Guild Wars 2

Ehh.
It’s sort of a buff for aurashare builds, especially if we get some content where that’s more useful, in that it lets you give nearby allies your aura buffs when they need them instead of when you decide to share them (so if someone suddenly realizes they’re out of dodges, they can grab your conjure for some protection).

It’s only ehh because conjures needed bigger buffs, along the lines of instant cast or an effect upon successful cast.

Stompy.1387:

Malediktus.3740:

Enko.6123:

They’re adding daily map rewards that will have these as drops. Luckily only 4 recipes needs these and you need a total of 291.

Farming 291 eyes yourself without using the TP can easily take 100k hours.

Which is exactly why this game is not designed for you to farm everything yourself. The trading post is there for a reason; to be used.

Yeah, but nobody really wants to spend 1750g on just the eyes for Immobulus.

I’m sorta hyped.
I run fire/arcane with two in air (arcane brilliance/wave/shield (sometimes armor of earth instead of shield) and a conjure, elites don’t matter) currently, so the only thing that really bothers me is elemental surge getting the 20% cooldown on arcane skills, because I like having evasive arcana.
Elemental surge is cool if you face someone that doesn’t have cleanses (not to mention it applies with arcane power), but everyone and their dog has six cleanses that they can afford to use to get rid of that massive stack of a single condition. It’s funny now because you can stack upwards of forty seconds of burn, but that will be quite gone.

I’m not really sure what else you could ask for, haha. Arcane got buffed in some pretty cool ways which is nothing abnormal because everyone was already in it anyway. I would have preferred some reallocation, but they at least massively buffed the traits that affected arcane skills.
Blasting staff is now baseline and you don’t need arcane for it.
Fire, our previously weakest line (People only even touched it in PvE because the, what, 5% increase in damage was worth the 50% decrease in everything else when you don’t need anything other than more deeps) had about half the traits merged.

Air basically lost bolt to the heart, which was why people put small amounts of points in air, in exchange for fresh air’s cooldown, which I can’t wait to horribly abuse.

Water and earth are nearly untouched outside of some slight tuning and the condensing of the earth signet traits (which is probably a buff if you were going to be running signets anyway).

What I see is a whole lot of options for people that weren’t going to go into traditional cantrip specs anyway.

phys.7689:

Coulter.2315:

Pino.5209:

Coulter.2315:

The traits are all more worthy of taking now, they have made every choice valid and have cut the pointless rubbish. You have more valid choices now just less pointless choices. Its a better move for diversity not worse.

This not entirely true. You have less choices and flexibility now. Less pointless choices, which you can’t avoid while being lock into a line, just because you want to get a specific useful trait in that line. I wouldn’t call it better move for diversity. It’s a better move to dumb down the traits, less complicated for the simple minded. Just like when they dumb down leveling, NPE. Not only this, the nerf bats that come with this new system is enormous, just to poor salt into the wound.

Old example, say you’re a Necro from a few years back and you want to take Dhuumfire you then are forced to take the 2 “least worst” options in Adept and Master – now because of the combining of traits and several useful choices at each level you now can get better options. Thats before I even mention Mesmers getting IP as baseline (a MASSIVE freedom), all classes getting 1/2 their bottom line effect and more.

The removal of redundant traits and the enpowering of all choices gives you more choice. Yes it makes it harder to make a bad choice but is that really “flexibility?”

you dont have to get rid of choices in order to make some choices better, thats a fallacy.
yes, they cut choices, and improved some choices at the same time, but they didnt have to.
they could just have had more choices which were better choices.

its like someone saying the only way you can have good food is if their are less types of food. simply not true, you can have choices AND high quality at the same time. Which gives you the ultimate amount of diversity and quality.

I think in this case it’s more like they wanted to prevent certain combinations, and also get rid of some of the choices that were never taken.

If nobody likes your pineapple zucchini sandwich and nothing else on your menu has zucchini in it, you take it off the menu so that you stop having to order zucchini. It might be reducing your choices, but there’s no real point in keeping objectively bad choices around or making too many of them (why do you think most restaurants only have a couple of pages of food?). One of the problems with GW1 that I think they’re trying to avoid is that there were significant numbers of skills that just weren’t used, period.

On top of all this, it makes the game easier to balance by making sure you don’t have to balance every trait with every single other trait, so that they can manage the traitlines more individually without worrying about unintended combinations that end up being too strong.

Wouldn’t most fights VS. condition users just have your entire bar greyed out for pretty much the entire time?
Condition builds have terrifying theoretical damage that just happens to be constantly cleansed, so your healthbar would be flashing red and grey whenever a condition build hits you.

Just make it so that autos can’t proc fire/air sigils and several other passive effects (certain traits), or reduce the chance greatly, and give swap sigils a half second delay (with or without an animation. Just making it dodgeable would make them easier to deal with).

I don’t see this ever being a bad thing, and would let Anet tweak them a bit to make them useful but not obnoxious.

DejaVu.9825:

Can anyone understand that even amulets are unbalanced and hurt? all that waste time to “think” about how to balance the game, when you do not even know where to start. GW2 E-sports? impossbile … amulets, runes (70% is not even used), traits, game mechanics in general do not allow this game to be E-sports.

Summary …

stability
CC instantaneous (Ex. Power lock the mesmer)
Amulets that give more stats than others …
Skill, utility and elite too strong or too weak ….
Rune … (some unnecessary effects)
AI builds

PS: Someone explain why the most op skill in this game -> Magnetic Wawe (Elementalist) <- is not retrieved by any “expert”? that is, it does it all: cure 3 conditions, reflected projectiles, does damage, it deals cripple and a combo finisher … at only 25 seconds of CD and has no cast time, this skill is louder than some of utility, I said all.

Magnetic wave is on earth focus, which also has obsidian flesh, which is probably more op. Sadly, the rest of focus is pretty lackluster, which is why focus on the whole is not that viable.
The reason being that fire is entirely useless, water is nearly as bad, and air is normal, so once they get your earth stuff popped you don’t really have anything except stalls in air for the next forty seconds.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Yup. It supports the general active combat of the game by requiring less time in which we are restricted to a small area. It literally does the exact same thing, but it does it faster.

Yup sure, lets make a complaint thread about.

Base AoE heal took a 45 and a half% nerf in ticks with a 50% buff in tick strength. However, the scaling per-tick is still .4, as it was pre-patch. 68.25% as strong as it was pre-patch with 0 healing power. Adding healing power worsens the difference.

That’s a hefty nerf in quality

Which may or may not be necessary, because as a rule frontloaded power is better than the same spread out over a longer duration.
They might still have to buff it, but nerfing total power in exchange for increasing the speed of it is pretty reasonable.

1) Arcing Slice is now vastly better in dungeons just because of AoE. Not that anyone uses burst in dungeons anyway, but whatever.

2) Arcing Slice is now vastly better in zergs, just because AoE and better damage if you’re hitting someone below 50% health (not sure how important this is on a roaming weapon).

3) Arcing Slice is now worth using in PvP situationally, for whatever that’s worth. You can sometimes hit a few people with it, and it has a better damage increase below 50% health than anything else in the game.

The only place the new arcing slice is not better is in 1v1s and solo roaming. You don’t take GS for damage in solo roaming, and you have no reason to take it in 1v1s anyway.

Literally the only thing this will ever be is a buff to arcing slice. It has potential use in certain situations now where it didn’t before, and anywhere you won’t use it now you wouldn’t use it before.
Any questions?

Here’s the problem with pretty much any fixes to those skills though:

1) With cast times on those skills, you would literally be unable to autoattack in air for fear of being locked into it for a full three seconds.

2) Attunements can’t have cast times, at all, or elementalists will instantly become unviable.

3) There are maybe three good focus skills out of the eight. Two of them are in earth. Unless something is done to improve focus overall, nerfing the earth skills would literally take it out of the game, even ignoring how obscenely high their cooldowns are already for weapon skills (you can talk about alacrity traits however much you want, the fact of the matter is that you just aren’t supposed to use them).

4) Scepter burst can remove one person from a fight every 40 seconds, or can do an inferior job to the thief of being an executioner in teamfights (Thieves have much better sticking potential than especially s/f, have stealth for stomping, and are mobile enough to stay alive for long enough to take out several worn-down opponents who would be trying to escape or recuperate, while S/F is slow, has one teleport on a 40 second cooldown, and one invulnerability, which doesn’t really lend itself to chasing down multiple weakened enemies).

Nope, sorry. Not a stupid question, we just don’t have that.

GuildWarsPlayer.5608:

sirian.4981:

When casting, the elementalist just kinda holds the staff off to the side while casting with his hand. Its really bothering me.

Staff is more of a group weapon than a roaming weapon in my opinion. I find staff more viable as a support weapon.

Your response is very relevant to the OP.

It bothers me too, I want my staff to be more weapon and less ornamentation.

Grimreaper.5370:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Grimreaper.5370:

Neko.9021:

I don’t really regard the ability of players to duel in 1v1 situations to be indicative of their skill, given that everything in the game (PvE, WvW, SPvP) is about your ability to team-fight well. If we accepted that 1v1 capability shows how good of a player you are, then PU Mesmers must be the best players in this game :P

SMH… Have you ever heard of a point holder? I know for a fact the 1000+ hours I’ve spent dueling, is the main reason I do so well for my team in spvp. How could learning what skills to dodge and when to burst for best chances of success ever be a bad thing? The fact you could ever think the ability to to fight well in 1v1 is irrelevant towards skill level is astounding, darn noob.

To the people saying “nerf drakes breath” can you people seriously not strafe? Out of all the things Anet should nerf on Ele, DRAKES BREATH?! LOL!

Well frankly you can just aim the thing manually by right clicking and dragging, as you can with a number of other skills, and that is usually a better idea anyway, but still, the thing has 300 range. If it’s that much of a problem, step out of the way for a full 2.25 seconds and then you’re good for at least ten seconds, because any ele that doesn’t swap attunements before then is probably a dead one, unless you don’t understand focusing.

Go try and spin in a circle while channeling drakes breath and watch how terrible the skill is at keeping up with your frontal arc. If you strafe around an ele in a circle while staying fairly close to them they aren’t going to land crap its almost as bad as trying to land the Guardian’s main hand sword skill: zealot’s defense, except nothing is quite that bad, except that skill ofc.

That’s why you lead a bit; it just needs a bit of practice, and really it needs to be somewhat avoidable anyways, with its twelve seconds of burn and 2.0 damage coefficient. Besides, it’s still better than letting the game try to do it for you.

Bhawb.7408:

Lifestealer.4910:

The fact that you think you have some of skill playing these AI builds really shows the type of player these builds attract. You can ask any top player and they would agree that while turret engi and MM necro arent viable in tourney plays, they are still brainless builds that a 12 year old can pick up and do

They don’t know how to play MM source: I’ve seen “top” necros like zombify play MM and its hilarious. Love the guy, but I very rarely even see an MM with a not-idiotic build, let alone see it played at anything close to well.

JinDaVikk.7291:

Furthermore we wouldn’t complain about AI if some of them weren’t so absurdly strong with no input. Most AI builds during specific metas (namely turret engi now) can win nearly any 1v1. Thats kittened and not competitive. Most Ai builds allow bunker amulets with full damage output.
Notice the trend? Everone complains about soldier/cele might stackers for the same reason. Far too tanky with too much damage output.

Being a bunker with high damage is bad enough being a bunker with AI killing people is just wrong, its not competitive.

Also don’t argue the “takes skill crap”. The difference between the skill gaps is huge.

1.5k DPS is the max the minions will do, assuming the person is standing still, the minion AI is perfect, and they never die. Unless you are saying a DPS build deals that much damage (I’ll solve the riddle, they deal more, even a soldier warrior will hit harder than that) then no. MM has an incredibly slow kill time unless you eat every single active they have, which still takes a 5+ seconds to do and can be easily avoided.

If you want to bring issues up with specific AI builds (like turrets, which are horribly designed) feel free. But don’t act like all AI builds are any more brainless than the vast majority of what is currently played.

Even though I hate AI focused builds myself (I think that pretty much all of them except MM and non-spirit Ranger have exactly zero potential for smart play, and while those two have the potential they currently fail horribly at using it. They should play like a strategy game thing, while currently all you have control over is activating a skill occasionally), I have to agree with the above post. I finally made a warrior about three days ago. It is level eight. I have no experience with any of the skills except sword and shield, and those only in PvE. I went into tPvP with a randomish longbow/axesword build with my guild, in berserker gear, and absolutely wrecked face. It was just stupidly easy. I would watch people blind and interrupt my important skills, and just not care, and still win fights easily.

So yeah, AI builds could be a lot smarter, but so could a number of other builds.

Grimreaper.5370:

Neko.9021:

I don’t really regard the ability of players to duel in 1v1 situations to be indicative of their skill, given that everything in the game (PvE, WvW, SPvP) is about your ability to team-fight well. If we accepted that 1v1 capability shows how good of a player you are, then PU Mesmers must be the best players in this game :P

SMH… Have you ever heard of a point holder? I know for a fact the 1000+ hours I’ve spent dueling, is the main reason I do so well for my team in spvp. How could learning what skills to dodge and when to burst for best chances of success ever be a bad thing? The fact you could ever think the ability to to fight well in 1v1 is irrelevant towards skill level is astounding, darn noob.

To the people saying “nerf drakes breath” can you people seriously not strafe? Out of all the things Anet should nerf on Ele, DRAKES BREATH?! LOL!

Well frankly you can just aim the thing manually by right clicking and dragging, as you can with a number of other skills, and that is usually a better idea anyway, but still, the thing has 300 range. If it’s that much of a problem, step out of the way for a full 2.25 seconds and then you’re good for at least ten seconds, because any ele that doesn’t swap attunements before then is probably a dead one, unless you don’t understand focusing.

Kashrlyyk.5364:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

…
Most importantly, this should be done in a way that does not increase PvE abilities, because everyone knows Ele damage is highest by now.

I don’t think that is important. At least it is much less important than the question how many buttons does an ele have to press compared to the other professions to get how much more damage than they do?

If an ele has to press twice as many buttons but only gets 10% more total damage out of it then we have a problem.

So how is the situation in that regard for the ele?

It’s fire staff, so we’re pretty set in that regard too. At maximum effectiveness, literally all you do is spam 2 off cooldown and autoattack, and maybe a meteor shower situationally, and possibly use utilities.
So that’s maybe five or six total separate buttons pressed in order to achieve maximum power at any point in a dungeon.

Just remove flame barrier and a lot of people will be happier.
Just give us pretty much anything else.

Atherakhia.4086:

What is it you want them to do? Elementalists are pretty tied down to things like Elemental Attunement and, to a lesser extent, Evasive Arcana. Do you want these traits baseline? That seems awfully overpowered unless given to you like:

If you have 1 pt in a line you unlock that element’s Evasive Arcana bonus. If you have 3pts in a tree you unlock that element’s Elemental Attunement. If you have 5 pts you unlock that element’s Elemental Contingency.

But doing something like that would likely be worse than the current system. Did you have any ideas on how to improve diversity in Ele spec without becoming insanely overpowered?

I do!
The problem with current ele traitlines outside of Arcane and Water are that they tend to promote specialization into one attunement, which is pretty much a really good way to be useless for 3/4 of the time or overspecialize and become a predictable one-trick pony.
A stellar example of this is the fire traitline. Pretty much everything outside of maybe three traits in fire is either overly weak, like the one conjure trait, only helps the one attunement, or affects some utility type other than cantrips (which instantly makes it unviable because of the low base stats that need compensation). This isn’t even talking about our kitten-poor alacrity traits, which don’t have any bonuses attached to them on top of the fact that using a trait to lower one attunement’s cooldown is a bad idea.
At the very least, there are certain grandmaster traits that need to be spread out. Persisting Flames should probably lose fury from blast and just extend all fields by 33% or some other number, Fresh Air should probably be something closer to: Reduce all attunement cooldowns by one second on crit (3 second ICD), which would take it out of the hands of carpel tunnel syndrome air burst specs and give it to more hardcore attunement dancers.
Most importantly, this should be done in a way that does not increase PvE abilities, because everyone knows Ele damage is highest by now.

I agree, let me move while casting meteor shower and churning earth!

;)

I think part of a good solution would to have mobs move more, and to use skills while running, as well as have more of the mechanics that are currently only available to players. I imagine PBAoE boon strips would put a damper on most meta stacking groups (oh, you liked having permanent protection and 25 stacks of might? Whoops), as would stealth kiting.

Not only that, but just adding more random elements to dungeon runs (even if it’s just variations to paths that the players have no control over) would make it much harder to memorize where to stand in each path. Even if it’s something as simple as the Mossman from the swamp fractal appearing with no leash range randomly in twilight arbor until you kill him, it would at the very least require you to mix up your stacking spot a bit.

Let me put it this way:

1) Dungeon content after roughly two runs is predictable and easy. Everyone knows what parts to skip and how to most efficiently pull off the rest, and content plays exactly the same from run to run, meaning that it’s pretty simple to literally make everything go as planned.

2) The meta is and always will be what clears content the fastest, especially with repeated content. Anyone with item goals will try to optimize to find the way to get rewards as soon as possible.

3) Because content is predictable, the meta becomes simply to run whatever deals the most damage. While with challenging and unpredictable dungeons this is not the case (you run dungeons slower if you wipe every three seconds), glass cannons become the norm when you have no reason to spec into survivability.

4) Healing power sucks horribly, which pretty much makes all support ever irrelevant outside of boons, and you don’t need stats for those so you still run full zerker. Part of this is that damage, critical chance, and critical damage have multiplicative synergy, which healing power, toughness, and vitality do not. That is to say, healing power and vitality don’t have any synergy at all. While toughness and vitality do have multiplicative synergy, this becomes irrelevant when conditions are considered, which still makes the synergy worse than PPF.

Some of this could be solved by making boons scale with healing power, while reducing their minimum and increasing their maximum effectiveness, but the meta would simply become one character have maxed healing power and secondary power, precision, and ferocity, while the rest are still zerker.

Removing zerker would just make the meta some other max damage potential mix, which someone would take five minutes to optimize and everyone would immediately switch over their gear to that.

I recommend arcane power as a utility and arcane retribution as your 2-point trait for this, because they both apply arcane surge on your next five hits. Obviously arcane mastery is a go-to as well for the reduced CD on each. Keep in mind though, arcane power applies its effect to the first five hits, which can all be used with a single AoE. It is obviously much more effective in single target situations. I also recommend wave over blast because one hits up to five while the other is single-target.

Staff does have the highest potential DPS against immobile targets, which is why it works in PvE where things don’t really care if you spam 2 on them all day.
The reason people don’t tend to run it too often in PvE is because your group wants you to stack, and you have exactly one defensive weapon skill in fire, which makes you stupidly squishy. LH is next in line, but brings stuns, mobility, blinds, and blast finishers making it a vastly better PvE weapon overall.

Really the only things I would have changed on staff would be slightly higher water damage (it should be low but not that low), a bit of air improvement (Gust is painful, the blind is okay but needs lower cast time to be effective), and less overlap between earth and air, which seem to both be control focused.

Ele burst has reached well over 21k damage near instantly using fresh air/zephyr (for the 20% damage boost on knockdown) + lightning flash + arcanes on s/d. It annihilates everything, but then has no defensive cooldowns or real sustained offense.

It’s still the highest skillcap PvP weapon eles have, and one of the best damage options after LH in PvE, and the best support weapon for zergs across all classes.

I fairly recently switched my ele over to female for armors, because male light armors seem a bit less interesting to me, not in the sense that you can expose a ton of leg/torso, but rather in the intricacy of the design (like the leg tattoos for the winged armor set, and the more flamboyant decorations in general).
I might have stayed with male (though probably not, my ele looks kitten now), if it was possible to have some more stand-out clothing styles (again, not in the sense that a certain torso makes you look topless and braless from behind).

I agree that the warrior mechanic could use a bit of work, mostly because the question of whether you should use your burst or not can be easily determined by the following flowchart:
Is your burst bar full → No: Wait another three seconds, Yes: Use your burst skill.

There’s pretty much no reason to ever not use it off cooldown unless you’re using GS, which in my opinion is pretty boring.

etiolate.9185:

Question: How long does revealed debuff last? I constantly knock a thief out of shadow refuge, it evades once and then its back to stealth. That’s not much of a debuff.

And for the person who doesn’t understand why constantly resetting a fight is a big advantage: It allows you to “lose” over and over, and continue the fight. You can wait around to engage on your own terms. If your burst is high enough that you don’t need more than a few hits from certain skills, then constant resets allow you to screw up more than other classes and survive.

Revealed only happens when someone stealthed does direct damage. It has nothing to do with getting knocked out of SR.

Naranek.3467:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

The sole reason he has limited this to engineers and elementalists is because these classes tend to OOC switch more than the others, mostly to a utility weapon, but also for different fights

So. You’re saying that this is for combat readiness in changing situations, yes? That you can tell your next fight is going to be a different scenario than the last and you want a quick change. Correct me if that is wrong.

Okay. Given that engi and ele have the fewest number of equipable weapons, I would argue that they would be the classes to least need/benefit from such an addition. On the contrary, it would be the warrior, with its 19 different weapon sets and all the specialization that that implies, who need it more. The difference between, to make up some completely random examples, a Sword/Horn + Greatsword warrior and a Mace/Shield + Rifle warrior is much greater than that of a Pistol/Pistol engineer and a Pistol/Shield engineer.

Fine. I don’t care, so I won’t bother arguing it. It’s irrelevant to the main point, which is that it would be nice to have an OOC weapon slot that can be easily swapped to. Warriors could enjoy not having to open their hero tab to put on a GS in order to move faster than a walk, Eles could switch to staff if they run into a zerg, mesmers could put on their focus to get a bit of swiftness… It’s purely QOL.
Actually there is a side reason (read: don’t actually give this any consideration in the main argument) to give it to eles and engis, which is that currently they have 1-2 less inventory slots than everyone else, though that isn’t particularly important.

Before Answering No, Please Read This

Thank you. ahem

What the OP wants is out-of-combat weapon swapping (presumably only for WvW and PvE). This inherently has zero effect on balance, because it is something already in the godkitten ed game. The sole change would be to condense the process to something less annoying.
The sole reason he has limited this to engineers and elementalists is because these classes tend to OOC switch more than the others, mostly to a utility weapon, but also for different fights (i.e. the range lock on an ele tends to mean that before fighting something ranged and slippery, it is necessary to switch out of d/f because that is spectacularly bad at staying on target). This is, however, true of other classes as well, like mesmers taking focus for swiftness, and I see no reason for this to not be a global change, again because it has absolutely no effect on balance.

Thank you for your time.

I’ve only ever seen two people claim this isn’t an issue in the myriad threads exactly like this one in the various subforums. Asura tend to vastly reduce body telegraphing across the board, which is an obvious problem seeing how this is a major part of balance that is being affected.

isolatedchimp.2510:

Rym.1469:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Pyroathiest.4168:

Pressing 6, 6, and F rapidly takes a lot of practice? We’re not talking about the overcharge blast, remember. This is just cast, overcharge, pick up. It’s not difficult in the slightest.

It is more physical actions to use that process then any other heal skill in the game. As well, it has to be done in a certain time frame, unlike something like mantras that can be primed ahead of time. Just sayin.

Pressing two buttons, oh, such skill. This is laughable argument. You don’t have to worry about being interrupted and part of HT is AoE. If one heal should be better just because it takes more buttons to press (which is not any issue for even average joe) then please make all heals like that!

Those are two extra button pushes that could have been used to activate at least one other skill or a dodge or something. Hell, if you don’t think it matters how many button pushes it takes, how about we double the amount of clicks for every skill on your skill bar then?

Wouldn’t affect me or anyone I play with.

I know this because nobody I play with still clicks skills.

I agree that interrupts are important, but the solution is not to arbitrarily insert them but rather to consider interruptibility in the balance of the skill (which is how it is now for the most part), as in you sacrifice heals in order to not be interrupted.

Oakwind.6187:

Thieves get screwed over by Chill just as anybody else. Even if you have Initiative, you might not be able to use crucial abilities and die. Most of the easily applied Chills are only 2-3 seconds, and interrupt your routine. What’s the problem really? It slows down your ability to burst, makes you prone to mistakes and can be used to sabotage your attempts to survive. Same goes for Thieves and everyone else. Elementalists are like freight trains; if you don’t derail them at the right spot, you’re going to get run over.

Not on their weapon skills, at all. Chill has zero effect on cast times, if that is the source of this.
Frankly I have no problem with chill being effective on elementalists, but real counterplay doesn’t come from “oh it’s an elementalist? Here, let me apply chill once or twice, they’re now instantly ineffective”. Elementalists are built entirely around having access to multiple attunements more than people who main other classes can understand, mostly because our skills are artificially weakened to compensate for the greater number, but also because individual attunements are generally more focused than actual weaponsets. Think of it as if there was a condition that made clones disappear after three seconds, or adrenaline drain rapidly, or reducing all stealth durations. Obviously, you could “just cleanse” those as well. Chill affecting attunement swapping is on that level, where you literally reduce counterplay to “apply a single condition, then they’re just kitten”.
I’m pretty sure you aren’t going to argue that this would make eles OP or uncounterable, because that would be stupid.

Anomaly.7612:

Neko.9021:

Elementalist is kinda screwed up in PvE without Fresh Air. The reason for this is that the design of PvE emphasizes auto-attacking everything to death for sustained damage. For the Ele, this means you generally just want to camp Lightning Whip on MH Dagger the whole time. At the same time, all your utility and burst is in the other attunements, but it’s difficult to dance around attunements if you don’t have Fresh Air.

Overall, no, it’s not just you. Eles have some of the hardest time leveling and really do rely on trait progression to become a full class.

If Ele is hard to level, then a Thief is legendary difficulty mode. Seriously, I died so much while leveling my Thief. I find Ele to be pretty fun and easy, but yet again, I know all the combo fields and burst rotations for D/D having played it in PvP long before caring to level it in PvE/WvW.

Once you get used to attunement swapping with the Ele, you’ll really like the class. It will feel second nature to swap to another attunement to keep a combo going or use a CD from another attunement. So much so, you’ll start to miss it when playing another class. I’ve found that swapping to just a second weapon set is now really boring, haha. Why have two sets when you can have 4?!

0.0 Leveling my thief is the next easiest thing outside of leveling my guardian (I haven’t leveled a warrior yet, and I don’t plan to until they make the class sufficiently engaging to bother with), outside of the sheer boredom that is trying to level to 80 after you do it the first couple of times. I haven’t really had any trouble surviving or dealing damage, when AI pretty much just AFKs when I pop stealth, and the extra armor helps more than you would think.

So basically classic d/d with strength runes instead of max boon duration, and celestial instead of soldier?

I’m totally going to find a way to obliterate all scepter mesmers in PvP with this. I had no idea I could copy tornadoes and lich form, but a good reason for the somewhat obscene damage the thing puts out could be either because the devs forgot to put stats in for tornado cones (lol) or possibly the huge power boost that comes with tornado/lich form. This could affect clone health too, and it could be why the things didn’t die in 1-2 hits.

Amnariel.3659:

Sheppy.9306:

Man i am so fed up with people complaining about thieves. They are perfectly balanced, i bet half the people that complain about them can’t last 10 seconds as a thief in a fight where the thief should be able to down the opponent in 20.

Perma stealth a problem/broken?? If yuo die to anybody perma stealthing then you are not a very good player. As a thiefs dps comes from using initiative and perma stealth saps it all, not to mention the thief is giving you free cooldowns in the meantime wheras the thief practically has no cooldowns so who really is worse off?

Play a thief and you will realise the dps trade-off for survivability is acceptable, also you ever considered that a thief may be a hard counter to the class/build you run? man the thief class is supposed to have ridiculous damage, not to mention in spvp they cannot even defend a point. Eles are generally a decent counter to thieves too, you looked in the thief forums? Half of them have no idea how to counter the elementalists. Boon steal or no.

^This^

and in addition except pvp you cannot really do anything else with Thief,in dungeons cuz of corner stacking you die by 1 hit if not the DoT from boss will kill you the damage cannot be even compared with a warrior damage or a caster.I left playing thief only because these reasons it’s only good in PvP and I wish to do bot.

and try playing a thief then complain about agree Hearthseeker spam and Backstab is annoying but sometimes not even enough…I fought many Bunkers against who I was only been able to damage with backstab,only Backstab…

Just want to interject here that thieves actually have the second highest DPS in PvE in the game, after eles, have a bit more survivability, and have skip utility as well.
They are most definitely not useless in PvE, though you could make a fair argument for preferring eles if you’re already sacrificing that much survivability.

Mesmers are third, warriors and guardians are pretty much tied for fourth (guardians sort of win but not really considering the change in survivability and the whole reason you bring guards in the first place), and I forget the order rangers, necros and engis are in.

So yeah.

Roe.3679:

Rayti.6531:

Also, when casting Glyph of Renewal in Fire and dying shortly afterwards, the Ele can rez him/herself with that glyph. This only takes several seconds to proc – so a few seconds after hitting the floor, the ele stands up again. Maybe that’s what happened…?

But if you say it took a while, the ele maybe just healed up with the downed heal skill. This doesn’t take too long with a low health pool that some cleric eles have.

This sounds like what happened. The fight took awhile because this ele had quite a bit of healing and cleansing, but when he was down, I went to make sure I wasn’t going to get ganked since I didn’t expect him to get back up, and then be just got back up. That part only took a few moments. He didn’t have very long to self heal, so that wasn’kitten

I have an additional question: is there a visual cue look for if glyph of renewal was cast in fire attunement? I’m a little rusty on my ele literacy.

I think there’s a buff icon, but you will never have to know it because any ele using glyph of renewal should never be a problem for you.

phaeris.7604:

I know the radius is meant to be 180, but it seems like you basically have to dodge roll on top of them for the blind to hit.

Maybe making it a little bigger to allow for ease of use?

Is that unreasonable?

Blind is pretty powerful, they probably want to limit it on EA.

Astaso.4806:

Mijo.3274:

…
I think the only build with higher skill cap is the good old fresh air SD build.

Where is the big skill in mashing all possible buttons at once and one shorting people or be killed.
Its lame.. None of those one shot build needs much skill.
Skill is reacting to your enemy’s moves and taking the right decisions.
I never understood where the skill should be in one hitting anybody..

I play dd ele since beta BTW.

It really does depend, as there are several S/D FA builds, with scales of burstiness.
Some are actually skillful and require combos and good positioning, while one in particular just relies on macroing a specific combo to do 22k damage once per 40 seconds.
I still don’t think anything gets to staff level though, it gets its bad reputation from wvw and PvE.

ArchieD.6972:

Why does this ability not heal in the path of the jet and instead heals on a small blast radius? If you “Spray a jet of water at foes” it’s going to hit people who are in the path. Same as if I were to take a water hose and spray it at someone. If you’re near the path I’m spraying in you’re going to get wet too.

Obviously it’s magical phasing water, gosh.
The reason it does damage is because it actually phases into the enemy. The healing blast you see is actually their sweet, sweet tears, which heal because they taste so good. Sadly, they are really pretty subpar tears when you get down to it, so the heal is mediocre.

The skill isn’t clear enough, though. It should really read, “phase a blast of water inside the body of your opponent, while nearby allies drink their sandwich-grade tears.”

oZii.2864:

T raw.4658:

There is no explanation needed tbh

Well the whole condi meta argument is dead the Tournament of Legends EU and NA showed there is no condi meta. We know there is not one in PvE. So that leaves hotjoins/dueling/WvW roaming definitely not zergs.

If conditions met the criteria you say then all the teams in the ToL EU and NA would have ran condi obviously there is a counter to make it not worth going conditions. Despite the “easy” to play of conditions they aren’t being used in high level competitive play with rewards on the line. So maybe they are “easy” but not effective?

Anyway the condi threads are about to die lets make way for the new era of “nerf bunkers” threads along with “we need to nerf hambow again”.

@ P Fun Daddy Necro staff is just as good in a power build as it is in a condition build. Check the necro forums look at Leeto V’s post should be on the first page with alot of views for an example of power necro with staff. There is trait for an extra 10% damage for staff marks because staff can do good damage as direct. There aren’t alot of weapons in GW2 that are great as a condi weapon but horrendous in a power build. Mesmer Scepter confusion images does more damage then blurred frenzy as an example and the auto attack while slow and telegraphed does comparable damage to sword auto attack except for the last hit with sword.

Anyway the whole condition argument is kind of moot more evidence by the recent TOL tournaments in EU and NA supporting that conditions are indeed fine unless your on some dueling server, in the obsidian sanctum dueling or solo roaming looking for 1vXs against power builds, or hotjoining.

Yeah, I just really dislike the weapon in general. If it’s usable in power builds that just makes it worse for me, I wasn’t aware that it could be.
I don’t think that having instant-hitting AoEs is good (not instant cast, that would be even worse, but no projectile or the like). I feel like I would vastly prefer a system where they worked like static field, or had a mechanic that discouraged casting them directly on to people (like lower base direct and condition damage/duration that increased the longer the mark was up before it was activated, probably frontloaded so that hitting it within a few seconds would be somewhere a bit above the current power but so that it wouldn’t scale to infinite damage after twenty seconds).

T raw.4658:

oZii.2864:

T raw.4658:

Terrahero.9358:

T raw.4658:

Had to edit that for you to bring it more inline with what’s really happening in the game and what this thread is about.

Lot’s of players prefer less faceroll gameplay of AoE condi spam or just flat out condi spam.

Let’s put skill back in the game mmkay?

Yes, kitten condition spam, more power-spam!

Or did you really think power-damage was this epitome of skill? Because its really not. Its even more spammy then conditions.

Ok what takes more skill

Condi Engi or Power?
Condi Necro or Power?
Condi Thief or Power?
Condi Ranger or Power?
Condi Warrior or Power?

The only classes Condi isn’t always the easiest is Ele and Guard, but we haven’t seen any viable builds hit the public yet tho

What is your definition of skill in GW2? That is what has to be determined first.

By the looks of it you would say skill is killing people with direct damage instead of conditions and for you that’s all that’s all you need to determine skill.

Really you would need ranking system, skilled opponents, tournaments results. Not “I Feelz” so it is determined by my own experience that this is skill. Need game mode specifics definitely not Doolz. So conquest where most top players play Power. So the game is balanced then right? K

It also looks like you assume people play conditions have never touched a power build on this game.

Again you go off on a tangent needlessly.

It’s simple

1. Condi is easier to play
2. Condi requires less skill to be successful

I agree, but he’s asking for a bit more of an explanation.

Necro staff. A bunch of 1200 range AoE conditions that, while they do have cast times, hit instantly after casting and have very similar telegraphs even in the case that they aren’t cast directly onto someone, not to mention the unblockable trait.
I don’t think power really has something that easy to use.

I think torment works thematically on mesmers. The class is all about mind games, after all, and torment delivers in that respect.

I think giving as much control as possible to the player would be a good thing, or at least letting me choose not to blast the kitten light fields.
It’s really just that, I hate playing with guardians in PvE because they kill my might with their autoattacks. It’s like griefing, but unintentional so it’s even more obnoxious because I have nobody to complain about.
Let us have 3 options:
1) First down first used (what I think the current system is).
2) Yours are prioritized, then first down first used.
3) Field-type based priority, for each finisher type (i.e. you would set which field is prioritized for which finisher. You could even just have it be the first 1-3, to minimize effort).

I’m pretty sure that would make everyone happier.

Aggrostemma.1703:

<= puts away his Great Slang Dictionary For Internet…

Yes, they are powerful but apart of the FSG I’m not sure they worth a permanent Utility Slot. You can use the Frost Bow for wall defence so giving a Guardian a very good ranged option. You can use the FSG for soloing camps or the Hammer if you know you going to be melee. All of them have their uses.

They are very good but usually situational.

Lol.
FGS.
Fiery Great Sword.
Not Fiery Sword Great

BlackBeard.2873:

Staff zerker ele is actually a very good build, and requires a lot of skill to not be constantly insta-gibbed by a burst profession. It can also carry a team if played well.

I laugh every time I wreck a thief b/c they are too impatient not to jump onto me while meteors are raining down from the sky, and then trying to stomp in that downed lava font. The build can definitely be played around, and isn’t very good 1v1 against patient/good opponents, but it can also do really well in soloQ.

People who are raging are probably just upset b/c they feel you should be an easy kill but are actually outplaying them!

That, and when people get kitteny because I meteor + lava font all over a point that I’m not on, because they can’t just sit still on the point.

If you’re basically a meteor bot, then yes, but honestly that isn’t even a good build by any stretch of the imagination and shouldn’t be getting complaints.

If not, I can’t figure out what the heck they’re talking about. In PvP, eles are most definitely the class with the highest skillcap and highest skill requirement, and I would say that staff is probably the weapon with the highest skillcap even compared to d/d, because rotations aren’t quite as relevant (I find that d/d tends to rely on 1-3 rotations rather than improvisation, like you find more on the staff).
Scepter massive burst is the only setup I would think could really be said to have a low skillcap (to avoid confusion: I mean the instagib one person/40 seconds build, and then be useless for the rest of the fight), because it’s really just hit all of a few buttons as fast as you possibly can, stomp, then run.

If they’re talking about you not 1v1ing them, they’re just stupid. Not even for just staff eles, you should avoid 1v1s on every class. If you’re fighting fair you’re doing it wrong, because the measure of any good team is how often they can make sure fights are slated in their favor.
It goes without saying that you would have to be even more stupid to expect a 1v1 with one of the single worst 1v1 builds in the entire game (though I do occasionally give 1v1s to people if it isn’t a thief/mes/condi, because those really are the 1v1 builds and should be avoided at all costs if you’re not one of them).

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

My recommended use for the frost bow is as a situational utility skill. If you find yourself in the right situation, use it, blow through your rotation (3542 for me) then immediately drop it and go back to normal skills. You can pick up the second one about ~20 seconds later to repeat.

This is basically how I tend to use my conjured weapons. Though some of the auto attacks can be quite nice. If you went for a tanky healer build instead the frost bow auto attack could do amazing healing for you while still being able to apply soft CC, hard CC, big damage and vulnerability debuff.

I’m mostly sPvP staff, so if I wanted that I would use the water #1 skill anyway just because it doesn’t cut down on my CC/Damage like it does on FB (charges).
I feel like the only conjure autos worth using are LH in PvE and Fire Axe in PvP for the might from both.

But yeah, a lot of people think they’re underpowered because they’re not standalone weapons like kits, but conjures on eles are still utilities, really.