Guild Wars 2

Kaizer.7135:

Walker.3056:

One of the most popular and and strong mesmers build are the Shatter builds, it can generate an insane amount of illusion and guess what they DO NOT need to stay alive for long cause the mesmer will blow them up asap to burst, interrupt, get invult, place conditions and thats why even inside an aoe they still work perfectly, so aoe cant negate a trait line.

Even on phantasm builds that focus on letting illusions up u can buff their HP to a very good amount, this can make them viable to small grp fights and AWESOME in 1v2 or 3. They can divide the foe attention wich usually leads them to death

Reveal on the other hand makes impossible for thief to get any thing out of a stealth trait line

I like how Knote completely ignores this hahaha

That’s one build (shatter build) and it requires 2 specific traits and utilities and they have to be in melee range for it to be completely instant.

Buffing phantasm hp requires 1 trait slot AND giving up an entire utility slot for it.

Oh not to mention, a good portion of Mesmer survivability comes from Stealth as well, and they also have important traits that rely on it. (PU), you don’t see them freaking out, despite the fact that stealth is their only true escape, while thieves have better evasion/mobility and teleports to escape with.

Keep exaggerating thieves.

(P.S. Thief and Mesmer are my most played classes since beta)

TheZeus.8617:

And yet nothing done to address the poor state that ele is in… like someone said b4 lowest hp yet no armor, agies, clones or stealth… forced to go certain lines to litterally not get one shot.. come on Anet do some real work and fix a broken class. We see what you did with warrior, that took a year, now to get the rest of the classes there.

They should just give them mesmer base health and call it a day.

SynfulChaot.3169:

Knote.2904:

SynfulChaot.3169:

I hold that elementalists and thieves are equally weak while levelling until they receive their traits as well.

Wow… no, just no.

Don’t you even go there, you obviously aren’t playing correctly.

Thief is probably by far the most efficient and easiest class to solo/level with and Elementalist is probably the hardest.

Thief is fine if you only ever aggro one at a time. Maybe two. More than that, especially at low level, and you’re kittened. As you level, though, and gain traits then it gets better. But at low level thief is just too squish.

raahk.2786:

Nah, wrongo. Thief is pretty easy to level using Sword/Pistol, I’d have to say the easiest is again, the pve king, warrior, while mesmer is definitely the hardest, or at least the most tedious. Most mesmer players say that their class doesn’t become fun until about level forty or so.

No. They really don’t. As a mesmer you practically require the traits to be useful and fun. And the useful utilities as well. Before that is a drag.

No, you obviously don’t know how to play your thief then.

It’s by far the easiest and most forgiving class to level (next to necro). I can literally take on 20 mobs.

Hope, and the fact that besides all the bad stuff the fighting is still pretty fun at it’s core.

Depressing though, turning off world finals LoL stream to come back here though lol.

True, but little too late for that, I doubt it will ever change.

raahk.2786:

Knote.2904:

SynfulChaot.3169:

I hold that elementalists and thieves are equally weak while levelling until they receive their traits as well.

Wow… no, just no.

Don’t you even go there, you obviously aren’t playing correctly.

Thief is probably by far the most efficient and easiest class to solo/level with and Elementalist is probably the hardest.

Nah, wrongo. Thief is pretty easy to level using Sword/Pistol, I’d have to say the easiest is again, the pve king, warrior, while mesmer is definitely the hardest, or at least the most tedious. Most mesmer players say that their class doesn’t become fun until about level forty or so.

Nope, even mesmer is easy.

Thief using s/p is doing it wrong. Shortbow/caltrops/signet of malice and you should never ever die and can kill anything incredibly fast/easy.

SynfulChaot.3169:

I hold that elementalists and thieves are equally weak while levelling until they receive their traits as well.

Wow… no, just no.

Don’t you even go there, you obviously aren’t playing correctly.

Thief is probably by far the most efficient and easiest class to solo/level with and Elementalist is probably the hardest.

Seren.6850:

zone.1073:

If you’ve ever cooked, you’d know that the most efficient way to prepare an elaborate meal for the family is to start working on multiple things at once and let them simmer. Triage between the sauce, the meat, the noodles and vegetables until everything’s ready, then put it all together and enjoy the fantastic meal.

If you only worked on one thing at a time, like the sauce, great, you now have amazing sauce YUMMY…but no noodles or meat and veggies to go along with it. You could sip on that sauce all day but it probably won’t be very filling.

I’ve watched enough cooking shows to know people walk out when they get too hungry.

My sis is a chef and she can cook 100’s of beautiful meals at an alarming rate.

Enough with that, I stopped playing a month or two ago, still pop on the forums to see if anythings changed (it hasnt, no new dungeons since fractals, classes havnt been balanced for months, if you’re not a fan of living story the games not for you. oh plus I need 30 ascended weapons to get all my alts up to date yey, I don’t even like crafting)

the reason arathi basin (wow) was so much better than spvp in gw2 is because you didnt have to stand in AOE spam to hold a point, you just had to interrupt anyone channeling the flag

Oooh they should really consider making point capping based on flag capturing instead.

Would love to see an arathi basin sized (flag capture) conquest map.

Halcyon.5340:

Jinks.2057:

Giving rangers a reveal skill is a knee jerk move and completely kittens WvW thieves.

Losing all faith in anet

It only kittens glass cannon thieves that die in 5 seconds.

Not to mention teleport and evasion are a massive portion of thief escapability/survivability, they wouldn’t die instantly unless they ran out of options besides stealth and that is their own fault.

Charak.9761:

Kaon.7192:

Charak.9761:

You see what I mean though, some thieves are QQing, even though only ONE class is getting the counter.

“Everything needs atleast one counter” – Charak

Does any other class mechanic have a counter that outright disables the mechanic like Revealed does to Stealth?

Right. I didn’t think so. Therein lies the difference between soft-counters (like AoE’s vs pets) and hard-counters by the way. The latter should be avoided if at all possible if balance is the goal.

The revealed is similar to the hunter flare in WoW. A rogue never has perma stealth, he can only have one re-stealth every 2-3mins (pending preperation). If a hunter knows that a rogue is nearby, he can choose to flare up.

Mechanic (a): a Rogue can stealth and initiate fights to whoever he chooses
Mechanic (b): a Hunter can ‘counter’ play and gain the initation.
Mechanic ©: a Rogue can outsmart the hunter and make them pre-flare, and initiate after

Here is GW2 it can have a similar effect:

Mechanic (a): Thief wants to initiate fight, so he stealths
Mechanic (b): The ranger can pre-dodge if he knows a thief is nearby
Mechanic ©: Thief wants to re-stealth, so he has to be mindful about the rangers ‘revealed’ CD, either by juking an early CD or stealthing before the pet can ‘sic em’
Mechanic (d): The ranger either gets the lock and continues fighting, or loses target, repeating back to mechanic (a).

This is counter-play, a smart thief needs to be aware if he’s fighting a ranger and watch the pets ‘sic em’ CD. The ranger needs to know the thiefs stealth CD and know when the best time to counter.

If the thief stealths forever, then there’s no enjoyment for the hunter because he lacks the counter option available. Similar to how a sniper in an FPS racks up kills but no one knows where the sniper is, so the enjoyment for the snipees are down because they have no counter to the sniper fire.

You have to understand that stealth can’t be left ‘as is’ every mechanics needs a counter hard or soft, but it can’t just ‘be’ because that would make the thieves focus primarily on stealth mechanics.

Yes but what he is saying is it shouldn’t be like “hit button, thief instantly gets revealed.”

And actually a better comparison to WoW would be when hunter pets would continue chasing rogues after they stealth, then bring them out of it by attacking, that becomes a soft counter.

Not to mention Flare is a completely different way to reveal since it’s just revealing in a small aoe as opposed to a targeted reveal.

If it requires the pet to hit the thief to reveal then the counterplay can be :

Ranger hits Sick ’Em. Pet now is glued to the thief regardless of stealth or visibility. Thief stealths and pet continues chasing and will reveal him if pet lands a hit. Thief dodges an attack/teleports away, or drops caltrops to kite pet and reopen on ranger.

Alternatively Ranger managed to cripple/immobilize thief before/during stealth and pet lands a hit and reveals.

Good counterplay both ways.

Kaon.7192:

Knote.2904:

Kaon.7192:

Charak.9761:

You see what I mean though, some thieves are QQing, even though only ONE class is getting the counter.

“Everything needs atleast one counter” – Charak

Does any other class mechanic have a counter that outright disables the mechanic like Revealed does to Stealth?

Right. I didn’t think so. Therein lies the difference between soft-counters (like AoE’s vs pets) and hard-counters by the way. The latter should be avoided if at all possible if balance is the goal.

Well they could make it so it just makes the pet see through your stealth and chase you down, and if it manages to attack you then it reveals.

Then you have counterplay to Sick Em by dodging/avoiding/cc’ing pet.

That would be a reasonable implementation of Sick Em than I imagine they’ll have in place next patch, but I still maintain my position that no class should have a hard-counter to another’s major class mechanics.

Yeah I definately agree with that because we’re stepping over the boundary and going into Rock/Paper/Scissors land, that is NOT good for 5v5 spvp or 1v’1’s. I really despise hard RPS balancing.

Should just be a soft counter, and besides that’s how hunter pets worked on rogues in WoW I imagine, it was basically a soft counter.

Kaon.7192:

Charak.9761:

You see what I mean though, some thieves are QQing, even though only ONE class is getting the counter.

“Everything needs atleast one counter” – Charak

Does any other class mechanic have a counter that outright disables the mechanic like Revealed does to Stealth?

Right. I didn’t think so. Therein lies the difference between soft-counters (like AoE’s vs pets) and hard-counters by the way. The latter should be avoided if at all possible if balance is the goal.

Well they could make it so it just makes the pet see through your stealth and chase you down, and if it manages to attack you then it reveals.

Then you have counterplay to Sick Em by dodging/avoiding/cc’ing pet.

I’ll try to compile some of the simplest band aid-fix style changes for Ele that could really help. Gonna do my best to keep this as short and sweet as I possibly can, these are changes I really would like to see.

Staff

Fireball – Radius boosted to 120 from 90.

Would really like even bigger like 240 even at a slight dmg cost just to make it aoe

Lava Font – Radius boosted to 180 from 120. Tics dmg instantly when placed.

Radius boost is needed for same reasons as Geyser, instant dmg tic isn’t important though IMO

Water Blast – Radius increased to 240 from 90.

The heal boost is completely useless when the range is still 90, that doesn’t hit anyone

Ice Spike – Cast time reduced to 1/2 or 3/4 seconds.

Has delay already, cast time too long for how spammable it is.

Chain Lightning/Lightning Surge – Damage boost. Surge CD set to 8 from 10.

Staff air dmg is really weak, Fire is the ONLY attunement that actually does decent dmg, there’s a reason you see people sit in Fire

I would also REALLY REALLY like to see their roles reversed. Air Auto should be single target with good dmg, and Surge should be a chain lightning effect with nice dmg. If this can’t happen then atleast boost their dmg please!

Gust – Needs a bigger projectile width, or just become a cone knockback.

Eruption – Cast time reduced to 1/2 or 3/4.

Same reason as Ice Spike, already has massive delay and a really short cooldown which makes the cast time eat up too much of your time

That’s all I could ask for staff, hope it’s considered.

Focus

Firewall – Needs a condensed effect to punish people for running through it just once, like 5s burn, and/or some other effects. Fear would be really cool, or a cripple. Or Fire Aura application on allies. Or much higher power dmg per tic and larger width.

Fire Aura – Longer ICD and stronger effect OR stronger effect that refreshes instead of stacks. 3s Burn that refreshes (not stacks). Needs a much lower cooldown, 40 is insane. Could also just replace it with a new skill entirely if Fire Wall applies Fire Aura.

All aura/armors in general need a better effect on slower attacks now that they have an ICD to make it less OP against fast attacks. Especially as an Elementalist you can’t afford to be taking enough hits to make good use of these

Chill Wind (The Focus Water #4) – 3 second chill on 25 skill is just bad, make it aoe, or longer duration, or shorter cooldown, or add an extra utility like 1s immobilize or boon strip.

Ride the Lightning – Please revert the nerf to something less clunky. I don’t like the mechanic at all. Just set the cooldown to 25 seconds or something.

Arcane Trait Attunement Cooldown

Band Aid Fix – Reduced to 1% attunement cooldown reduction per point spent from 2%. Attunement Cooldowns adjusted to 13 seconds base (or w/e would meet half way).

Attunement cooldowns are insane w/o Arcane and promote spamming and hurt your ability to save important cooldowns

That’s a list of the things I REALLY care about mostly, tried to keep as small as I possibly could to avoid asking for too much, but I really want to see those changes if at all possible. 2 main ones are Staff Air dmg buffs and Arcane Trait dependency changes.

Thanks if you read. <3

Da Beetus.1275:

Knote.2904:

They need to balance it so it’s more like League of Legends, considering how much they want to follow it.

Compare Anivia to Ryze.

Anivia is more complex and takes a lot more skill, but is also very effective and has a lot of weaknesses as well.

Ryze has some weakness in being shorter ranged and slightly weak early game, but becomes a friggin tanky massive dps monster mid-late, but is VERY simple and faceroll to play. Easy yet stupidly effective.

Harder champs like Anivia however are actually rewarded for their weaknesses and skill requirement, unlike Elementalist.

One thing I see a lot of (especially on the Ele forums) is a lack of understanding of balancing for skill. If you are unfamiliar with First Order Optimal strategies check out this video:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/balancing-for-skill

It makes me giggle when I see people comparing amount of effort in to result out of two different classes/techniques/builds/strategies. Sometimes the easy to perform technique is supposed to be powerful. Like, really powerful. Otherwise the game would be incredibly frustrating and unfriendly to new players and if that were the case then GW2 (or any game balanced that way) would become a ghost town very quickly.

Of course in order for players to progress in their own skill level, they need to be weened off of the First Order Optimal strategies in favor of the harder to perform, slightly more powerful techniques as this will ultimately be more rewarding for the player.

As I just said, Riot did it right.

Champs like Ryze are extremely easy to play but very very effective.

And so are champs like Anivia who are harder to play but also very very effective.

Peetee.9406:

The goal is to get you to build towards your weapon slowly and not for you to just hoard all your mats and do it in one swoop.

1. Time gating already prevents that.

2. You can hoard past 250 anyway.

Fade.7658:

Knote.2904:

Fade.7658:

Knote.2904:

Fade.7658:

Knote.2904:

Fade.7658:

Tell ya what, how about thieves get a utility that gimps any other classes’ damage, utility or defense? Not everyone plays S/D or D/P. I play P/D and no stealth means no sneak attack (or any defenses gotten from the shadow arts line).

Giving an ability that causes reveal entirely negates a whole trait line for those that spec shadow arts.

Pistols have kitten for a #2 slot, and their idea of a boost for it for team play will be garbage.

I swear to god, the devs are clueless, and have no idea how to properly balance anything. If there was a monthly fee to play, I would’ve taken this off the hard drive 9 months ago.

Aoe dmg kills mesmer illusions and completely invalidated all of their illusion traits.

QQ mesmers useless.

And yet, I’m talking about thieves, in the thief forum, not Mesmers.

It was an example to show how what you said is ridiculous.

And yet stealth plays a much larger part of how a thief operates. Nearly every single spec incorporates it into how it plays.

There is maybe 1 or 2 build types that doesn’t rely on stealth. Mesmer illusions don’t play as an important role in that respect. While I don’t play one, I bet there are plenty of builds that don’t focus on illusions.

You want to a be a thief hater, fine. Go elsewhere and hate on thieves there.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL omg.

You have to be kidding me.

There isn’t a single mesmer build that doesn’t use illusions, a mesmer w/o illusions is literally nothing.

Thank you for proving my point regarding stealth and thieves. It’s the same thing, with maybe a niche S/D non-stealth build.

If you also read my post, I stated I didn’t play a mesmer, nor knew a lot about them.

The fact remains that you would love to see thieves suffer some sort of nerf regarding stealth.

I could care less either way. Point is you’re over exaggerating.

A long cooldown that reveals you briefly does not completely invalidate a thief and their stealth traits lol…. You can stealth right after that. Not to mention all the evasion/teleports you have to escape as well.

Mesmers do fine even if their core mechanic gets killed/disabled, you will too…

Fade.7658:

Knote.2904:

Fade.7658:

Knote.2904:

Fade.7658:

Tell ya what, how about thieves get a utility that gimps any other classes’ damage, utility or defense? Not everyone plays S/D or D/P. I play P/D and no stealth means no sneak attack (or any defenses gotten from the shadow arts line).

Giving an ability that causes reveal entirely negates a whole trait line for those that spec shadow arts.

Pistols have kitten for a #2 slot, and their idea of a boost for it for team play will be garbage.

I swear to god, the devs are clueless, and have no idea how to properly balance anything. If there was a monthly fee to play, I would’ve taken this off the hard drive 9 months ago.

Aoe dmg kills mesmer illusions and completely invalidated all of their illusion traits.

QQ mesmers useless.

And yet, I’m talking about thieves, in the thief forum, not Mesmers.

It was an example to show how what you said is ridiculous.

And yet stealth plays a much larger part of how a thief operates. Nearly every single spec incorporates it into how it plays.

There is maybe 1 or 2 build types that doesn’t rely on stealth. Mesmer illusions don’t play as an important role in that respect. While I don’t play one, I bet there are plenty of builds that don’t focus on illusions.

You want to a be a thief hater, fine. Go elsewhere and hate on thieves there.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL omg.

You have to be kidding me.

There isn’t a single mesmer build that doesn’t use illusions, a mesmer w/o illusions is literally nothing.

Zinwrath.2049:

Honestly, the players who love playing CCG’s (aka want 2000 options going into a match to customize thus creating a never near balanced scenario) are a minority, and this is obvious and who is left.

Creating a more simple to dive into game like League, TF2, smite etc. Would have been a better choice. I think shrinking down the runes considerably would have/still is an incredibly smart decision. Also shrinking down the sigils and possibly even creating fewer more generic (evenly split stat) amulets with the option of which gem do you want in it to push your stats into the direction of your play style vs the MASS stats in a certain area creating the unstoppable force/immovable object builds that plague every game that does this.

Your trait system already offers tons of neat customizations, you really never needed much past that…if each class only had 5 tabs you could play for play styles, you’d still have 40 play styles to master in spvp.

So, right now..you need massive guides to know what sigil/trait/rune/mastertrait/utility/amulet/gem before you can even be competitive due to the high number of “nub traps” aka…options in the game that are vastly inferior and will create a huge handicap for the player furthering their upset at trying to learn the basic combat tactics of the game (which combat ALONE is a huge learning curve outside all this pre-build tactics).

I’m just saying what you should do if you REALLY want a larger player base, and more people funneling in to try it out/play it. Right now its just silly…and it also adds to your needing TONS of time to balance things dueing to having NO clue what the slightest change will do being as there are 1000 options between all the variables I just listed that it could effect.

Yet Hearthstone is insanely popular and easy to understand and get into.

Fade.7658:

Knote.2904:

Fade.7658:

Tell ya what, how about thieves get a utility that gimps any other classes’ damage, utility or defense? Not everyone plays S/D or D/P. I play P/D and no stealth means no sneak attack (or any defenses gotten from the shadow arts line).

Giving an ability that causes reveal entirely negates a whole trait line for those that spec shadow arts.

Pistols have kitten for a #2 slot, and their idea of a boost for it for team play will be garbage.

I swear to god, the devs are clueless, and have no idea how to properly balance anything. If there was a monthly fee to play, I would’ve taken this off the hard drive 9 months ago.

Aoe dmg kills mesmer illusions and completely invalidated all of their illusion traits.

QQ mesmers useless.

And yet, I’m talking about thieves, in the thief forum, not Mesmers.

It was an example to show how what you said is ridiculous.

Fade.7658:

Tell ya what, how about thieves get a utility that gimps any other classes’ damage, utility or defense? Not everyone plays S/D or D/P. I play P/D and no stealth means no sneak attack (or any defenses gotten from the shadow arts line).

Giving an ability that causes reveal entirely negates a whole trait line for those that spec shadow arts.

Pistols have kitten for a #2 slot, and their idea of a boost for it for team play will be garbage.

I swear to god, the devs are clueless, and have no idea how to properly balance anything. If there was a monthly fee to play, I would’ve taken this off the hard drive 9 months ago.

Aoe dmg kills mesmer illusions and completely invalidated all of their illusion traits.

QQ mesmers useless.

The zelda animation from SAB when picking up a conjured weapon, complete with the chip tune.

Get over it, you guys are more than fine and will be more than fine after this.

1. Rangers would have to give up a utility slot to slot that gimpy shout ability who’s only purpose is to reveal you once, you have non stop stealth and plenty of evades/teleports/escapes besides just stealth as well.

2. Larcenous Strike was a skill that did too many things, dmg, evasion, AND a massive utility (spammable 2 boon STEAL). That is huge, and it has to lose one of those. I would probably have chosen a dmg reduction instead TBH. So Larcenous is utility/defensive skill with some dmg and Auto’s are your bread n butter dmg, but w/e.

Stop freaking out..

Almost any mesmer build can work for roaming.

Except if you want to be able to catch runners then you’ll need a power/greatsword build, but other than that you can fight anyone otherwise.

Yes, pure deathmatch won’t work very well outside of like 2v2 or 3v3 which could be fun/interesting.

But deathmatch with objectives is there it’s at.

Conquest is more like objectives with some killing.

Avead.5760:

So the elementalist nerfs consist of better healing on staff auto(aim at your feet,not hard) ,unsteady ground working like line of warding (omg), better geyser for staff..
You also get lighting hammer buff on static field and n4 and number 3 nockback getting the range of guardians banish (OMFG we can play finally play golf in skyhammer)
I dont know..Its sad that ele is getting so much nerfed but i think i ll take it !!!
I can already see it!!Staff bunker at far point with lightning hammer and tornado that can decap anything! Holy kitten! More cc than engi

Water Auto only heals for like 11 unless you hit someone with it, aiming at your feet won’t heal for anything.

ahuba.6430:

Lol some people think GvG has more esport potential than conquest kk

No one is saying it will or should be an Esports.

Nothing should be “determined” to be an esports, it can’t be, that’s not how it works.

They just need to make the game as fun and possible and give people options, whichever happens to get the most play and support will probably be your esports format, whatever it may be.

Fungalfoot.7213:

I think it’s time we impose some kind of penalty on zerging. Maybe lower the rewards while giving smaller groups more? It’s seriously ruining the game.

No, that’s a terrible idea, and it’s what Anet used to do (and still does somewhat) all the time, and it doesn’t work.

You need to give viable alternatives.

Anet has this pattern of nerfing the single viable farming option, then introducing a new one, nerfing that to worthlessness, introducing a new one, nerfing it… etc.

ryston.7640:

Knote.2904:

They’re balancing for the entire game, not just pvp.

1) They identified early in the development process that it was a bad idea to chain PvE and PvP together like that, and promised they would balance the two separately.

2) Their PvE is such a joke of face roll easy that I honestly don’t see why they bother. There are two modes,
a. I can see enemy animations and press ‘immune’ when I’m supposed to. So I use melee weapons and go fast
b. I have special needs and so I go ranged, where I can afford to miss a few dodges

Why do we care if we upset the delicate balance of easy and medium. No hard mode exists. This game is not at risk of making it’s PvE content unplayably difficult or unchallanging, It will never be either.

EDIT:

Oh I forgot about WvW.

Does stomping an enemy in WvW still cause rally? Because I really don’t think balancing discussions matter as long as that’s still around.

While I mostly agree with you on this, I was just pointing out that’s what he meant by “it’s a big game”.

ahuba.6430:

are people seriously asking for 10v10 and 15v15? Lol? Less is more, the less people playing vs eachother the more enjoyable the combat (down to a number of 3)

Not asking for 15 v 15 in the current maps, but bigger maps, think the old FA/JQ GW1 maps or even classic battlegrounds for WoW.

Actually conquest would probably be more fun if it were bigger like Arathi Basin.

I think they should wait to see if the pvp population grows first before trying to make large maps meant for 15 v 15 and stuff however.

mjharrison.3209:

I’m very concerned by the lack of QOL improvement for weak/underused Ele weapons & traits. Your criteria for balancing seems to still only come from sPVP performance.

Specifics:

• focus — lack of mobility/healing vs dagger, fire #4, #5, water #4, air #4 all very weak
• conjures — the limiting factor is how clunky they are to use
• glyphs — traits are weak, elementals are weak
• staff — needs to lose some AOE and gain some single-target dmg
• traits — still loads of garbage traits

Another part of the problem with Conjured weapons is Ele’s are so pigeonholed into taking cantrips because they’re just SO innately squishy that w/o them they can just die instantly.

They decided to nerf them for being used too much, but that was nerfing the symptom and not the cause, they were used too much because Ele’s HAVE to use them so much.

Just adding 1-2k more base health or maybe including more of these defensive skills into weapon abilities themselves would probably be better and still have a couple decent oh snap utilities.

But it’s a very tricky thing to balance.

Guardians seem to have no problem with dying instantly due to their low base hp though, so yeah.

Aethyl.7519:

I actually … Like the hunched posture of my Charr, and don’t understand the whole concept of a hunched Charr appearing weak.

I personally think it suits them well as war beasts, especially considering many Charr had that posture in the first one.

I am however always for more options, and I would gladly accept such a feature, especially if we can choose to change it at any time.

I’m not asking to change it for everyone, just an option for stances in character creation, I’ve seen other MMO’s that have optional stance selections and thought it would be nice to have.

I’m also not asking for a huge change either, it’d just be the torso angled upward a little bit more to lessen the hunching.

Kodan has this amazing posture with it’s torso while also have the curve of the powerful neck to make them bestial, I would love that posture for my charr caster.

Dustfinger.9510:

I have done boxing, kick boxing, tae kwan do and was a hand to hand combat instructor in the Marine Corps. Hunched forward is common to both boxing and mma. But forget these resumes that may or may not actually be true. This to me doesn’t seem reminiscent of a beaten dog. it look confident and dangerous. Like a predator:

Actually the pic you posted isn’t a charr in a full hunch.

Frostfang.5109:

No, No, No, No… no cat-haed on human body here thanks!!!

Where are people getting these arguments? It’s already a cat head on a human body.

It’s a humanoid creature for crying out loud, it’s bipedal, IT HAS ABS AND PECS!

Even with a slight adjustment in posture it looks very menacing and bestial, just look at it’s powerful neck curvature, with a better balanced posture it still looks very powerful but also graceful.

Nuka Cola.8520:

D I V A.6018:

Make Deathmatch happen in some sort of continuous Random Arena\Team Arena and I will randomly propose to someone from the PVP-staff. #nohomo
D I V A

why people sign their messages with their name when you can clearly see the name already? Are we in 1800 sending a letter to a castle across barren seas or what lol

Well, his name is Diva….

ryston.7640:

JonathanSharp.7094:

For a game the size of an MMO, these things take time. We’re not a small game that can move/change/adapt quickly.

Just checked Twitch.

Sonic 2 has more viewers than you.

Diablo 3, the flop of all flops, have more viewers than you.

Your PvP is not a large game. Keep making excuses for having one of the worst sequels in the history of bad sequels. I think you should hire George Lucas.

They’re balancing for the entire game, not just pvp.

Fortus.6175:

Lava font should get Geyser treatment (radius wise), and make the first tick be instant or(and?) at least make it higher damage.

Air #3 blowout is so underwhelming and fails 4/3 times, please make it more like shockwave or a small cone with reduced range.

Burning retreat (#4 fire) should be a blast finisher on cast at the place it started, and remove either roots/chills/slows or 3 conditions and a small heal considering how thats our only active “defensive” skill for staff.

Oher than that maybe increase the radius on water auto attack to match that of the bow, it would be very frustrating when we have to rely on niche weapons to do what a skill should had been doing from release.

Great post and I really hope we do more for eles than just that, they are in a dire state. Guardians access to fury is a great start, but lets not stop there, for low stats they should have a higher chance to lock down a target rather than hope i will stay for the fight

/cheers

The radius on water auto and frost bow auto are the same gimpy 90 radius.

But what about Necro’s sucking giant blood bubbles out of you!!!

Think of my babies!!!

Blix.8021:

I miss CoF farming tbh, it was something relaxing to do for an hour or two. More so than frantically waypointing around to keep up with the zerg at least.

Yes, this is what the problem is, there needs to be more variety in what you can do to somewhat efficiently make money.

Champ farming can actually be fun for a while (would be more fun if they actually scaled and put up a fight =p), but it can get boring being the ONLY option.

There just needs to be more viable farming “activities” to the point where it no longer becomes “Farming” and just becomes playing the game doing w/e you feel like doing and making progress in terms of gold.

JonathanSharp.7094:

@ Rewards: We want to make it more fun to rank up and we want to provide more incentive to rank up. We also want to have more fun progression as you’re ranking up with cool rewards as you’re ranking.

We also don’t like how long it takes to rank up for some players after they hit a certain rank, so we’ll be addressing that as well.

@ Bigger maps: The idea right now is to make something that can scale in team size so that you can play it in bigger teams, or smaller teams. We also want to make sure we spread people out on the maps in a way that creates space, while also creating pockets where conflict is encouraged (and rewarded!).

That sounds like well designed map if you can make it happen. Team scaling maps sounds interesting too.

I don’t want to take up more of your free time with silly questions but, I know you’re afraid of splitting people up and possibly lowering the population that will participate in the normal conquest.

But lets say you release some of these new modes and they’re a huge hit and it takes away from conquest a bit. Then eventually people start to play the new modes/maps more competitively if it happens to just be more balanced and fun, would your balance/esports priorities move from the less desired mode to the new ones? It would probably be wise to follow the crowd’s desires and nurture a budding esports scene out of it like Riot did with LoL.

Just wondering how open minded you guys are with the esports situation.

Would love to see some alternative options for profit, like a way to go to old zones and do events with like 5 people that would scale better and give better rewards.

Nuka Cola.8520:

They’re working on new modes? Wow! I just want big maps, 10 vs 10, attack/defend kind of scenario (aka FA in gw1). team DM would be ‘okay’ as well but that’s what hotjoin is for so meh

This, just one map/mode that’s more like a bigger 15 v 15 like Jade Quarry.

I played the HELL out of Jade Quarry when I played casually in gw1. Dear god those were fun times.

SynfulChaot.3169:

Lighter.5631:

how is wall of reflects, spirit shield, shield 5 and everything else not party support?

A guardian can provide far more support than that. I’m not saying zerker isn’t good. I’m saying zerker isn’t the ‘one true way’. There are other viable builds.

It’s not that anything other than zerker isn’t viable, it’s that anything else other than zerker isn’t worth it or efficient just because the way the game is, high tanky or high supportive builds just aren’t needed or as useful in the end.

Would be nice to have that change so a supportive or tanky build would be desired in some way, but right now it’s not the case.

ensoriki.5789:

JonathanSharp.7094:

We are working on new game modes. As we get closer to being ready to talk about them more, we’ll give you guys more details!

Is this because you aren’t sure about the mode or because you don’t have things ready for that mode?

Because they’re not finished and won’t discuss them til they’re close to being cut in stone. It’s probably at a point where it will change a whole lot and can’t be determined when it will be finished and thus talking to us in depth about it will be a waste of time and cause “expectations” and dissapointments.

foofad.5162:

Guardian Sword’s autoattack chain is the only melee weapon you can kill yourself with in Jade Maw. It’s dumb. The damage on it is fine though. Sword AA hits very hard.

Excited about the Purging Flames change, but I don’t think it’s going to address the issue of how much condition damage is being thrown around in WvW and the ability to reapply conditions immediately after they’ve been purged. Condition removal is very easily over saturated to the point of uselessness. Reducing condition duration in the field is a good start, but when the condition damage specs you’re fighting have conditions even on their autoattacks (Warrior sword, Necro scepter, etc etc) it becomes a pretty meaningless gesture. There needs to be a more systematic addressing of conditions. I won’t go so far as to say that they’re OP, but right now the counter-play that exists for them is ineffective in many settings.

Yeah, conditions (as well as pretty much all dmg in the game) needs to be a little less sustained on auto attacks, and a little more bursty on bigger more avoidable attacks. It’s a futile effort to have avoidance when most of the DPS coming at you is from free no cooldown auto spam, especially in the case of Conditions that need condition cleansing to counter.

Passive condition cleansing would also need to be looked at.

Heiltdo.2891:

Question about: Better fast cast ground targeting.

Will it be possible to display the AoE projected area while still using this function?

Why?, because sometimes in large fights, it’s easy to lose your mouse, and it will add more functionality.

I believe that’s what the new option is for, the ability to hold and release a skill, holding should show the aoe projection, then release to cast.

morrolan.9608:

Arheundel.6451:

@Jonhatan Sharp

We’re working on the staff in an effort to make it a stronger support weapon, and we also improved the conjure weapons so that they’re stronger for support. You’ll see improvements to all 4 of the conjure weapons to make them stronger and better for support.

We also increased the healing on Water Blast, the radius on Geyser and we reworked
Unsteady Ground to make it function more like line of warding.

Basically the upcoming “buffs” are all intended for support role , including the conjure skills which may be now more appealing to an ally.

Anet doesn’t want ele to be best at anything, it’s their intention to have the ele as a " ready for everything" high skill cap profession, what are your thoughts?

Its ridiculous, the staff is already a strong support weapon it needs buffing in terms of attacking abilities.

Yes and no, some abilities that are “supportive” or utility needed the help.

Geyser radius boost is mainly a QoL change, and a huge one at that.

Unsteady Ground really needed help and changing it to a block will be a very nice utility boost.

The water auto healing boost though is a questionable change, the healing boost isn’t needed it desperately needs a boost in radius as well because it’s currently useless at 90 radius.

JonathanSharp.7094:

We are working on new game modes. As we get closer to being ready to talk about them more, we’ll give you guys more details!

Unfortunately for you guys, we saw the leaks, however I have to say I’m extremely excited for it.

I’m really glad to see you adopting the idea of “Deathmatch with Objectives” or something like that, instead the opposite that Conquest sort of is which is “Objectives with some killing here and there.”

Objectives based pvp modes are actually fine, like conquest, but some VARIETY in objective based pvp modes is what will be the true winner here. =D

Again I can’t wait, this should breath some fresh air into the game, good luck.

Arheundel.6451:

You promoted this profession as highly versatile..but you want us to invest 45% of the available trait pts in a specific line in order to play the profession

Your original concept was a profession able to switch to the right attunement at the right time, but that concept idea never really got implemented, for obvious marketing reasons ( all the illegitimate QQ on unofficial forums ) you decided to change each attunement into something you simply stay for few secs rather than use it at the right time.

Yes this exactly, it’s a huge problem.

The thing is, even if attunements had NO cooldown, people say it would be massively overpowered but I honestly do not think so.

First of course you would just have to put cooldowns on the procs from attunement swapping, just like on-swap sigils, but then this actually opens up the flexibility to use your abilities when you actually need them.

Right now, even with 10 second attunement cooldowns, if you have a clutch/important cooldown in an attunement, you can’t save it and hope to use it right when you need to because of the cooldown.

If staff Ele needs to drop his chill field and swap to water attunement to do so, but doesn’t need the healing/cleanse and swaps out, they’re locked out of their ability to do that for 10-16 seconds JUST so they could drop that chill field. All of a sudden they need that condition cleanse/healing? Nope.

This also encourages you to basically just spam everything on cooldown (the way necro’s are encouraged to spam everything on cooldown) and basically just create a static rotation, this is not a good thing.

Attunement cooldowns do not affect the individual skill cooldowns, which btw are already balanced by having massive cooldowns like 45 – 50 seconds. Engineers don’t get locked out their kits when swapping in and out, why should Elementalists suffer this HUGE penalty to access their flexibility?

If each attunement was good as standalone ability set this would actually be perfectly fine, but they’re not. Fire is most of your dmg, Water very low dmg and all of your healing, Earth is all of your hard defensive stuff, Air all your CC, etc.

I’ve been saying this, they need to remove some dmg/emphasis on the auto’s and put higher dmg/reward/emphasis on the bigger skills and combo’s to reward better more tactical play.

This if for both pvp and pve.

They just need to buff the reward to match the risk, atleast to a better degree.

League of Legends nailed this for the most part.

Playing Anivia for example takes a lot more work than other easier and effective champs, but my god can it be rewarding.

I think something like that would’ve made it much less gimmicky really.

Then we wouldn’t have so many utilities devoted to these gimmicks.

Should’ve just been a Glyph basically.

Glyph of Conjured Weapons, and you summon one depending on the attunement you’re in.

Maybe they could’ve even made it so there’s 2 versions like our Elemental summons, a regular utility one and the elite one. So in this case, Greatsword would have a Water/Air/Earth version as well.

DevO.9854:

How about untraited traps.

That’s an attack, not a buff for allies, completely different.