Guild Wars 2

GankSinatra.2653:

Refugee.3092:

Has this profession been tested during beta? Compared to my engineer the gap in playability seems huge. A real shame.

Oh yes it has been tested. And it has probably gotten the biggest nerfs of all during the last beta weekends. I dont even wanna know what kind of damage and horribly OP kitten we did if we got nerfed before Haste/PW and Mesmers and guardians.

Actually during the first BWEs we’d do some good damage in total glass cannon, with one build and one weapon. Therefore they nerfed it silly, all across the board.

I found out that respeccing to warrior or ranger tends to give an awesome ability to farm mobs.

MaxChaos.3825:

Yes, thieves atm has the most burst and damage. Warriors falls only a bit below, but are much more tankier. Eles go third, but are much more versatile.

To get third, eles go with 12k health, playing a zero thoughness and vitality melee D/D spec? They are the joke of this game, don’t bother mention them. Whilst being melee, they are squishier than thief while bringing half of the raw, brutal effectiveness.

Well, the thing that hit me the most is the inability to control the pets. They go wherever, they are in super-aggressive mode (except when you REALLY want them to attack! Then they sit still and look at you silly!) and even in PvE it’s a chore not to aggro the whole region.

Said that, my other 80 character is an Elementalist, I suppose this is what makes me feel fairly powerful on my necro…

Here’s my Elementalist.

I did not mean to post the picture but after I actually got people cheering at the looks I decided to do it.

Ronin.8095:

So how much are your ANet & CCP salaries exactly? You obviously work for them.

Tell us when the BLTC is going to be back up instead of waxing lyrical about how they’re hemorrhaging money right now. (Yeah right!)

Or, stop wildly speculating. Conjecture just confuses people and leads to misinformation.

I wish I worked for ANet (not CCP, their wages are LOW), my previous job was computer programmer.

Welcome to a player based market.

Those who complain the TP is “imbalanced” or “fees are unfair” or “people are selling below cost” are welcome to try the real life financial markets (my RL job), where the same identical stuff happens every day.

Markets are based on human mutual relations (barter), just because they are implemented inside a game does not change the human beings being behind them.

raype.6179:

Ugh. It’s hard to play with my inventory full of stuff I want to sell.
Anyways is there a good reason for it being down for almost 24(?) hours besides “maintenance”?

There’s at least 1 obvious exploit being heavily hammered right now (no I won’t say which it is because it’s really BAD to do on a forum).
Games like GW2 or EvE Online rely on their economy not being devastated by those exploits because they immediately turn into massive gems / PLEX damage and that damage directly maps on real money damage for the company.
This is why they bring the TP down at the first sign of something suspicious going on, they really lose money if they don’t.

Nate.3927:

Zaron.1687:

These issues don’t seem to happen with other games. I beta tested and played SWTOR and never had the kind of problems i have had with this game. 6 years of development and this is what we get……

isn’t that more because nobody wanted to use it? since it was really really bad? SWTOR did not have this very specific problem true, but it had a lot of other problems unique to it.

Warhammer Online had their auction house daily crash for several months before they made it functional. It was 2 orders of magnitudes simpler to code than this one.

About minute 3:00, a downed guy of another class could bring your health down to half. Just saying how deadly we are, even in a high damage low survivability build like yours.

Drew.1865:

Earth atunement is where it’s at and I just keep switching atunements when using a staff.

This imo is where Eles need a review. Earth attunement shold NOT be “where it’s at”, it should be one of four free choices of risk / reward.

Instead, be earth or die seems the mantra for us. I really really wanted to go fire + air and have high risk for high reward but that just does not happen. Fire + air give some better numbers, but not noticeable enough to justify the vertical drop in survivability.

Otaur

I keep hoping that as I level and get better gear, I will become more powerful… It hasn’t happened. I actually seem to do less damage the higher I get fighting mobs my level. It is very discouraging… I think I may roll an alt just to try and like this game again.

On a side note, played Ele in Beta and they were awesome, so wtf happened between beta’s and launch, we got a major nerf bat?

No, actually once you will enter the Orr surrounding regions, YOUR difficulty rises by about 3 times and so does the time to kill stuff.
I found out that in order to feel Orr regions “as easy as” the previous level I had to gear up to rares, expecially the weapons.

If you want to farm like a pro I found out the best are ranger and necro, then mesmer and guardian.
Warrior is still insanely better but has survivability issues in some Orrian areas expecially when multiple mobs cripple or slow you.

Necro would be my favourite (less 2 buttons PvE class than ranger, it’s really boring for me) if not for the pets easily aggroing multiple adds and not having lots of survivability.
It’s still 3 times as more survivable and just better than farming the same mobs on an Ele.

You do get much less “oh kitten!” escape buttons, healing stance and so on, so when you go down, you go down harder. But hey, it’s much harder to go down to begin with, my necro repair bills are minuscule at best.

kublai

Come up with some original material please. This joke has been done to death in every game.

Because in every game, for some reason, the developers keep repeating the same game design gross mistakes about “rogues” and “warriors” again and again.

DoM

Every time I see a guardian that knows half of what there doing, I say to myself “Whens that nerf coming, or wheres my buff?”.

The most logic approach would be to tone down the 2 shot => dead classes, in order to finally create one MMO where all the classes need tactical, planned gameplay and where you lose because outplayed and not outclassed.

It’s going to be a rough ride though, because this would require a mass nerf on most classes and it’d be quite unpopular.

Roll a Necro and Ranger and level them up like I did.
Then come tell how you find your Ele 80 compared to them.

It’s very odd, yesterday I was timing my combo fields with my guildies just fine.

Thadren Calder.1397:

I can only imagine if the original ultima online was released now with the ability to loot player corpses, steal houses, and completely SCREW over other players how the community would react now after playing all the soft and fluffy MMO’s that the genre has turned into.

It’d be like playing EvE Online or Darkfall Online: 30-40k (yes 30 – 40 thousands) players who accept the freedom and the challenges that come with those games.

The remaining 14M are just not “enough” to play those games.

Rizzy.8293:

Yup its not the game for me, pity I bought it thinking I could enjoy the pve content and the pvp equally but thats not the case.

PVE is just boring tedious grind now with very little reward, PVP on the other hand, is fast pace, ever changing and dynamic.

I just wish they hadn’t lied about what the game was actually focused on.

How odd, GW2 is exactly how I expected for it to be.
But hey, GW1, EvE Online / DAoC / Warhammer players know how a game like GW2 is going to be.
It’s not ArenaNET fault if the other “conventional” MMOs are different and their players expect GW2 to be different.

libintia.7026:

Got to level 80 a few days ago and I am not sure what to do now ?!

This is an open ended game with strong emphasis on PvP.

I suppose you could… you know… PvP?

I’ve spent years on other PvP games, they did not even have several instances to visit or decent crafting. You PvPed and that’s it.

Goose

What happened to this game being for the people who don’t have time to play the game religiously?

This is one of the few games where gear does not matter, so why do you feel you had to grind?

It’s not like you being unable to get that plissed garb NAO is going to make you lose at PvP.
You can just gather the mats in 10 days instead of 1 or you can play 10 instances over 10 weeks instead of 1.

Vlaid

I think people are missing the point being that the pvp doesn’t have enough play diversity from moment to moment and between builds, not that the GW2 PVP is so impossiblly skill sensitive that everyone is having trouble (at least I’m not really).

It’s just the actual style and implementation of abilities and number of abilities available, and the impact of abilities to change the flow of a specific encounter doesn’t feel that great.

Actually, the point IS to not give “impact of abilities to change the flow…”. These are a misnomer for “I win abilities”. Those indeed impact the flow but make for a poor game.
I also played other MMOs and for some reason, most come with stupidly OP skills that make some classes “just stupid”.
The developers pretend that putting a long CD on those skills automagically make them fair, but putting 30 mins CD on a auto-win skill does not make it any less auto-win and unfair.

As such, I really prefer GW2 over other PvP MMOs, I actually hope they nerf the outstanding – clearly visible – few OP skills and make all of them more tactical.

People have to win because they outplayed, not because their CD was available or they had better gear.

Mayama.1854:

The burst of all classes, combined with haste is to strong right now.

Scepter and dagger Elementalist here. Am I included in the “burst of all classes”? Because my client seems to be missing the burst hotkey…

Maple

Guardian is the easiest class.
Thief is the easiest way to farm glory.
Mesmer has the best sustained presence.
Needs a nerf..?

Until this kind of thief gameplay is even possible, GW2 PvP will be even inferior to WoW’s.

DiogoSilva.7089:

When playing with an elementalist gives the idea that general pve is hard, and playing with all other professions gives the idea that general pve is easy, then the problem is with the class, not the player.

Also, I’m going to shock a few people here, but: Elementalist is not that hard to play. “Wow, did I just read what I did? This guy said that the Elementalist is not that hard to play.”

Oh, it is hard to master, but not more than a few other professions, where people have been getting excellent results for some time. Elementalists require kiting, timing and correct attunement switching. And memorizing its skills, which gets second nature after putting a few hours into it. The Mesmer also requires timing, kiting, and a great deal of illusion management and shatter decision-making, and even more so, the Mesmer is harder for a beginner to grasp than the Elementalist. And yet, its already gaining a lot of popularity over pvp’s meta, unlike our poor Ellie.

I have played a Mesmer for about a few hours, and I have leveled my Elementalist to 80. I get better results in pvp with Mesmer, and that’s not even comparable. I started playing pve with a Mesmer, and it is also difficult, and it also requires some degree of mastery, yet once you “get it”, it’s so much easier than with an Elementalist.

This idea that the means to master the Ellie are extremely obscure to us all, and that we are all noobs who haven’t found the dodge button yet, is a naive accusation.

The Elementalist is underpowered. Once it gets its deserved buff, most of us will be properly rewarded for our effort, just like good players from other hard-to-master professions are already getting the wins they deserve.

Here’s somebody else’s input about what happened when he switched from his Mesmer to his Ele:

Rerolling from Mesmer to Elementalist. WOW?

Ahahaha!
So true!

When are you going to post the warrior flavour?

I understand it’s more complicate because you have not two but THREE buttons to learn so the mastering curve might not be at everybody’s grasp anymore. But still…

Kalendraf.9521:

In fact, right now I think ele is the least fun class compared to the others.

I don’t agree, elementalist is very fun.

What it lacks is a poor ratio in the two important factors:

Risk : Reward
Effort : Reward.

Some classes have high risk but high reward (thief), others give fat reward for the involved effort (engineer), others give high reward for low-ish risk and effort.

Elementalist is unique in that it imposes an high risk (expecially sPvP / close range builds) for low-ish reward and also gives low-ish reward for the profuse effort.

I.e. on my elementalist I will feel “pro” for having survived 5 mobs taking 5 minutes to kill them, several times going close to death, using all the cooldowns, summons, attunements.
On my warrior or ranger? I just mowed thru them without second thought then went to help that other elementalist over there still struggling since 5 minutes and about to die.
The difference in risk : reward is brutal. It CAN be overcome with quasi-masochistic dedication but why that?
Ele should be very hard to learn but then it should shine, not “busily, barely outlive” every encounter / PvP opponent like it was the last epochal deed.

Janson Smalling

Yes, you can report that player as Scamming.

EvE Online player reporting here.

What about the “gray cases”?
Who is going to decide the exact point where a certain deal is a scam and a similar one is not?

Also, I am not sure how being able to C.O.D. mail is bad. Put a tax on COD maybe or only allow COD between “friends” or guildies.
Players vs players trading is a feature offered since text based games made in the past millenium.
Does GW2 being “new concept MMO” => we can’t get so incredibly basic features because the developers can’t find an innovative way to do it?

Wazabi

Given all these factor, it’s better to just rely in TP. You fail to provide sufficient justification to put in 2 system and obviously only considered that from a personal standpoint.

Simple example: guy X wants exotic / rare Orichalcum sword crafted.
Guy Y sends stuff and then guy X disappears / deletes characters / bounces stuff between multiple accounts of just puts it on the TP.
Once on the TP guy Z buys it and makes a nice bow.

What now? Guy Y really worked hard to farm the insane materials, really wanted to use his sword today.

Yet:

- He’ll have to open a ticket and wait for who knows how long.

- What about guy Z? Will ArenaNet confiscate his now soulbound bow and give it to X who wanted a sword?

Without a 1 vs 1 trading system I can see a lot of ramifications coming and not all nice playing for the player base.

Bunzy.8674:

Vaerah.4907:

Bunzy.8674:

If you can’t kill anything 1v1 stop using a staff, if you aren’t using a staff its because you aren’t good. PRACTICE

“If you rolled a mage, stop playing mage and play cookie cutter lol melee range squishie”.

an elementalist is not a mage… o.O

Yeah it’s a pink bunny.

Bunzy.8674:

If you can’t kill anything 1v1 stop using a staff, if you aren’t using a staff its because you aren’t good. PRACTICE

“If you rolled a mage, stop playing mage and play cookie cutter lol melee range squishie”.

Anyone who designed the “Against the Corruption” personal quest should be brain checked.

We don’t all play Rangers. Who plays Elementalist already has to spit gallons of bile to kill anything because in BWE2 sombebody decided that melee Ele critting for 3k was OP but warriors / thieves critting for 6k+ was fine.
But wait, in this mission the mobs reset (and refill health) as you begin to kite so you have to redo the pulls 10 times.
But wait more, in this mission you are SWARMED by armies of mobs that trucidate all your allies (useless anyway, they do 1 DPS) and then the same swarm plus veteran abomination (that is, knockdown + huge damage) all aggro to you.

In case the allies don’t insta-die, they do no damage so YOU have to kill the mobs and guess what, the mobs all come to you 5-8 at a time. With snares and all those things that make Elementalists possibly even kittenier than they are.

OP plays very well, but the opponents were sub par enough to sit inside the loltastic churning earth and to deal <= 2.8k hits (except a thief, once).

Ethrin.6287:

Honestly, I wholeheartedly disagree that the Elementalists require TOO much effort to play. I actually do enjoy the challenge of taking on 3 foes at a time and having to switch between my attunements/conjured weapons. I like this class the best out of all the others BECAUSE of the effort that it takes. I am not experiencing the issue where the OT talks about a standard wolf equating to a boss monster at all. Perhaps it is because I am only level 30 with my Elementalist and I have been purchasing decent gear off the trading post.

Past 70 it gets exponentially harder. Mobs are 50% of the times grouped, well packed so when you kite it’s very easy to pull 5-6 more. Plus they come with a number of cripples, DoTs, heal debuffs and nasty long knockdowns.

You’ll see Rangers and warriors still zipping thru mobs like butter, while you’ll take 2-3 minutes to clear the two risen blocking your way.

There are non elite mobs like risen gorillas that can kill your 15k health in 2-3 seconds if you are super tank geared and specced (not talking of people in full exotic).
At the same time your autoattack hits them for 150…

End result: enter the waypoint all to the SW of Cursed Shore (the one on the SW isle).

You will probably NOT be able to get out alive. The ultra-low Ele DPS won’t kill the 5-6 mobs per room before they begin to repop in your face and you die.

In the mean time, while laying dead on the floor, you’ll see rangers, warriors and necros kill everything and come ress you and then go ahead before the mobs respawned…

In before the OP posts a competitive PvP video showing the example.

Oh wait, he like others will invent some excuse as to why his computer cannot record and similar.

P.S. I kill stuff underwater just fine so the OP is wrong. Underwater is meh all round, not just for Elementalists.

Doc.8930:

Everyone is complaining about the single target damage. My friend plays a Warrior and we do a lot of things together. He was watching me play and was amazed at how i could pull 5 or 6 mobs and kill them all at the same time. Also my guildies have commented multiple times about how when they do explorablables with me, its so much faster because of the amount of dps an Ele brings. Fights with multiple targets are cut in half it seems. We don’t notice the difference because we’re always there.

If you’re truly having trouble killing things in the Ruins of Orr or Orr, then you’re prolly just standing there letting the mob whail on you. Try moving around and using your dodge/cantrips. Really makes it easy.

I have both an Ele 80 and a vastly worse geared greatsword warrior. The warrior is like 3 times the damage and this involves pressing “2” then “3” and in case the mobs (I always take multiple to save time) are still not dead I press “4”.

Dortmunder.9572:

Bogartan.2756:

If we can’t “stay logged in,” could we maybe get an option to save our password? I’ve read that saving your password is more secure than entering it every time — don’t know how accurate that is, but it’s certainly more convenient.

On the plus side, now I have my password memorized

It remembers my password. I still have to click log in twice, but I don’t have to type it.

Don’t understand how having it auto log in is less secure than how my password is already saved and I have to manually transmit it every time I come here, though.

Cookies phishing and various vulnerabilities exploits. Yahoo users may have a word with you about how their credentials were stolen by using the “stay logged in” option.

Is it just me thinking that “legendary” would imply some legendary deeds (which may take little time) and not some prolonged muppet grinding?

I mean, legendary men and things in RL are so because of what they did not because they were nerds.

OneBloke.7264:

Flavius.9580:

Actually, Elementalists are better than warriors in WvW, where melee is merely cannon fodder.

You know that warriors can use rifles and longbows, right?

I deal more ranged damage on my warrior using a shotgun (not specced for it) than on my elementalist.

Then I press backslash and the greatsword gets out. Then I press 3 (to close up and almost insta-gib) or press 2 and then 3 by aiming a bit ahead of the target and that target WILL die.

Is the warrior kittenly OP or the ele kittenly lol?

Still bugged on Gunnar’s Hold.

I moved 5 mins ago to Arborstone [FR] and it worked.

What I don’t like about Elementalist:

- Go superkitten defensive specced or die (literally!)
- Go bleed spec or lol.
- Thou Shall useth D/D for sPvP or go away.

That’s a lot of constraints for a class meant to be “sandbox”.
I am not sure if ANET will want (and much less, do it right) to tweak the class to become really a free form stance switcher.

It’s not the first “hybrid” class I play that fails and just can’t be fixed.
In fact, I actually stopped playing hybrids in MMOs because they always suck so I went for the purest classes. But mage in GW2 is not pure class, so here I am again: another hybrid, another supposed “free form” class that only has ONE dumb way to be specced or played or it woes.

I am not even talking about being underpowered or not. That
can be fixed, straight buffs are just some higher numbers entered in a database. I am talking about the underlying class design, that sadly has born flawed and will stay flawed.

Glad I also have a warrior and necro but for one I don’t like facerolling and I am not a melee type (despite my warrior apparently suggests I am an OP melee player! All the 3 buttons of it!) nor I like “warlock” type classes.

What I don’t like about Elementalist:

- Go superkitten defensive specced or die (literally!)
- Go bleed spec or lol.
- Thou Shall useth D/D for sPvP or go away.

That’s a lot of constraints for a class meant to be “sandbox”.
I am not sure if ANET will want (and much less, do it right) to tweak the class to become really a free form stance switcher.

It’s not the first “hybrid” class I play that fails and just can’t be fixed.
In fact, I actually stopped playing hybrids in MMOs because they always suck so I went for the purest classes. But mage in GW2 is not pure class, so here I am again: another hybrid, another supposed “free form” class that only has ONE dumb way to be specced or played or it woes.

I am not even talking about being underpowered or not. That
can* be fixed. I an talking about the underlying class design, that sadly has born flawed and will stay flawed.

Glad I also have a warrior and necro but for one I don’t like facerolling and I am not a melee type (despite my warrior apparently suggests I am an OP melee player! All the 3 buttons of it!) nor I like “warlock” type classes.

I found the cause of the issue: certain popular antivirus software block cloudfront.net (what looks like being where this website pictures are located at) as source of possible malware / inappropriate pictures and also automatically add cloudfront.net to the Firefox blocked sites option located at Tools => Options => Automatically load images => Exceptions button.

This bug is fun when you are in those deep Orrian lands, surrounded by 20 super though risen undead and “whoops my switch to air made me just hit a leader of a 10 mobs pack”.

Both on EvE and GW2 the basic rule is the same: “play smarter, not harder”.

Stop grinding and start making profits with the market. They make grinding bad so that baddies and gold farmers have it though. Don’t be a baddie.

Since the last BWE I can:

- See everything perfectly on latest Internet Explorer.
- Not see any picture on latest Firefox.

Now, I use Firefox for everything, I follow 6-7 different MMOs and other websites and not one has a problem except this.

I don’t see the top page banner nor the “reply / quote / report” buttons graphics.
If I mouse over their locations I can still use the functionality but it’s really blind guessing where the various icons are located.

What can I do to fix this issue? I already tried clearing cache and whatsnot.

Pinkerton.5643:

@Dabrixmpg: The issue with only a small number of people being good at elementalist has to do with the overall design of the class. In order to make the complainers happy, Anet would either have to buff the class to godmode status or overhaul the entire thing so playing isn’t even recognizable. It has a weird skill curve. So what? Ride the curve or don’t. If you do, you’ll eventually figure it out and then you’ll forget about all this underpowered nonsense.

There’s an issue with this reasonment.
Even if I don’t have issues on my elementalist (besides being forced to spec earth or die), once a class gets the stigma of being BAD, then the other classes start not wanting them in their teams.

See I also played other “odd” classes in the past (i.e. PvP feral druid in WoW in 2007…), I recall entire teams (both PvE and PvP) refusing to invite even on farm mode content, because that class was seen as worthless.

I had spent 4 years to prove I was “worth taking” and in the end there were all of 2 feral druids (me being one) on the whole server accepted in competitive teams.

Now, I like challenge but I hate stigma, I’d really despise having to spend 4 years again just to prove I am not “the average elementalist that sucks” every time I have to try and join a new team.

I have Ele 80, warrior, necro.

Warrior is definitely the faceroll one of the trio, I tried all weapons but all I ever needed is greatsword for 1k blades spam and a shotgun.

Necro used to be very OP in beta, now it’s quite tamed but really survivable.
I also played hunter in beta and it’s possibly a more easy mode class than warrior.

Ele is OK but I like fire spells. But the much, much needed thoughness and wounds sit on earth and water. ATM I am trying not to give up fire completely but it’s hard. Earth is way too good, since it gets the nasty DoTs and the thoughness and some awesome traits. So fire gets the backburner.
For now I am 20 fire 20 earth 20 water (I really love those, not going to give it up) and 10 arcana, but I feel I’d do better going 30 earth and deleting fire.
Which is a shame, because fire is what I wanted to do. But in PvP DD specs are way too easily countered and can’t get the required thoughness (else melee auto-win).

Basically what I miss of Ele is not damage but real freedom to spec and still be very competitive (instead of going the FOTM Earth) and the lack of thoughness unless you go deep in FOTM Earth.

PvE doesn’t really matter, mobs can be stupidly kited even 6-7 forever and slowly chipped at (on my warrior this involves pressing “2” and then “3” mwahaha!) but in PvP thoughness is really needed and only having it on Earth removes a lot of choices.

Dabrixmgp.4758:

Cayenne.5341:

I think some people chose elementalist because they wanted a damage dealing mage

where is that class? They arent even close to the damage of Warrior and Rangers. Probably not close to Thieves either. If they are a damage dealer who are they dealing more damage than?

When ArenaNET said that GW2 would get rid of the “Holy Trinity” I am quite sure it was not just limited to “tank and healer”. The third of the Trinity too has gone and everybody now are “damage dealers”. Eles just happen to deal less direct damage than most.

Dabrixmgp.4758:

Well at least theres one good thing about an elementalist. When you are at the bottom the only way to go is up. Seen it in ever single MMO. One single patch and BAM! from worst to first.

Are at the bottom?
Every day I fear we’ll get nerfed!

It’s true that on my warrior I chew thru stuff like a bulldozer but Elementalist is not weak, it’s just intricate to make it work.

@Pinkerton
Could you please share your build? It looks intriguing.

Very simple concept: add the same button for weapon set swapping all the other classes have, just disable it in combat. Pronto, a fix that does not require any additional developers effort except an “if in combat” check in the code.