Guild Wars 2

Oh my god, Jon Peters listened to my suggestion to make windborne daggers function outside of combat! Thank you! This is huge in WvW since an extra utility slot (from saying goodbye to signet of air) is worth more to me than most traits. My only qualm is that it requires two daggers for 25% speed, so for d/f (an incredibly fun set that wrecks projectile classes) it’s still not really worth it. I’ll take what I can get for now though. I just hope they make sure not to remove the buff when using a conjure.

Still hoping cleansing wave remains adept, because being able to clear blind at the end of churning earth channel is often vital. With the change to soothing mist, it sounds like that may be the case?

Healing and condition cleanses. But unlike other class survival mechanicsms, it is all bottled up in a couple traits so you need to spend 45 points in arcana and water to get any of it.

I would at least be willing to try a 10/0/30/20/10 or 0/0/30/30/10 condition build if elemental attunement was left as is. However, wherever it ends up is essentially the new baseline for arcana. You can barely even make use of the water grandmaster to remove conditions without having elemental attunement.

As op as the thread name sounds, this actually gets at the heart of ele problems. Right now, nearly 100% of our sustainability is bottle up in 3 traits: evasive arcana, healing ripple, and elemental attunement. Splitting up the HEALING portion of evasive arcana into smaller parts in the arcana or water minor traits would alleviate having to go all or nothing in arcana. For instance, you could get a small heal along with fury on attunement swap for 5 minor (say 250 hp), and have arcane precision give a 20% chance to heal you for 500 hp on hit (in water attunement), with 10s icd. Then reduce the healing of evasive arcana by half.

I posted about this in the big patch thread, but feel this issue could use its own thread because it affects just about all of eles, whether they go full arcane or not. That is the matter of elemental attunement being moved to master tier. Here is my initial counter to this posted in the patch thread:

Jabberwock.9014:

JonPeters.5630:

Summation of high risk concerns for elementalist.

Arcana
…
That being said, Elemental Attunement is just a beast of a trait and could honestly be compared with most grandmaster traits.

I have a problem with this line of thinking. Yes elemental attunement is extremely powerful, but that is why ALL elementalists should have easy access to it, since it is such a core element of our survivability. It’s not like you would say “having 4 attunements is too powerful, so we are moving the functionality of changing attunements to a grandmaster trait”. That is how you should think of the trait elemental attunement, because it should never have been a trait in the first place; it should have been a built in feature of attunement swapping. The fact that nearly 100% of eles take it and still can’t compete with warriors and the like should tell you that it is not a problem having a powerful trait in the adept tier, especially for a class with atrocious inherent survivability.

I will argue that yes, elemental attunement is so powerful that it is essentially mandatory to take in all builds. However, that does not make it overpowered. Why? Well when was the last time an ele with elemental attunement (hint: all of them) was considered a good class? Because nearly 100% of eles take the trait and are not overpowered, this state should be taken as a baseline. You should not mess with the baseline when attempting to buff a class, because you might inadvertently go in the wrong direction, or nowhere at all.

The problem is that eles, as the class with the lowest hp and armor, REQUIRE extremely powerful traits to survive. The reason we don’t have diversity is that we have a few extremely powerful game changing traits which make us at least competitive with other classes, while the rest are comparatively trash. The ones I consider nearly mandatory are elemental attunement, water 15 minor, and evasive arcana (and I will note that it is impossible to take another grandmaster trait while going for both arcana 30 and water 15, which means attempting to buff eles by buffing other grandmasters is an exercise in futility). The degree to which these three traits add to our survivability is insane. Without the latter 2, you are missing out on 4k hp worth of healing and a cleanse every 10 seconds, and without the former, you are missing out on massive protection, regen, and swiftness uptime. Until the time where we can split the power of those traits among other traits or make them partly inherent to the ele class, we will never have real diversity. And until that time, you should not mess with those traits.

JonPeters.5630:

Summation of high risk concerns for elementalist.

Arcana
…
That being said, Elemental Attunement is just a beast of a trait and could honestly be compared with most grandmaster traits.

I have a problem with this line of thinking. Yes elemental attunement is extremely powerful, but that is why ALL elementalists should have easy access to it, since it is such a core element of our survivability. It’s not like you would say “having 4 attunements is too powerful, so we are moving the functionality of changing attunements to a grandmaster trait”. That is how you should think of the trait elemental attunement, because it should never have been a trait in the first place; it should have been a built in feature of attunement swapping. The fact that nearly 100% of eles take it and still can’t compete with warriors and the like should tell you that it is not a problem having a powerful trait in the adept tier, especially for a class with atrocious inherent survivability.

Ok first of all, thank you so much for finally coming to our subforums and addressing concerns we have brought up again and again. I am especially glad you noted our low health and armor and are beginning to consciously design around it.

Going to try moving my condition build to 20/0/30/20/0… or possibly 10/0/30/0/30. I need at least one of healing ripple and evasive arcana. It remains to be seen if one alone will be enough… all depends on if diamond skin ends up being game changing or not.

However, I really want you to rethink the water trait changes. The current change would leave absolutely no good adept water traits for defensive eles. You say you are on the fence about both cleansing wave and cantrip mastery; in that case, please put one of them in the adept tier. Those are the two water traits I currently take. Because water 15 minor is such a huge part of our survival, it would be really unfortunate to have to take a useless adept trait just to get it.

I hope you still don’t completely throw away the idea of increasing our hp. Because I can see players qqing about diamond skin, causing it to get nerfed, in which case we will be in no better place as far as survivability is concerned.

And finally, with windborne dagger moving to adept, could you finally look at making it work out of combat? One of the reasons why war is so great to play in wvw right now is because you don’t need to slot a utility for 25% movement speed, and you can equip any melee weapon to do it. Our trait only functions fully with ONE weaponset period, yet it is infinitely worse since it only works in combat, which is honestly when I care least about speed. It would be great to finally free myself of the air signet handicap in wvw just to move around at a reasonable pace (which will be even more mandatory with elemental attunement moving to master tier now).

I feel like the scraps are as rare as the tickets. So far I’m at 1 scrap and 1 ticket., which kind of defeats the purpose given you need a whopping 10 scraps for 1 ticket.

IllegalChocolate.6938:

Jabberwock.9014:

They exist in the data files, but apparently Anet decided to nix both along with swimsuits. For some reason Anet is extremely conservative and refuse to release anything that could be seen as somewhat sexual (probably for fear of appearing like Tera).

Bags I’m sure were nixed because it would be immersion breaking having people running around in battle with paper bags as helms. Although why they don’t just release them as town clothes is beyond me.

you know the game is serious business when we have rainbow unicorns of death, bikini battle plate and little baby quaggans running around in world vs world.

There is no bikini battle plate in this game… not even close. Unless you are talking about underwear with the juggernaut equipped. The dreamer I can understand a bit since it is unobtainable by most players, so you won’t see unicorns flying everywhere you go. At least that’s anet’s logic. But anyways, I’m not saying this game should be serious business, I’m just saying that’s what anet is trying for. After all, there is no other reason not to release items that have already been modeled and put in the game.

Ele change would be good if evasive arcana was moved to master. As it is, that is the main reason I have to go 30 in arcana, since it is nearly half of our healing per second.

Although diamond skin is intriguing. I’ll have to see if it ends up being good in practice or if 90% threshold is too high. Unfortunately it is impossible to take diamond skin along with evasive arcana and healing ripple.

There are literally only three other (non cultural) heavy leg armors in the whole game that show significant skin on females, and none are particularly stylish. People who like revealing armors are already far less catered to in this game, so don’t complain.

My only problem with this skin is the scales look very flat and fake, like an N64 texture.

I was just browsing the thief forums and noticed a post which really made a lot of sense to me as to what’s going wrong with the current balancing scheme.

roamzero.9486:

The problem with p/d is that it’s been left behind in the balancing arms race that anet created. They keep pushing extra condition removal on classes because of the ridiculous condition spam that necros and engineers can put out, instead of nerfing necros/engineers. IMO the aftercast for pistol 1 should be lowered a bit and the duration of the bleeds increased from 4 to 6s

This “arms race” is favoring specific participant professions while leaving the rest behind. It started with necros receiving the ridiculous dhuumfire, but instead of admitting a mistake and removing the trait, anet balanced around it by buffing condition removal/immunity on classes who were never intended to be that strong against conditions. The most atrocious example is warrior, who gained an 8-10 second cond immunity in addition to a spammable 3 cond cleanse (and healing signet buff of course which helps survival no matter the situation, especially with it being easier to negate poison). However other classes like guardian and I believe mesmer also got additional cleanses.

This has had two effects: the relative nerfing of non-necro condition classes like P/D thief due to widespread cleansing, and the relative nerfing of classes which previously excelled in condition removal. Ele is one of the worst affected, since it has horrible hp and armor and lacks escape traits like stealth, and had mobility nerfed. Access to many condition removals was one of the key survivability traits of the ele, but it is no longer a unique one (and was actually nerfed before others were buffed, with ER now impossible to cast in mist form). Additionally, because burst uncleansed conditions are more potent against ele than other classes (due to low hp and reliance on healing which is hindered by poison), we’ve reached a tipping point where ele doesn’t even have enough condition removal for its health pool. War may have less total removal, but when you consider health pool and regen rate, they are stronger against conditions than ele, despite the fact that it was initially intended to be (and was) the other way around.

It really is a racket. If they made the transmutation splitters a reasonable cost (or free, which is what they should be) there would be no problem. This is the absolute worst MMO I’ve ever seen as far as cost of wardrobe and/or build changing is concerned. My recommendation is to just find a very versatile build and a look you like, and stick with it. It’ll only get worse when ascended armor comes out.

They exist in the data files, but apparently Anet decided to nix both along with swimsuits. For some reason Anet is extremely conservative and refuse to release anything that could be seen as somewhat sexual (probably for fear of appearing like Tera).

Bags I’m sure were nixed because it would be immersion breaking having people running around in battle with paper bags as helms. Although why they don’t just release them as town clothes is beyond me.

First of all this grandmaster minor trait even in a power line would be bad, because it only gives damage when endurance is full (which is almost never the case). But most importantly, why is it in the toughness and condition line? I have often pondered going 25 or 30 in earth, but both the minor and major traits are so bad that I have absolutely no motivation.

If you ask me, the trait should give 5-10% condition damage when endurance is NOT full (similar to the actually useful warrior trait stick and move). It even fits better with the name since condition damage “endures”.

Where is this influx coming from exactly? More people buying bl keys for a chance at the new shiny weapons? Or did they actually buff the drop rate or make them obtainable elsewhere?

I hope you change the veteran slaying dailies to compensate for transforming all these veterans into elites.

I hate our elites, except for running away. Whenever I play warrior, it’s so awesome being able to use an elite every 60 seconds (48 traited), and have it provide almost perma fury, swiftness, and 5 stacks of might. When I play ele, I’m always so worried about wasting the kitten things because they all have ridiculous cooldowns. At least give us one low cd option that allows us to have a consistent level of power in all confrontations.

In my opinion, there is no way that Anet is keeping a best in slot item discontinued. You can do that with skins, but giving actual power to a small minority of players just doesn’t fly. There will be immense backlash if they are not reintroduced.

And if I recall correctly, sigils dropped from gift boxes… and trick or treat bags were brought back for halloween, so it’s very likely gift boxes will come back for wintersday.

PlatypusRex.3428:

Jabberwock.9014:

Never change chain lightning. It is mandatory for tagging in high lag or chaotic situations.

I’d say lava font, fireburst, and meteor shower still completely outshine this at least in PvE, not sure bout WvW. I’ve been running mad king’s realm constantly and I never get below gold.

Try using anything besides auto-attack in lagfest stonemist castle battles. You can’t. So we need at least one auto-attack good for tagging multiple foes.

mjharrison.3209:

Imagi.4561:

I run D/F, and I don’t find earth and air #4 redundant at all. Earth #4 requires impeccable timing to reflect and has a very small area of reflection, so it only works against single-target projectiles. Air doesn’t have those limitations.

They’re both pretty redundant when fighting a melee warrior…

I think it’s poor design to double up on anti-projectile when focus completely lacks heals and mobility.

I agree, I feel like god against rangers and engies, but then two of my best skills are completely useless against full melee. I don’t understand why offhand dagger couldn’t have gotten one of those anti-projectile skills, and give focus a minor mobility skill in place of one (preferably swirling winds because magnetic wave is problem our single best skill in the game with how many roles it plays).

I can’t believe you just called a 2k+ burst heal with condition cleanse useless. 30 in arcana boosts survival in so many ways. First of all the obvious evasive arcana. Second it lowers cd on water attune so you can trigger healing ripple more often. And then you get lower attunement swap for earth which means more protection. Not going 30 in arcana might as well be glass, since it is the only thing right now that compensates for our low hp and armor. We don’t have some uber healing signet like war that we can plug into any build, you need full arcana if you don’t wanna run a burst or die build.

And of course ER is mandatory for all ele builds at the moment. So that’s why you take it on top of 30 arcana, not in place of it.

Zodiac skins have already doubled to quadrupled in price for the most part, so it’s a safe bet that the even more pleasing halloween skins will too. The only problem is that the new ticket price still caps them at 300 or so g (look at fused weapons that cost 7 tickets). My only question mark is if halloween skins will fall before their rise on the 11th, like zodiac skins. Anecdotally I opened a single chest from a dropped key today and got a bl ticket, so they may not be as rare as I initially thought. Or I got lucky.

My best guess though is that prices will fall briefly after halloween. As you can see on gw2spidy supply average is still going continuously up, and demand will likely fall after halloween and people get busy with new content. They may actually take longer to rise than zodiac skins, since supply for those was split amongst a ton of different weapon types, while for these supply is much larger and concentrated for each weapon skin.

They don’t drop in black lion chests, wiki is wrong. They only ever dropped from wintersday gem boxes, which is why supply tanked sharply after wintersday and never recovered.

Zodiac skins dropped after the first 2 weeks, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that happened here. Of course they will rise to 150+g in a month or 2 after the 11th.

The threshold is way too high. You are screwing support, condition classes, and people who don’t run in groups. I have yet to get a single point and I’ve tried rams and rushing into door with fgs 4 multiple times, on so many doors.

Getting bursted within milliseconds is really something that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and it does happen way too much in this game. Especially in WvW with the out of control ascended, food buff and bloodlust nightmare, if you don’t react to a single backstab thief within 2 to 4 fast attacks you’ll be dead as an ele, even with 2900 toughness and 18000 hp (which is about as high as you can go on the squishtastic class). It’s unfortunately most magnified on active defense classes like this, as opposed to mammoth hp pool and armor warrior with endure pain triggered passively.

Never change chain lightning. It is mandatory for tagging in high lag or chaotic situations.

It’s the best item in game imo, and continuously rises in value since hair kit value is based on gems. And there might not even be any non-soulbound ones left in the game given there were so few to begin with. Wish I wouldn’t have sold my second kit back in January for 300g, but I’m just happy I have what will end up the rarest item in game if not re-released (which wouldn’t surprise me since it cuts into gem sales).

Wintersday skins won’t skyrocket from being discontinued since there are already way more than enough to satisfy demand for the next five years. People still have stacks of these things lying in their banks. But since halloween skins did so well, I expect speculation will push them higher than market value and they will crash upon release.

I don’t glass scepter is good in anything besides small group roaming honestly. Terrible for solo and terrible for zergs.

I prefer geomancy, but there are times (when facing annoying regen classes solo) that I really want that poison. However, geomancy does direct AND condition damage (and more condition damage than doom) though, and hits multiple targets. Plus there are so many classes with annoying pets and minions that sigil of doom is often wasted.

Yeah, ele minors are really, really horrible except air and earth attunement switch bonuses, fury on attune, and water heal (which should be a core class mechanic honestly).

Regarding wvw… d/x for smaller battles, and staff for larger battles. Staff is better when you will likely die running into a zerg with dagger, and especially on chokepoints where an enemy zerg is all bunched up, but it’s so slow to cast that you may miss some outliers in small battles where people die really fast (or not do enough for kill credit).

For stonemist battles, staff air is the only viable option, since lag will prevent you from using non-auto attack skills, and staff air is the only one that hits more than one person from range.

For PvE mob farming, d/x is always best at tagging.

The title from last year is unique.

infantrydiv.1620:

^Because Jonathan Sharp wants warriors to be big beefy manly chunky hunks of meatiness.

“Sturdy Body”

I agree. When I started using war I was dumbfounded at how unpunishing (for the war) bursts are. I fully expected to have adrenaline depleted even on a miss, but lo and behold there is almost literally no penalty for spamming bursts, given the cooldown of burst skills are plain laughable. Depleting the whole bar might be a bit much, but at least take away half on a miss.

And for cleansing ire, yeah, just require the burst skill to hit to get cleanse.

This bat gs is of legendary aesthetics. The only thing it is missing is footfalls… but the bat effects help in that regard.

Meanwhile look at daggers… there literally have been no good non-legendary, particle effect daggers since launch. The few that come close (super, fused, winter’s, zodiac) are still lackluster compared to gs counterparts.

Providing different paths almost always leads to shallowness, since developer’s rarely take the effort to account for the massive amount of different combinations of choices (I hear planescape torment is one of the few games to succeed in this regard). They could have made a far more immersive personal story if they just did away with the choice nonsense.

If you choose guardian, play as a norn. Guardians have bad mobility, but norns have an op racial elite that lets you do 3000 range rushes while stealthed (snow leopard form).

The problem is when they are with a group. You just can’t get away, even if for instance you use fgs as an ele. Those gs+1hs wars will chase you down in no time and bull’s rush, bola, and cripple you until their group comes to finish you off.

But you only need one or the other (1hs or gs) to have op mobility as a war. With that dumb as hell 25% movement trait that might as well be free given the trait line it is in (while us peon classes have to slot an entire utility to get the same), wars get ridiculous mobility without sacrificing anything really, all while being the beefiest class with now ridiculous sustain from healing signet.

No. It is by far the hardest jp regardless of what your ego may tell you. I had no trouble with it this year because I’m playing on a good computer, but last year it was near impossible playing on my laptop with mediocre framerate. If you make it any harder you will be limiting rewards to a very small subset of people, be it due to skill or computer specs.

It really is ridiculous that rtl has remained neutered this entire time in pve and wvw because of a single silly spvp map imbalance. It’s not fair that because this happened in the era before they began splitting skills, it is stuck like this in all game modes. I am convinced that they will eventually revert it in pve and wvw, but it has already been an unforgivably long time. They need to change it yesterday.

Khisanth.2948:

Mystic.5934:

just gotta write a script that will list 6 stacks, wait 30 seconds, list 6 stacks, wait 30 seconds, etc. the anti-botting error is surprisingly bot-friendly. 28,000 stacks of leather in 38.88 hours.
oh… 5600g to buy them, then 700g for the listing fee. then the fun part: picking up 12,600g from the TP!

that sounds very much bannable

His account is probably on a permanent watchlist now :P

If you guys ever see a dev in game, please play horribly so they don’t mistake the skill we’ve developed playing this up class for the class itself being good.

It’s good except for the fact that it is ungodly annoying to turn around to use burning retreat for mobility. It’s just… unnatural, and makes roaming a pain even if it is faster. If I could use a macro it would be nicer, but first off they aren’t allowed, and second I don’t know how I would make a macro only apply when I have flame axe.

I found out about this yesterday and tried it in pvp. It’s horrible. Yes you can get 25 might stacks easy if your opponent is standing still doing nothing, but at least 40% of the time you’ll be missing… and lava axe 1 is pretty horrible single target damage even with 25 stacks so while you are getting those stacks you’ll be sucking. And once you have the stacks, what do you do? Can’t use firegrab without dropping axe. Can’t use fgs without dropping axe. And then you are left with axe on cd for 30s (and most of the time you’ll be moving and not able to pick up your second axe). And taking 30 in fire along with a wasted utility slot means you’ll be dying in seconds (especially since you don’t want to move out of fire).

Might be good for pve since mobs usually take all hits.

Seems like a buff to me. One of the few useful ones we got today. Range makes this a lot better, since you don’t have to do the ridiculously long cast in harms way and risk dying or being interrupted. You can rez people inconspicuously from ledges etc in pvp. And the aoe circle makes it a lot easier to see how many people you can actually successfully rez. Before it was kind of a crapshoot running in the middle of your dead teammates and hoping they all get rezzed.

The only problem now is downed thieves and eles accidentally running away from your aoe is a bit more of a concern.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll just remove them from the game eventually. 3 of our utilities squandered for some crappy pure damage that probably only serves to make anet weaken our normal attacks (because zomg that ele burst is too strong). I’d prefer my utilities to actually be utile.

What do you suggest then? Having 4 attunements for each conjure? Because that is never going to happen for so many reasons.