Guild Wars 2

Everything that is powerful currently in the meta completely owns mesmer. I used to be able to protect xeph from the horrors that tried to charge him but it was useless, the horrors are now too much, so he switched to s/d thief. He then tried to stop the horrors from killing me on my ele but that was also futile. So now I’m a necro. We joined the horrors.

I love the idea. Probably not anytime soon but especially when the meta has a lot of variety I think this would be amazing.

I thought about bans in a draft mode but that just doesn’t work. Only picks imo!

Yeah this is the combo I 1 shot things with. It’s cool.

samo.1054:

Warrior does not need fixing. Other classes need fixing. They need a lot of cheese removed.

Agreed. I actually think warrior is pretty close to having a place even in this meta but some other classes are gonna need to be toned down (quite a bit) before warrior can make it in.

GW2 needs someone like what David Kim is to Starcraft 2.

Probably not a bug because all dazes break your own stuns. Does this with warrior mace if you are not careful. Unfortunate that steal breaks basilisk. Perhaps they could fix with with basilisk specifically because basilisk seems to be unique.

Fourth.1567:

The real question is can Anet overhaul the game to such a degree? From what I have seen in recent changes they are sacrificing good gameplay for quick balance and they aren’t even achieving balance with this approach. Not sure if they have the vision for this sort of project.

This +1 Perhaps a public test realm is in order?

Btw whisper me sometime fourth miss you <3 I has warrior build for you to try out.

I literally just use the same exact build for scepter, it’s as good as it gets for staff even. I just switch out vigor for bigger staff AOE and use an energy sigil to keep the same amount of dodges. So yeah not only does staff already lack damage but I lose both of my damage sigils. Oh, and I use triple arcane because lightning flash is kind of meh for staff.

The slow and steady balancing part is also something that just blows my mind. What made them want to give necros SO much at once? Necros had practically sat there using the same exact build since the release and then one day BOOM. You have tons of new stuff. Not very slow and steady.

Completely agree with this. The perfect example of something that is nearly the complete opposite of being active is spirit ranger. Spam 1 on your shortbow and if they get close just activate all spirits! You’ve now played this class to near optimization grats. Skill needs to be a more emphasized part of the game. And if simple builds are to stay in, they shouldn’t be the strongest builds.

dagger/pistol thiefs are pretty much a thing of the past. I can’t remember the last time I played against a team that used one.

Actually I do and it was really easy to beat

EoNxBoNx.9213:

Phantaram.1265:

Here’s a few things that I think are too strong at the moment.

Sword/Dagger Thief – It just dodges too much. It is often the biggest threat on the enemy team but also the last thing you wanna focus because you will end up wasting all your spells on him while he’s dodging. Alternatively you could leave the thief himself really strong but reduce his utility. Shadow Refuge is just as strong of a rez utility as any other in my opinion if not stronger and is only on a 60 second cooldown. Lyssa runes are also pretty strong, reduce boon duration to 5 seconds instead of 10? Obviously nerfing all of this is way too much. Just choose 1 or 2. It’s also kind of odd that flanking strike aoe cleaves. That dagger has quite the wide range of attack!

Stealth – This is the biggest one for me and I talked about this a long time ago in the SOTG and it’s just gotten more and more out of control. If you have two sources of long stealths in your teams line up your options at any point in the game and especially at the beginning are limitless.

There HAS to be a limit on how much stealth you can get. 6-7 seconds sounds reasonable to me but even then with two sources of stealth that is 12-14 seconds which will still give you tons of options and advantages over the other team. Stealth is a REALLY tough one to balance. As it is now people are walking around the map all leisure like for 30 seconds just talking amongst themselves like “Well I dunno who do you wanna 1 shot? We’ll 1 shot jimmy, no… bob! Well actually lets not even attack this node, onward to the enemy close point! Okay we are all here? Roger Roger. 3 2 4.. I can’t count… go! success! that other team can’t counter our amazing strat lol!”

I am going to try and be as constructive as I can.

For S/D thieves it works great against basically everything, but it is not overpowered. What made this build, and this role, much strong is Shadow Trap. The fact that you can keep pressure on 1 side of the map (mostly being the enemies close point) a good 50-70% of the time during the game, is pretty noticeable and makes teams overreact.

Changing Lyssa runes boons would be fine, but I personally do not like this. Thieves have never been the class that should be stomping enemy players, but if they can do it, they should, and Lyssa’s stability helps a lot with that.

As far as too many dodges, rangers have “too” many dodges, they can get a lot of vigor as well, I would like to see something more specific.

Shadow Refuge is a great skill to be used for reviving it really is, But it is not an instant revive, say Illusion of Life, or Signet of Undeath or Warbanner. The thief or teammates still have to actually revive that downed player, and that is the difference.

Stealth, stealth openings are good, and borderline too strong against players who react incorrectly, or overreact to it. Even when you react correctly, its mostly true your back point should die. Changing something like this, did you think how it might effect thieves? I mean D/P Burst thieve of course.

I am going to agree with most of what you said for thieves and stealth. I just wanted to give some counter-arguments, and hear your thoughts.

No S/D thieves I know of even use shadow trap nor do they assault far point solo. Shadow refuge stealths everyone rezzing so the enemy doesn’t even know if they have successfully stopped the rezzing and are blowing all there spells into the shadow refuge to prevent it. If they don’t succeed they just wasted every one of there cooldowns and the whole enemy team can initiate on you from stealth, it’s practically a won team fight at that point. Rezzing with illusion of life is far from a won team fight, the enemy can play defensive and save cooldowns for 15 seconds later when the illusioned guy goes down.

So while I appreciate the counter argument I’m afraid you don’t have enough experience to comment correctly on this because the way you describe S/D thieves play is not how they play.

And if they didn’t want the stealth changes to affect dagger thieves very much that is a very easy solution, just give them some kind of trait that allows them to stealth themselves longer.

I have a lot of experience with elemental surge just so every knows. I think I used it for the first 4-5 months until I learned how the signet heal worked with evasive arcana. (which now doesn’t work but I still prefer evasive now that I’ve learned to use it)

So yeah I haven’t used ele surge in a long time but I’d like to think I have a grasp on how strong it would be and I don’t think its too strong after nerfing the arcane spell damage pretty hard, in fact I think it is quite the possibility that it would be weaker. The concern that condis are already all over the place is a completely valid concern though and I would also be afraid that this would just improve the crazy amount that currently exists. Definitely open to more suggestions to adjust ele burst and/or arcane spells!

I’d just ignore arheundal just based on my past experience. He just argues for the sake of it I think.

Siric.3589:

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

As someone who has played 4 different classes in the last month trying to find one that worked with my team (eventually siding with running s/d ele)I do think after the fresh air buff that instant cast eles are strong. I would hold off on any notions of broken though. It may come across as a bit bias seeing as I do play the class but there are A LOT of hard counters that exist for it at the moment. While a full air arcane combo can instant cast for backstab-ish damage you’re not doing it from stealth and the CD on it is much higher. I personally have not been running double arcane as you have been for quite some time and we also don’t run a thief at the moment (so no gibs from stealth) so this all could be part of the reasons we have differing opinions on the matter. I think arcane wave is in a good spot and when run alone is strong, but not broken IMO. Maybe it is the fact that when you run 2 arcanes it becomes over the top? In that case wouldn’t it be better to see arcane blast repurposed a bit rather than nerfing both to not hurt builds that don’t run double arcane? Nerfing it in the way you suggest essentially means that in order to achive solid burst still you are forced to then run both where there is an option at the moment. Again, just change blast to have some more utility IMO. Some more discussion here would be nice.

Well elementalist don’t need fresh air to instagib people in a full instant cast combo. I use divinity runes with 20 air 20 water 30 arcana and do it quite often. Switch out divinity for scholar and you can 1 shot guardians and rangers with just a little bit of help, fresh air is definitely not needed and in my opinion is still not strong enough to drop my regular build. That’s a different topic though.

Good posts though siric thanks for the insight very constructive!

“The arcane skills aren’t decent when used in isolation. No one runs arcane blast or wave alone.” Sry I suck at figuring out how to quote in an edit. Anyways.

Actually running wave with flash/mist form is definitely viable. A little less burst but mist form is the difference between getting a stomp or rez or not.

Nikkle.4013:

Changing ele arcane could be a solution but by themselves I don’t find arcane op. It’s more that they and earth-air burst is basicly all instant cast. Instant cast skills are always going to cause issues in gw2.

Yeah there can be multiple solutions to ele burst but I think we can knock out 2 birds with 1 stone by doing this to arcane spells. Lets look at this realistically and compare arcane spells to all other utilities in the game… pretty uninteresting. Ele surge is what actually makes them a UTILITY and not just a way to up the elementalists damage haha. Also if you go try to do the elementalist burst combo without arcane spells, well, it feels really wimpy.

sorrow.2364:

Phantaram.1265:

Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (100% – 125% less damage) but give them some kind of utility.

Wait wait wait.
Are you suggesting to reduce the Arcane spells damage to below 0?
Like, instead of dealing damage it heals your enemy for the 25% of their actual damage?

Don’t ask my mind was elsewhere when typing that hahaha.

Here’s a few things that I think are too strong at the moment.

Greatsword Mesmer – The damage is just insane, if S/D thief or Necro ever get nerfed (mesmers counters) the greatsword mesmer will just range from afar destroying people while his teammates make sure nothing gets to him.

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

Necromancers – I think the rest of the forums can tell you about this one.

Sword/Dagger Thief – It just dodges too much. It is often the biggest threat on the enemy team but also the last thing you wanna focus because you will end up wasting all your spells on him while he’s dodging. Alternatively you could leave the thief himself really strong but reduce his utility. Shadow Refuge is just as strong of a rez utility as any other in my opinion if not stronger and is only on a 60 second cooldown. Lyssa runes are also pretty strong, reduce boon duration to 5 seconds instead of 10? Obviously nerfing all of this is way too much. Just choose 1 or 2. It’s also kind of odd that flanking strike aoe cleaves. That dagger has quite the wide range of attack!

Weakness – This condition went from not affecting critical strikes at all to absolutely destroying them. My arcane spells can hit a 1600 toughness necromancer for about 1700 average but if it glances from weakness it just went down to 360 damage. That is an absolutely drastic reduction of damage on top of reducing my endurance regeneration. It’s also entirely plausible to get 20+ seconds of weakness on you quite often from necromancers.

Stealth – This is the biggest one for me and I talked about this a long time ago in the SOTG and it’s just gotten more and more out of control. If you have two sources of long stealths in your teams line up your options at any point in the game and especially at the beginning are limitless.

There HAS to be a limit on how much stealth you can get. 6-7 seconds sounds reasonable to me but even then with two sources of stealth that is 12-14 seconds which will still give you tons of options and advantages over the other team. Stealth is a REALLY tough one to balance. As it is now people are walking around the map all leisure like for 30 seconds just talking amongst themselves like “Well I dunno who do you wanna 1 shot? We’ll 1 shot jimmy, no… bob! Well actually lets not even attack this node, onward to the enemy close point! Okay we are all here? Roger Roger. 3 2 4.. I can’t count… go! success! that other team can’t counter our amazing strat lol!”

Another solution is to give stealth some sort of counter.

AOE damage has been talked about in the past and I feel like nerfs to Ele burst/greatsword mesmer/necro actually solves this pretty well.

Discuss away but please be constructive.

Sounds really fun! Once custom arenas are given even more freedom to edit the maps (more points for example) you could really make long epic battles on a map like this.
Heck, with 8 players on each team you could even make some jungle camps that give specific power ups like someones damage becomes siege damage and they can help the NPCs bring down the doors and stuff!

Just an awesome idea all around that fits as a perfect mix between the current conquest and GvG.

Come on Arena Net, show you care about the GW2 competitive scene. The age and region restrictions are not only affecting top teams forcing them to make roster changes, but it is discouraging newer teams from even attempting to participate. I can imagine Arena Net is just wanting to show off the game at this tournament, but the players attitudes will reflect on everything and it won’t be near as positive with everything going so awkwardly for the teams.

I haven’t read anything but the OP but I’d just like to state that most DPS builds in this game are hybrid, at least to a degree. Sword/Dagger thieves use lyssa runes, 30 in acrobatics, energy sigils, etc. Just try changing those 3 things to full damage and you will see a HUGE increase in damage( I’m guessing at least 40-50% more damage) but that’s how useful these defensive opportunities are compared to full glass. Elementalists use valkyries amulets with only 10 or 20 in an actual damage trait line. I could keep going on just how most dps use hybrid builds.

The only viable full glass build I can think of that is used is shatter mesmer, but they rely on invulnerabilities/teleports/stealths for survivability. Glass dagger/pistol thief is pretty much wiped from the meta right now and any teams still using it aren’t seeing success.

More on topic: Coming up with something to prevent snowballing is interesting. At the same time I think the snowball nature just has to do with how much damage and mobility is in the game right now. As soon as 1 player is eliminated from the field on a team, good teams know how to take advantage of this and since they aren’t under as much pressure are free to “dive” into enemy territory with less fear. Thieves are the ultimate snowballers, especially sword/dagger. While other classes blow cooldowns to secure the kills they can get in a team fight, sword/dagger thieves just wait for initiative to come back and then go back to being 100%.

Deified.7520:

Phantaram.1265:

Deified.7520:

I don’t think it is viable for anything that wants to be competitive. It forgives dieing way too much on top of a whole lot of issues in pvp.

There are very specific situations where going into downstate is actually beneficial but those are few and far in between. I don’t think very many people just think “its fine if I go into downstate no biggy”

Never said they do, but when someone goes down and you have 3-4 people power rez him instantly, seems kind of forgiving.

About 3 or 4 months ago this could be accurate but right now more than ever there is huge amounts of cleave going down on all downed bodies, really hard to get rezes off.

Good downstate management is definitely a skill, we’ve been improving ours since october as a team.

killahmayne.9518:

well I guess it is about time Necros had their time to shine (even though they were still pretty good pre patch they just weren’t as popular).

Still have to do something about warriors, and Mesmers, yeah they have been on top since the beginning.

Warriors have been on the bottom since the beginning

Deified.7520:

I don’t think it is viable for anything that wants to be competitive. It forgives dieing way too much on top of a whole lot of issues in pvp.

There are very specific situations where going into downstate is actually beneficial but those are few and far in between. I don’t think very many people just think “its fine if I go into downstate no biggy”

Thoughts after patch! Although I’ll be honest I’m not completely sure on guardian as we have not played with Azshene since the patch due to his graduation (so proud of him)

Tier S: Necro

Tier A:
Mesmer+ – Mesmer is + because xeph has shown me the way
Ele=
Guardian=
Engineer-? Maybe Tier B – I think Teldo is really affective at what he’s doing though and I can’t think of anything that would replace his role. So that is my reasoning for this placement.
Ranger- Not really any weaker imo but the fact that necro is so strong means its harder to fit on a team since you can only have 5 and necro is so strong. Still probably one of if not the strongest back node defender still.
Thief- Hard for me to place but I guess this seems good.

Tier B
Warrior+ I think people could prove me wrong and have warrior on Tier A but I personally haven’t tried to make warrior viable in a comp and I’ve seen others attempt to do it and either fail or sort of succeed to a frustrating degree(Chieftan ninjas!) so for now its Tier B.

kaplis.7195:

Phantaram.1265:

So the complaint about stealth is that you can attack from it?

God have mercy on their souls. Attacking from stealth, treason!

Nice! When, few months ago, That’s So Pish used to instagib one of your teammates from stealth at the beginning of each match it sounded like you guys had a big problem with it.

I still do have a problem with that. Just not the attacking from stealth part. You can stack stealth to about 14 seconds and this makes it unpredictable where and who they will attack even if you see them stealth. So literally the only solid and reliable counter is to do a stealth opening of your own, which we now do. This is really lame having to make nearly every team use a stealth opener. The easy solution is to just reduce the maximum amount of time you can stealth, so if you see them stealth you can either A. know where they are going or B. pull them out of the stealth in a number of ways since they will likely try to stealth closer to their objectives (or have to if they want to remain in stealth till they get there)

Surviving a stealth opener gank from 3 or even 4 people happens all the time now as people have gotten used to it, but it’s still a big advantage to be the stealthing team and not that fun to play around. Moa, and Moa from stealth, is a whole different subject.

1. Solo queue
2. Good pvp reward/rank system
3. I dunno, replays I guess

You should try Valkyries amulet. It works better than the amulet you described for most classes and builds. Precision is honestly a pretty lack luster stat in this game. Only a minimum amount is required for most classes.

So the complaint about stealth is that you can attack from it?

God have mercy on their souls. Attacking from stealth, treason!

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

definitely, the game though needs a bit more variety before this draft-mode could be interesting.
As now I think of possibly Moa Morph to ban and shadow-refuge or stand your ground as utilities.

Definitely, and some classes only have 1 or 2 reliable stun breakers and banning them would make the classes really nerfed, everything needs to be strong before something like this can go in. But, this is also why a game mode like this maybe can’t work. Maybe each stunbreaker on a class is only good for 1 build so if you ban 1 utility you essentially ban a whole build and with it maybe the whole class. (cause there’s only 1 viable build)

I thought about this in the past and decided banning classes was taking it too far. Utilities and elites would be the way to go. So maybe it goes something like this.

Team1 – 1 utility ban
Team 2 – 1 utility ban
Team 1 – 1 Elite ban
Team 2 – 1 Elite ban

1st Picking phase – each team cycles through 3 class picks

Team 1 – 1 utility ban
team 2 – 1 utility ban

2nd picking phase – each team cycles through 2 class picks

You could say the picking phase is pointless because teams will just pick all the classes they like but I don’t think it will be like that in the future. Teams will have multiple comps they can run and people will be knowledgeable about counters and the such so picking order will actually matter.

It could have some limitations like stun breakers can’t be banned.

Anyways, just something to think about. The games fine as is but a draft mode would be interesting.

Iceflame.5024:

Necro Flesh Wurm Necrotic Traversal teleport has always been working like this and still does, welcome to the club. It’s got to do with the way pathing works and this issue is actually messing with a lot of things(corrupt boon for example). This game is strange: 5 target AOE limit, high tier pleayers that defend clearly bugged teleports through walls as good skill promoting plays(wut???), basically promoting bugs? A humongous number of bugs unfixed since release? Lots of strange stuff going on here.

Actually I’m pretty sure flesh worm could be used in every spot every other teleport worked, didn’t matter much though because who is going to cast for 1 and a half seconds to teleport in the middle of a fight.

And it’s not promoting bugs, it’s promoting good gameplay. This one just so happens to be a bug(maybe?), but that isn’t of any relevancy.

I haven’t heard a single positive response about removing blink spots. Sure maybe most of the blink spots were unintended from the beginning but they enhanced gameplay. I can think of tons of games in the past where unintended features stayed in because the community liked them and the developers realized it was actually good for the game.

The same should happen here. Just revert the changes to blink spots imo.

Passing through to dispel the rumor that scepter doesn’t do good ranged damage.

Air #1 and #2 is some of the most viable ranged damage in the game right now. You won’t have to leave attunements till something gets close to you or someone goes down so you can land a bunch of fire spells on their downed body, so you just sit in air attunement until a reason arises to switch. The only reason elementalist use dagger off hand over focus is just because the focus is bad, not because we have to go into melee for some unknown reason.

Honestly if anything elementalists should feel forced into scepter rather than dagger main hand because against good teams you need the ranged damage.

I’m all for buffs to staff though!

If anything elementalist is still too powerful in spvp. It’s in a really good state compared to most classes so there was no reason to bring up ele when we were only given an hour to talk.

Chaosky.5276:

Still waiting for a ranged weapon that’s more 1v1 oriented.

…And is actually EFFECTIVE at range, unlike the scepter.

Scepter is effective at range. Air #1 and #2 is probably the most reliable 900 range damage in the game.

It’s definitely not a joke, it’s very close to being viable.

It’s CC and group support is definitely greater than scepter or dagger weapon sets. The only thing it lacks is good consistent damage, which can be easily helped by just adding some damage to some of the abilities that currently don’t do any damage and maybe messing with some cast times.

I think arena net should stick with their method of slow and steady balancing because buffing staff too much could get insane.

PowerBottom.5796:

To see Teldo playing a HGH-Engi was like listening to Kenny G playing the Kazoo. ^^’

I’m so glad he’s back to playing his old build, because it requires so much more skill and is really interesting to watch.

^ This is great, I will tell him about this.

First of all, it would be awesome to get some really experienced organi(s)ers such as yourself to start a league. Second, the community is way too small on NA to get 4 good teams even let alone 32.

On EU, I actually think you could achieve 32 teams, but a lot of them would be quite inexperienced and probably some pugs forming just to participate in tournaments. Even in top 16 on eu you will have some low quality games but they can get experienced pretty quick if there are actual tournaments or leagues to participate in.

Anyways, just trying to familiarize you with the actual gw2 scene, as it is it is quite small but we’ll see how fast it can grow once tournaments start.

Having 2 substitutes would also be very hard to achieve considering the size of the scene.

Tier S: none

Tier A: Ranger +
Mesmer +
Elementalist=+
Engineer=
Thief=
Guardian=
Necro -
Warrior-
Tier B: none
Tier C: none

Ranger is very map dependent, on legacy its probably an =, on forest it is pushing Tier S grounds with its ability to push far unseen and kill forest creatures.
Pretty balanced overall if you ask me.

Bumping this post! Good to see some people coming back.

Shatter mesmer as a backpoint defender works great if you have a thief on your team to help you out. Otherwise you are better off using something else.

I personally like the negative effect of using it as only a mobility skill. However, I wish you were rewarded if you hit it. With a 40 second cooldown if you miss, the risk of trying to use RTL as damage is way too high. So either they need to reduce the risk or increase the reward.

They could do a number of things to make dealing damage with it more rewarding. I’ll just leave that up to the rest of you to brain storm!

It’s really a mystery why this all happens. Our team only queues together these days and we jump around in ranks between us. From one hour to the next Azshene will be on top, then symbolic will be on top, then I will be on top. There is really no telling where we will end up and it’s really odd because Azshene was way ahead of us all on the ladder initially, and symbolic was below all of us.

I think this is actually a pretty good suggestion. I rarely if ever actually use my signet of restoration because of the draw back.

They could definitely do this to the thief one and it would be fine. Currently on the ele signet of restoration is the strongest heal and buffing it more would probably be too powerful.

Trap rangers have always been able to 1v1 guardians easily. There isn’t many trap rangers on EU but if you were on NA you would be experiencing this a lot.

Ostricheggs.3742:

Is there any chance at all that you can improve the current salvaging system?

My wrist hurts ;_;

Good suggestion, something I wanna ask anyways is if they have plans for reworking a lot of the pvp system. Unless people don’t care for that kind of question in which case just tell me in here! I am personally quite interested because at this rate I’ll be rank 80 in like 3 more years. And then another year salvaging the chests I buy at rank 80.

Aza.2105:

DiogoSilva.7089:

I honestly wouldn’t want to see the healing scale to be toned down, or at least not much, or else this would make the healing power stat a bit useless.

They already did this with guardian months ago and the class is still pretty good. I’m not sure why ele hasn’t taken a nerf to healing abilities. Unless I overlooked it.

Ele’s have received a few nerfs to healing. Namely halving the switch to water and evasive arcana, and evasive arcana losing all its blast finishers except in earth.

Lert.6287:

With all these ’’fixes’’ it’d come to one huge nerf. Class close to not worth playing on.
Nerfing heals, boons, viable attack potential (attunement swapping), condition cure.

If Ele is going to be drastically nerfed, so thief, mesmer and few other proffessions build should.

The thing Symbolic is missing that this build (with 1.3k healing power, toughness, close to no criticals) is to provide group support and tank. Elementalist like that basicly doesn’t deal much damage and anyone who isn’t cannon can out-tank that.

You take damage runes/jewel/sigils so when you assault far you can kill the back point defender easier on a cantrips ele. Without Fire elite out cantrips ele have more damage than most targets have sustain so you can eventually kill. With fire ele elite out you can end the fight in a good 30-45 seconds against most classes if not faster.

Going full support team fight ele is viable and effective and maybe slightly OP, but nothing absurd. It’s also not the reason people are complaining about elementalist, under focus fire they are forced to run or die. Playing an ele effectively in a team fight is something to be admired and I don’t think many can do it well enough to justify bringing an ele to a team fight. I will admit there is some finess to optimizing your attack on far point as a cantrips ele but whether you are a good player or not it is automatically extremely effective because your fire elite and you can win just about any 1v1 especially against what people bring as back point defenders.

I don’t think symbolic is suggesting to do all these nerfs at once, they are just singular ideas. And to those interested, I didn’t help him with this lol. He’s dedicated.

Balance isn’t the reason people are leaving. So while I agree splitting more stuff from pve and wvwvw is a good idea it’s far down on the list of important things.