Guild Wars 2

I’ve suggest the change to signet of air before, and think it’s a good change. For goep, however, is a bit weird. :P And why no stun break to arcanes or conjures?

Also, it was clear that they also wanted to nerf cantrip builds by removing some stun breakers from it.

GoEP is instant-cast now, too, which is not all bad.

Increased the phantasm base hit points by 55% in PvP and WvW.
Increased the phantasm base hit points by 270% in PvE.

LumAnth.5124:

Have you realized that Mesmer’s we’re nerfed almost every single patch? The only time I recall good buff was the 3 Mights / illusion shattered, and that was reverted back.

That was not a “good” buff. :P It was a broken change, and it was clear the moment it hit the patch notes. That change came at the same time a similar one came to elementalist’s might stacking trait too. The elementalist’s have gotten twice the might duration (5s to 10s) while the mesmers have gotten twice the might duration AND three times the stacking, in a trait that could already apply 3 stacks at once. That lead to a huge 9 stacks of might by doing something as simple as pressing a shatter skill once. It was clearly a mistake. :P That being said, it was never reverted back. It used to last 5s, it now lasts 10s. Only the number of stacks were reverted, not the entire trait’s functionality.

nullixin.9462:

DiogoSilva.7089:

[phantasm builds i.e. inspiration line] didn’t see more play because shatter builds bring very valuable team support with its utility.

Lol? Most of your posts here (e.g. “stays on the field until it’s manually destroyed”) are genuinely village joke materials. Your posts in ele forum are somewhat better, except the MH sword… thing.

I was talking about pvp when I made the comparison between both builds. And what I’ve said is true. Shatter Mesmers can bring both Portal and Illusion of Life, which are meta-changing utility skills.

For pve (and even for pvp), it’s common for your phantasms to last enough time to strike at least twice. Not everyone in pvp decides to kill your phantasms, because it’s usually a much better strategy to burst the mesmer player instead. Granted, the change to the minor trait might change that situation, but at the same time, the buff to the signet is going to compensate for it. In general pve, as long as you know the best time to cast your phantasms, they can easily overlast. Use clones as decoys, cast both of your phantasms, interrupt foes when they are about to attack, etc. Again, the nerf to the trait is compensated by the buff to the signet.

I can understand that the situation is different in fractals, but fractals is not the entire game.

This is only the trait changes. There will also exist skill changes.

Runes of Divinity are excellent for critical/ precision, because they offer high critical damage while also giving you a bit of each stat. Runes of Scholar are great if you can keep your HP high (burst at the start of each battle). Runes of the Ogre are probably better than scholar for pve: they allow you to create a rockdog pet, which can be great to aggro for you or for extra damage.

Generally, fire-themed runes aren’t as good for crit/ precision builds, imo, but decent nonetheless. Fire Aura is sucky for elementalists, because you don’t want to get hit, and 1s of burning and 1 stack of might per hit isn’t worth losing huge chunks of your low hp pool.

That’s not comparable, but I’ll give you a better example: elementalists drastically depend on the attunement bonus of their arcana traitline. If the devs nerfed it, people would rage with reason, and at least demand that base attunement cooldowns were decreased to compensate for the nerf. Which is kind what is happening with the mesmer’s change.

In GW1, if you equipped a two-handed weapon over your one-handed set, the off-hand equipment would remain in its slot, just “disabled”. So you could equip a bow or a staff with a shield, but the shield would not be functional.

It would be nice if GW2 had something like this. It would make weapon switching outside of combat less clunky, and avoid similar problems.

An invincible bag is not enough because you can’t “reserve” a slot just for one piece of equipment, so when you switch, your equipment might not go there, especially if its full. And if you leave it empty, a random piece of loot will go there automatically, rendering that strategy useless.

Zyro.5672:

oZii.2864:

Water Magic

Minor Grandmaster Trait has been changed to deal 1% more damage for each boon on you.

This is actually a big nerf to d/d or am i seeing this wrong?

It’s a nerf to bunkers.

You can now have two phantasm builds. One with at least 25 illusions, for more reliable casting of phantasms. Another with the old setup, except without the 5 points in illusions, for more damage but less reliability.

Sorry if I’m not being overly negative.

If you think a 16 cooldown is stupidly high for a skill that stays on the field until it’s manually destroyed, then you should never touch an elementalist. :P

But anyway, with the proper setup, I usually don’t need to recast my phantasms that often in pve. Casting them once is usually enough to defeat a random pve mob.

I know some people want every single cantrip to be a stunbreaker and their insanely strong cantrip builds to never get nerfed – but it has to happen someday, and it finally did.

To be perfectly honest, I’m excited for a signet to finally have a stun break effect, and to see LF get its damage and cooldown improved at the cost of breaking stun.

I’m fully convinced that this is an important step to increase build diversity, but ONLY if they nerf shatter builds as well.

Regardless, overpowered stuff gets nerfed. Many people get shocked when this happens, and think the world is coming to an end, but it happens and it must happen.

Should mesmers become too weak after this change, then the problem lies on the cooldowns of their weapon’s skills, not on this trait.

Regardless, phantasm builds were insanely overpowered, and they only didn’t see more play because shatter builds bring very valuable team support with its utility.

Confusion was never nerfed in pvp and pve, was it? It always dealt double damage in pve than it did in pvp, and I don’t remember the damage formula ever having been changed.

The reason why confusion was so strong in wvw, was because it used the pve formula in a pvp format.So they fixed that, by making wvw’s confusion the same as pvp’s.

And there you have it: that’s why anet “nerfed” 50% of its damage, instead of, say, 15% or something. Because they weren’t directly nerfing it, they just switched the pve formula for the pvp formula.

If confusion is ever to get a real buff or a real nerf, it would probably affect all formats, not just wvw.

Hey, Colin, has your team ever considered revamping current dungeons to have a structure similar to molten alliance’s, where you have a single path (that maybe generates itself) instead of three different explorable paths? This, to me, seems like it would improve party searching, and even allow more dungeons to be created in the future without stretching dungeon players too much.

First, cleansing fire is going to be better at removing conditions than it is now. So it WILL be a useful option for builds that don’t have 30/ 30 in water/ arcane, nor ether renewal.

Second, mh dagger builds with aura trait support synergy well with the new tempest defense trait, so if anything, glass cannon (+ aura) builds will be stronger. With earthquake (or focus #5), access to two shocking auras (and four auras total), +20% damage to stunned and knocked down foes and an anti-burst self defense.

Finally, staff builds will get much better.

Putting a stun breaker on goep isn’t going to raise the skill cap. If you run a glyph build, goep will be your only stun breaker, so to put it in simple terms, you’ll only use it when you need to break stun – unless you want to die from a random burst out of nowhere sometime later. And you’ll use it to break stun as fast as possible – or else you’ll die. That means that you will almost never have control over the attunement’s effect on goep.

If you want to use it to cc with your lava font, and build around this strategy, it means that you’ll never want to use this skill as a stun break, for the sake of not ruining your entire strategy. But then, it’s the same as never having a stun break, which means you’ll have to dedicate a slot for signet of air or one of the two cantrips anyways. Which makes this entire change to goep pointless.

Exactly. Fresh Air will only be picked because of scepter’s air skills and air’s 15th trait; otherwise, no one would sacrifice 30 arcana’s boon and attunement upgrades, and a grandmaster slot, for a single attunement.

The best is, in the future, to fuse the effects of Fresh Air with the traits that reduce the skill’s cooldowns for that attunement. That would make Fresh Fire/ Water/ Earth worthwhile, and even so, it would be best to put them on the master tier, not grandmaster, imo.

@Vayne,

You’re right that my examples were too narrow, but that was for clarity’s sake. I also like both story and exploration, and even more so with friends, but unlike you, I don’t find GW2 to be as satisfying at offering those things as it could.

There’s almost no reason to meet new people in the game, so unless I have friends I know in the real world that also play GW2, exploring the world is a lonely experience. I’ve 100% explored Tyria with my elementalist – completed it a few days ago, and I don’t recall any friendship I made. Besides, pve experience is so easy, that when i was playing with friends, combat got very trivial.

Some people blame the players for not interacting more with the in-game community, but it’s not the player’s fault, it’s the mechanics. If there are no mechanics that make people play together (guild-driven content, party-driven content, etc, etc), most players won’t play together. Surely, it’s still important to add support for those who like to play solo, but GW2 mostly only cared about those. There’s no healthy balance between community and solo experience in this game, it’s mostly one-sided to solo content, with the except of a few dungeons, which are only a small thing of what there is to experience in Tyria, and a few guild missions, which are gated.

But as you’ve said, there’s no game coming that offers a real alternative (well, maybe the new ff14, but it has a monthly paying model). We’re left waiting for for this game to get better, expecially and hopefully in an expansion, but it still doesn’t changes that this game was very unfocused when it was launched, it tried to appeal to every player with quantity of content, but then there was not enough time to focus on the quality of each type of content.

Maybe, the Living Story development is going to change that – it certainly seems very focused, with new content revolved around the same premise; but living story is still at an experimental phase, and the only thing we see anet focusing mostly at the moment, is on online shop and RNG content. I don’t mind that as long as that’s what is needed to keep supporting the game, so it can get massive updates later on; but should all future content in GW2 revolve around this RNG content model each month, with little else to bring to the table but a few unfocused, independent gated content, I’ll lose hope in this game.

Signet of Air makes an excellent stun breaker. People are going to use it in signet builds, and in places like pve or wvw to roam faster without having to sacrifice a stun breaker. Even s/d pvp roamers might use it, I guess, due to the lack of swiftness (no healing glyph, no aura build, and those builds already use the healing signet).

However, stun break on the glyph is just a bad choice, and it won’t work, not even strategically. This is because the main strategy behind glyphs is knowing the best attunement to use them for each situation. By adding a stun break to the glyph, people will not use it for their main effect.

However, a functionality polish might make it an acceptable change. For example, goep’s effect depends on the attunement you were in when you cast the skill. If you are in fire and use it, and switch to any of the other four attunements, you’re still going to apply burning. If they change it so that the effect is dynamic – where it changes every time you change attunement, where the initial attunement where it is cast no longer matters, then stun breaking would make more sense to this skill. You would use to prevent a burst, yes, but then you would be able to, say, switch to air and apply weakness, or switch to water or earth and chill or cripple. That would work.

TL;DR: It can work with some tweaks to the functionality.

Different people are attracted by different kinds of content, that’s why there’s many different games out there, and you get to choice the ones that best pick your interest.

An unfocused game can’t compete against focused games, because it revolves more around quantity than quality. Let’s imagine an example:

Game A: Mediocre/ decent at world exploration, story and pvp.
Game B: Excellent story.
Game C: Excellent exploration.
Game D : Excellent pvp.

Which game do you think story-driven players will pick? B. And those who love exploring? Game C. And those who love pvp? Game D. Hybrid players might pick game A, but they’ll never get extreme satisfaction out of each of its features.

GW2 has one big detail akittens side: it has no direct competition (although that’s debatable). There’s little diversity in the MMO genre out there, which is mostly filled with WoW and WoW clones. There’s no good pvp-driven mmo out there, or else, gw2’s pvp would already have lost the little support and faith it still has. There’s no good world-versus-world pvpve driven mmo out there, although one is already in the making. And most pve experiences follow the wow’s formula and combat, or archaic formulas and combat. GW1 is not a MMO, and is outdated too.

GW2 gives you “freedom”, but it’s a very restricted freedom. It gives you freedom to grind where you want: grind world exploration, or events, and do a dungeon or two inbetween. GW2’s “freedom” is almost never exciting, because there’s no tension, epic feeling or danger created from challenging encounters. GW2’s “freedom” is restricting, because most builds you can do will suck or will be very niche (pvp only, dungeon only), most things you want are gotten from the TP (which means all you’re doing with your “freedom” is farming gold), and most things you can pick are unfocused (dungeons revolve around predictable fights with enemies with a looot of hp, world exploration is repetitive because the devs don’t have time to focus on expanding it; events are repetitive because the devs don’t have time to focus on them, etc, etc).

This is the “freedom” of GW2. Giving you the choice between several tasks, most of them mediocre because they were not fleshed out, and they were not fleshed out because the devs didn’t focus enough time to flesh them out.

What is GW2 best at? The (solo) combat? Although it still has ways to go, the combat in GW2 is fun because it was focused – the devs clearly spend a lot of time on it, as it shows when you have an entire team devoted to balancing and expanding it. The streamlined content? GW2’s devs focused a lot on making the content as streamlined as possible (no talking to npcs, automatic event system, etc). These things make this game stand out from other mmos.

By “lack of focus”, I mean from a design-view, not from the player’s view, which are different things.

GW1 was a focused game, but the player could still participate in different kind of content. Outside of pvp, they could follow the story, explore the world, or design builds espefically for farming, running, etc. Granted, this only got better with future expansions, when titles were added in, where world exploration became less tied to story progression, and where more casual pvp modes were added in.

I don’t have anything against the idea of GW2 offering different things to do for each player, as long as it doesn’t stretches the devs too thin (which, unfortunately, it did). What I do have against, is how those many different tasks, instead of complemeting each other, they are way too independent of each other – sometimes to the point of clashing with each other.

So a player can have a lack of focus, which is not a bad thing by itself, but they will get punished by many things they do, because the game design also lacks focus.

(Too long, had to double-post)

Not only that, but GW1’s features synergize with each other. The party-driven content, the building system, the story-driven content or the pvp content, they all support each other. The story is fluid because henchmen/ heroes allow you to never depend on players to progress; the henchmen/ heroes work because they allow the game to be fully party-driven even to solo players; the party-driven ideas were acchieved because the game was fully party-driven even to solo players; the skill system worked because, in addition to being fun, was designed to support party-driven content, which the whole game revolves around; and the pvp was deep because building and team synergy were deep.

In comparison, GW2’s ideas and mechanics clash with each other. The game wants to have a large diversity of builds, but it punishes players for them due to several mechanics (defiance, condition capping, easyness of dps builds to complete every content) or due to large amounts of grind (because attributes are linked to the equipment). GW2 wants to tell a story, but it punishes players who want a fluid story progression, by gating it behind levels. GW2 wants party-driven content in some instances (dungeons), but it punishes players who use party-driven builds when those players are NOT doing dungeons. GW2 wants skill over grinding, but punishes skillful content with bad rewards, and rewards mindless content to keep the casual players, the gamblers, the farmers and the online shop going on.

This is what happens when a game wants something as impossible as being everything at the same time. A game – or any product or piece of work, for that matter, must have a focus, and it must be unified towards the goals it wants to accomplish. Every single component should be designed to synergy with each other. In GW2, this does not happens. New mechanics and new content are many times designed independent of each other, and sometimes they clash with each other, and contradict with each other.

What is GW2 about? This is one of the biggest problems with GW2: it doesn’t knows what it wants to be.

Is it a story-driven game? It sorta wants to be one, but for months, it has been lacking infrastructure, systems and cutscenes to present its story, and the story itself was rushed. It still sorta wants to be one, with new content being called Living Story, but we’re still at an experimental phase, and no one knows when it’ll kick off for real.

Is it a party-driven game? It sorta wants to be one. The damage/ control/ support trinity is broken, party synergy is lacking, events are completed with mindless zergs, and the only places that are designed around parties, are few and thrown to a few corners of the world.

Is it a skill-driven game? It sorta wants to be one, it surely was the devs’ original intention. The devs wanted this game to reward players for skill instead of farming, but it completely failed at that. GW2 is an extremely casual game that can be farmed, explored and completed mindlessly. There’s little to no adrenaline, tension or epic adventuring going on, challenging-wise.

Is it a pvp-driven game? It sorta wants to be one, but its pvp was completely bare-bones at launch, and only very slowing have they been expanding it, but at least it’s going there.

Is GW2 a casual-driven game? Yes, absolutely yes. Outside of the initial challenge of learning how to dodge and some other mechanics, GW2 is all about casuals doing braind-dead stuff for “fun”. Farming events where you are highly rewarded for watching your characters auto-attack, grinding mindless, repetitive, story-less hearts, grinding numbers for repetitive world exploration, not requiring any form of coordenation and near to no strategy, etc.

GW2 has some good foundations, but it greatly lacks polish. Many of the things that it tried to accomplish, it didn’t. It’s a game that wants to be a little bit of everything, and ends up having little to no identity.

In comparison, GW1, even though it was far from a perfect game at launch (and even for its lifetime), it accomplished a lot of its goals.

GW1 knew it wanted to be a story-driven game, and revolved around a mission structure to tell its story, with quests inbetween to keep the storytelling flow, and with cutscenes to boot. GW2 launched with neither of those features, and slowly has been bringing them back. We’ve seen cutscenes in F&F, we’re starting to see quests to tell small stories for the living world content, and we know the devs are working on infrastructure/ systems to improve the way the story is presented and guided.

GW1 knew it wanted to have a deep party-driven system, and so its content revolves around parties and its skill system around party synergy. For solo-players, it very elegantly features a henchmen/ hero system, which would allow players to play alone in instances, without sacrificing the party-driven content.

GW1 knew it wanted a very fun building system, and so it streamlined building, with no money sinks behind it, featured rules and restrictions to keep each build unique, and had a skill-collecting mini-game that also added an unique twist to the concept of exploring a world.

GW1 knew it wanted to have strong pvp, and had multiple game modes, matchmaking, etc. GW2 is slowing going the GW1’s way.

In the end, GW1 knew what it wanted to be, and attempted to be as good as possible at what it was; while GW2 wanted to be a little of everything, and failed at being great at any of those goals.

kostbabis.8791:

Its bot that bad..but i still think that removing it from flash is too much.At least give it a 30 sec cooldown like blink or some other attribute.Not ever ele is gonna take the cantrip traits to trait flash
And flash alone compared to most teleports in the game isnt anything to be excited about

If I’m not wrong, the new LF damage – if it critical hits – is going to equal Arcane Blast’s damage. You lose a projectile finisher and some cooldown by using it, but get a very handy teleport for churning earth that can still function as a pseudo stun-breaker or quickly bring you back to the point you are defending/ attacking.

Sunflowers.1729:

DiogoSilva.7089:

If you think a single nerf to bountiful power (the only real nerf in the leaked notes), amidst countless buffs to other skills, is going to destroy the elementalists, you are being dramatic.

And uh, while I don’t think the supposed patch notes would actually be that detrimental, there are a few more notable nerfs in them (other than the one you mentioned). The most obvious one is that Cleansing Fire no longer breaks stuns

The patch notes also indicate that CF would get a cooldown decrease, which is a buff. Considering that this cantrip is mostly used to remove conditions, you’ll be able to remove conditions more often (and inflict burning more often) than you can do now.

Likewise, Lightning Flash’s “nerf” is compensated with a cooldown decrease too, and a 50% damage buff, which actually makes it better in many of the situations it is used for, and all the weakness duration nerfs are a reaction to weakness getting a buff and actually working versus what is intended to work, so if anything, those are actually buffs versus glass cannon builds.

In the end, the only flat, unquestionable nerf is in bountiful power.

ARM.3912:

What dungeon are you in right now?

I don’t enjoy playing dungeons in this game much, but I do play pvp, if that counts, and I’ve widely used cantrip builds in the past.

ARM.3912:

The OP is completely right. Anyone who thinks ele’s are getting buffed based on the leaked notes doesn’t understand the game at all. Anet is killing the class and after this patch the only ones playing it will be the PvErs who occasionally WvW to give away free kills to everyone else.

If you think a single nerf to bountiful power (the only real nerf in the leaked notes), amidst countless buffs to other skills, is going to destroy the elementalists, you are being dramatic.

It could end up being a pretty sucky build, but I can envision a suicidal s/d build with 30 fire and air, with Fresh Air, Lava Tomb and Persisting Flames. You would basically burst with air, switch to another attunement (fire?), apply fury to yourself, burst higher with phoenix and fire grab, switch back to air, burst, all in few seconds and in zerker gear, for massive area damage and still apply a strong lava font on death.

Now that I think of it, a “Fresh Earth” trait would be pretty important for condition elementalists, as they would be able to apply bleeding more often. It would actually work very well as an additional effect to the new Diamond Skin trait (which, imo, I’m not sure if it’s strong enough by itself). It’s more important for that than Fresh Fire, because elementalists can already apply burning outside of fire (signet of fire, cleansing flames, fire conjures, fire auras, etc).

I understand the importance of those traits to substitute arcana, but arcana still has a massive advantage: you don’t have to waste a grandmaster trait to decrease the cooldown of your skills. This way, I’m not sure if, say, a Fresh Fire would be good enough. Even a Fresh Water would be better to activate the healing, but probably not as good as Arcana’s universal cooldown decrease + evasive arcana’s water heal. But Fresh Air is good enough because the scepter’s air 2 has kitten cooldown too, and so does sigil of fire/ air, and both burst well with electric discharge.

A good offense is sometimes the best defense, and if you can kill fast enough, you don’t need the extra utility. That’s what makes Fresh Air a good alternative to arcana.

Cleansing Fire IS going to be taken, regardless of it being a stun breaker, because not every ele has 30 points in water, nor ether renewal equipped, nor every ele is using a s/f combo with good condition removal.

And cantrips are some of the best utilities in this game, both because of the effects and the trait synergy. Being overloaded with stun breakers only made them absolutely necessary for every or almost every build.

You can move while casting Ether Renewal, so that should allow you to avoid several burst sequences.

Rock Solid with good investment in boon duration should allow you to use Ether Renewal without being interrupted. Also, Cleansing Fire would have a shorter cooldown, which would allow us to remove conditions more often.

Also, the s/d burst builds have phoenix, cleansing water, and possibly points in water or evasive arcana.

I’m not sure if it would be that useful.

What makes Fresh Air awesome is the scepter’s air skills and trait 15 (which is ranged, unlike fire 15, and stronger versus single target, if I’m not wrong). You can switch to air, use arc lightning + 2 and 3, use your arcanes, and activate sigil of fire, for a large amount of damage, switch to something else real fast, and get back to air for half of that burst. That would be enough to kill someone in pvp.

I find the new Tempest Defense equally exciting. Not only do shocking aura and grounded work well together, and shocking aura can activate more often, but it can be an excellent trait both for d/d aura eles, and for s/d burst (spamming your instant bursts in that 1 second window, and/ or after earthquake too).

Well, the focus will also be getting buffs similar to the staff’s (although to a lesser extent), but we all know those won’t be enough yet.

AndrewSX.3794:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Also, the possibly reworked fire grandmaster trait should allow you to get fury out of lava font for each blast finisher. How cool is that?

The issue is that the rest of the line looks still garbage. :p

Unfortunately, but for a staff ele that stays at range in wvw or even in pve, Ember’s Might, Spell Slinger and Fire’s Embrace might be decent fillers to put in. The OP will just have to trade in the signet for a second cantrip, or lightning flash for a second signet and pick some aura traits.

The new grandmaster air traits won’t find much use for a staff wielder, so that’s not the best option if someone wants to go offensive.

30 fire, Ember’s Might, Fire’s Embrace, Persisting Flames.
20 air, Zephyr’s Boon, Bolt to the Heart.
20 arcana, Elemental Attunement, Blasting Staff.

Here you have it, a good offensive staff build after the patch. Aoe fury from fields, and self-fury (and swiftness) from signets, frost aura fields and magnetic aura.

If zephyr’s boon is too redudant with fury on fields and with signet of air, you can keep 10 in air for bolt, and go 10 in earth for signet mastery or protection per aura, or go 10 in water or 30 in arcane.

If the leaked notes are true, gale will be an aoe-line knockback, eruption and lava font will have shorter casting times (not animation times), meteor shower’s individual radius for each hit is going to be bigger, and most of the skill’s aftercast durations are going to be reduced – sometimes up to half. That should make staff’s playstyle smoother and faster.

Also, the possibly reworked fire grandmaster trait should allow you to get fury out of lava font for each blast finisher. How cool is that?

Confusion scaling better with condition damage should only affect condition mesmers, so it seems like a fine change. The current power mesmers wouldn’t benefit from this change.

This is all theory, guys:

1. S/D Valkyrie Eles with more burst but less utility/ defense; Possibility for S/D Zerker Eles

Fresh Air is going to be meta for valkyrie burster eles, and maybe even open up to a zerker air ele build (all for Scepter). I’m not sure if arcane lightning is going to be better for them compared to +10% damage while in air, though. But eles will be able to invest less in arcana (losing cleansing water, boon duration and utility) for more precision, more critical damage, more air burst and more vulnerability on critical. Add in Signet of Air instead of Mist Form, and they’ll be able to roam as well.

We can go for a more drastic route.

2. Suicidal S/D Zerkers

30 fire (with new Persisting Flames trait, new Lava Tomb trait, don’t know what to put in slot 2), and Bolt to the Heart, the new Arcane Lightning and the new Fresh Air OR the new Tempest Defense.

Ring of Fire → Arcane Wave → Phoenix → Switch to earth → Earthquake → Switch to air → Burst with +20% damage (if you have Tempest Defense), while having +10% critical damage and +20% critical chance from fury. With Berzerker gear, that’s perma 70% critical chance and about 70% or more critical damage, and you’ll deal 20% more damage when they strike you or when you use earthquake, or you’ll activate air attunement twice of even three times very quickly.

You’ll down your enemy fast, you might get downed fast, but you’ll still create a strong Lava Font at your location (you should be at melee range) and deal good damage while in downed.

3. D/D Aura Valkyrie Bursters with Tempest Defense

30 air for Zephyr’s Boon, Bolt to the Heart and Tempest Defense. 10 air for protection on auras. 20 water for healing and 20 arcane for vigor on critical and elemental attunement.

You’ll have four auras, two of them that can stun, which will allow you to deal 20% more damage while having good protection, vigor, fury and swiftness. You can heal nicely, and invest 10 less points in arcane (keeping elemental attunement) for 10 more in water for aura sharing (giving stun aura, protection, fury, swiftness, frost armor and elemental attunement’s effects to your party) or even override EA for faster rezzing with auras. Enemies should get stunned a lot more often if you are alongside a teamate – make sure they bring stuns or KDs too.

4. Possible condition build

I’m unsure about this one, but involves 30 in earth for the improved Stone Splinters (wrong name? Serrated Stones?), the new Diamond Skin, and – maybe – the new Rock Solid, the new Obsidian Focus, whatever. Not sure if it’ll be good enough.

5. Possible signet build

Same as above, has Signet of Restoration, Signet of Air (stun break), and not sure what else. 30 in earth for signet mastery (optional, yes) or rock solid or even serrated stones, written in stone, and protection on aura; 20 in fire for fire auras and +5% damage versus burning foes, 10 in air for zephyr’s boon, 10 in arcane for elemental attunement. Possibly a burst/ condition hybrid build with fury, +damage for conditions, +precision/ burning (signet of fire) and chill/ immobilize from water, lots of might that works well with both.

There’s almost no nerf. The weakness reductions are a reaction to weakness getting stronger – those should actually count as buffs. Two stunbreaking cantrips are still good, and they other two are getting buffed in other ways. Electrocute received a strong buff, and the higher cooldown is to prevent it from being op.

The only real nerf listed there, is Bountiful Power, which is more than fair.

Torment, much like Confusion, also reward good decision making.

@evilapprentice, the devs have already confirmed that ranger’s pet damage would get nerfed, and that the next patch would feature massive balancing changes. In fact, the later information is all over there: it’s stated on their blog page, on their release page, on their facebook page, etc.

Based on the leaked notes, Lightning Flash is going to deal 50% more damage and recharge 5s faster. This is really cool for offensive eles, and as long as it remains instant, it’ll still work like a pseudo sun breaker.

Cleansing Fire was mostly used for condition removal. If it’s now going to recharge 10s faster, then it’ll be a stronger condition removal skill.

All cantrips being stun-breakers was also problematic. This should make other skills stronger while slightly nerfing (or not) cantrip eles.

Signet of Air already had a good passive, and now the active is going to be worth it. I’m not sure if that’s going to make a big difference to signets as a whole, though, but it’s a start.

0/30/0/15/20 (with 5 extra points, probably for water) is going to be viable after this patch.

The new version of grounded is going to do this:
1. Cast Earthquake
2. Switch to air, make the burst sequence, +20% damage
3. Switch to fire, get hit, activating shocking aura, fury and swiftness
4. Ring of fire or Phoenix or Fire Grab, +20% damage

Mesmers and thieves don’t use condition builds. This will open new builds for them, not make existing builds stronger.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Raven.9603:

its not the nerfs you need to worry about, its the buffs.

thieves and mesmers are getting a condi called torment that does damage to anyone that decides to move.

GG.

And Necros.

So what? Cleanse the darn thing with one of our many condi removals. Or don’t, since most Mesmers and Thieves go for direct-damage builds so their Torment stacks will barely tickle.

Mesmers don’t use the scepter. If they started using it for torment, if the leaked notes are true, then they would have to give away the staff, the greatsword or the sword (blurred frenzy).

Torment on mesmers and thieves will only be used in new builds for them, not in older builds.

Nikkinella.8254:

Why would they nerf bountiful power? We already do crap damage, If anything they should have buffed it up to 5%. Not even worth taking now. And why remove the stunbreaker from cleansing fire and lightning flash? I get that they want stunbreakers on glyphs and signets, but why not just add them and not remove 2 of the already existing stunbreakers?

It allowed bunker eles to deal too much damage. If you wanna deal more damage, in theory, you shouldn’t spec in water, which is the ele’s most defensive traitline.

Topic creator: I recommend you to remove the link, if you don’t want anet to delete this thread.

Air attunement recharge can be pretty good for the s/d valkyrie burster eles. Imagine making a huge air burst (instant air skills + air 15 trait + fire sigil + arcanes), switching to another attunement, and switching back to air for a huge burst. Usually, this would require investment in arcana so you can switch back to air quickly, but the grandmaster trait would allow you to override the “advantage” of investing in arcane. Yes, it would mean less acess to other attunements, but you would burst (=kill) faster with air, and have vulnerability on critical + more precision and critical damage. Pretty big.

Tempest Defense would become awesome. The shocking aura synergies itself with grounded, it would be a strong trait both offensively and defensively, and synergy well with aura traits. If someone striked you, they would get stunned, and you would get fury, swiftness, protection (maybe) and deal 20% more damage to them. That IS good.

Fire’s grandmaster trait change is awesome, but everything else in that traitlibe is still rather lame and the change to lava tomb is too niche.

A few months ago, anet announced that they would add more means to counter boons, aka, “boon-hate”.

The community exploded and cried that the end of the world was coming. People raged how bad of a thing that was, and claimed that using boons would suddenly be a bad thing.

When that update came out, warrior’s boon hate was meh, and thieves’ boon hate was necessary to counter guardian’s bunkers. That was it. It did not ruin the game. The world did not get destroyed.

Now, this new Torment condition is coming, and once again, people are crying for the apocalypse, and how this condition is going to break this game.

To be honest, and that also depends on the actual numbers, but immobilize and KD seem to be stronger anti-movement effects than this Torment. How is torment going to destroy this game’s combat, for punishing movement, if there are other effects that completely nullify movement? Immobilize and KD make you eat entire, HUGE bursts if you do not have a stun breaker. The new torment will give you a choice between moving or not – you can decide to avoid a burst, or if there’s none, decide not to move and take less damage.

I’m not sure how strong it’s going to be, but it seems healthy to the game to exist a new anti-movement condition that has a different tactical purpose than the other anti-movement effects. It adds more depth and more diversity to combat.

Thieves’ and Mesmers’ current builds will also get nerfed with the weakness buff. Thieves and Mesmers have pretty much been using zerker gear, so they’ll get hit hard with weakness.

All cantrips breaking stun was always a bit too much.