Guild Wars 2

A single guy with Arrow Cart mastery and 3 Superior Arrow Carts can derail a EOTM karma train.

Just hole up inside FR keep and no one can take it with proper siege setup.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Stability-Change-Max-limit-to-CC-skills/first#post4842649

Called it.

You’ve always been able to use Lightning Flash regardless of what status you are in. For example if you are stunned, you can still Lightning Flash but the stun remains for the duration (So if you teleport away while 2s stun remaining, you will still be stunned for 2s).

What it likely means is that it will still function like the old method while stunned. So right now if you try to target a bad location, it says you can’t teleport there. Previously it’d put you as close to the area as you clicked. So if you are stunned, it will teleport you as close as you can to that area and if not it will print out a message saying you can’t port there.

Usable while stunned, doesn’t break stun.

They copied the same note for every single skill.

I’m betting on copy paste.

There are two main factors that go into talking about WvW gear and setups:

1. The server bracket you’re on. Talking about T1 WvW and talking about T4 WvW are two entirely separate things. Each server group does things differently and the level of organization on higher tier servers is much higher. For example, in T1 not having sufficient Toughness to survive a spike means you will fall off Commander tag and ultimately get singled out and killed. You don’t have to be frontline, but you gotta be able to survive enough incidental AOE to keep up as part of the backline as the Commander moves.

2. What are you doing in WvW? There’s three primary activities in WvW. Zerg, Havoc, and Roaming. A build that’s designed to do very well and survive/support a Zerg isn’t going to usually also do well in solo Roam. Zerg (20+) is all about large scale fighting with large spikes usually following the “GWEN” model ("G"uardian-Frontline, "W"arrior-Banner, "E"lementalist-Support, "N"ecro-Well Spike). Havoc (3-20) is about a lot of mobility as you’re often times attempting to avoid the zerg and take side objectives and generally cause backline mayhem like taking supply camps and towers as they can. Roaming (1) is about a lot of 1vX.

Sometimes these two factors are determined together. For example on T1, there isn’t a lot of solo roam and it’s mostly Havoc and Zergs.

This is actually the first thing I thought about when I read the camera changes as well regardless if it has any merit. There’s been a lot of buzz about VR this year and who knows what the future holds.

For one, I wouldn’t make Ascended anything but weapons right now. Weapons are usually pretty useful and unless them somehow dismantle the Power build meta, Berserker weapons are always going to be useful no matter what. I just don’t see them doing this so they are safe bets to build.

Armor on the other hand can shift constantly. They’re already talking about changing up encounter mechanics for HOT where stacking and bursting boss down with maximum DPS isn’t going to be viable. Or in their words, it’s due to “bad encounter design.” So whether or not that will really continue to work you don’t know. There’s also the matter of specializations. You may find that after investing 500g in Ascended armor you’re now going to play the new Guardian specialization and well that’s all wasted now isn’kitten

As for the actual gear…

There’s lots of ways to mix and match gear. A lot of it comes down to spec. I almost always have 6 points in Air so I always have maximum Precision and Ferocity from just specing into that line. This is because Lightning Rod is awesome in WvW and Fresh Air is awesome at just about anything else Lightning Rod isn’t awesome at.

With that in mind, I always run PVT (Soldiers) armor. The high power base doesn’t detract much from PvE dungeons or fractals and the extra Vit/Tough is largely needed for self survivability in WvW. I run Strength runes as well because I S/D and D/D a lot and occasionally spec into 6 Fire for the extra might as Staff for event farm otherwise I’d be running Pack.

What I instead swap out is jewelry. I use Ascended Berserker Jewelry and Weapons which in turn make up all the stat deficiencies I have. Even compared to someone who is 66020 with full Zerker gear, when I spec similar I am only missing out on a very minor amount of crit and ferocity (talking a few % here) and if someone is gonna bust my chops for that then I usually don’t got time for them. Conversely for WvW I have Knight Jewelry (Emeralds) with Celestial (Charged Quartz) gems socketed in. That gives me a colossal boost in survivability for zerg or solo roaming.

Works great, never have problems, and doesn’t take up huge inventory cause it’s 5 jewelry pieces that I swap back and forth.

I just use self might stacking S/D and everything melts.

I don’t really see any point in this.

I leveled a new Thief from 0-20 using a birthday scroll, then 20-80 in about 2 days of Edge of the Mist Karma trains. I don’t have to learn to play a character, I just follow the zerg, and mindlessly kill Champs all day long. I never learned how to play the thief, I still have no appreciation for the class beyond spam “Unload” with Pistol/Pistol which I know from my other amount of experience playing the game is a “bad” way to play.

The mindless karma trains are but one way to level. I have also leveled numerous characters by throwing gold at them and level them up almost entirely by Crafting (each craft 1-400 is 11 levels). I have numerous boosters I could turn into crafting boosters and level entirely this way with a birthday booster and I have ample time to prepare and get all the mats I need now to make me a Revenant in no time flat.

Assuming people will learn their class 1-80 is a poor assumption at best and serves no real purpose. Limiting Tomes of Knowledge ultimately serves no purpose but annoyance.

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Rebound.3409:

It’s quite impressive how many performance related topics have been opened since the announcement of HoT with absolutely 0 responses or any kind of info/news from the devs. I knew their PR is nonexistent at best but even so….impressive.

If you look at the history of GW thy have always made a product that could run on both high and not so high end machines. i don’t think there will be any changes made to the code to optimize it for beefier machines.

I don’t have a problem with this. I actually enjoyed the fact I could play GW1 on just about any computer I could download it on cause of how minimal the requirements were.

The problem is that you shouldn’t get to the opposite stage where the more beefier your computer the more issues you have with the game. I consistently client crash due to going over maximum memory at huge events. Either limit the client, or make the client able to handle what you’re letting it handle.

When you look at the class as a whole:

Staff (1200)
Scepter (900)
Dagger (450)
Focus
Axe (Conjure)
Shield (Conjure)
Bow (Conjure)
Hammer (Conjure)
Greatsword (Conjure)

Then you look at that pistol usually is 900m which we already have Scepter for and Rifle is 1200m which we already have Staff for the most likely candidates for something we don’t already have are Sword, Mace and Horn.

Mace in general is a dud on just about every class. Very few people like using maces and I think most people just try to not think about it as a potential option (me being one of them). Sword on the other hand is more universally appreciated as a weapon in general. Horn isn’t really thought about much but you can see Mesmer is getting an offhand so maybe we could as well. Considering we lack a mid-range (600) weapon and we have a few ranged options it’s likely whatever option we get (outside of Horn) will be 300-600 range.

The biggest problem in speculation is how these will fit into play. The most common association with the Elementalist is Attunement Swap which is our class mechanic. However they’ve already said that Specialization is going to change class mechanics, utilities and traits. A lot of people go, “Oh we will get a sword!” and assume that we’re going to get Fire/Water/Air/Earth sword skills. The classic mechanic change most likely means while we will get a new weapon but not in the way we’re thinking.

Personally I still think the specialization will be Zephyrite Elementalist where we lose attunements and instead weapon we get would have multiple attunement attacks on them like an Air focused 1, Fire focused 2, etc. Class would be focused on mobility to compensate for sudden lack of healing/boons of the base Elementalist class but that really depends if they’re willing to buff HP or change armor amounts. Also has a strong Lore tie in as well.

Lawful.5314:

So if some of these changes do come in fruition, i will probably either end up either playing another class, or quitting GW2 entirely again for half a year-year, because that is how long it usually takes Anet to wake up and rebalance the classes, while letting players suffer for that entire period because of some willy-nilly porrly thought-out suggestions.

I’m one class away from full level 80s and got the Revenant instant 80 plan ready to go as well like most people. Never know what could happen specialization wise. Another class could end up with some kinda specialization and that could look more appealing.

Also remember that each class is going to be getting a balance pass coming up with HOT as well for the default class. They could (and most likely will) do most of the re-balancing then. This could mean we’d end up with newer boons like Resistance in place of some of our existing boons like Protection and such. Lots of possibilities.

Scoobaniec.9561:

They dont have granades. Engi on the other hand uses rifle as shotgun. And we still miss that awesome outfit!

Remember that specialization means new weapon, new utilities, new traits.

Isn’t a stretch to see Thief get turned into some kinda Sniper/Commando with the Rifle. “Flashbang” sounds like a great utility for Damage, Daze followed by Blindness after Daze wears off

BlackBeard.2873:

Kodiak.3281:

The only “reasonable” course of action they could take would be to reduce the total number of boons we generate and increase duration of others to compensate. For example remove the Protection from Elemental Shielding, and then add additional duration to the Glyph bonuses (GoEH, Inscription Trait). By reducing our total sources of boons we generate, it’d make boon strip more effective.

Nerfing self-survival in a starved class isn’t really the answer, imo. They need to make self-survival traits easier to get, but reduce the capability to support other players as easily. If you nerf d/d ele so its no longer a great duelist, the class becomes basically unviable (see: pre 4/15 situation). Decoupling the self-survival and support capabilities makes eles less inherently stack-able, so they aren’t “great in 1v1’s and very good in teamfights” in all the same build.

But that’s just it, you really aren’t nerfing self survival because the total durations in which the boons last remain the same in total. In some ways this condenses game play since certain sources of boons would be higher and more useful without as many button presses. All it does is leave the class more vulnerable to boon strip which is uncommon at best. This gives Arena Net a stance they can reasonably take, “We made Elementalist more vulnerable to boon strip, to counter them use boon strip.” without gutting the Elementalist class’ survivability since the same amount of survivability still exists only in longer duration, less quantity of boons.

Again this is ONLY if they actually are going to do something. I still don’t think they should. As I said earlier in this thread, none of us Elementalists are realistically going to suggest they do anything because we all universally agree that Elementalist is already weak enough with no HP or Armor. Nerfing might is bad. Nerfing Cele amulet is bad. Nerfing Elementalist is bad. We’re all the choir and we’re all preaching to each other. HOWEVER if they are really stuck on doing something, making us more vulnerable to boon strip is probably the least damaging way to do it.

Thief getting Rifle…

…just saying

Lawful.5314:

I really dislike that kind of solution because it would destroy Signet builds, D/F builds, D/D builds, S/F builds, and S/D builds that are running signets as the core survivability mechanic with elemental shielding for the sake of nerfing the D/D cele build.

First of all, it’s an example solution. Any variety of changes can be made. However since healing has pretty much been gutted and overnerfed many times over the only alternative route they feasibly have to explore is going after our boon generation. Wouldn’t be hard for them to reduce our total number of sources of boons while increasing the duration of other sources of boons since combined together that means we get the same amount of boon coverage only with fewer sources making us even more suceptible to boon strip. Boon Strip just isn’t effective if you clear Regen off only to have an Ele reapply it again one second later.

Second of all, any kind of nerf or solution would hurt. Duh. Eles are a huge tangled mess and honestly this is the only kind of solution that doesn’t have far game impacting issues for not only our class but every other class as well. As others have pointed out, it’s only an issue with the Ele. That means the only kind of solution is going to be Ele based.

THE GOOD
I love my Elementalist because it simply has versatility that other classes don’t have. I have insanely strong AOE that isn’t tied to my utility slots with staff. I have great group support and buffing with most weapons since I am a self comboing machine for boons. There is literally no part in this game where I feel like I can’t fit in and perform well be it ranged combat, melee combat, mid ranged combat, pve, pvp or wvw.

THE BAD
The best way to describe an elementalist is you have two broken legs. Your left leg is broken and named “Low Health” and your right leg is broken and named “Low Armor.” The only way you can get by in most scenarios is relying on your two crutches. Your left crutch is “Water Traits (Healing)” and right crutch is “Arcane Traits (Boons)”. Most cases this means you’re guaranteed to gear Vit/Tough to make up for these deficencies and you’re really pegged into class builds. Most builds are basically small variations of each other with heavy (4+) points into Water/Arcane.

The exception to this is you will read about high end PvE encounter builds where by having a strong knowledge of the content, you can avoid most boss mechanics and thus avoid taking damage. By doing this you can go full offense mode with as much damage as you can kick out because you’re avoiding damage through strong knowledge of the game content. However this is not feasible for much of the game where you are guaranteed to take damage, such as in WvW or PvP.

THE BUILD
As stated previously, you got two main builds. 4 Arcane, 4 Water is the standard base of most builds. I use it and put the other 6 in Air for Fresh Air and Lightning Rod and swap my traits around as needed.

I do this for a very specific reason. Gearing. I don’t like swapping gear much. By going this route, I can easily build my gear around my trait stat bonuses. I know by going 6 in Air I am going to get maximum Precision/Ferocity meaning I can slack on those two stats on my gear and gear more for Vit/Tough with Soldier gear and still have a really good Crit rating. Most cases it’s just a matter of playing around with the skill/stat builder at GW2 Skills.net once you’ve settled on a build and going with that.

Generally speaking I recommend going more tanky to start, and ease into more offense as you get comfortable with the class. That can be expensive however so not many people go for that route. However with SPvP reward tracts, dungeon runs, wvw badges and much more I’ve never had a problem with getting tons of gear.

Personally I run PVT (Soldier) armor, with Berserker Jewelry/Weapons on a 06044 spec. I also carry a backup set of Emerald (Knight) Jewelry with Charged Quartz (Celestial) gems socketed in them for WvW zerg play when I need more tank.

If you nerf might stacks you nerf everyone who uses Might. There are a lot of group comps and other classes that also stack might so this is kinda a poor idea. Might also already has a counter with Boon Stripping. Not bringing boon stripping if you know boons are that common and powerful is kinda on you and a decision you make. It’d be like running no condition removal, and then complaining about conditions.

Celestial Amulet also has a lot of other builds, and nerfing it will just hurt those builds as well. A classic high end case is the Celestial Engie builds you see out there that are quite popular.

This really only leaves the class to go after. Elementalist as a class has nothing that’s singularly overpowering. They can nerf a heal or two, but that doesn’t really change much but make it more harder to do the same thing but the experienced players still going to pull it off. They can remove some boon generation, but then they’re directly going after the parts we get in compensation for the low HP and low Armor and people will stop playing it again until others have been nerfed down again or we’re brought back up.

The only “reasonable” course of action they could take would be to reduce the total number of boons we generate and increase duration of others to compensate. For example remove the Protection from Elemental Shielding, and then add additional duration to the Glyph bonuses (GoEH, Inscription Trait). By reducing our total sources of boons we generate, it’d make boon strip more effective.

Basically looks like a tanky (High HP, High Tough, High Heal) Condi build which is pretty easy to do in a variety of ways when you have access to WvW/PvE consumables and goods.

The real question is what can you do for a SPvP build which doesn’t have access to most of the stuff you use?

For example Givers Weapons are off the table. So is Food and Consumables. Your Condi duration will drop to a mere 15% with this build from the Runes alone.

Honestly it’s the lack of a 64 bit client but the ability to go over 4GB of Memory that’s simply atrocious at this stage.

Either limit it back to where the client can’t go over 4GB of Memory or give us a 64 bit client.

Crashing on huge raid bosses is simply terrible.

Person buys game today. Gets told to play Berserker in Berserker gear.

Taking bets on how they’re going to hate how often times they get downed and then either quit game or roll another class

They already went after Might and Might Stacking. Not only did they nerf Sigil of Battle, they also went after the effectiveness of Might. This is again exactly what I’m talking about where instead of addressing the real issues at the core, they go after the side effects hoping that will discourage people or irritate them enough to change specs.

However when you’re forced into a spec by class design that you can’t really change from all this does is force you to double down harder on it. Reducing the effectiveness of the Might boon doesn’t force us to look at other options because no other viable options exist. It just means we have to work even harder to ensure that we’re keeping as many stacks of Might as we can on ourselves.

wmryan.7209:

Ooh I really like this idea, complete focus on just one field of magic. I wasn’t an ele main, but wasn’t that how the they played in GW1?

Pyromancer could be a burst aoe spec, Aeromancer (sp?) would be single target, Geomancer could be a condi/bunker type class and Aquamancer would be full support?

My concern would be that an Aquamancer would be too close to a full-support healing class for those who specifically don’t want the trinity.

I mained an Ele for a long time until Dervish came along and yea that’s more or less how it worked. You had to put points into 1-2 lines as each class, so that lead to 12 points into Fire so you used mostly Fire oriented skills with something like Energy Storage (the class specific line). In GW1 Fire was very AOE+Burn focused, Water was more about chill and delayed burst damage, Air was very burst single target armor pen (and really the only viable one for high end PvE due to high natural AR values until the change) and Earth was mostly about bunker/tanking with wards and light damage.

Considering all the new info on Specializations and their scope with the new HOT press info dump an overhaul of things isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. They were quoted saying that they’re looking at a new weapon, utilities, traits and even new profession mechanic as part of specializations. This really opens up the scale of what specialization means so you never know.

The new necro specialization must be forum based…:x

Good interview. Thumbs up.

Supreme.3164:

Ele crap HP base and armour is here to stay, the powerful defensive tools we have is the compensation for that, this won’t change in the end.

Few changes will come I know but this is not the Anet of 2013/14 with its carpet bomb nerfs, some positive changes happened in the development team.

All the current PvP devs : Jon, karl, Hugh and Ron are all reasonable guys. Changes will come but won’t be profession destroying like it happened in 2013.

I’d like to add that in 2013 the ele got almost wiped out because of a really broken thief : spammable pistol whip(less ini compared to now), double boon steal spammable sword( less ini compared to now + Infiltrator did not require target so it was possible to precast it before teleporting for massive dmg and boon steal + poison spamm from stealth using SB ); and finally uber broken Lyssa Runes that used to give all boons in game to thief on a very short CD ( 32s CD with elite venom) and clear all condis at the same time

So even if ele get nerfed to pre-April 2014 levels ( 99% sure it won’t happen), we would still be fine( more buffs to scepter inc also)

But that’s precisely the point. Those “powerful” defensive tools we have in compensation for that have been systematically attacked and dismantled patch after patch after patch since release.

Some of the biggest earliest nerfs were to our defensive mobility cool downs. They went after Ride the Lightning. They removed the Cantrip stun breakers off of Cleansing Fire (hidden) and Lightning Flash (intentional). From there most of our healing was also systematically nerfed as well losing chunks of % performance. There was absolutely zero compensation for these nerfs and it got so bad that we eventually had zero presence in PvP at all.

Think about this from another light. Look at Thief vs Ranger. Ranger is more about tanking through and sustaining through in their defense and has a medium health pool to compensate. Thief has many escape tools and mobility and has a smaller health pool to compensate. Now look at Elementalist vs Mesmer. Elementalist is forced to sustain defense through boons and heals but has a lower HP pool while the Mesmer has many escape tools and in combat mobility but have a medium health pool. There’s no consistency there.

So we’re forced, by design, to compensate for our natural deficiencies that we get as a class in the sake of balance. This compensation comes in the form of requiring Boons (for defense and offense) and healing revolving around a Water/Arcane spec. If they want us to venture out of those specs, they need to give us something else to stand on. They could make Fire/Air traits uber as hell, and the simple truth of the matter is you won’t be able to go to them still because you simply won’t live long enough to make them matter. They actually already are really good if used but as others denote once they know you got 6 in Air (Fresh Air) they know you’re a good and easy kill when focused.

Those natural deficiencies essentially cripple us down to one truly viable and good specialization that your average player can use. We are crippled by design. If they want to try different things and they want us to get off these crutches (Water/Arcane) then they need to uncripple us by design. It is the only way. Destroying our crutches just makes us the class non-viable in high level play and you saw that when no one did an Elementalist.

If they’re unwilling to do that, then it’s just a huge waste of time.

While I don’t think they will really let us get 4 specializations I could see them going with 1 specialization now and opening up the rest later. Something along the lines that we get one attunement, abilities get more powerful versions, and we can swap weapons. This way they don’t have to reinvent the wheel a bunch of times for each thing and a majority of our multi-attunement effects (such in fire this Glyph does Fire) still are relevant.

Personally I’d hope for Earth in that case, because it’s an Earth style expansion with the Forest and such.

Alternatively I’d love to see something like an Arcanist where we lose all our attunements, and everything becomes Arcane oriented and we gain Weapon Swap and access to a new weapon type. However when you get into something like that you’re talking about a complete and total overhaul for how the class is and I just don’t think Specializations are going to be scaled up that much.

Graendall.4765:

If you think D/D Cantrip ele didn’t work before Celestial i am telling you now..you think wrong.Its a good build it works.Its been nerfed and nerfed.No need for more debating.Instead of asking if its OP ask the devs if they plan on changing traits in other lines so Fire(for example) can be used more.

D/D ele was ALWAYS OP in 1vs1 or more in the hands of a good player.It is known.

The problem honestly isn’t the other lines. Fire, Air and Earth all received major boosts in the traits they have on those lines. They all have great options.

The REAL problem is…you’ll rarely see those lines in things like WvW or PvP because we’re pretty much forced into Water/Arcane to get enough survivability to have any kind of sustained presence. We have the weakest armor and HP base yet our mobility has been systematically dismantled and nerfed repeatedly since launch. Instead we’re supposed to rely entirely on large numbers of small heals with pitififul coefficients for sustainability and use boons to give us offense and defense. When they go after these things they give absolutely nothing to compensate. They don’t reduce our boon effectiveness and then add a little armor. They don’t nerf our healing and then add some HP. This just forces us to continuously double down time after time again further into more defense. It’s been this way since release.

Celestial Amulet is nothing more than the latest variation of that same old problem. Where once we wore Cleric’s gear and relied entirely on Boons for damage source, we now have the option to use the Celestial Amulet and still get a bit of the big defenses while also giving us some offensive stats that when stacked with boons is good enough.

Simple fact of the matter is if they want Elementalists to break out of the Water/Arcane crutch then they have to give us something else to stand on. They refuse to do this and refuse to acknowledge it as a issue so it will continue until they do.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Thanks Kodiak, I highly enjoyed this fruitful discussion with you

Sure! Anytime!

I really look forward to the ground breaking effort that you have with Arena Net and all the change and impact you have on the actual game with your discussion and debate. I imagine it will be far reaching and meaningful.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Kodiak, once more, I am fairly certain that top players are not “scrublords”. Therefore they must have reasons to think that the ele is OP if they think the ele is OP. If the top players do not think that the ele is OP then there is no need for debate.

Now that we have settled this divergence for the third time, could we get to the reasons why top players could objectively think the ele is OP?

You haven’t settled anything. You still don’t understand.

You’re asking a bunch of Elementalists why do we think the Elementalist is OP. None of us think it’s OP. None of us can think of a reason it is considered OP. We all play the class and know it’s not OP. Even if you’re a bad player or a good player no one here thinks the Elementalist is OP. We’re all aware of it’s advantages the class has as well as all painfully aware of it’s limitations.

If you want other people’s opinions on the matter, you have to go elsewhere to get them. Debating whether or not the Elementalist is OP in an Elementalist forum where Elementalists come is entirely and completely pointless.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

So if we are going to have a debate, it needs to be objective.

If at the end of the debate you determine 100% objectively that people are scrublords who don’t know how to play their class and counter the Elementalist there’s absolutely no way in hell any game company is going to tell their players, “Hey noobs, l2p you filthy casual scrubs, Ele is fine.”

If you approach the upset players and present to them a logical, well reasoned and thought filled post about why they are wrong and why the Ele is fine and not overpowered they’re going to take it as you’re attacking them and saying they are bad and will ignore everything you say.

What I’m saying is having the debate at all is pointless. You’re trying to get people to buy something they can’t sell and something other people don’t want.

I think the real point here is that while AOE’s were unlimited, they were made limited. That’s something we’ve always had to deal with. Rehashing whether that was a good or bad decision is more or less irrelevant since they seem largely unwilling to go back and revisit that decision.

However there’s also a number of skills that still have unlimited targets. Specifically any kind or form of ground CC like Line of Warding, Static Field, Spectral Wall, etc. These generally aren’t as bad now because Stability has unlimited CC protection against walls that have unlimited CC potential. They both negate each other.

However once Stability becomes stacks, these forms of unlimited CC generation will cause huge havoc in zerg play because there’s no equal counter. In large enough battles even people dropping them as they run away (common tactic) will be enough to strip huge stacks of Stability off people. It’s really not hard to see a CC heavy meta develop again (Hammer Warriors, etc) with these unlimited forms of CC at the core of it.

Which again, may be 100% possibly the intent of Anet. Maybe they want more ways to dismantle zergs and CC is the way they are going to do it. Thumbs up. However maybe not, and maybe they didn’t consider these as part of the Stability changes and these forms of CC need to go to charged base similar to Mesmer Portals where after X people run into them they disappear.

kyon.8601:

P.S. BTW that new signet build is really fun (6 fire 2 air 6 earth). It might not be as strong as our standard cele bunker DD but it’s fun and refreshing for a change.

Signet build isn’t new. I had a lot of fun with it back in the day as a change of pace. Stacking max condi duration to 100% negated most of the negatives of the build and since our conditions by default already have huge durations it was pretty great as a change of pace.

@Zelyhn Again your problem is not your logic nor is it that people aren’t logical it’s that there are scenarios and situations where logic or being right simply have no bearing. Very few people will ever have the courage to look at what went wrong, analyze what they could have done differently, what actually happened vs what they assume happened, and make corrections. Most people are going to go, “Man that ele is such BS I bursted him and he healed to full and then he just killed me and I couldn’t do anything.” even when it has nothing to do with what actually happened.

It’s an emotional response where someone is mad and they aren’t thinking logically. Turning around and rebuking that emotional response and putting it back on the person will invariably be seen as an attack. This creates an antagonized situation that most people tend to want to avoid thus, the only real response in this scenario is to simply sit back, be quiet and ignore it and hope the emotion subsides.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

First off, none of those abilities are “instant cast”.

Most abilities, outside of Line of Warding, all have under a second cast time and all of them can be done on the run. If you really want to mince the fact that 1/4th of a second isn’t instant by all means, but in actual functionality of the skill it appears instantly for other players.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Second, unlike other AoE’s, the walls don’t work reliably if they are placed directly on a person. It is entirely up to the opponent whether or not they apply any CC.

When you’re talking about 40 vs 40, like we are, being exact isn’t exactly required. If you put down a wall in a giant group of people it’s really hard to miss.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

On the rare occasion that they do work on a person they were placed directly on top of, they certainly would not be hitting more than one or two people. In that respect, they are just like any other AoE effect. The difference is when people are dumb enough to run into them after they have been placed. If there are so many effects in that area that you can’t see the walls, maybe you shouldn’t be there yourself.

You seemingly either have little or no experience with large Zerg vs Zerg game play in WvW or you just seem to be speculating on how things happen. Walls reliably hit targets constantly in large group play. These forms of ground CC with uncapped targets are going to be a problem with the stability changes unless we either get a stupid amount of Stability stacks or the CC is capped on these abilities. Saying “Oh well, avoid the area, problem solved!” is about as naive as it gets when it comes to Zerg vs Zerg game play.

Now this could be by intent for ANet to dismantle zerg play. That’s totally a huge possibility and they’re going after Stability to make make that happen. That’s why I’m putting this question forward. Belitting the obvious problem with some “l2p” trope is simply ignorant.

Atherakhia.4086:

They mentioned in another thread that each time you pass through these walls you’ll lose a stability charge. Believe it or not, coordinating 10+ of these effects takes a bit of effort though so you’ll probably be fine.

Consider each guardian you bring will drop 1 wall, but their group stability will provide 3 charges. It’ll take quite a bit of effort.

With duration, sure, you’re just fine because you can run into a number of them and for that duration you’re immune currently. However it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the new meta is going to be spam CC (which it always was) to burst through Stability stacks. Remember hammer warriors? All that CC is going to make a huge comeback for zerg vs zerg and unless the stacks of stability are huge when combined with the sheer number of walls and other CC going on it’s going to be crazy.

Most of that CC is already limited by the 5 target cap. However that doesn’t address these other effects that are unlimited in the number of targets they effect.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Probably not, because they only do anything if you’re dumb enough to run into them.

By that logic all AOE’s should be unlimited because they’d only do any damage if you were dumb enough to run into the AOE, right?

It’s not as if with 80+ people on the screen all of them doing AOE’s and other ground targeted abilities it’d be impossible to miss a thin wall often times with no graphical profile out on the ground buried under the rest of those AOE’s right? I mean surely they don’t instantly appear and instantly take effect in the middle of a large group running around right? It’s soooooooo easy to avoid you’d just have to be dumb to run into an instant cast CC wall buried under other AOEs.

There’s always been a huge discrepancy in the game in terms of certain AOE abilities. While most AOE abilities cap out at 5 targets max, there are many ground targeted abilities that have potentially an unlimited number of targets for their duration. Some classic examples are:

Static Field
Unsteady Ground
Line of Warding
Spectral Wall
etc

All of these abilities are ground targeted AOE abilities that provide potentially unlimited amounts of crowd control. In WvW, for example, these are often times bypassed entirely by Stability and requiring Stability for large zerg encounters like 40+ vs 40+ that are quite common.

With the new stability changes it’s easy to imagine a scenario where there’s enough of these kinds of abilities with unlimited amounts of CC that will simply strip stacks of Stability off you with little to no effort. This means that it either will require a large number of stability stacks per use, negating the real point of stacks, or maintaining any semblance of stability is impossible and WvW is going to be dramatically altered (not neccessarily a good or bad thing).

My question then is simple: Will these skills with unlimited CC potential also be changed alongside the change to stability since they go hand in hand?

Lawful.5314:

In the end, i have a feeling that elementalist will end up against where we were a year ago, being really bad in pvp, but meh, what are you gonna do about it.

Personally I’m finishing off my Guardian, Necro and Thief before the expansion hoping that Revenant or a class specialization will offer me similar ranged AOE not tied to my utility (IE: Necro wells).

That’s where you’re wrong, as you asked us to enlighten you.

Objective truth, while very informative, is often times not very useful because it doesn’t really propose a path forward but simply explain what is happening. Analyzing that it’s the players who are wrong, while accurate, isn’t a solution. Telling players to nut up and “l2p” also isn’t an acceptable solution. Their only choices involve either nerfing the class in some way to allow other players to counter the class easier or do and say nothing and hope players figure it out.

At some point you just gotta step back and not really think about things too much. If you didn’t, you’d realize every person you see running around is the Chosen Pact Commander and the boss of the new Living Story Team.

Just let it gooooo…

The L2P argument never works in terms of game balance discussions. It just never has, and never will. I land Dragon Tooth all day long in SPvP. You can cry at the top of your lungs that’s a L2P issue for my opponents, and you won’t be incorrect, but no developer is going to openly take the stance “L2P scrubs.”

Harper.4173:

Kodiak.3281:

Yea lots of ways to change encounters so players just have to keep eating damage as a mitigation check rather than a DPS check. Changing the way blind works is a huge one.

Now if they mess with projectile reflects…haha…boom.

This is just absurd.

Why would they “mess with projectile reflects”? Why do we even have them in the game in the first place? That’s right – to reflect projectiles. So why would we mess with something that was put in the game in the first place and is working as intended?

Why not mess with let’s say “stealth”. Why not mess with other mechanics? What’s the point?

Why would they? The only person who could answer that is Arena Net for sure. As the person who threw that entirely hypothetical idea out there I’d hazard a guess at to disrupt the meta and get people to do different things.

If you are trying to imply reflects aren’t pretty darned important to the Zerker meta I kinda don’t got a response to that one because it’s just so out there. It’s like saying water isn’t wet.

Yea lots of ways to change encounters so players just have to keep eating damage as a mitigation check rather than a DPS check. Changing the way blind works is a huge one.

Now if they mess with projectile reflects…haha…boom.

PierPiero.9142:

just a curiosity for learning : which are the defensive skill of /D ? i can think air 4,5 for evasion and water 5 or earth 4 … but you don’t have any defense againt projectiles … i play s/f but with s/d it seems to me much harder to survive … and i am just curious to learn

Projectiles are definitely tricky as you don’t have a hard counter as S/D. Some of the tougher opponents I face are definitely Longbow rangers as a result as they can really pelt you hard and use their knockback to keep you out of melee range to stop moves like Air 5 or Earth 4 forcing you to use Air 4 to close the gap (only to make yourself vulnerable to the Wolf fear haha).

The rest you pretty much covered. It all comes down to a comfort thing. I really am used to the /D water and /D Air more than anything in terms of mobility and defense. Especially Air 4. A lot of PvP fights (be it in WvW or SPvP) come down to the start of an engagement. Who gets the jump on whom, what terrain, what openers, what cool downs used, etc. By using RTL to “reset” the fight and walk away and come back a few seconds later it can dramatically alter the outcome of a battle. S/F on the other hand is more committed. You’re there and there’s really no escape outside of Lightning Flash cantrip.

That’s what I am doing Memories Lost. I am just continuously gathering finished Ascended materials (wood, metal, cloth, leather) and sitting on them for the most part until HOT.

For all you know when HOT comes out there could be some uber awesome class specialization for another class you may want to play and you will totally regret that 300-500g worth of gear you put on a class you don’t play anymore let alone the meta changing.

Also there’s already a thread in the HOT forums about how Blind is basically considered another CC effect for boss defiance bars. So the perma blind thing that people are using in dungeons and what not is likely going to be a thing of the past. What affect that has on people for Zerker gear will have to be seen.

Static Field and Unsteady ground are already staple skills pretty good.

If you’re going to look at anything then Earth 2 and Air 2 are honestly the only skills that aren’t really that great and Earth 2 at least serves a function of a delayed blast finisher.

A lot of PvP is understanding what is actually going on and why things are happening the way that they are. Even in unranked, I catch a lot of people who are extremely stationary at all times and stand in powerful AOE’s that they should never be hit with.

A lot of Ele’s survivability is understanding your cool downs and when to use them and when to simply walk away. I usually rock a S/D Fresh Air build (06044) and the main reason I stay /D over /F is the colossal number of defenses I have with /D that I like.

With these Water heavy builds, going into Water attunement is a huge defensive cooldown. You heal, you cleanse conditions, you gain regen, you gain a side regen and in the case of /D you also get some huge defensive cool downs with Frost Aura and another heal/cleanse. Most players you face know this and they try to push you down low enough fast (with burst) to force you to blow that cool down. Typically I don’t like to go into Water unless I know I got Frost Aura to help transition out of Water when they start wanting to burst me down.

There’s a lot of other cool downs as well, from Earthquake to Updraft to passives like Evasive Arcana. Knowing when to use these and when not to use these is ultimately what gets you killed.

Doesn’t mean you’re not going to face hard teams from time to time, good teams are going to prod/poke you and see what kinda Ele you are. If you are very survivable and use everything right I find most teams will do their best to ignore you cause they know you know what’s up. However if you don’t and you just fall over dead then a lot of teams will continue to focus you in any kind of engagement. All about learning how to survive and then figuring out how to do DPS afterwords.

Aggrostemma.1703:

06044 or 06026 is the way to go… in zerg bursting you WANT Lighting Rod. LR has no AoE cap so this is the most powerfull trait elementalist have.

You can be tanky with this trait setup (8 points in defensive trait lines..) but with Pack runes and Air and Fire sigils you can be a real offensive support.

My two coppers..

EDIT: I’m stupid? You need energy sigil… must have

I agree completely here but you have to be smart in how you use your CC. First thing zergs do when they come in contact with each other is pop stability so you don’t get feared (Necro) or Stunned (Static Field) or stopped (Guardian or Ele Wall). So blowing your big cool downs (Static Field and Unsteady Ground) too early can be a bad choice if it’s a prolonged engagement.

If you can, Frostbow 4 is devastating. I mean completely and utterly devastating. Like Meteor Shower each projectile is a mini AOE and the devastation a single cast can do is surprisingly fast and deadly to many zergs with a few people using it. However due to the rather stationary nature of the skill you have to be careful using it.

Disconnects is a bad word for it.

There’s a commonly known issue that is well documented in many other places that when there is a grossly large encounter (3 way WvW zerg fight, Jormag, Shadow Behemoth, Teq, Karka Queen, etc) with a ton of people at it sometimes you randomly just crash. An error pops up, you can send this error to Arena Net. I have probably done so around 50+ odd times over the last few years. It’s been there since the start of the game far as I can remember.

This is not an uncommon problem and it seems to happen not only randomly but also to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of hardware and setups. For example I run the game on “Ultra” settings with no problems at large events, but once every few large events I just get dumped to desktop with that crash error despite still having great FPS performance and the like.

It’s incredibly frustrating because when you are on an event, like Jormag or Teq, and you crash you get put out of that instance and thus you get screwed out of doing that event because you often times end up in a random map with nothing going on.

The only even semi-work around is to lower the number of people models that render (down to lowest/lowest) which seems to give some semblance of reliable stability. That said it’s kinda silly if my FPS computer performance is doing fine, why should it matter how many people the game shows?

What I’ll do to grab the error is run again on highest/highest later and when I invariably crash at a large event I’ll record the error down and post it here.