Guild Wars 2

Old request, we first had in the beta.
It would be great to have a second weapon swap slot that can only be activated when you are out of combat (like the skills). It would help roamers in WvW a lot (as we know the feeling of fighting a de-cloaked Thief with only the main hand dagger when we were in the process of switching from staff to D/D).

I think there are two things that contribute to ME failing at a platform event fighting a warden (not talking about the complete group fail or lane fail – just me)

- My loading time to the platform is around 8 to 12 seconds in which I can’t contribute to the fight. Until I can react, I am often hit at least once by either the warden or the marionette attack (that’s why I probably still at one out of five of those evasive achievements). How do I know? I enter with full health and see a dent in the health globe when I am on the platform.

- Out of dodges. Some wardens + the marionette knock down, move you around whatever. Eventually you will run out of dodges, especially when you have to dodge twice because 95% of the platform is covered by orange circles. Recovering from damage etc. takes a while, which might cause you to lose a few necessary seconds to destroy the generator in the end.

+ The skill lock bug. I’d say that about 20% of my loading from or to a platform result in a skill lock right now. I know it is not a complete skill lock, as I can still use skills without an animation (e.g. Arcane Wave) and pick up loot with “F”.

Easier functionality & bigger range has been on the wish list of WvW commanders for a long time

One main game mechanic question remains for me:
Is the game engine able to remember the status of a “pick up item” / environmental weapon after it is dropped, or is it reset?

Which means, would it be possible to conjure a Frostbow, use 4 charges, drop it, cast a few staff skills and pick up the Frostbow again with the same charges?
A lot of ideas about improving the conjures are tied to this question.

I wish they would work a bit like Warrior banners, so once you drop the item, it leaves behind a smaller combo field with charges:
Fire => Circle of Fire to either lose a charge once a friendly combo is triggered or set an enemy on fire for one sec if they pass through
Air => Circle of Lightning to either lose a charge once a friendly combo is triggered or weaken an enemy for one sec if they pass through
Water => Circle of Water to either lose a charge once a friendly combo is triggered or chill an enemy for one sec if they pass through
Earth => Circle of Earth to either lose a charge once a friendly combo is triggered or cripple an enemy for one sec if they pass through

This would require the Ele to chose functionality:
>> Use the weapon for attribute boosts & skills 1-5
>> or lay down a longer lasting combo field (on a spot he has to run to first)

PS: The number of charges used per combo could be tweaked though, as could be the size of the combo field

The yellow stars told me to go to the Vigil camp in Bloodtide & the Marionette in Lornar’s Pass. my problem was:
It did not indicate when to go to the “L.A. meeting in the harbour” and when to go to the secret lair (or perhaps that was kind of buggy on the release day).

IIRC from a Dev post, those two stars appear after you participated in one of those world events.
It would have been better using mechanics from the past to guide us along:
>> send us an in-game mail, telling us that the mysterious probes are now guarded and we should investigate – which would have led to the first two achievements possible.
>> Lock the Secret Lair achievement in the beginning
>> send us a an in-game mail asking to meet up with old friends in LA after the first (non-) successful encounter with the Marionette or Wurm
>> make the meeting instance end with an LS achievement (you never know when it is over). IIRC it was mentioned that Scarlet hid under the nose of the Priory, so…
>> unlock Secret Lair achievement

If you take a look the sticky to CDI in this forum, you can see that there is no thing currently going on and all the old ones (Commander, Progression, Population) are locked down and not discussed any more.

While I see the ideas in the thread about commander abilities heading in a good direction, the two others don’t seem to tackle current issues. The Edge of the Mists map might solve some queue issues, but moves population dominance only to a different battlefield.
I would like to hear something about the current stance on Waypoints (is the idea to remove them still around?), what future WvW abilities are planned (will we finally get more defensive ones?) and how do you see the impact of the bloodlust ruins after a few months? Other things come to mind like: When will we see the account bound WxP pool (2nd quarter of the year, 3rd quarter …). How does the dev team think about the material reward situation for WvW players that can’t really get enough mats for ascended crafting (eyes on you, dragonite ore).

Thanks for considering throwing us a bone on some of those topics.

WP in EB are not the problem, the ones on borderlands are, because the travelling time over the map favours attackers most of the time, when no/few WP are up.

Lets take a look at Hills:
>> Attacking team has a very short route for supply dolyaks and a sentry that will alert the presence of roamers. With a Mortar (or Treb at the high south tower) you can even cover the path of the dolly with shells. Your respawn is very close to the keep, so if you get killed, you can run back within a minute with speed boosts (perhaps even grabbing supply from Water camp).
>> The defending team on the other hand has to either run from Citadel (when there is no WP) or Garrison to get to Hills to defend. Dolyaks from East camp take about three times longer to reach the keep than from Water camp. The travelling path from a respawn is long and treacherous and it takes defenders far longer to reach Hills than from the bottom right corner.

Removing the WPs altogether would allow servers with bigger numbers to dominate in invasions of enemy BLs even more, forcing the defenders to zerg more to actually be able to breach a blockade.

Possible solutions to the contested WP dilemma (IMHO):
1. Make a tower or keep only contested by roaming if all of the gate guards on the ground are killed (that would mean 2 guards & 2 scouts at keep gates and IIRC one guard and one scout at towers). This would make contesting by just running by much more difficult.
2. Give keeps in BLs two WP spots. One on the outer yard and the current one. Also add two different areas to contest, the outer and the inner. If the outer perimeter is contested or breached, the WP in the outer yard gets disabled. The inner works as it works right now, when attackers hit the inner structures.
This would give defenders a chance to get manpower to the inner even when the main attackers are still at the outer gates. I would also force attackers with large numbers to attack (“treb”) from at least two different spots to contest both WPs as once.

PS: I have other ideas involving better defensive play via skills & new abilities, but that would be supplemental to the WP idea.

A good start to make Eles a bit better compared to other professions. The nerf to DPS (Ferocity) should be a good thing – too much emphasis on Berserker stats at the moment. I know it is not all that will be in the patch, but I had hoped they would buff Glyphs and highlight that in the preview.

When I read the headline my first thought was our heavy dependence on Cantrips to use on competitive builds (WvW/PvP). That’s where stun breakers & survival tools are – not really in Signets & Glyphs.
My second thought goes to emphasis on builds that go heavy into Water & Arcana.

If you take a look at the Twitch podcast of Isaiah Cartwright (! anachronism) featuring the Ele, you see that Anet still sees the profession as a master of nothing, but average at all other things. Strangely condition damage is kind of bad (not average) and perhaps that’s were they should tune a bit (also some Focus tuning):

1. Flamestrike (Scepter #1) needs a speed up to 0.5 sec a cast or a burning increase to 3 seconds.
2. Stage 3 of Arc Lightning should add 1 sec of Weakness
3, Dust Devil should Immobilize for 1 sec
4. Impale should get a range increase to 400
5. Ring of Fire should apply burning to foes that stand in it, not just passing through
6. Flame Wall should have a recharge of 15 sec
7. Gust should either have a longer Chill (4 sec) or a shorter recharge (20 sec)
8. Comet should get either get no casting time or a bigger radius (180 perhaps)
9. Gale needs it recharge halved and added a small damage component
10. Swirling Winds recharge should go down to 25 sec.

The condi suggestions are just minor, but could be a first step.
I would not change traits too much now, with the exception of Soothing Wave (which is no replacement for Cleansing Wave) that would get another second of Regeneration.

Glyphs need love (I made a thread called “A Plea for Glyphs” a while ago with some suggestions) and Conjures are still a mess. I would like to see some “banner effect” for the spot you cast the second weapon, perhaps with a little smaller radius than Warrior’s banners and applying like the same stat combo bonus than the weapon.

It’s a fundamental problem that goes hand in hand with favouring zergs, offensive WvW abilities and obstructed line of sight for defenders. Could Anet WvW devs introduce counters & tweaks? Yes. DO they want to change it? Maybe

PS: Counters IMO
1. Tower & Keep upgrade called “Moat”, which prevents siege being built directly in front of walls & cripples attackers standing still for longer than 2 seconds.
2. WvW ability line “Tower defender”, which grants you e.g. protection, stability, +300 range (as LoS can hardly be fixed) when fighting from contested tower walls. (Would need an internal cooldown though)
3. Traps called “Moat trap” that will make it impossible to build a siege on that spot for 15 min. (Can be upgraded with Sapper Mastery which enhances Trap use; new traps could also include an alarm trap, which will trigger when more than 10 people pass it within a time window of 10 sec; that would slow down zergs a lot if they want to move relatively unnoticed)

Currently I’d go with Warrior, as you can be so durable without having severe trade off like other classes need to take when taking a special rout of development.
With their ability to “banner the Lord” they even have one of the three meta abilities, too (the other two are perma stealth and portaling).

I have mixed feelings about the downed state and there are two things that need some tweaking I think:
1. Zergs – It is too hard to kill stuff in a zerg due to so many resurrects. At least when your server induces the “outnumbered buff” there should be a negative effect on rallying.
2. “Zergs vs. walls” – It should be easier to kill off mindless forces of people DPSing a gate for a few defenders inside. Face it, whe you have 5 people inside a tower and 20 on the outside none of the attackers will die unless they are extremely stupid. Best way to fix this would be a “Stalwart Defender” ability that allows you to deal double damage on downed foes while fighting inside a tower or the inner wall of a keep, perhaps.

Perma stealth Thieves are awful and right now I would like to see them go, but I think that’s not the foundation of the whole problem. IMO, it is the targeting of GW2, which makes it cumbersome to fight Mesmers and Thieves.

PS: Stealth Traps should be cheaper to obtain and the fact that they exist is an indication for me that devs too think there is something phony with stealth in WvW.

Same with escorting dolyaks. ANet’s dev team for WvW just does not like defensive tactics & abilities. I can’t repeat that often enough – look at our WvW abilities: Lots of siege related things that makes those stronger and hardly anything that makes defending almost useless (just look at the reward you get for taking a tower or killing a dolly compared to defending a tower & speeding up/defending a caravan.

@Noxrawr.6125

Not knowing a lot what kind of Ele (D/D, S/F, Staff) hit you, I can say this from my experience as an Ele:
The big damage output you saw can be done by a very glassy spec, that in my experience has no survivability against a Mesmer who starts to get some clones out. In case he got you by surprise, you really had to survive the burst by an evade to get the upper hand on him later. An Ele can not pull off that trick every few seconds and some of those are heavily advertised like charging up Churning Earth, trails of lightning or fire or the hovering Dragon’s Tooth.

Once a Mesmer has some clones up, the burst Ele has a very hard time getting a second burst on you and shatters & confusion will kill him faster than you think.

How are we “not viable”? Because doing that huge damage burst requires excellent timing, great reflexes and a lot of luck. Missing out on one of those factors and we are back to being mediocre at best against classes that can excel us on many levels (armour, health, traits, range discrepancy etc.)

I have adapted to click twice now, but it does not the solve the problem of being useless under water. Unless I am in shallow water, I can’t target a foe and will just blast pretty textures on the sea bottom. That issue needs to be resolved.

Just here to see what troubles the Warrior profession has compared to other professions and the most important thing in post #1 is: “Don’t come here to complain about Warrior.”
You are indeed blessed by ArenaNet.

At that level (which I assume is PvE only) my “only” advice is: “Play for fun”
Use all weapons to unlock the skills, try some setups and find out what works for you.
If the Ele is your first character and you do not have a lot of funds (= money & materials for crafting), go with what you find & what drops for you. Try to replace anything that gets 10 levels below your current stuff (e.g. try to replace everythign that is below level 30 right now.)
If you already think that Fire is the attunement you are most in (you should swap, that’s how the mechanic is played), try to get Blasting Staff as your adept trait and Elemental Attunement as you master trait. Internal Fire gives you 10% more damage while attuned to Fire (and that’s 30 trait points spend).
If you feel you are getting killed too often, try to mix more defensive stats (like Clerics & Knights), if you want to see some damage numbers, add in Berserker & Cavalier.

I think those are not too bad, because
>> Windborne Dagger is now “out of combat”
>> Vigorous Scepter can replace Renewing Stamina
>> Blasting Staff got nifty extras with auto attack Fire & Water

The Alacrity traits are the problem. Those should get extra effects like many other weapon line trait other professions have (e.g. Forceful Greatsword). Mastery traits that improve damage are better than ours right now too (10% damage increase).
An awesome addition would also be to give the Alacrity traits a 10% recharge reduction on their corresponding Signets, Glyphs & Conjures (e.g Aquamancers Alacrity would reduce the recharge of Signet of Water from 30 to 27 seconds, Glyph of Stroms to 54 if you used it in Water attunement, Frostbow to 54 sec etc.).

Glaucs.1546:

This isn’t really true. Did they fix everything we wanted? No, but they did listen to some of our ideas.

1) Didn’t move renewing stamina
2) Redesigned soothing wave
3) Made windborne dagger work OOC
4) Moved blasting staff to adept
5) Allowed FGS to cast while moving
6) Buffed earth 5 point
7) Reduced CD on tempest defense
8) Moved conjurer to adept

Using this to review changes made/not made
1) OK on this, we need it it adept. They listened to us.
2) As “replacement trait” in the adept Water line for “Cleansing Wave” this is not enough. Remember they moved CW because it was an AoE cleanse on demand, but left us weaker alone.
3) This should never have been in combat only before. Still too many better choices in Arcana
4) Buffs staff further, still other weapons are hardly addressed (Focus anyone?)
5) There was no reason for it to root you in the first place
6) This closes the armour/health gap to other professions only slightly
7) Good
8) It is still only viable to run regular Conjures in PvE

Josh Davis.6015:

There are a lot of valid concerns with the elementalist right now and we’re going to be working on addressing those points. Once everyone gets back from holiday vacation we’ll be posting up our proposed balance changes and we’ll go from there.

This surprises me a bit. Wasn’t the December update meant to be a big balance update to fix stuff? If they have to admit that there are “a lot of valid concerns”, why did they not address them with the December patch? The update notes had been out like 6 weeks in advance? A big majority of veteran Elementalist players summed up their concerns and they went through with about 80% of their planned balance update without changes.
Now, two weeks later we see that most of the predictions the community has made came true: Diamond Skin is a “one trick pony” and not OP at all, Eles have not switched out of Water/Arcane and build diversity did not happen. Our foes in competitive environment have not been weakened a lot to make us better compared to them. Swapping cool down got better for people not invested in Arcana, but for those who put points in it, nothing has changed to ease some of our “double cooldown dilemmas”.

The traits are not the problem with Glyphs, its the skills themselves, as most of them have very long cool downs and are not that great with “on cast” effects.
Take a look at what I suggested for Glyphs a few weeks back, if you are interested:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/A-plea-for-Glyphs

Those are tweak GW2 ideas, not a new game (GW3)

1. Work on the health pools by switching Elementalist and Mesmer and generally lowering the highest pool by 10%.

2. Allow us to make Fine Transmutation Stones out of normal ones in the Mystic Forge.

3. Allow us to store the countless back item skins in the tab with the Zenith skins, even if it is only retractable once.

4. Make all racial armour be a skin and not a actual item.

5. Allow us to upgrade our home instance by adding those account bound items (e.g. Marjory’s journal) as a location/item to the instance.

6. Revert the introduction of ascended armour for ascended jewellery allowing the majority of players to catch up wit those already being stacked with ascended weapons, trinkets & Legendary weapons.

7. Introduce some defensive WvW abilities that make defending a structure actually worthwhile and counter that large amount of offensive abilities we have now.

The increase in ability stat points is minimal (as far as I have seen item codes dug up from reddit data miners), the increase in armour is 5%, which combined with the same “creep” in ascended weapons makes a difference and can not be called cosmetic only over players with exotic items.
I expect each item to have an infusion slot, so you can either spec deeper into WvW infusions (probably defensive slots, as weapons have offensive ones) or increase AR (which makes resistance overkill possible – a bad sign for increased Agony levels or higher level Fractals?).

I am not looking forward to the grind, I am still at 470 with my highest weapon crafter. But gladly, I will not try levelling on any other armor profession than that for my main character.

PS: Introducing ascended jewellery would have allowed us to close the gap between the people already with ascended weapons, since most of them are available for laurels. Adding armor in a few months would have allowed the more casual players to catch up to the ones that are already pimped out through Fractals or grinding for Legendary/Ascended stuff.

ANet is playing the “addiction” game with us when it comes to achievements (by making any bonus above 5 points count as well), Living Story (by putting out meta achievements with each biweekly update) and giving us rewards that are kind of useless (backpack skins, cinematic books/models etc.) which we don’t want to throw away. The last thing applies to LS quest items as well: Will we ever need those again? Voting tokens, Captain’s Council Commendations, Gauntlet tickets)

ANet could have designed the game differently, but decided not to.
Some items could be placed in your home instance (e.g. the Marjory cinematic book or the bazaar model), added to the Zenith skins tab in your hero menu (even if it can be removed from there just once), automatically removing all LS-quest items (which are soul bound most of the time) from the inventory, when the event is done.

In addition to that, I find it hard to have faith in what Devs are saying these days (or what they are being allowed to say): e.g. For a very long time, account bound WvW ranks & XP – they repeatedly said – will never happen due to design choices + technical reasons. Now it is possible.

What does all of this mean for a player of GW2?
He/she probably has to be bold and step back. Get out of the farming trains and start to find parts of the game that are fun and entertaining – an no chores.
It will not make Anet’s decision makers change anything, but you might be able to enjoy a good game others have turned into a time-sink, grind fest & loot train.

What works for you, I am using this:
http://i.imgur.com/iQl1eCA.jpg

I try to avoid the canceling-each-other-out phenomenon, whether bugged or intended by using a stack building dagger and replacing it with a fixed stat one (e.g. Force) and keeping just one (Battle) on the off hand.
I wanted to try out Torment/Battle next, but I am reluctant to mess with the shared cool downs so far.

Are we talking PvE? Can you craft yourself as a Tailor? Do you do dungeons?

If you are low on resources, get any rare armour piece you can get to replace your green master work items. If you are looking for specific stats try to focus on more balanced stats (Knight’s, Soldier’s) and don’t spec heavily into the Condition side. Elementalists work well with balanced stats.
Due to the predictable AI of foes in PvE, many people go Berserker/Cavalier, but that leaves you very vulnerable to smarter foes (e.g. players in WvW or sPvP).

If you go into detail on what are you funds % play style, we can help you a bit better.

ThiBash.5634:

Would be nice, but combined with fire attunement and altruism this could make GoEH give 9 might (maybe a bit too much?).

It requires you to haver at least 2 Sup runes of Altruism, so a specific setup. And of course you are giving up speed (Air) or Protection (Earth) from GoEH. I think its OK, but it is probably a thing you have to do maths on to see how “OP” this might get.

I’m a bit on the fence about this one. I can understand what you’re saying, but on the other hand, I view glyphs as ‘multiple options based on choice’. In that sense, the stunbreaker actually fits: you can either choose for a condition, OR use it as a stunbreaker. To me, the stunbreaker is just one of the 5 options you can use it for. Guess it’s a point of view.

45 seconds for a stun break skill that is conditional anyway (are you in the “right” attunement for the condition effect you desire when you hit the “panic button”?) is too long IMO – POV like you said (that’s why I reduced the duration to make it more active to manage).

Agreed. A lower casting time would be fine, but 1 sec is probably too short. Maybe 2 seconds? And maybe the fire effect could last a bit longer.

From a WvW POV, I have to say it takes a while to see the downed ally, click him and hit the glyph. Anything that is beyond 1 sec makes this skill a gamble & not an option to me.

Currently, you are playing not at full potential when using Glyphs over Cantrips (or other utility types like Signets & Arcane skills to a lesser extend). Here are some ideas to tweak Glyphs a little bit to make them more viable:

Traits:
Inscription: The Might boost from attuning to Fire should be 3 stacks (like with GoEH); the bug with not working on Glyph of Elementals is still unresolved, right?

Quick Glyphs: The 20% reduction is fine; Some glyphs need a recharge tweak though. See below.

Skills:
Glyph of Elemental Harmony: Fine, no changes

Glyph of Elemental Power: As it is useless as a Stunbreaker at the moment (compared to e.g. Signet of Air), I would like to see its recharge going down to 30 seconds and the duration reduced to 20 seconds. This will still keep the current uptime ratio (30/20 compared to 45/30), but would allow a calculated use of the Glyph either as a stun break or as a pre-fight damage boost via its conditions.

Glyph of Renewal: It currently takes way too much time to revive a downed foe before a stomp, so reducing the casting time to 1 second is the only option for me to make it more viable. The recharge should go down to 120 seconds and it should heal like GoEH (without the boons). This way the skills gets out of the corner of being a highly situational skill that is dead weight on the skill bar most of the time.

Glyph of Storms: Fine

Glyph of Lesser Elementals: Fine, I just wish they would not die under water, so I can swim small distances after I have summoned them. Just make them invulnerable as long as they are in the water and use the “passive” setting from Ranger pets. They can’t attack or can not be attacked.

Glyph of Elementals: same as GoLE

Do you see any alternatives? Discuss.

Server: AG
League: Silver / EU
Enjoyed Season 1: Most of the time
Should we have season 2?: Yes, next year with some changes

Announcing how to create the leagues in advance was a problem (eyes Desolation), as is the current fixation on offensive tasks – both in achievements & abilities.
If they find a way of prohibiting sudden “ladder drops” to a lower league, it would be better. I also hope that they find a way to change the reward system for defensive tasks (dolly protection) and reduce the effectiveness of zergs (there are some very good ideas on this forum).

I think the season had two phases for AG: The first phase was dominated by chaos (how to integrate the new PvE achievement hunters) and to organize things better (including off-hour coverage). This brought the community together.
In the second phase, commanders & WvW centric guilds started to burn out and the sense of helping out each other eroded quickly. Sadly, I think we have returned to the starting point again, when in comes to open up the WvW community to the more casual people from PvE & LS experience.

When do I want a second season?

Same time next year! Anet flooded us with both the Season 1 and LS stuff. Players with a “completist” mind set need a break and return to just a few weeks of nothing special except gathering mats & leveling an alt character. Really Anet. We love the content (well, not Scarlet in my case), but wrap up the LS and take it slow with Wintersday.

I’ve played around with a build generator and I think that I would like an all Celestial set, since I am running something slightly balanced out for WvW now anyway. The all Ascended Celestial (+ Berserker/Valkyrie daggers) would have all the strengths of my current setup + getting rid of the weaknesses (low healing & condi damage e.g.). With a high chance of crit-attacks your DPS from raw damage + conditions should be good, so you can pair it with a Superior Sigil of Torment for the almost permanent AoE Torment. I imagine that being quite lethal if you do not run a burst build (which would probably substitute a few trinkets to Berserker/Cavalier as already mentioned.

Why strategy over Zerg doe snot work at the moment (not counting the fact that zerging gets easier the larger the zerg gets and requires less skill):

1) Zergs outside have an insane ability to revive downed players, which makes it hard to reduce their numbers when you are defending a fortification (you can’t jump down and finish him).
2) Devs have given us more and more offensive WvW abilities that make attacking easier than defending.

Solution IMO:

1. Tweak Supply traps like I described on another thread

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Fixing-the-zerg-problem-Supply-Capacity/3250318

2. Introduce defensive ability lines to the score of abilities (some ideas, e.g. : gaining Aegis when fighting on walls, so you don’t be in that much danger when fighting from the top of the wall; double the effectiveness of repairs while the fortification is contested; gaining stability during repairing gates; doing 25% more damage to downed foes with siege weapons)

When ArenaNet said that there would be liquid WxP, I thought that we might get them with each rank up chest (one 250 WxP one), with perhaps a chance to get a 2500 potion instead. But that did not happen. I also get very few of them during normal game play, around one of the smallest variant every two hours. I have never seen a 5k one (or better) so far during the whole season 1 fights.

If I could boost an alternative character with the regular liquid WxP potions, I would be happier to do WvW on another character than my main. But currently, it feels like a wasted investment.

Alternative idea:

Make those “Supply removal traps” easier to get & use. They are 15 Badges & 525 Karma + 10 supply to build, now. If you make them as “cheap” as an AC (6 Badges) + 6 supply to build you would see a wider use of them. Also make them more visible on the map (e.g. by some flag posts) and non de-spawing when the player leaves the map. Perhaps change the functionality to that of the other siege items & introduce a refresh mechanic.

You could even go a step further and make those patrolling NPC upgrades drop them in front of a gate automatically.

Being a good commander is not limited by its profession. I am commanding in WvW as an Elementalist as well.
The limitations I see are the situations where you command stuff like “focus on my icon” on TS (e.g. Treb fire or AC fields of arrows). As a staff Ele I usually don’t want to be at that spot, but a little further away from it kiting to avoid damage. A heavy armour profession has some advantage over the Ele on that fields. On the other hand, I have a better tactical view when I am a few steps away from the main mess (compared to e.g a hammer Warrior commander in the middle of the balled up combatants )

Razor.6392:

I actually found an anet post in page 3, I hope they stay true to their words and keep Renewing stamina as an adept trait.

I believe it, when I see it in the actual update notes, sad but true.
Do not forget that Cleansing Wave will move to Master tier as well, because it is “and AoE condition remove on demand” although most of us consider it a vital “personal” survival skill.

In my opinion, the “nerf to Arcana” is the fact that the dependency on Arcana will still exist and that people investing in Arcana will not get a single second of reduced cool down after the patch.

Don’t get me wrong, perhaps the patch will be good for the Ele as patch “nerfs” some other classes more, but at the moment, I don’t see it.

To be honest, Dragon’s Tooth is the only “meta” advantage the Ele has in WvW compared to other professions (think about perma stealth Thieves, Mesmer’s portal’ing Golems faster and forces inside fortifications) after The Focus can’t destroy siege shots any more. Dragons Tooth is a 900 range skill, so you have to get very close to a wall to be able to target that siege engine on the wall anyway. This is not “OP”.

The changes planned at the Dec 10th update do not make the Ele better (see discussions about Elemental Attunement, Renewing Stamina & especially Cleasning Wave on the Ele forums), it could even be the cause for more Water & Arcana heavy builds.
I agree that Ele still needs balancing for WvW, but as far as the possible changes to the class are known to the players, I do not think that we will get what we think is needed soon.

Am I the only one that ponders about Jon Peter’s main reason to move Cleansing Wave from Adept to Master because it is an AoE skill?

I claim that most of the Elementalists see it as an essential trait for PERSONAL survival and not group support. Why not reduce the AoE to 180 or 150 and see how “over powered” it still is as Adept trait?

Leuca.5732:

Gorani.7205:

OK, this got way too long to read & follow for me.

Can somebody from the balance team (Tyler Chapman perhaps) post a revised version of the initial Dec 10th balance idea for the Elementalist?

I get the impression from Tyler Champman’s and Jon Peter’s posts (as far I I saw & read them) that out of the three critical changes to Master level traits (Cleansing Wave, Renewing Stamina & Elemental Atunement) only Elemental Attunement will be moved to Master tier – the other two will remain Adept traits (?).

Elemental Attunement and Cleansing Wave are both getting moved to Master tier in an attempt to make eles move away from Water/Arcana.

So this is off the hook ?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/December-10th-Elementalist-changes/page/3#post3138306

Cleansing Wave
This is the one I am most on the fence about of all of the elementalist changes. It is a borderline master level trait and I think a better solution would be to leave it at adept tier and instead of moving Soothing Wave (which is only moving because it is better to have a 100% worthless trait at adept tier rather than master tier) we would redesign Soothing Wave into something worthy of master level.

OK, this got way too long to read & follow for me.

Can somebody from the balance team (Tyler Chapman perhaps) post a revised version of the initial Dec 10th balance idea for the Elementalist?

I get the impression from Tyler Champman’s and Jon Peter’s posts (as far I I saw & read them) that out of the three critical changes to Master level traits (Cleansing Wave, Renewing Stamina & Elemental Atunement) only Elemental Attunement will be moved to Master tier – the other two will remain Adept traits (?).

Prism described the initial concept very well: Versatility

If the Elementalist is able to switch through all his attunements he should be able to do everything the other classes can do as well (with a few exceptions, like never been as strong as e.g. a Condi class like Necro). That’s why we are limited with our weapon swap, too.

Now come the problems (from the start & right now) with this concept:

>> Unlike GW1, professions differ in health points too and ArenaNet has put the Ele in the lowest HP class as well as in the lowest armour class. Our versatility should balance that downside, but the cool down of many of our skills (especially weapons skills #4 % #5) are so long, that we can’t switch back to a certain “role” in time we need to have at the moment of battle.

>> Many of our traits give us benefits for staying in a certain attunement, which contradicts the concept of swapping often. In addition Lingering Elements is buggy/broken and will not work as we players think it should work, even after the fix Jon Peters has promised (e.g. see the Dec 10th thread about stacking of the +% damage traits with Lingering Elements)

>> Since we are not fast enough to adept to a situation (as described above), Eles has to go very defensive to survive initial attacks. That’s why bunker builds and spec’ing in Water & Arcana is so popular. With this defensive build, our damage is not on par with balanced setups of other professions, so we have a hard time killing them e.g. in WvW. The longer a fight lasts, the less dangerous an Ele gets most of the time (see cool down of skills)

How can the Elementalists class be improved (for the majority of players) – IMHO part:

>> ArenaNet has the possibility the make the gap in health between classes smaller, which would result in huge balancing stuff across the board. This will not happen. The initial flaw will remain in the game forever.

>> Devs need to tweak attunement swapping more than they will do with the Dec 10th update. Now we have a cool down from 16-10 second, in December it will be 13-10 seconds. They need to shave off 2 more seconds (which is not that game breaking as we still have to deal with our skill cool downs too).

>> They need to re-think the idea of putting Cleansing Wave, Renewing Stamina & Elemental Attunement in the Master trait line. Just putting EA there should be enough. There are hints by Jon Peters that this might actually be considered at the moment.

>> They should gradually work on decreasing skill cool downs and watch the effects on competitive play. Also increasing condition duration by one or two seconds on a few skills should also be considered. This might make Condi builds more viable to play.

What does this mean for most of the builds?

The combo of the nerfs to Elemental Attunement, Cleansing Wave & Renewing Stamina will most likely result in Eles spec’ing even heavier in Water & Arcane to set off some of the losses to their ability to remove conditions & dodge. We lost survivability & mobility the past year (Nerf to Mist Form, RTL, e.g.), now you are taking away the ability to dodge.

More Eles will switch to Ether Renewal as their healing skill to counter the condition meta. The related effect is that non-staff Ele’s will get slower by not having access to the GoEH swiftness (or any other boon coming from that Glyph). Glyph builds will get even weaker as some might drop the reduced recharge trait for having points to move to Water & Arcane – and this is were the circle closes again.

Instead of providing us with diversity outside Water/Arcane builds, this patch could (or will) limit the numbers of viable builds that provide any survivability even more. The alternative to go to a condi based build is not there, even after changes to the Earth & Fire traits, Glyph builds got worse and D/D builds have lost even more survivability than other weapon setups, although they are the most dangerous to play (they are melee builds & they have not received a damage buff). The issue of the Focus was not addressed at all.

Here comes my assessment:

The attunement cooldown buff only profits Elementalists that had no investment in Arcane at all, which – and I am sure about that – is only a insignificant portion of Ele players anyway. Arcane traits are too important right now, Anet makes a false assumption we spec in Arcane for the cooldown. For people that have e.g. 20 points invested, there is no change at all, we are still at 11 seconds. The global cooldown change is insignificant as we hardly fire off only one skill in an attunement line before we change to another anyway.
Although this looks like a buff on paper, it changes nothing for 95% of all Elementalists.

Fire II – Nice change, but it should be an adept trait, because we are in dire need of condition cleaning when this patch hits (see below).

Fire VIII – OK change, but we still give up way too much when using Conjures so they are sup par even after all the small buffs of the past.

Fire III – That would be great if Eles had any chance of a cover condition. Burning usually is the first one cleansed anyway. Additionally, with the short burning durations we have (or the chances to burn continuously) only a very heavy investment in Fire Magic would makes sense (which will no happen – see below)

Burning Rage 25 – Good change to the minor trait, but again: Who goes 25 points in Fire?.

Air V – Soothing Winds. Healing still scales awfully making it the worst of all “conversion traits” the professions have (eyes the Vitality for Power of the Warrior profession). It is not worth taking.

Air XI – Tempest Defense. Good change.

Earth 5 – Stone Flesh – An additional 40 Toughness will not make a huge difference as long as Lingering Elements is buggy and the Ascended Weapon power creep took that away pre-emptively a few weeks ago.

Earth VII – Strength of Stone. – I still believe that condi builds for Eles are not working at the moment + no Ele can make Fire & Earth heavy builds and survive without Water & Arcane.

Earth XI – Diamond Skin. This looks incredible on paper, but taken the fact that pretty much two auto attacks from any profession will take the class with the lowest health pool & armour below 90% just highlights one thing: This trait is useless 90% of the time.

Water I – Aquamancer’s Alacrity. OK, I could live with that.

Water V – Cleansing Wave. This is a game breaker for pretty much every D/D build that is not already spec’ed for full bunker. We are low on Condi removals and with torment condi, Perplexity runes and Immobilization now stacking, Elementalists need that “on demand condition removal” by swapping into Water Magic. Moving it to Master tier does the opposite of what Anet wants with this patch: Taking out the builds that invest in Water & Arcane. To still have access to Cleansing Wave, Eles will need to invest even further into Water Magic.

Water VIII – Arcane Abatement. OK, but this is still a trait you will not take, even in WvW.

Water X – Soothing Wave. This is way too conditional & weak, even at a low tier.

Arcane III – Arcane Retribution. Even at 45 seconds (half the recharge now) I don’t see it as a grea move to wait to get to 75% health to get an automated Arcane Power cast .

Arcane IV – Final Shielding. See Arcane Retribution. still not worth it

Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. This will hit us hard, as it is our backbone of getting a boons (which are far from awesome after other classes can strip boons more easily and have “boon hate” traits). Alone, this is not too bad, but it will put us in a position to drop Renewing Stamina (see below)

Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Anet wants to take away Vigor boons – or at least their duration) across all classes and that’s where the Ele gets hit. Especially as D/D wielders (low HP & armour described above already) we need to evade more often than other professions. With Elemental Attunement also moved to Master tier we will lose 50% of our dodging ability due to the fact that we can not spec two master traits any more. Anet has not touched e.g. the Mesmer’s Vigor on Crit with their 5 point Critical Infusion – but moved our carbon copy trait from adept to master (?).

Arcane VII – Vigorous Scepter. It is still bound to work only in combat and does not help staff or dagger wielding builds.

Arcane VIII – Blasting Staff. This makes the buffs to staff from the last balance patch even better. Good, but why?

Arcane IX – Windborne Dagger. It is still useless, as it is linked to work only in combat. The Warrior has a minor trait that gives him 25% passive speed while wielding ANY melee weapon. Why can’t that work for Elementalists too? Get rid of the “only in combat thing”.

Bsgapollo.5364:

I’ll talk about elementalist since I’ve been playing it since beta.

The things I will mention are the things I disagree with, everything els is fine.

• Water V – Cleansing Wave: It’s one of the very few condition removals an elementalist has. And for it to be effective he still has to put a lot of points into arcana for it to be good. Even after the buff to the elemental cooldown it would mean you can only remove 1 condition every 13 seconds. Which is not extremly great for a master tier trait.

• Arcane V – Elemental Attunement and Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina: Yes 1 should be moved to a master tier but not both, each one of those traits are almost an essence to have on an elementalist. My suggestion would be to put Arcane VI into the master trait, that way elementalists still have the choice to pick between a slightly less effective endurance regen traits such as Arcane VII ( vigorous scepter ) if they would only put 10 points into arcana.

Although I wouldn’t know exactly which one. I would like to know how other elementalist think about this.

I agree with this observation (running D/D). Cleansing Wave as a adept tier trait was a viable way to get a condition off your back without the need to spec into Cantrips and run something else on the skill bar (at Water magic 10 & Glyphs in my case, which are still pretty weak). If I want to keep my Glyphs and some condition removal, I will have to get Ether Renewal and lose Glyph of Elemental Harmony. This ties in to the changes in Arcana: I am currently having Renewing Stamina & Elemental Attunement as my traits (Arcana 20). I can keep only one, which will mean that I say goodbye to Renewing Stamina. That reduces my ability to dodge (less ways to avoid damage, as I got no buff on the defense side) and (because of no GoEH) I lose off-combat travelling speed by not being able to cast GoEH in Air Magic for the swiftness boon. This is bad for moving in WvW (I don’t see my foes like Warriors & Thieves slowed down e.g.). To be fast, I would have to run a staff, but wait, I don’t even have an off-combat weapon swap …

How can I cope? I could turn down my Earth Magic in favour of Water Magic & Arcana.

Wait? Wasn’t the patch not intended to get people out of those two lines of skills and strengthen the other lines?

PS: An alternative would be to get Windborne Dagger & Vigourous Scepter out of their “only in combat” mechanic, so you can get a passive 25% speed for dual wielding daggers (most classes have 25% passive speed anyway via signet) and reducing the endurance on the Scepter trait to 25% to counter the current passive effect.

This would still be weaker than Renewing Stamina in combat & give the (dual wielding Dagger) Ele some tactical speed while travelling in maps in WvW.

I was able to do all four JPs for the meta so far, two of them with “enemies” in the puzzle (borderland ones). So far I have seen no one ganked there. I was in the Obsidian puzzle alone, in the early morning hours – I don’t trust anyone there.
As long as I see someone moving on the edge of the Faith/Arah/God’s camp towards the north, I let them go. Outside of that area, you are either fast – or prepare to fight. it is a battle zone after all.
I think we should not kill each other inside the puzzle. It should be a neutral de-militarized zone.

I dare to raise this question to the attention level of devs & the community again.

PS: I don’t know why I get a bump warning saying the last post was 7 days go, when it has been 2 months. I chose the manual override, because it think it is (still) a legitimate question & I have not seen a reason that would prevent adding ascended items from the Laurel vendor with certain stats.

@Larkir

With the exception that there was no daily reward after leaving the instance & having daily Keg Brawl completed + 5/5 dailies done shown. You get no second chance if the reward does not show up as the 6th daily does nothing except adding +1 to points.

Hasn’t it always been that way? At least you lose your target a lot, because of the auto re-aligning of the camera angle.

PS: Don’t get me started on no being able to see conditions while in downed state, that’s even more frustrating.

Other classes have that too, e.g. Ranger pets still glitch through gates sometime or at least can attack people behind it. Mesmer clones can spawn behind gates and on top of walls.
Dragon’s Tooth does not require a line of sight, but that does not mean it always works. GW2 line of sight / targeting system is far from perfect and sometimes unpredictable.