Guild Wars 2

I’ve tested it.
This does not proc powerful aura.
:(

Arcana
Arcane III – Arcane Retribution. Moved to Master tier. Decreased cooldown from 90 seconds to 45 seconds.

Not sure how much this will be used. This is still not very effective.

Arcane IV – Final Shielding. Decreased cooldown from 90s to 75s._

(Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.*
I get it, this was a very powerful trait, it needed more of an investment in the Arcana tree to obtain it. At least we don’t need to decide between Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina (which would have been bad).
Arcane II – Arcane Resurrection. Moved to Master tier.
Ok
Arcane VII – Vigorous Scepter. Moved to Adept tier.
Great, Renewing Stamina is still twice as good; this need some kind of additional bonus. (Grants a boon on dodge?)
Arcane VIII – Blasting Staff. Moved to Adept tier.
Nice, much needed.
Arcane IX – Windborne Dagger. Functions outside of combat. Moved to Adept tier.
Good

Final Thoughts: Arcana
The changes in Arcana are fair. I see a lot of people complaining about these and I see their point, but in order to get rid of our
dependency on this trait-line, some of this stuff needs to change. I still feel like our 15 and 25 bonuses need to be fixed because I’m not able to detect the effects of them.

+Last Words on the Elementalist+
This is a step in the right direction for ANet.
Currently we are dealing with two issues:
1. Dependence on Arcana
2. Lack of Survivability

The dependence on Arcana is focused around the fact that the rest of the traitlines do not provide as much utility as Arcana. The changes to the Fire and Earth Magic traitline is a good start, but Fire Magic will still need a lot of help. Nerfing certain parts of the Arcana traitline will work, but it will destroy the few builds that are currently in rotation. It will take time for the dust to settle after this balance patch, but I feel like we are going in the right direction.

Lack of survivability is another issue that Elementalists have to deal with. As a class with the lowest health pool in the game with the lowest base armor , we were bound to have issues surviving. Most elementalists are FORCED to take different cantrips just to survive from a few hits. We are forced to trait into high amounts of vigor uptime, and healing. This shuts down our build variety even more. I could never even THINK about speccing into fire because if I don’t spec into water, I would just fall over and die every time someone looks at me. All trait-lines need a trait for some sort of damage mitigation or condition removal. The Cleansing Fire trait which is going to be added during the next patch is a GREAT start! I can finally start depend on a trait other than water to clear my conditions. There should be traits which fit the core needs of a class in all traitlines so they’re not forced into certain specs.

All in all, these were a couple of good changes from ANet and I look forward to see the patch and let the dust settle. I will be making another post about my recommended changes for the ele and my extra thoughts later so keep your eyes peeled for that!
-Gasmic

Earth Magic
Earth 5 – Stone Flesh – Increased toughness while attuned to Earth Magic to 1.5/level (120 at level 80).

Nice; bonus toughness is nice considering how squishy we are.

Earth VII – Strength of Stone. This trait is now Gain condition damage based on your Toughness. 10%.

Bringing this trait down was a great move. This was not a grandmaster trait and now it can play a part towards building reliable Condition Elementalist builds.

Earth XI – Diamond Skin. This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%.

I’m pretty sure that this skill is a little over-hyped. Most elementalists have from 10k-15k health; the health can be maxed out around 20k. That means that an elementalist only needs to take around 2k before he is vulnerable to conditions again.
It should be noted that ele’s are able to heal up to full health regularly but that is only if they invest in Water Magic and healing power.

Final Thoughts: Earth Magic
The changes to Earth Magic are very well done. They have substantially improved the trait-line and made it more attractive. The have provided good synergy between condition damage, condition protection, and toughness. I feel that elementalists still need better ways to apply conditions and the Earth Magic tree is where it should go.

Water I – Aquamancer’s Alacrity. Moved to Master tier.
Water III – Soothing Disruption is moving to master tier.
Water V – Cleansing Wave. Moved to Master tier.
Water VIII – Arcane Abatement. Moved to Adept tier.
Water IX – Cantrip Mastery is moving to adept tier.

I understand why these changes were made; the perma-vigor up-time because of Soothing Disruption needed to be brought up a little bit. Cantrip mastery was a nice trade-off for it. Not too upset about these changes.

Water X – Soothing Wave redesign: Gain Regeneration(3s) on incoming critical hits. 10s recharge. Moved to Adept tier.

Thank god this useless trait got fixed! This is significantly better, but I don’t know if it would be an effective choice. Since Elementalists have a low health-pool, we need to avoid damage instead of tanking it. I don’t know how effective 3 seconds of regeneration would be after taking crit damage. It doesn’t make much sense to me.

Final Thoughts: Water Magic
I feel that Water Magic is a little underwhelming right now. Just because it was highly used doesn’t mean it was overpowered at all. It used to have amazing synergy which just isn’t there anymore. These changes aren’t very impressive.

Lets go through all of the proposed changes, shall we?

Fire:
Fire II – Burning Fire – This trait has a new effect. Use Cleansing Fire automatically when you have a number of conditions on you. 3 conditions. 40 second cooldown.
Moved to Master tier.

Not bad, the condition removal is nice… but it requires investing at least 20 in fire. Furthermore, it’s on a 40 second cooldown and is something which you cannot control. This promotes more AI-like play and I don’t like that.
Notes: You can trait this to provide vigor, regen, and might every time this procs.
This will clear fear and immobilize.
AoE Burn which might synergize with the rest of the Fire tree. (Will have to look at this later)

Fire VIII – Conjurer – Moved to Adept tier.

Unfortunately conjures are still very situational and not worth giving up the 20 primary weapon skills on the elementalist . Not worth the 10 in fire.

Fire III – Ember’s Might. The effect of this trait has been changed to Burns you apply last longer. 25%.
Burning Rage 25– Increased damage dealt to burning foes from 5% to 10%.

Nice buffs, now only if we can have decent ways to apply and maintain burns; I can start to see a Burning Condition Ele build in the making here. (I’m not sure if it would be viable)

Final Thoughts: Fire Magic
There are a few nice buffs to Fire Magic, especially burning fire which provides condition removal to a trait-line other than water; this reduces our dependence on Water Magic.
I have been approached by multiple people asking me to develop a Condition Elementalist build;I haven’t been able to because of lack of synergy. Maybe with the upcoming changes that could be a possibility.

Air Magic

Air V – Soothing Winds. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
I’ve always felt that this trait wasn’t very effective. The 2% bonus doesn’t make much of a difference. Even with 1000 Precision this would only provide +70 Healing Power which is a pittance and is not worth it at all when there are much better traits to pick from.

Air XI – Tempest Defense. Decreased the cooldown from 60s to 25s.

All I can say about this change is that fighting an elementalist with this trait could be very annoying. The truth of the matter is, the shocking aura will only be able to stun an enemy once because of it’s short duration and it’s internal cooldown. Furthermore we’ll still get eaten alive by anything with stability. We don’t have enough stuns or knockdowns of our own to be able to take advantage of the damage aspect of this trait as we should a grandmaster trait. This trait is very underwhelming and is a bad choice when we have better traits available.

Final Thoughts: Air Magic
These are very minor buffs to Air Magic that no one will use. One thing I’ve noticed is that Air Magic seriously lacks synergy and the traits don’t interact with each other very well. (In some cases)

So apparently no server has an active Heart of the Mists Community….

How many servers actually get more than 50 people online in HOM at the same time anyways?

I still really have hope that they’re doing whatever they can to improve the GW2 PvP community.

I think this would give the players a better chance of improving it themselves.

What happened to this post?
Fixed it!

Justin ODell.9517:

But… but then I won’t have a bunch of fans because I’m one of the only devs on my server!

I would definitely like to see this done, but it requires some back-end server work. If I could only clone myself.

So this could be something we could see in the future?

Could we get anet’s thoughts on this?

alemfi.5107:

Hey Gasmic!

Just thought I’d say that this is a great idea, and aside from the whole practice dummies stuff (which could be moved to an instance or something, as you mentioned), would definitely be really great for the pvp community I think.

PS. Is GASM still playing anymore? haven’t seen you guys in a while.

Hey Alfem,
Thanks for the support.
I think the practice dummies are just a reminder of how the game lacks proper build testing features. I believe that also needs a massive overhaul but thats for another thread!

Yes, GASM is still playing; a couple of our team has been taking a break because of the meta but I’m always willing to play! Whisper me in-game about it and I’ll be happy to play with you!

How bout a game mode in which guilds can play competitively against each other?
(first post)

Stealth.9324:

Mash Hog.5672:

Stealth.9324:

I would say map chat should stay at what they are now, visible only to that continent. However, I would love to see you can whisper to a different player in Eu for example, then join in the same PvP server and have a match.

I believe that the intentional purpose of this thread is being lost.
My suggestion was to make it so that everyone on an NA server would go to the same Heart of the Mists map or an overflow if the map is full.

Alternatively those on a EU server would go to another Heart of the Mists map; not the same HOM as NA.

While your idea is great but for doing so,many problem would rise. Here are some of the problem:

1/Lag would occur more often, due to a large amount of players packed in one place. Not to mention some players already have issue with their Net already like me. By doing so, it just adds more frustration to players.

2/ Not enough dummies to practice. More people but the same number of Practice Dummy, will make people hard to test out their build to see their dams. I guess that you also hate other player jump in and kill your dummies while you testing your build.

3/Map chat will be unable to handle with all the context. Each text will be able to see like o.5s before it is filled up with other text. Not to mention if you want to normal chat with your friend, first you won’t be able to see it on your chat due to many chat happened at once. Second your screen will fill up with a whole lot of random Chat bubble everywhere. If u wish to chat in private, we can already doing so by Whispering or Sending Mail.

4/You won’t be able to see your friend character due to the large number of people packed in the same place. We already have Guest Feature for this if u wish to see him in person. I have not tried to Guest in FOTM yet but I think it should work too.

Above are just some quick reason why I think the feature should not be implemented. We can already dueling anyone on different continent already. I am pretty happy with that. What we are lacking of atm is the feature that allows players from NA server compete with players from EU server. It would be awesome if we can have that.

I believe these issues are a non-issue, mainly because of the kind of community that has formed in Lion’s Arch in all of the servers.

1. Lag is not an issue in LA. There will be just as many people in Heart of the Mists as there are in Lion’s Arch at peak hours and I’ve never had to deal with lag at all. Also even if there is lag people are always able to move out of the laggy area to other sections of the Mists which lag less.

2. This is an issue that I had thought of and I believe that the benefits far outweigh the cons of not having a dummy to train on. It shouldn’t be difficult to introduce a private instance in which people can tests builds. More on that note, there should be better ways to test out builds than the dummies. It will just call to attention the fact that we have a really terrible way to test builds.

3. Lion’s Arch generally doesn’t have this problem. But that’s besides the point; Heart of the Mists is supposed to be a giant hub and gathering point for all aspiring PvPers. The hub should be bustling with people going about doing their own things. Take private messages to whisper/party/all chat.

4. Uhhh…. wut?

I feel that fixing this games PvP comes from the players as much as Anet. Having this few PvPers is stagnating the game and preventing the PvP experience from improving. GW2 PvP requires massive change and this is a step in the right direction because it allows the community to finally come together and interact.

I think that Heart of The Mists took a step back with the portable queuing.

Killing Tequatl now!
Whisper “Gasmic” now for more information!

We’re gonna kill him once at 3PM PST and once at 5PM PST!
Killed him once before reset!
Gonna kill him again after reset!

People can say that there is no “end-game”…
But I think that the entire game is end-game.
You hit level 80 within 2 weeks, get full exotics within 3; then that is when the entire game is open to you.

You have WvW, Dungeons, World Bosses, Guild Events and all other sorts of things.
I’ve noticed that people who aren’t in an active guild get bored of the stuff and quit and the people in active guilds stay for very long!

GASM is going to start organizing for Tequatl in 30 minutes.
Whisper: “Gasmic” for more information from now until this post announces the kill.

We will kill him once at 3PM and once at 5PM after reset.

Killed him once before reset: Now killing him again after reset!

CLOSED!

I would like to keep this thread devoted to the daily Dragonbrand kills.

We’re going to be killing Tequatl in 15 minutes!

Whisper: Gasmic for an invite anytime between now and 6PM PST.

Update:
We killed him once before the reset: now we are gathering to kill him once after the reset.

CLOSED

Tequatl Raid happening in 45 Minutes for everyone’s information!

Killed him!

It is server time, my apologies!

GASM kills Tequatl for every daily chest on Dragonbrand:

Timings are all PST:
3PM: Wed, Fri
5PM: Mon, Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun

We don’t ever fail anymore: we just require Teamspeak.

PM: Gasmic, Relexis, Sol Taurus for more information.
Happy Dragon Hunting!

Just because a game has difficult content doesn’t mean that it is a raiding game.
Just because a game has raid-like content still does not mean that it is a raiding game.

It is a game which has raids.
It is NOT a raiding game.

There is nothing wrong with adding difficult content to appease to the end-game player base.

Lies, Lies, Blasphemy, and more lies!

Tequatl has brought my server together unlike WvW ever could.
The boss has allowed me to meet many new people from our server and make multiple connections. Though Akitteng is an issue, it can be avoided by an organized group.

My server has decided to kill tequatl every day at 6PM PST. Tequatl will not be dead content.

The rewards tequatl gives are also pretty good.
ANET did an amazing job on Tequatl and they should use the feedback (even the negative kind) on enhancing the other world bosses to make them much more challenging and entertaining like they did this one.

The world bosses were meant to bring the WORLD together and that is what Tequatl does. Keep it up ANET, there still may be hope for you yet!

P.S: You need to fix eles.

Dragonbrand has 3 kills now.

It was some of the best PvE I’ve ever experienced and it brought together our entire server!
Keep them coming Anet!

GASM was considering hopping over to Devona’s Rest to help you guys with it!

Took 105 people on TS.
We had 2 minutes left on the timer.

Took 4 attempts!

Good job and congratulations Dragonbrand!

Dragonbrand just killed him!
We had 2 minute to go!

Gasm[GASM]

Very attractive ele you have there: 10/10.

Top is Gasmic in PvP.
Bottom is Gasmic in PvE!

You can add me to all of the elementalist ones!
I’d be happy to help out!

You can add time to it whenever you want.

I read your work with guardian and the sylvari and I am a HUGE fan!
I would love to see how you would deal with the fast paced reactionary playstyle of a dual dagger elementalist. Id love to speak with you about the different tricks eles use in fights. I would be happy to duel you as many times as you’d like. I should be able to answer any of your questions:I’ve beenn playing this class since release.

We have been having this issue over half a year now.
And no, the issue has NOT been solved.

Another issue is that when I search something it throws up topics that have NOTHING to do with the topic I searched for.

We’re looking for a fill-in right now…
but we are also looking for another long-term 5th to play with us!

Whisper me!

Staying on point and defending a point does not get you points.
Usually when someone bunkers and defends a point they don’t normally get very many points as apposed to those who are only zerging from point to point capping it and letting it get back-capped.

Those kind of people are essentially useless to the team but also get the most points.

What are the Custom Arena /Commands?

I purchased it a few minutes ago and I changed settings. How can I update these settings without forcing everyone outside?

The animation looks quite dumb.

This is a really annoying issue and I hope it gets fixed.

Yep,
Big issue!
I can’t use it in PvP right now cause it throws off the balance!
(Even though we’re not even supposed to have them yet)

You need to interact with the little thing on the side and it lets you in.
It works so that people can’t escape the boss fight and heal up.

PvP Achievements are bugged not to count atm.

That was kittening adorable!
I miss you guys!

IGN: Gasmic
Main Profession: Elementalist
Alternate Professions: None
Account name: Mash Hog.5672
Practice Availablity: Day, times, time Zone: Most days, PST
Current PvP rank: 37
Level of Desire: Leaderboard Hog/Teacher
NA or EU: NA
:P

Stealth.9324:

I would say map chat should stay at what they are now, visible only to that continent. However, I would love to see you can whisper to a different player in Eu for example, then join in the same PvP server and have a match.

I believe that the intentional purpose of this thread is being lost.
My suggestion was to make it so that everyone on an NA server would go to the same Heart of the Mists map or an overflow if the map is full.

Alternatively those on a EU server would go to another Heart of the Mists map; not the same HOM as NA.

Eurantien.4632:

There are no words to describe the map chat that would occur…

It could be comparable to how LA gets during a busy day or during WvW Reset…
It’s not un-handleable.

Stealth.9324:

I think all continental would be able to duel in hotm as long as we are on the same region, Eu or NA.Say for example, I am in NA FOrt Aspenwood and you are NA Kaineng, we can stir meet up and duel in HOTM.Same for me as well

That’s exactly what I meant!

Dungeons, world bosses, and other events need more incentive in general.
The only GOOD incentive system they have in place is for Fractals.

Otherwise all other incentive system in place are terrible.
sPvP/tPvP
WvW
Dungeons
World Bosses

Guild Mission incentives are quite nice…

I think it is a great idea to use Fractals to tell the history of Tyria!

Stealth.9324:

It would be a nice feature if we can implement it. I want to meet some good EU Eles but too bad I am in NA..I hate that so much.

It would be nice to meet people from NA to EU, but I think the first step would be to merge the Continental servers at first!

P.S: I have 1.8k hours logged on my Elementalist: I’m not too good, but I’d love to meet up with you!