Guild Wars 2

Olba.5376:

Not an invulnerability. And Defy Pain takes 30 points into a traitline that is also full of other useful traits.

Unfortunately for Eles, most of our traitlines don’t have any useful traits. Must be nice.

Ride the Lightning ignores chill and Cripple, Rush does not. Also, Rush is very buggy with actually hitting anything.

Rush doesn’t get put on a double CD if it misses. Must be nice.

Yeah and the other five professions have nothing like that. At least you have the option for permanent Vigor at all. If a Warrior wants permanent Vigor, they’re going to need 20 points into Tactics, an additional 40% boon duration and a Warhorn offhand. Put that trait of yours for 20 points for Warrior into just about any traitline and people would sing praise.
The December 10th patch is also going to reduce the Vigor access of a Thief to half of what it is right now.

Did it ever occur to you that the reason the other professions don’t have as much access to Vigor is because their very survival doesn’t depend on precise dodging? A Warrior doesn’t need perma-vigor because they, again, have the largest health pool, heaviest armor, and against all logic, better healing than the Ele now. Not to mention quick weapon swapping which allows them to engage in melee or range at will, meaning they, unlike a D/D Ele for example don’t absolutely need to be always dodging.

I swear, its like some people just have a thing about nerfing Eles, especially people defending the unanimously agreed upon OP Warrior. Is it the SFX of our skills that you’re jealous of or something?

Seras.5702:

Using primarily conjure LH & FB, which weapon would you recommend using for leveling and dungeons?

It really depends on your playstyle, and how much time you’ll spend out of conjure (15 or 25 charges).

FB gives you good range, and LH is a beast of a melee weapon. A good compromise would be S/D, for stacking Might (especially if you’re soloing, you can take Fire up to 30 for extended fire fields) before entering into a Conjure, plus S/D is a pretty good weaponset on its own, and I’d think most would agree its somewhat more versatile than just D/D.

Alternatively, if you want access to pretty much every range, go Staff. You’ll get long range and a ton of utility with all the combo fields you can lay down for your dungeon party (or WvW), Frost Bow combined with GoS and MS is an absolute ton of AoE, and if anything gets close you can mix it up with the LH.

I’m really hoping that ANet at some point removes charges from Conjures and instead makes them swappable like Engy kits which would result in much less clunky gameplay for a scenario like I described above, but I won’t hold my breath and it still functions.

Avatara.1042:

Also for those bagging Lava Tomb, it is the best staff zerker trait we have.

You do realize that saying this, that the best trait in an entire line is one that functions when DOWNED, shows just how sorry a state the Ele is in right?

EpicBanHammer.7521:

Can someone go over how each weapon plays? Just general ideas would be great.

Daggers – in your face PBAoE brawler, generally hitting skills as they cooldown, analagous to the Shadowstep Starburster from GW1

Staff – long range support and nuking, works great in 5 man content and WvW and probably your best bet in open world content such as Dragon encounters

Scepter – mid range stand off weapon, more focused on single target damage and somewhat tough to land attacks vs. kiting or mobile foes (Shatterstone, Dragon’s Tooth, etc.), has access to blind, more of a “finesse” weapon than Dagger

Focus – almost exclusively a defensive weapon, its few offensive skills are either grossly underpowered or difficult to execute/bugged (positioning Flamewall for example), the defensive skills in Air and Earth attunement make it a must have combined with Dagger or Scepter for hard PvE content such as high level Fractals

Destroyer Staff is kind of earthy, being they come from underground and its all lava-y and obsidian-y.

Etched Branch is earthy in that its got animal horns on it.

Melandru’s Gaze is a classic for the Earth theme.

Sovereign Pillar has kind of an Aztec style theme going for it, and might fit the bill.

Wolfborn Staff is also kind of Earth or Nature-y with the brambles and wolf head.

Jski.6180:

You need to give up some things power or crit dmg to a high def ability like vigor.
Now if your just going on about losing your ability to roll for not evading dmg but to just simply use your evasion skill then your wasting a lot of dmg protection as is.

So what do these professions “give up?”

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vigorous_Precision
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Invigorating_Speed
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Critical_Infusion

Both Guardians and Mesmers are going to have these traits almost guaranteed, and many Engys also take Speedy Kits, which means for two Adept traits in two good lines, an Engy gets Vigor and Swiftness with no cooldown.

But I guess it makes sense that the most squishy profession with the least inherent survivability should not only have to try twice as hard to do anything, they should also have to pay twice as much or more for access to what other professions have as a baseline.

This build might help, I’ve found it works for me:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhEmmbwR3wjEAEFm4SQxBMMK0RRxM5A

With 20 points in Fire you can play around with Conjurer if you want, Earth 10 gives you access to Earth’s Embrace and Elemental Shielding, and Water 20 and Arcane 20 give you access to a bunch of traits like Blasting Staff, Arcane Abatement and more that are useful in PvE, PvP and WvW. I’ve found that this distribution, apart from a Scepter FA build with 30 in Air, gives the most versatility of any build I’ve played.

It certainly may not be optimized to the hilt, but I play with full Celestial gear too! I like the versatility in playstyle, allowing me to switch up on the fly between close combat D/D to distance nuker with Staff. And with judicious switching up of certain Water and Earth traits, I can usually solo a Champ, groups of 2 to 3 Veterans, and the aggro limit on trash mobs. Its primarily a PvE build, but with the right gear could do well in PvP.

I’m not going to get into specifics, just frame the core of a simple idea.

Each attunement represents a certain aspect of Ele gameplay. Fire for AoE damage, Air for single target, Water for healing and support, Earth for defense and CC.

Why not make the traits reflect this more? A trait like Blasting Staff should then sit in the Fire traitline to reflect the Staff’s role as a long range blasting weapon (whoever thought the Staff should be “supporty” is crazy) for example. Daggers tend to be a brawler’s weapon, so Dagger related traits would go to Earth, Focus into Water and Scepter into Air.

This would then be a reason for ANet to adjust minor traits to give cross-attunement bonuses. So if a Ele was running Scepter/Focus, and had 30 points into both Air and Water, then each Minor trait should give either a secondary effect or boost the strength of each effect to represent the “specialization.” Dual Daggers and Staff would of course hybridize with Arcana more readily.

As an example, using the above, you’d have both “Weak Spot” and “Bountiful Power.” With the “attunement specialization” bonus described above, Weak Spot would cause Bountiful Power to be a 2% damage increase per boon, and Bountiful Power would cause Weak Spot to inflict two stacks of Vulnerability instead of one. Or take “Healing Ripple” and “Electric Discharge.” Healing Ripple would cause Electric Discharge to inflict Chilled in addition to damage, and Electric Discharge would cause Healing Ripple to apply Swiftness to up to five allies in the AoE.

Certain Arcana traits would split to increase the effectiveness of all attunements, rather than being located in a crutch traitline for survival. For example, the effects of Elemental Attunement would be spread to the 5 point minor trait in each elemental line, so if you wanted access to each boon you’d have to sink a minimum of 5 points into each traitline (which means 20 trait points, what you’d spend in Arcana post Dec 10th). A trait like Renewing Stamina, being based on crit, should be moved to Air, likely the 5 point minor trait to compete with the Mesmer (yes with 5 points into Air you’d have access to attunement to Air Swiftness and on-crit Vigor, which is powerful, but spreading out the other effects to other attunements keeps it from being OP and makes sense being in the Air line). In keeping with the idea of “elemental” traits being distributed to the individual attunement traitlines, the individual effects of Evasive Arcana would be moved to the 15 point minor traits in each attunement traitline, so to get all four effects from this current GM trait, you’d have to spend 15 points into each attunement. If you went with a Scepter/Focus Air/Water build as described above, then you’d have access to the Blinding Flash and Cleansing Wave, but not the Flame Burst or Churning Earth effects.

Then make Arcana traits deal specifically with Arcane, Glyph, Cantrip and Conjure skills, making this traitline a boost to utility skills but not required to effectively play with the primary weapon skills. In this way, Arcana helps round out the customization options, rather than being required to make effective use of the profession at all.

Individual Attunement recharge rates should be lowered to a baseline of ten seconds, with the governing attribute further reducing recharge to a minimum of seven seconds. So an Ele with 30 Fire and 0 Air would have a 7 second recharge on Fire Attunement, but a 10 second recharge on Air Attunement. Arcana could still increase Boon Duration, and to replace the attunement recharge reduction, Arcana would instead reduce recharge on any skill (weapon or utility including individual skills on conjures) that gives a movement boost, whether it be a “charge” like RtL, a teleport like Lightning Flash or a boon granting skill like Windborne Speed. This would reflect the idea of Arcane as a general improvement line and the “meta magic” aspect.

I realize this may well be an extremely drastic change, but if ANet truly wants to increase build variance without having to nerf everything into the ground to force players into unfavorable builds, then making each traitline distinct and useful is a much better way to go about things. It would also be a great setup if ANet ever decides to allow players to “save” an alternate build that can be switched to when OOC. Such as having a D/D build (Earth30/Water10/Arcane30) for general PvE , then being able to switch to a Staff build (Fire30/Air10/Arcane30) for organized WvW, or if WvW isn’t your cup of tea, a Scepter/Focus build (Air30/Water30/Arcane10) for Fractals. Given that in my idea, Conjures would be governed by Arcana, the D/D and Staff builds would have good access to Conjure related traits, giving even more variety.

Jabberwock.9014:

especially for a class with atrocious inherent survivability.

The root problem is ANet doesn’t believe the above for some reason. I think they must still decide the balance patches based on daphoenix’s videos from several months ago. That’s the only rationale that makes sense anyways. And even then daphoenix wasn’t slaying everyone, just stalling, which was the whole point of the bunker build in the first place!

When you give the lowest armored, lowest health class the sole survival mechanism of healing, then nerf its healing into the ground, what do they expect is going to happen? Oh we can’t give the Ele mobility, that’s what Thief is for! And Warrior. And Ranger. And Guardian. Heck, even Mesmer has better in combat mobility, and OOC we have waypoints.

I’m still waiting for ANet to make good on their promise regarding the Elementalist:

“Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.” (by “single attack” ANet means all 20 weapon skills and all utility skills total aggregate damage on one target in the space of 1 second, which is impossible, but that has to be the metric right?)

“Elementalists quickly adapt to new threats by harnessing the power of the elements as needed.” (which means every 15 seconds of course)

The Game Slayer.7632:

You are so naive. You’re entire argument is completely illegitimate due to this single statement.

“Your.”

You confuse the saying “Jack of all Trades” with bringing things to the table; ie damage, support, control. Every class can heal each other, but if you had a brain cell you would think to yourself for a second and say “I wonder who brings more healing, a heal-way guard or a thief.”

Jack of All Trades in this context is exactly what it says on the tin, damage, support and control. Once you get into the specific balancing act that differentiates professions, then yes you move away from the trifecta of gameplay. But at its core, this is how GW2 is designed. And no need to be such a jerk.

Every profession CAN bring things to the table, but other professions are really bad at doing it. You really made yourself look like a fool by saying “every profession is a jack of all trades profession”.

This is part of the balancing act referenced above, but in basic design every class can do everything, i.e. Jack of all Trades. Making some classes better or worse makes it so there isn’t just one single profession, which is necessary for an MMO.

The elementalist can do everything, and is halfway decent at it. We have decent control, decent healing, decent support and boons, decent mobility, decent damage ETC. But there is nothing that we are amazing at, like a heal-way guard, or glass cannon warrior.

I’d argue that saying an Ele is “decent” at everything is a gross overstatement, but apparently you’re blind to the facts of current game balance.

Let’s compare another class to get it through your skull.
A thief is bad at healing, decent at damage, amazing in mobility, amazing in stealth, and bad with support and boons.

Shall I continue? Or can I at least safely assume you have played this game for more than a week?

And yet, a Thief can use their Stealth skills in a Support role to get a party through a dungeon, or use Venom Share for extra party DPS and control, or stealth rezzing and stomping to avoid damage, or blind spam…

Things like healing, mobility and boons are aspects of support, so while the Thief may be not as good with boons, it offers different types of Support which are as or more valuable. If the Thief was straight up as good with boons as say a Guardian, then the Thief would either be grossly OP in a support role.

I could continue, but then I might sink to your level of insulting and misinformed rhetoric.

I still don’t see why ANet fails to grasp the obvious and just move Renewing Stamina to the Air 5 trait, and get rid of Zephyr’s Speed which is incredibly useless (and still bugged). Then the Ele has the same Precision line minor trait as the Mesmer. Balance.

Call it “Second Wind” or something similar.

oZii.2864:

fadeaway.2807:

Comparisons like that are useless because the usefulness of those skills goes up and down depending on their interaction with other skills, base hp, traits etc.

pretty much this.

OP lists traits or skills in a vacuum and thinks it is intelligent.

They’re not useless specifically because each professions traits and skills work exactly the same way. A vigor on crit trait works the same whether its on a Guard, Ele or Mesmer. A skill that works as a gap closer/opener with a listed distance is going to propel any class that has one the same distance. In point of fact skills and traits as compared by the OP is a very accurate representation of the lopsided class balance, and is obvious to anyone who spends even a few seconds thinking about it.

Saying “skills in a vacuum” does not make your commentary intelligent if you have no idea what it means.

The Game Slayer.7632:

You seem to not grasp any idea of what an elementalist is.
Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None
If you don’t like it, go play another profession. I’m really tired of people like you on the forums.

Don’t be intentionally foolish. Every profession is a “Jack of All Trades” because every profession is designed to bring damage, support and control in every game aspect, that’s how GW2 is designed from the ground up.

Calling the Ele the “Jack of All Trades” is a cop out by ANet and players who don’t want the Ele to compete and refers specifically to the Ele possessing 20 weapon skills. Which of course ignores being range locked, and the majority of utility skills and trait selections being wildly under par compared to other professions, as well as the Ele having no inherent survivability beyond healing, which has been nerfed across the board (except Warrior apparently) and specifically nerfed hardcore on the Ele itself.

According to ANet’s lore and own statements, the Ele was supposed to be the king of damage dealing at all ranges, as a balance to the extremely low survivability. But, just like in GW1, ANet has no idea how to make this happen without ticking off all the players who don’t want an even fight, so we’re eventually going to have the GW2 equivalent of the ER Infuser build.

What’s hilarious is that you say you’re tired of people on the forum pointing out the obvious, when its the obvious that ANet and players like you KEEP IGNORING. A squishy profession that has no compensation for squishiness is not a meta character, and scarcely competes. Which eventually leads to such characters falling completely out of favor, which if you participated in high end PvP you’d know that Eles are hardly ever brought along.

Can someone explain why the Elementalist’s Vigor on Crit trait is now a 20 point master trait, but Mesmer and Guardian’s Vigor on Crit trait is a 5 point Adept trait in lines almost all builds take?

Is there some justification by ANet that I missed that lays out why the squishiest profession with the least inherent survival mechanics should also have the least access to survival oriented boons?

ThiBash.5634:

But this isn’t ANY RPG based game. I don’t understand why you insist on the lore being similar to other games, when it’s the same as saying ‘it was the butler because it was always the butler in other detective novels’.

The thief focuses purely on shadow spellcasting, making them vastly superior in that particular area of spellcasting. If you’re a professional cook, ’does that automatically mean no Italian pizza maker can bake better pizzas than you can? Of course not.

Also, if you’re really that much into lore, you should know that the whole ‘separate schools’ thing has been retconned.

I’m not discussing lore, I’m talking about balance that is consistent. Class concepts are a part of this. If ANet wanted to give the Necromancer the ability to fly, blasting enemies with wells and life blasts while being totally immune to melee attacks, would that make sense from either a lore or balance perspective? Of course not.

Consistency in game design is crucial because players expect it. If you have a class called a Warrior, no one expects it to start teleporting around the battlefield and calling down meteors from space.

I’m not sure what is unclear here, your metaphors don’t really make sense given the discussion at hand.

Heinel.6548:

I never said Scarlet wasn’t a Mary Sue. I said Trahearne wasn’t. You, however, flip flopped between characters.

Because I can multitask. And I argued that Trahearne COULD be considered one, but not from backstory as is Scarlet, but via development during the personal story.

He’s a bookish nerd handed a magic sword and told to go cleanse Orr, and all of his personality flaws such as uncertainty and self-doubt evaporate and he succeeds quite handily, with some small help from the player. Let us not forget that one of the accoutrements of the Marty Stu is the:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoolSword

In fact, Trahearne may just be epitomized by the Geeky Stu archetype.

ThiBash.5634:

No, you’re misrepresent facts by stating the ele has NO teleport. You should state truthfully that we have LESS teleports. Don’t try to make your argument more valid by conveniently leaving out facts. As for the blind spam, with 20% air cooldown we can blind every 8 seconds, which is plenty.

Oh please don’t force me to point out where, in every post so far I’ve explicitly stated that the Ele has Lightning Flash as the sole teleport for the class, making my claim of NINE to ONE in the Thief’s favor perfectly valid. I never left out facts, you simply didn’t read or chose not to read, I don’t know which. Your next claim might be true were it not for the attunement cooldowns, along with the need to switch attunements regularly to get any semblance of DPS or support going, meaning the practical CD is even higher than the listed, a problem no other profession has to worry about. Yes, they have weapon swaps, but in most cases its swapping to a different range, or another of the same set to double up on effects, something else the Ele is incapable of.

Of course you would, but the fact that the thief wouldn’t be magical at all is something you came up with yourself. Nowhere in lore does it say that the thief doesn’t use magic. In fact, the thief probably got the skills from the assassin, a profession we know for a fact used magic.

The difference between an elementalist and a thief is that the elementalist uses nothing but spells and the thief uses spells in combination with physical attacks. But they do use magic, it’s a know fact (or at least Oola knows).

You must have a reading comprehension problem. I wasn’t arguing that the Thief isn’t magical at all, the obvious use of Shadow Magic and the connection to the Denial Bloodstone is pretty obvious. What I was arguing was the idea that the Thief, an adventurer profession is AS magical as the scholarly Elementalist, which was the claim you made.

A common thread in ANY RPG based game pretty much ever is that classes that split their training time between two different vocations (fighter/mage, fighter/thief, thief/mage, fighter/mage/thief, and all the other ways of “multiclassing”) is usually never as skilled in their various vocations as a “pure” class. Which you seem to be missing. The point isn’t that GW2 should follow D&D rules, its that GW2 needs to follow an internal logic consistent with player expectations. If a Thief spends 50% of his training on combat, 25% on stealth and 25% on magic, should he logically be as (or more competent) at spellcraft than a profession like the Ele who spends 100% of his training on spellcraft? Logic would dictate no, but you seem to think otherwise, for what reason I cannot fathom.

ThiBash.5634:

The answer isn’t about balance or overpowered skills.

The answer is that it would effectively give us a 25-skills action bar and that’s not what the game is about. The reason there’s an internal cooldown is to give you limitations to make the game interesting. Would chess be fun if every piece could move to any square on the board?

Individual skill cooldowns two to three times as long on average compared to all other professions say hello.

ThiBash.5634:

How seriously do you want to be taken by your readers if you purposefully feed us false information? The only one of the 3 that the ele doesn’t have is stealth. They can teleport and they can spam blinds.

The Ele only has one teleport, Lightning Flash, a utility, whereas the Thief has multiple ports on both weapon and utility skills. “Spamming” blinds is a bit of a misnomer, the Thief can do it over and over, whereas the Ele’s got a total of four skills that cause Blind, three of which possessing CDs of 10 or 15 seconds, and a utility Glyph of Storms that only applies Blind in Earth Attunement and is on a 30 sec CD. There is a world of difference between the Thief’s ability to teleport and blind and the Ele’s, you should probably try not to misrepresent that fact with accusations of false information. By my count, Thieves have NINE teleports to the Ele’s ONE.

All creatures are magical, including the physical ones. Check the lore behind the Oola’s Lab minidungeon. The thief is as magical as the elementalist.

I would argue that point. All professions tap into, to a greater or lesser extent, the magic of the Bloodstones, such as Guardians using Preservation, Mesmers Denial, and Eles Destruction. But it would be silly to argue that a Warrior tapping into the Aggression stone is as “magical” as an Ele tapping into the Destruction stone. And regardless of the lore, one must look at how the mechanics work out in a balance aspect, and also as to what players expect from a logical continuity. And Thieves being as or more magical (9 teleports to 1) makes zero sense to me and I’d hazard a guess that its the same for the majority of players out there, especially given the Ele’s low inherent survivability.

Heinel.6548:

This is making less sense by the word. A character that is smarter than everyone is a genius, not a Mary Sue. Otherwise, every major Asuran character would be a Mary Sue.

While most Mary Sues are portrayed as intelligent, that is because high intelligence is a desirable trait. Mary Sues are characterized as someone who is idealized to the point of being unrealistic. It takes more than just generic “smarts” for that.

Ok, look into Scarlet’s backstory. She’s smarter than every Asuran genius. She’s better at every race’s “hat” than the entire race itself. She has perfect tactical and strategic awareness. Even the efforts of the players seemingly work into her grand and vast designs.

While the term Mary Sue may originally have meant someone who is perfect AND the supporting cast idealized her for it (see also: The Wesley) in common vernacular it has come to mean any extremely overpowered character that is better than everyone else at everything.

If you’re going to keep arguing the opposite, at least know the character you’re arguing over first.

There is no valid argument against a zero CD on attunement swapping. Every mechanic that needs to exist to prevent overpowering already exists in the game, such as ICD on skills, traits, sigils and runes.

ANet have already demonstrated that they’re not too worried about it due to Fresh Air and the builds that sprang up allowing Eles to work in a Air Attune in between each swap for the Air 15 trait.

Yes, some traits might need to be re-worked or altered to avoid overpowering the profession, but would end up with a much more interesting and dynamic profession that could use Attunements tactically, rather than as a limiting facet of playstyle and build variety.

Cries Of Sorrow.5864:

oh look it’s this thread again. lets also totally forget about the travel time of Infiltrators arrow while the user is under swiftness.

A guy who steals things should not have more teleports (any really) than the guy who has mastery over the forces of creation and arcane energy.

Heinel.6548:

You mightvwant to read the wiki article again. Trahearne was never portrayed as having exceptional skill in everything. In fact we are exposed to more of his flaws than his strengths.

Actually Trahearne might qualify as a Marty Stu, the flaws we see are those of self-doubt and uncertainty, which are quickly overcome as he easily falls into the role of conquering commander. Trahearne is still good at everything, from combat (of which he had no real training, he goes from being a researcher to hacking down legions of Risen with a greatsword of pure tree magic) to knowing exactly where, when and how to attack Zhaitan. He even makes a mean cobb salad.

So while Trahearne doesn’t start out as a Marty Stu, he quickly develops into one. With Scarlet, we don’t see the development, we just get the backstory, and all her qualities point absolutely to someone at ANet’s fanfic author avatar.

Heinel.6548:

I don’t see any logic here. All I see is your assumption that skills are only added to the game if they trivialize profession skills. This assumption is inconsistent with racial skills, which is part of reality. Therefore your post is inconsistent with reality, hence must be false.

Racial skills were developed in tandem with regular profession skills and are by design weaker or limited so as not to overshadow the main profession skills, not to mention that racial skills cannot be used in PvP, further marginalizing them.

As this will be the first new skill added since release, logic dictates that it must stand out enough to be used by players, else there is no point in adding it. Given that for players to choose it over other established skills requires it to be better or give options that the regular skills don’t (otherwise why replace it?) this introduces powercreep to the game. Therefore my assertion is not inconsistent with reality and you fail at logic.

I’ve been arguing this since the game went live. You hear it all the time, “the class with the least inherent survivability is also ridiculously not mobile.”

ANet has responded in the past that they want the Thief to be the most mobile, usually in response to outcry over Ele nerfs. That doesn’t really explain why Warriors, Rangers and Guardians are also more mobile than Eles, and have been even prior to the massive RtL nerfing. And it doesn’t make sense to give preferential treatment to a profession like the Thief in terms of mobility, when traditionally Thieves skulk slowly through the shadows, using Stealth as their defense. To give the Thief Stealth, along with ninja-assassin dodging ability, blinds out the wazoo, and more teleports than any other profession in the game along with medium armor is just silly balance design.

As for teleports being a Mesmer thing, just no. A Mesmer deals with Illusion and Chaos magic, and draw their power from the Denial bloodstone. Traditionally, Illusionists are great at appearing to teleport, when its really just trickery or Invisibility. In every other game and lore system out there, the quintessential Destruction Mage, being the lightest armored and most vulnerable, has the MOST number of teleports, blinks and general skills related to vanishing or disappearing precisely because they’re the squishiest.

IMO, if the Ele doesn’t regain the top slot as most mobile via skill or trait alterations, then a mechanic needs to be introduced that can compete with profession mechanics like Stealth, Death Shroud, Ranger Pets and the like. Something to compete with every other professions’ abilities, ESPECIALLY when the Ele is expected to perform in melee. But to make the Ele’s sole defense mechanic boons and healing, then nerfing to hell what mobility the profession has and then nerfing healing and adding in boon hate is just all manner of short sighted.

After you beat Scarlet at the very apex of the Tower O’ Doom, you head home to see your kids, spinning your totem top on the table but forgetting about it in your happiness that the ordeal is finally over… or IS IT???

Oh yeah… BBWWWWWAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

lordkrall.7241:

Why assume it will marginalize or trivialize old skills?
We have more or less NO information about this new skin, so why assume it will not be balanced?

People have been asking for new skills since the game was released more or less, and this is the first one.

Because logic. For it to be taken over other professions’ native heals it has to be more powerful or offer options that the standard skills don’t. That’s called powercreep, and its one of the things that trivialized GW1 content with the EoTN PvE only skills.

I really don’t understand why ANet spends so much time adding more junk to the game instead of balancing and streamlining the already awesome content that exists now. The utopia of all professions being bug-free and balanced is certainly more enticing than another healing skill.

Eles need Rifle.

http://fapit.net/imgs/606/multi-classing.jpg

Bottom line is this:

If you play an Ele, you’re every wizard from Fairy Tail and a certain manga with Dark Schneider in it combined! At 1/100000th the power level.

BUT you look so much cooler than anybody else in the game that its totally worth it! You are the explosion that players walk away from!

Is anyone else a bit nervous about this new universal healing skill?

Does ANet not remember the power creep and imbalance that EoTN and PvE skills introduced to GW1? Like Ursan DoA runs?

Seems a bit early in the game’s life cycle to already be introducing new skills that marginalize or trivialize old skills, especially when multiple skills across all professions are still either imbalanced or not working properly.

Given the multiple additions to the Home Instance we’re seeing now (quartz, obelisk, candy corn) would it make sense for there to be an Azurite Deposit that can be mined placed as well?

Since the insignias and inscriptions for Sentinel gear were drops and are not craftable, why not also add a merchant who takes Azurite crystals/orbs in trade? That way they don’t have to be added to crafting lists, and each insignia or inscription could cost five crystals or one orb each for example. Those numbers could be adjusted depending on the time gating ANet wants, such kitten and 5 respectively if they want it closer to Celestial.

Well first, you’re missing 10 trait points. You might consider putting 10 points into Earth for Stone Splinters and the additional Toughness.

Here is a good analysis by one of the better players out there:

http://daphoenix555.wordpress.com/

I currently have three armor sets in my bags, an all Zerker with Ruby Orbs, a PTV set with runes of the Ogre, and an all Celestial set with two runes each of Water, Monk and Melandru. I usually use the PTV set for world bosses and WvW, the Zerker set for organized PvE (dungeons, fractals) and the Celestial for pretty much everything else. I use a Cavalier backpiece, along with several different configurations of Ascended trinkets (Celestial, Zerker and Cavalier).

I also have two sets of weapons for each combination, Zerker and Celestial. The Zerker comes out in organized stuff, Celestial for everything else.

But as a general rule, you’re going to want to focus on Toughness and/or Vitality in PvP, so Soldier’s or Knights is a good base there, as is Valkyrie for the extra health in the current condition meta. Sentinel’s isn’t bad either, but as Molten Core is no longer available they’re pretty expensive on the TP.

Exosferatu.2961:

The largos do not interact much with the other races. We only get a sneak peek of the most elusive races in personal story and in Guild Wars 1 campaigns.

I dunno, I mean sure in Prophecies the Forgotten were only there for a couple of quests in the Crystal Desert, but by the time Elona and EoTN were released they were much more involved in certain aspects of the game, such as the Domain of Anguish.

It just seems to me that Krait for example have always been just a generic snake enemy, whereas the Largos seem to have much more leeway for an interesting story, along with said “unknown horrors” driving them from their homeland. It feels like a lot of the Living Story so far has been “forced” (Scarlet as a Mary Sue being a perfect example) and contrived, rather than flowing organically from an interesting base.

Danikat.8537:

I find it mildly amusing that you complain about them ‘throwing out’ all the GW1 lore and then also complain about them using the Krait in a storyline when they’re one of the races that was introduced in GW1 and this might well give us more lore and history on them.

But also I think they’re saving the Largos for a future update (expansion pack?) and I don’t think they’d be appropriate for this update. From the little we know about them their society as a whole is neutral, leaning towards friendly to the player races and the appear to operate as individuals rather than large groups, none of which lends itself into turning them into a new organised threat for us to take down.

Perhaps because from what we’ve seen so far, this isn’t delving into the history of the Krait, or are the words “unlike anything seen before in Tyria” too ambiguous? Given the focus on the character of Scarlet, and how the Living Story has progressed so far, we’ve not seen real inroads or attempts to connect to GW1. Not to mention that the world is supposed to be at war with several Dragons, but we’re all conveniently forgetting about that.

And I was by no means suggesting that the Largos are themselves the threat, instead it would be the unknown “horrors” from the Unending Ocean. Which could make for an excellent tie-in to some Cthulhu inspired stuff, or heck, give us some giant golems to pilot and fight Kaiju Pacific Rim style.

I find it mildly amusing that my questions regarding a disregarded part of the world’s mythology that has some interesting hooks to it compared to the almost universally detested character of Mary Sue Scarlet is considered complaining. Its amazing how some people will view any criticism as negative.

Does anyone know WHY ANet is not utilizing the Abyss-style alien beings from the Unending Ocean who fled a “great horror” as Living Story fodder instead of Krait and Mary Scarlet?

Seems like such a waste of interesting lore and story, especially considering that ANet has apparently decided to throw out all the rich history and lore of GW1.

Eles:

1. GUI improvement. Needs a set of bars, say above the F1-4 attunement icons that show smaller versions of the non-active attunements and the CD on those skills. It is not fun nor realistic to expect an Ele player to memorize in the heat of combat which skills are on CD and their length, especially given the wildly varying and high CDs we have compared to other professions combined with individual attunement CDs.

2. Un-nerf us. Period, full stop.

All professions:

Pretty much the only thing ANet needs to do as a general improvement is to figure out roles for the professions. I don’t mean “tank, DPS, healz” I’m talking more about HOW each class contributes. In simple terms, take again the Ele and Thief. ANet has stated they want the Thief to be most mobile. And nerf Ele mobility into the ground. If Eles had a bunch of profession mechanic based survivability options, such as more teleports, invisibility, or more access to skills that worked like Stoneskin from D&D this wouldn’t be such a problem. But to be survivable, the Ele has to pack Arcane Shield, Mistform and likely use a Focus. The Thief has Stealth designed into multiple skills across various weapons, and quite a few teleports. It just makes no sense that a class with less inherent survivability should also have less mobility, armor and health.

ANet needs to get their balancing act together, and stop working off of misconceptions as a basis for balance.

Draknar.5748:

You could also argue that you should give money to charity instead of spending it on video games…

There are plenty of things people could do with their money that is more beneficial to society, but that’s really their business now isn’kitten

I have a really, really strong suspicion that you don’t practice what you preach.

My response was to the idea of wasting money that is just laying around, not doing a marginal cost assessment of what entertainment one like.

And your really strong suspicion is of course baseless, I volunteer at my local Humane Society shelter (love working the adoption drives and seeing the looks on peoples’ faces) as well as giving to the local toy drives every Christmas, specifically the Love Doctors’ charity here in Florida.

Of course its each person’s business what they do with their money, that doesn’t prevent others from making judgments about it, which just about everyone does even if they won’t admit it. Rich people judge the poor (telling a bum to get a job), poor judge the rich (why does that guy need another yacht?) and back and forth.

My judgment was based on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on a single item in a game that may or may not last a few more years, especially in the face of many other quality and perhaps better games coming out very soon. For $650 you could buy ten games, with all the content therein, or one Legendary weapon in this game, at current conversion rates. That borders on insanity.

Kyskythyn.6471:

Next time a guardian or mesmer chases you down as you RTL and blink away, let me know.

Seriously? People are still trying, after ALL the nerfs and tonnes of videos proving to the contrary, that Elementalists still have good mobility?

Take a D/D with LF:

Burning Speed – 600 range, 15 sec CD
RtL – 1200 range, 40 sec CD (assuming running away)
LF – 900 range, 40 sec CD

Then take your Guardian, say GS and S/F:

Leap of Faith – 600 range, 15 sec CD
Binding Blade – 600 range pull, 30 sec CD
Flashing Blade – 600 range, 10 sec CD
JI – 1200 range (stunbreaker), 45 sec CD

Obviously, Burning Speed and Leap of Faith are the same in terms of chasing, so they’re a wash. Binding Blade’s Pull is not always reliable, so we strike that. JI outranges LF AND stunbreaks at the cost of a 5 sec longer CD. I’d say the advantage goes to JI there. Flashing Blade has half the range of RtL, but has one quarter the CD (meaning it can be used fourtimes for every one RtL!), doesn’t bug out because its a teleport, and has an AoE Blind. Advantage definitely goes to Flashing Blade.

So just from running the numbers, we see that the Guardian, having higher armor, Aegis, and a variety of defensive skills that include multiple blinds and blocks is also more mobile than the most mobile Ele build you can build for. Does it really make sense to ANYBODY, especially ANet’s devs, that a heavily armored Knight Templar/Paladin style profession is faster and with more teleport style skills than a caster who traditionally would depend on invisibility, blinks and teleports to stay alive on the field?

I don’t want to go and reference every other RPG ever made, but usually the plate armored heavies slog it out, while the wizards are zipping all over the battlefield with their magic, using teleports, dimension doors, flying, etc. This profession design really doesn’t make sense. I don’t care if ANet wants a profession like Thief to be the most mobile from a perception standpoint, mechanically the most fragile professions are always the most mobile, because their survivability depends on not getting hit. Making the Ele, especially in a melee D/D format have sub-par mobility options to half the other professions, while simultaneously having no profession specific skills or mechanics that lend to needed survivability is quite simply poorly thought out design.

Anyone who says otherwise is just shilling for Warriors.

Youkay.5294:

Against necro: use a build that doesn’t prioritise boons. Have a lot of condi cleanse skills on the expense of others.
Against thieves: LOL, permastealth. Thieves dont have permastealth. But how to win: use AoE attacks and deny stealth by avoiding Cloak and Dagger.
Against warrior: Your mobility skill on daggers is just as good as a warriors, so stop whining about warrior mobility.

So you want to go back in time to when D/D ele was dominating everything with ease and no other profession stood a chance. I can’t take you seriously. You are just crying.

You lost all credibility when you imply that an Ele can carry enough condi clears to stay ahead of a Necro. There’s a reason why conditions are meta. You lost more credibility when you claimed Thieves don’t have perma-stealth, its actually quite easy to do and maintain. And you lost even MORE (probably the most) credibility when you claim that mobility skills for Ele are just as good as Warriors, when its been empirically shown over the last several months that multiple professions such as Warriors, Rangers and Thieves all have much better mobility options with much shorter cooldowns.

Finally, you put the nail in the coffin of credibility when you claimed the “history” of the Ele dominating everything with ease, which clearly means you were one of those who saw daphoenix’s videos and inferred the obvious wrong conclusion that bunker D/D was killing everything in sight. As was shown, time and again, D/D bunkers could survive and reset at their whim sure, but to actually kill anyone was extremely difficult, and much more so now. The problem became a vocal set of whiners complaining that Eles were too hard to kill, not that Eles were slaughtering all other professions in droves. The two are not equal.

Now, given the above, why should anyone take your arguments seriously?

a t s e.9614:

Losers? What if im rich and have cash to waste? The loser is
The guy who stays in the basement and farm champs for
15 hours a day .

If you have cash to waste I suggest donating it to a charity or good cause, such as the Humane Society or Christmas time toy drives for underprivileged children. I realize that the gem store helps pay for new content in GW2, but dropping several hundred dollars on a single virtual item that you’ll eventually get bored with and move on from is ridiculous when you consider the good that money could do elsewhere.

If you want to be offended, introduce a Swordsage from the Tome of Battle, and watch every other profession get murdered.

Or ask yourselves if you should be “offended” by something put in a game.

Every time I hear Scarlet’s voice, or the hammy dialogue, or simply think about the totally hackneyed and cliche filled character that she is, I imagine doing this to her:

If ANet allows me to do THAT at the end of this next Living Story installment, they can take my money!

Kozume.9035:

Gathslan.1870:

whatever class is added in the future i just hope it has no ’’shadow’’ in it’s name.

Shadow is probably the most corny overused word in fantasy and i would not be able to play a class with that word in it xD

Definitely needs a more original and less cliche name, I agree.

My wife and I are big Firefly/Serenity fans, why not call a new heavy armored necromantic warrior profession the “Reaver”?

Give it the new Scythe weapon, and allow it to dual wield any bladed weapon (swords, daggers, axes) and make the majority of its utility skills have some sort of snare and be based off of bolas and/or shuriken.

Not really sure what would make for a good class mechanic, maybe have something to do with Haste as the Reaver kills more.

Just a quick suggestion, but would it be possible to do? Seems like an obvious change to me, given that the Ele’s animations suggest they are using those weapon types, and not just casting spells from them like with Daggers.

Grind. Ugh.

Anyways, here’s the question: Why not scale Ascended stats back to Exotic, but make Ascended switchable on the fly?

So someone who crafts an Exotic greatsword will have the same stats as someone using an Ascended greatsword or Legendary greatsword. The benefit to Ascended and Legendary is stat switching, and Legendaries further have the cool effects and prestige. I would also include the ability to “infuse” all gear with Agony Resistance, so that Exotic is not overshadowed by Ascended and/or Legendary.

That way, gear obtainable by the vast majority of players will not be outclassed by the privileged few, just like it was in GW1, and ostensibly how it was supposed to be in this sequel.

There isn’t team-work, which is why Tequatl is so hard.

The game consists of blitzing the target, then rezzing anyone who mis-timed a dodge. If teamwork were required and designed into content, then you wouldn’t see a prevalence of Berzerker stats everywhere, with the best (and seemingly only) tactic being to kill the target as quickly as possible to minimize the potential of being defeated.

While that is a sound strategy, the problem arises when that is the ONLY strategy. One need only watch the “tactics” of people taking on the bosses in the Mad King’s Labyrinth, where an attack insta-downs multiple players, and the only strategy is to attack til you die, head to the WP and runback to continue DPSing. There’s no challenge, no cohesion, just whacking away at targets.

To be fair, some of that is the fault of players, but truth be told, many of the “mechanics” in GW2 have enemies which can 1-hit KO a player or multiple players. yes we have Dodge, and we have skills like reflects and projectile destruction, but those don’t work against melee, and there are player capped AoE, whereas the Candy Corn Viscount guy can down the entire field in one shot if lucky.

1-hit KOs make defensive gear and stats worthless, and also make healing and support useless in the long term. If ANet wants the longevity of other successful MMOs, they’re going to need to re-visit their design concepts and figure out how to make challenging content that isn’t composed of attacking til you die then re-spawn.

Rather than insulting and threatening the players, wouldn’t it be far simpler, and more hilarious, to just add the regular list of suspects when it comes to “insulting words” to the profanity filter?

I can just imagine entire paragraphs full of nothing but the word “kitten” the next time “a player feels” ANet mucked up on balancing or failed to deliver on a promise. Yes, “a player feels” makes it sound less confrontational, but also takes away the impact of the criticism, and simply sounds silly and redundant.

For the most variety (and long term interest) in gameplay, go with Elementalist or Engineer. Both have the most skills, and frankly more diverse playstyles than the other professions. Elementalist is quite underpowered atm, and the Engineer needs some love too, but neither professions is as unviable as the poor Ranger. But for fun, and a variety in gameplay, its Ele or Engy.

If you prefer to be good at everything, while having few drawbacks, then you’ll want to main a Warrior or Guardian. Warrior is more offensive, Guardian defensive, but both tend to be pretty boring IMHO and several others have voiced this critique as well, that their gameplay style is monotonous.

Thief is pretty good, and has Stealth, lots of evades and plenty of mobility. But they can be pretty fragile. The Thief also has some similar elements to the Mesmer (deception based gameplay) and while not having clones does take quite a bit of micromanagement to get the most out of.

Necromancer is actually a good choice for you. They can be powerful as a power build, a condi build and a hybrid build, and have minions for extra defense and offense, as well as Death Shroud, with extra skills and more health. Usually though, more than one Necro in a party is a no-no since multiple condition sources don’t stack, but as a solo PvE character its fine. They can also be pretty versatile in PvP, and a Staff and Wells Necro is quite powerful as an AoE blaster in WvW.

I personally main an Ele, and have a Mesmer, Necro and Engy. I still prefer the Ele, but Engy is quite fun too, and both Mesmer and Necro have interesting gameplay mechanics that I enjoy. Also, three of those four are considered “underpowered” so its unlikely my gameplay will suffer long term as a consequence of nerfs.

It is important to have CLEARLY defined standards. I’ve had a couple of posts infracted, most recently one that was in the “Collaborative Development” thread that lamented the downfall of SWTOR and the parallels I’ve seen in GW2.

At no time did my post make a personal attack against anybody, yet it garnered an “Infraction Point” for being rude and inflammatory, despite it simply being criticism and including me saying that I really like the game despite the mentioned flaws.

So yes, “cleverly disguised” is an out for any moderator to remove and infract posts and ban users if the content can be seen as any way negative, which means even constructive criticism will be targeted because its still CRITICISM. And the “you’ve been warned” line sounds straight out of some Bond villain’s mouth, I would say quite unprofessional but I might get banned.

I know as silly as it souds, I actually might try to craft one just because of the Zelda flavor text!