I don’t even think the prior behavior was especially overpowered (outside of sPvp). It was good and it was useful, but it required active play and cost endurance to use.
Grandmaster Major traits are supposed to be good and useful. The old behavior should have been the norm for GM Major traits rather than the one decent trait in a disappointing group.
The elementalist isn’t powerless all of a sudden. There are still plenty of powerful and useful builds out there, even for staff.
They’re less fun to play though.
Give them a little more time. They didn’t ruin Ele play in GW1 in a single update either (though the 11/11/05 AI updates went a long way to kittening it up).
Exactly right. The OP part of it was that this “unintended feature” gave us another blast finisher on the move, enabling us to stack up extra boons on yourself and others that Anet never intended for us to be able to do. Now, we just have one less blast finisher available to us. That is all.
Actually, we now have 2 less blast finishers. They removed the finisher from Dragon’s Tooth too.
For christ’s sake, you still get to throw out a churning earth on a dodge roll…what are you complaining about? It can still be useful in builds, I guarantee it.
Not really. Churning earth puts out 8 stacks of Bleed, Evasive Arcana’s dodge in earth does 1 stack.
I just checked myself and yeah it seems that the cooldown reduction only works in sPvP (the heart of the mists) while the skill is unaffected by the cooldown reduction in PvE and WvW.
Is this intended? or it’s a bug?
If we’re lucky, they’ll “fix” the tooltip in the next patch.
You guys should all just spam their twitter with this stuff (I would but I dont do social media). Clearly they read that and clearly they don’t give a rats kitten about this forum.
This is actually a really good suggestion. I don’t have a twitter account, but I should set one up for that purpose. It would be much more productive than throwing feedback into this black-hole of a forum.
Anyhow, the Dragon’s Tooth bug gives me some hope that the complete EA nerf was a bug too — but again, communication is called for.
Doubtful. It’s much more likely that they’ll reclassify the Dragon’s Tooth and Mist Form CD kitten-ups as “features”, update the tooltips, and mark them as-intended.
Seems I’ll be leveling up the other classes while I wait for ANet to get their heads out of their collective arses and give us an answer on whether we should even consider playing Ele any more.
I’m fully confident that ANet will address this.
In GW1, they gave Elementalists two focused updates, part one and part two
Unfortunately, both occurred in 2012, 6 and a half years after they gutted Elementalist play in GW1.
I enjoy playing Staff wielding clothy support classes in MMO’s. Leave my Staff Ele alone! Is that so much to ask???? Apparently!
I’m just happy I didn’t waste money on Exotic Armor or Weapons for my Ele. Think how bad you’d feel if you soulbound a Bifrost to an elementalist.
Well the Legedaries are getting upgraded to be on par with Ascended so those are still worth your time. I do eventually want a Bifrost but that’s so far down the line for me….
As for Exotic weapons and armor, it’s still worth it. They don’t cost much to make or buy and it will be months before any Ascended versions are released. In the meantime, Exotics are quite powerful compared to Rare’s and Masterwork, and given how easy they are to get, I’d say go for it.
If I can get back into GW2, I’ll spend my in-game money gearing-out a Warrior or Guardian instead.
Mephane, I completely agree with you. The Evasive Arcana was the crown kitten in this update, though breaking Dragon’s Tooth and yet-again leaving Mist Form CD untouched are nice additions. (I think Mist Form CD is just a tradition now).
A 10 or 15 limit on heal targets would have been much, much, much better. A limit of 5 can’t hit a full random sPvP team or even a full 5-person party, since pets, NPCs, and elementals could take healing as well.
I’d suggest separating class nerfs from content updates in the future. Twenty-four hours ago, I was looking forward to Lost Shores content. Now I’ll spend the weekend either finding a new working Ele build or, more likely, just doing something else.
Agreed. Unless one likes to play D/D, elementalists’ viability is down to landscape PvE and WvWvW.
I don’t like d/d or WvWvW.
Landscape PvE is getting repetitive.
We need guidance as to the future for the profession, if any.
WvW and PvE ain’t looking so great either, if you take this “general” change at face value:
“Many skills, items, and traits were applying healing to an infinite amount of targets and have now been limited to 5 targets. "
So you can no longer heal your whole team in random sPvP, your heals in WvW will be radically reduced, and you can’t even heal a dungeon group with Ranger pets, summoned Elementals, Necro Minions, or friendly NPCs present.
Obviously there are no numbers between 5 and infinity, so they didn’t have a choice but to nerf the kitten out of support Elementalists.
I can’t seem to find dev post for this thread, can someone enlighten me? It has red symbol in the forum.
It just shows that for the thread merge. We don’t get developer replies here.
Compare and contrast with a certain other class’s forums where a thread kittening that they didn’t get enough buffs and fixes gets a reply and apology within an hour.
Good luck getting anet to reply to this or even look at this.
I’m just going to level my warrior with 5 new combo finishers now.
I’m fully confident that ANet will address this.
In GW1, they gave Elementalists two focused updates, part one and part two
Unfortunately, both occurred in 2012, 6 and a half years after they gutted Elementalist play in GW1.
After the current dev team moves on to GW3, Elementalists may get some improvements and bugfixes.
I’m just thankful I didn’t waste any money or tokens on Exotic weapons or armor for my Elementalist. If this had happened just 2 or 3 days later, I could have made a giant mistake.
Someone was ragging on the new blast of Dragon’s Tooth, but it now works more intuitively, and lets you drop a Dragon’s Tooth over your group’s target and insert a water field under it to AoE heal.
I guess that you can’t use it on yourself anymore to stack some Might, but it always was a little strange that the blast occurred at you instead of where an enormous tooth fell and exploded.
They completely removed the finisher from Dragon’s Tooth, they didn’t move it.
Yeehaw Conjure buffs! Man, I can’t wait to still not use them. This patch nerfed our best (only good?) Grandmaster trait into the ground. Other than the sorely needed RTL fix nothing good has come out of it. While I wasn’t expecting any massive buffs, I certainly wasn’t expecting one of our only viable specs to be nerfed so harshly.
Conjures are now slightly better than having no weapon equipped at all. Yay.
Dodge blast finishers were fun. They weren’t especially powerful, but they sure were fun.
In the patch notes, I see 3 not-as-documented changes.
For Healing Rain and Armor of Earth, they changed the tooltip and left the skill worse-than-described.
For Evasive Arcana, they made the trait strictly worse.
On the plus side, Warriors got a damage buff to one skill and 5 new combo finishers. Yay.
I should have known better than to make an Elementalist in a Guild Wars game. I still remember when they gutted Ether Renewal in GW and when they changed AI to severely limit AoE.
Either you get with the program, that progression is needed and it’s needed now, or you can kiss Guild Wars 2 completely goodbye.
This game needs a carrot that’s not Legendaries. Folks, if you think that this isn’t being done because they are having a retention problem, then you need to look again.
If ArenaNet doesn’t put something in there to keep people playing, and quickly, GW2 is toast. I love the game, but that’s just the truth.
Where are you getting this data from?
Guild Wars 2 has an obvious retention problem. Its subscriber base is now 0.
Just salvaged 10 rares, got 2 ectos, mystic salvage kit. Very disheartening if u dont use black lion kit u might be in for a bad time.
Ten trials isn’t nearly enough to establish an average. Also, the rate of ecto salvage for Level 67 and lower items is 0%. If you didn’t exclude those from your sample, then you’ll have badly-skewed data.
a dev has explicitly stated they are addign gear progression to the game.
No. You interpreted that into an auto-translated version of a German journalist’s interpretation of an ArenaNet press briefing or interview.
that is the dev’s words in german, talking to a gaming site. it is not paraphrased by the interviewee. it is translated by an actual person.
it is not a google translation or any other web translation app.
there’s nothing to indicate from the the two english news posts we have that there is any of this wishful think and rationalization that’s going on either, and entirely supports what the dev told the german site.
i’ll not the person that did the translation and linked the article to me, was rationalizing this as a good thing too, and that i was based on what the community wants.
i welcome anyone else to do a better more accurate translation. in fact the more translations the merrier.
The text you quoted is from a Google-Translate translation.
“This is a departure from the principle, that an improvementof items should not be in the game rather the exotics (and the more beautiful butequal legendaries) should be the end of the value-flagpole. Arenanet reasonedthis change of course with the feedback from fans and players. The appreciation of equip is a big motivation for many”
The exact same text appears in the Google translation.
Did you really think that a human translator used the phrase “value-flagpole”?
All we have right now, guys, is intentionally vague information from two different third-party sources. Nothing from ANet at all.
Don’t get me wrong; I do not want a gear treadmill, but I’m also not going to go ballistic before I see what ANet is actually doing with this.
“Slightly more powerful” does not necessarily mean higher stats. It very well could be that the “infusion” slot is the only tangible difference between exotic and ascended. We simply do not know, so there is absolutely no reason to fly off the handle yet.
These are all very good points. I think ArenaNet badly overestimates the maturity of the people who post on their forums. Before, during, and after every change, I see the same couple of dozen people on here complaining, moaning, throwing themselves at the fainting couches , and threatening to quit.
It’s somewhat amusing that people bother to spend their time that way, but mostly, I feel pity for them. It can’t feel good to constantly upset yourself over a game.
