Guild Wars 2

I feel bad for every critter who happens to be standing near me when I attune to air. Poor guy never sees it coming.

Also, not so much on the killing end, but I feel bad when I get instructed to run into some Skritt’s cave and break all their stuff. Makes me feel like a jerk.

Let’s see…

My main is a human male Elementalist, then I’ve got seven alts. Human female necromancer, Sylvari female Mesmer, Sylvari male Thief, Charr female Engineer, Sylvari female Ranger, Asura male Guardian, and Norn female Warrior.

Huh, I didn’t think I’d end up going with more female characters. Weird. I just sorta thought up character ideas and use what I thought was appropriate where. Also, I tried to have an even breakdown of races, but didn’t really think about gender when making them.

Science.4207:

Oh, you’re that one ele from last night that kept saying “Owned” whenever you and your team zerged someone.

Remember me? The guardian? The one you would just dance around and not be able to touch unless your zerg showed up? It was funny watching you squirm around doing all sorts of shenanigans while i just autoattacked you with my scepter and flicked you off point like a bug.

Oh yeah, just zerg in 8v8 and be the best elementalist out there who says “owned” whenever he gangs up on someone.

Wow, ouch. Looks like someone’s got your number, Bunzy.

Devildoc.6721:

weapon speed is in the game, ie daggers attack faster than swords which attack faster than greatswords, just 1 sword doesn’t swing faster than another. I think the weapon system is fine though I kind of wish elemental damage had more impact.

Yeah, I could totally go for that. During the beta testing phase ArenaNet kept on talking about how they wanted to make it really feel like you were hitting things. Get on an Elementalist and cast Lightning Touch and tell me if that feels like anything.

ElemenZ.5486:

“The boss will always be in the boss room, for example.”

That’s one of things about the MMO status quo that should be redesigned.
If I had my say, I’d do a really dynamic boss who could be roaming aroung the entire dungeon, if at all.

And with him a set of adds with different types of resistances and immunities, making it vital for the group to come up with a solution of their own, improvise.

Either match the roles, fire vs ice, melee vs melee, etc., or use a dynamic environment to beat “the boss”, which wouldn’t even necessarily mean having to kill him, but maybe trap or subdue, disarm, blind, there could be endless different ways to solve a problem. Also, mobs and npcs would have A.I. out of this world, adding unexpectable “realism” and requiring real problem solving skills and a “logical approach” from players, and not just gazing at stats, carrying different sets of gear with them that they could simply swap based on what type of enemies they face.

But I guess I’m just dreaming decades ahead of my time just seeing the way MMOs will be one day.

Wait, so first you say ArenaNet is trying too hard to keep things modern and should stick to classical RPG formulas, and now you’re saying that MMOs aren’t doing enough to change things?

And this new point is now addressing purely technical challenges. Well, that, and unreliable encounter design that would probably prove to be more frustrating and ragequit-inducing than fun or dynamic. Not only would it probably more-often-than-anyone-could-enjoy catch groups with their pants down, but it would make every encounter besides the roaming boss be more nerve-wracking because you never know when you might accidentally pull the boss. Overpulling is enough of a concern without the boss being part of that mix.

Modern games have a hard enough time making enemies that can walk in a straight line and attack a moving player. And even in Guild Wars 2, you can see how “smarter” mobs are more unfair than anything else. Having five Risen Quaggan keeping you in a stunlock by taking turns to hit you for two seconds each isn’t fun, but they’re being smart and not overlapping disables, right?

The scenario you’re suggesting of a roaming boss with minions with different damage types and resistances would only create the need to have everyone in a group geared to take on specific targets so that the numerical advantage can be maintained. One person with fire would take the fire-vulnerable enemies, the slashing-resistant player would take on the sword enemies, etc., and it still becomes a gear-check. Even against normal mobs, players of an MMO would quickly manage to detail higher-difficulty zones with most preferred damage/resistance types, carry spare gear sets for different areas, and gear for each challenge accordingly, because as nice as dealing with a challenge with skill is (which, by the way, doesn’t need resistances and damage types to happen), in MMOs a numerical advantage is usually the most significant factor in determining the outcome of a fight.

And personally, I think the future of games in general, MMOs included, will probably move in the direction of “simple tools, complex interactions.” By creating a minimal but effective stable of functions and abilities the players can utilize, but having the way those things interact be dynamic and compelling, you can create an accessible and rewarding gaming experience while not placing a huge technical demand on the developers. Of course, the future is unknowable, but I think it’s the likelier outcome.

So…you’re saying you’d rather play D&D? Because, you know, you can just do grab some dice and do that.

Stuff like that in MMOs, unfortunately, tend to create gear checks (regarding damage types) and often turn things numbers games (regarding weapon speed and such).

First of all, there are slow two-handed weapons with specific speeds. They’re called hammers. Hammer autoattacks are significantly slower than with other weapons, and daggers, a light one-handed weapon, typically deliver many more attacks in a short period of time (commonly by having attack chains include multiple strikes). But these things are determined by class and skills, not by the weapon statistics themselves. Pretty much the same thing, but in a different location and not explicitly detailed.

And as for different weapon damage types and resistances, the issue with having this in an MMO is that enemy placement tends to be less than organic. The boss will always be in the boss room, for example. If one boss had high fire resistance, or was susceptible to slashing damage, it would give players a numerical advantage to use weapons that used other elements/slashing weapons, and this would be something that could be resolved before combat began. Against more difficult enemies, where every point counts, this could create a situation where players wouldn’t want anyone not geared properly.

Also, when things like this are involved, trends become apparent and certain qualities are revealed as advantageous. In Skyrim, which does have stuff like damage types and resistances, use of frost magic isn’t as helpful for doing damage as fire, because in an colder northern setting like that one, full of frost monsters and such, a lot of things tend to have frost resistance/immunity. So clearly it’s a better choice to use fire more regularly.

It’s not bad stuff, but in MMOs it tends to be more limiting than interesting or complex. And the complexity it does offer creates complications and unseen restrictions.

Apparently. Bulbasaaaaaur!

This is probably one of the more frustrating things about air. It has a lot of elements associated with increased movement speed, but because of how movement speed boosts work in this game, most of them are completely useless. The build I use keeps me in perpetual swiftness, basically. So the Signet of Air, Zephyr’s Speed, Windborne Dagger, and One with Air are worthless to me. It’s nice that I’m only actually forced to take one of those, but it’s rather upsetting. I don’t think there’s a single other profession or even trait line that has a problem like this, where it’s just packed with redundancies.

A smart move would be to make at least one of these bonuses be able to stack, or possibly roll them into each other, like making Zephyr’s Speed give the 10% but then gain One with Air’s growing speed boost, or perhaps, as cooldown-reducing traits combined with secondary effects become more common, combine Aeromancer’s Alacrity with One with Air, at least to make it a tiny bit more appealing.

Also, regarding One with Air, let’s be frank here: what elementalist actually stays in air attunement (or any attunement) for a full 50 seconds? Besides when travelling, which if you actually spec into air there are methods for keeping up permanent swiftness anyway? This trait either needs to have the boost grow significantly faster or just give the full bonus upfront. Also, it’s completely useless for a whole ten seconds? What the kitten?

Okay, so I’ve been messing around with my alts, and recently got around to doing some personal story missions with my Sylvari Thief. I was doing one mission when the game gave me an environmental weapon: a vine I pulled off of a jail cell. It had an autoattack where you whipped a single target at medium range from you.

It hit more reliably and at wider angles than Lightning Whip. The character’s cast animation was identical.

This is just silly. There’s no good reason that Lightning Whip should be as unreliable as it is when there’s an example of another whip skill in the game that has no real issues.

Just sayin’.

This is called the Winged set, I believe. It’s the 4th tier of armor crafted by Tailoring.

I have a simple question, and I just wanted to get the community’s feel on this topic.

When using a weapon, do you feel restricted if your autoattack can only hit one enemy at a time? And a followup, have you ever decided to use a weapon that can hit multiple enemies with it’s autoattack for that reason alone?

This is more about melee weapons, since ranged weapons tend to be single target unless they can bounce. So what’s the vibe on this?

So this thing happened to me once. Let me share it.

I happened to meet up with a friend playing a warrior by accident, while both of us were in the late 50s, I believe. We decided to play together a bit, and so we strolled into a Skritt cave. I’d already been exploring this cave a bit beforehand, and was having a fairly hard time. Skritt enemies are fairly heavy hitting, cluster a bit tight, and have quite a few ranged variants. I was getting by, but would end every fight pretty bloodied.

And so we started going through the cave, and my heart sank as I watched him fight. Enemies I would dance around, bust utilities, my elite, and two or more full attunements on, he walked up to and did nothing but autoattack. He never slowed down, walked in straight lines, rarely used any other skills, and never dropped below 50% health. We departed after trudging through a bunch of veterans guarding a rich vein.

On my walk back to town I encountered two coyotes. When the fight started, they leapt at me simultaneously, and downed me instantly. I died in under five seconds after that and went back to town.

I can’t say with earnest that I never had doubts about the Elementalist, or never considered rerolling. However I stuck with it and ultimately I’m glad for it. But it’s extremely clear to anyone who has played one that the Elementalist is lacking relative to other professions.

I agree wholeheartedly with this theory.

Autoattacks really should be a major component to a character’s damage, if not the greatest contributor. It’s very obvious when playing…well, basically everyone except the Elementalist, that your skills are essentially tools that should be used judiciously, when the player deems it appropriate, and not as soon as the icon resaturates and the skill comes off cooldown. Even the damage skills, like Hundred Blades or Zealot’s Defense, have a time and place and shouldn’t just be cast immediately.

(Bear in mind my opinion primarily comes from use of daggers, but I believe to be true for other weapons as well)

However, when playing an Elementalist, the feeling is very different. Once you begin a fight or switch attunements, there’s a pressure to cast everything. Of course there’s some order to it, and one shouldn’t just cast haphazardly. You want fire fields down as soon as possible, you want to hold on Churning Earth until the enemy is disabled (and you’re ballsey enough to try casting it), whatever. But in order to feel effective, or to even be effective, you want to cast everything in your attunement, and then as soon as possible, switch to something else and work another attunement. There’s no reason not to cast everything on a bar before switching. While wielding daggers, the only skill I typically don’t bother casting is Magnetic Grasp because I feel it’s the only skill that if I cast would slow me down. And once your skills are on cooldown, there’s virtually no incentive to not swap attunements immediately.

It’s stressful and fatiguing, and while I do enjoy my Elementalist immensely, I don’t think it’s good design. If autoattack skills were more powerful, even if just by a blanket increase to damage, it would help lift this problem off our shoulders. By having effective autoattacks, our use of skills could be more meaningful, more thoughtful, and less mandatory.

And this would be in no way gamebreaking. Obviously, only one autoattack is available at any given time, regardless of attunement. Unlike other skills, it’s no some cooldown a player can cherrypick, and so doesn’t contribute to the inherent balance issue presented by the Elementalist.

Also, I think it’s extremely necessary that dagger autoattacks all have the ability to hit multiple opponents. Yes, their “melee range” is slightly further away than other professions’, but it’s still an extremely dangerous place to be. For Guardians and Warriors, all non-ranged autoattacks affect multiple opponents. Mesmers as well. Being only able to attack one enemy in melee feels extremely limiting, and I think Elementalist daggers, as well as all other melee weapons, need to be able to do the same.

Okay, so I’m mostly focused with dagger/dagger with my elementalist, so here’s my take…

Fire
A lot of people have been saying fire is pretty much golden, and I agree. But like people have been saying, Fire Grab’s cooldown feels a bit high for it’s damage and range, but it’s still very functional and doesn’t take away much.

Air
Very clearly the weakest of the dagger attunements. Not because all the skills are weak, but the kit lacks cohesion and the most effective skills by far are on the offhand.

“By harnessing wind and lightning, elementalists can target specific foes with focused, high-damage attacks.” Unfortunately not. In air attunement, every skill except Lightning Whip can potentially affect more than one target and typically does little to no damage. Ride the Lightning does less damage than a cast of Lightning Whip. Lightning Touch does less than one lash.

Lightning Whip itself does reasonable damage. It’s single target, inflicts no conditions, and for some strange reason has a strange conical hit zone despite being single target. It either needs to hit multiple targets or do more damage and hit reliably.

Lightning Touch. Insignificant damage and a condition that might not pay off at all. I would just as soon throw it out and add a different, better skill, but if it has to stay it’d be much better with more damage and a longer weakness duration.

Shocking Aura. It can interrupt channeled melee skills. It’d feel a lot better and make more sense if it did damage, I think.

One thing that I think is needed for the elementalist, and I believe air attunement daggers is a good place for it: more lightning fields. There are currently two skills that produces one, or more accurately, a single skill twice. Daggers only have two fields in fire, and two finishers in earth. If there were more fields and more finishers to choose from, I think we’d see less of the linear comboing shenanigans we see now, and more variety and malleability with dagger elementalists.

And while Ride the Lightning obviously is a good skill (if a little wonky against moving targets), I’d be very satisfied to see it as a blast finisher. It would give Ride the Lightning value during combat, and make it not just a tool for initiation/chasing.

Water
Water, like fire, is also in a fairly good spot. I think what really hurts it is the longer cooldowns and the fact that Frozen Burst is a better applicator for Chill than Frost Armor. And does damage. And has a significantly shorter cooldown.

Earth
Earth has a similar problem to air: it’s most useful for it’s offhand and, unfortunately, the offhand skills have very long cooldowns. There’s little incentive to stay in this attunement with daggers. Impale does decent damage but can’t sustain damage as well as fire, even when used with periodic Ring of Earth casts. Speaking of, I’m extremely surprised Ring of Earth only applies a single stack of bleed. And by surprised I mean sad that.

I like Magnetic Grasp. It’s a darn shame I never use it. It takes a very long time for a gap closer, and I don’t see why it couldn’t just be a “requires target” skill and immediately start the dash when cast.

Earthquake suffers for being so awesome. It’s damaging area knockdown. Reasonably, it should have a long cooldown. Unfortunately, there’s little that can be done to change it that wouldn’t either diminish the skill or place it wildly out of the existing power curve.

Churning Earth, however, has obvious shortcomings. The long cast time combined with an agonizing thirty second cooldown make it very ineffective. Consider Eruption, which can’t be interrupted, allows you to do other things while it’s cooking, does greater bleed damage at it’s full duration, and takes roughly as long to finish. At five times the cooldown, Churning Earth just doesn’t measure up.

It’s apparent that ArenaNet likes skills that do damage over time, even if it’s an enormous amount of damage, but wants to discourage large upfront amounts of damage with either delays or long cooldowns, but it’s obvious which kind shines brighter.

Auras in general, to be more effective, need either longer duration, effects on activation, or built-in damage reduction.

And now two last things regarding traits.

Arcane Precision feels too infrequent. I might get one activation every few minutes. Three seconds of weakness, lucky me! A higher proc chance would be welcome.

Evasive Arcana obviously fights itself. Dodging away from my opponent puts me completely out of range. Other evasive skills like Mark of Evasion or Deceptive Evasion activate at the initial location, and Evasive Arcane needs to do the same.

It totally depends on the weapon, I suppose. Broadly, WvW or otherwise, when using daggers fire does better damage to single targets and groups, and can benefit more from either crit or pure damage builds. This is primarily because air has no real damage mover with daggers, and does fewer hits over time than fire. In fact, I’d even say fire might be better for mobility because a lot of its damage happens passively, because Burning Speed is more reliable than Ride the Lightning, and because the best source of damage with dagger air (Lightning Whip) is pretty inconsistent, so despite doing more damage than Dragon’s Claw it really isn’t as favorable.

At least, that’s my experience. I might be totally wrong. Most of my experience with the elementalist has been with daggers, and besides having strong initiation and being a great stance for travel, there’s little incentive to return to air after a fight has begun, even for the purposes of mobility and damage mitigation, which is a huge shame because it’s my favorite attunement.

Curiosity compels me to bump.

All this loot couldn’t possibly be contained by just one Borderlands game, or even two. No, there had to be some in Guild Wars 2 as well.

Lightning Whip still behaves strangely when in motion. Often times I can’t hit stationary objects within range if I’m moving. Other times, I can’t hit them if I’m standing still. Occasionally it misses enemies one second and the next, target still in the same relative position, and it hits.

It’s just overall wonky. If it was an aoe attack the weird conical hit zone would make sense, like Wave of Wrath on the guardian’s staff, but seeing as it’s a single target attack, it shouldn’t have nearly this much trouble.

Does anyone know how to get the Arcing weapon type? Originally I wanted to get a Mystic Shard for my elementalist, because as I understood it Mystic weapons were blue versions of Inquest weapons, but someone recently linked the dagger specifically and it was also red, so identical.

I found out about the Arcing weapons while browsing item databases and so now I’m glad I can get back on track for that weapon model, but I have no idea where to get one. Can someone help me out maybe?