Guild Wars 2

This is insanely good for player morale. Servers on WoW like tichondrius with there massive pvp population make the game actually feel alive, rather than some dead empty heart of the mists.

Well done Mr. Sharp, and anyone else who listened, this is a good decision.

I’m still afraid of what conditions may turn into myself though. 55% burn duration on a single rune set is really scary and in my opinion more of a buff compared to the power rune sets shown alongside Balthazar.

Frenk.5917:

Phantaram.1265:

I like the idea behind this chart to illustrate the problem but your example of s/f ele overcoming hambow due to skill isn’t a very good example since it will not overcome it unless the hambow player is really bad.

Unless you are saying that chart is how it should be. In which case I completely agree!

Beside the fact that a good S/F eles can beat a hambow warrior (just take a look at the 1v1 arenas), I used the term “efficiency” exactly because this is not a 1v1 game but a “capture the point”-based game. A S/F elementalist can be more efficient than a hambow warrior IF played extremely (I’d say insanely) well.

The graph is exactly how it should be, but since there aren’t numerical comparisons, and assuming that the graph represents the current situation, the blue line intercept should be way lower than that, in order to not to force people to play (for example) S/F elementalist for 1 year to achieve the overcoming of the Hambow Warrior.

It’s just a matter of intercepts, slopes and perspective.

Well in the case of a real organized high lvl game your graph should show the s/f ele graph climbing to a certain point and then plummeting to 0 at the point at which thieves get half a brain and you become a free 5 points for the other team.

Again, I agree that the graph is how the game should be, except for the part where the warriors is completely flat. (I assume you just made it flat to make it simple) The game has a learning curve no matter what you play.

I like the idea behind this chart to illustrate the problem but your example of s/f ele overcoming hambow due to skill isn’t a very good example since it will not overcome it unless the hambow player is really bad.

Unless you are saying that chart is how it should be. In which case I completely agree!

I like the build. The arcane spells + burning from ele surge helps make up for the loss of damage you get by taking staff in the first place, and at the same time take advantage of the water fields to give you tons of healing on top of the good healing staff already has. A build like this will also take huge advantage of the sigil changes coming in the future (battle will make burning so strong with celestial!)

In WvW no doubt celestial is probably some of the go to gear for this build. However, in spvp the celestial amulet is vastly under budget compared to pve. If PvP ever gets the pve budget for celestial I would use it for this build but as others have said valkyries is probably better right now. I may even think about trying it with berserkers + valkyries jewel.

Alas it has the same weaknesses as any ele build. (thieves)

I’ll be trying this build out though, the build makes so much sense and I hope it works out well for me. Really gonna miss the bigger aoe on staff though

Huh. This is a great post and I agree with it. It’s something I’ve always thought about and this has helped me expand my thought on it.

Originally I just thought “Hey remove most of the customization cause it’s making balance way to hard, take the direction WoW did!”. Thing is people love tons of customization. I even think it’s fun it just has bad consequences.

Now my thoughts are “Put a ton of customization in but make the customization not affect the game very much.” It’s almost like you are fooling the playerbase into customizing their character but really it’s not a lot.

I think ArenaNet really did want to allow every class to be able to do almost everything with very small amounts of things you can’t do. Maybe they didn’t think about how hard this would actually be to balance things.

So lets say 100% would be a class being able to do everything there is in a game and 0% is a class being able to do nothing in the game.

As it is every class is probably able to do 80%(ballpark) of everything in the game(how well they do it is another subject). This makes it INSANELY hard to balance.

The lower the % gets below 80% the easier it is. We can’t deny that 0 customization would be super easy to balance, but something like 25% or below in customization would be easy enough to balance and still allow players to do the customization that we like.

After that is achieved create the illusion that there is tons of customization(but in reality you are only editing 25% of your class) by spreading it across many things, gw2 has already done this. Runes/trinkets/sigils/traits. It’s just that the customization at this point is too high of a %.

Let’s be real though. ArenaNet realizes they can’t make every single build viable across all classes. The thing most of us are frustrated about is that they have made the un-fun builds(the ones that basically ignore everything this games combat system is about) some of the best ones and left the most fun builds that play perfectly into the games combat system (elementalist, shatter mesmer, etc) alone to die to these atrocious builds that make the game a bore.

Balance is really nice, but having a fun game is 10x better.

Anyways, great post, +1d.

From a pvp perspective

Staff:
Fire #1 – Good damage but misses at anything +900 too much
Water #1 – Obviously horrible at damage and extremely hard to heal teammates with also misses just like fireball
Air #1 – Reliably hits and slightly above average damage, good auto attack
Earth #1 – Pretty sure it misses even more often than water and fire

Scepter:
Fire #1 – Reliably hits, good damage for condi or if you have might stacks, mediocre damage otherwise
Water #1 – Mediocre damage if you can hit all 3 attacks consistently, good luck with that though. I’ve been near melee range of an opponent with swiftness and was missing almost all swings.
Air #1 – Extremely reliable and average damage auto attack, paired with Air #2
makes this the only reliable source of consistent damage a scepter ele has, which is why fresh air is so necessary for pvp with scepter.
Earth #1 – Misses a lot but not as often as Water #1, often not very worth it to cast as a power spec

Dagger:
Fire #1 – Good damage
Water #1 – Misses too often, vulnerability isn’t good enough to make up for its mediocre damage
Air #1 – Very good damage
Earth #1 – Hits reliably and average damage

Dagger also has abilities like Earth #2, Water #2, and Fire #2, which are all just like auto attacks with side benefits. This makes the dagger weapon set flow really well because it always has consistent damage through out all of its attunements. Scepter and Staff do not have this ability to the point that healing signets on warriors often heal for more than you do damage if you go anything but glass/fresh air.

Insanity.5174:

ele is fine, high damage = low survability.

nerf thief’s evade.
nerf warriors.
nerf ai build,spirit ranger,mm.
nerf condispam.
lower some stupid long cooldown like arcane shield,mist form and armor of earth.

puff,ele in meta.

This is what we all want. It’s hard to imagine all these changes happening though. More likely they try to bring ele up to the level of all of this stuff you just listed. It may not be the better change but it is the easier one especially with how powerful everything has gotten compared to ele.

Despite the video quality you were very articulate and showed the problems well. High Five! (borat voice)

There is some odd-behavior for abilities like Dragons Tooth too where if it gets interrupted it still goes on full cooldown. That’s only 2 seconds longer though so hardly noticeable especially since I usually rotate out of fire very quickly.

Nice to see such an educational post and vidja around these parts.

If you go against another elementalist use dagger/dagger. It’s the best in ele v ele duels. Also use it against dps guards. (go 10 air 30 water 30 arcana and focus on chill up-time, probably use hydromancy sigil)

Fresh Air Scepter works well against things like warriors/engineers and is probably the only way you’ll have a real chance of beating a condi necro(just get a good opener and then finish them off while dodging/blinding everything they do). You actually have to run fresh air against warriors or you simply won’t have enough damage to kill them (unless they are bad). Definitely use a berserkers amulet with fresh air. If the warrior is using an axe just dodge/blind/arcaneshield/lightning flash/mist form every single eviscerate and you can maybe win. (yeah, it’s gonna be a tough one)

If you go against a thief, may god have mercy on your soul.

I’ve only participated in one 1v1 tournament but the grand finals ended up being me and my teammate teldo! I actually had to forfeit it to him because I had to be on that twitch show grouch hosted, I think it was called “State of the Game”. That was back when elementalists were good though. Good times.

Good luck with your 1v1 tournament.

In this thread we all list 1 reason why skyhammer shouldn’t be in solo queue.

Here is my reason: http://www.twitch.tv/phantaram/c/3826867

I call that somebody is going to pull me off the edge in stealth, and it happens, and I die.

EU solo queue is pretty good overall.

MailMail.6534:

Remember the days where killshots were insanely common and everyone died after two hits? Yeah, that’s so much better than the current Meta. Definitely some issues here with everyone going the route of passive gameplay, but I’d take that over glass cannons any day.

I can honestly say I probably haven’t been hit by a number of killshots above single digits in spvp.

Craft dyes my friend. Craft as many as you can.

Ryld.1340:

Phantaram.1265:

Jackums.3496:

kaikalii.4198:

Aren’t eles generally more concerned with thieves than warriors? Thief is the only profession that really hard-counters them.

Pretty much every profession “hard counters” Ele right now, simply because the Ele is that bad. The Mesmer is just as effective against an Ele as a Thief is. Both can strip the Ele’s boons and then unload a one-shot burst on them in a matter of seconds. The Necro and Engi can unload more conditions than the Ele can cleanse. Etc, etc.

I kill mesmers, necros, and engis all the time, even in 1v1s. The engi vs ele match-up I’d say is like 75-25 in the eles favor in most cases. (fresh air ele)

Signet of spite, a separate class from necro, is definitely a match up ele has trouble with though.

Thief is the only real problem.

How does an Engi lose to an Ele? Block your attacks, unload with conditions, knock you around so that you can’t combo properly.

I don’t even usually need to do combos. Just sit back and do air attacks. Kite when I need to. Because they are the aggressors(they have to be aggressive to win) it makes it pretty easy to hit phoenix.

WvW is a different story when the engi uses a #3 pistol and applies 6 condis immediately and your health melts within seconds.

Their Elite is definitely a problem though.

Jackums.3496:

kaikalii.4198:

Aren’t eles generally more concerned with thieves than warriors? Thief is the only profession that really hard-counters them.

Pretty much every profession “hard counters” Ele right now, simply because the Ele is that bad. The Mesmer is just as effective against an Ele as a Thief is. Both can strip the Ele’s boons and then unload a one-shot burst on them in a matter of seconds. The Necro and Engi can unload more conditions than the Ele can cleanse. Etc, etc.

I kill mesmers, necros, and engis all the time, even in 1v1s. The engi vs ele match-up I’d say is like 75-25 in the eles favor in most cases. (fresh air ele)

Signet of spite, a separate class from necro, is definitely a match up ele has trouble with though.

Thief is the only real problem.

Elementalist has 2 choices.

Take enough survivability to live against thieves, which will reduce your damage to negligible amounts.

Take enough damage to kill tanky specs or any warrior, but become a free 5 points for thieves.

This is why healing staff ele works in a lot of cases because it’s self survivability (healing power) translates into supporting teammates. If the enemy team is running very high damage, your low health pool will still melt without peels but most teams these days are running quite tanky and these tanky peeps are currently much stronger in general than the high damage peeps so staff healing eles weakness isn’t what most teams are running.

Mrbig.8019:

And even if you can’t do it, S/P thieves have 2 dodges, like all other classes.

Yeah for sure.

If it were up to me there wouldn’t be an ability quite like this in the game, I don’t think its really all that bad though.

The real problem is casting it from stealth, that’s pretty scummy. A long time ago in spvp stealth openers with moa were everywhere and it felt like there was nothing you could do about it but just let it happen.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

If thieves and warriors could not train mesmers into obvilion, mesmers could be in a much better place. Until then, Idk when we will be better.

That also sounds like the problem that elemen…. every other class has at the moment.

Play elementalist.

The sigil change hardly helps elementalist. There is a chance the rune/sigil changes overall are mostly neutral or even possibly a nerf. (nerf depending on what rune sets are changed and in what way, or how sigils change)

At the moment I use primarily strength/battle with a force sigil. Strength/battle is by far the highest damage rune/sigil set up you can get granted your target isn’t constantly dodging (this strengthens fire/air as you can proc it every time you actually get a chance to hit the target between all the stealth/dodging or w/e) and the fight is of moderate length.

Assuming this stays the same way the only thing that will change is that elementalist will be able to replace the force sigil(5% damage) with something else. Replacing it with another damage sigil like fire or air will probably result in similar damage over all, I dunno I’m not gonna do the math on it. Point is it’s minimal at best and at worst ele ends up using the same exact rune/sigil set-up while other classes get to try out some new stuff. Sure you can replace 5% damage with energy, that is something, but you lose damage. It’s a trade-off.

Can’t say I’m excited about countering conditions. Staff healing ele already did this really well. The problem is infinite dazes/CC chains. (aka warriors and thieves)

DiogoSilva.7089:

An overpowered profession, being already a problem by itself, should not be twice the problem by being an obstacle to any changes that the game needs. If anything, this is even more of an incentive for Anet to push warrior’s nerfs a bit harder (because, ironically, I’d argue that even a class like the mesmer is getting a bigger nerf out of the announced changes than the warrior itself).

Very well said.

And I never even thought about comparing how much mesmer was being nerfed compared to warrior but you are probably right.

We don’t see the whole picture just yet though so I guess we’ll wait and see.

Ghostwolf.9863:

Nothing new that 284 stats on amulet equals 15% cd, this creates a loss of 134 stats which isn’t fair at all against condition and bunker builds who maintain all their stats.

I would rather see those 134 stats moved to toughness, vitality or healing power.

I was hoping for Ferocity in sPvP since it would actually mean a slight increase in dmg afaik.

Anything is better than the wasted stats! Only power specs have to deal with this like you said.

MonMalthias.4763:

Phantaram.4816:

That’s part of the point though. The only power tanky class we’ve ever seen work is warrior and that’s because they are grossly overpowered. We’ve never seen any other class run this because they’ve never had the proper amulet to run it.

It’s simple, introduce proper tanky amulet -> nerf warriors. Ele and Mesmer used valks during the power meta (a long time ago) and let me tell you the game did not feel tanky. Just because there is an actual tanky amulet that works doesn’t mean the game is tanky, that is just a fault of too many dodges/immunities/warriors, not the amulets.

And because ele and mesmer were allowed to run valks because of the lack of condis, we actually survived against thieves, which is exactly what we need rather than just instadieing to the thief that just turns his gaze our way. And we have to run berserkers on ele/mes because otherwise we don’t do enough damage to kill warriors.

I do not think it will make things worse unless warriors are left untouched.

Hmm, I don’t know about this one. I think Warrior wouldn’t have actually received half the buffs it did if it weren’t for the fact that Knights amulet (Pow/Prec/Tough) didn’t exist at the time; which relegated Warriors to using Soldier’s or Berserkers – both of which were too extreme on the one end of tankyness vs damage output.

With Warriors as they are now, however, with so much HPS from Healing Signet and overwhelming condition removal, the addition of Knights amulet could well spell disaster. Warriors already put 30 into Discipline for Burst Mastery – the sustained direct damage mitigation from Toughness on Knights amulet coupled with strong regeneration may well further entrench Warrior as the King of the Mountain. Hambow’s damage output would only increase; with 569 Precision behind it granting 31% crit chance before Traits and Sigils.

I think that the addition of Knights; whilst a worthy aspiration, needs to be considered very carefully right now. I for one, would love it on Engineer and Elementalist. But giving Warriors Knights – and with March 18, double Sigil procs every 5 seconds – may well begin the 5 Warrior meta.

Your post makes it sound like we don’t agree but… I think we agree on everything.

Amulet + nerf to warrior = good addition.

I made a post sort of addressing this subject. I think a good reason we see more tanky condition is because Power specs don’t have a proper tanky amulet to work with in a lot of cases. That’s in spvp though.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Spvp-Amulets-Critical-damage-tanky-power

Anyone who has looked at stats on items/traitlines/foods throughout the game and then looked at critical damage on amulets in spvp knows how lowly the stat is weighed on them.

For comparison heres the stats on the jewel in pvp, compared to the amulet.

Valkyries Jewel
125 Power
75 Toughness
5% critical Damage
45 Healing

Valkyries Amulet
798 Power
569 Toughness
15% critical Damage
284 Healing

The power on the amulet is 6.3 times greater than the power on the jewel. The critical damage however is only 3 times greater. This isn’t because the power is overly efficient on the jewel, it’s because it’s weighed very poorly compared to everything else in the game. (this isn’t me saying to buff critical damage on pvp amulets, we’ll get to that in a bit)

There is currently only 3 amulets in Spvp that have Critical Damage.
Celestial
Valkyries
Berserkers

Berserkers is a power damage amulet in that it has every stat that buffs power damage (Power, Precision, Crit Damage). Valkyries is a hybrid amulet in that it gives 2 survivability stats and 2 damage stats. Celestial has never been used in a serious build in spvp to my knowledge, we’ll just sweep that one under the rug for the rest of this discussion.

The point I’m trying to make by providing all this information is that critical damage does not belong on the valkyries amulet and that it would be less limiting to all classes if it was made into the other damage stat, precision. Why?

In order to make use of the already very low weighted Critical Damage stat on the Valkyries amulet the class has to get a respectable amount of Crit Chance, which the amulet doesn’t provide. Because of this classes that want to use this Valkyries amulet and be a hybrid Power Tanky/DPS, just like most of the Condition classes are, must trait into precision. Even when they do they are only doing it to make use of the lowly weighted Crit Damage stat.

If the critical damage was changed into precision, not only would it be a buff to all power/tanky hybrids (of which we see none of besides warriors, but only because they are OP, they deal a ton of condi damage too because of all the might) because precision on pvp amulets is just more highly weighted, it would free up trait line use that classes using the Valkyries amulet normally wouldn’t use.

Some examples:

A Valkyries with precision on Elementalist could go
25 fire/15 water/30 Arcana, instead of
20 air/20 water/30 Arcana

Both would work greatly, and they could trait into the different trait lines based upon which utilities they wanted to run. Glyphs in Air for example.

A Warrior using a Valkyries with precision could go
20/0/20/0/30, instead of
0/20/20/0/30

In both of these examples if the ele/warrior doesn’t go 20 into their precision trait lines they make very little use of the 15% critical damage on the valkyries amulet. As precision though they have the freedom to spec into other trait lines. This will make people use a wider assortment of utilities also since different trait lines affect different utilities.

Heck now that I think about it, it would be great for every single class. Currently thieves rule as a damage roamer because they make use of the berserkers amulet better than anyone, and all the other classes don’t have the option to go hybrid because the amulets we are currently working with don’t support it well enough.

You get the idea. Power specs need a proper amulet to work with that gives them some survivability!

Chill is definitely extremely strong against elementalists. It makes the thief steal ability extremely potent too. If you happen to leave water as they chill you it’s pretty much a loss at that very moment. If you take the condi clear heal goodluck getting it off through the billion dazes/basi venom.

Pve and WvWvWers that casually come to hotjoin spvp like it. People who solo queue all the time hate it.

Take it out of solo queue.

It’s that simple.

Aegael.6938:

True counterplay isn’t “block” which is essentially invulnerability and very limited “unblockable” skills. That’s build wars. That’s “if you didn’t bring this one skill, you are at a major, major disadvantage.”

Instead, true counterplay is something like “block only works on attacks from the front” or “block only blocks X number of attacks.”

Of course it would be a major defensive rehaul for many classes and will never happen.

Some weapon abilities, for example, a scepter ele’s phoenix is unblockable and an extremely powerful skill. A sword thief would think twice about using his new “block”(not evade) ability in front of my face rather than just being competely invincible.

Along with this block change they could give every single weapon-set a base unblockable ability, and all of them could have some fairly long cooldowns so you actually have to use them wisely rather than the “blocking” thief randomly getting crushed by all the unblockable ability spam.

Well that’s odd. So when you aren’t wearing any condi duration does it tic only 2 times?Maybe it always tics 3 times and with condi duration it tics 4 it’s just a tooltip error or something. In which case. Nerf!

I think the idea he is going for is that when you use the elemental skill it is a single skill that goes on a 1 minute cooldown. The ability is different based on attunement you are in when you cast it.

All attunements go on a 10 second cooldown and the arcana trait line passive is changed to reducing the cooldown of this “Elemental skill”

I like it a lot actually. Solves the problem of reliance on the Arcana trait line.

When he started throwing the plates I lol’d so hard.

I will put them in order from favorite to play to least favorite!

Elementalist
Mesmer
Engineer
Necromancer
Thief
Guardian
Warrior
Ranger

Warriors really iffy because I really like the old berserker 100 blades warriors and that would probably beat out necros with that spec but what warriors play today isn’t as fun.

Certainly the strength of conditions like chill and weakness are the most frustrating part. They just so happen to be more abundant in condi specs and also get more condi duration than everyone else.

caveman.5840:

mind u i am talking about glassy thief’s being hit!
but don’t act like it has never happened !
strong elements can hit a glassy thief with ride the lighting and if not kill them leave them with very low hp ! in wvw. a GLASSY thief would be running about 10,000 hp

It has never happened. Ride the lightning at most could probably take half of a thieves life if both of them are running as glassy as possible.

Tachii.3506:

Getting boon ripped doesn’t seem like a huge risk. Only some classes can steal/rip boons (usually has to trait for it), while almost every class can CC a thief outside of their refuge.

Using SR to res is also a setup waiting for classes to cleave the downed + thief. Again, I don’t see the “extremely high” reward with little risk.

SR has its uses and its counters. The problems when I visit these class balance threads usually comes down to eles being underpowered. Just buff their cantrips or something.

Needless to say we don’t agree on the riskyness of getting knocked out. Just use a few of your many dodges within the shadow refuge and you won’t get knocked out. If you have a hard time staying in the circle just use Shadow Refuge against a wall and dodge against the wall.

On the subject of getting cleaved on downed bodies. This happens regardless of the shadow refuge, the shadow refuge doesn’t set up for it. A huge problem is one team doesn’t know if they are keeping the enemy down. As a team we’ve blown tons of cooldowns into shadow refuges sometimes and then they all pop out full health and we have no cooldowns left.

Shadow Refuge also doesn’t just stealth the downed player it actually heals their downed health, this alone can make it too late to drop a bunch of aoe on them because they can get rezzed so fast. This is also how thieves rez themselves so often when you actually do down them in the shadow refuge. Usually by the time they get revealed and are healing themselves in down state you have about 1 second to hit them or they self rez themselves. Often in a team fight you don’t have the kind of time to sit around for 12 seconds and wait for a thief to reveal while he rezes himself either. Often this doesn’t happen though, a teammate just walks up and finishes the last 5% of rezzing needed. Self rez complete.

Tachii.3506:

Shadow Refuge also becomes instantly useless if you manage to knock them out of it. Most other skills doesn’t have that risk involved.

Armor of earth gets boons Ripped.
Arcane Shield takes 3 hits from something that hits multiple times(absorbing very little damage think illusion greatsword attack or ele arc lightning), and the enemy dodges the explosion, or you even die from an unblockable attack.
Mesmer and Necro utilities get interrupted or the downed body gets blown away from where they were casting the rez or the target just gets stomped before you are able to get it off
Etc.

Plenty of utilities have a huge risk. Shadow Refuge has a low amount of risk if you ask me. At 60 seconds cooldown it’s reward is extremely high. Has multiple uses as well.

Shadow Refuge has a 60 second cooldown and is arguably one of the strongest utilities in the game. Either the cooldown needs increased or cooldowns from other professions need decreased to create some kind of fairness.

Mostly I think it just needs its CD increased though.

Some examples of some other abilities:

Arcane shield has a 75 second cooldown and I think most people would agree Shadow Refuge is way stronger.

Armor of earth – 90 second cooldown now, 75 after next balance patch as they said on ready up – on either cooldown it’s worse.

Glyph of Storms – 60 second cooldown, way worse

Spectral Walk – 60 second cooldown, nice for personal survivability but shadow refuge is probably just as good or better for personal survivability and can be used for teammates as well for many situations.

Veil – 90 second cooldown – Worse in almost every way ( I realize it is used for zergs in wvwvw but the limit of 5 in spvp is a whole team, perfect opportunity to split skills, although I’d be a fan of limiting stealth to no more than there already is in spvp)

Sanctuary – Solid ability that can probably help rez people a little more often than Shadow Refuge but on twice the cooldown.

Shadow Refuge is similar to other profession rez utilities like Necro and Mesmers resurrects and those utilities were nerfed very hard a long time ago. I would say these utilities are on longer cooldowns than shadow refuge and probably succeed less.

Shadow Refuge success rate is highly based on the thiefs judgement but in the right hands its very successful and in a lot of situations practically a free rez.

Edit: Something I forgot to mention is that Shadow Refuge actually heals downed players health too, increasing rez speed.

Hitting someone in stealth is lucky. More news at 10.

I think most people are missing the point of this thread.

Yes the meta is super tanky and within it thieves are just average. Take away the super tanky meta and it will be about thieves. Mesmer and ele, the other mobile power squishy roamers, won’t see the light of day because thieves are so far ahead of them and actually counter the mesmer and ele themselves.

There are layers of broken things in this game. The first one that needs peeled back is the tanky meta, after that there are other things that need peeled back. Thief is one of them.

Lol this is amazing.

I’m not a mesmer player my self but when I do play one without energy sigils it feels like I can’t play the class properly. I can imagine the vigor nerf will make this feeling more apparent.

Berserker gear will be unaffected by this change decision making wise. They have all 3 damage stats on 1 gear so it’s clearly the best gear for full damage. What this change affects is gear that took 2 damage stats and 1 defensive or 2 defensive 1 damage.

For example Cavalier and Knights both give the same amount of power and toughness but Cavalier gives Crit Damage and Knights gives precision. Some builds may have already bought a lot of Cavalier because they were satisfied with the amount of crit chance they had.

After this change goes through that same person that decided to gear a lot of their pieces Cavalier may want Knights because suddenly Precision is a more valuable stat than Crit Damage. This is just 1 example.

Guardian bunker is a great role to have in the game. A bunker that can support and rez teammates all at once, it’s the only one that has ever been able to do it well enough solo.

The goal should be to make some other classes be able to do what the guardian does just in a different way.

Unless builds outside of Fresh Air can start doing good damage for Elementalist I’d probably only care for an amulet that supports Fresh Air.

798 Power
284 Vitality
284 Toughness
284 Precision
284 Healing Power

This would make Fresh Air not so insanely glass cannon. With Divinity runes on top of these stats I’d be quite satisfied.

If I wanted the perfect Amulet for 0/20/0/20/30 I’d just replace the crit damage on valkyries with precision and I’d be quite happy with that.

Anyways, I feel like Elementalists require more stats than most classes to make up for their weakness while lots of others can just stack 3 stats so the current amulets work perfect for them anyways.

Can’t say I wouldn’t be interested. The rules and bans will have to be very specific though.

redslion.9675:

I hunt down hambows ranked higher than me with my gs glass war (or othe homemade builds) and then sceam “DEMACIAAAA” when I down them.

In tournament I learned to go after burst eles, because they are dangerous if left unchecked.

Can’t believe you would tell everyone this about us poor eles. We are harmless I swear just leave me alone!

Through out GW2 history the 3 point strat has dominated the souls of any team trying to play off of only two nodes. Whether it be 1 player pushing far all the time or a thief constantly decapping far. It’s just a far better strat points wise and makes your deaths feel far more negligible.

Playing a comp like thief/ele/mes/guard/ranger means your thief doesn’t have time to go far and decap because the ele and mes are squishy so if the thief leaves them for any amount of time the tanky dps the enemy has in their team fight will win easily. So the strat becomes the ele/thief/mes roaming between the two points bunkered by the ranger/guard bursting people and trying to control off two points.

If anyone has attempted this strategy you know how fragile it feels. Me, Xeph, and Azshene were playing a similar comp with the 2 point strat and part of the way through the game I looked at how much score we had gained from kills. The score at that point of the game was 400-300 and we had gained 95 score from kills(19 wopping kills). Our whole lead was from kills. .Granted we were in a sort of puggish group and our home node was decapped more than we would had liked, it goes to show how fragile this strat is. Any death feels like it could lose you the game cause you will suddenly lose control of your precious two points and fall behind in score rapidly.

I think a 2 point strat by default will get a lot of kills if they are ahead because a 3 point strat will mostly try to bunker a point as they rez and come back rather than regrouping or sniping people off node, giving the 2 point control team the opportunity to grind kills as the enemy constantly streams in after respawns as they try to hold a node as theirs or nuetral.

If the 3 point strat team gains control at any point they will gain a massive lead that is almost unrecoverable by the other team. Meanwhile a 2 point strat team can control the game all the way through and still be only 100 points ahead by the end of the game.

Increasing the score gained from kills slightly can make the 2 point strat a more solid game plan and inherently increase the viability of more specs instead of mostly tanky DPS being viable. I know something like 7 score from a kill feels awkward but I think it may actually be a welcomed changed.

Before this gets brought up I’ll bring it up my self. Someone in here is bound to think “I’ve seen really tanky comps play for two nodes in tournaments though!” That’s because they can often go against nearly mirror comps in which case there is no clear 2 or 3 point strat team. If this tanky comp was smart and saw a team of squishies they would immediately go for 3 nodes.

TLDR; if a squishy composition had the ability to play for 3 nodes they would, but they do not. As such they are by default playing the strat that gets less points even when clearly controlling the game (2 point strat). Increasing score from kills slightly can help make the 2 point strat a more solid game plan and at the same time increase composition diversity by allowing teams to exist that aren’t 3+ tanky members.

Thoughts anyone?

Edit: This could easily be publicly tested by just adding this option on to Custom Arenas and letting some scrims/tournaments be held with kills being worth varied amounts of score.

I disagree highly with that kensuda. Mesmer was definitely top top tier with focus pull and thief was losing usefulness very quick. Vanish on helseths team stopped running thief right before the necro patch because lightning flash -> double arcane would instakill a thief every time so he was never safe to go into a fight. Xeph started using a greatsword at that time too (which wasn’t as common as staff) and could zone a thief out very easy from 1200 range.

Mesmer focus pull was like 50% of how all kills happened during that meta so naturally mesmer was top with ranger.

My tier list from 6 months ago
S Tier:
=Necromancer
=S/D Thief
-Spirit Ranger
A Tier:
+Guardian
-Engineer
B Tier:
=Warrior
= Elementalist
-Mesmer

And then my tier list from 8 months ago
Tier S: none
Tier A: Ranger +
Mesmer +
Elementalist=+
Engineer=
Thief=
Guardian=
Necro -
Warrior-
Tier B: none
Tier C: none

I know what you are thinking. “Whoa Phantaram looks like you had a very positive view about GW2s balance 8 months ago” And you’d be right. I rated necro and warrior the worst at that time, which was easily agreed upon community wide. Yet the two top teams on EU at the time both used 1 of these classes maybe only just a month before I made this tier list, and we both only dropped these classes because people started discovering beastmaster ranger. We used a Necro and Team Curse at the time (Helseth, Lowell, Danto, Fredzw, Hyxorcisten,) used a warrior.

The 2 worst classes were being played on the two top teams. Just let that sink in for a moment.

Then you can see how divided my tier list became after the necro burning patch(6 months ago). The rules of the game we had all played dun changed after this patch.

Just thought this would be interesting for people to look at.