Guild Wars 2

Raestloz.7134:

It depends entirely on:
1) Definition of tankiness
2) Relative distance to enemies
3) How much damage we’re talking about
4) Whether you confused “tankability” and “survivability” or not.

Staff eles do not wield the same mobility melee eles have. Staff eles do, in fact, have great survivability, they have quite a lot of mobility hampering skills, but they cannot “tank”, they simply avoid being wounded in the first place, which is mainly thanks to the fact they’re not at the front lines relative to melee units. A staff using ele facing a “zerg” (as in, more than 5, which is a raid party) will either:

a) Fought back for some time and die a moment later
b) Escape from the very beginning and survive

Unfortunately, there is no c) Fought back and escaped, unless you’re in front of your tower

I’ve actually done this on my auramancer when the situation called for staff or when unexpected combat happened while I was using staff for a specific purpose. I speak from experience when I say built tanky as an auramancer I can hang with the front line, staff or no, with no real issues. Magnetic aura being shared with the front line heavies is actually an unexpectedly nasty twist.

I wouldn’t call it ideal, I still think D/D and /F can tank better in close range situations., but staff can definitely get the job done without any real difficulties and does have it’s own specific large advantages.

Again, this is not from Idle speculation. I’ve been there on my auramancer in fights exceeding 20 members from both sides. PVE of course you can kite melee like a boss and avoid ranged damage just as well.

All ele weapons are mobile and the vast vast amount of bunker ele survivability is from the stats, boons, and mobility, not the weapon sets specifically. Perhaps with the exception of /F being exceptional in defense.

Kaleban.9834:

Ralathar.7236:

I’ve staff tanked zergs multiple times on my auramancer. The weapon skills to avoid/cripple/chill/immobilize/stun multiple melee at a time, shared reflect, protection and flame armor constantly, defensive utility skills, good dodge skill in fire, decent healing and water fields.

Think more creatively. I am a runner of wierd builds haha. Because used correctly alot more builds work well than the player base realizes. I don’t always intent to get stuck in staff, but sometimes it happens and you adapt. Adapting and learning is much better than giving up and flailing around complaining before exhausting your resources.

And I have a Raptor Jesus and Dino-unicorn living in my house.

Either you’re being intentionally facetious, or you think “zerg” means 1 person. A Staff Ele confronted with even a 5 man team is going down, much less a zerg of 20+. A Staff Ele facing off against one other competent player is at a significant disadvantage.

Or perhaps you’re confused and the zergs you were tanking were in the Super Adventure Box?

Ele’s built for tankiness can handle damage just fine. D/D bunker ele’s have shown that. The survivability that is lacked from direct mitigation is made up by mobility and boons. Staff isn’t much difference and a tanky auramancer is an extremely defensive build even using staff. Even more so if you have any sort of choke point with your ability to control enemy mobility and your ranged status honestly. Prolly doesn’t hurt that you can set up a healing blast finisher for your own water fields either.

It’s different, it was highly unexpected the first time I did it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Properly used burning retreat and magnetic aura are highly effective on a normal build. That only makes a bigger difference on a bunker build with constant protect and fire shield that still lays down AOE damage and CC (albeit much weaker AOE damage…being 500-800 per meteor instead of 2-3k…but it still does damage :P). Lets not even get into the LOLfactor defense on Tornado or Fiery Greatsword used in their proper situations on such a build.

In choke points specifically a staff ele is a far superior tank due to being able to use frozen ground, unsteady ground, and shock wave combined with magnetic aura and protection to vastly reduce the possible incoming damage while the enemy dies to your team. Meanwhile both you and the team are capable of providing you heal support.

Mewa.5423:

1. Condition builds get their DPS out of stacking the conditions and maintaining them. Doing other things? Like what? Having a cup of digital coffee? If you stop attacking in power based builds, so does the damage and same applies to condition damage builds.

Correction. Condition builds get more of their dps from conditions and maintaining them than normal builds. The base damage of attacks is still a rather important part of DPS. You cannot possibly ignore base damage as a part of DPS. Even completely bunker builds with no additional DPS can kill people. They just can’t kill people as fast.

Also, there is much more to a fight than DPS. If you doubt ask a thief that missed his backstab and yanked out of Shadow Refuge. Ask a Guardian that had his boons turned into conditions by necromancer. Ask a Ranger that just hit himself 4 times thanks to feedback.

2. Confusion builds also are accompanied by other conditions. Despite the fact that for a mesmer they are a minor source of damage, condition->boon conversions are as effective on them as onother cd builds.

That is entirely based on you. The glamor build relies on 2 conditions. Blind and confusion. With people attacking blind is consumed by a miss within a second nearly all of the time. Blinds CAN be converted, but the window is pretty short and so they will not be converted nearly as often as other conditions.

A glamor mesmer will apply almost exclusively confusion and blind. The exceptions to this are Staff Auto Attack and chaos storm. However one of the glamor Mesmer’s core abilities also strips boons. So this mitigates this somewhat. The only other popular glamor build condition is the burning from offhand torch’s “The Prestige.”.

All of this combined together does not even come near the frequency of condition application of any other condition damage build. Others apply conditions on a nearly constant basis so there is always a condition up to convert or drop, rendering them much more vulnerable to boon conversion.

In the damage comparison example you gave you listed a necromancer that would provide permanent up-time on boon conversion. 2 boons possible per every 1 1/2 seconds. Another if they used the cripple on the second scepter skill.. In no way could confusion builds possibly be this kind of liability vs a well built group.

2 warriors can convert 4 conditions to boons every 20 seconds, while freeing allies from movement impairing effects, giving them swiftness, and granting them vigor. 4 warriors can convert 8 conditions every 20 seconds. If you are based around conditions what do you think the odds of 2 warriors giving their front line boons from your potential damage are within 10 seconds?

If you are a glamor mesmer or condition engineer (only other major condition user) you’ve at least also contributed sizable utility. That necro however would be rendered impotent during the most important part of the fight.

3. Confusion builds were mostly brought up vs enemy zergs, which presumably also had lots of cd removals (eg forementioned warhorns) resulting in the stacks disappearing quite effectively

As mentioned above confusion builds also bring considerable utility. Other condition builds are not as lucky.

I can`t really understand what makes people whine about confusion so much while retaliation gets almost unscatched. But perhaps now, with a striking indication that you`re being hit by retaliation will bring about QQ about it, as it`s as OP as confusion was, according to whiners(a.k.a. bad players).

IIRC people are claiming a 33% nerf to retal That’s not precisely unscathed.

My conclusion concerning your posts is that you`re too biased in this matter.
You are omiting aspects that are crucial to understanding the cause and drawing one-sided conclusions, purposely forgetting about other sides of the arguments you`re bringing, which would destroy the point of view you are trying to dragoon.
My guess is you must`ve taken a hard beating from manymanymany mesmers and engineers and their confusion stacks.

I apologize if you feel I am one sided and biased because I consider nuance, tactics, counters, and context. The irony of your assumption is hilarious though as the glamor mesmers in my guild were utterly unconcerned with the nerf. They already knew they would still be effective.

ExZee.8109:

Stop reviving this thread and let it die already. The math in all the OP’s posts are completely useless and there’s already people misled to thinking it has actual meaning.

This thread is more relevant.

I give numbers, facts, and situations that can be verified and proven. That thread gives biased opinions and generalities based on an agenda. Ironically providing the raw information makes me the one who misleads with a numbers and concepts which can be scientifically verified and tested and summarily proven or dismissed?

Your world is a strange one sir. I can either be right or I can be wrong. There is no mislead or not here. You can test everything I said. Go test the DPS, Go test condition damage vs good groups. Go test the ability of a sword/warhorn warrior to turn constant conditions into a liability. Go test your ability to do other things while still applying your damage.

I am providing you everything you need to disprove me if I am wrong. Use it and come back with evidence instead of anecdotal opinions please. Evidence is far more helpful.

Chaosky.5276:

This build really isn’t optimal. Sigil of Earth’s effect (2 second internal cooldown, one stack of bleeding on application), will only grant you a maximum uptime of 2.5 stacks of bleeding in a perfect scenario in which it always activates, which it won’t. Furthermore, you lack the sustainability to really take advantage of condition damage, and you’ll lose a lot of damage whenever you switch out of the air attunement (which will happen, because healing) due to the lack of sustained damage in other attunements, the decreased bleeding and burning uptime (well, earth won’t have a problem with bleeding, nor fire with burning), and the massive 16 second wait to get back into the air attunement.

Bottom line: This build has neither the survivability nor the burst damage necessary for effectiveness in 1v1s, and due to the lack of damage potential in other attunements, you’ll end up fighting against your class mechanic.

The scepter simply isn’t effectively designed for ranged combat; the best I’ve been able to get out of it is an extremely boring 0/0/30/20/20 signet condition build, and it’s simply a poor choice compared to other builds.

I never intent to 1 vs 1 someone though of course I have won plenty of 1 vs 1. However I of course agree this is not optimal for 1 vs 1. I said small scale, not 1 vs 1. It’s not uncommon for me to quickly build and maintain 10 stacks of vulnerability n someone and spike as high as 16 stacks. This without any serious condition duration. The 60% on crit trait in air apparently has no ICD.

The condition damage is not so much based on DPSing someone down faster so much as it is stacking with the burning to take down runners and allowing me to take down toughness spec’s more easily. DPS and DPS that makes a difference is not the same thing. Alot of players choose to leave the battle late and fall to a late firing arcane blast + condition damage.

I can also easily switch to earth and focus on condition damage for those high toughness builds and still be quite effective. The short switch to fire for DT, and a phoenix that predicts the doge/causes it, then fire ring presets the earth attunement nicely. I do not lose alot of damage potential switching out of air because condition damage is equally effective with my build.

So yeah, it’s a scepter damage build capable of dealing high damage on both the power and condition spectrum. It loses a slight amount on the “optimal damage” to be more versatile instead. Even still it’s slightly less versatile as a pure scepter build.

BUT it’s not a pure scepter build. It’s a build meant to easily roll into staff. On staff the dividends paid back by a equal condition focus are paid back in spades. Not only are more of the weapon skills useful for high amounts of damage but the bleed ticks I am getting highlight my enemies for future AOE’s even when out of sight. All I have to do is track the bleed numbers to figure out where they moved to hide and AOE some more.

sPVP and PVE are very narrow spectrum of game play and lead to very narrow thinking and very narrow “best” builds. I have a build that does excels at WvW and does good at PvP. Only extremely select pigeon hole builds are viable for PVP. This will always be the case with it’s extremely specific focus. That is a no win battle.

Certain classes like Warrior might excel at PVE but then do poorly at WvW with the same build. Vice versa is true of many WvW builds. Thanks to the power and versatility of elementalist I can do both with a variety of builds. Again PVP will always be pigeon holed thanks to it’s very narrow focus.

Too many people build themselves into a tiny box focusing on excelling at Y or Z and then discount anything that doesn’t do as well as Y or Z completely ignoring the fact that the situation is not always like that.

Kaleban.9834:

Ralathar.7236:

I could easily make a staff auramancer. a cc staff build, a staff tank, a support staff uild, etc. All of these would be viable options that could be successfully pulled off and be good. My play style could actually change dramatically and still be effective.

Lol.

Possible to make? Sort of. A build is a collection of gear and traits. Very few (if any) traits are conducive to something like “staff tanking.”

As to them being good and/or effective, just no. In a game with few customization options, the effective builds are few and far between. Could your staff tank do good? Yes, in Queensdale DEs. High level PvP or WvWvW? Probably, laughably not.

I’ve staff tanked zergs multiple times on my auramancer. The weapon skills to avoid/cripple/chill/immobilize/stun multiple melee at a time, shared reflect, protection and flame armor constantly, defensive utility skills, good dodge skill in fire, decent healing and water fields.

Think more creatively. I am a runner of wierd builds haha. Because used correctly alot more builds work well than the player base realizes. I don’t always intent to get stuck in staff, but sometimes it happens and you adapt. Adapting and learning is much better than giving up and flailing around complaining before exhausting your resources.

TwoBit.5903:

@Ralathor
Efficient? Hardly. The only it’s efficient at is covering the field in pretty particles. The damage is subpar in PvE and PvP compared to D/D. Ranged AoE isn’t as useful as it sounds in PvE when you can simply facetank mobs and dps them down, in which case melee cleave is superior than the staff’s AoE. The staff’s only saving grace as a ranged dps weapon is WvW and that’s if you hide behind allies or keep walls, but it’s greatest utility in WvW is (surprise surprise) ranged AoE CCs. And lol Hounds as AoE…

It is true that damage wise I will be beat by many others in PVE when you can facetank things. But I don’t just have damage. I also have control and utility built into my weapon. Even still there will always be a “most effective” build/class. There is a 7/8 chance that any one class will not have it.

The question isn’t whether something is optimal or not. But whether it is viable or not. Viewed from the position of the top dog a large % of builds will always be viewed as not competitive. But that doesn’t mean they are underpowered.

In fact middle of the road builds will always have one rather large advantage over your top dogs. I won’t be facing the nerfs you will inevitably receive and might actually get some buffs. Also, in regards to hounds their initial attack is essentially the skill flameburst centered on thier target. In zergs this almost always hits 3+ per hound. It’s not super deadly, but it’s reliable and it does make a difference. It’s extra dps I know what is going to do and can be cued up before a battle or during cooldowns. A plus no matter how it is viewed.

PVP is another animal. It would be difficult to make an AOE heavy weapon viable for PVP without making it OP for everything else. I don’t look for staff to ever be competitive with the nature of PVP being what it is. It will continue to be good in both PVE and WvW however. Not best, but good.

But I digress. Rebutting your blind defense of the staff besides the point. The point is that traits need to provide actual tradeoffs; they need change the properties of skills, let players choose between damage cc, etc. All they’re doing right now is sometimes tweaking skills a tiny bit, and mostly changing their damage values. We’re only provided the illusion of customization of playstyle when all that we can adjust is the speed at which health bars go down. That’s why we have very cookie cutter builds with each weapon set.

I could easily make a staff auramancer. a cc staff build, a staff tank, a support staff uild, etc. All of these would be viable options that could be successfully pulled off and be good. My play style could actually change dramatically and still be effective.

Kaleban.9834:

Also, Hounds for “reliable burst AoE.” Every four minutes is reliable? No wonder the pro-nerfers drive me insane, the amount of hyperbole that is spewed is remarkable.

Yes, it’s quite reliable. I cast it and it does exactly what I want every time regardless of the situation. If I need to use my elite more than every 4 minutes my side is doing something wrong or it’s a stalemate battle in which case it really doesn’t matter. I am part of an organized guild and even the largest zerg battles are normally won within the first 60 seconds, exceptions possibly being 3 ways or areas where we get corpse rushed.

The hounds are not terribly survivable but they quickly leap into combat using an AOE flame burst attack then chew on one target. They have a reasonably good alpha. I was doubtful at first myself and was on the fence for a good time while I weighed my options.

Push comes to shove I start battles normally in either Air or Water. I travel in Air. Air Elemental does not fare very well against zergs, starting a battle I only want to be in water long enough to drop frozen ground (I switch back to it again later), Fiery Greatsword doesn’t add terribly to my anti-zerg DPS and greatly increases my risk, and Tornado does not fare very well when built as glassy as I am vs ay decent players.

I have to react quickly and drop my frozen ground/static field at the start of combat and combat is not always pre-planned in a way convenient for attunement swap just for a useful elemental. Also, while my foe is stunned/chilled I should be unleashing AOE death or yet more CC, not pets that will die quickly regardless of which pet I use. Pets are before planned combat or after my initial cooldowns from whatever improvised skill chain I just used. (ending in water always btw)

greyblue.4962:

Honestly, the flaw in the logic here is that anyone is going to use a skill once per second. When you consider that channeled skills only tick once, regardless of duration, and also that a lot of classes naturally do everything at a slow pace than that, it’s more honest to put the rate at 1 skill use per 1.5 seconds.

If people are not using 1 skill per second on average then they are either being less effective than they could be or they are a sitting duck while they cast long duration and interrupt-able skills. As a Staff Elementalist main I can tell you that there are many times where Meteor Shower is not a valid option and would be a death sentence. Also vs good groups I will get interrupted alot if I do not carefully choose when to use those long casting abilities.

I’d say 1 second per skill is a fair long term average. Even channeled abilities like Rapid Fire (5 seconds) and Barrage (2 3/4 seconds) get balanced out by other abilities like dodge rolls, Long Range shot (3/4 second auto-attack), Hunter’s Shot (Instant) and Point Blank shot (3/4 second). Over the course of 30 seconds you can use Barrage once and Rapid fire 2 times (12 3/4 seconds total). Assuming Long Ranged shot only is used and no instants, Point Blanks, or dodges are used you get 23 Long Ranged shots used in that time. 26 abilities in 30 seconds on a severly conservative estimate that assume you do not dodge roll, use your instant (no brainer) twice, and stay only in longbow so 1 second per activation is easily possible for nearly all situations.

That is one of the worst examples in the game and assumes no weapon change, yet still averages near 1 activation per second. Staff Ele doesn’t even come close since only Meteor Shower (4 1/4), Eruption (1 3/4), and Lightning Surge (1 1/2) take longer than 1 second to channel. Also in that example the two big confusion users: Mesmer and Engineer both have the easy ability to reflect rapid fire back at the Ranger or interrupt it easily forcing more activations. It’s built into their confusion builds quite literally.

Your statement = debunked by cold hard truth. Activations are far more frequent than you state.

Also, while it’s possible for a necromancer to maintain 9 stacks of bleed by auto-attacking (along with poison), confusion can’t be applied without burning cooldowns, and I don’t believe it’s possible for one character to stack confusion past 16 under any conditions. The highest number of stacks than can be maintained over time reasonably is 4.

Let’s apply the math to that:
9 stacks of bleed with 1,000 condition damage = 832.5 damage per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and 1 skill per second = 560 per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and a more realistic 1 skill per 1.5 seconds = 373 damage per second

Note that pre-nerf confusion was better, post nerf it’s about 3/5 as good as bleeding.

You are right you have more steady application. But this is both an advantage and a possible severe weakness. Maintaining that damage requires your constant time, prohibiting you from maintaining that DPS AND doing other things like confusion application builds do. You do other things, you lose DPS, we do not.

Second weakness is that your constant application of conditions makes you extremely vulnerable to condition > boon conversion. Confusion builds bursting their confusion does not expose them much to those conversions. In a zerg 4 warriors with war horns traited can make your necro a liability instead of an asset.

It’s not uncommon for my warrior to end up with full boons in battle thanks to the possible overpowered nature of the war horn trait used by multiple warriors. I actually welcome most conditions for this reason.

Einlanzer.1627:

Good, yes, but that hardly makes up for the staff’s inability to function effectively in a non-support role.

If I want range, I’ve gotta go staff, so that’s a major gripe for me.

You can go Scepter for ranged easily single target. It’s AOE is currently on too big of delays for WvW, but I would bet RL money that that will be remedied. But before they buff the weapon they have to balance out some of the stuff that was making the weapon combo too good and then data mine. Hence this series of nerfs is actually a step towards that.

Your gripe about long range AOE options is fair atm, but I heavily believe that will be remedied.

While it doesn’t bother me as much as it does some, this is the real crux of the problem. What they should do is repurpose the Staff for damage primary and utility second,ary and introduce a new weapon type, like maybe a Tome/Book, with a heavier emphasis on support/utility.

In other words, the problem is having only one long range weapon, and that weapon having a very specific play-style requirement.

Staff can do both damage and utility equally well. In fact alot of the utility is there to ensure that you land your damage vs opponents by robbing them of mobility. Meanwhile Staff is not designed for 1 on 1 so of course it’s not going to perform well in 1 vs 1. It gains power with the number of people involved in the fight.

With full rampagers I hit entire groups extremely hard and I can wipe groups by myself if allowed with good targetting and other people keeping their attention. Having to scurry around to survive reduces my DPS somewhat, but that’s mainly in the loss of Meteor Shower. With Rampagers my mobile DPS is still almost as good as my stationary DPS unless I am needing to use many abilities to keep myself alive.

TwoBit.5903:

IMO, the problem is that the only real customization we have is the damage-survivability tradeoff. There’s no true customization beyond that, no modding attacks for specific effects. We can’t have an efficient 1200 dps range weapon because that weapon always has to come with cc, and in a game where dps is king it’ll always be a mediocre weapon set.

This problem of shallow customization is an issue with all professions in the game and it’s why we have very cookie cutter sets.

Staff can successfully be support, direct damage, condition damage, utility, or CC oriented. It is quite efficient at all roles. The only thing staff isn’t efficient at is single target. Elementalist is NOT cookie cutter, people choose to play it that way but it actually has a variety of capable builds. Take my Full Rampager’s build instead of traditional beserkers. Made to change utility skills and the major water trait and instantly become Scepter/Dagger build focused on Air and large amounts of vulnerability/bleeding/burning procs.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/?1.3|6.1o.h16|0.0.0.0.0.0|1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3.1o.a3|1o.63.1o.63.1o.63.1o.63.1o.63.1g.63|a5.u469.k18.a1.0|2e.1|1m.1q.23.1y.g|e

You’ll notice I don’t have any Arcane “MADNESS!!” everyone shouts. Also I use Hounds of Balthazar for reliable burst AOE regardless of attunement. “MORE MADNESS” people shout.

Utilities include Arcane Shield (always), Glyph of Storms, Ice Bow, Armor of Earth, and Mist Form in some combination when wielding staff. Arcane Shield, Arcane Blast, and Signet of Fire when wielding Scepter/Dagger.

Certainly not cookie cutter, but quite effective and versatile I assure you.

Chaosky.5276:

When I use a staff, I run a 0/20/0/30/20 (Valkyrie’s amulet/Berserker’s jewel in SPvP, mix of Knight’s, Berserker’s and Valkyrie’s in WvW) build. Even with the nerf to Mist Form I can still survive fine 1v1, and against multiple enemies with allies to back me up.

However, surviving doesn’t mean much if I can’t actually accomplish anything. Staff eles serve absolutely no purpose in SPvP, and in WvW (unless they’re using full ’Zerker’s, in which case they’re a mobile arrow cart used for assaulting/defending structures that the zerg has to keep thieves off of) their utility is outdone by mesmers and guardians, despite support being the only option a staff ele has.

You are out of your mind. With tools like Frozen Ground, Static Field, Unsteady Ground, shockwave, and healing rain (on call large water field with good duration!!) elementalist is one of the core utility classes in a large WvW conflict.

The more I’ve played staff ele in WvW, the more I realize that my job is support first and damage second. This is true even built glass cannon. I still do my large masses of damage, but laying down those crucial abilities that do far more to determine the fight always takes priority.

MiLkZz.4789:

Guys, I hate to say this but Anue has more WvW experience than most of you combined. And he is not alone, all the hardcore WvW players are disgusted by these AC changes. They were strong before and now they are rediculous.

Don’t doubt Anue his words, all what he says is true.

I am wary of this new change but I need a couple weeks to see it pan out first. I do firmly believe that Arrow Carts are too powerful en masse, both before and after the buff. However I also believe that they were not a big enough deterrent before the buff if there was 1-2. I also extremely firmly believe there are ready counters that good players can leverage and they will find them in the next month or two.

I SUSPECT that there may be an eventual change to how many arrow carts can blanket an area though. The problem with Arrow Carts isn’t their individual damage, but how many can aim at a single area and combine their damage to melt ANYTHING.

This is not a problem in open world and most towers, however it is an incredibly large problem in certain keeps (Hills Keep) where you cannot counter Arrow Carts via trebuchet. Also, I am waiting on catapult and trebuchet mastery with my WvW exp. Prepare to eat Bovine Death!!

Xillllix.3485:

Your may be one of the exceptional players at surviving I can believe that, but lets not pretend everyone that play that class can survive as easily. I played hundreds of hours and have high level equipment and a build I developed. I could stay alive as well until the end of a zerg battle when I was beside the amazing guardian commander we have, and could cast mistform-heal at the worse moment (to heal from stacks of bleeding for example), else I would have died way earlier in the battle. However in reality and in 90% of the case the Elementists die easily, in 1vs1 they rarely survive, and with a staff they have no chance at all.

Now you cast mist-form and you still bleed to death and there is nothing you can do about it for 3 seconds, it’s broken.

Part of the difficulty of becoming a better player is learning not to rely on crutches. Some skills allow you to survive in situation you certainly would not have. Using those types of skills before gaining proficiency at a class can easily stunt your growth as a player.

I was not a good player when I started playing MMORPG’s either. I played Dark Age of Camelot for 5-6 years. I got wrecked for the first 2-3. I learned. Now I avoid the most popular builds as a general rule because they rely on broken game play mechanics destined to be changed normally. Instead I gravitate towards either the “underpowered” or the team based, which actually improves my playing ability and normally get buffs instead of nerfs.

I’ve looked up a goodly amount of info for the game and when this game released I practiced my dodging and positioning on the highly deadly original incarnation of the Fire Elemental before they nerfed it’s difficulty into the ground.

I’ll tell you learn to play, but I’ll also try to give you the tools you need to learn. It’s not a disparaging comment from me, but one that hopes you will honestly stop depending on powerful builds and start improving your own play. When that happens a new world of builds will open to you as viable or good. You’ll see greater success across all characters and likely all MMORPG’s in the future as well.

Also, once you reach a certain level and see things as the optional tools they are instead of necessary you’ll find the skills that used to be crutches can be used to much better effect. To accomplish specific goals instead of just to save your butt or do your work for you.

Raptured.9307:

When i hear people complain about how eles die and mist form back to keep from forever ago to now, i’m like why would you be jealous of these guys, are they getting any bags or just trolling?

We were not trolling, we have been heavily abusing the ability to re-enter the keep to do bursts of damage to the people outside that should not be possible without us dying. This will continue until our ability to mist-form back in is nerfed.

After all the only penalty for running outside with arcane shield and armor of earth to meteor storm an entire zerg for 2-4k damage a hit is that we have to hammer 3 and then rez back up inside. Might as well kill and tag alot of people for free.

Xillllix.3485:

We are not trolling, what they have done to this class has dramatically decreased our ability to stay alive, and we already had the lowest health and thinnest armor of all classes. If you played an elementalist in PvP or WvW you would know that we were not OP, but the complexity of our class forced us to play very well with what we had. Now they didnt just change the stats on our skills, they changed up how they worked together (or prevented them from working together), therefore breaking our combos.

As a staff ele in full rampagers I am one of the last people alive in any confrontation. A fellow guildie is hybrid, not even full bunker, and he is also one of the last alive…but one of the first into the fray. Don’t let people lie to you, ele’s have not had any survivability issues. They have bad players that are not using proper positioning and active damage avoidance. I laugh at every battle I am in the thick of things and outlive all the tougher people around me.

Lowest health and thinnest armor doesn’t matter much when you can control your positioning and the enemies. Protection, mobility, regen, and ready condition removal also blow such arguments out of the water. Warriors can keep their leaps, staff ele’s can control the movement of entire zergs and D/D ele’s have far more movement controlling abilities than mobility warriors. Higher mobility doesn’t mean jack when you cannot use it, we can stop you from using it very effectively if we play correctly.

SoggyFrog.4170:

The bias is strong with this post. If you want to appear objective, don’t conclude all your points with “lol”.

While you point out that the other conditions face a handful of condition counters, you neglect entirely to mention that every other damage-dealing condition is buffed by a sigil and a number of runes. Burning and poison also benefit directly from certain food items. On top of that, there are traits that improve damage to players affected by these specific conditions, there’s no such traits for confusion.

You also make the claim that confusion can do its damage up front because people won’t notice it, which is absurd. Confusion has a special visual indicator; on top of that, you should be aware of when you might be affected by confusion because it’s almost exclusively applied by mesmers and engineers. Anyone who runs a confusion build will tell you that only bad players are destroyed up front – against someone who knows what they’re doing, confusion is best used as a source of pressure.

Burning can be constantly applied through a fight to maintain pressure despite cleanses; high stacks of bleeding have no counter for someone whose cleanses are on cooldown, while high stacks of confusion can still be countered by not doing anything. Both can be applied more easily and consistently, which is the main criticism of your analysis.

I overuse LOL. It’s a personal thing, get over it lol.. Also you right it has no specific confusion damage boosters, it has a visual indicator, and has no sigils or runes. I believe confusion sigils and runes, like condi/toughness/vit armor are something that should be in game. I don’t think they are the only equipement missing by a long shot either cough healing/toughness/vitality cough. I don’t think it needs damage boosting trait because that only function on direct damage and confuse is meant to be short lived.

The visual indicator is also there to make sure people don’t accidentally destroy themselves because they didn’t eagle eye their buff bar. Something only retaliation has the same situation as, which is why it got a visual indicator. You are right only bad players get destroyed by confusion. The same is true with all other conditions.

You are also right that burning can be applied constantly throughout a fight. But this can easily count against you. Warrior with Warhorns, Engineers with Elixir C, Mesmer’ with arcane thievery, Plague Signet, and more can make your burning not only do no damage, but actually HELP the people you are fighting. Worse if you combine these people together in a zerg working together (wow, it’s almost like teamwork!!).

My observations over the last few weeks actually have me questioning the wisdom of any long duration condition damage in WvW at all against a properly formed group. See you are looking at things in small scale, but that is not WvW which is what this is affecting. Properly made groups run multiple hammer/shout warriors with soldier runes, guardians, and a smattering of other things. I regularly see my conditions disappear and my boon bar filll up. Even my Glass cannon Longbow warrior runs sword/war horn because the grouping power of the traited war horn en masse is ridiculous.

Honestly I’m concerned that there may be too much conditional removal in a well made WvW group for conditions to be viable atm. Much less something like burn that relies on long durations of steady damage when 20 seconds can be cleansed as easily as 5.

In small scale confusion is a far burstier source of damage that can be reapplied before the cleanses. In large scale confusion is the only condition that stands a chance of doing any real damage against a well made group and in the case of glamor mesmer has many other benefits. Your average pug of course can be killed via dang near any means and confusion is extra effective agianst them lol.

TheGuy.3568:

Elementalist

Comet skill: Blast finisher now occurs at the comet’s location rather than at the elementalist’s location.

This is a bug fix. This should be expected and is not a nerf. Taking advantage of a bug you should realize eventually the bug will be fixed.

Mist Form skill: Activation now locks heal, utility, and elite skills.

This should have been expected. You already get to be invulnerable which is a powerful skill in and of itself for keeping you alive. The healing and utility skills being available put this skill over the top. Learn to use it as it was intended.

Ride the Lightning skill:
Increased recharge increased 20 seconds to 40 seconds.
Recharge is now halved if the player strikes a foe.
Reduced the range to 1200 from the previous (hidden) 1550.

Hated by most of you I’m sure but I’ve been expecting big nerfs to RTL on my S/D ele for a very long time now. It was way too good. Excellent at attacking, closing the distance, setting up CC, escaping, and general mobility. With wise skill useage you could escape anyone as a bunker build.

Yes some classes could catch you, assuming you didn’t cripple, immobilize, or chill them properly. But the distance it required them to chase you to even try and catch you was immense an totally broken for having the tankiness + damage that was commonly used. They have now given it a role as a distance closing attack that can be used for a quick escape in a pinch. But it can no longer be used to run endlessly.

To be fair though, I think they should separate this change for PVE players. sPVP and WvW needed it, it does no real good for PVE.

Cleansing Water trait: Can now trigger only once every 5 seconds (only in PvP).

A fair change, too much condition removal was available. I hope they eventually port this change to WvW. I am unsure of PVE on this one.

Swirling Winds skill: No longer destroys unblockable missiles.

This wasn’t just used to block projectiles against defending siege. It was used much more often to defend attacking siege and keep walls. Being in a coordinated guild properly speed built counter-siege tactics were being ruined by this skill. Also the larger side benefited more from this skill.

This change puts more emphasize on properly organized counter siege and less on who has a bigger force and more ele’s that can cover more siege than your smaller force.

If it matters I main elementalist, regularly use mist form, and was called up regularly for swirling winds duty. My main build is built around Scepter/Dagger air spec with rampagers armor taking advantage of a high crit rate, hight power, and high crit effects. RTL is still going to be a mainstay of mine. I wield staff extremely often as well.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Glyph of Storms might be nice for pve now.

It always was, but for damage there was never really a reason to switch outside of firestorm. Now there is. Simple as that. Earth retains it’s reason as a pulsing blind that is awesome for both WvW and PVE.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Glyph’s Fire storm also hits 11 times, like earth. For some reason, ice storm seems to last for a less amount of time than the three other storms, and about as much as the conjure’s version. It’s probably bugged.

It’s not a bug. Ice Storm applies large amounts of chill. The lesser duration is to balance this.

You people are freaking out too much.

With broken and unreliable siege timers they have no useful metrics for how siege timer duration affects WvW. Without consistent metrics they will not modify the existing timers. Siege will now provide these data metrics. The current timers are subject to change based on the information they will gather on things within the next 1-2 months. If they find it is too short they will likely extend it.

The 2 and 5 minute timers were likely instituted to help combat one form of siege griefer. The guy who followed you around and threw incorrect siege or threw siege on top of your siege specifically to screw up your ability to build the proper siege and waste supplies on active assaults. The 2 minute timer is perfectly fair. The 5 minute timer might require some testing to see if it is sufficient for lower population servers.

I’ve gone pretty in depth on the numbers and some additional advantages here. Give feedback and criticism. I will correct anything if you find an inaccuracy.

Looking at the confusion damage another way: even halved it will do the same damage as equal stacks of burn with 1-2 skills used. Burn is the highest damage condition by far pound for pound and is balanced by the fact it scales in duration instead of intensity.

Getting into the numbers. All damages are base damages, confusion numbers are the new sPVP numbers.

Base Damages:
Burn = 325 base damage per stack per second.
Bleed = 42.5 damage per stack per second. So 7-8 bleed stacks = 1 burn tick.
Confusion = 65 damage per skill activation. So 5 stacks of confusion = 1 burn tick per skill activation.
Poison = 84 damage per second but lowers healing by 33%.

Scaling:
Burn = condition damage * 0.25.
Bleed = condition damage * 0.05
Confusion = condition damage * 0.075.
Poison = condition damage * 0.1

Damage gains with 1,000 condition damage:
Burn: 250 additional damage per second
Bleeding: 50 additional damage per second per stack
Confusion: 75 additional damage per stack per skill activation
Poison: 100 additional damage per second.

(Total damages with 1,000 condition damage:
Burn: 575 per second
Bleed: 92.5 per second per stack (6 stacks = 1 second burn)
Confusion: 140 damage per stack per skill activation (4 stacks skill use = 1 second burn)
Poison: 184 damage per second but lowers healing by 33%.

Initially burn seems the clear winner in conditions, but you’ll noticed while other require stacks and have lower bases and scaling, they actually more than double their damage while burn gains less than 50%. Furthermore burn cannot stack more than that set amount per second and bleed and confusion can stack to 25. All other conditions actually become MORE competitive with burn with additional condition damage despite lower scaling.

So we can see that straight damage wise confusion in a clear winner assuming you can apply 4 – 5 stacks. Even more so if you consider that vs classes with instants or fast attacks confusion can activate more than once per second.

But we have a caveat, condition removal. People say so much about condition removal = lol confuse worthless. This is actually less true of confusion than it is of other conditions. Confusion faces condition removal and convert condition to boons skills. All other conditions face all of that PLUS a few class counters. List of known counters: Thief: Pain Response and Slowed Pulse, Ele: Stop Drop and Roll, Ranger: Oakheart Salve and Evasive Purity, Guardian: Inner Fire (Burning gives them Fury), Engineer: Leafy Bandage (toolkit skill of Healing seed Sylvari Racial),

So if you look at the numbers, the counters, and the capabilities confusion is still superior to other conditions even post nerf. Confusion is also kinda nasty in the way it sneaks up on ya. Bleeding, burning, and poison put lots of numbers above your head and you quickly counter it if you have counters. It also typically takes several seconds to get alot of bleeding, poison, or burning on someone. If someone puts confusion on you though you typically take a couple skill activations before realizing it in a hectic fight. In doing that you’ve already done the full damage the other conditions would have done many times. They depend on constant reapplication, confusion does alot of damage up front.

It was nerfed because it was needed. Confusion is still the best condition even after a 50% nerf lol.

Additional notes:

Keep in mind that you may average more damage in the long run because people may not choose to blow their condition removal on your confusion anymore. 1 more activation on average brings you right back up to pre-nerf levels.

Burning, bleeding, and poison take time to stack and take time to deal their damage. Confusion deals alot of damage up front and confusion is applied in short order allowing you to do other things. In many cases confusion deals it’s damage where other conditions simply do not, though other conditions may be applied more frequently.

One last thing. Because bleeding, poison, and burning are applied frequently classes that can convert conditions to boons or send conditions to enemies can actually benefit alot more heavily from them. Great example is the popular Warrior War Horn traited. With proper War Horn support condition damage dealers are actually making the enemy zerg stronger by giving them boons.

Dealing all of your damage in one occasionally applied condition up front is actually a significant benefit against well made enemy team comps. It strikes a good balance between getting a chance to deal your damage and not empowering the enemy zerg.

Thorson.9218:

Ralathar.7236:

Looking at the confusion damage another way:
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Thanks for taking the time to look into this in such detail and running the numbers. Very interesting, and much appreciated. :-)

No problem. MMORPG’s and their balance is kind of a passion of mine so when I get interested in something I tend to get pretty deep into the guts and context of it.

ammayhem.5962:

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

As I read this thread, I was wondering when people were going to mention the fact that we’re reflecting, blinding, and stripping boons!

When I first heard about the Confusion nerf, I was a bit upset as well, but then I remembered, I only used Glamor Confusion to begin with because I like the Glamor skills, and the rest was added bonus. I wasn’t even expecting adding one or two stacks of Confusion to do much anyway.

Same as above.

Godmoney.2048:

All this talk talk talk.

Let me debunk your talk in one simple statement. Good players never proc confusion so therefore it is far less worse than any other cond.

I’ll tell you right now I’d rather have a Bleed shatter or poison shatter than 50% weaker confusion.

Then you are silly. If they never proc confusion then they are effectively dazed and unable to dodge for 5-10 seconds. If they use condition removal then bleeding, poison, and burn would all be in the same boat.

McNuggetBandit.8376:

The thing is the overall damage you do now to that zerg with be very minimal, sure your gona tag em all and so it will still work there however its not going to provide much more support.

Atm you can drop that cofusion on the zerg and start ticking them for 500-1500 dmg (depending on how many fields they go through as your not gonna get much higher stacks on a full zerg) currently this damage on its own still shouldn’t kill someone. What is does those is forces players to think of their actions more which causes a slight slow down in their attacks (or they will die if they keep attacking) this allows the your zerg time to infict more damage killing the rest of that zerg that you have now weakend.

In my mind thats why glamours are strong zerg v zerg, the can hit the whole zerg and deal some okay damage to everyone (and mabye burst 1 or 2) but cause them to slow down as they have to think if they can take the damage from that confusion hit buying your zerg time to kill them

With the reduction in damage now you will just hit them for 250-750 ticks reall which is almost nothing considering it last only a few seconds because of foods or the condtion removal of a zerg. Now players will jusst fight through it and laugh as the regen that just got applied out does your confusion damage

I think you forgot about the fact that you are applying massive amounts of blinds, boon stripping, reflection, and chaos fields. Plus whatever you are doing with your actual weapons.

Glamor Mesmer is not intended to be zerg wiping damage. It’s intended to be a support build that get a fair amount of damage for free. Keep in mind as well this stacks with multiple Mesmers and Necromancers are your best friend.

Also keep in mind that you may average more damage in the long run because people may not choose to blow their condition removal on your confusion anymore. 1 more activation on average brings you right back up to pre-nerf levels.

Burning, bleeding, and poison take time to stack and take time to deal their damage. Confusion deals it’s damage up front and confusion is applied in short order allowing you to do other things. In many cases confusion deals it’s damage where other conditions simply do not, though other conditions may be applied more frequently.

One last thing. Because bleeding, poison, and burning are applied frequently classes that can convert conditions to boons or send conditions to enemies can actually benefit alot more heavily from them. Great example is the popular Warrior War Horn traited. With proper War Horn support condition damage dealers are actually making the enemy zerg stronger by giving them boons.

Dealing all of your damage in one occasionally applied condition up front is actually a significant benefit against well made enemy team comps. It strikes a good balance between getting a chance to deal your damage and not empowering the enemy zerg. Not to mention the fact one of your glamor abilities is actually stripping their boons.

It seems that the WOW community itself on WOWhead disagrees with you and uses the phrase “rose-tinted glasses” many many times.

More!!:

most of whats stated above is true, in 40 man raids, when a tier item dropped, youll see billions of rolls and whatnot, it was insane and yet, somehow funny looking back to it

on the other hand, vanilla wow was the host of many npc’s that became legends, people reallized what Varian was, the awesomeness of Saurfang on AQ40 gates and his impassable defense when alliance tried to raid orgrimmar by the front gates (his chained cleave one-shotted entire raids), also directing onyxia 40 man on such a small place drove many people insane (see onyxia wipe video on youtube), leeroy jenkings (may not be liked by some)

Having more than 3 mounts was considered eccentric too, now ppl over 100 mounts boast it in trade

all in all, vanilla wow saw some of the greatest raids, npcs and players (merit to whose deserves it) of all time, and thats what people miss, even with its insane grind hours, in short, it was harder than the current, yet the fun factor remains for the most part

One last quote:

I think Aetsu pretty much summed it up quite well.

While the game was a lot simpler, it required a lot more dedication. In this sense, I guess it could be described as both being casual and hardcore; the game in itself was very easy to understand, yet required an immense investment of time to reach the top. Questing and leveling was simplistic, repetitive and non-streamlined. In many cases, as Aetsu described, this would make the world feel more like a sandbox. It was not uncommon to find low-level quests in high level areas, and vice versa. Of course, initially this made the game feel more like an adventure, but after experiencing it for a while one quickly realises that this made for poor, convoluted gameplay.

Overall, the game had a really haphazard feel to it; for all intents and purposes, Vanilla felt much like a Beta. Certain game mechanics were inexplicable to the point of feeling ‘broken’ and the unrefined nature of the game made it feel more like an experiment.

So yeah, to answer the OP’s question, the game was – for all intents and purposes – harder. Not so much because the game was designed to be challenging, but because the game mechanics of the time were unintentionally unforgiving and frustrating.

Ahem, quotes taken from thread directly from the mouths of WOW players themselves: http://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=169306/what-was-vanilla-wow-like-i-am-curious-to-know

Vanilla was very very much more “grindy” than the game is now. Leveling took more effort and gold was so very much harder to come by. Raid experiences, while they still could be fun, took many more hours dedication than raids do now and often a lot of that was spent wading through trash mobs.

The biggest changes in my opinion have been made to the multi-role classes. Classes like paladins and druids were effectively pigeon-holed into one raiding spec and those roles were often tedious to the point of insanity. (i.e. Holy Paladins on 2min buff duty for their 40m raid).

Another big change is the amount of information available to the average player. Sites similar to wowhead were in their infancy and access to information like caps, talent builds, and optimal rotations were known by relatively few players.

As zdouse says, the game has pretty much been steadily improving. And although we had good times back in those days, if we take off our rose-tinted glasses its pretty clear it was a rough road back then.

Another quote:

Vanilla was a lot like other MMOs in there infancy , cept we didnt know what A fully fleshed out , well thought out and properly executed MMO looked like , There where pit falls , Long "grinding " sessions , think farming but just for XP , Terribly itemized drops , breadcrumb quests every three lvls , Some of it was a nightmare , getting 40 ppl for raids was like herding narcoleptic cats . CC was mandatory even in lower lvl stuff . Mobs hit harder , you didnt hit near as hard , Retpallys sucked , 200 dps endgame was fantastic , Shadow priests melted faces . But a lot of it was really fun , St , Strat , Scholo , Brd , took HOURS to clear and had rewarding loot for everyone , Bgs could last for days , you knew a good player from a baddie at a glance. to be honest , i do kinda miss it , but i love properly itemized gear .. I suppose it is a trade off .

Yet another:

It is wholly a myth that Vanilla was more hardcore than WotLK.

Vanilla was actually much more casual than any expansion since. To get by in the game, it was not necessary to have an in-depth understanding of, nor even any interest in, game mechanics, itemization, or weird and intrusive design elements like difficulty settings or LFD or stat weighting or the hit/crit/defense caps. There was not a feeding frenzy whenever new content was implemented. There was no rush to the top or to the end of the game.

WoW as a whole moved much more slowly in Vanilla. Gear never really became obsolete. Class balance changed very gradually. You could log off for a year of Vanilla and pick up where you left off.

The outdoor environment was more significant than instances, to a dramatic extent players who did not play then cannot comprehend. Content in general seemed to meander, and was sprawling, rather than linear, or having what I call “Disneyland syndrome”, where you travel between discrete, surreal vignettes – Borean Tundra and Grizzly Hills are acute examples of this.

Most importantly – and I think this will be the most common sentiment in the thread – Vanilla was more of an adventure. It was about discovery, interacting with a diverse playerbase, finding interesting things like the sharks off the coast of Silverpine or Purgation Isle or the countless rare spawns or weird quest chains.

Some will say this was merely because it was “new”, and I don’t buy that. Vanilla followed a very different design philosophy that emphasized the experience of the game over the game itself, that put heavy emphasis on the journey rather than the goal, that fundamentally treated instances as a diversion from the outdoor environment and the interface as something to be marginalized as much as possible, except to the extent desired by individual players.

Vanilla had many grave design flaws – most of them directly attributable to its being made in the long shadow of Everquest – but I think players and developers tend to overlook the many things that were done so right in Vanilla and have been neglected since.

Looking at the confusion damage another way: even halved it will do the same damage as equal stacks of burn with 1-2 skills used. Burn is the highest damage condition by far pound for pound and is balanced by the fact it scales in duration instead of intensity.

Getting into the numbers. All damages are base damages, confusion numbers are the new sPVP numbers. Burn does 325 base damage per stack per second. Bleed does 42.5 damage per stack per second. So 7-8 bleed stacks = 1 burn tick. Confusion does 65 damage per skill activation. So 5 stacks of confusion = 1 burn tick per skill activation. Poison does 84 damage per second but lowers healing by 33%.

Furthermore the condition scaling for each as is follows.
Burn = condition damage * 0.25.
Bleed = condition damage * 0.05
Confusion = condition damage * 0.075.
Poison = condition damage * 0.1

IE someone with 1000 condition damage would gain 250 damage per second on burn, 50 damage per second per stack on bleed, 75 damage per stack on confusion, and 100 damage per stack on poison. IE the new numbers would be Burn 575 per second, Bleed 92.5 per second per stack (6 stacks = 1 second burn), 140 damage per stack pet skill on confusion (4 stacks skill use = 1 second burn), and poison 184 damage per second.

Initially burn seems the clear winner in conditions, but you’ll noticed while other require stacks and have lower bases and scaling, they actually more than double their damage while burn gains less than 50%. Furthermore burn cannot stack more than that set amount per second and bleed and confusion can stack to 25.

So we can see that damage wise confusion in a clear winner assuming you can apply 4 – 5 stacks. Even more so if you consider that vs classes with instants or fast attacks confusion can activate more than once per second. But this assumes you can apply confusion in an aoe in just as effective of a fashion. But you can. Glamour mesmers can still apply around 4 stacks to multiple people, exceeding the 5 target AOE cap as well. This is on skills with other good usage as well as a traited blind.

But we have one last caveat, condition removal. People say so much about condition removal = lol confuse worthless. This is actually less true of confusion than it is of other conditions. Confusion faces condition removal and convert condition to boons skills. All other conditions face all of that PLUS a few class counters. List of known counters: Thief: Pain Response and Slowed Pulse, Ele: Stop Drop and Roll, Ranger: Oakheart Salve and Evasive Purity, Guardian: Inner Fire.

So if you look at the numbers, the counters, and the capabilities confusion is still superior to other conditions even post nerf. Confusion is also kinda nasty in the way it sneaks up on ya. Bleeding, burning, and poison put lots of numbers above your head and you quickly counter it if you have counters. It also typically takes several seconds to get alot of bleeding, poison, or burning on someone. If someone puts confusion on you though you typically take a couple skill activations before realizing it in a hectic fight. In doing that you’ve already done the full damage the other conditions would have done. They depend on constant reapplication, confusion does all it’s damage up front.

It was nerfed because it was needed. Confusion is still the best condition even after a 50% nerf lol.

So yes condition/glamor will still be viable considering you’re applying the equivalent of 6 stacks of bleed on a zerg while providing great support. This while bursting higher on single targets and small clusters of people and using your supportive weapon abilities.

Mesmer’s are actually one of the stronger professions and I’ve seen some of the nerfs coming for a long while now. Just like ele’s.

The important thing is not to focus on the amount of nerfs or buffs but instead on the capability you still have. While I wish mesmer’s had a bit more AOE power they have every other role down in a really strong way. Even confusion is still going to be very strong, it just won’t be brokenly strong anymore. Check here for my words on that:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Confusion-Nerf-Move-on-to-Power-for-WvW/first#post1916543

Edit: Moved numbers to a more relevant thread.

bubblyball.7591:

I really dont get this… they take away the only effective thing from mesmers? Ppl can say whatever they want but in wvw all mesmers can offer is the couple of tricks they have. Warriors and elementalists get tons of lookbags after killing a zerg. What do mesmers get…? If you dont like confusion, all you have to do is stop brainless button spamming, remove the condition or (oh wait) simply face the other way… it has a reson to exist. Nerfing it doesnt qualify as balancing classes.

While I certainly do believe that mesmers need more aOE options confusion will still be effective and mesmers are far from hurting in WvW. I do heavily agree with you that there are some select things they need to be able to do they currently cannot. On the other hand they will likely face the same style of toning down ele’s will be getting at some time or another as well.

Confuse was also arguably too strong in it’s own right as well. You could easily apply many stacks of confusion to people and even a single skill use does as much damage as the equivalent stacks of burn.

Also, keep in mind that condition removal makes nice counter play but leaves you vulnerable to the other conditions out there. The mesmers can counter-play as well by staggering their glamor bombs or baiting the conditional removal with only part of them.

And Kitten help you if they have competent necro backup. Epidemic + confusion mesmers is wicked evil broken stuff.

PS. Don’t bring the NPC’s into this. Since when does a mesmer have issues killing NPCS? I kill em just fine on my boon share mesmer and I’m built for survivability.

Kaaboose.3897:

Competition at the time. WoW may have been released years ago but it’s still the competition. Just the way Everquest was WoW’s competition when it was released. Seems like solid comparison to me.

Then later:

Well seeing as the bug comparision and polish was refering to release in the first place I don’t see why I should waste my time.

1. We’ve already been through this. WOW had alot of bugs and problems at release.

2. Make up your mind. Competition at the time or release state. Which is it? Because release state is not what Guild Wars 2 is in competition with, if it was you’d have been laughed out of here already. Things really have come a long way.

What I will do next time is be a bit more picky with my wording so it cannot be picked to death by every GW2 player you gets upset when somone compares the game to WoW.

That won’t work. Stick to one story and making accurate comparisons based on facts instead of nostalgia and information you do not even know yourself. Phrasing won’t fix either of those.

Instead of saying look to WoW for as an example I should say “Look at what WoW does right” next time I’ll say “Look at what WoW does/did right” and save myself the time replying to comments like these.

But you are not saying either of those. You are saying “look at what Guild Wars 2 did wrong, WOW didn’t have those issues, you should be like WOW.” But that is blatantly false. Seriously for cysts sake choose a story to stick to.

I did indeed dislike WOW. I’ll even go as far as to say I hated it. BUT, it did alot of things right. It also did alot of things wrong and got very lucky that it had the interest of a large franchise to start it.

IIRC the only other game that had a franchise before it that released was Final Fantasy XI and it wasn’t very accessible, yet still had quite alot of success. Kitten, at the time I was an MMORPG noob and I liked the game alot. At the time I thought it was a great game. Haha, I was silly. It was a terrible game with alot of good elements. Not even competitive for it’s time. Had I played WOW first it would have been pretty similar. Only in fairness WOW is a better game than Final Fantasy XI by a large margin.

I just want to be clear guys that WvW is far different from sPVP and confusion builds fare far better there. Both because of the increased numbers of people, and because of the plethora of choke points.

Confusion wasn’t nerfed in WvW because of what one mesmer could do. It was nerfed because of what a coordinated group of mesmers could do. 3 stacks of confusion hurt, 6 stacks kills, 10+ stacks eradicates. Glamor mesmers coordinating could easily put multiple stacks per mesmer on a large amount of people resulting in ridiculously easy zerg wipes.

My hope is that in time they roll the confusion damage back partway in return for making some of the tactics respect the 5 target limit. The problem with this is if they change the mechanic for some of these things they completely nerf many other skills in the game. So this is what needs to be done for the time being.

Oh, and confusion will still hurt. It just won’t be doing 2k+ damage per skill use on someone without multiple mesmers. Last note: I hope they buff the rest of ele’s ability to do condition damage. I really do.

I just want a playable and balanced pet class. That is an example of something not in the game yet. A true pet class not a hyrbid like the Ranger.

Kaaboose.3897:

Ralathar.7236:

Wait wait wait wait wait. You’re telling me that Guild Wars 2 must be compared against it’s current competitors. You named the competitor of choice. Then you tell me you are not even familiar with the current state of the very game you named?

You really don’t even know what you are arguing. I can’t pursue this point further because there is no point, you have invalidated it and have no ground to stand on.

Well, since I’m unquallified, would you be so kind as to list what these bugs are. Let’s get a direct comparision going. This would be an ideal moment for you to bring up some points to back up your claims, not shout “Ha you don’t know what your talking about! case closed!”

To be fair it’s not my job to make your case for you. When professing something as a fact the burden of proof is on you. Until you fulfill your burden further conversation is pointless as the entire comparison is based on ignorance.

You wanna make your point, YOU find the bug list and YOU do YOUR research instead of popping off without a clue as to the current state of your championed game. It’s our job to make sure you did your job right and find any issues with the things you call fact. That is the nature of making an assertion.

ThiBash.5634:

There was a video of a scepter user not too far back that used Hurl in combination with switching to Air to create a massive instant spike. Combined with the combo finishers bit, it gave me a new insight into the skill.

I can see that if you did what I just posted and combod it with double lightning strike (one from the passive), and Arcane Blast. But that is a rather niche situation and as an Air Scepter ele let me assure you that 95% of that damage was not hurl. Also both Arcane Blast and Hurl are rather easy to see coming on a 1 on 1 and should be dodged, avoided, blocked, or reflected by good players. Specifically since the combo field + rock armor practically screams “I’m going to use hurl within 5 seconds!!”.

Kind of like when someone used Ride the Lightning at me there is a 90% chance he is going to try and use updraft if he enters melee range.

haviz.1340:

Ice shard doesn’t give vulnerability unless you have 25 air minor trait or 25 arcana minor trait.

As for Hurl, it’s a 100% 5 combo finishers, sometime it finds its usage justified.

That’s why I said it can be useful for starting a battle. However mid battle the DPS loss from casting hurl mitigates whatever gains you achieve. Furthermore once activated they cannot be stopped, thus leaving you vulnerable to have your own flaming rocks reflected back into you.

Additionally most fields outside of the Asura racial are extremely short lived. by the time you cast say flame wall or ring of fire, switch attunements, and cast rock barrier you’ve exhausted half the fields life cycle. This means to gain the finishers you must start in earth, THEN cast rock barrier, THEN switch out, THEN lay down the field when you are in fire (within 30 seconds!!), THEN switch back and hurl.

Very cumbersome for a marginal gain.

So continuing to play with scepter I will give my thoughts on each skill.

Fire:

Flamestrike: Servicable but feels underwhelming. A slightly faster channel (1s) or a slightly longer base duration might make this feel a little better.

Dragon’s Tooth: This is a great skill for stationary targets. Hit’s hard in a small AOE and causes burning too. However the delay on it is a bit too great for more than easy PVE targets. It badly needs about a full second delay reduction even if it means a slight damage nerf. I hesitate to suggest ground targetting since this has it’s own “flavor”.

Pheonix: An overall fantastic skill that suffers the same problems as Dragon’s Tooth, but with a far longer recharge. Thie Phoenix needs to travel about 50% faster.

Ice:

Ice Shard: There is absolutely no reason to use this. It needs more damage, vulnerability, chill, or bleeding. Give it SOMETHING, because currently it’s just terrible. Maybe make it a 20% projectile finisher. That could help a bit considering it’s 3 projectiles each cast.

Shatterstone: Terrible skill. Decent damage, long vulnerability, terrible delay. This either needs a full second off of it’s delay or it needs to gain chill.

Water Trident: Underwhelming skill. It gives a small boost to healing and some mediocre damage. It needs more. Make it remove a condition or add regeneration IMO. That would make it a solid skill again.

Air:

Arc Lightning: I feel this is roughly where it should be on DPS after the multi-target update, but it just doesn’t feel fluid and good. The nerf to crit-based effects hit Arc-Lightning heavily and it really feels the internal timers. I’d say it could use a slightly faster channel to feel more fluid. 3 seconds instead of 3 1/2 would be a nice start. That’s not a big DPS increase but it’ll make it feel alot more satisfying.

Lightning Strike: Overall good skill. I like it and have no suggestions for it.

Blinding Flash: A decent skill being a blind on a low CD, but it feels like it could use a little more oomph. Give it a small radius, like 120 or 180.

Earth:

Stone Shards: A great skill overall my only complain is that it feels ssssooooo SLOW. I think this would feel better if you reduced the channel to 1 sec (down from 1 1/2) and reduced the damage and bleed damage by 33% to compensate. Also it needs like a 20% projectile speed increase.

Rock Barrier: Good skill in concept, bad skill in practice. The duration is too short and the DPS from Hurl is not good enough to warrant using except to preload a fight. To make this a more usable skill it needs to be instant or at the very least 1/2 second instead of a full second. Either that or double the duration to 60 seconds.

Dust Devil: Serviceable line blind. It’s decent but it could really use a slightly larger radius that it hits in. Also, where the heck is the whirl finisher on this? This is a whirl finisher if I ever saw one.

Overall Scepter isn’t bad, but it’s not quite up to par. Still I’d like to see it improved.

Edit: Added projectile finisher suggestion to Ice Shards,

I don’t like being a necromancer but this deserves it. My guild failed 2 Tier 3 Guild Bounties back to back recently due to this. In both cases we got everything else but we could not find more than a few barrels on the entire map.

Total time we spent looking for him was over an hour because we continued trying to find the barrel after both bounties had failed. We checked water, all manners of aggro infested caves, the entire perimeter of the map, had plenty of people scouring the rest of the map.

If you can put 15+ people looking for this barrel for over 30 minutes, have multiple people case the entire map, delve into all sorts of trouble and STILL not find the barrel then I SAY IT’S BROKEN. It’s certainly not in the same league as the other bounties in such a case.

IMO ANET should give guild merits to every guild that has failed a bounty mission because of Sottz. IE if that was the only bounty left and it was failed, toss them an e-mail and some merits.

I cannot explain the amount of frustration this bugged bounty target has caused people.

Bit hard to forget them if I haven’t even experianced them. I stoped playing WoW when GW2 came out, I never got MoP.

Wait wait wait wait wait. You’re telling me that Guild Wars 2 must be compared against it’s current competitors. You named the competitor of choice. Then you tell me you are not even familiar with the current state of the very game you named?

You really don’t even know what you are arguing. I can’t pursue this point further because there is no point, you have invalidated it and have no ground to stand on.

So you agree the game needs polish as well?

Every game still needs polish, forever. Because there is always room for improvement. Fact is polish is a relative term. You say polished or unpolished relative to the status quo or the competition. The difference in our views is not in the yea or nay of the issue but one of scope and scale.

You put polish as the number 1 biggest and most glaring issue of the game. But relative to it’s competitors it’s actually top tier in that respect. Simple as that.

Ralathar.7236:

The ability to roll so many specs and builds for each class and still be viable in dungeons is one. Unlikely to be fully comprehended by someone obsessed with a party member being “less useful”. One is based around fun and being viable, the other is based off of your own selfish interest and “efficiency”. Most gamers want fun. Only a select amount are looking for selfish efficiency.

Yes your selfish interest, because you are the on telling others how they should build and play in a blanket statement without regard to whether or not they were capable or not. Also, this strong of an opinion on “efficiency” and you expect us to believe it stops at magic find? That’s highly unlikely.

However if somone decides they want to run MF it’s not to suit a certin playstyle, it’s to satisfy their lust for gold.

That’s a play style of it’s own as well. Some people like damage, some like tanking, some like support. They build that way and play that way. Some people as well like farming and economy.

I’ll state this again since you ignore it every time I post* “MF encourages players to work against other players rather then with them.”*

That’s not really true, people use magic find for a variety of reasons. To fund their guilds, buy their real gear, help friends, etc. Maybe that “good player” you just ran a dungeon with got his good gear via magic find gear. In fact it could be argued that people wearing beserker gear are the real selfish one’s as they expect everyone else to pull the weight when they inevitably go down due to no mitigation and no defensive utility skills.

It’s all in perspective isn’t it? When you view something negatively you will ultimately see exactly what you think you will.

Mentalhead.5721:

I also have to say that world bosses are too easy. I just did Fire Elemental and about 20 of us killed it with no problem. I just had to stand in one place and use my ranged attack, there’s really no challenge. If there are tons of people going after a world boss, give that boss a bit more toughness, some knockbacks, AoE attacks, summon minions (champion[s]). Make those bosses really challenging and make them scale to the number of players.

Fire Elemental used to be one of the toughest boss fights in the game to survive. People complained and they nerfed it. People evidently don’t feel the same way. I personally found it a nice challenge but I’m a bit of a masochist.

I agree there needs to be a bit more parity in elite skills so that some are not overwhelmingly chosen over others, however I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel here. Some select buffs/nerfs would be just fine.

I heavily disagree on rotations. A good player does alot more than stick to a rotation unless you are only looking for max DPS and are not facing a challenge. In which case builds, specs, and skills are really only flavoring.

For instance on my Ele I have an AOE DPS rotation worked out with variables and additions/subtractions based on critter type and situation. However rarely do I actually run the rotation, I’m always adjusting to the needs of the group and myself.

It’s difficult to explain alot of the concepts of the solidarity of the game base because they require a certain amount of perspective to appreciate.

For example: The ability to roll so many specs and builds for each class and still be viable in dungeons is one. Unlikely to be fully comprehended by someone obsessed with a party member being “less useful”. One is based around fun and being viable, the other is based off of your own selfish interest and “efficiency”. Most gamers want fun. Only a select amount are looking for selfish efficiency.

Yes your selfish interest, because you are the on telling others how they should build and play in a blanket statement without regard to whether or not they were capable or not. Also, this strong of an opinion on “efficiency” and you expect us to believe it stops at magic find? That’s highly unlikely.

Competition at the time. WoW may have been released years ago but it’s still the competition. Just the way Everquest was WoW’s competition when it was released. Seems like solid comparison to me.

So now you ARE directly comparing it with a 10 year old game in regards to polish. This is of course not a fair comparison and is very biased. You also seem to have forgotten the large amount of bugs that were introduced in the newest expansion, Mists of Pandaria.

I’m glad to hear GW2 is doing much better in terms of inital realese then most other attempts though Runiir disagrees with you on the SWTOR launch.

WoW has the worst launch in MMO history, I was an in house tester for the various stages of development…the game’s launch was atrocious. TOR however had the cleanest and smoothest launch for any MMO to date…that game went into decline due to the linear progression however.

I beta tested that game because I was soooooo excited for it. Game failed because it had wonderful story, but meh combat mechanics and lackluster dungeons. Dungeon stories were fun though, just not the content.

It definitely had it’s share of bugs. From broken abilities, to glaring imbalances between the identical classes on both sides (all favoring Sith ironically), to bugged equipment causing terribly visible graphical glitches, to the amusing tiny NPC’s in story dialog. Plenty more.

It was a relatively smooth launch and was not terrible. But it definitely had a large spread of mostly minor issues with a few much bigger issues.

Grackleflint here sums up why it’s Number 1 with this awesome analogy.

Grackleflint.4956:

I support the views in this video. There are issues across the board with GW2 from bad UI design to bosses. Stop worrying about the living world content and fix what you have. It’s like hanging Christmas lights on a house that’s got holes in the roof, walls and floor.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132611/the_art_of_game_polish_developers_.php

That is a fair overview of polish. What Grackleflint describes is either serious hyperbole or not polish at all. A better analogy would be taking a home and renovating it + repainting it before hanging Christmas lights on it. The home itself is quite sound, not a broken down hovel as is described.

Guild Wars 2 as a game is an extremely solid foundation. It performs well and functions well and as you mentioned they are constantly optimizing it careful step by careful step. It’s just not fast enough for you. TOUGH. That’s software development. You have unrealistic expectations on how fast things can get done right.

I have 10+ years of MMORPG experience and I’m actually headed towards that field right now as a career. I’ve been studying each game I play seriously for a long time now as well as just being a player. This is likely the most solid release I have seen or heard of, has incredible class versatility built in and mostly balanced, and has a large amount of room for expansion for the future. There are alot of extremely complex things here done astoundingly well and I’ve been impressed.

There are things I desire still, or still don’t feel are perfect. But realistically speaking the game is already a breathtaking accomplishment. I shall see if they can continue their general excellence from here. Hopefully they do.

Kaaboose.3897:

You can bring up all the flaws in WoW’s release you can find but the simple fact is that it was LESS flawed then all of it’s competition at the time. It had flaws, yes, Some bad ones, but they were overshadowed by the the games design and the fact that the competition had much worse on offer.
There were VERY few incomplete and bugged quests, and for the competition this was the norm. The game ran well on a variety of systems, and was playable on even the most terrible of connections (Back when WoW was released the best connection this country had to offer to your average joe was 56k Dial-up!)
There are some many people in this thread and others stating “You can’t compare GW2 to WoW beacuse it’s a new game! WoW has had years to get it right!” when all you are trying to do is compare it to the competition.
Then when you try and compare how WoW was on release (I did state ON RELEASE in that video) we get people saying “You can’t say WoW was a polished product on release it was far less polished then it is now!”
What I see is players going out of their way to pick flaws in WoW to defend GW2. I’ll state this once again:
“I find GW2 a superior product to WoW in spite of it’s flaws”
I bring up GW2’s lack of polish and optimization becuase compared to it’s competition it is sub par. It’s just the world GW2 was released in. If GW2 had been released back when WoW first was (Theoreticly! Obviously with system requirements relevant to the time) then there’s no way I’d have made an arguement like this.
I’m not syaing I expected GW2 to be perfect on release but I’m certinlly not going to say it’s fine as it is.
This was “The Top 10 Things GW2 Needs To Improve” not “The Top 10 Things GW2 Should Have Done Before Release” and as it stands Polish And Optimization need improvement as compared to the competition they are lacking.
When WoW was released compared to it’s competition it was NOT lacking. That is why it was used as an example. We did follow up this example with a non-mmo (The Witcher for thoese of you that havn’t watched) as well since it’s a much better example. If you guys can think of a better MMO example then WoW then please feel free to suggest it.

By your own words the two games are not comparable, you can only compare to the competition being released at the time. Thus you yourself should have never even brought up WOW in regards to polish. It’s not a proper comparison even by your own logic.

I played Rift, I played SWTOR, I played WAR, I played STO, I played AOC, I played LOTRO, I played FFXIV.

You’ve already admitted Guild Wars 2 is a better polished game than WOW was at release. Guild Wars 2 is also hands down more polished than it’s competition at release. I can attest to that personally. This is the first game in a long time where I felt like I was playing a 2nd year MMORPG while it was still in beta. Every single one of the games I listed had far worse issues than this game.

I am sorry, but you are quite simply wrong. You have good points in your video, but you do the entire video an injustice by stubbornly and wrongly sticking to a single salient point out of sheer pride and bias. Let the rest of your vid stand on it’s own merits, it’s quite capable of it. Concede that polish is actually not an issue. Stop destroying the credibility of the rest of your stuff with stubbornness.

GummiBear.2756:

Ralathar.7236:

I think they should add Condition + Toughness + Vitality gear to the game. I find it ironic that Soldier gear exists for the power oriented user, yet condition users, who require longer to kill their foes, do not have the same survivability options.

Please add this gear Anet.

tbh if you are a full condition spec you dont need THAT much longer to kill stuff if you stack your conditions properly. However a condition based user’s dps don’t drop to 0 if they begin to play more defensively, whereas power/crit builds do, so you can by the nature of how conditions work easier play more defensively already

While this is true we also do not gain the benefits of %damage increasers, critical hits/crit damage, or vulnerability. This also does not touch stacking caps, condition removal (even into boons!) or other things power damage users do not have to worry about.

In a closed and very specific example against high toughness low vit opponents conditions can even take people down faster, but on the whole conditions need longer. So I don’t see why we do not have this gear as an option.

Also to give us a beserker’s equivalent, condition damage/precision/condition duration would be nice.

This isn’t the only type of gear missing, it’s just one of the biggest omissions.

Kaaboose.3897:

MF is not the same as other stats as it offers NOTHING to the group. You choose healing, you’re offering the group extra healing, or yourself, which can still be seen as saoking more dmg. I hear this “It’s their choice as to how they play” defence constantly but everyone of you ignores the glaringly obvious flaw with this argument:
You could play a healer spec in regualr or MF gear. You could play a tank spec in regualr or MF gear. You could play a DPS in regular or MF gear. Doesn’t matter what type of character you are playing it will be statisicly better in egular gear over MF gear.
I’ll state this AGAIN: MF gear offers NOTHING to team play. Not a kitten thing. Players only bring it to benifit themselves and that’s exactly the type of play I thought GW2 was trying to avoid.
I’ll also say this again: If MF was a group wide buff then I would have NO problem with it as it would be offering something to the rest of the group.

But the problem isn’t that it brings nothing. The problem you have is that the character wearing it brings less to the table by wearing it. If the gear merely had extra MF on it in addition to other stats you’d have no issue with it. Thus it is precisely equivalent to any other choice a player could make that brings less to the table than the optimum. Say, healing where damage would be more useful, less than the proper DPS spec, etc.

I’d hardly call WoW my beloved game. I don’t even play it anymore. Comparing it to pet rocks gave me the biggest laugh I’d had in a while. I’d love to see pet rocks hold somones interest for 6+ years. I also don’t get why you’re so set on claiming WoW is not a quality product. If I specificed BC-WOW would that make you feel better?

I call it your beloved game because you quite obviously hold it on a pedestal. It’s plain from the way you speak of it. It’s exactly the same way I once spoke of Dark Age of Camelot.

1st off the game did not hold that many people for that long. It replaced alot of the original players with new players and gold farmers. Alot of the original players were scared off and tip toed back in with every new expansion only to leave burnt once more. Alot of players didn’t even join until Burning Crusade or later.

2nd it is a polished product that was easily polished because it was built off of old tech. This it the design equivalent of a “layup”. Quite simply WOW wasn’t pushing any boundaries technologically so it’s far easier for them to “polish” what the previous generation of games already polished. I mean for crying out loud the graphics engine was based off of the graphics engine of Warcraft III. At that time WC III was already a 3 year old game with admittedly only modest graphics. All of it’s competition endeavored to raise the graphical bar, and successfully did so, but with new engines comes new bugs.

3rd if all the people who played WOW first had started on another MMORPG first they would not have thought it was so great. It was a really plague for the 1st 5 years of the game for WOW players to tell every other MMORPG that “they did it first”. Ya know, like the world map without load screens that was raved about that had already been done. WOW did it first syndrome got really really really bad and really the game didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done on a gameplay level.

I think they should add Condition + Toughness + Vitality gear to the game. I find it ironic that Soldier gear exists for the power oriented user, yet condition users, who require longer to kill their foes, do not have the same survivability options.

Please add this gear Anet.

Kaaboose.3897:

uknortherner.2670:

Zeanix.8624:

i smell a fanboy it’s a fact that blizzard makes high quality games, why do you think 9mio players play an 8 years old game ?

Fanboy=strawman.

No, it’s your opinion that Blizzard makes high quality games. I disagree. I think their games are woefully grindy generic cash cows capitalising on the games that came before them, like Everquest and MUDs.

I have to agree that on the whole blizzard does make good quality games. The d3 fiasco was a kitten mess but it’s not like it’s the norm for them like, let’s say, the simcity BS from EA.
And Unfortunattly WoW is a very polished product. It does have 10 years on GW2 so keep that in mind, but it doesn’t mean it’s something GW2 shouldn’t strive to achive as well.

Ask a Vanilla Warrior how polished of a game it is after he rebuilds his character from scratch for the 50th time lol. WOW has it’s failings as well. It had it’s failings on launch, and has continued to have failings.

Was it popular? Yes. Was it really a much greater production quality than the games around it? No. I played around and I played MMORPG’s before WOW as well. Mechanically WOW seems like a solid game because it forces you into a very specific and simple structure.

The mechanics and gameplay are actually more simple than the games around it. Though you had to know your builds because lets face it, unlike alot of other games alot of builds were worthless in dungeons. Even the good builds were worthless without good gear.

By comparison the combat in City of Hero’s, Dark Age of Camelot, and EverQuest II were more robust and complex. Final Fantasy Online and City of Hero’s also had hands down deeper team mechanics. In fact in Final Fantasy Online teams were required past a certain level and learning skill chains was a big thing. Star Wars Galaxies was a world unto itself.

Blizzard made a masterful Diablo I and II. A decent Warcraft I and II and a great Warcraft III. They made the beautifully designed Starcraft. While the Warcraft and Starcraft design and lore were stolen from the Warhammer universe their gameplay was well honed and balance + execution brilliant.

WOW simply does not fall into that category. Really, truly, it was average. An average that became very successful just like pet rocks once did. It was built on old stable architecture that ran on very old systems and was built around rehashing a minimum of content. So yes, with their piles of cash they were able to polish it. Then as soon as they got money look what happened….everything past Burning Crusade, which is largely viewed by the original WOW populace as where the game started going wrong.

You love your game, I get that. We all have our games we love. Please stop bringing your biased opinions into the fray as logical arguments however. Whether you realize it or not you cater heavily towards your beloved game, and you shouldn’t.

Kaaboose.3897:

Kaimick.5109:

Wall Of Text

Kaimick, the problem with MF is that is ONLY benifits the player running it. You can say how player skill is more important than gear, and I certinly agree with you on this, but a skiled player running normal gear IS (statisiticly) going to benifit his team more then a skilled player in regular gear.
And comparing MF to non-zerker gear is not a good comaparison. A player running Apocracerys might be doing less dmg, but they’ll be offering more healing.
Same could be said for a player running soildeirs. Less dmg, but capable of taking more hits. (Which if he died, might be hits directed at you)
However a player running MF is offering nothing else to his group in place of the stats lost.
I stand my stance that players running MF are being selfish by putting their needs above the group.

The problem with this style of thinking is the inherent elitism involved. You are breaking things down to a statistical level claiming someone is slowing the group down because they could be better statistically.

However this is not an argument you can pick and choose on. If it is true of magic find gear, so too is it true of any other gear or class combo’s that would be “sub-optimal”. So my healing engie would be a no go. As would my tanky ranger. Heck ranger itself would likely completely lose thanks to pet issues.

End of the day when you try to draw your own personal line in the sand to avoid that you leave all the logic you had behind. You are left with only your personal preference. That is equal to anyone else’s personal preference. This is a non-elitist game where the vast majority of the people here just like running the content for fun. You need to face the facts you are in the minority on this one and that it is just an opinion.

Kaaboose.3897:

Well there you go, You learn something new every day. However my point still stands. WoW currently has more polish then GW2 and it’s current optimitaion is still something GW2 should be striving towards.
I never played TOR as the publishes didn’t even bother releasing the game locally in this country. So I waited a bit to see how it panned out, though I remember seeing some odd bugs in some of the reviews, though come to think of it none of them were anything serious.
Also, and correct me if I’m wrong on this, but wasn’t Everquest the number 1 MMO before WoW came along? What MMO’s on WoW’s realease had more polish then WoW?
The only other game close to an MMO I played then was NWN (Fan made MMO’s. My god the RP ones like Narfell were glorious)

On release WOW didn’t have much competition in the MMORPG market. If WOW was to have released in todays market it would have likely completely bombed. There were ALOT more bugs and major gameplay changes that happened since release than people with rose colored glasses like to remember.

A small, but very much incomplete list of some things I noted on the video: “The loot bug? The completely flooded servers after a massively flooded beta? Originally there was no viable way to increase spell damage. Unfinished zones. A completely empty zone IIRC. Weapon Normalization didn’t exist. Druids couldn’t talk to NPC’s in feral forms. There wasn’t a repair all button, yes you had to repair each piece of gear individually, and NPC’s wouldn’t buy gear that was damaged. Plenty more.”

That list gives examples of a spread of problems from small to large and there is definitely more where that came from. I won’t say it was a train wreck release like Conan or Vanguard, but it wasn’t good for sure.

Yamagawa.5941:

Wolf, liking it somewhat… gotta keep in mind we already have Elementalist, Necro, Ranger, Mesmer, Thief, Sylvari, Norn, and Charr summons (apologies to any I missed, not aiming to be complete). I’d favor not stepping on any of their summon styles, and most of the Elementalist summons can fit the bill of ‘manifested energy’.
I’m all for ethereal creatures, but formed from ‘essence of dead stuff’. Ritualists in GW1 focused mostly on spirits, weapon spells (Notionally non-stackable buffs to weapons, but many gave protection, adrenaline, etc) and ashes (Hold the ashes as bundle, replacing your weapon, to gain a benefit. Drop the ashes and a cruel or vengeful spirit might lash out at all nearby enemies! Or heal you, or give you energy…)

How about we go medium armor, pulling features from the Dervish and Rit – heavy on the melee combat with several good PBAoE weapon skills, with moderate single-target ranged attacks and some spirits for support. Grant them the ability to summon up to 2-4 spirits (one weapon or heal based) each chained to their spot to provide support while the dervish tanks – Drawback is the spirits will be chained in place, making any DoT AoE on them fatal… but give traits and spirits that do things when the spirit is killed/dies.

I figure the PBAoE would be a good compliment to Elemenetalists in WvW, that have the ranged AoE niche covered.

Mixing control of spirits with the dervish Scythe might call for a name of ‘Reaper’… Drop in utility skills that involve ashes that temporarily replace weapon skills (a-la engineer bundle-skills, but with short-use time limits and long recharges), would fit that well. Weapon Spells could be purely personal stuff, doing things like shattering boons/applying conditions on attack, providing temporary protections, etc.

//Yamagawa

I hate to say but what you describe is Ranger spirits. Though it’s fair that you may have never seen them as they currently are not very good and don’t get used much.