line effect that needs to be wider.
• Unsteady Ground: This skill doesn’t seems to work the first half second, or maybe it’s the cast time that needs to be finished before the skill is even activated. Lower the cast time, have the effect work the moment the animation triggers.
• Stoning: 1 second extra of weakness, or higher damage. It’s pointless to keep an enemy weakened, if you’re wasting your entire time by doing so and end up dying anyways. Either of those buffs would make the time casting Stoning worthier.
• Lightning Surge: Needs some sort of base defense while channeling. Or create a new mechanic: the more damage you receive while channeling this skill, the stronger it hits for.
• Fire Aura: Add retaliation, or add a stat-neutral active defense, like a block. would make it too similar to arcane shield, though. Perhaps a flat defense boost like frost aura? Or maybe increase the burning duration to 2s in pvp, and 4s in pve, to punish however hits the ele much harder?

Additional forms of defense

• Add evasion to burning speed.
• Elemental shielding trait: increased protection duration.

Adastra.9821:

AndrewSX.3794:

Anyway, any touch to hp pools would mean doing a massive rebalance to the prof, so it’s highly unlikely to happen imo.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Offense-vs-punishment-risk-vs-reward/first#post2912970

His ideas may not be entirely correct, but that’s why Anet doesn’t (always) do balance based on the forums. Well-written posts are often the starting points leading to great discussions as demonstrated in the collaborative development initiative and your own thoughts on health rebalancing.

Yes. Even though I’ve spent some sweet time writing that many posts defending an health swap between both professions, if I was a developer, I probably wouldn’t do it (but certainly consider it). My posts were to put things into a new perspective, and as you’ve said, to be a starting point. Anet wanted the elementalist profession to rely on active defenses, in order to compensate for their lack of passive defenses, but mesmer was given the most neutral defenses while most of the elementalist’s defenses rely on the very same passive stats that they were originally designed to compensate for. We have a conflicting design here. We have a profession that wants passive defenses to improve not only their passive survival, but their active survival as well.

@AndrewSX, I remember defending a shorter gap between health before, but for some reason, I totally forgot to mention that here! The problem is, some of the professions are totally fine with their current health values. Guardian, for example, is one of the best professions across all game modes, and they have the health of an elementalist.

@Malcastus, I’ve also thought of the ranger’s and engineer’s base values being the same. There’s no medium armor user with a high health base. I don’t see the problem with elementalists getting medium health and sharing the same base values as the mesmer. Both professions are still completely different.

@oZii, I’ve been suggesting that buff to elemental shielding too. Both in this thread and in the universal dec 10th balance discussion thread. Haven’t got an answer, but my main argument is that elemental shielding mostly affects mh dagger builds, and mh dagger builds are the ones that need defense the most. If they weren’t overpowered with elemental attunement offering 8s of protection, would they suddenly become so with (assuming no points in arcana for aurasharing builds) 3 seconds of protection per aura? That’s two auras under 25 and 40 seconds cooldown. The fire aura from the leap is not always simple to trigger, and the shocking aura from tempest defense trait is triggered by your opponent, so many times it might not affect your party. I don’t see how it would be overpowered. In fact, in the current situation, I’d dare to say that an aurasharing build is better without 30 in air for tempest defense, even after its buff, just for the sake of 20 in arcana for elemental attunement (plus all the goodies from +20% boon duration and renewing stamina).

From my experience, the lack of passive defense makes LH a horrible choice in pvp. You can do some nice damage with auto-attacks, but the remaining skills are simply too ineffective, and everything is too slow, that an elementalist will just melt with it on before doing any worthwhile damage. I haven’t tried it in a tankier build.

SoR works with instant skills, which is the charm of it. For example, switching to air and using 1-2-3 will make it trigger 3 times.

It won’t be a good emergency heal, but fortunately for us elementalists, we have the water attunement, don’t we? Switching to water and using frost aura, water trident and cleansing wave will trigger SoR three times while activating two healing skills. Assuming you have 15 points in water, and that’s three heals. You can get about ~5.5k healing from that sequence along, which is what, the same amount as you would usually get from using an healing skill? And then just get back to other attunements and strike as fast as possible, for even more SoR triggers.

And it procs for each LH attack, yes. Because LH builds are more optimal with 10 points in water traits and while staying in water, you’ll get a passive regen healing from the 5-points trait, plus SoR, plus whichever regeneration an ally might apply to you, which adds some nice amount of healing over-time.

The cape would be THE backpiece, I think.

About the over-abudance of generic drops, that’s why I would like to see more flavorful rewards tied to each event.

If an event wants me to kill a drake, then by all means, may the event’s reward be 3x scales. Depending on the zone and your level, that could go from Tiny Scales to Armored Scales.

If an event wants me to defeat a knight in battle, then by all means, may the event’s reward be a mh sword or a shield of any tier, with a cool sigil that fits within that event’s theme, or a cool skill that would be uncommon to find otherwise.

If an event wants me to protect somebody’s house from an assault, by all means, may the event’s reward be a meal (=consumible buff or for crafting) that the house’s owner would offer me after the battle.

Those little details can make each event far more unique and improve world immersion. It would also make players hunt specific events for the stuff they need. “Hey, I want to gather some scales for crafting. Is there any drake broodmother event around here?” and “Hey, I would like to get an unique sword skin, and I’ve heard I can get it by slaying the black knight in that event over there!”

In addition to making each event stand out more, and improving world immersion, this would also make world exploration a lot more enjoyable. Every event could be a source of a skin, a consumible buff, a crafting material, or something else, and finding and doing events one by one would be exciting to find out what they would offer at the end.

I’m personally bored of all the generic rewards as well. This reminds me of how in GW1 there were specific skill quests full of flavor, like a necromancer getting new skills in the catacombs and a ranger getting new skills while exploring the wilds, and in GW2, all skill quests are just generic fights for a generic skill point.

So, what’s the solution?

• The easiest/ simplest one, would be to swap each profession’s health, fixing the lack of defenses of one and fixing the huge amount of defenses for the other. But being the easiest/ simplest solution might not necessarily mean it would be the best one, of course.
• The alternative solution, and probably the one that Anet wants us elementalists to discuss for, is to improve all the current underwhelming survival skills (lightning touch, gust and shockwave have unreliable functionality, dust devil, fire shield and freezing gust are underwhelming), improve our access to chill (suggestion: add chill in shatterstone’s effect, dare to buff freezing gust’s chill duration to 5 seconds aoe, consider making frost burst adding 1 second extra of chill, add good chill traits), rethink our access to mobility effects, add more defensive traits in our offensive traitlines, and consider improving our access to other defensive conditions. And then hope that the sum of all parts would fix this profession’s base survival. Will that be enough? Which chill traits could exist outside of water and arcane traitlines? Probably none. Is Anet willing to revert the mobility nerfs? Is Anet willing to make us closer to the mesmer’s or necromancer’s active defenses? Will Anet simply fill all our traitlines with defensive options? How should it be?

EDIT About mobility, with easier/ stronger access to chill effects in our weapon skills, elementalists would have an easier time escaping with a combination of chill + swiftness. It’s mechanically important for us, it’s flavorful, and allows us to escape without getting the old RTL back. Yes, speed + chill is already possible in current builds, but clearly not effective enough, is it? Besides, skills like dragon’s Tooth, Flamewall, Lava Font, etc, want and demand more anti-movement skills. I definitely think our access to chill should be stronger.

Adastra.9821:

Jon, please give this post a good read.

Another interesting thing about my argument, is that I could use Jon’s post to justify the health swap suggestion instead of using his post to counter it. Let me explain:

Jon wants each profession to have fixed values and tools built around them, in order to define them (aka, to make them stand out from each other).

My post tries to explain how I feel that mesmer’s stat-neutral active defenses are more fitting (mechanically, not flavorfully) to the squishier elementalist, while the elementalist’s stat-biased active defenses are more fitting to the sturdier mesmer.

Now, here’s the big question: what would need to be done to fix the elementalist’s unviable base survival, in a way that would retain the profession’s uniqueness? And most of the answers can I think of, are followed with a problem that contradicts it.

1. Improve our existing active defenses?

• That’s a solution for staff’s very slow survival skills, and a few others. But how would that fix d/d builds, for example, which have currently some of our best defensive options, yet are still ineffective at surviving without strong trait/ stat support? A staff build’s survival is nearly non-existent, to the point that even heavily specced defensive builds still having a hard time justifying it. Making some of its defenses better will merely make staff builds at a base level of survival similar to the other already existing sets. Which we know it’s not enough. Still, something that definitely needs to be tweaked.

2. Add more stat-neutral defenses?

• But how, without making the elementalist too similar to the mesmer? Which stat-neutral active defenses can the elementalist have, that the mesmer doesn’t already? The only one I can think of, is mobility. Which Anet doesn’t wants us to excell at, as they have shown by toning down RTL. Still, if One with Air is a bit further buffed, that one has potential for an unique elementalist-flavored escape mechanism, but a single adept-tier trait won’t save the entire profession’s survival. Anet has two contradicting problems here: they can’t make the ele too close to other professions (mesmer), and they don’t want the profession to have better mobility than the thief.

3. Diversify the range of stat-biased active defenses?

• So, auras, healing skills, and a few others of our defensive mechanics rely too much on boons, healing power and defensive stats. They can’t be buffed any further (fire aura excluded), or else bunker eles will be too strong. But at their current situation, they are not strong enough to sustain a glass cannon elementalist neither. So another solution is to look for more active defenses that rely on different stats. Elementalists can be given more Weaknesses and Cripples (condition duration), Torment and Confusion (condition duration/ damage) and Retaliation (boon duration, yes, but also power). This way, elementalists can invest in other stats and still have enough defenses. But this leads to the same conflicting problems as the suggestion above: it makes eles too similar to already existing professions. Mostly to necromancer, but also to mesmer and, to a lesser extent, guardian. The only thing I can see improved out of this, is more access to chill, and perhaps receiving the torment condition. It would be worth considering, but again, not enough.

4. Make all traits offer strong defensive options?

• Here’s the problem right here: it wouldn’t make traitlines distinct enough from each other. “Oh, so, I’m going to spec in water for defense… wait, no, I’ll spec in fire instead, for defense!” Not very exciting, is it? And I’d take a guess that Jon wants trait lines to be as distinct from each other as professions. Making all of them with heavy defensive mechanics is just a big no to that, so unless Anet wants all our glass cannon builds to revolve around 3-second burst-or-die killshots, our base survival must be improved from somewhere else.

5. Would swapping mesmer’s and elementalist’s health make each of those classes less defined?

• Not really. Not, because there’s only a single profession with light armor and low health, and a single profession with light armor and mid health, in this game. Swapping them out would retain their uniqueness. We currently have a mid-health scholar profession with strong, neutral active defenses, and a low-health scholar profession with strong-if-specced-defensively-or-else-mediocre active defenses. Because elementalist’s active defenses are less reliable than the mesmer, they could get the higher health of the two to compensate, and both professions would still retain their uniqueness, as there would still exist a single schoalr profession with mid health, and a single one with low health.

oZii.2864:

look at this gem

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_historical_traits#Elementalist_traits

The old elementalist traits

It looks like Elemental Attunement was actually the 5 point minors before.

Only thing I like there is One with Mists- Mist form at 33% health.

There’s some very interesting stuff there.

Tempest Strength Air Magic Adept Major Deal 5% more damage while moving.

Anyone thinks this could be perfectly added to Windborne Dagger or to Zephyr’s Speed?

EDIT: On second thoughts, it could incentivate too much auto-running (and bad playing) while using skills, which would be annoying. Not sure.

It’s possible that they’re still going to change it someday, as they’re planning to tone down vigor across several professions, but nothing will be done about it in 10 Dec patch.

Going to make a list for my arguments, for a clearer presentation.

Change
Elementalist’s base Health,
10,805 -> 15,082
And
Mesmer’s base Health,
15,082 -> 10,805

Why:

• Eles have a hard time if not heavily specced in stronger passive defense;
• Mes have an easy time even while in berserker gear;

• Many of the eles active defenses are stat-biased. They rely on defensive stats to be strong enough. Examples: healing skills which rely on healing power, auras which require eles to get hit, boons.
• Most mes active defenses are stat-neutral. They excel at reflection, blocks, invulnerabilities, stuns, teleports, stealth etc. Some of them are already present in the core profession mechanic. Many of them are under low cooldowns, or are offered by very strong traits. In addition to all this, they have illusions.

• Eles were officially designed to rely less on passive defenses, and more on active defenses. However, the most neutral active defenses were given to mes, not to ele, alongside the higher health value too. It’s unfair that the “profession officially designed to rely on active defenses” has weaker or more restricting active defenses than another profession that also happens to get higher base health and equally strong burst/ damage potential.

• If Eles had higher health, builds with more offensive stats/ traits would become viable. However, players would still desire defensive stats because their active defenses depend a lot on them.
• If Mes had lower health, their offensive builds would come at a higher risk, but players would still have enough stat-neutral defenses to compensate for that. Meanwhile, defensive stats would be more desired, due to the risk of the low health.