So we all do less damage. Maybe they could remove armour benefits and just gives us blank armour that only runes can be applied to. They could also remove trinkets and only give us amulets. They could then change amulet stats to be different from PvE/WvW. They could also remove runes of perplexity etc….
oh wait,..they’ve already done that….They have already diminshed damage output.
No, that’s not my idea. I apologize if I was unclear. My idea is to make hard-to-land, longer-CD skills do the bulk of a class’s damage, while spammable/passive skills supplement that damage and provide other forms of utility. Everyone’s overall damage on paper could still be the same, or even higher. What will affect your damage the most is your skill in timing and landing your hard-hitting attacks.
I don’t know why you think I’m asking for everyone’s stats to be lowered. I’d appreciate if you can point out where you got that impression from, so that I can clarify my post.
Your idea that auto does ‘jab’ damage..well good luck to mace guardian/warrior where their mace primary three do auto-block-stun/ward…as you can see, the auto is the only sustained damage to that weapon. It is easy to say I’ll down grade my scepter which attacks at range in a channeled fashion as long as you down grade your melee weapon that doesn’t channel and requires you to be in constant melee range to connect. The day maces do ranged damaged in a channeled fashion, then that would be a more balanced idea. As long as blocks, evades, glancing blows exists, melee weapons auto should be able to connect for worth while damage.
I totally agree melee should do more damage than ranged, because it places you at greater risk. And melee burst should do more damage than ranged burst for the same reason. My point is just that, even for melee classes, the bulk of its damage should come from longer-CD burst attacks and not from simply spamming low-CD skills and autoattacks. This would mean retuning those weapons so that their auto is not the only source of meaningful damage.
And in all cases, autoattack damage is still going to be meaningful. But I don’t think it should comprise the bulk of your damage. If two evenly matched players fight, you should expect the player who makes fewer mistakes and lands more of his bursts to win, not the player who’s “1” skill happens to do more damage.
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I agree on all 4 points.
Maybe #1 would be partially addressed by showing more info on players from birds view? For example showing health/endurance bars near the characters and maybe also showing skill activations and/or cooldowns somehow.
Regarding #2 there are also many skills that are important in battles that aren’t elite skills like interrupts, slows and blinds. These also needs to be easy to see to be able to understand the battles.
Yeah I think these are pretty good ideas.
One other idea I just had would be to make the bird’s eye view similar to an MMOB interface. The shoutcaster can click on a player and it’ll show the player’s UI bar on the bottom (i.e. his skills, hp, and endurance) but WITHOUT moving the camera to the player’s view. In other words, it’s like selecting a unit in an RTS game. The camera stays the same, but you get to pull up all the information on that unit. That way, you can still see exactly what skills the player has available to him and what his status is at that time, but it let’s shoutcasters follow different players w/o creating that jarring effect of constantly changing camera views.
so you want insta burst from air/arcanes to be the benchmark for all professions ?
No thanks.
It sounds like you don’t know the ele class well enough to comment on it. Judging from all of your other posts, it sounds like you really only know the game from the perspective of a glass thief. That said, I still appreciate you sharing any views you have on the broader picture of tying high-damage attacks to riskier, longer-CD skills.
Now, to answer your view on fresh air eles:
The burst from a fresh air ele comes from them using all of their skills combined. Without fresh air procs, channeling air 1 and spamming air2 off CD does less DPS than lightning whip. With perfect fresh air procs, channelling air 1 and getting off the double static discharges still does less damage than an S/D thief’s autoattack chain. When a fresh air ele bursts you down, it’s because he comboed his air burst with either a fire burst or an earthquake + lightning flash.
Just swapping in and out of air while channeling air1 does mediocre damage and puts the full glass cannon ele at huge risk of getting instagibbed. First of all, it puts his other attunemnts on a full 10s CD, which is huge since he needs earth to survive any damage and water to heal. Second, to maximize his proc chance he has to keep channeling air1 after the attunement swap. If he dodges or casts any other spells after swapping out of air, he breaks the air1 channel and to reliably proc a crit he’ll either have to use water autoattack or earth autoattack (both of which rank amongst the worst autoattack skills in the game). In other words, if you think you’re dying purely to air burst, then you either failed to notice that he also firebursted you, or you’re a full glass thief who stayed in combat too long and didn’t pressure the ele (which is the counter to fresh air builds).
That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing air instaburst changed, but it’s not as big a problem as some people claim. Right now, all it really does is supplement the ele’s passive damage to be on par with other classes. If you actually do the math, fresh air just brings a glass ele’s passive damage to be about on par with most other classes’ zerker-build autoattack damage. The airburst only seems problematic because, after you eat a full earth+fire burst, the airburst + double arcanes will usually be enough to finish you off. If you dodge the first part (which is telegraphed and on a long CD), you avoid ~70% of the damage.
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So the basic argument you’re making is that autoattacks and skills with short cooldowns should generally do less damage and players should be forced to make more intelligent use of their longer cooldowns to achieve high damage.
I see the merit in this argument but it also concerns me that this would move the game in a direction of greater burst and could significantly devalue more defensive builds. After all, if the key to staying alive is seeing your enemy’s telegraphed burst combo and avoiding it outright, what’s the value of defensive stats like toughness or healing power? Could this potentially lead to a situation where everyone wears berserker gear and just goes for all-in alpha strike builds?
I think you make a great point, which is that toughness/healing power become less important if burst is largely avoidable. But I think you would still want toughness/healing power in teamfights to survive focused autoattacks from more than one person (i.e. anytime you get focused by the enemy team).
Furthermore, even outide of teamfights, toughness/healing power will help you in two ways. First and most obvious, having more toughness/hp gives you more room for error — no one plays perfectly, and sometime you get surprise bursted from someone who wasn’t in your field of view. Second, having more toughness/hp also gives you more flexibility in landing your burst. For example, imagine you are at half HP and the warrior you’re fighting is at 20% hp. You see that the warrior is about to eviscerate you. If you have high enough toughness to survive the eviscerate, you can land your burst while the warrior is doing the eviscerate leap. You’ll eat the eviscerate but live, while the warrior will die. On the other hand, if you specced full glass, you would have to dodge the eviscerate and then burst, but at that point the warrior might also be able to avoid your burst. Similarly, some burst skills (such as churning earth) have a long channeling time during which you’re vulnerable. Having high toughness increases your ability to land those skills.
I guess the TLDR is that toughness/hp would still be an important stat for bunkers who fend off multiple players, and it would also give players more flexibility in 1v1s about when to time their attacks.
The RtL nerf really was a mistake that should be reverted. When RtL was nerfed, people hadn’t realized that warrior/thief/melee-ranger were just as mobile because those classes weren’t yet popular in tPvP.
Right, I don’t want this thread to get into a discussion about some classes being OP or UP or whatever. There’s plenty of those threads already. I’m talking about tuning the way some classes deal damage, so that the damages comes more from longer CD burst attacks rather than spammable passive ones. This would require buffing some parts of warriors/necros/thieves/whatever, but it would also require nerfing other parts of those classes.
I don’t think this change would require any sort of drastic, technical overhaul. Simply adjusting damage numbers + cooldowns on a lot of skills would go a long way towards making the game less spammy.
The discussion in this thread has caused me to think that the overall power level of the Ele (specifically S/D) is where all the other classes should be brought to.
The reason for this is that the S/D ele’s damage revolves around two key principles:
(1) The S/D ele has low spammable damage. Air1 combined with lightning bolt spam (from Air2 and air-attune) does meaningful damage, but it is not enough to kill someone in any reasonable amount of time.
(2) The S/D ele has powerful burst combos that are telegraphed, risky, and have long cooldowns. Yes, hurl -> earthquake -> lightning flash -> air burst + arcane burst -> updraft -> fire rotation hurts. A lot. But all the initiation skills (earthquake, lightning flash, updraft) have 40+ second cooldowns. The burst skills are telegraphed and leave room for the opponent to stunbreak/bubble. And the burst requires the S/D ele to leave his comfort zone and get right on top of the enemy.
The net result is that you generally don’t expect the S/D ele to win a fight unless he nails his burst combo. In other words, the ele can’t win through spamming low-risk “passive” damage. This means there is room for the opponent to counterplay (by avoiding the ele’s burst), and creates an interesting back-and-forth dynamic in fights. Positioning, timing, and endurance-management become more meaningful.
The problem with the current powerhouse trinity (war/necro/thief), along with many of the other popular builds (spirit ranger, phanta mesmer for duels), is that they function along the complete opposite lines. When you watch these classes fight, you expect them to win even if they never land their burst. Sure, a necro can completely destroy someone with a perfectly executed fear chain, but he can still down someone quickly just by rotating through his low-CD condi skills. And a CC warrior’s F1 skills are on such a low CD that they’re essentially spammable. (Compare warrior’s earthshaker at 8s CD, to ele’s earthquake at 40s CD). Heck, the S/D thief doesn’t even have bursts, he wholly relies on a steady stream of high-damage autoattacks. Duel-specced phanta mesmers don’t burst, either. They summon phantasms and run around to obstruct LOS. Etc. The problem with fighting all of these classes is that they leave little room for counterplay. Dodging either has no meaningful impact (ex: you dodge an S/D thief’s larcenous strike, he autoattacks you just as hard), or it buys you a negligible amount of breathing room (dodge one skullcrack, eat another).
I think combat would be a lot more interesting if these other classes were adjusted (this means buffed and nerfed) to follow the ele’s model of “low passive damage, high burst damage.” For example, warrior F1 skills could be buffed but their CDs increased. So landing an F1 skill would have a major impact on the battle, but it would be riskier to execute due to the CD. Phantasms could have their attack cooldowns refreshed whenever the mesmer interrupts a target, but their base attack cooldowns would be increased to diminish their passive power. Etc. Adjusting these classes this way would open up more room for counterplay and, ultimately, create more room for team-based strategies, too.
Otherwise, if we stick with the current model, we end up seeing very little room for counterplay. Dodging/bubbling/blocking does almost nothing against an S/D thief. You’ll avoid some of his autoattacks, but then he’ll just keep on swinging. What’s the point of playing a high-risk, high-reward build, when you can play a low-risk, high-reward one? There really doesn’t seem to be any — as evidenced by the fact that many of the top teams’ players have swapped to these low-risk, high-reward builds.
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Don’t get me wrong — I LOVE the new bloodlust mechanic — it let’s players who are more skilled in 1v1 and small-group skirmishes shine, and it gives guilds something to do besides PvDooring.
But every minute or so, everyone on the server seems to get afflicted by massive lag spikes. This seems to happen whenever the bloodlust buff swaps. Has A.net said anything about this problem?
And, if the problem is caused by the server having to recalculate everyone’s stats, would it be wise to get rid of the stat buff? The +1 point per stomp thing is already pretty huge. My server (Blackgate) is currently down 200 PPT from the leading server, yet we’ve been CLIMBING AHEAD in overall points because we consistently hold about ~2 of the orbs and apparently keep stomping the other servers’ players. I don’t know if we need a stat buff on top of that to make the orbs worth holding — especially if the stat buff is what’s causing the lag.
edit: The rubberbanding lag appears to have been fixed, so this thread is kinda pointless now.
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Too much passive HIGH dmg is thrown around way too much, the game needs to not only slow down a bit, but needs more focus on bigger, easier to avoid, harder to land, and more obvious attacks. Think of 100 blades warriors, Dragon’s Tooth/Phoenix Ele’s, Kill Shot Warriors (although not totally obvious), etc.
Taking these 3 examples, notice how Greatsword Warriors, Rifle, and Sceptre Ele’s don’t have massive auto attack or passive dmg? Most of the dmg is baked into cooldown abilities that are harder to get off, or take longer to get off and actually need to be thought about when to use or combo’d into CC.
I think this is a great description of the problem with a meta based on high passive damage. I think the comment on scepter eles is especially accurate. You don’t expect a scepter ele to win unless he manages to land his burst, which requires good positioning, timing, and sometimes teamwork. And the risk involved in landing the burst is high, due to many of the initiating spells having a 40s+ CD. Without his burst, his autoattack damage, while meaningful, is not going to end a fight anytime soon (even as a glass cannon).
The same is not true of the classes that are popular in this current meta. An S/D thief has no “burst” to land. Instead, he consistently hits for 1k-2k damage with sword AA and larcenous strike while repeatedly dodging. And while CC warriors and necros do have “burst” combos, you can expect them to win even if they don’t attempt or land the burst combo. For example, a necro doesn’t need to get a full fear combo chain off to quickly down a player, and you can still expect a warrior to win a fight even if he whiffs his first 2-3 skullcracks.
Thanks for the constructive feedback! You make a lot of good points, though I am curious about one thing:
In #1 you’re saying that you can’t understand enough of the combat without being latched on to one specific player. Then, in #2, you say that epic skills should have epic animations. If we did #2, would that help with #1?
I see a couple problems with following players while shoutcasting; First, it puts the focus mostly on 1 entity in the fight, when there could easily be things happening around/behind that player that the casters might miss due to not being able to see them. Second, it is more difficult to control what’s happening with the camera. There isn’t much we can do about this as we can’t tell players to sit still so the camera doesn’t jerk around.
So, it makes me wonder if these two problems, maybe even #3 as well, would be alleviated with better skill tells and maybe less skill effects. Either way, I think we have a few options to help with the problems you feel happening in the shoutcasted matches.
Thanks for the response Allie, I appreciate that you took the time to consider these thoughts.
In answer to your question, I think there is definitely some overlap between #1 and #2. But even if we fine-tune the effects perfectly, I think #1 would still be a major issue (at least for me). The reason is because I feel a sense of drama when watching the game from the player’s perspective that I don’t get when watching it from a bird’s-eye view.
For example, imagine watching a teamfight from the guardian’s perspective — you see his cooldowns slowly being used up (and you can see exactly when he’s using them), you can count how many of his virtues he has left, how much endurance he has remaining, etc. You feel the tension rising as that last bubble gets cast, and now he’s down to just an evade. If he can hold out for 6 more seconds, his line of warding will be back up, which will buy him some more time, and you know 10 seconds later he’ll be able to cast shelter again. So these next few seconds are critical. When you see that nothing has happened (i.e. he didn’t die) — you breathe a sigh of relief (or a cry of frustration if you were rooting for the other team).
Now imagine watching the same thing from a bird’s eye perspective. Let’s also imagine that all the animations are now distinctive and clear. So we can still see the guardian slowly using up his cooldowns, but it’s harder to know which cooldowns he has left, and how much time remains until he can re-use some of his earlier skills. We don’t know how much endurance he has. So instead we see him casting some defensive spells, running around a bit, dodging, running around some more (this part is the critical 6-10 second window where he was extremely vulnerable), then casting some more defensive spells. I think the drama is missing here.
Also, there’s something to be said for not seeing everything that’s going on in the fight. Trying to show every player at once leads to a bit of information overload, at least for me. I think watching the teamfight fight through the perspective of a single player helps to filter out the less important information and let’s the viewer focus on what matters. If the teams are coordinated, then the player you’re viewing is probably focusing on the most important target. Through his perspective, you can identify who the key target is and realize that all the other enemy players are currently just obstacles. It filters out the noise. I realize a bird’s-eye view works for MOBA-type games, but I think GW2 is a lot more complex in the sense that each player is juggling way more abilities, and strategies often have less of a ramp-up time (e.g., in a MOBA, you can see the gank coming from a mile away).
Now, I guess the next issue would be figuring out which player to focus on. Different viewers obviously have different favorites. In the style of Solomon, my approach would be to have the shoutcaster use a different player’s perspective for each fight — but please don’t swap between perspectives mid-fight, that is jarring. Let us watch the entire fight unfold from one player’s perspective, and only swap to a different fight if it looks like this one isn’t going anywhere and there’s a more important fight happening elsewhere.
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1. This is basically what happens now, you are perfectly capable of viewing from the player’s perspective, while also getting other views when you want to watch the flow of combat instead of the individual play.
2. I think they actually need an overall toning down of animations. While this would include making some things look more flashy to match their effect, an overabundance is one of the biggest things that makes GW2 really hard to watch compared to LoL (where a single pro player can get bigger numbers than GW2 has ever seen). So yes I agree bump up certain big skills, but also bump down the less meaningful ones.
3. 1000000000% agree. Conquest is really easy to understand and follow; the points go up, when it hits 500 you win. However it also feels really slow, there aren’t many clutch moments that make viewers have amazing reactions. There need to be more of those big mechanics.
4. An interesting idea overall. I’m not sure I agree or disagree but I think it could work.
Thanks for the feedback! For the most part, I agree with what you’re saying. Except for #1 — I think maybe I wasn’t clear about what I was asking for. I know I can currently join a game that’s in progress and watch from a player’s perspective, but I don’t think I can, for example, go back and watch the PAX finals from Xeph’s point of view. Instead, at least as far as I know, I have to watch the streamers shoutcast it. In that case, I’m locked to whatever they’re viewing, which 99% of the time is the Bird’s Eye view. (Sometimes they randomly jump between the players, spending like 10 seconds on each player, which isn’t all that helpful to me). If I’m wrong, please let me know.
With respect to #2, I think we’re mostly in agreement here. I want the overall graphical effects to be toned down, but I want the more epic skills be relatively flashier. Shatterstone (the most worthless skill in the game) should not be a flashy, animated ball of ice that slowly builds up and explodes all over the place for 500dmg, while skullcrack looks like an autoattack.
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I was one of the ~5,000 people who watched PAX, and one of the ~2,000 people who watched the ESL Finals. I’ve found that I really enjoy watching streams from individual players (like Phantaram, or Ostrich Eggs, or Helseth, or whoever), yet I find shoutcasted tournament games to be a dull, confusing mess. Here are some suggestions for making tournament games more interesting to watch:
1. Change the way GW2 tournaments are shoutcasted so that each viewer can choose to watch the match from a specific player’s perspective. Or, at the very least, have shoutcasters stick to one player’s perspective during any given fight (they can swap perspectives after the fight, so we eventually get to see everyone’s POV over the course of a match).
Almost all the drama and action in GW2 is at the personal player level. Watching the ele blind the warrior’s earthshaker (okay I made this up, none of the top teams run ele). Or watching a warrior use earthshaker on the thief, and then seeing that the thief has no endurance or init and thinking, “THAT’S GONNA LAND!” I can’t really see or appreciate most of these plays when I’m watching from the bird’s eye view.
Instead, from the bird’s eye view, I see a handful of players running inside the point waving shivs at each other (that’s what Asura-sized weapons look like). The whole time, green, purple, and orange AOE effects are raining down on the point. And outside the point I see a few people running around waving their hands in the air doing some rain dance while being chased around by a scantily-dressed thief.
2. Give epic skills epic animations.
The skills that really turn the tide of a battle should have a big visual OOMPH to them, while skills that are relatively meaningless should be less flashy. I’m not talking about telegraphing all epic skills — the animation can come before or after the skill’s effect has taken place. And some telegraphed skills still have non-flashy animations (like churning earth). Making the animations on game-changing skills more visually striking will draw the viewers’ attention to the most important parts of the battle.
Skullcrack, final thrust, phoenix, fire grab, combustion shot, reaper’s mark etc. are all heavy-hitting gamechangers that have relatively light animations. While phoenix and fire grab do have some shine to them, they’re less shiny than many other ele skills. On the other hand, skills like earthshaker, meteor shower, the guardian’s bubbles, etc. look and feel kitten (except meteor shower, which only looks kitten).
3. Increase emphasis on clutch plays
Watching two players autoattack each other and spam low-cooldown skills until one of them drops from attrition isn’t interesting. Attrition fights in general aren’t interesting. What is interesting is watching someone successfully pull off a risky maneuver that has a big impact on the battle. Landing Pudge’s hook in Dota is a good example of this. But most of these clutch plays seem to be missing in high-level GW2 tournaments. It’s not that they aren’t available, but it seems like the top teams have discovered the optimal low-risk, high-reward builds that simply don’t leave room for clutch plays.
The solution I’d like to see is having each weapon set have ~2-3 spammable low-key attack skills, maybe 1 non-spammable defensive skill, and ~1-2 high-CD risky but powerful moves (with flashy animations). A lot of weapon sets already kind of conform to this (especially the ele’s weapon sets), except for the animations part (dust devil has a bigger visual effect than earthquake, even though earthquake is way more powerful). Other weapon sets or classes should be re-evaluated (maybe make warrior bursts more powerful but have a higher CD).
4. More interesting capture point layouts
First, capture points should not be the size of a traited necro mark. Whenever I watch a fight on one of these points, it looks like everyone is vomiting rainbows everywhere. The capture-point fight that look the most appealing to me is on Graveyard in Foefire. There, the AOEs are spread out, and that leaves room for more clever positioning.
Second, I would like to see capture points that just aren’t a flat wide circle. For example, having a capture point spread out over several narrow planks (like the rafters of a tall building). Player movement and positioning becomes a lot more important here, since falling means you’re no longer on the point. And the planks would be spread out enough so that people on top could avoid AOEs.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts/suggestions on the issue. And I’d appreciate anyone else’s constructive thoughts on this.
edit: fixed viewership numbers on ESL tourney.
edit 2: changed suggestion #1 a bit based on feedback
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Easy to stop the perma-stealthing if you know how it’s done. Just stand next to the black powder field (not in it or you get blinded). The thief stacks stealth by heartseeking through the black powder field over and over and over. If you’re anywhere near the black powder field, the heartseeker will hit you and the thief will get a 3s revealed debuff.
Stealth overall is OP, but this specific problem is a l2p issue.
I mean, c’mon people just try it out.
But you haven’t even tried it out yourself… Whereas many of us have.
Learn to play one and you’ll realize how easy it is to down them after they pop obs flesh and arcane shield (just run away or stealth when they pop it, they have 0 mobility).
The targeting updates and other quality-of-life improvements are AMAZING.
The balance changes, especially with respect to the ele, seem very underwhelming. Here are my patch-specific thoughts. While there are, of course, many other problems facing eles (just like with every other class), I’ll focus on two that this patch specifically touches upon.
1) Increasing ele’s support potential will not increase its viability in tPvP. The problem with Ele’s in tPvP was never with their lack of support options. The problem was staying alive long enough to provide that support. Ele’s right now need to build very selfishly to survive against thieves and CC warriors in higher-end tPvP. This leaves little room for them to take support skills, and eles that take these support skills will become even bigger targets for the enemy team.
The survivability problem comes down to this: Due to the healing and mobility nerfs, Ele has no defense to being trained by thieves and CC-warriors, and is quickly focused down by any competent team. This was why Phantaram and Mogwow (two of the top eles, playing for two of the top teams) chose to play a different class in the PAX tournament. You talked about how shaving some of the other classes down might help this, but the patch notes don’t indicate any relevant shaving (except making larcenous strike steal one boon instead of two, which isn’t going to help much in terms of damage).
Suggestions:
- Increase ele mobility by reverting the RtL’s CD nerf, but keep the distance reduction. A 1.2k distance leap on a 20s cooldown will give the ele some breathing room to recover from bursts, without letting the ele constantly reset fights. Other, far tankier classes can disengage much better than the ele currently can (warriors, thieves, mesmers, rangers, certain engineer builds). The ones that can’t (guardian and necro) have other survivability mechanics. Increasing ele mobility will give ele more breathing room to recover from a heavy burst and time for his team to react to the ele being bursted.
- Increase base healing on ele’s healing skills, but reduce how well healing scales w/ healing power. This increases the survivability of DPS/hybrid ele builds without overpowering ele bunker builds. Right now, it often isn’t worth it for a DPS ele to cast his water-skill heals because the damage he takes while casting those skills outpaces the health he’d get back.
2) Conjures need to be a lot better than your default weapon skills, otherwise there is no point in taking them. Consider what you are giving up for a conjure: a utility slot, access to all your main weapon skills, and the ~1s cast time involved in summoning the conjure. Unless the benefits of having this conjure outweigh the cost, there is no reason to slot it. In certain PvE situations, there are benefits to summoning conjures (frost bow for destroying large structures, lightning hammer for blind spam vs. dumb AI, greatsword for high DPS when a mob is against a wall). But these situations rarely if ever arise in pvp.
Part of the problem goes back to survivability. Most viable pvp builds are either built around taking multiple defensive utilities to survive, or taking arcane blast+wave to try and instagib your opponent before dying. Simply put, you’re giving up a LOT to slot a conjured weapon, and the conjured weapon needs to be powerful enough to warrant the loss.
Suggestions:
- I think there are two ways to go about making conjures worthwhile (you can ofc mix and match). The first is to make conjures serve specific utility roles: the ele summons the conjure, activates one or two abilities, and then drops it. For this to work, I really think the cast time of conjures needs to become instant, or at least much much quicker. Otherwise, the utility simply isn’t worth the time cost. Furthermore, the cooldown on the conjure needs to be much lower. It seems like the current cooldowns for conjured weapons are based on the assumption that you use all of the summoned weapon’s charges, then pick up the other weapon, and then use all of that weapon’s charges. If you use the conjured for only a few utility skills before dropping it, then you wind up paying a much higher cooldown cost.
- The second way to go about this it to make it so that the conjure temporarily buffs the ele’s combat potential across the board (damage and survivability/mobility). Broadly speaking, the conjure would be similar to signet of rage or a ranger spirit — you’re stronger when you’re using it than when you’re not, but you can only use it for a short duration and it has a long CD. For this to work, the conjured weapon skills need to do a lot more damage, have lower cooldown times, and some of their skills need to be reworked to provide more survivability.
With a 5 man AoE cap I fail to see how it’s a zerg counter. Anyone running in a small man knows AOE is great and all but half the people in the AOE range aren’t even getting touched.
AOE is a zerg counter even with a 5-man cap because hitting 5 people is still more damage than hitting 2-3 people (which is what would realistically happen if large groups split up). The 5-man cap makes it so that AOE doesn’t completely obliterate zergs. In other words, AOE is a soft counter to zerging. I’m fine with that.
The difference is the zerg ball has a lot of players who don’t pay attention and thus get punished for it where our 5 man notices the giant symbols flying all over the place and adjusts to it.
Right, which is why retal benefits zergs more than small groups. The zerg doesn’t have to pay attention, yet you have to stop attacking to avoid the retal procs. And if the zerg has enough blast finishers, it can maintain retal permanently. If the amount of retal damage you took was capped, you could instead use AOEs to punish players for not paying attention.
Most of the complaining I see here is in the form of zerging. Anything the zerg ball hates and encourages them so split up/play smarter I am all for.
I run guard in our 5 man and see no problem with retal. Against larger numbers it’s a great way to tick down the larger groups health while still focus firing single targets. Occasionally yeah we get screwed when a huge group has it stacked, usually it’s our own fault for not disengaging and trying a new approach.
For those engi’s complaining I have to giggle. You’re upset because there’s a counter to you sitting in the back lineand dropping LOL damage with zero risk…you poor things! Our engi does just fine staying alive so it seems its a l2p issue.
If you nerf retal even more just delete guard entirely. With our lack of mobility and ranged dmg options we already are at a significant disadvantage in a lot of situations, nerfing retal even more would be overkill.
TLDR: Please don’t make the game any easier for the carebear crowd.
You got it backwards. Retal benefits large mindless zergs because it hurts their natural counter, which is AOE. This is not a L2P issue for anyone — getting better as an ele or engy or whatever won’t make a difference. The whole point of AOE is to discourage players from clumping together, and the tradeoff to AOE is that it generally does less damage than single-target attacks. The 5-man AOE limit already gives zerg balls a lot of passive protection against AOEs. Adding retal on top of that makes the zerg balls even more powerful.
Solution: The amount of ticks the attacker takes from retal should be capped, so you only get hit by retal a max of 5 times per second. The cap is per-person, so if you have retaliation on yourself and 20 people attack you, you can theoretically deal out 100 retal ticks per second. In other words, if the attacker cast an AOE into a retal zerg, he’ll take about 1.5k damage per second. That’s fair. Being a mesmer and casting feedback in front of a zerg and instantly dying is not.
Right now, the only real counter to a retal zergball is to run your own retal zergball. The skill then boils down to which zerg is more coordinated and mobile. This is a pretty simple and obvious fact, and one that’s been demonstrated consistently by the T1 WvW guilds. This isn’t a L2P issue. It’s a “get your own zerg” issue.
My problem with glass ele is that i can’ t find a suitable role during ranked games. I am too slow to roam and too squishy to stay into a fight, i find myself hiding somewhere most of the time and getting the occasional 1hko combo on other frail targets.
What do you think should a glass cannon ele do during a team fight ?
My experience isn’t too far off. I try to defensively roam between home point and mid fight, helping wherever the fight is. My goal is to join a fight that’s already in progress, burst down whoever seems to be low and out of evades/blocks/etc, apply pressure on downed enemies, and then leave.
This works best on maps where home and mid point are nearby — such as Foefire, Temple, and to some extent Kylo (w/ lightning flash). Mobility isn’t as big an issue on those maps, and you can get some good Z-axis angles for bursting people down.
One thing I’ve found helpful, that may seem counter-intuitive, is that when an enemy is gunning for you, sometimes you’re better off charging into the middle of the team fight than trying to run away. S/F has super low mobility so your odds of escape are pretty low. On the flip side, running into the fray and popping obsidian flesh might cause your erstwhile attacker to go down to all the AOE spam. At the very least, it’ll make it easier for your team to revive you.
I’d be happy if WvW players could get WvW-only ascended gear via WvW. This gear would be usable only in WvW, obviously, but it’d be obtainable via badges. Seems like a win/win/win for everyone involved.
WvWers win because they can fight on a more even playing field. PvErs win because they’ll already have ascended gear so they don’t need to waste badges (and their ascended gear will be better). A.net wins because ppl will need to buy more bank/bag space for the extra gear, and more transmutation stones if they want to customize their WvW look.
2 things
A. Thieves are not the best argument against this build.. Running double arcane shield, invuln from the focus, and the ability to one shot a thief makes it hold its own vs such a strat, provided the players are at equal skill levels. D/P is more of a problem though there’s still ways of dealing with it.
B. 10 in arcane seems fairly mandatory.. Am I right?
A. Yeah, I’ll down the thief the first or second time because he’s overconfident and overextends. But after that, the thief knows to open up w/ backstab then he shadowsteps out and ports back in a few seconds later (again stealthed). In a duel-situation, I think the ele fares pretty well against both S/D and D/P thieves. But realistically, when I’m in a group fight, it’s pretty easy for a thief to pop out of stealth for a quick backstab, then shadowstep out or withdraw + dodge away (thus avoiding the one-shot). At that point, I can either run away (thus being forced out of the fight), or stay (and die ~10 seconds later to the next backstab). Moreover, just the knowledge that there’s a thief around will often force me to hold back on my burst skills because I want to be ready to nail the thief as soon as he appears. This means I’m not contributing as much to my team.
B. I don’t know if 10 in arcana is mandatory, but the benefits of taking at least 10 in arcana seem to outweigh the costs in almost every situation I can think of. I’m open to suggestions, though, if the OP would like to elaborate.
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Sorry Warriors are more a problem them spirit rangers were, when it takes 3 players to drop a bunker warrior below 90% health there is a problem.
It’s crazy hyperbole like this that makes A.net’s job more difficult. 3 players will absolutely wreck a warrior. Even two DPS classes can reliably overcome a warrior’s ~500-600HP/s regen if they coordinate their spikes.
GC ele plays like a ranged thief without stealth and mobility. If you can pop into a fight unnoticed, you can end it VERY quickly by chaining all your skills. But if the enemy knows to train you, you are almost guaranteed to die. Running a zerker amulet, you will die in one backstab + autoattack chain. If you pop shield, the thief can just stealth again then backstab you again later, which will kill you even if you pop your heals. If you pop lightning flash, the thief can inf. sig or steal to follow you and finish you off. So the only way to survive against thieves is to have great map awareness so that you never get caught off guard by the thief. Easier said than done, but certainly possible (if your team is good at communicating).
The TLDR is that I think GC ele is a decent, defensive support roamer and a terrible carry class. If your team is already competent at holding their own, you can swoop into fights to quickly down a player or two, then quickly swoop out (or get downed yourself but your team still comes out ahead). If your team is not competent at holding their own, then you will accomplish very little because you lack the sustain to remain in a fight.
Mesmers imo do the best against a CC warrior. With staff, you can avoid every single 100b followup to a stun, because the cooldown on Staff2 is close to the cooldown on skullcrack. On top of that, phantasms put out steady damage that outpaces the warrior’s regen, and the phantasms do their work even while I’m running around kiting. I’d go so far as to say that, on my mesmer, I’m pretty comfortable just walking up to a warrior on a node and expecting to force him off.
I’ve found fresh air ele to be a pretty poor counter to CC warriors in a 1v1 (if the warrior is running a valk amulet, which he should). The TLDR is that the ele’s sustained damage isn’t high enough to overcome healing signet + adrenal health and, at the same time, the ele has limited survivability tools. My experience with this matchup is that, for the ele to win, he needs to land more than his full burst rotation. Hurl + earthquake, air attune bolt, lightning bolt, updraft, dragon’s tooth, ring of fire, phoenix, fire grab, back to air, arcane blast and/or wave will take the warrior down to 25%-33% hp. IF he lands it all, which requires that the warrior fail to dodge/EP/shield-stance/interrupt/etc. This rarely happens in my experience. The only times I’ve landed this full combo on a competent warrior are when the warrior gets up after updraft and tries to unload on me for a quick kill instead of dodging, but I pop arcane shield and continue bursting. The problem is that, even after landing this full combo, the warrior often regens most of his health back before I can finish him off w/ air auto and double-lightning-bolts. After 20 seconds (the time it takes for phoenix to recharge), the warrior will have passively regened almost 10k hp. After 40 seconds (the time it takes for ele’s CCs to recharge), the warrior is back to full health.
This is with me playing a zerker fresh air ele vs. mace/shield + GS warrs. I’ve tried the same matchup with an S/F zerker ele, and the results are even worse (b/c you have even fewer high-damage skills). I don’t have as much of a problem vs hammer/LB warriors (if there’s room to kite) because (1) those warriors tend to run zerkers so they’re squishier; and (2) the hammer’s long animation times makes the warrior more vulnerable to burst.
This last month and a half have been very confusing to me. The majority of PvP players agree that the condition meta isn’t fun and needs to go asap.
I’m going to be weird and say the current meta is not a condition meta anymore, after the nerf of spirit ranger. It is a cc-meta. Think of every popular build: terror necro and stunlock warrior especially. Yeah, dhuumfire is good, but that’s just what gives necros the damage to 1v1 a bunker over a period of time—something we all wanted to happen anyway. Torment is negligible. The thing that makes a good necro nearly unbeatable is terror. Warrior regen is good, but not a ton better than guardian or engineer. It’s cc that makes stunlock warrior either the first- or second- most popular build, not sure which.
To a lesser extent, fresh air ele, condition engi, S/D thief, and most ranger builds rely heavily on cc. We keep saying “condition meta” but I don’t think that even reflects reality any more. Sure, conditions in general are better than zerker amulet builds in general right now, but that’s about as far as the “condition meta” goes.
I agree — CC seems to me to be the meta right now, at least in solo-queue. But I don’t think the other classes you described are really CC-heavy.
Fresh air ele is definitely not a CC-heavy class, though; nor does it really rely on CC. Fresh air ele instead relies on repeatedly spamming instacast 2k hits via static discharge & lightning bolt, and then bursting w/ more instacast skills via arcane wave+blast. The CC potential is pretty mediocre — earthquake is on a 40s CD and updraft is on a 40s CD.
S/D thieves have a 1s immobilize and bas venom, but they mostly rely on having high, steady autoattack damage and a ton of evades. They don’t need CC to land their nukes because they don’t really have any “nukes.”
Rangers have a few interrupts that they ideally save to stop heals. They don’t really rely on CC to land any big bursts, at least as far as I’ve seen.
Engineers can be built to be CC heavy, so I’ll give you that one. But even then, CC engineers don’t need the CC to land condi bursts, they use it to neutralize points.
I think the video gives a good explanation around the 4m mark. And I’m sure A.net is aware of this basic concept, and the difficulty maybe is in implementing it well.
For those too lazy to watch the video, at the 4m mark it talks about “foo” strategies — strategies that are easy to execute and cause you to win over other beginners. But there are other, more powerful strategies that require more skill to execute well. The idea is that the developer should lay out an evenly-spaced crumb trail of higher risk, higher reward strategies. The new player starts with the foo strategy first, then realizes there’s a better (but more difficult) strategy he can do, and starts doing that. Then he realizes there’s an even better, but even more difficult strategy, and he starts doing that.
We don’t have this in GW2. Many of the “foo” builds in GW2 are NOT outclassed by higher risk, more difficult builds. For example, a phantasm mesmer will dominate an interrupt mesmer 9 times out of 10, even though the interrupt mesmer is way harder to play.
In other words, the current availability of low-risk, high-reward builds makes it so people have no incentive to improve. If you’re already achieving the max result with the current build, why change things up? For example, playing an interrupt mesmer is probably far riskier, takes more strategy, and takes better timing to pull off than a phantasm mesmer. But even if you play it perfectly, you’ll still do worse than a phantasm mesmer. So why bother?
Also, I want to clarify one thing. I don’t think playing an “easy” build means that you’re bad, or that you’re dumb, or that you have slow reflexes. I don’t even think “easy” builds are necessarily “braindead” to play. For example, I consider shatter mesmer to be mechanically easy, but I think it has a fair amount of strategic depth. Especially if you’re also taking portal. An “easy” build to me just means one where you can afford to make many more mistakes than your opponent and still win.
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Everything about this game is easy. It’s honestly one of the most simplistic games I’ve ever played. So when a build is easy, even in terms of this game, yet is one of if not the strongest available, obviously people aren’t going to like it.
“Easy” is a relative term.
People claim something is “Easy” when it is popular. S/D thief? Popular therefore it is easy. Shatter Mesmer? Popular therefore easy. Stun Warrior? Popular therefore easy.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive but as long as they’re getting killed by something you don’t quite understand how to counter, and it is being adopted by a majority of the populace, it is officially easy.
Or, sometimes, some things are popular because they are easy to play. And again, by “easy” I again mean low-risk, high-reward.
In an MMO, “Easy” vs. “Hard” isn’t about how many buttons you have to press to obtain a desired result. It’s about the risks you have to take when you play a certain build, and the rewards you get out of it. In other words, it is about how many tactical mistakes you can make in a fight compared to your enemy and still win. Theoretically speaking, if two players fight each other, and Player A makes 10 major mistakes while Player B only makes 2, you would expect Player B to win. The game feels unbalanced when Player A’s build allows him to win despite having made more mistakes.
The “simple” to play builds, phantasm, CC warrior, spirit ranger, engender a lot of hate because they allow you to beat another player even when outplayed. In the case of mesmers and rangers, the AI handles the damage attacks for you. Thus, there’s less room for error. For example, you don’t have to worry about your phantasm summon missing because your opponent dodged. (Yes, they can dodge the phantasm’s attacks, but a dodge won’t prevent the summon). Moreover, if you miss your main damage-attacks (because you were outplayed), it’s a short cooldown before you can attempt the burst again. Thus, any errors you do make don’t hurt you much. (Compare summoning a phantasm to landing a firegrab, and compare the cooldowns).
On the flip side, these easy classes tend to be more forgiving on the defensive side, too. If you fail to dodge a stun as a mesmer, you have plenty of blinks/stunbreaks. If you position yourself poorly, you have stealth. Many other classes, if specced glassy, will simply die in these situations.
Edit: I should add that the above example w/ mesmers holds true only in a power-centric meta. In the condi-meta, the traditional phantasm/shatter mesmer is pretty risky to play due to the lack of condi removals. Hence the lack of complaints about mesmers in the condi-meta.
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Warrior is the answer? Warrior is the meta.
Then why do we see so few in high level play? Most of the Warriors you see in SoloQ are new to the class and aren’t good at it yet/aren’t built right. As for hotjoin, nothing there matters.
Dude get it out of your head warrior is not hard to play…. I see so many warriors now in high tier tourneys that perform near my level (been playing warrior since the start). Your suggesting what is already in the meta… Although pretty much all classes in meta are not to hard to play. The reason people are complaining is because low tier players can compete with higher tier players because of cheese specs carrying them.
We’ve had this argument before, no class in this game is that hard to play. Every build tends to have some sort of gimmick behind it. Even Engis and Eles have very clear combos that you aim to pull off the only initial challenge is the sheer amount of skills and that doesn’t take long to get over. I still maintain that Warriors are heavily dependent on managing their utilities and long cooldown skills effectively, one misuse of a key skill and you’ll find yourself in a bad spot. This is especially true with the condition removal/mitigation skills. Other classes have this as well but with Warriors being melee with no access to stealth or some of the mechanics Guardian has makes it have bit of a learning curve.
What class/build would you claim requires a lot of skill to play? I used to think Engi nades was hard to use but after a while I found that it wasn’t that bad once you get used to the travel time, and in the end all your doing is pointing and clicking. This game isn’t Counter Strike or any other game considered to have a high skill ceiling. At the end of the game this is 2rd person MMO combat, it can be fun but it it’s more about teamwork than it is about the difficulty of playing your class.
Maybe “high skill” isn’t the right phrase for it, but the risk-to-reward ratio is certainly not even between builds. I think that is what people mean when they say that some builds are “hard” or “easy.”
In other words, a build seems “easier” to play when you can mess up a good amount and still beat your opponent, who made far fewer mistakes.
For example, if you want to play a burst ele (and put out about as much pressure as a valk CC warrior), you are so squishy that you will die in a few hits. With a zerker jewel, a backstab + autoattack chain from a thief will kill you. A s/d thief will kill you with a few autoattacks or larcenous strikes. A shatter mesmer’s GS phantasm will take you down below half health in pass. This makes the class risky, or skill-intensive, to play. You need to always be aware of your surroundings (including the possibility of stealthed mesmers/thieves) and think ahead. You also need to be very, very fast on hitting your lightning flash (or arcane shield if you run with that as well). If you mess up, you will almost certainly die.
If you play the current valk amulet + unsuspecting foe CC build, you can afford to make many more mistakes. A backstab from a thief will take off about 20%-25% of your health. While you should obviously still pay attention and react quickly, failing to do so won’t guarantee your death.
Conversely, missing an updraft/earhquake on an ele puts the skill on a 40s cooldown. Missing a gale (focus air5) on an ele puts the skill on a 50s cooldown. Missing a skullcrack on a warrior means you have to wait 8s to try again. This, combined with the survivability issues discussed above, means you can miss more skullcracks as a warrior than you can miss earthquakes/updrafts/gales as an ele.
The complaint about this meta is that these “low risk” (i.e. “easy to play”) builds seem to be more rewarding than the “high risk” (i.e. “hard to play”) builds. Necros, spirit rangers, and phantasm mesmers in particular come across as being particularly low risk, high reward. While current CC warriors may counter necros and spirit rangers, they only exacerbate the whole “low risk, high reward” problem that people have.
What I would personally prefer is to give warriors, rangers, necros, and mesmers high-risk builds that outperform their low-risk builds when played competently. This gives players something to strive for and incentive to improve.
Anyway, those are my 2 cents. Thanks for considering these thoughts.
The thing is you just explained how a class be in trouble or how to go in for the attack successfully. Necro for example if he wants me dead he has to push me to use my water attunement and see what heal I have, once he’s certain of my condition removing capabilities he should decide his last move. So while I can get away, if the Necro pays attention he can bleed me to death with no problem at all even if im running away and this would be the Necros strong point and one way to win. Now Necro vs Warrior, the necro goes into his final phase and bleeds the warrior, but the problem is that this build was designed for mobility and nothing else, but its too perfect if put in the right hands. Where as my ele had to be pushed to use my CC removal, what are you pushing the warrior towards? To use his mobility skills? If so then he will use his CC removal and then leap away and cast his immense swiftness and you won’t be able to catch him, and he can reset with very little punishment towards him, since you can only push him to flee.
A necro beats Ele when the ele overextends. At any time, the ele can choose to disengage. But the longer he stays in the fight, the lower his chances of successfully escaping.
The same holds true for a warrior, who is actually worse at cleansing DPS condis when running from a fight (since he can’t cleansing ire in that situation). If the warrior is at low enough health and he’s got bleed/burning/poison stacked up, he’ll die while running/WWing away.
The real difference here is that the warrior’s sustain during the fight is a lot higher b/c signet of healing is ridiculous. So the warrior has more room for error. But the difference in sustain isn’t due to the mobility skills, it’s due to signet of healing currently being way too strong. (To get that same level of healing out of signet of resto, an ele would have to constantly be casting 2 spells per second). Fixing the warrior’s sustain would make it riskier for the warrior to stay in the fight too long.
But again, I see no special reason why ele should be the best at running away to reset fights, especially since ele can put out so much instant burst damage w/ S/D. If A.net has to make one class better at running away, I don’t mind it being a melee warrior.
And to the person who says warriors aren’t viable in high-end tPvP, you’re way behind on the times. The top PAX tourney team ran a warrior, and many top tPvP players (Phantaram, Symbolic, Fuzion, etc.) consider warrior top-tier if not slightly OP in tpvp.
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As I said above, I don’t see running away from a battle really early as an issue, because you have all your skills ready anyways. And yes I have run from many battles when I was in trouble but that is because I paid attention and had something ready just in case that certain class followed up with what I expected. For example if im about to kill a thief but I know he’s either going to refuge or combo field to stealth then I will do something to either prevent that or kill him before he completes his getaway route. If a necro fails to bleed me down and just stands there not realizing that I’m about to drop dmg on him because he failed his attack then if he does not seek a way to regain his balance, then he will die. That being said even as an ele or most class/builds, I still have a weakness, and that is wrongly using a skill at the wrong time or to early. Lets say im about to RTL but I get immobilized, I am suddenly screwed for trying to escape without paying attention. So yes classes can escape but they can still be killed if they make a mistake. But the Warrior mobility is extremely forgiving even if they make a mistake. Trying to CC him did not work on my ele, or Guardian and trying to burn him down with pure damage wasn’t working either as Warriors already come with a high HP pool and a variety of CC removal and immune to damage and plenty of swiftness and range leap skills.
Right, warrior is better at escaping than ele/ranger. They can do it more easily and at less risk. I understand the points you’re making, and I think they’re valid. But this same unfairness exists between ele/ranger and engy/necro. It’s waaay easier and less risky for an ele/ranger to escape than it is for an engy/necro.
An engy has very little access to stunbreakers and pretty much has to save his smokebomb + rocketboots for the escape. Plus, there’s the setup time involved in waiting for the smokebomb to go off so the engy has to plan ahead. If he gets CCd during this time, he’s dead.
A necro either needs to juke you with spectral walk (assuming he hasn’t wasted it as a stunbreaker), or save all his fears so he can chain fear you and run in the opposite direction.
A mesmer needs to save his decoy (32s CD with the grandmaster minor trait), which means he can’t use it during the fight as a stunbreaker.
The difference in escapability (in terms of how risky it is, how easy it is to pull off, and how much you need to hold back during the fight to take advantage of it) between engy/necro to ele/ranger is about the same as it is from ele/ranger to warrior. And ofc thief is in a whole different realm of ezmode. In other words, the way you feel about warriors is probably how engies/necros/guardians/mesmers feel about you. And I’m sure warriors feel the same way about thieves. So unless you’re willing to even the playing field for all of these classes, I don’t think it’s really fair to complain that some classes are better at resetting a fight than the classes you play.
And to the nitty gritty details about warrior mobility: it’s not entirely risk-free for warriors, either. If they save their stability for escape, it means they don’t have it up during the fight, making them more susceptible to CC. (For example, if they stun you to line up a 100b, and you pop shocking aura, they have to decide whether to pop their stability to go through w/ the 100b, or save it to help them escape).
Again, I think you should just consider yourself the winner if you forced your opponent to flee. It’s what all the other classes have to do when you yourself flee from fights.
On the one hand, I agree with OP that it isn’t “fair” that warriors can always run away when they’re losing. It makes for very unsatisfying fights. It’s the same deal w/ thieves stealthing + running to reset a fight whenever they’re losing.
On the other hand, I feel like the OP’s complaint is a little hypocritical and disingenuous. Ele and ranger are also high mobility classes (even if they’re slower than warrior), and I have no doubt the OP also runs away to reset fights whenever he’s losing (as would anyone else). This will be a problem as long as you have classes with different overall movespeeds. The OP might not be able to catch a warrior on his ele/ranger, but if he’s losing to a mesmer/necro/engy, he can run away and reset without them being able to do much, either. It’s not especially risky to condi cleanse + rtl/blink away as ele, or spam swoop + sword2 as ranger, either.
At the end of the day, I think the best way to look at it is to assume you’ve won if you’re contesting an area and forced the other player to retreat. Chasing him back to his spawn isn’t too different from killing him and having him respawn, anyway.
Number of times warrior in video was crippled, chilled, or immobilized: 0
Why should you be able to catch someone when you bring 0 ways to catch them?
FYI: Most warriors run dogged march, and many use condi-reduction food + runes, so movement impairing skills last <1s even if the warrior doesn’t actively cleanse.
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^
You do realize that the current builds most Warriors use are actually weak to power builds even with the amount of toughness they have yes? Toughness only goes so far, the proper Mesmer, Ele, or Thief build trounces it because we don’t bring skills like Endure Pain. Almost all of the changes we were given were gear towards condition countering, Dogged March, Cleansing Ire, and Zerker Stance in no way help with power builds. Endure Pain got a CD reduction but like I said nobody uses that.Most decent warriors are smart enough to switch out Zerker Stance for Endure Pain before the match starts when they see that they’re up against a power-heavy team. The rest of the build can stay the same and the warrior will still be very strong vs. power classes.
In 12 seconds, healing sig alone passively heals for about as much as many class’s ACTIVE heals. This high level of healing, combined with high armor and access to either CC, blocks, damage immunity, or distance creators gives enough time for a warrior to passively regen back the damage he took from a burst — with no room for counterplay by the burster.
How many teams actually run all power or all condis though? If there’s one condi user and they focus you down and you decided to only take Endure Pain then you’re screwed because chances are Cleansing Ire alone would not be enough. If you take both skills then you’re sacrificing another skill as well, not to mention both have high cooldowns.
Are you talking about a team fight where you’re up against multiple power users and one condi user? In that case, I agree that the warrior will probably go down if focused, but I don’t think that makes warrior balanced. Moreover, it seems to me that the necro bomber is the first to get focused down in every teamfight anyway. He’s not gonna be able to put many condis on you if he’s getting CC-ed by you and trained hard by your teammates.
If you’re talking about 1v1 vs. a condi user, I think a warrior w/ endure pain is still in a good spot compared to just about every other class. You still have decent condi remove w/ cleansing ire and signet of stamina, and you have high pressure to keep the engy/necro from going balls deep on you.
I understand that A.net wants players to play all aspects of the game, and not just WvW. But the current reward structure is taking things way too far. I play on the Blackgate server, which historically has had a strong presence in all of the WvW maps. Now, I’m often playing with an outmanned buff, and there is almost never a queue for any of the maps – even during primetime.
It just doesn’t make sense that, in half the time it takes to cap SM, I can sit at a temple event autoattacking the boss and get over TEN TIMES the dragonite ore and rares/exotics on top of that. And I suspect a lot of other people feel that way, which is why they’ve all left WvW for the meta-event trains.
^^
Warriors will not suck in the power meta for at least two reasons:
1) Their high armor, which doesn’t help vs conditions, suddenly becomes very noticeable. This high armor comes from the fact that they can run valk and still maintain near zerker-level damage via unsuspecting foe. (Or they can run soldier for more tankiness while still maintaining high power). Zerker stance can be swapped out for endure pain vs. a power-heavy team.
2) Many high-damaged power builds tend to be squishier than condi-based builds, and they will die a lot more easily to the warrior’s power-based damage.
I think the biggest threat to warriors in the power meta will be mesmers, since Staff2’s CD is low enough to avoid the burst after each stun, and phantasms (even on a shatter build) put out enough passive pressure to overcome the healing signet’s passive regen. The warrior would still win out on mobility, though.
Last I checked, the ranger’s underwater downed #3 is bugged. You can’t interrupt the pet healing at all. Even killing the pet during the healing won’t stop it from happening. The only way to finish off a downed ranger underwater is to DPS him down before he can activate lick wounds.
^
You do realize that the current builds most Warriors use are actually weak to power builds even with the amount of toughness they have yes? Toughness only goes so far, the proper Mesmer, Ele, or Thief build trounces it because we don’t bring skills like Endure Pain. Almost all of the changes we were given were gear towards condition countering, Dogged March, Cleansing Ire, and Zerker Stance in no way help with power builds. Endure Pain got a CD reduction but like I said nobody uses that.
Most decent warriors are smart enough to switch out Zerker Stance for Endure Pain before the match starts when they see that they’re up against a power-heavy team. The rest of the build can stay the same and the warrior will still be very strong vs. power classes.
In 12 seconds, healing sig alone passively heals for about as much as many class’s ACTIVE heals. This high level of healing, combined with high armor and access to either CC, blocks, damage immunity, or distance creators gives enough time for a warrior to passively regen back the damage he took from a burst — with no room for counterplay by the burster.
Flipping paper keeps as we were yesterday is a lot faster than waiting for Temple runs to start.
Doesn’t matter. You only get the reward once per day per keep, no matter how many times you flip it.
Incorrect. Thanks to TC’s massive numbers and flipping our home BL multiple times I can tell you, this is not working as it says in the notes.
Thanks for the clarification. But my point still stands. If you can flip the same keep over and over to keep getting dragonite ore, then that’s a bug that A.net is sure to fix. Once they fix it, the underlying problem still remains that capturing Stonemist gives you 1/3 the ore you’d get from tagging Jormag and going afk (not to mention fewer rares as well).
Flipping paper keeps as we were yesterday is a lot faster than waiting for Temple runs to start.
Doesn’t matter. You only get the reward once per day per keep, no matter how many times you flip it.
And no one waits around for Temple runs to start. They farm other metas and champs, going through the whole Maw → Jormag → Teq → Shaman → Fire elemental → whatever cycle (the actual order may vary), and then pop into Orr when they hear that a temple event is starting.
I’m not asking for Temple runs to give less dragonite. I just think WvW caps (especially keeps) should similar amounts of dragonite. PvErs can still stick to their Temple runs and they’ll be just as well off. I’m not knocking the PvErs — if they enjoy what they do, more power to them. But there’s no reason why the same shouldn’t hold true of WvWers.
Can we normalize the rewards a bit here?
A keep takes way more effort to capture and often requires way more time, than doing an Orr temple. Also, if you don’t tag the Keep lord, you don’t even get any dragonite ore, even if you got a gold for participating in the cap (say, trying to kill all the enemy reinforcements trying to get in).
Keep in mind that you can only get dragonite from each particular keep once per day, so two servers CAN’T keep trading keeps for the dragonite.
A glass ele is just a thief who has traded his armor, stealth, and mobility for AOE CC and dmg. More risk (a lot more), more reward.
If you train a glass ele, he is going to die. This will be even more true if/when we return to a more power-oriented meta (zerker ele was actually better than valk ele vs. conditions due to zerk giving more HP and valk toughness not helping).
In other words, there is counterplay to the glass ele. He needs to constantly be hitting you to trigger fresh air. But he can’t do that if he’s getting attacked because he melts under pressure. You avoid his air-attune burst by pressuring him so he can’t benefit from fresh air as much.
I don’t pretend to speak for everybody, but I am extremely disappointed with the introduction of ascended weapons.
What drew me to Guild Wars 2, and what separates Guild Wars 2 from virtually ever other MMO, is that the game was more skill-based rather than gear-based. If you lose to someone in WvW, it’s probably because you got outplayed, and not because the other person had farmed up a better set of gear. In other words, you earn your win by developing your skills as a player, not by running dungeons over and over. As more and more ascended equipment gets added, this becomes less true.
If I was predominantly a PvEer, then I wouldn’t care all that much about the introduction of ascended gear. It isn’t necessary for any of the content (except high level fractals ’cause of agony resist). Hell, I 8-orbed Liadri on an alt using a combination of rares and exotics. But from a PvP standpoint, the introduction of ascended gear definitely shifts the game from being skill-based to being more grind-based. Moreover, this change makes it a lot harder to experiment with different builds and to play with alts.
I understand that some (maybe a lot of) PvEers want more progression because they’ve already farmed the crap out of this game. And maybe skin progression isn’t enough for them. But why not give them other PvE-focused bonuses — such as ways to develop and improve their home instance, adding in guild halls, or adding PvE-specific bonuses (such as infusions to increase damage to certain mob types)?
*Note: By PvP, I mean WvW. I also do tPvP, which has no gear grind at all. But tPvP in this game feels really incomplete due to the lack game modes, maps, and stat allocation choices, so I don’t find it very satisfactory to play all by itself.
(edited by ResJudicator.7916)
IMO, a glass zerker ele should have the highest DPS in the game. It has the least survivability of any other class. Unlike thief or mes, it has no capacity to evade damage via stealth. Highest risk should yield the highest reward.
A glass ele’s only survival skill is lightning flash cantrip (assuming you haven’t already used it to land your burst), high vigor uptime, and air3 (low-CD blind). Maybe mistform/arcaneshield, but taking one of those skills cuts your burst down. The water heals on a glass ele are so low that it often isn’t worth casting them in combat. In the time it takes to cast healing trident or cleansing wave, you’d take more damage from your opponent’s autoattacks than you’d get back in healing. This is because you have almost 0 toughness and close to 0 healing).
The amount of squishiness a glass ele has cannot be overstated. A glass d/p thief will kill you with one backstab and 2-3 autoattacks. A CC warrior will kill you in one rotation if your lightning flash is on cooldown. (Swapping to earth for protection will just put you at near death so you’ll die to the next autoattack). One GS/Pistol/Sword phantasm summon will take you to 33%-40% health. Your only defense is to actively outplay your opponent by timing the blind or the dodge. If you get hit, you are dead.
Moreover, if you “shave” glass cannon ele’s burst, you’ll be nerfing the non-damage eles even harder. The base damage on the ele’s instacast skills (lightning bolt, static discharge, arcane blast/wave) have relatively low damage coefficients. The arcane blast/wave skills don’t even scale with weapon damage. These skills might be instacast, but their actual damage is on par with many other classes’ autoattacks. The only reason the ele’s burst feels so high is because the ele has sacrified everything for the sake of damage. In other words, the glass ele’s burst is in line with other glass specs.
One change I would like — which would reduce glass ele’s dps — is to change arcane blast/wave. These utility skills are just a very boring, non-strategic source of damage. I would rather they did less damage but have more utility (such as making them apply a condition based on attunement, like with the grandmaster trait).
(edited by ResJudicator.7916)
You can’t say the dome doesn’t belong to someone then claim the other person has “priority”. wtf
Sure you can. Ownership != priority. Ownership gives you the right to exclude others, which is what some of the more selfish farmers want to do. They want to have a dome all to themselves so they can farm Deadeye 24/7. Priority isn’t based on ownership. Priority just means that the person who is legitimately trying to complete the Gauntlet gets to have his fair shot in the dome before you get to resume your farming. You still get to farm in the same dome, you just have to take turns.
In a game where gold buys you nothing but different skins, the shallow greed that drives some players in this game is really astounding. There’s nothing wrong with farming up some (or even a lot) of gold, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a total kitten to everyone else.
What you need to understand is that when you walk into the dome a farmer is using and go straight to failing Liadri, without asking if you can use his dome (There are five other domes, one of them will surely have people actually doing the gauntlet, and thus will res you), he’s not going to see you as a human being. He’s going to see you as a piece of filth that gets in his way, wastes his time and then wants him to res you, so you can waste more of his time.
It has nothing to do with community, it has to do with you being rude and getting in the way of someone who wants money, repeatedly, without even asking.
Flame me all you want, but the fact of the matter is that you’re the aggressors, the farmers JUST WANT TO FARM, so stay away from my dome.
As someone who also farms the Gauntlet, I have to completely disagree with everything you said. The dome is not yours. Priority should go to people who are still trying to complete the Gauntlet for their first time.
The real issue is that you don’t even get a title when you finally do get the achievement =X
I’d be willing to try this comp just for variety’s sake, if anyone else wants to run it this weekend. All the theorycrafting in the world isn’t going to tell us whether this build works or not, simply because theorycrafting (while helpful) often doesn’t take into account important factors like team synergy, mobility, and positioning. Theorycrafting is aptly named because it helps come up with theories, it doesn’t yield ultimate answers.
Out of curiosity, I’d be interested to see how this comp would play out using a necro in place of the ele. You lose out on the swiftness, but you get more CC via fears, more AOE dps, and the necro himself is a bit more survivable. Sometimes beating the meta involves only a partial deviation from it. If I’m overlooking something, feel free to let me know.
Once the condi meta gets balanced out, mesmers will easily be one of the most powerful classes again. Their weakness is to aoe condition spam.
And if you run a phantasm build w/ staff, you should at worst stalemate vs a CC warrior. Your blink is on the same CD as skullcrack and you can kite him and use clones to bodyblock (skullcrack doesn’t stun in an aoe) while your phantasms whittle him down.
Ele’s teamfight potential right now is weak due to the condi meta. The ele’s biggest contribution to teamfights is actually the high AOE protection uptime that ele gives to teammtes via Arcana5, and protection is largely worthless in the condi-heavy meta. (Also, spirit ranger does it better). Ele’s also relied on this protection to be less squishy. But if teams move away from condi spam, then ele might have a bigger place in teamfights again.
Outside of the teamfight context, ele seems to be in a good spot vs some builds and outmatched vs others. I guess that’s what balance is supposed to feel like. I think we’re closely matched in a 1v1 against most power-based builds, except CC warrs and phantasm mesmers. Most power-based builds right now are either CC warrs, phantasm mesmers, or thieves. As for condi builds, we lack the DPS and condi cleanse to take out the more popular condi-based builds without dying first, unless we completely outplay the opponent — and this holds true even if we take a lot of condi removal.
It would probably be OP to have one ele build shine at both teamfights and offensive roaming, but right now the ele doesn’t seem to shine in either situation.
For example, if I want to roam, I might as well just run a valk CC/100b warrior. The CC warrior is tankier due to doly sig, heal sig, cleansing ire, mace+shield blocks, and whirlwind/rush juking. The CC warr is also more mobile, because rush + whirlwind moves you farther than RtL and has less than 1/2 the cooldown. And the CC warrior puts out far more offensive pressure due to all the CC spam forcing your opponent to burn his dodges and stunbreakers. It only takes 1 unmitigated skullcrack-100B combo to win the fight, and you can try the combo every 7-8 seconds. Ele’s burst combos have 40+s CDs to do about the same damage. The ele’s passive damage may be higher, but this difference is made up for by the fact that the CC warr doesn’t have to stop to heal (yay healing signet).