Guild Wars 2

Visionary.5681:

This is essentially Spvp. In an ideal world, you wouldnt need to nerf thief or mesmer, just actually make them harder to play somehow.

There are some mechanics in certain skills that are very rewarding and too easy to pull off like Heartseeker (gap closer, can be executed consecutively because of initiative, decent damage, auto-heat seeking on target) i mean what more could you ask for?

Imagine thief’s Heartseeket with it’s damage (pre-nerf) to actually not auto-home-in to the target but actually work like how Backstab works wherein you need to be behind or beside your target in order to land the hit. That would have been awesome.

Imagine shatters dealing a lot more damage than they do now and also a larger aoe BUT does not home-in to the target and just explodes on the clones’ current position. That would have been awesome

Difficult to execute. But very rewarding if executed properly.

mongolianmisfit.8350:

And from the SOTG, hopefully the improvements to our lazarrr beamz (GS), sceptor/confusion, and future mantra builds will be coming soon. With more viable builds like this, I wouldn’t mind a small nerf to shatter so it is in line with other AoEs. I want to play a mesmer again.

Yes to this please

how do you constantly target a thief stealthing every 3 seconds or so?

LOL, another nerf ele thread. I don’t even have to see who made the thread and I was right.

It would be an okay idea if implemented properly. However, allowing these boon-hate abilities to be accessible to the already stronger/more favored builds for each profession will be a definite failure if they want diversity or change in the meta.

Grevender.9235:

The new system is globally ok, what needs to be reviewed is the concept of Group Event:

- hundreds of players shooting at the same target? nah, this is fail

if you have hundreds of players (“group”) playing an “event”, then try to have ’em all busy doing different tasks, without necessarily increasing the HP of a boss (which is a very cheap move imho):

- add guards, each with differents mechanics (it’s very easy to implement this, just have ‘em attack specific random players or specific classes, this will force players to cooperate on different goals)
- add evil supporters (which will buff, heal, CC etc)
- add environmental dynamic changes (ex: a creepy fog which reduces visibility, will split groups of players which will be hunted, no more hunters…)
- modify the story of the event: it’s unlikely that every day those NPC will do the same exact thing for the same exact reason

I could continue but I am sure devs can do better than me, I have faith things will get great with some time

Oh my god! Yes to these please!! Buffing HP won’t cut it, people will still just afk auto attack at boss’ foot and it’s still lame. Make ’em dynamic! Make people do other stuff than hitting boss or trash mobs! Make ’em exciting! BUT NOT ANNOYING!

Dingle.2743:

Staff air definitely needs some help.

Air attunement is described as having “heavy damage and control abilities”. This is true for D/D, and it’s true for Scepter (focus lacks on the damage part, however).

I concur. IMO, the rest of the weapons skills on staff are great except for Air skills 2,3 and 4. They really need to rework then to be in line with what Lightning Attunement is supposed to be. I hardly use skills 2 and 3 since they are both difficult to land and not worth using, at all.

As for staff auto-attacks, Water 1 is in dire need of halp too.

condiments.8043:

These builds might strong against boon builds but weaker against those who don’t(stacking more damage bonuses against boon stackers=weaker against regular opponents in comparison), so you’ll have to have a balanced team with roles that can neutralize their threat.

This is exactly what should happen, but I’m sensing that it won’t be the case. Color me pessimist. XD

jportell.2197:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Yeah, stealthed targets should be invulnerable.

? yeah no… Absolutely not… then we would have thieves that will be invuln every 3 seconds… And any skill that came into using stealth is gone because it won’t matter….

Oops, forgot to insert “/sarcasm”

jportell.2197:

Those mesmers usually run some form of toughness in their amulets… The ones that don’t aren’t as effective as you would think. A full GC Mesmer in a tournament is a dead Mesmer to anything that is either faster or has a moniker of toughness…. If I run the 20/20/0/0/30 build you but your hind parts I am running soldiers amulet or zerker with a jewel that has toughness.

GC thieves and mesmurs die easily when caught offguard, well what GC prof doesn’t? But apparently thieves and mesmurs have an array of innate defensive mechanics that are difficult or infuriating to cope up with- stealth, clones, and a plethora of evasive and defensive skills on their weapon sets.

jportell.2197:

A gc thief is good at one thing being completely alone because if anyone so much as looks at them… they dead.

Problem is that, I can hardly look at thieves who pop stealth every 3 seconds or so, let alone re-target them constantly.. Yeah, I know.. L2P

Yeah, stealthed targets should be invulnerable.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Yes, probably genius. There are some people who have them, we’re just too smart to display them. Everyone wants to kill the engi, especially if he’s got the title. Best to let them think you’ll be a free kill.

Why would everyone want to kill the engi?

I’d rather get drowned in lag/particle effects by dozens of players rather than feel forever alone because of the stupid culling effect. But that’s me XD

PlagueParade.7942:

Doesn’t this thread belong in suggestions? Nice idea, though I don’t see it happening. I mean one of the reasons people farm these dungeons are for the skins, as you pointed out, and as such less people will want to fight in dungeons once they have that skin leading to less groups being made making harder for others to get said skin or gear for the stats in themselves.

Once it’s moved to the Suggestions section, it will be buried there and forgotten.. forever..

Champion Genius. Too few geniuses around..

I have yet to lay my eyes on one.

Awesome idea.

Aridia.3042:

Here you go Anet.

Some ideas to get you started.

Sweet!

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

do PvE dailies
do sPvP dailies
do daily Fractals of the Mist dungeon with my elder bro who is living in another country.

do PvE monthly if not completed yet
do sPvP monthly if not completed yet

guild activities during Saturday nights
- guild bounty
- WvW

join the chatter in guild chat channel

Pretty much this without the Fractals.

I agree wholeheartedly. +10000000 to this post

It’s the unintended consequence of improved chest loots from world events. People will definitely farm them. I’m not saying they need to nerf it again. They should work on proper dynamic event scaling.

It triggers once you reach 75% HP and works just like the Arcane Power Utility. It’s not unlimited.

Timelord.8190:

So they want to punish us for using our only viable build. Guess i have to lvl my warrior then. It’s so nice with the rifle who can one-shot enemies from a safe distanse.

They also said that something good is coming for Scepters (multiple target Arc Lightning! Yay! ) and I believe other weapon sets also as well as reworking on the ele traits so there’s a possibility for other builds to become viable for the ele if they get this right. But I might be too hopeful on this, though :/

Navzar.2938:

Is this something that’s coming?
I personally don’t like it seeing as there are already anti boon skills on other classes, and I’d rather have more single use boon punishment expanded on than continued use since you don’t have the option of tearing down your own boons to react to such abilities.

It’d also be nice if we had some more options for non boon builds before something like that would be suggested.

Yes there are existing skills and traits that allow for boon removal (Thieves, Necros, Mesmers) but right now, other options for these classes far outshine the build that specializes in boon-removal (burst shatter mes, BS thieves).

I believe the rock-paper-scissor approach the devs are heading to with this future change is a good thing for the meta. However they need to be very careful about it since it may render certain builds to become too powerful or too useless and then we’re back to square one.

chrisk.4320:

Reselecting a thief is trivial.

No, it isn’t. Can you halp me? >.<

Saital.4819:

Is this a new record for least amount of posts in a thread before it becomes derailed about mesmers and thieves?

You can’t blame us. Targetting is a not so much of an issue if you factor out Stealth or abilities that drop target, is it? XD

I click on my targets most of the time. I prolly should practice with the tabbing enemies but it’s more frustrating in my experience with Minion Masters and Mesmers with a bajillion clones here and there. Pressing tab is cool for other classes without an army of NPCs.

And for thieves, they are a special case so I spam Target Nearest Enemy. Stealth is a kittener. No wonder Thieves and Mesmurs rule in hotjoin sPVP. The frustration in targetting them everytime they drop target.

The Arc Lightning (Scepter Air 1) change was prolly in line with the GreatSword 1 skill of mesmers also being changed to hit multiple targets along that laser beam. It will be a good change that doesn’t make it OP, IMO. I mean, how often can you see enemies falling in line to get hit by a laser beam, anyway XD.

I wish there will be more good stuff changes to other eles weapon sets. And yea, the idea of giving anti-boons/anti-bunker traits/abilities to professions are nice counters to the current bunker-heavy meta. It also provides possible builds for classes thus providing diversity, assuming these traits/abilities are not lackluster to the currently favored specs for every class.

Eurantien.4632:

I almost forgot what hope felt like.

LOL.

Penguin.5197:

All the while engies just stare at other classes running around with their gap closers in envy. Engies got very screwed in that department.

Yep, waaaay too clunky gap closers for engies.

Hotjoin was fun when they added 5v5 since 8v8 is way too zergy for me. And then when more than half of the 5v5 servers became duel servers, I never entered hotjoin for a long time now and only solo que in tpvp. But yeah, hotjoin is supposed to be fun. But only if you like zerging for glory farming or dueling.

It might be something they might have missed or not fixed yet like a lot of other underwater skills. Underwater combat isn’t high priority anyway compared to land-based skills.

But if this gets attention, I’m sure it’s gonna get a quick fix.

Soulview.4532:

Lavadiel.6231:

How ele was created:

DevA:lets give an ele 2x more skils!!!

meanwhile DevB: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, lets take 50% of his HP
meanwhile DevC: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, lets make his CD twice as long
meanwhile DevD: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, lets make his condis 50% shorter
meanwhile DevE: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, lets make his auto attack effective hits only 50%
meanwhile DevF: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, lets take 300 tou frmm the ele compared to heavy
meanwhile DevG: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, lets make pre and after cast times twice as long as others have
meanwhile DevH: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, they absolutely cant swap weapons!!!
meanwhile DevI: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, they must be either close, mid or range – but never all at same time
meanwhile DevJ: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, they must use watter/arcane traitline to live
meanwhile DevK: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, they must have ultra obvious/long skill animations
meanwhile DevL: omg ele has so many skills its so OP, lets put some nasty bugs ^^ to make it more balanced

@devs:
Please communicate with each other

so true

LOL. seems legit.

Shurbryn.1360:

Came here expecting discussion about the summon. I am dissapoint…

Why? You wanna change the Fire Elemental too like wut they did with Lightning Elemental?

Evan Lesh.3295:

I looked into this and have updated character select to work with PvP equipment and town clothes. Whether it goes into this month’s patch is questionable.

Wicked

bigtime.7410:

Why are you complaining its too easy? Whats wrong with you? Do you take a horse to work? Do you want to blow up technology because it makes life to easy? Easy is the point, shutup and enjoy it, you dont want a challenge, you dont.

What is wrong with you? You want everyone else to depend on website timers for these world events, waypoint to the area, spam autoattack and see the boss drop dead in a matter of seconds and collect Rare loots? You really think these world events are designed just to become another farming node? You really enjoy doing this every single day until you get the gold you needed to craft your Legendary?

We want a BETTER game. It’s not that we want challenging hardcore content. We want reasonable and working dynamic event scaling to provide a better gaming experience for everybody.

This just in! I was in Caledon Forest (near Twilight Arbor WP) doing some stuff and I got the opportunity to participate in the pre-event for the Jungle Wurm. It was awesome! Now, the Jungle Wurm appeared! I was so excited! But there were a lot of players so I guess this would be easy. When I say a lot, I meakittenerg of farmers.

But just as the Wurm finished its “rising from slumber” animation, it died instantly. Like less than 15 seconds or so. The worse part is I hadn’t even had the oportunity to target the sorry Wurm before it died. So I got zero medal and zero chest and loot from the event. No exaggeration here. You might want to try them out including Shadow Behemoth in Queensdale or Fire Elemental in Metrica Province. They die so fast now that people farm them for Rares every single day.

Wow. Just wow at the dynamic event scaling. Yeah I get it, it shouldn’t be difficult since it’s in a starter area but when you guys bump the world event chests wherein there are guaranteed yellow drops from it (heck even precursors in some world events like dragons), expect people to farm these events to the point that it has become a totally lame experience for the first timers or noobs, and even the rest of the players participating due to culling or lag because of the number of players participating. They are not participating because the event is fun but because the rewards are so good for an event that never even reached a 1 minute duration. Just check website timer for World Event. Waypoint to event. Autoattack on boss for a few seconds. Profit. Rinse and repeat. You made the situation for the dragons before you improved the loot drops on all world event chests worse and made other world events pretty similar which is just disheartening. Please do something about your dynamic event scaling with regards to these world bosses. Please.

Such horrible horrible game design. I’m not asking for loot drop nerfs. I’m asking for a DECENT DYNAMIC SCALING which does not let a world event boss die in less than 10 seconds from a zerg of level 80 players waiting for the fixed respawn timer to reset and repeat all over again. -_-

Puandro.3245:

Many eles been running D/D since beta, me included. Its delusion to think a person made a spec popular by themselves. The Nov. 15th patch killed Staff bunker spec and people flocked the next bunker spec which was D/D. This is because Bunker is the only viable spec for eles at high level tPvP.

Sad but true.

haviz.1340:

Anet hasn’t changed staff at all, just EA.

EA was the bread and butter of the ungodly Staff bunker that was more OP than the current d/d. To think that the staff arsenal is loaded with a plethora of combo fields. (gasp) Instant blast finisher every dodge anyone?

Ragnas.6832:

“Hot joins” I play to have fun, not to tourney. I don’t know enough about pvp to attempt tourneys yet

Well, tough luck bro. Hotjoins will always be swarming with thieves and mesmers. They eat noobs for lunch and they eat them before the unsuspecting victims even had the chance to realize what happened to them. It’s fun! But only if you’re the thief or the mesmer.

When staff got nerfed i.e. evasive arcana was fixed, everyone else went for d/d.

hharry.1967:

Arheundel.6451:

raise base HP by 5k, add evasive skills to water + small regenen solution ( something on the line of water trident) remove huge heal skills like water trident and cleansing wave (while remaining the single condition removal) and remove heal from EA+condition removal and add 3s chill, increase damage of auto-attacks and buff a couple of skill, finally make so that fire/air trait lines have more synergy with the rest of the attunement/utilities..done fixed ele for you

Only nerf/balance suggestion that ever made sense from all the endless “NERF PLX” posts around. You have my sword!

Add my sword! Then we swordfight!

Players like big crits with big numbers. Both of these professions deliver while also having access to a variety of defensive mechanics like stealth, and clones thus providing difficulty to the opposing player to target them consistently. And these professions feed on noobs mainly because of these issues.

NinjaEd.3946:

Actual agree with everything op stated. One thing Anet should do publically is send a poll to every active account through ingame mail and ask them what prof and what build they use(general, not specifics like traits/utility/armor/runes/etc).

I can almost bet that 90% of ele use d/d, thieves use d/d, guardian has something/shield, warrior GS, Mesmer S/something(havnt seen many lately tbh), necro staff, ranger sb, and engineer grenade kit. Point is, there arn’t many viable builds.

There needs to be rapid nerfs/buffs like every 1 or 2 weeks in spvp primarily to start getting this show on the road, people see profession X and just predict “I know what he/she is about to do…” and it gets boring after the kitten millionth time.

SOOOOOOO much potential between each prof to have multiple (3 or more) builds but the numbers don’t support that at all atm.

True. True.

It’s the nerf cycle that plagues every MMO. From the current OP profession to the next, a whiner will always QQ.

Lavadiel.6231:

there is simple rure in this game:
1v1:
tank cant kill tank – endless battle
gc cant kill tank, tank wins
gc vs gc – messmer wins

2v2 and 3v3. ..4v4…5v5
2/3/4/5 gc wins vs 2/3/4/5 tanks

that is because in this game GC complement each other while tanks and especially condi builds does not combine so well… and that is why chiftain ninjas (DPS oriented PT build) owns so hard any tank PT in pvp.

i LOLed at this but sad to say it’s pretty much true

Nikkle.4013:

Don’t try to play a gc ele till anet fixes the major problems with ele traits/mechanics. Which probably won’t happen, ever. Its cookie cutter or bust.

QFT

Add gems to rewards, people will que for it.

People follow the money.

Eles have a lot of healing going on. Main heal (SoR active, burst heal glyph, or channeled that removes condition) every 15-25 seconds, attuning to water (traited) can happen every 9 seconds with max Arcana, weapon heals (in dagger off-hand, scepter main heal, or staff) with 20-40 second CDs, comboing water fields with blast weapon skills (dagger off-hand has 2, scepter has 2, staff has 1. of course water combo fields can come from other professions but staff has 2 water fields) and an on demand dodge in Water attune (traited) every 10 seconds. Add to that the Regen boon when attuning to water (traited), Regen when using cantrip (traited and can use 3 cantrips okitten90sec CDs each), and projectile comboing (doable with staff and scepter in earth attunement). I’m sure I still missed some of them.

Of course an ele cannot have ALL of these, but still, one particular spec can have A LOT of ways to heal himself up given these choices. The problem I see here is when the healing skills in the weapon sets are used in conjuction with the traits that grant healing/regen (Water and Arcana), the ele has a plethora of healing abilities. What the devs have to realize is that this is a very delicate balance of bringing the pure bunker builds in line to not allow them to be purely unkillable but at the same time not destroying the survivability of balanced builds or any other build not specced to bunker. This just proves that Water/Arcana are the eles BEST choice since speccing for raw damage or burst (Fire, Air, Earth) are very very lackluster compared to the benefits of speccing for healing/survivability.

But one also has to consider that unlike other classes, the ele has no other means of mitigating damage other than boons and healing, some form of CC, escapes (RTL from off-hand dagger) which other classes can do too, and/or using a horrible weapon like the focus. The ele has no clones, no stealth, no death shroud, no reliable means of gaining stability outside of cantrips.

I am expecting more nerfs to this god-awful spec of this wonderful class but I am also hoping that the devs do realize that the other options need a good hard look – traits wise, weapon set wise, and utility wise so that eles can finally have other viable specs.

Other classes can surely spec similar to the bunker ele (like mesmers, and in a certain way rangers). But these classes are have other specs that are more viable or are more effective doing other things (condition or burst) that’s why we don’t see a lot of them in play and the spotlight is always only on eles.

I just hope the next patch addresses the glaring issue of build diversity in each profession. Improving or reworking certain traits/weapon sets to make them become competitive or on-par with the existing working builds can go a long way of creating a healthier PVP environment.

Yep. Temple has nice secondary mechanics but it’s waaaay tooooo big :/

google.3709:

you’re forgetting to talk about casting times, ele’s have small heals which you can pretty much use within 1 second on a extremily short cool down to full heal.

also, don’t forget ele can heal in the middle of the battle without having to stop attacking, while other classes have to actual stop to heal, also the healing is ele continuous, it NEVER STOP so is not like other classes that after they use their heal you know their hp is only gonna go, and the shorter the recharge of the heal, the weaker the heal will be.

What do you mean ele heals NEVER STOP? If you mean the signet of restoration passive, yea it heals on every attack. But also note that it heals very small amounts for a period of time meaning eles give up actual burst heal on the healing slot. But I still have a feeling that this healing skill is gonna get bashed by the nerf hammer on the next patch.

Then you guys gonna go “But they heal on every single dodge in water attunement via evasive arcana every 10 seconds!” Yeah, it got cut in half in PVP last patch, go check it out. They might as well change it to chill or some sort of evasion thingy rather than Cleansing Wave to stop all the whining.