Guild Wars 2

CHEERS.

/15 Char

I am a Valk D/D ele, and I do fine. I have two counters in Terrormancer Necromancers and GOOD PU condition mesmers.

I can beat or tie everything else, so I have fun. And if I change my traits to be the slightest bit more tanky, I can even tie necros and mesmers that would normally kill me off..

I understand I may be part of that group Gallrvaghn mentioned, but really ele is all about your dedication to the class. If you have fun on it, then you need to work to become one of the best at it.

I have confidence that anybody with good skill binds and quick reaction times can be a good ele, it just takes that dedication to play the class whenever you log on GW2. It’s not for the alt-o-holic.

Best of luck to you.

Since WvW is in the mists, why not roll back all pvp changes, then balance for “The mists” as a place. Include all the armor options from WvW, but introduce some of the nerfs from spvp.

I say this because I am personally sick of the over simplistic armor options in spvp, lack of diversity, and the fact that what should be a superior game mode for small teams play and inter server dueling is ruined by the fact that your WvW builds are null and void.

Summation? Balance specifically for the mists. I’d like to get some support for this idea so perhaps the devs will see it.

The Game Slayer.7632:

Mbelch.9028:

Glad to see this thread.

Conditions. They are the bane of elementalists. I can’t tell you the last time I lost a direct damage duel. But the time I lost a condition damage duel was recent. We have enough clears, but we virtually have to devote ourselves to clearing conditions.

I literally have 30 points invested just so I don’t have to worry as much about hybrid condi builds. And against bomb engineers, why even try as a d/d ele?

ether renewal? .. no? … “DEY RUPT MER ETHER.”
Oh, I use rock solid, just saying.

I don’t appreciate the sarcasm. Ether renewal is in my opinion an inferior healing skill. It’s length and the fact that it forces you to quit combat make for the ride of your life. You had better use it when your opponent is low, otherwise yes, believe me it will be interrupted. Rock solid you say? Yes a valid pvp option, but it greatly decreases your DPS. I have played ele for an extremely long time and given each of our skills lengthy testing.

Your opinions are yours, but try to get some fact into them before bashing me.

Mash Hog.5672:

Lots of good points here.
I’m going to start adding more to the main thread.

Lets talk specifically about our Attunement Mechanic and how that hurts us instead of helps us.

I think I touched on it earlier with chill. Other than that, I don’t believe it does hurt us. We have to pick our poison. Range or melee. D/D has a good deal of gap closers and reasonably ranged attacks, so I’m not too concerned with that.

I wish conjures were worth taking, such that lightning hammer had all four attunements, and defensive and offensive skills on all. Lightning hammer was just an example. If frost bow was better altered to have all attunements and more charges, d/d users could have it to compensate for range for a time. Staff users could switch to any number of the weapons to protect themselves in melee.

Basically, make conjures worth a kitten.

Past that, arcana should be re-extended to -attunement recharge, with the 25 and 30 granting an additional amount of recharge rate. This allows for quicker weapon swap, something I believe we need, and anet set themselves up for it by condensing the bonus to just 20 arcana.

Past that, our best skills could use considerable shortenings. RTL and updraft don’t deserve 40 second cool downs, not does churning earth or fire grab. Give me a break on that one.

If we saw even a slight drop in skill cooldowns, a little bit of an increased recharge rate and conjure weapons worth burning a slot on, we may see complaints about our skill mechanic diminish.

This was deleted once, as it isn’t constructive. It even inspired a snarky response from me. I’m excited for it to be removed once again.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Josh Davis.6015:

We agree. There were some PvP-only changes for professions that made sense in a previous meta, but not so much now. I expect we’ll be looking very closely at some of these skills over the next few weeks.

That’s interesting to know.

I suggest looking at Elementalist’s Water Magic #30th trait, Cleansing Water. A 5 second cooldown was added in a previous meta, which made the skill less funnier and removed some interesting combos out of it. Since then, the condition meta came and the new version still didn’t see much use, while elementalist’s water condition removal was further toned down by putting both cleansing wave and soothing disruption at master tier (making it impossible to use all three). For all those reasons, and for how fun the trait used to be before, I think it’s one of the best candidates for a revert.

Even more so, reverting it would make its interaction with the new auto-regen trait at adept tier less clumsy. It’s annoying when the grandmaster trait is put under cooldown because our opponent critically hit us. It makes any second source of regen a gamble, because when we we proc a second regen, we don’t know if the grandmaster trait is still under cooldown or not.

All of this. We’re glad to hear a response. I support the OP’s thoughts.

Mine go a step further, I feel you need to introduce a more complex armor system for SPvP, perhaps even bringing in core armor sets from WvW. Allowing ELEMENTALISTS to choose their own armor is extremely important, as our base stats are so low in some areas, we are up to 50% more damaging in WvW. We can’t achieve that in SPvP, and we suffer for that.

I still play SPvP, but it’s nowhere near as fun.

As it is, all or most of ele skills are far too broadcasted with motion.

Many of your changes include increasing the cast times. This will break the profession. 2 second cast time on updraft? That’s ridiculous. Ele has two CC skills with D/D, and one is already hard to use.

I don’t say this to be mean or not constructive, but you really shouldn’t give tips on how to balance the game for classes which you haven’t played to an extremely large extent. I say this because your changes for ele would break weapon sets, and they’re just changing skills you personally feel are ‘OP’. This isn’t the case for many of them.

Something new I’d like to add, but I’m afraid won’t receive attention here. Perhaps you could add it to your thread post, Gasmic.

Eles can suffer from chill, but our attunements can’t… This means anybody who keeps up perma chill on an ele will win, especially if its a terrormancer necro (A direct counter to d/d ele in spvp).

Other classes’ weapon swaps aren’t affected, I don’t believe? Correct me if I’m wrong there, but even if they are, ele shouldn’t be. Our attunement swap isn’t’ the equivalent of a weapon swap. Usually by the time an ele notices he has chill, there are other conditions there as well, and a clear would be useful, or is being bursted and feared, so needs to swap through either water or earth in a pinch. This is even if we only just swapped to fire or air, so a fight could obviously get mucked up pretty easily by this condition.

As everybody on this forum knows, I’m a strong supporter of buffing condition removal, removing condition duration food.

Gokil.2543:

I just went through the first 5 pages of every profession forum.

Most of them don’t even have 1 red answer, some have 1 like us, and engi has 2.

You’re just complaining for the sake of complaining

I still wish there was more activity by Devs as a whole. We had that string of responses for one day, and it felt good to get the communication out there..

Otherwise there’s a stifled feeling.

Good morning,

I’d just like to point this out to the Devs that Evasive Arcana has a tool tip error. It says on dodge, earth gives bleeding and immobilize.

I’d very much like it to give immobilize, as I think that gives ele a bit of the control it needs to orchestrate some new combos.

Wether or not this was intended, this was pointed out to me the other day by an ele in my guild Legendary Frost, and I’m here asking you to let us know if this could become a new feature, or if this is a tool tip error, in which case you should be informed to fix it.

Thanks,

Yes, boons per category.

As Rage said, expect 5-6 percent. Ele usually has might, swiftness, protection, fury, regeneration and vigor, although many eles can’t afford permanent uptime on each of those boons. At times it has stability, but don’t count on it. Other classes can give it retaliation.

This is just a ‘pick up as you go along’ minor trait. It was nerfed, as it was giving us double the amount. I wish they’d un-do that change.

My personal verdict is: useful in this meta if you’d like to be an interesting tank. You’ll have little damage available if you go this route.

Dueling necromancers, mesmers and engineers, it too has its uses. Take it for what you will, but I’m not behind hard counters, and I do not support this trait.

As far as I’m concerned, our last balance patch was also a nerf.

Largos are my number one choice, but I hope none are released unless they choose to also release permanently to the BLTC a race change token.

Conncept.7638:

I really don’t think its a class balance issue at all, it’s a system issue. The condition and boon systems are both invisible and lack any play to counterplay beyond slotted hard counters.

But I doubt they’ll fix this beyond making adjustments to individual classes, so it still is a class issue.

Also, to everybody saying stuff about PvE condis.. That’s ruined by the fact that only one person can stack conditions effectively. But multiple people can burst effectively. So take that up with game design, it’s ruining PvP and WvW right now though.

Proven.2854:

If not full cleanses, I’d like to see more targetted and priority based cleanses. The current system of trying to cover conditions just leads to too much UI watching.

Either way, if condition application is near guaranteed, then cleansing needs to be closer to near guaranteed as well.

Yeah I can get behind this. I wish I could pick what was removed first second and third. That should be an option every class can prioritize.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

As far as conditions go… I think the mess we have now is the product of a series decisions that went down since launch.

At launch, condition cleansing was originally much more powerful. I can’t provide many examples off the top of my had, but one such example is Mantra of Resolve, which used to cleanse every condition you had on a 20 second cooldown, but only once before needing a recharge. A lot of condition cleansing was like this, but as time went on full cleanses were nerfed, and conditions themselves kept getting more and more buffs.

With cleansing taking on a limited approach, spam became much more important. Originally there were no “covering” conditions at first, and dumping them all was more likely to make you lose than anything else. Now, you can spam without abandon, since so many classes don’t have a full cleanse. The ones that do have it on a long cooldown, much longer than their blocks or their dodges.

Personally, I would like to see it go back a bit to how it was around release: more full cleanses on shorter cooldowns.

While I personally wholeheartedly agree, I only want to point out that there will be more balancing issues if we go this route. Condition eles or condition rangers will suffer since burning and bleeding are their main conditions, and at least eles can’t apply much else aside from that.

I think if they just tune down conditions as a whole, the current cleanses would be sufficient.

I will add I thin torment was the worst addition to gw2.

I appreciate all the responses. I don’t think I agree with the 50% condi duration armor. I suppose it isn’t any different than crit dmg though.

If that happened we’d 100% have to drop that food from the game..

Monoman.2068:

This condition meta is powerful enough to scare me off my meditation guardian with 2 condition removing utilities to play on my necro and spend most of the fight just transferring them back. I’ve seen the arguments of both sides, but I honestly can’t agree with the people who say conditions are fine with the state that removal is currently in. Condition damage just reeks of a lack of foresight since most classes’ ability to defend from it is either borderline obnoxious or nonexistent. The way condition damage usefulness falls off or spikes through the roof in certain scenarios (roaming, zerging, pve, etc) also doesn’t help.

I’m honestly in the mindset that conditions need to be reworked and that won’t happen.

Haha. I like your response.

I can’t help but agree. It discourages 1v2 play. I won a 1v3 yesterday vs some decent players and I never would have won without mist form to stomp.

The fact that I find myself bursting most people to death shows me something is out of whack

All of this. This gives eles underlying problems. I can’t run from a group, but being so squishy I should be able to.

I have to leave a fight that stacks against me quicker than another class unless I bust FGS.

But balance wise I think it is abhorrent warriors have a cheaper RTL on that cooldown.

But just to respond to some of the ‘downers’.. here are a few responses to feed you.

Gnat.9405:

I think OP keeps getting owned by Necros and doesn’t want to adapt.

I don’t. I did die twice to a necro earlier today. He was quite good. We dueled 6 times and he got me three times. His build chilled me and kited me around, but he was genius with signet of spite. I think necros are in a good place, I think conditions are out of balance. If you disagree, fine. If you want to duel me, contact me in game. Next.

Aenesthesia.1697:

Mbelch.9028:

Ozii hit the nail on the head. It is obnoxious that they spam, need to take a break, and their damage is still ticking. Of course you can be smart about this, but I think it merits some extra shaving down.

If you are power specced, then you should be able to kill a condition spec before his conditions kill you. Power/crit is burst, condition is attrition. Of course he will try to kite you, what else can he do? Just bring utilities to break his kiting. Otherwise, if you bring utilities that only maximize your damage at close range, and don’t carry a condition cleansing utility, don’t expect to be able to surive a kiting condition spec. You are basically ignoring all your nemesis’s strenghts and trying to kill it like it was a sitting duck.

You’re right, that’s what he’s left to do. That’s only some condition builds though. That’s basically a mesmer build and a necro build, there are others that keep in your face while tanking you and applying devastating conditions. Warriors using longbow mace sword can do a devastating 1v1 build in this way. I’m no glass cannon, so I think you’re a little off base. The goal of SOME power builds are to burst, but the goal of others is to put off burst and do enough damage to overcome in that fashion. I do that, and I do OK.

Mbelch.9028:

I would love to see virtually all condi clears get an extra condi removed, and their duration decreased by 15%. I’d be ok with the way things were if that were the case.

Yeah, and let’s give additional armor to all condition specs, why not? And the cooldown on your burst skills increased in 15%.

Well, I’m no warrior, so…. Burst skills aren’t for me. Try again soon. It was a simple proposition. If you have a constructive criticism on it, say so. If you disagree, also say so. I really feel that is an appropriate change. If others don’t, so be it. It’s just a suggestion, and good for you all, I’m not a game designer.

Necros tend to do well in 1v1, do great in SPvP and are invaluable in medium-small groups.

I think necros need an increase in mobility, but are in an OK place past that. The issue lies with conditions overall..

And tim, several posts back you asked if I was trolling? I’m afraid not my friend. I don’t troll.

This basically is for staff?

And it’s pretty apparent why eles can be harder to play. They have the highest action per minute of any class. More actions doesn’t always equate to better, but if you use those actions right, you can surpass other classes with fewer actions per minute.

I feel amazing as an ele in WvW. No complaints whatsoever.

They don’t face as many issues as you think. And they aren’t as perfect as warriors right now. I don’t think we are in a bad spot if they just bring other classes down a tad.

And pardon us old eles for being… Very skeptical at anybody saying they’ll change ele positively. Each patch we’ve gotten has been a nerf, and yes I consider the most recent patch a nerf since I don’t support hard counters.

Glad to see this thread.

Conditions. They are the bane of elementalists. I can’t tell you the last time I lost a direct damage duel. But the time I lost a condition damage duel was recent. We have enough clears, but we virtually have to devote ourselves to clearing conditions.

I literally have 30 points invested just so I don’t have to worry as much about hybrid condi builds. And against bomb engineers, why even try as a d/d ele?

I intended this to be across the board. Pvp and WvW. I do mostly WvW, and I only do small teams. So conditions are a menace anywhere I go.

Another issue I have with conditions are they are mostly ranged. I feel like if anything, conditions should be melee only, as ranged just gives them an excuse to kite the heck out of players.

Ozii hit the nail on the head. It is obnoxious that they spam, need to take a break, and their damage is still ticking. Of course you can be smart about this, but I think it merits some extra shaving down.

I would love to see virtually all condi clears get an extra condi removed, and their duration decreased by 15%. I’d be ok with the way things were if that were the case.

silvershadez.8421:

LightningBlaze.4913:

Nothing is viable or optimal in WvW/spvp if you don’t have the player skills. It is as simple and straight forward as that. I roam now with s/f and I ’m performing better now than I ever did with d/d or s/d. Fgs, lightning flash and my permanent 25% speed is all I need for mobility.

The ele (PvP) community stopped looking for new builds after they had their 0/10/0/30/30 D/D build. Anything else is just not “viable”…

This is one of the major reasons eles are currently leading the whining ladder.

Sure eles ain’t on the top but it’s far away from being as worse as some people make it up.

While I agree most of these Eles whine too much, I’d kill to see changes to the class in a positive direction.

I disagree though. I don’t run that build, and I know many people who don’t run that build. I think there are some people out there running epic things and not sharing them, and I don’t blame them. Look at what happened thanks to dapheonix’s videos.

I think this is an important topic for us to discuss. It was repeated that conditions needed to be shaved down, but I think it needs to happen even further.

Nothing promotes passive play like condition spamming, and it ruins small teams gameplay.

I’d just love to hear everybody’s thoughts on how conditions affect their classes. I know Eles have a very hard time with conditions, but we can combat them.

How does everybody else feel, and who are the culprits? Is it a class balance thing or should it be across the board?

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

Mbelch.9028:

Sure they are. Or maybe that’s just you when you play ele.

Or maybe you shouldn’t judge other players based on yourself.

Any player that is excellent at playing ele will be MUCH better when playing another class to the same extend. That’s a fact that even the devlopers acknowledged.

FYI I’m beast at playing ele.

FYI so am I, and I know the class isn’t a liability. Where does that leave us? I’m sick of everybody trashing ele at every turn, so my kindness level towards the negativity is about a zero right now.

Sure they are. Or maybe that’s just you when you play ele.

Gokil.2543:

Elementalist is considered by many the worst PvP class at the moment. However, since the last patch, viablity of the elementalist has gone up due to most important meta builds, especially the ones that specifically countered the ele, getting nerfed. People are playing elementalist succesfully at every spot in the leaderboards, but it’s not as easy to do that well as it used to be.

You can still play D/D ele like you used to, you just won’t be a god. Other important builds are S/X glass cannon, staff glass cannon and diamond skin D/D (new earth grandmaster trait that makes you immune to conditions above 90%. Highly situational trait)

This. This is probably how I should have said it elsewhere. It’ll really come down to your skill, dedication, key binds and how prepared your build is to fight in any situation.

D/F is a great build which has potential for WvW roaming.

In fact I beat a D/F ele today who ran condition perplexity, he was epic, and he gave me a hard time. He beat a lot of other people, though. And I have a friend who ties me with D/F all the time.

The invulnerable skill really gives you some opportunities.

Bow out because eles are epic. Really though, just coordinate yourself. Any 2v2 should have a roughly equal chance against each other, especially when organized.

Let me ask my friend Serane. Best ele..NA/EU/Anywhere lol. Awesome in spvp too. If he joins in this will be a real party. He’s been having some unfortunate lag though.

We have great defense as well. Just no evades blocks or stealth. The amount of bad in this thread is startling.

No smart ele would let a warrior auto attack him to death.

I’ll part ways with this thread, as I don’t think any forward progression is happening in this discussion.

Use them for leveling up but don’t rely on them in WvW/pvp.

I think honestly you may be better suited to a flamethrower bunker condi engineer. That’s just based off your description of yourself.

Otherwise staff in a Zerg? Try out engie

Gokil.2543:

Mbelch.9028:

Bingo, Gokil, we do find two hard counters in terrormancers and well played condition 20/20/30 mesmers, but that doesn’t mean we suck.

Unless we slap on diamond skin ofcourse But I’d rather not

Right on lol. I won’t support hard counters! Anet def should get away from doing that.

Bingo, Gokil, we do find two hard counters in terrormancers and well played condition 20/20/30 mesmers, but that doesn’t mean we suck.

dostunuz.3982:

No matter what you do if you face a full condition/anti-boon necro you will probably die or run.

I don’t have trouble with them 1v1 just 1v2. I was just giving this person the benefit of the doubt that the necro and engie were both full condi, and I was asking how he dealt with them with limited condi removal.

I know how I would have done it lol. With cleansing fire and a crap ton of burst!

ThiBash.5634:

Kyon.9735:

Cool. “Elite” Forum eles teaming up, are you guys?

Why not? We’re always getting ganged up on by the people that scream for buffs and thrash the profession, so why shouldn’t we work together too? Whether you like it or not, there’s a small group of players that can handle the elementalist the way it is now. So maybe if the thrash talkers and the elite town things down a bit, we can actually find the buffs that are actually needed. Instead of just yelling ele sucks/rules and calling it a day…

Huge +1 here. Half the time on the ele forum I feel overwhelmed by people who just aren’t good at the class and are frustrated. If this is the case, just ask for help, don’t flame the ele.

I also stopped using lemongrass food.

Nice video, and nice video editing. I’d like to ask you, other than lemongrass how do you deal with full condi classes? I’m not exactly sure if we saw you fight any. There was an engineer and a necro, but it didn’t seem like they were ticking conditions for a lot. I virtually go full condi removal and still have trouble when two full condi classes are against me.

Back to your video though, you did well, but I like what the guy said about conservative dodges. You missed out on some easy stomps, extra might and such.

You leave several skills unused. Air 2? Man that’s a super valuable skill. That would have come in handy a bunch when you were fighting that hammer warrior. I don’t think I saw you use it once. Also when you set up earth 3’s magnetic grip.. Why not ever leap? I saw a handful of times when you could have pressed the button and have gotten a free fire aura. Which with boon duration never hurts, as you usually get 3 stacks of might from it.

On the other side, it was a great video. You fought well and you know your ele’s limitations which is half of the battle.

Hopefully some day we can duel.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Otaur.9268:

Mbelch.9028:

They’ve stated they want to change the condi meta. Hence all their talk about shaving down condition builds. So I do understand.

Conditions shouldn’t be like this in any game.. Period.

Elite forum eles teaming up. I like that, but no. It’s a simple view that certain people have. I don’t mind that your view differs. I think differently.

I got peeved off at your sarcasm.

There is a difference between continuously buffing all classes and trying to maintain a status quo. You can think one is better than the other, but it isn’t nitpicking to have an opinion one way or another.

I personally think that elementalists, guardians and rangers are in a good place, but changes need to happen to conditions and other classes to adjust the game to head in a good direction which encourages skill over anything else.

Full zerk ele hitting 3.5k with Lightning whip on a GS warrior using healing signet. The warrior was out-healing the damage of my lightning whip and hit for 2.8k – 3.2k damage with each swing just from his auto attack… Buff the freaking Ele to Beta status. Give us the damage, mobility, and healing power we had back in Beta. No one at Arena Net even plays an Elementalist, and it shows.

What? I think you exaggerate somewhat, max hp/s of a warrior is about 1200.

^ This. Your situation doesn’t make sense. I stalemate very few warriors, and I lose to none. Healing signet makes them quite OP for certain situations, but not like what you’re describing.

If a warrior is doing the 1200hp/sec build they will hit mediocre numbers and not be very mobile by warrior standards.

They’ve stated they want to change the condi meta. Hence all their talk about shaving down condition builds. So I do understand.

Conditions shouldn’t be like this in any game.. Period.

Elite forum eles teaming up. I like that, but no. It’s a simple view that certain people have. I don’t mind that your view differs. I think differently.

I got peeved off at your sarcasm.

There is a difference between continuously buffing all classes and trying to maintain a status quo. You can think one is better than the other, but it isn’t nitpicking to have an opinion one way or another.

I personally think that elementalists, guardians and rangers are in a good place, but changes need to happen to conditions and other classes to adjust the game to head in a good direction which encourages skill over anything else.

I’ve responded. Let’s set some dates so we don’t fall behind. At some point this week I’d like to do some dueling between our team and practicing.

Wow I read it as “increase elementalist hp and armor.” So I thought he meant as a new boon. Never mind lol.

No problem.

Combat some of her moves. These double in duels with real thieves. Knock her out of blinding powder with air 5. Weaken them so they don’t do too much damage. No reason to stay in close range during dagger storm.

You can dodge 50%+ of an unload if you begin your dodge no less than 1 hit into it.

One beautiful thing about our skills even in melee range; they all have a longer range than any other class melee wise.

So abuse lightning whip, and that blinding powder won’t hinder you too much.

Trigger is a friend of mine, and he’s quite good. Heidia next time you’re against us remind me to have you fight my other thief friend. You’ll have fun with it.

I find if I can’t beat a thief I can always tie them. I’ve yet to find a thief who consistently beats me.

I’m that one guy who still has fun in spvp even though I have two hard counters. I’m over it.

Wintel and I disagree that ele is a liability. It is certainly one in the wrong hands, as I know you need more skill to play ele now more than ever.

You’ll know if ele isn’t right for you by how dedicated you are to the class. Also, don’t just follow the “meta” most of the best builds aren’t found by sticking to the “meta”.