Warrior is ridiculous right now, accept it.
The only thing ridiculous about warrior right now is the amount of energy a few people spend complaining about them.
I find my warrior to be significantly more difficult to play well than my elementalist. With an Ele, the vast majority of the time there is a correct answer to whatever your current issue is, you just have to find it and execute it. There is a learning curve there of course, and elementalist is fun, but it is learnable.
Warrior is different because so much of your decision making happens before you even get to a fight. With warrior you have to spec(trait, gear, utilities, etc) to develop a gameplan for anything and then apply your gameplan regardless of the situation. Because the toolbox is powerful but shorter than other classes you have to maximize the effectiveness of your chosen tools, which is a different discipline from learning to pick the right tool from a full toolbox.
The problem comes when the choice is too obvious.
That part I don’t agree with; that the choices are obvious. The nice part about warrior is there are a large number of good utilities and traits to choose from; there is more than one trait combination that’s good. Mixing and matching them in different combinations is a huge part of what I enjoy about playing the class.
One of the reasons I don’t enjoy my elementalist as much is the traits especially are poorly implemented with very little functional variety. Ele skills are tremendously flexible and powerful, but the traits make designing an Ele build feel very limited and frustrating.
I must be doing it wrong, gaining adrenaline is always an issue. Every moment you’re in combat its a huge issue.
I find my warrior to be significantly more difficult to play well than my elementalist. With an Ele, the vast majority of the time there is a correct answer to whatever your current issue is, you just have to find it and execute it. There is a learning curve there of course, and elementalist is fun, but it is learnable.
Warrior is different because so much of your decision making happens before you even get to a fight. With warrior you have to spec(trait, gear, utilities, etc) to develop a gameplan for anything and then apply your gameplan regardless of the situation. Because the toolbox is powerful but shorter than other classes you have to maximize the effectiveness of your chosen tools, which is a different discipline from learning to pick the right tool from a full toolbox.
I completely disagree and hope they keep the Arcane Wave changes; having a ranged, instant blast finisher is amazlingly useful and I hope we can keep it.
Hmm, I still don’t get how 3s regen helps me if I need to get critted for it, let’s say an average crit of 3K dmg…..
..which would make you near immortal versus direct damage classes…
Another possibility I can see with it, is in an aura build. Because aura builds will want to be hit (for tempest defense, frost aura and shocking aura), assuming a balanced build with good points in toughness, vitality and healing power while still being strong at dealing damage (example: valkyrie amulet with berserker jewel, 10 earth for elemental shielding, 30 water for powerful auras, 30 air for zephyr’s boon and tempest defense, runes of divinity), you’ll want to make sure that being hit by your opponents is as least risky as possible. The new soothing wave does that, by giving you regen to offset the damage you receive, which also happens to scale well with your healing power investment.
LOL! Nearly immortal, love it.
The new Soothing Wave is a decent trait, taking the sting out of getting hit, but is slightly shy of immortality. Sadly, they are moving Cleansing Wave out of Adept though; it is actually good.
And the trees are 20 points required now. Want Elemental Attunement or Cleansing Wave, traits useful to almost any build? Today you can invest 10 points each and have 50 or 60 points available for your crazy Fire/Air/Earth idea, on Tuesday those builds are crushed.
I like the new heal skill and arcane wave change for running with a team in wvw; I’ll use it a lot.
It doesn’t address the core issues being made worse in the patch which is an overreliance on water and arcana for survivability and because the traits usable by many builds are being pushed further into those trees.
If they just replaced Staff Air 2 with the active of Air signet on a shorter cooldown it would be a tremendous improvement (maybe only blinding the primary target).
The changes aren’t a nerf for power but they are a huge nerf for diversity. Moving the traits which are good across builds from adept to master and replacing them with very specific traits is a terrible nerf to being able to create diverse builds.
The result of the changes will be some more powerful builds, at the cost of being able to make anything interesting.
Staff’s primary problem is Lightning Surge isn’t instant or on a very short cast time which makes Fresh Air terrible for staff builds. I would also help if the first target of chain lightning took a little more damage to make switching to Air to finish off targets more realistic. Today, you give up too much single target damage switching out of Fire to Air to make Air useful.
Ele’s tend to have better sustain and more ways to escape than Necro’s. Necro roaming builds are usually better at killing things.
I think the safest assumption is the passive heal will activate per skill, not per hit.
No assuming, they just previewed it. It is on hit, with a 1 second internal cooldown.
Thanks.
It seems pretty fair overall; I think it will have use for very coordinated teams that put the offense on the active to good use and are good at water field healing while not being the goto heal for necros (which will still be CC).
If you like roaming and the choices are Necro or Elementalist, I’d choose Mesmer.
I think the safest assumption is the passive heal will activate per skill, not per hit.
check out the active WvW Wellomancer thread
Mostly great discussion so far; lots to think about.
20/10/25/15/0
This is for WvW mostly zerging, some roaming.
Weapons are Axe/Dagger with Staff for long range bombing. I have emphasized sustain with the 15 points in Blood for siphons and the 5pt Spite ability in addition to Sigils of Blood and Restoration, axe damage and passive stats with 25 Death which will add 190 power or so come next Tuesday. I also have good Marks but not faster regen of them. Death Shroud is very deemphasized, essentially just for defense and shroudhopping for Retaliation and to drop annoying conditions.
I’m not sure about the Sigil of Restoration, it has its moments and there is a lot to be said for a lot of toughness + health regen, but Sigil of Force might just be better. My guildies and I go back and forth on Fire vs Blood also for big fights.
It is a crying shame to not get Curses 15 for a shroudhopping build with +25% boon duration, but I can’t find the points for it.
This is what I am testing now, it will get better on 12/10 and the new heal could be very good for this spec.
(edited by Xernth.8561)
I am a “hater” because people twinking out there level 2s to have 3700 armor is intended behavior, lol.
No, I’m complaining because the scaling is absurd and should be fixed. I don’t really ever play 1v1 in wvw other than chance encounters running from one place to the next.
Please redo the uplevel boosts for very low level toons.
Level 2 characters are running around with 3500+ armor and/or 3500+ power. Its ridiculous, please fix it.
Elementalists will get more build diversity in this patch, not less. Cleansing Water and Elemental Attunement on higher tiers will barely affect current builds.
This is not correct.
Cantrip builds that were 40-60 points in water/arcana already are mostly unaffected.
Build that are impossible now which could have been viable are:
- Any build that wanted to splash arcana because Elemental Attunement is out of reach.
- Water builds that want to run something other than cantrips because of both Aquamancer’s Alacrity and Cleansing Wave being moved to master
- Any build that wanted to splash water because of the Cleansing Wave move
- Builds that got endurance from something other than Renewing Stamina because they can’t get EA at 10 arcana anymore
The fact is, unfortunately the most power Elementalist traits also tend to be the most generally useful across many types of builds and gameplay. Elemental Attunement is powerful because Might/Swiftness/Protection/Regen are useful almost all of the time. Cleansing Wave is powerful because conditions are a significant part of the game regardless of what you are trying to do.
By moving so many generalist traits high into the tiers, build diversity is crushed. The sad truth is, the tiering of traits should be considered both by power and by application across builds. By moving traits that almost every build might use high into the trees the player gets less options and obviously there will be less diversity.
Of course the argument can be made that having powerful traits at Adept makes Elementalists overpowered. The Devs may feel that way, but if they do they should come out and say so. General perception is not that Elementalists are overpowered right now; so in theory don’t need nerfing. This balancing was sold as promoting diversity, not being a backhanded nerf by moving good traits out of reach.
Change to Chain Lightning is good.
Air 2 change would be insane. Make Air 2 instant, only blind the target and do half the damage it does now. This would make Staff viable with Fresh Air.
Gust changes are fine.
Lava Font is awesome, leave it alone.
So in summary, with the changes, Ele’s now need 20+ water and 20+arcane instead of 15+ water and 20+ arcane before the changes.
Awesome.
Yep, and in water Aquamancer’s Alacrity and Cleansing Water were moved to Master meaning you can’t have both unless you give up a grandmaster and now the best Adept water traits are either for Cantrips (heaven forbid we use any other utility skill) or Regen when you get crit; hurray!
Just brutal nerfs this patch, especially to any builds that used to try to splash water or arcana. The effects are the exact opposite of the stated design goals; it is really difficult to understand.
(edited by Xernth.8561)
Um, figure it out and report back to us. Community wisdom is there is no such thing, good luck and I look forward to your awesome videos.
My last minute wish is to revert all changes and leave the Elementalist class alone.
The buffs of our terrible traits to be bad instead of terrible doesn’t offset moving all of our good traits to master level or higher so we have no chance to have any build diversity.
Oniyui.8279 said it perfectly.
You also lack easy application of lots of cover conditions, so in this metagame where condition removal against the good condition classes has to be very strong, competent builds remove your relatively sparse conditions easily because they are built to deal with even more than you can create.
Probably by design, the 0/10/0/30/30 spec will be one of the specs impacted the least by the changes because you are spending the 60 water/arcana trait points anyway.
The specs getting harmed are support specs that didn’t pick Cantrip Mastery previously and could get Cleansing Wave at 10 but can’t anymore and any spec that relied on Elemental Attunement but didn’t spend 20+ in Arcana.
Since we are going to be required to spend more points in water and arcana with the December 10th changes, would it be possible to review the Fire Adept traits and give us at least one generalist trait that was attractive?
The new Fire II seems useful, but it will be hidden behind:
- Conjurer (useless given the water changes have made us more reliant on slotting cantrips, not less by moving up the generalist Cleansing Wave and Cantrip Mastery down)
- Lava Tomb (a trait to improve downed state, awesome)
- Spell Slinger (heaven forbid we slot anything but cantrips)
- Misc traits that improve burning (everyone agrees condition builds aren’t currently viable, adding burning duration is particularly terrible and yet is one of the new traits)
Thank you for the consideration.
The most unbelievable part about this is I’m pretty sure the developers are actually trying to help; they just haven’t identified the actual problem and as a result are making things worse.
The actual problem is base health that is too low. That problem is mitigated by investing in water for hit points and investing in Arcana for vigor, dodge heals and EA for protection. The way to fix the issue if you’re not going to give us more base hit points is to make Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana apply to us as minors somewhere or spread throughout the minors in the various elements low in the trees and give their party effects as the traits.
I love helping my team; I don’t love requiring to spend the majority of my trait points to have the survivability every other class has just because all my personal survivability traits also affect my team.
Diogo, how is your 30/0/30/0/0 build with 10 points left going to get much use out of Diamond Skin with 12k hps? You can go 10 water for some hp’s and Soothing’s new cleanse but you won’t have vigor then or vigor and good luck with that health pool.
For PvE, sure, but for any kind of PvP hopefully you can glass cannon everything down and use your two initial dodge rolls to get any mileage at all from DS.
Tyler used to play Ele in Tpvp. We are in good hands ppl! : D
Certainly doesn’t look that way, we’ve gotten a new grandmaster trait that will either be amazing in a broken and un-fun way or completely useless depending on the opponent and a bunch of changes that make us more reliant on water and arcana than we are now.
Any build that expects to take damage has to take 20+ in water to improve our abysmal base hit points and now we’ll have to take 20+ in arcana also for access to protection regularly. In addition, the 30 point water and arcana traits are still clearly better than every trait in fire, earth or air with the exception of Fresh Air, so once you’re obligated to put 40 into water/arcana, you might as well get the GM traits.
Ahh, build diversity!
Your choice of Protection/Swiftness/Regen/Might at any given time (within the context of attunement switching) is really strong even if it was just personal.
Fine, I removed it and put toughness in it’s place. Is it any better? Given the reactions probably not.
Sure, toughness is quite a bit more limiting than pure damage reduction, some amount of it would be fair, but Earth already has a pure toughness adder (as well as adding toughness per trait point).
If the goal is to give us help against conditions in the Earth line, doesn’t reduced condition duration fill the need nicely?
25% passive, unstrippable damage reduction would be ridiculous.
Jon, if you are still reading:
- Please consider amending Staff Air to be better against single targets with more instant abilities (like scepter)
- If you want build diversity Elemental Attunement and Cleansing Wave need to be easily accessible as they are essential
- We are over reliant on Water partially because of our low base health
- As an alternative, consider making the Elemental Attunement bonus’ as baseline to be applied to us and applying them AoE as a trait or as part of our 5 point traits
- -25-35% condition duration would be preferable for Diamond Skin over the immunity, even if the immunity ends up balanced stronger. It would be more fair for all sides
This would be insane for balancing and is a terrible idea. With any given weapon combination there are 20 skill choices, lets work on making quality weapon skills rather than giving us access to 40 terrible ones that have to be terrible because we’re balanced around having so many choices.
The problem with elementalist isn’t having too few choices of what to do at any given time.
Elemental Attunement is just a beast of a trait and could honestly be compared with most grandmaster traits.
Thing is, if Elemental Attunement is master level, a very large proportion of Eles will feel compelled to spec 20+ arcane, and if you’re 20 into arcane, you might as well get Evasive Arcana as well, and we’re back where we are now.
A better solution IMO would be either:
- make a caster-only version of Elemental Attunement baseline to all Eles, and make an AOE trait for it in its place.
- to redistribute Elemental Attunement’s bonuses among all 4 elements, replacing or combining with the existing 5pt traits.
I think a good compromise would be to place Renewing Stamina back in the adept tier
Sure, but IMO Ele is not Ele without Elemental Attunement and refactoring/rethinking that change is the single most important thing in all the proposals after the switch timer reduction.
This is the best post so far. Jon you’re right, Elemental Attunement is vital for any Elementalist, please don’t reduce my trait points to 50 by requiring me to spend 20 in Arcana for every build.
Bash, I’m a WvW noob but will likely play a fair amount; I won’t play any material amount of highly competitive pvp. I’d like to make something viable out of this setup for WvW, but I don’t know if its possible. My experience with WvW to date is standing in a zerg dropping AoE bombs for a couple of hours with a Necro.
Zackie, the synergy between RHS, fast hitting weapons and Empowering Might (and Vigorous Precision but that’s only 5) jumped out at me when considering builds. Where do people usually go for RHS builds?
Thanks for the feedback.
I’ve been playing a Right Hand Strength build and am looking to start a conversation about gear/weapon/trait choices, etc.
For traits, I’ve been playing:
Radiance (Blind Exposure, Powerful Blades, Right Hand Strength)
Honor (Superior Aria, Empowering Might)
Virtues(Vengeful, Supreme Justice)
Based on some forum reading here, I’m going to consider dumping Supreme Justice for Pure of Voice, though I’d need to consider the implication of losing 10% boon duration.
Gearwise, I’ve been building a PVT set of armor and trinkets with ruby gems in the trinkets. For Runes, I have 2 Strength for Might Duration and 4 Citadel for Fury duration and generating Fury. Between significant Fury uptime and RHS I feel like I don’t need to go out of my way to gear Precision, which is nice. Sigils are Strength and Force.
Weapons, I’ve been using Sword/Shield and Scepter/Focus. I am a pretty new 80 and the PvE content is still new to me, so I feel I have to play Scepter so I can stand back on content I’m learning.
For Utility skills, I think Save Yourselves is a must, I’ve been using Judge’s Intervention and Purging Flames for mobility and condition removal and because they help tag mobs in PvE. If I swap to Pure of Voice, obviously I’d want another shout or two.
The build is entirely based around the synergy between RHS, Empowering Might and fast hitting weapons. I think it makes at least a reasonable amount of sense. Looking forward to hearing suggestions or potential improvements.
Played Elementalist to 80, learned there was one true build which I didn’t like and that one or two element builds weren’t viable, so abandoned that. Played a Mesmer to 47 and lost interest. I then played warrior to 80 and still find that occasionally fun. My Necro is 53 now and its easily my favorite class so far; it has its warts, but the variety of viable builds has been nice and I like being able to do some of everything. I just wish we healed a little more effectively.
I may consider Axe/Dagger instead of Scepter too, for single target situations. Axe synergizes with Reaper’s Precision and some of these other traits better in some ways.
Sounds like Deathly Invigoration would be only moderately terrible in a melee build where you had friends nearby, but given I’m hoping to stand away from “bad things” its going to be completely terrible for what I’m hoping to do. PinCushion, I have an 80 Elem and like Healing Ripple, which is kind of where I was going, but it doesn’t sound like DI can fill that role.
Thanks for the responses. I’m new to Necro, just playing around with all the options and trying to find something to suit my playstyle. So far I’m planning on:
10 (VI), 20 (V, IX), 0, 20 (II,IX), 10 (VI) with scepter/dagger typically and staff for heavy AoE
I have 10 points I’m undecided on.
The basic idea is to be able to jump in and out of DS relatively often, to provide boons and other effects, with Wells and other AoE to tag mobs. I play mostly open world PvE and have plenty of events in my future so just trying to build something all around survivable with plenty of AoE and fun until I gear out and decide to play more seriously.
I’m very partial to all around utility and survivability, which makes something like Deathly Invigoration interesting to me, even if its not amazing. Also, if Reaper’s Precision has no ICD, with Wells, it should generate quite a bit of Life Force?
Wondering if anyone has opinions or experience with the following traits:
Curses V Reaper’s Precision – Does this have an internal cooldown and if so does anyone know what it is?
Blood Magic IX Deathly Invigoration – How big is the AoE of this heal?
Thanks in advance.