Guild Wars 2

nerva.7940:

nah, d/d ele is faceroll. you have 50 boons up at all times, you come in, unload, get out, heal up, and repeat. it’s the dumbest spec, only second to d/d thief.

Regardless of how strong or not a D/D ele might be, it’s not a faceroll build. Dot. The elementalist is one of the hardest professions to master in GW2, and D/D is possibly the hardest of their weapon sets. Your description fits a thief, but is extremely simplified for a D/D ele.

That’s why there are so many thief players owning others, but so few D/D eles that are truly good.

On second thoughts, Tixx looks an extremely nice and humble guy in the in-game screens…

I was wondering if Toypocalypse was some sort of evil scheme, but it looks like it’ll just be a typical asura accident of epic proportions. It might be fun, though. We’ll be fighting against toys, afterall.

arrownin.3128:

DiogoSilva.7089:

In the section where you claimed this event does not makes sense, you explained in a clear and simple way why this event makes sense (or better, why the old one doesn’t anymore).

I guess I meant, how did this holiday which was tradition for hundreds of years, become interpreted into asuras giving out toys?

Because a random Asura genius decided to revolutionize what this holiday meant for Tyria? :P

Let’s wait first to see the backstory and personality behind him. Am I the only one who truly thinks that the Asura has an evil smile in his artwork?

Besides, the asura idea has already lead to awesome artwork and screens. Watching the huge golem-baloon in the skies was impressive in the official site.

In the section where you claimed this event does not makes sense, you explained in a clear and simple way why this event makes sense (or better, why the old one doesn’t anymore).

Caffynated.5713:

How did ele go from being considered underpowered a month ago to overpowered now, when it has received pretty much nothing but nerfs during that time?

We’ve been getting the best buffs alongside necro and ranger, imo.

D/D buffs, downed state buffs, good bunker builds since the beginning of the game, and nerfs to the three top professions (thief, mesmer, guardian) in addition to ele’s bunker builds. Ele’s bunkers might have been toned down, but so has the competition.

Also, most people think the eles are underpowered, because of a combition of hard-to-master with poor traits/ synergy with burst builds. The ele is advertised as a class of destruction. Most people decide to pick it to burst with their flashy fire skills. And burst eles have always been a bit underpowered because of our traits, probably less so now with the better D/D and with players knowing better and speccing the profession’s best traits (the defensive ones) with offensive amulets.

People were judging the entire class’s effectiveness on pure damage builds, as it could be clear by their comments, and they got shocked how other professions could do every burst they could with far less effort and far more defense.

Xenn.1420:

JonPeters.5630:

You guys must be channeling some psychic powers this weekend. We agree arrows need to be a bit faster to make DPS against moving targets a bit more reliable. 12/14 can’t come soon enough. :P

Since you guys is fixing them why not proceed in fixing you know that underpower class like i dont know maybe “mesmer?”

Mesmer has a few problems with general PvE, but that’s possibly the only time where that class is not overpowered. :P

Radialshifter.8351:

JonPeters.5630:

Agreed. Signet of the hunt needs to and will go to 25%.

… Necromancer Signet of the Locust?…

And Elementalist Signet of Air (and because elementalists almost always have swiftness on, it wouldn’t even be a problem to them. It would give them an alternative to their swiftness skills/ traits, especially for any focus off-hand builds without the healing glyph).

Always felt that a 10% increase was irrelevant. 25% seems nice, especially because a swiftness foe will still have advantage when it comes to running away if they’re not within your range, or they’ll keep hitting you if you’re at within their range.

Seems a good number, and if it proves to be too strong for walking through the map, the devs can always limit it to combat only.

ZombiesTT.3619:

Well that makes inner fire pretty much useless since you need to fight someone who uses burn conds (probably only another guardian).

Elementalist is also another garanteed class to have always burning. So this trait seems more like a reliable anti-ele/ guardian trait.

As a semi-casual player who barely touched dungeons yet, I loved fractals and midly enjoyed AC/ CM/ Furnace story mode, because the former felt more creative and diverse, while the later experiences were crippled with looooong HP and graveyard zergs (but I loved the story-driven content and story ambience). Honestly, long, monotonous fights and content designed (or was it?) around rezzing and fixing armor did not allow me to enjoy the experience as much as it could have been.

As an extra concern for a semi-casual player – and I’m sure that does not applies to the specific part of the community that loves dungeons, is that I’m not sure if I’ll ever enjoy farming tokens, and so I have a dilemma: should I try to do explorable mode just for the sake of finishing each path once? Will they be worth it, or are they worth it only if I farm them?

One thing I liked about GW1’s EotN dungeons, is that their first reward for completion was a nice title boost (for hall of monuments and gameplay bonus in that area) and the existence of books that recorded all dungeons I’ve completed and gave me a big reward for completing them all once.

I would like to see this kind of books in GW2. It would make more people attempt at finishing every dungeon and dungeon path possible, but only once, for those who would like to enjoy the experience but do not have any motivation to farm them over and over.

A Staff ele is actually great to farm kill points at spvp because of the format’s zergy nature. Make sure you pick a server that’s almost full, and big battles will always happen all the time. All you’ll have to do is spread the chaos with your aoe, and know when and where to fight.

Then you’ll have two big build choices. Glass Cannon to kill faster during zergs, but you’ll also be killed pretty fast on 1vs1. Or Defensive/ Bunker to still kill efficiently enough during zergs (and still get all the glory you would get with a glass cannon build), with better party support, and with being able to survive on 1vs1 (which you can have chance to win overtime against frail/ glass cannon builds that try to duel you).

EDIT: Also, there’s another advantage in going defensive. Because you are an elementalist, more players will want to target you first, thinking of you as a free kill. And in the middle of a 3vs3 or bigger battle, it’s always a bad idea to target the tanks first and leave the glass cannons for last. Many people do this mistake, and I usually end up fighting one or two players at the middle of any zerg. Because they can’t usually kill a defensive elementalist (fast enough, at least), the allies in the area will end up cleaning everything in due time, because they are killing other players while half of the opposing team is trying and having an hard time to just kill a single elementalist.

Elementalists’ best traits are, generally, water’s and arcane’s. So I recommend you to specc mostly into those, and then decide through equipment stats and remaining points to go for defense, damage or inbetween.

But an extreme glass cannon with fire/ air traits is not very good at the moment.

@ Arheundel,

You’ll have three cantrips to get out of stun/ daze, and a lot of condition removal with grandmaster’s water trait by using: healing rain (each time regen ticks), healing glyph on water, attuning to water, using a cantrip – one of them that removes four. If the healing glyph is rupted, it’ll go into a 5s cooldown, which isn’t too bad.

Mind Wrack is only available every 10ish-15 seconds, and other shatters aren’t usually a threat, so just keep putting fields and killing phantasms. Water-traited eles counter any condition builds, expecially when they’re all about stacking a single condition. Phantasmal Duelists auto-kill themselves if you use Magnetic Aura, which you should be prepared for when starting a battle againt a mesmer.

Giving examples of 2vs1 do not exactly make a good argument. A thief popping up from anywhere and cleaning up a duel works against anything. Likewise, water-traited eles only have real problems against conditions when they’re being targetted by more than one foe, but that’s perfectly normal, isn’t it?

I also don’t care about videos, so if you don’t agree with what I said, it’s fine.

@ LordByron,
Staff is a boring and static weapon when all you’re doing is standing far away spamming fields, aka, for most of pve. But I actually find it interesting in group fights for pvp, where skills like magnetic aura, gust + lightning field (to take them away from points) and the fire dodge are very satisfying to use, and negating movement for an entire running zerg while your party is raining arrows (and projectile finishers) on them also gives some pleasure. Of course, Staff is also in an unfair position, because it’s an Elementalist weapon. And all Elementalist’s weapons must inevitable be compared to one of the greatest, funniest and most adrenaline-intensive playstyles of any MMORPG ever, the Dagger/ Dagger Elementalist.

How many big counters do bunker eles have outside of boon removal?

One of the biggest weaknesses of a glass cannon, especially for a thief, is their long-term survival. We’re talking about builds that revolve around killing-or-be-killed in a short ammount of time. For that reason, a glass cannon cannot simply counter a bunker elementalist by only trying to acchieve long-term success. Waiting for an elementalist to dodge, dodge, CC, dodge again because of vigor, use one cantrip, CC, dodge again because of vigor, use another cantrip, dodge with burning retreat, all the while regenerating their health to full, is not a proper way of a glass cannon to counter a bunker ele. You need to burst outright, or you’ll have a hard time, and eles have so many means to counter bursts. A thief will lose their adrenaline, and a mesmer will have to deal with aoe. So, as can be seen, a staff bunker ele has as many counters against those builds, as they have against an ele.

This idea that a staff ele can’t damage is a myth. Bunkers versus bunkers can’t usually kill each other, but a bunker ele can kill glass cannons because of their little defense. We’ll gain might out of cantrips and eruption, eruption hits pretty hard, our fire spells are decent, we’ll apply decent burning and bleeding while dealing average damage. We can kill by outlasting them. And it isn’t as simple as dodging our spells. We can use plenty of them, we’ll surely use them at the points we’re trying to defend or capture, and we have a lot of movement control. Our opponent will have to take damage while CC’d, or to keep their melee range, or they’ll have to leave the point and give my team an advantage in team points overtime. Mesmer’s illusions won’t even get a big chance, unless the Mesmer shatters as fast as possible. And with fire dodges, vigor and all that, we’ll usually dodge more often than our opponent, and it’ll be easier to dodge illusions too when they come in running against you.

(Staff) bunker eles are very strong because they have so much going for them. They have hard counters to bursts, large long-term defense, never-ending CC and plenty of AOE to spam. They punish opponents for staying inside the point, they prevent opponents from escaping during big fights, and they give a huge boost to your entire time. And they get credit for all the kills in their area, because of their aoe, making them excellent to farm glory points in spvp.

Boons make us too strong at the moment, and boon removal is a pretty huge counter, because that’s what give us so much healing, dodging, and even stability, protection, fury, swiftness, might and even more power through the 25 points water trait. It fuels our long-term defense and long-term offense, and it’s even what allows us to outlast our own cantrip cooldowns against some builds, restarting our defensive cycle and keeping us basically unkillable unless the situation changes.

STRanger.5120:

DiogoSilva.7089:

I feel that the staff was lacking an interesting, specific skill sequence like that before.

Unfortunately no, it doesn´t. You just had more options of the interesting, specific sequences than now, because you were not forced to switch to Earth every time for the finisher (I refer to the fact that all of the EA spells were finishers, not to that bug which caused that every dodge was a finisher, to be clear, that was ofc hugely OP)

Wrong. It’s exactly because you must switch to earth, that you have a specific sequence now. With the old EA, there were no sequences, you simply created a field, and dodged, created a field, and dodged. You did not have to sacrifice anything for a specific sequence. It was very out there.

Elementalist is restricted to specific builds, and so people get this idea that the class is underpowered (which it is) for the builds they most wish to play an elementalist as: glass cannons, spikers, bursters, mages of elemental destruction as it was advertised by the game.

But if we look at what the best the elementalists have to offer, we are a little bit too strong, specially considering we’ve actually been getting a healthy amount of buffs, unlike truly overpowered professions, like the mesmer, the guardian and the thief, who have been getting far, far, far more nerfs than buffs. And in a game where everyone gets nerfs, and I mean everyone gets nerfs, crying that the elementalists are getting nerfed does not means much, because the entire powercurve of the entire game is getting toned down. Many other profession users would love to get the treatment we’ve been getting… Well, rangers and necros have been getting some nice buffs too, but while those are slowly (or still trying) to get a place in the meta, the bunker ele has already been one of the pillars of current meta for long.

1. Ether Renewal prevents you from using skills for 3 seconds, and can be interrupted. It heals better than other heal skills, but it can’t burst heal to save your kitten from the first seconds against a thief (you’ll have to rely on other skills and only heal later). But, of course, lots and lots of condition removal, which is usually scarce with the elementalists. And a low recharge. I feel like this skill is at a decent situation, and I won’t be surprised if it’s actually buffed further if our channelling traits become more appealing in the future.

2. DD is our most polished weaponset. It’s the one that I feel like we have the less amount of useless/ filler skills (probably none). It’s a very risky weaponset, because it puts our naturally terrible defensive profession at the upfront dealing damage, and we desperately depend on active defenses and movement control to not be killed in seconds. This is specially notable if you specc in fire and air traits: if you don’t kill fast enough, all your CC will only delay your death. And we usually can’t kill fast enough. Meanwhile, water/ arcane specced eles are complete fortresses. I’d say that DD is fine, but our traits are not. Spike traits are not good enough, and Bunker traits are a bit better than they should.

3. Staff is absolutely awesome in spvp exactly because it’s all about kills. Spvp is full of zerg encounters. You get credit for kills by hitting them all with aoes. Staff is beautiful at aoes. In the countless 3v3 or more situations, spamming your fields and watching your party using finishers for lots of regeneration/ chill/ vulnerability/ burning, while keeping your opponents CC’ed within your fields, alongside the occasional Meteor Shower, is an absolutely awesome way to farm for glory in spvp. The fact that ele bunkers are one of the stronger builds for the current meta, and in those matches you can easily delay your death even against two opponnents, while making your allies combo finisher machines with a staff equipped, and the end result is that slowly but soundly you’re killing them faster than they are killing your allies. Should the enemies priotize glass cannons over your bunker fortress build, which the smartest should, you’re going to have a much easier time field spamming and self-comboing your opponent. Your cantrips will also allow you to safely finish most downed professions. Seriously, I consistently get 1s-3rd place in spvp thanks to staff, and when I do not, it’s because I spent too much time bunkering a point, which still gives an advantage to my team nonetheless.

Outside of that, the Staff has a few underpowered skills. Water’s auto attack, air’s second skill and earth’s four are skills that I personally think do too little.

4. If (= when) they nerf our downed state, I hope they reduce the cooldown of our #3 skill. At the moment we can only use it because Vapor Form allows us to delay our death enough for that.

5. I think our water trait that grants 9 seconds of regen and vigor to our cantrips is too strong. I would swap it with the cantrip recharge trait, making it a master trait, and probably nerf the duration to 6 seconds. It would still be very strong, but bunker eles are ridiculous at surviving long-term, until their cooldowns are off. I think this would balance that out, while still remaining very strong. I feel like it would be the best place to start to tone down bunkers, without doing anything drastic.

I also think that, although the fights should be strategically harder, enemies should have generally lower HP and/ or, maybe, better rewards.

For a simple reason: fighting challenging battles is fun, having every single enemy of the 1000th foes you’ll have to defeat taking too long to beat is not, unless there’s a proper reward. The alternative is really lower HP.

Let the battles be harder but faster, requiring higher skill but rewarding you with faster battles. This should make any fuure harder pve experience more fluid. And I doubt slightly faster battles = easier battles, unless th HP is so low that you can burst and kill every single time before even getting hit.

JonPeters.5630:

We are working to make sigils work with kits. Our intention is to push this as soon as possible. Hope that helps.

Jon

Are there any plans to do the same with conjure weapons, or are those going into a different direction?

This is relevant also because the weapons have extra stats in pve, and different rarities as well, unlike pvp.

With three attunements with skills dedicated to controlling movement, two of the four skills specifically in earth, I don’t think Eruption is in a bad spot, and it’s a pretty strong skill by itself. I usually manage to hit with it even in pvp, and even when the opponent dodges away, my party usually gets their boon from the combo finisher. But without a doubt that Arcane Wave is far more reliable to hit the exact field we want. I just think it requires some practice.

The new EA is pretty much a new AW as long as you attune to earth right after you create your field. And then you cast Shockwave for a projectile finisher and an immobilize, eruption to that spot, switch back to another attunement, use another combo field on top of eruption. It works pretty fine when you get the hang of it, it’s fun, and I feel that the staff was lacking an interesting, specific skill sequence like that before.

You do not only have a blast finisher with earth, you have a handy cripple along it, a nice heal spell with condition removal for water, and burning for fire that allows you to activate fire grab right after. Only air’s dodge is unimpressive for most situations, but that’s still four skills, even if you can only blast finish with one of them.

I didn’t even know until now that auras were affected by boon duration. So it was a bug fix then.

1v1? I don’t know, but for casual spvp, if you know how and where to fight, staff is the easiest weapon to get credit for kills, because you’re hitting everyone. I usually don’t rely on Staff much for duels. :/

Seems like they changed RTL’s functionality, and that the HP loss is a bug. The new functionality does not seems to take my vitality from traits into account.

It’s a funny typo.

If we go by devs’ comments, it should only do each 10 seconds.

Very interesting patch.

To note that this was not exactly a balancing patch (that one will come in december 14th, I believe? The wintersday patch), but mostly a bug fix patch. Look at other professions’ changes, they were mostly bug fixes too, and so was almost everything else in this patch.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Karl McLain.5604:

… to keep it in line with our general policy of not having a blast finisher in the same weapon set you have a combo field….

I’m curious about this, Karl. Lots of professions have a blast finisher in the same weapon set as a combo field: (Guardian Hammer + GS / Necromancer Staff / etc).

I think that policy depends on the weapon set and on the profession, and I also think attunement set counts as a weapon set. So he probably meant that, a weapon like the elementalist’s staff, that requires party members, utility or the earth set to combo with itself, might get a combo finisher for the earth dodge.

Archaon.6245:

Actually there are ways to not being killed also in full scholar zerk gear…strange uh?

Of course there are: illusions and stealth.

Pity that only two professions have them, heh?

I think it’s clear to everyone except to several thieves that this profession is poorly balanced at the moment.

This is especially clear when all that can be said to defend the thief is “lol l2p”. I’d have to ask: why should I need to “l2p” after months mastering my elementalist, playing piano with my keyboard to be able to use all my 20 skills, trying to hit with my slow and predictable burst, when a random thief does not needs to “l2p” to do a lot more with a lot less button presses, while he is stealthed to boot?

The backstab/ heartseeker thief is, at the moment, the noob profession – with due respect to the thief pros. It’s extremely easy to get any results with it, and your opponent must play really well to stand a chance. It’s contraditory to demand your opponents to “l2p” when you’re using a cheap build that rarely puts you in such a situation where you must play as well as others to kill anything.

I like quick fights. I don’t like, however, when fights end before they start to get fun. Likewise, I like longer, intense fights, but there’s a limit to them, and anything beyond that limit starts to get repetitive and boring.

The extreme burst and the extreme bunker builds in this game push the battles to both extremes, and worse, they are the best counter to each other, making a large amount of possible builds inbetween underpowered.

Nah, it’s balanced man. You’re supposed to start a fight against a thief with 10-40% your health, waste your heal skill right at the moment while they spam heartseeker, and then run away while they spam heartseeker. But I heard an extreme bunker build works.

So, you play this game like a rock-paper-scissors game: will you kill me in three seconds, or will you fail and be killed by me in the following three seconds? You know, like a proper rock-paper-scissors game.

It’s not as much that eles should be overpowered, but that other classes should be harder/ more stressful to play.

The attunements are fun by themselves, but when we’re it direct competition to other players, it’s always frustating to give your heart and soul to use your 20 skills correctly and lose against a sudden thief that puts you down with 3-4. (And yes, I can kill plenty of thieves. But it’s still annoying whenever they manage to kill me in 2 seconds).

There’s a lot of negative comments for elementalists, too, so I don’t think people should pick one over the other based on that.

I don’t know much about the necro, but as an elem. player, I warn you that the profession takes hard work to play with and master, because you must play keyboard with your piano. Some people love the added difficulty, but others lose motivations because of that. Pick it if you really enjoy that style or a crazy key-pressing playstyle.

The only elemental I find lacking is air. I sometimes wonder if a ball of lightning for that thing was done on purpose, or if it’s a placeholder that they have forgotten to remove.

ryston.7640:

Lol @ ppl trying to compare thief to ele cause of this.

They both burst too kittening hard. No need to compare rtl out with stealth out, just fix both.

Really? Do people suddenly draw those conclusions based on a newly-made video, after countless experience in spvp?

An elementalist can’t burst at all at the moment. Burst elementalists are the big reason why so many people were disappointed with the class and left it. Their burst combos deal less damage than thieves, require more time to set up and cast, are easier to dodge, and eles have no stealth to compensate for all that, and are punished with high recharges. In addition to that, the elementalist’s traits for bursting are either weak, or bugged and don’t work all the time.

Although the damage input of this video was impressive, it’s based on stacking bad traits for the sake of a little more damage, on wasting utility for the sake of a little more damage, on equipping the most damage-related runes ans sigils, and then expect a low-hp/ low-or-medium armored class like a thief to be randomly afk in a match to get them. Any good thief can acchieve the same faster, easier, and still have options to survive, and the target doesn’t even need to be afk.

Temperantia.3207:

Eles who don’t swap atts… to me, It feels like another profession only using the “2” skill. I met one of these on a FotM run, when I asked why he wasn’t changing, he said he’s lazy. He was using fire only (staff).

I activally change atts and combo everything (S/D); still, I don’t think I did more damage than the lazy fire staff guy.

In PvE, sometimes its best to stay in fire attunement for a long time. Especially for Staff, where the recharges are not very high, the aoe damage is great, and the combo field is almost spammable. Why change to other attunements if you don’t need them? Water will be good to heal your allies in FotM, air and earth mostly to protect yourself, and earth has some nice combo finishers. Outside of that, fire, fire and fire is an effective strategy whenever you can keep yourself safe, mostly in parties or events content.

The best D/D (or any ele) builds currently are defensive-oriented and rely on a lot of boons, especially on regeneration to bring back their HP up to full while they’re dodging/ controling you. They also lose a condition each time they gain regeneration, and they usually gain it through their utiltiy skills (with long recharges, one of them might also remove conditions) and their healing skill if they’re on water. Any anti-boon build can be pretty good against them, because it’ll remove half their defense. Because elementalists are naturally squishy, immobilize/ stun/ KD them and burst them down. It might take a few tries, because defensive eles have anti-burst skills, but those will eventually be put into a recharge. Also consider some strong ranged options against D/D.

I still don’t see what’s so bad about a warrior, although I barely played one myself.

What broken builds do they have? Thieves used to have stealth bugs that made them stronger than they should, overpowered heartseekers/ pistol whips, and currently have a troublesome backstab build. Shatter mesmers are so kitten strong, you even wonder if there’s any decision-making behind sacrificing your clones for mind wrack – there usually isn’t, because they have buttloads of ways to spawn illusions. Guardian’s bunkers are ridiculous, and they used to be pretty overpowered with long-duration retaliation/ countless self-boons before all the nerfs have taken place.

Really, even the old bunker elementalists used to be far more relevant and important to pvp than warriors in general.

Outside of a random warrior appearing at your back from nowhere at the middle of a fight and surprising you with a frenzied HB – which is pretty annoying, playing against warriors usually leads to pretty balanced fights, as it’s very easy to counter them.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Its simple: Mesmer is played by one of the 2 class “balance-ers” while Ele isnt. Thats why Mesmer, Thief, Guardian and Warrior are so strong and Necro, ele and Ranger are not as these 3 classes are not played by them.

Since when is a Warrior stronger than an Elementalist, or even a top-tier profession at all? Could a warrior even kill a pre-patch bunker ele at all? Seriously, just because HB+frenzy works well against noobs, it does not makes the warrior overpowered. Truly overpowered professions are the thief, the mesmer and the guardian. And those three have been getting nerfed and nerfed again, more so than the any elementalist nerf so far (including EA). Likewise, necro, ranger and -yes- the elementalist either have gotten the most complete buffs so far, or are promised to get them soon. In fact, the elementalist was, like, an overpowered juggernaut during the initial stages of beta, killing faster back then than a thief today. For a profession with long-term power (20 skills) compared to a blow-it-all power (adrenaline), that sure was crazy.

Regarding the original topic, I think it’s because of the mechanics behind environmental weapons. They’re usually independent from character builds, and it happens that conjures are environmental weapons (if I’m not wrong). I believe they’d have to redesign either how enviroment weapons are, or redesign the mechanics behind conjures. Or find any other solution.

When it comes to shatter, it’s a direct mesmer skill. It’s affected by mesmer’s builds, just like how attunements can be affected by elementalists’ builds.

I get the idea that the game keeps running while the screen is loading. That’s because if I wait for a while, when the map changes, the screen loading changes too for the new map and I get to enter.

Hammer’s auto-attack is actually worth it. You waste 3 charges, but you can keep the foe blinded for long. Meanwhile, although I think the Bow is strong, its auto-attack is a waste of charges that you’re forced to do if everything else is recharging.

If there’s one thing I can wish for, when it comes to communication with the fans, is that I (and many others, I’m sure) would like if red posts on the profession boards popped up a little more often. Usually devs go there hype one or two upcomming changes, which is cool, and I can understand why it’s not a good idea to promise much more than that. But I would also enjoy to see more often the devs’ thoughts on the current state of each profession, or even answering to some ambiguous patch changes or intentions behind changes.

For example, the elementalist. We know Evasive Arcana had unintended blast finishers that had to be and were removed. But were all of them unintended or is the full removal a new bug? And what does the devs think of EA’s contribution to a different playstyle? And about conjures, what’s your vision behind them? Are you trying to do, what will come after the buffs? If we could get one or two extra red posts each week or even each two weeks, it would create a much nicer forum environment, imo.

Underwater makes sense for when you fall down, but I agree with whoever said that it should be easy and fast to get out of water.

Allies being able to pick our conjures is a cool idea, and it makes the skills stand out more from kits, but I’d change how it would work. Either it would be:
a) Optional – requiring a specific trait to create one/ two conjures for your allies;
b) For your allies only, meaning you wouldn’t be able to pick your conjure on the ground.

I think this would allow the devs to balance around one-usage only, so that builds don’t rely on allies NOT picking your own conjures.

I would then propose:
a) Keep their cast time, but after being cast, the utility skill would be substituted by a swap, which would allow you to change back to your 20 skills and back again to your conjure.
b) No duration, only charges. After charges are used, weapon is put on a cooldown. If another conjure is cast, the former conjure is put on a cooldown too. (= You would only be able to have one conjure cast at a time).
c) Have the conjure buffs inherent to their weapon, and have the weapon stats at level 80 be on par with level 80 top tier weapons. Split for pvp so they would have no/ less stats.

All professions have means to self-combo, but combos are still meant for party group, and not all classes are equally good at self-comboing (for example, Rangers and Warriors are much better at finishing, while staff Elementalists at fields).

Also, many tooltip descriptions in this game are outdated and wrong. Updating them does not means that Anet is lazy. Armor of Earth, Churning Earth, Phoenix and Healing Rain are strong skills by themselves. Elementalists need their weakest skills to be stronger, not their strong skills to be op.

Navzar.2938:

Fire ball> Air 1 for single target or 3+ target. Air 1 is only nice when its 2 targets since it hits the first one twice.

Chain Lightning is also better when your targets are spread apart from each other. Fireball’s radius is not as big as C.Lightning’s.

It’s a buff nonetheless, and my current favourite elementalist’s heal skill. The 1.? second that was taken away means more time spent using other skills or dodging (and, of course, stronger healing before any rupt). I find the condition immunity to be very conditional, and even then, it’s still good at that as it lasts 3+ seconds.

The ironic thing behind this thread is that any balancing changes with casuals in mind will only translate to nerfs for the thief, because the casuals are also abusing this profession.

Mil.3562:

Arcane Power is still bugged with this patch. When active, it does not crit the next 5 attacks, only 1 or 2.

Oh wait… I am sure Anet will fix this bug in the next patch… that is by changing the tooltip to ’ Your Next 1 To 2 Attack Will Crit ’. Brilliant.

Some of the skills were/ are are working as intended, and it’s the tooltips that are outdated.

That being said, I doubt Arcane Power is working as intended.

Weapon X.5163:

better to just reroll at this point, or stop playing. Might was the only thing making this class playable, and now you will struggle to get more that 6, unless you use Arcane blast.

Bunker builds, or more generally water and arcane traitline speccs, were and are the only things making this class playable.

You can still get some nice might stacking by picking fire’s cantrip trait in your bunker cantrip-regeneration-condition removal builds. And now that Mist Form recharges 20% faster (in pvp only, though), you have pretty much the perfect 10/0/10/30/10 setup, with 10 free points to be spent whenever you like best (air for glyph recharges?).