Stuipd ideas from convos with a friend for the Earth/Fire 5-point traits.
Earth: Apply Protection for 3 secs while in Earth attunement, this happens every 12 seconds.
Fire: Gradually gain Might while in Fire attunement, probably should cap it at 3 Might stacks maximum before Boon Duration?
I just reallize something:
Aquamancer’s Alacrity
We moved this trait because all profession cooldown traits are in master tier, and because that is a good investment for this type of improvement. That being said, they may all not be powerful enough to warrant a master level triat right now, but I would rather increase the cooldown to 25% to get people to consider them than to have them be adept tier and allow elementalists to run all four of them.The fact is that you CAN’T compare alatracity trait to “reduce CD on X weapon” trait from other class for this reason: for other classes, this kind of trait reduce CD on 50% of their skills, were for ele its only 25% of our skills. In addition, they ALWAYS got another buff like +X to Ystat, or things like that.
examples:
great sword training for mesmer: 20% CD AND +50power
warden’s feedback for mesmer: 20% CD AND reflect projectile
honorable shield for guardian: 20% CD AND 90toughness
etc.Our “reduce CD” trait are weaker, so they don’t have to be in master tier because others are in.
In my mind, alatracity trait should disappear, and the reduce on CD should be the bonus from arcana but at the cost 1%/2point or maybe 1%/3point as a total of 15% on 4skill bar could be too strong. (and obvsiouly, CD on attunement should be “perma-traited”)
I’ve personally long held the belief that traits that are just -20% CD to something should be Adept tier, with -20%+Effect being Master and Grandmaster tier. For example, if Written in Stone were to be merged with Signet Mastery, that would likely make far more Elementalists use it and Signets as a whole (I wager very few use Signet Mastery on its own) whereas you could put Cantrip Mastery and Soothing Disruption together in the Master tier. This could also apply when a trait lowers the CD of multiple setups, like how Ranger has Quick Draw at Master tier to lower CD of both Longbow and Shortbow.
Merging traits appropriately (like with Written in Stone + Signet Mastery) could make for a good QoL change for all professions, not just Elementalists.
Higher CD than is needed on several of our skills and on attunement recharge. Lowering the CD on many of our 4/5 weapon skills and on the more absurdly high CD utilities (Armour of Earth and Mistform for example, but even things like Glyph of Storms suffer from this) would go an incredibly long way to making us more viable.
Jon, I know this might sound like an insane idea, but what about letting traiting into a line lower the cooldown for swapping back into that attunement and for skills of that attunement. Eles already have absurdly high cooldowns on lots of their skills, yet they are expected to use them in concert quite often (things like Ride the Lightning/Updraft and Burning Speed, for example) to have good damage output. You could do something as small as 1% per every 2 points into a line and it would be INCREDIBLY well received by Eles, perhaps even 1% per every 1 point in a line. Arcana could be given more Boon Duration or perhaps even a Celestial-ish function (boost all stats save +CritDam by 2-3 points?) to still make it usable even if it’s not used for attunement recharge.
I think this could be at least something to consider to help Eles out, perhaps could replace the Alacrity traits with something else entirely (maybe keep them but have them lower all utilities of that element? So Pyromancer’s Alacrity lowers CD of Conjure Flame, Cleansing Fire, and Signet of Fire?).
Also, as a last note: Why does Armour of Earth have such a heavy CD when stuff like Stand Your Ground from Guardians and Balanced Stance from Warriors is far shorter in CD duration?
So was talking with a friend of mine, and after some discussion I think we happened upon what could be an interesting setup for Elementalist that would be infinitely better than what we currently have. The general idea is that we would have how deep you are into a trait line determine the cooldown for that attunement recharge, but it would ALSO determine the cooldown for all weapon skills of that attunement. The current effects of the Fire/Air/Earth/Water lines would still remain, these would just be added on.
General Idea: Each point in an attunement line, in addition to the current bonuses, gives -1% to the cooldown after swapping out of that attunement, and -1% to the cooldown for all weapon skills tied to that element. So 20 points in Fire means that you have -20% CD on fire attunement recharge, as well as -20% CD on all weapon skills while in fire attunement.
One big thought on this is that we will need to nuke all of the “Alacrity” skills, traiting into a line is what will grant lower cooldowns for an Elementalist instead. The other thing that needs to be considered is what the Arcana line should do, since it shouldn’t keep its current ability of lowering recharge for all attunements.
Instead, I propose that the Arcana line boost Boon Duration by +1% per point, and boost by 2 points all of the stats Celestial attribute weapons and armour boosts, aside from Critical Damage boost. This keeps Arcana useful, and makes it work in a variety of good ways, like the various traits that work on all elements seem to promote. The idea might be incredibly stupid, but what do you guys think?
Elemental Attunement being moved to Master tier is going to hurt pretty bad. Will it at least be getting buffed so that it provides more than a single stack of Might when attuning to Fire? Also disliking the moving of Cleansing Wave to Master, it is a good trait that gives a good little burst effect when attuning to Water.
As far as the Earth 5 trait, I would instead like to suggest that it give a larger boost to Toughness once you attune to Earth, but have said boost only last for 3-5 seconds or so. That will help to encourage players to swap into and out of attunements to keep up the pressure on their foes.
Finally, I don’t see any changes to the Flame Barrier trait, are there any plans to change it, or is it currently believed to be good enough as it is?
First thing I’d do is make this the 5 point minor trait in Air. That alone would make it moderately decent since it would overlap the horrid passive speed boost we currently have for the 5 point trait. I’d also say either double the duration to 3 secs (1.5 secs is pitiful) or use the above idea to have it cure Cripple/Immobilise/Chill. Hell, could potentially give immunity to those statuses for the duration of the speed boost. Any one of these would be fantastic, and would go in line with the “You should be swapping attunements constantly, so we’re going to give you short duration effects that are still pretty powerful when you swap into an attunement.” idea that I think this trait tries to promote.
Anet, paying attention to this guy, if not straight up hiring him as a consultant, is about the best decision you could EVER make regarding GW2 story and development. I would advise you look very carefully at several of the points this guy is making, and use them to improve what plans you already have set to go.
I do not like the hidden slavery message in the elemental mechanic. Direct control of the elemental would make that message stronger.
I didn’t really see the summoned ones as sentient, but rather as the elements temporarily given a shape. The ‘wild’ elementals however, I’m not so sure about. An Asura could probably answer that question.
As for making them controllable, there are 3 basic problems: they’d make the true pet professions less different (if anyone can control their pets, why does the ranger need the F2 skill?), they have more than 1 skill each (which one to pick for the trigger) and finally, every other summon skill would need to get that ability too (including warbands, thieves, golems, etc.).
Frankly, I see no reason we can’t let all summoned minions do this. As far as the Elite Elemental having 2 non-basic abilities, that one’s simple as well. Tap the button/key for one ability, hold it down for half a sec for the other ability. Similar to the bomb throw/place in the Super Adventure Box. I’d also much prefer it if the Elementals stayed around until they actually were defeated, instead of being on a timer, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.
I also like the home instance rewards, however what I would also like to see them do with the cosmetic rewards like the back pieces is put them all into the achievement panel with the Zenith weapon skins and such. I don’t like holding them in my bank, but I also don’t like the idea of using them and needing a gem item just to get them back after I’ve used them.
First off, let me state that I don’t mind Scarlet as a character, she’s a loon and that can make for an interesting character, and I’m sure that if/when (hopefully the latter) we find out her motivations that they should be pretty interesting. However, I feel that one of the big problems with Scarlet in the Living Story is namely that she’s the one responsible for Every. Single. Thing. If you want to make a truly living world then a more realistic way would be to have multiple villains that you could cycle through, each of them doing their own thing and trying to take over the world (OF COURSE!) in their own varied ways.
Having a single big villain gets old, and it makes it seem like all the other forces in the world are content to simply let themselves go with the flow until this single villain comes along and does something. The other factions should be able to have some motivation, or at the very least there HAVE to be some other villains with differing methods that could be used. It’s a fact that not everyone is going to like every release, and it’s also a fact that not everyone is going to like a particular character. Overusing Scarlet is going to just make it so that the players that DO like her (as a character or as a villain) are going to feel that she’s worn out her welcome in very short order.
tl;dr: Scarlet can’t be the only villain with this kind of ambition, give us some other villains to cycle through, overdosing on a single villain is a bad thing.
I was mainly wondering if the Obelisk Shard is going to be a standard place of power that’s only good for the one skill point (and for fusing Quartz and anything else that might use the fusing mechanic later) or if it will “refresh” itself each day and be a source of an extra skill point once per account per day. Could be a good way to get new characters to get some skill points aside from Scrolls of Knowledge.
Main thing I’d like them to do to make Evasive Arcana MUCH better would be to make all but the Water form of it centre from where you started the dodge. It really would make them far more useful, since generally when you dodge you’re outside the range of what was just hitting you.
Most people only used Evasive Arcana for the Water and Earth moves. Water for the extra healing (which frankly COULD be accomplished just fine with more points into Water or Earth, either would work) or Earth purely because it is a Blast Finisher (and even that’s not so great). People still liked going into Arcana because it helped lower attunement cooldowns and gave some Boon Duration. Thing is, attunement swapping CAN be mitigated somewhat thanks to Conjures actually being semi-usable now (can use one after you do some big combo, putting lots of your skills on cooldown) and the Grandmaster traits in Arcana aren’t that great now when you take a hard look at them.
Stability is also pretty silly on the Ele. Only non-Elite that grants it is Armour of Earth, and that’s on an oh so short 90s cooldown. Meanwhile Guardians and Warriors get Stand Your Ground and Balanced Stance, which you can see above are 30s and 40s, respectively. Frankly, there’s no logical reason that an Ele should be required to have such hefty cooldowns on the vast majority of their abilities, especially ones like stun-breakers and stability granting skills.
PvE
1) Class balance (would like to see Elementalists discussed in particular)
2) Condition cap in group encounters and possible solutions
3) Skins rewarded for achievements: Why are these one-use and not incorporated into the achievement panel like the Zenith weapons and Hellfire/Radiant armour skins?
Frankly, lots of Ele skills need some shorter cooldowns. For example, one common D/D combo is to use RtL, Updraft, Burning Speed, Fire Grab, Ring of Fire, Earthquake, Churning Earth. This is a pretty good combo, and if you use Signet of Earth to stop the enemy from getting away or dodging during the last step, you land some heavy damage. Main problem is that if ANY step of this combo is left out, it can bork things. And several of these skills have a cooldown of 40 secs or more. If one of the key attributes of an Elementalist is attunement dancing and setting up these kinds of combos, then they NEED to have shorter CDs so that we can actually use these combos instead of being reduced to using our auto-attacks.
Fire Grab in particular really needs the change though, making it a PBAoE could maybe work, even if it means lowering the damage a touch. Just about anything could work better than how Fire Grab works now.
Idea I had a while back was to let the conjure spawned in our hands be something we could swap back and forth from with the weapon swap key (the one that is spawned on the ground would still be treated as a normal bundle, so still only get 15-25 charges out of it). General idea with this was that we could use the conjure to add to our current weapon skills, instead of replacing them entirely. The stat bonuses from the conjure would also only apply while actively using it, and not while on your normal weapon skills. It could be an interesting thing to see just what kind of combo setups we could do with our normal weapon skills and conjures able to be swapped back and forth.
Combo fields/finishers are usable by EVERYONE though, not just an Ele. This Overcast idea is meant to be something unique to the Elementalist. And while it could potentially be overpowered (would Tornado last 30 secs, or FGS have 22 base charges or something under this?) I can really see it being a unique setup, since you not only use it for raw damage, but for utility purposes as well.
I’m wondering why they don’t use that fancy achievement panel that they have for things like the Zenith weapons and the Radiant/Hellfire armours. It’s simple, lets a player get a copy of the item as much as they want (because there’s a LOT of hoarders) and makes it so that the item doesn’t take up precious bank space. It seems like this’d be the easiest and most customer friendly way to manage any and everything that comes as a cosmetic reward from meta achievements, so I really have to wonder why it’s not used more.
The other thing is that quite frequently we’re expected to get rapid procs of 1 or 2 sec Burns in some things. Now if these are applied after Drake’s Breath, for example, you have to wonder if the smallest duration stack is consumed first (which would be logical, make it so that the shorter stacks are zipped out of there ASAP) or if it’ll be waiting for each of the 3 sec Burns from Drake’s Breath to burn out (hah!) just so you can apply more than one of your small duration Burns.
An option I’d really like to see is smart ground targeting when targeting areas that are out of range.
Like if I use a 900 range teleport, but I cast it at 1000 range, then it still casts at it’s maximum 900 range in the direction of where I tried to cast it. Instead, right now it just fails until you target within range, which usually means you’ll waste like 100 range.
This would be a huge QOL change.
Ideally what could happen is a “range circle” could appear while using ground target skills. Picture it like the circle that is shown to indicate a Banner’s area of effect. If you move your mouse outside of this circle while targeting, the green targeting circle simply stops at the edge. This would help players see how where they can hit with the AoE, how much closer (or further away) they should get, and it would help LOADS with any and all teleports.
The main reason I suggested having short duration and high power effects when swapping attunements was because generally our skills are lacklustre. We can fire off our most powerful stuff, but then we’re on CD for about 40 seconds for the same cool combo to come up again. We REALLY need short cooldowns on our skills if they’re going to be lower in damage than the other classes and we’re required to shift around. Things like Ride the Lightning and Updraft need to be on 20 sec CDs in order for us to be able to effectively use them, similar with Churning Earth and the Dagger 4 skill. If they’re parts of our combos, then they NEED low CDs for us to be able to effectively use them.
(edited by Kamui.3150)
Lowering base cooldown would help a great deal, IMO. Another thing I think they should do is tweak some of the “Gain this bonus while in this attunement” traits to be a great deal stronger, but really limited in duration. So for the Earth Minor Adept you change it from “+Lv Toughness while in Earth” to something like “+Lv*5 Toughness for 5 seconds after attuning to Earth, or for the first 5 seconds after entering combat while in Earth attunement.”
This gives you reasons aside from the Elemental Attunement trait and the trait that gives Fury on attunement to actually DO the attunement dancing. You get good bonuses for doing so, and can use them strategically, like swapping to Earth right when a big attack comes your way.
We’re not talking about closing the gap, we’re talking about when situations get bad and it’s a better idea to engage at range instead of sticking in melee. There’s no way for a D/D Ele to move to ranged combat and stay there when things get hairy.
Aye, what I’d try doing with Conjures instead would be to make your active Conjure (by which I mean if Flame Axe is the current one, casting Frost Bow changes your active one to that) something you can swap to and from with the weapon swap key. You’d only get the stat boosts from the conjure while using its skills, and this would let you swap between your Conjure and your standard weapon set for some really cool combos, and wouldn’t require you to be using just your 15 (or 25) Conjure charges. Ideally this would only apply to the Conjure that is spawned in your hands, the one that’s dropped on the ground would likely be treated like a regular bundle.
You’re forgetting that duration stacking conditions (and boons) will be limited to 5 “stacks” after the balance patch this month. Also, the issue will still arise when there’s multiple people. The big problem with Bleeding is the 25 stack limit, and the problem with the duration stacking conditions is that only one tick is happening each second (so if two people apply Burning, there’s still only one damage tick each second). The idea I like (I didn’t come up with it, but can’t recall who did) was to have the lowest damage stack be removed and converted to direct damage if the incoming condition would cause the intensity or duration cap to be reached.
So if you had 15 Bleed stacks that last 10 secs, and 10 Bleed stacks that last 5 secs, and try to apply 3 Bleed stacks that last 7 secs, 3 of the 5 sec stacks would be converted to direct damage, and you’d now have… 15 stacks for 10 secs, 7 stacks for 5 secs and 3 stacks for 7 secs. It’s worth noting that player’s Condition Damage could make duration not be the main factor, but this is a good basic concept. A similar setup can be done with duration stacking conditions by converting the stack with the shortest time left (since they’re capping them at 5 “stacks” then this means they can track the individual ones as well).
Evasive Arcana doesn’t exactly do me too much good while I’m swimming around.
That’s part of the cost of having made that trait choice.
Yes, and I get that, what I’m talking about is having two setups for my traits without changing where the points are allocated. So instead of Evasive Arcana I can have it set so my GM Arcana slot automatically shifts to Final Shielding or the like once I go underwater. Ideally players would be doing all that anyway once they go into the water, but this is mainly a streamlining thing so that players don’t need to spend the time to reshift their selected traits each time they move from land to water and vice versa. It’s no different from shifting your 6-0 skills when changing combat modes, so I see no reason why this couldn’t happen.
Now we just need it set up so that we can have differently selected traits while in water and land combat. It’s already set so that we have different 6-0 skills while underwater. Evasive Arcana doesn’t exactly do me too much good while I’m swimming around.
My personal favourite is this method.
- When a mob is hit with a condition that would take it over the cap for that condition (eg another Bleed when the mob is at 25 stacks or 5 secs of Burn when the mob is already at 21 secs or higher) then the incoming condition is compared against the ones currently on the mob.
- The stack with the smallest damage (for Bleeds, this is generally the shortest duration one, but this can vary based on WHO applied the stack) is instantly removed and converted to direct damage. This can either be a stack currently applied to the mob, or the new one that is trying to apply.
- The damage can be the direct amount, or it could be a slightly lowered amount, say anywhere from 70-90% instead of the full damage that stack would have done. The important thing is that the condition be doing SOMETHING once the stack limit for said condition has been reached.
Similar setups can be used for Burning, since we KNOW that the game tracks each “stack” of it separately, since both conditions and boons that stack duration will be limited to five “stacks” in the upcoming balance patch. Just check which stack has the lowest damage, and convert it to direct damage.
To show this in action, say an enemy has 15 Bleed stacks that are all 10 sec duration, and 10 stacks that are all 5 sec duration. An incoming attack applies 3 stacks of Bleed for 7 secs. Assuming no ConDam, this setup removes 3 of the 5 sec stacks, converts them to direct damage, and we now have the following. 15 of the 10 sec stacks, 7 of the 5 sec stacks, and 3 of the 7 sec stacks.
As another example, let’s say that 22 secs of Burning are on a mob, and an attack attempts to apply 5 secs of Burning. This would convert 2 secs of Burning to direct damage, and apply incoming condition to give 25 secs Burning.
This setup would work pretty well IMO, and could be used for just about every damaging condition to ensure that condition builds aren’t left out.
This is probably a stupid idea (it’s mine after all), make the base healing lower, but have it multiply based on cast time. So stuff like Churning Earth and Meteor Shower have the side effect of providing healing to us as well, while we can still spam stuff like Lightning Whip to get rapid-fire heals off.
True, I was mainly looking at skills that are stunbreak + Stability. I’d far prefer to just use Blink to get the hell away from my enemy than use the Mantra.
Comparing to other classes can be a good thing, because some things are just plain ridiculous when you look at them. Things such as the difference between the standard Stability-granting skills for Eles and, say… Guardians. Eles have Armour of Earth while Guardians have Stand Your Ground . So let’s take a look at these two, shall we? AoE gives 6 secs of Stability and 6 secs of Protection to the user, and also acts as a stunbreak, pretty useful. It’s got a 90 sec cooldown, but a stunbreak and Stability has to be worth it, right?
Let’s see what the Guardian one looks like, it’s only 5 secs of Stability, and 5 secs of Retaliation instead of Protection, alright, so not gonna mitigate damage, instead sending it back. Oh, but this is a Shout, so it affects up to 4 other people in range as well. It also acts as a stunbreak too, so this is REALLY powerful. Surely it’s got a really high cooldown to go along with this, right? It’s got a 30 sec cooldown, 1/3 of what an Ele’s Stability skill is.
Well, maybe the Guardian one is just a bit too strong, let’s see what other Stability skills are for other professions. Warrior has Balanced Stance which gives Stability and Swiftness to the user for 8 secs. Pretty good, he can avoid knockdown and could potentially use it to flee, so how long does it take to recharge? 40 secs, that’s a little under half the Ele’s AoE CD.
Mesmers and Necros are our fellow casters, surely they have similar Stability skills as us, right? Ah, nope, Mesmer’s Mantra of Concentration is a Mantra, so it does require charging, but they can fire it off twice and give themselves 2 secs of Stability and stunbreak each time. How long is the recharge? 25 secs. Necros have Well of Power which is a really nice Well if enemies are spamming conditions on you, it also stunbreaks as well as pulsing 1 sec of Stability each second while inside it. This is great, surely you can’t use a skill like THIS very often? Nope, 50 sec CD, little OVER half the CD of AoE on the little Ele.
So there’s 4 classes who just have a better Stability skill than the Ele, and every single one of them has better ways to take the damage if they DO end up getting stunned anyway. If an Ele gets stunned, they’re basically dead unless they pop a stunbreak, and even then with an Ele being so fragile, they’re going to get smacked hard again. And since this is on a utility skill, they don’t even have any justification on the grounds of “but you get 20 weapon skills!”. It’s pretty ridiculous, frankly, as well as pretty kitten sad.
It wasn’t the boss that was killing them, it was the cheap mechanics of the dungeon and the sense that the player couldn’t really do anything to do better aside from doing better at the jumping. The other issue was the fact that the golems (and thus their pull tells) were nigh invisible when the player was trying as hard as they could to just stay way ahead of the beams. If the beams had moved about half of their speed during the fight, so that players had more time to be doing SOMETHING other than constantly fleeing from them, then the fight might have been more fair. As it was, most players had to do everything they could just to stay ahead of the laser walls, and thus the golems got charged up and became nigh unkillable.
Frankly, if this actually is a “smaller” update, that’s not really always a bad thing. The Tequatl update for example is relatively small (I know it took a LOT of work, but I mean that getting a few of the fights in and getting the achievements, as well as the Boss Week achievements, didn’t take that long if you were dedicated to it), and it’s given me more time to actually play the game on my other characters and progress on my main instead of just trying to farm the content non-stop. Smaller updates can be good, both new players and players that have some lower level alts shouldn’t have to pick between devoting all their time to the content of the week (2 weeks, but shush) or to progressing their characters a bit.
Yamsandjams, I was stating that one thing they could do was put an item in the gem store that reverts an item that’s soulbound to account bound, which then becomes soulbound again upon being equipped. That way ANet would get a bit of cash with each time someone wanted to move around the item to another character. Putting a cost on moving them will make it so that they still can’t be moved nearly as much as a normal account bound item, but are still able to be moved if something new comes out that is cooler looking. Player will then buy the new item, as well as the unbinding item from the gem store, so like I said, it’s a win/win. Players get the limited ability to move their soulbound stuff to another character, and ANet gets a bit of extra gem purchases.
That’s why I think they really need to release some kind of item (in the gem store maybe?) that can turn a soulbound item into an account bound item, some stuff would have to be excluded of course, like the racial armours. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to spread special items like this around to characters, even if there has to be a cost to doing said moving.
If the back skin were awarded via the achievement panel similar to the Zenith weapon skins and the Radiant/Molten armour ones, I would have a far harder choice. But if it’s between an item that only ONE character can use, and one that all my characters can share, then I’m definitely going for the mini. I don’t even USE minis, but I far prefer something that I don’t have to worry about being soulbound.
I was actually pondering getting this for my Necromancer, it sounded like it might be pretty cool. Then I saw that the “pick” looks more like a sickle and I don’t see as much of it as “bone” as it looks like a wing or something. And then I saw the animation, ye gods the animation. It’s just black rocks and sludge, I mean, really? For a bone pick I expected the rocks to be skulls and for either a fountain of blood to erupt or for undead arms to pick apart the node for me, hell, wouldn’t even need the normal mining animation for the second one.
I’m also seeing a problem in the eventual future with things like this. If you had gotten the Molten Pick in the past and later found that for SOME reason you preferred this one? You are screwed, you have to wonder if spending 800 gems is worth the new aesthetics for any content down the line or if you want to bite the bullet and get what you can now. My Ele is not only my main, he was also a perfect fit for the 3 initial gathering tools, including the oddity of the Chop-It-All Axe, since it calls down lightning. But that’s not the case with everyone, I like the idea of having infinite tools which are also aesthetically pleasing to my characters’ designs, and would greatly appreciate it if ANet would put some kind of item in the gem store that can change a single piece of equipment from being soulbound to being account bound instead. That would give players the ability to get the new tools and still send the old ones to another character that fits the old tool, and ANet would actually be making more income from gems, it’s a win/win.
Finally, the Bone Pick is Rare quality while the Molten Pick is Masterwork? It doesn’t actually affect anything, but it really seems like an odd choice, I see no reason why all the infinite tools shouldn’t be considered Exotic quality. Just my 2 copper.
One thing I’m not looking forward to is limiting conditions (and boons) that stack in duration to only 5 “stacks” at once. This means that Burning is screwed for Eles, since one of the things that tends to happen with that is we do lots of small applications of it, like from the Minor Adept Fire trait, Drake’s Breath, Burning Precision, etc. It’s also gonna suck for the boon side, since it’s going to slaughter the LH build’s Fury uptime. The other thing we have to wonder is if it’s only considering “stacks” from a single source, or if I’ll need to worry about any other party members that might have long lasting Burns but no ConDam. Damaging conditions in general need a look at due to how they get screwed over when a cap is reached, especially on Champs and world bosses, and this is just going to make the problem even worse.
So I take no claim for the base form of this idea, but earlier today I saw a vid by Wooden Potatoes where he mentioned using the dynamic event mechanics in the game to improve the big meta events. I figured it could be a really cool idea to see what could be done with the other events around the Splintered Coast in order to improve both the Tequatl fight, and to give a bigger sense of actually being in a living world where your actions in the area around you can really affect things. Not only that, it will also give players that want to fight Tequatl something interesting they can do instead of just sitting on the beach waiting for him to fly in. So here’s what I’m figuring could be done with the local events to alter the Tequatl fight to be more interesting.
- Defend Chokevine Gorge before Risen overrun it
This event involves slaying some Risen that are inhabiting the gorge which separates the Splintered Coast from the outpost of Caer Brier. My suggestion is that if this event has been cleared since the last Tequatl spawn, then there should be some Sylvari reinforcements that arrive to help defend the Megalaser and the batteries during those parts of the Tequatl fight. I find it hard to believe that the Sylvari would not notice Tequatl having flown in, and it makes sense that they would have reason to help you out in order to make sure the coast isn’t corrupted. However if the event is currently active when Tequatl spawns, then the Sylvari will be unable to get through the gorge to aid the players, they will instead be congested in the gorge with their hands full.
- Escort the Quaggans to Quaztocel
This event has you escorting a small group of Quaggans to the battle site, apparently due to an order from Quaztocel for “plant materials”. If this event has been cleared, then we could buff the 3-5 skills on the Hylek turrets in some way. The plants are used to enhance whatever is already in the turrets to be even more effective. The 4-5 skills could have their boons last a bit longer, and the 3 skill could either prevent a poison field from being laid down in the same area for a short time. If we wanted to get really crazy, we could have the 3 skill actually revive one player in the AOE of the effect from downed or defeated state, giving the people on the turrets a way of helping out the downed players and giving them some extra time to attack Tequatl. If the event has not been done, then the turrets could be in either their current state, or we could even have them be slightly less effective than they currently are, to give good incentive to clear the event.
- Defend the supply of energy from krait (United Arcanist Lab)
This event has you defending an energy supply from some Krait for five and a half minutes. If this event has been cleared, then during the next Tequatl fight the Megalaser could stun Tequatl for a bit longer when fired. The Asura have their energy containers, and are able to use them to help power up the Megalaser to give it a bit more of a punch. Alternatively, if they’re adding in extra power, this event’s success could shorten the time on the defend the Megalaser event to 1:30 or 1:45 instead of the current two minutes, since the Asura have some energy already, it doesn’t take as long to charge.
Well, those are my ideas on what could be done with the Dynamic Events in the area around Tequatl to help make it feel like the players have actually accomplished something, as well as to make the world actually feel alive and ever-changing. The additional bonus to this is that like I said, this gives the players waiting for Tequatl to spawn something to do while they wait. If needed, we could have the events spawn a couple of times between spawn windows, and require that they be cleared 2 or more times each. The general idea is using these dynamic events to make it feel like the player(s) changed things around them, hopefully for the better. Any input you guys have would be great, so what do you think?
Yes, we can do all of that, and the decent ones do so, however it’s a simple fact that we’re simply spread too thin for it to work very well. By default, we’ve got mediocre direct damage, conditions, healing, and control. If we spec for glass cannon or bunkery, we get those stats, but we remain mediocre at everything else, to the point where it’s more beneficial to just wait for the cooldowns in our chosen specialty to refresh. The point is that without speccing in a certain focus, we remain well below average in those categories, and since we can really only focus on one or two stats at a time, it means that we’ll get decent in that category, and still mediocre at the others, while the other classes will be great in their focused path, but still be decent at other stuff if they want to try it.
I had an alternative idea to making them somewhat but not quite like kits in this thread over here. Short version was have them be our swappable weapons while active, and have it only apply to the one we spawn in our hands. So you can swap back and forth from the active Conjure to your normal skills.
One thing I believe ANet could do to help Eles a lot is to balance out what Glenstorm mentioned by changing most of the “Get X while in this attunement” to be skills that are short in duration but can be quite powerful when used well, things like changing the Minor Adept Earth trait from “+Lv Toughness while in Earth” to “+Lv*5 Toughness for 5 seconds after attuning to Earth or for the first 5 seconds after entering combat mode while in Earth attunement” would go a long way to making the attunement dance a useful tool for us that could be used very strategically. Similar things should be done with the other minor traits, IMO, so you can balance between having powerful effects when swapping attunement, or having faster attunements by picking between the elemental lines or the Arcana line.
That or they could just scale his HP down to where it’s reasonable to do it within the 15 minute limit. He’s a tough fight, can bring up that bone wall purely to run said timer down, and it seems like the 2 skill on the turrets doesn’t negate the wall, just delays the inevitable. Some of the mechanics are also a bit wonky, like the poison fields popping up right under the turret locations, and, since they deal damage, slaughtering the turrets themselves as well as the players in them. I had figured that the poison would just be a hazard for those that were trying to do melee on Tequatl, not something that even the turrets would need to worry about spawning under them.
In short, nerf his HP (HP sponges are just boring, lengthening the timer isn’t going to fix this), make it so the poison doesn’t reach to where the turrets are positioned, and I think the fight would be a lot more manageable. Still very difficult, but managable.
So I was talking with a friend of mine about Conjures and improvements that could be done for them, and I think I came upon something that could really integrate them well into an Ele’s fighting style (even with the buffs coming for them) and make them something truly unique for an Ele, while still usable for everyone else as great temp items.
The general idea is this, when you use a Conjure, you get the one plopped on the ground, and the one spawned in your hands. At this point, instead of a “drop bundle” button, you get a “swap weapon” button. This will last for the duration of the conjure, depleted either when you run out of charges or time, and once you have lost all the charges or time, the Conjure skill starts its cooldown at that point (until then it’s a “Locked Skill” similar to Elemental summoning Glyphs). This feature will only be used for the Conjure that manifests in the Ele’s hands, if they pick up the one that was placed on the ground, it will act as a normal bundle and drop as they currently do. If they pick up another bundle of any kind, or use another Conjure, their current Conjure instantly poofs and goes on cooldown. So they can only have one swappable Conjure active at a time.
I think that this might actually give a really neat aspect to Conjures exclusive to Eles, letting them use the Conjures as their alt weapon sets would give them a great utility use, and expand their options to make Eles more versatile, which is what ANet seems to want to do with Eles. I would also have the stat boosts from all Conjures (Such as +Pow/ConDam with the Fire ones) only apply while actively wielding it, so as to not be used as passive stat boosters. Imagine how cool it would be to call up the Lava Axe, lay down a Fire Ring without need for Dagger off-hand, and then swap back to your normal weapon for Might stacking before swapping BACK into the Lava Axe to use the potential new Blast finisher and speedy Might stacking on the auto. It’d be something unique to Elementalists, and would play greatly on expanding our versatility in weapon skills.
Some might say this is too close to Kits, but those can be swapped instantly, have no limit on charges or how long you can have them out, you can use multiple Kits in combos all strung together (whereas there can only be one active Conjure with this idea) and also have no cooldown after they have been used up. Having them be a swappable item and then having a full minute where they’re inactive should be a good counterbalance to the power and utility this would provide, at least IMO.
I understand why this needs to be fixed, but can I request that we get stack sigils for things like Toughness and Vitality as well? Possibly even for the profession specific attributes.
(edited by Kamui.3150)
The main benefit that an Ele loses when trading the weapon swap is the fact that they can’t change their combat range at all. A secondary benefit of weapon swap is that you can drastically change what skills you have as combos for some very interesting effects. Ele only gets 4 weapons, one of which can go in main-hand or off-hand, and that’s it. Despite having a vast array of skills, they’re very predictable. Anyone that’s played an Ele and gotten decent at it knows that there’s a few combos that work and work comparatively well; things such as RTL and Updraft followed by Burning Speed, as well as basic stuff like Eruption and Lava Font, and the standard Might stacking in Sceptre/Dagger.
Any other class, even Engineers, to an extent, can drastically change their combat style with weapon swap, they can change range, they can change from a heavy damage setup to something like Mace/Shield for Warriors, so they can tank up and heal, they have loads of options. And they can also spec their utilities around one or both of their weapon sets. Necromancer has a great setup with Sceptre/Dagger as well as Corruption utilities, but they can still do well with Staff. In the meantime, an Ele has no great combos to use with weapon skills aside from maybe Lightning Flash with things such as Churning Earth and maybe Fire Grab if you add Cleansing Fire into the mix. Most of an Ele’s utilities are spent just on trying to stay alive. There’s no room to use something like Glyph of Storms or Signet of Water, because all you have must be spent on skills like Armour of Earth and Arcane Shield so you can actually stay alive.
Ele does indeed have a lot of problems, and there are several ways that ANet could go about it. One way could be to just add in weapon swapping, another could be to put in better traits that encourage staying in an attunement so that a player can choose to swap around or stick in one or two of their favourites. Another thing the could do might be to lower base CD on attunement swapping to 10-12 seconds, possibly lowering the boost from the Arcana line. A final thing they could do if they really must insist that Ele players rely on swapping around a lot could be to tweak the traits that are attunement specific. Make them short in duration, but VERY powerful while they’re active. Something like “Attacks against you for 5 secs after swapping to Earth inflict Bleeding onto the foe” or “Next 5 skills after shifting into Air attunement inflict Weakness or Vulnerability”. Traits like that would encourage you to get into the attunement, fire off your skills, and then leave it ASAP so you could get it on cooldown and get back into the attunement to get your boost going again.
I ended up burning my Liquid Karma on Tuesday because I figured it wouldn’t be changed, but I still had my boosters. The rollback apparently didn’t hit me, as I still have the karma from chugging all my jugs and such. I’m unsure if we were supposed to lose the karma from the liquid consumption and gain the jugs back, or something else. It would be really helpful if we could get info on exactly what is/was supposed to happen, as I’m a bit confused now.