It’s a pretty big shave off of a rune that doesn’t give boons that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Fury, 1 stack of might and switfness are boons that every group already has in permanent.
So to change it form 50% uptime to 33% up time only hurts soloers. This was a non sense change to a rune that wasn’t OP.
ANET keeps buffing condis while they make changes like this making condis more and more stronger all the time.
Well if they don’t realize it at this point with hundreds of people saying the same thing on the forums then they never will.
It’s pretty ironic that a bug made this skill more balanced and finally useful.
Says a lot about the quality of the skill balancing.
I am not a game developer in any way, so i cant say if it is bad or good for the class, but i would appreciate if anyone of the dev team could drop down here or ele forums section and explain current developers stand on elementalist as a profession. For example, what is the profession meant to be, and what is it meant to do. .
Perhaps Karl, since he’s in charge of the elementalist balance changes, could play a dozen competitive pvp matches on Twitch to demonstrate how to play the class in a competitive environment? How would particularly like to see how Wash the Pain Away is now more balanced for pvp.
Hey folks,
Just a quick reminder: the PvP team is not responsible for profession balance. The PvP team, along with all of the other major feature teams, provides feedback to the skills team, but the PvP team itself is not directly involved in making balance changes.
What we do have control over – however – is the build panel (sigils, amulets, runes). It’s one of the knobs we can use to push gameplay in whichever direction we feel it needs to go for that particular season. For this release, we wanted to take support down a notch and increase the pace of combat.
It’s not our intent to completely remove professions from the meta – but things do fluctuate and I think we need to give the change a bit more time to see how it plays out. Elemental Bastion being bugged since Tuesday certainly has not helped the Tempest situation, but that should be resolved fairly soon and we’ll be able to properly see how ele will fare.
I know many of you fundamentally disagree with the removal of build items – and that’s fine. I understand where you’re coming from, but I hope you understand why we use this as a tool for balancing PvP specifically.
-Grouch
Forget about the removal of the amulet. Elementalist’s damage builds cannot compete with their counterparts. You guys have known about this since the release of HOT. Most of the amulets you introduce cannot be used by the profession because of the low base health.
I hope is that they actually read this thread in a positive way and realize they have to change the way they do class balance, or who in their team should do class balance.
Bringing celestial back would be a start. Or they completely scrap that system, and let us use our gear stats (with a pvp global scaling for each stats).
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
Hey folks,
Just a quick reminder: the PvP team is not responsible for profession balance. The PvP team, along with all of the other major feature teams, provides feedback to the skills team, but the PvP team itself is not directly involved in making balance changes.
What we do have control over – however – is the build panel (sigils, amulets, runes). It’s one of the knobs we can use to push gameplay in whichever direction we feel it needs to go for that particular season. For this release, we wanted to take support down a notch and increase the pace of combat.
It’s not our intent to completely remove professions from the meta – but things do fluctuate and I think we need to give the change a bit more time to see how it plays out. Elemental Bastion being bugged since Tuesday certainly has not helped the Tempest situation, but that should be resolved fairly soon and we’ll be able to properly see how ele will fare.
I know many of you fundamentally disagree with the removal of build items – and that’s fine. I understand where you’re coming from, but I hope you understand why we use this as a tool for balancing PvP specifically.
-Grouch
What about non-elite specs? I am not interested in PvE anymore so buying HoT for 4-5 specs wasn’t the life I was about. I hope that’s understandable. What’s my core Ele to do then? I felt pigeon-holed before and now there is no hole really whatsoever. Wholesale removal of the amulet feels like the path of least resistance. It doesn’t feel like the grandiose words that get bandied around by the staff when they are hyping a patch. The words are much grander than the result. I hope that makes sense as well.
The elementalist class is just made to be played with Celestial. Anything else and build variety is just gone. The class was also made with the old trait system in mind, because builds for the elementalist depends on stats more than with the other classes. Diversity had taken a hit first when that change was made.
A good balance team would have nerfed the celestial amulet by 5% or 7% after some testing. I presume that it’s the balance team that didn’t want to balance it so the PvP team removed it. Its probably just a miscommunication that lead to more impactful complications than what they imagined.
Why cant the PvP team balance PvP, WvW team balance WvW and PvE team balance PvE?
When the balance team do changes we should be able to test them on a test server, and also they should have to demonstrate why the changes are good.
Can we share some good old times?
For some reason I feel my farewell video is relevant again (gvg stuff), specially before of the lyrics in the music. Maybe it’s time for another break.
I have the feeling that Ele’s “Wash the Pain Away!” was hit too hard.
Just to help everyone remember:
“Wash the Pain Away!”: The base healing per level for this skill has been decreased by 33%. The healing power contribution has been increased by 150%. The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 25 seconds to 20 seconds in all game types.When you got to use your dedicated healing skill, you want to heal a large chunk of points. Taking away a third of that ability is a big blow to the skill. Why the large number? A bit of restraint on the use of the nerf hammer would have been a better way. Why not start with 20% and see if that’s not already over the top?
As a Ele which still runs a fair bit of “out of meta” Cele stats in PvE/WvW (for a total of 440 healing power), the effect of the 150% contribution is fairly negligible. I think it is fair for non-healing power combos (e.g. zerker) to be weaker, but balanced builds should not be as bad as they are now casting the skill.I see where the balance idea is coming from (sPvP bunkering with Clerics + Water trait), but doesn’t the group heal effect be the part that should have been addressed? Why not keep the individual heal at the original numbers and reduce the party heal by 50%?
Yes the cool down reduction means 20% more healing compared to before (narrowing down the “loss” to 13%, but that only applies if you can use the skill over and over again. It does not apply if the skill does not help you ward off a spike of damage, which will kill you, because the health is not going up significantly.
Lets not forget that Elemental Bastion got a similar treatment, which also contributes to the sorry state of “Wash the pain away”.
Please take a look at this skill nerf again and strengthen the individual heal to something useful again, if you had some investment in healing power.
I think you misunderstand the way the balance team works.
What they did is remove Wash the Pain Away from pvp. Nobody is doing to equip it now; since we can’t even stay alive ourselves why would we try to keep others alive?
It’s like the Ice Bow nerf, they surely didn’t think 50% gave good and balanced damage output results, they just wanted it out of the game. I have never seen anyone equip one in pvp or wvw since the nerf.
What we got here is a balance team that wants to dictate the builds we use instead of a balance team that wants to create build variety, it’s the complete opposite of how it was when the game was first released. Apparently there seems to have been a failure of communication between the pvp team and the balance team gave result that we lost the only amulet that would have made our class perhaps viable in pvp avec the other drastic nerfs.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
I thought the entire point of separating skill balance between PvP, WvW and PvE was to ensure that situations like the current state of things would be avoided. No?
It may be ok to nerf ele dps in PvE, because enemies stand still so that even if your skills have more delay than all the other classes they still hit the target.
However in pvp we were already at a disadvantage, that’s why the class went bunker in the first place, it was near-impossible to survive in a truly competitive environment with other builds. Why would you nerf skills like lava font and skill recharge for staff in PvP? Anyone has 1 second to dodge out and staff was already underpowered. It makes no sense at all.
The first thing is to admit that you’ve done something wrong but then secondly you must react swiftly. Why should we endure such an unfair state of things for months just for a grand balance experiment gone bad?
Ask the “balance” team to (1) Buff elementalist staff CD & speed for PvP, (2) buff other skills/traits that are useless in pvp, and (3) give us celestial back because that’s the nature of the class.
Hey folks,
…
It’s not our intent to completely remove professions from the meta – but things do fluctuate and I think we need to give the change a bit more time to see how it plays out. Elemental Bastion being bugged since Tuesday certainly has not helped the Tempest situation, but that should be resolved fairly soon and we’ll be able to properly see how ele will fare.
…
-Grouch
Thanks for addressing our worries. The impression that you are at an unfair disadvantage in a competitive environment is an extremely frustrating experience.
However the issue doesn’t only have to do with numbers. The elementalist gameplay has taken multiple hits that have drastically reduced build variety and made the rotation of skills feel clunky. Fixing a bug won’t resolve all the issues that elementalists have asked to be fixed in the last year, first and foremost the lack of build variety.
I have the feeling that it is specifically because the PvP team isn’t in charge of class balance that the easiest builds to play have overtaken a game that was intended to be skill-based and about countering attacks with combos.
We gave the feedback that overloads and tempest were a horrible direction for the class pre hot, thousands only suggestions on better methods, tweaks etc. They ignored all of them.
They chose to stick with overloads, we pointed out time and time again long cast melee range abilities would only further force us to tank amulets because our horrible base stats. We pointed out that without stability on overloads they would be useless. Karl the lead ele design got wrecked trying to show off overloads, he was interupted multiple times by the Npc.
They won’t be reworking overloads it would be such a massive undertaking, especially how their game engine is apparently a nightmare to work in, ele is unfortunately stuck with a bad pvp spekittenil we roll the dice on them kittening up our next spec on the next expansion.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t do an aura rework or rework our arcane or conjures or glyph. They could provide us active defenses, give us access to resilience (w/ the condition immunity is) give us access to more evades, higher mobility, better burst, less Telegraphed bullkitten (I’m looking at you dragons tooth) improved blocks (arcane shield) traits that provide toughness, vitality, or healing power base instead of just in an attunement.
There are so many small tweaks they could make to make us viable, they choose not to.
You know what I would like to see? I want to see the Anet balance team play pvp with an ele, doing a 4 hours Live-Stream taking turns showing us how overpowered it is.
It would be the funniest thing ever, it would certainly make their Twitch audience increase as well.
One thing is for sure – you won’t see many ele’s…if any at all
I played some games today.
What I noticed:
1- Way too many Guardians: One match had 6 and another had 5
And there is a reason for that, 2 guardian traps on a point insta-kill anyone.
2- Condis are out of control, just just melt constantly and find yourself out of cleanses eventually. Probably another reason why almost everyone plays Guardian
3- No other eles at all, that class is just gone
4- In 1v1 I can win some fights facerolling on a hybrid Necro (about 10 hours of experience), with my ele I find nothing is viable (and I have 5k hours experience)
I’m not happy about the balance changes at all. I miss the old zerk staff or celestial d/d ele days. No thanks for making the game less interesting.
I agree with the OP on every point. We saw it coming a mile away however, when they first presented Tempest. It didn’t seem ready back then and it still doesn’t feel finished today.
Lmao I have to say i think this is the only game ive seen where so many people get kittened ofF after every patch. I suppose this what happens when you are at the mercy of really bad devs.
Not too bright but at least they are good artists
-So after another 3 month wait we now have:
- Revenants more buggy than ever (even after a patch focused on bug fixing) to the point where revenants cannot play the next season- Elementalists no longer relevant. I kinda expected them to completely annihilate the heal bot but i thought they would have opened up another build. Pretty naive of me considering what they’ve done to other classes before
- Mesmers stronger than ever when they didnt really need to be buffed in the first place.
- No new builds available aside from Guardian and maybe mesmer and druids. Power necros will still be unusable in ranked because of how stiff it is.
I’m not too surprised since ive been around for a bit and this sort of anti productive patch is a pretty common thing, but, if you are one of those that came in around HoT release well although i have nothing to do with Anet i’d still like to sincerely apologize on their behalf.
If you are like me and you spend most of your time in game at PvP then like me you are better off playing something else
I know dude! Completely agree. I’m trying to restrain my complaints so I’ll just say that I think this balance patch is taking this game one huge step more in the wrong direction instead of fixing the issues we have discussed for over a year.
As an elementalist it’s the second season in a row I’m going to skip.
Or maybe I’ll try facerolling elementalists to death on other classes for practice.
Why did you skip last season? Eles were great last season.
Many of us absolutely hate that our class got turned into a heal bot cc cleanse face tank. And we were only relevant and will only continue to be relevant because support is better than no support.
That’s the reason why I left for 6 months. I used to run d/d zerk when the game was launched. Might as well play some cheesy game like The Sims if you’re going to reduce yourself to being a heal bot.
Wow, sounds good for some 10v10 GvGs, maybe we should try that instead.
It’s for PvE.
Most of the nerfing and changes that were done to the elementalist was done with Raids in mind and dps meters vs enemies that stand still. It had nothing to do with actual competitive gameplay where the class was already a pain in the kitten to play and could only survive with a bunker amulet.
As an elementalist it’s the second season in a row I’m going to skip.
Or maybe I’ll try facerolling elementalists to death on other classes for practice.
It’s all mostly positive besides how the elementalist nerf was done.
Build diversity has once again taken a huge hit for the class.
Something more drastic has to be done to make the elementalist fun to play and diverse again.
Also the fire grandmaster trait Pyromancer’s Puissance isn’t working either. There is no might on using a fire skill.
They’ll probably fix that by changing the tooltip.
From the reddit ama for todays patch, which you can read up at dulfy.
http://dulfy.net/2016/07/26/gw2-out-of-the-shadows-developer-ama-on-reddit/WvW
- The WvW team has a different release schedule than the other teams and we will continue to release outside of the quarterly releases.
- Repair hammers will be coming in the beginning of August.
2 Alpine, 1 Desert and Scoring are tentatively coming the end of August.
Cannons will be coming sometime after that.
(we don’t want Cannons and Scoring going out at the same time).- No plans to refund WvW Infusions for laurels since they are still functional.
- As for lag, it is always something we are trying to improve. There are some changes coming in early August specific to WvW that should help with lag, but we are constantly working on improving lag for WvW.
Wow!
They forgot to talk about the WvW overhaul.
ANY class where you are forced into using a “cookie cutter” build in order to even compete needs attention. Sure, are there good players out there playing an Elementalist? Absolutely! But this doesn’t mean that the class itself is good. Those same good players could be doing well on any class. Why have all of the different elements available if they are too weak to use and cycle through? Why force people into using only one build and weapon choice? I have played through all of the classes and the Elementalist was by far the most disappointing even though I had high hopes. It seems very interesting until you actually play it and then realize youre only going to be using the same certain skills. I don’t see it getting fixed anytime soon, so i guess it will just be the last of the mohicans who play it from here on out. I see most players switching to another main or starting a new character. Not sure what else to say here, as much of the chat in game shows most people unhappy with Elementalist. I would think that would have been enough for them to realize they are laughed at…a joke…
It was the most interesting class at launch, they just consistently destroyed it little by little and now it’s at the bottom of the list.
They seem to forget that other classes can also dodge.
Now we know why things went so wrong.
You would think that since Karl died against Svanir in his Tempest presentation that he would be more inclined to buff a class that desperately needs SOMETHING POSITIVE going for it.
Right now it’s just the boring slow gameplay of Tempest taking over the entire class.
What is the ele supposed to do in WvW now Karl? Lava font is great against an AI that doesn’t move but in WvW it barely scratch someone. It needed a buff not a nerf, and so did 75% of our useless skills and traits.
Patch seems more like pvp class removal then ,,balance" from elementalist perspective.
Actually eles just now actually have to play vs just standing on point living forever.
Wrong – state of ele is right like this:
1. ele vs anything in pvp – dies
2. ele bunkers node – dies
3. ele suports – dies
4. ele enters match – diesNo matter what amulet, no matter what traits and skills have ele will DIE – druid staff auto attack will blast ele in deep space…
It’s been a problem for years, that’s why the ele had to be bunker in the first place, because nothing else was viable. Because of pretty high skills level of many elementalist rotations for might blasting made celestial a viable thing to regain the lost damage output. With the removal of celestial only cleric bunker was left as viable, zerk was already pretty bad. Now there is nothing left.
Once thieves realize this and start to use more venoms, expect tons of CC and condi spam from randomly affected allies. At least the venoms were nerfed same time, because we really don’t need more random spam.
Just shows Arenanet doesn’t play much WvWvW.
The balancing is clearly not done with WvW in mind at all, even if they said WvW would be the focus after HoT’s release.
I mean check this out:
We’ve been asking for Lava font to tick as soon as it is down because it is unreliable. It’s something we asked for 2-3 years!
What did Anet do? They ignore 2-3 years of requests and nerf a skill nobody ever complained about.
Ele will do tons of damage but get deleted faster than even thieves. Not sure it’s viable yet, but we’ll see.
What makes you think they’ll do tons of damage? They haven’t done it in this meta eer and even got damage nerfs. Of course it’s not gonna be viable, otherwise it would have been viable up to this point.
When the game was released, for a year the elementalist was actually viable with a berserker amulet, there was so much variety. Now look how far down the class has gone. There is no variety left, Anet eliminated all of it. It’s just a class where you wonder what is the only viable build that everyone that plays it runs.
I think it’s a complicated class to play and balance, and Anet balance team just has no clue what must be done. They balance the class only according to the one viable build everyone runs instead of fixing all the core issues that have destroyed variety.
Well the class balance is the worse ever, a complete disaster, but the rest of the fractals stuff seems good. I wonder if the LS3 is enough content.
Reroll another class
This, it’s useless. Play necro, rev or thief.
Worse balance patch for ele ever. Why did I even bother reinstalling the game?
yuk yuk yuk, what terrible balancing.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
Personally if my build doesn’t hit a 20k Ice Spike on Champion Lord (I understand it doesn’t mean much, since most people are running bunker and perma-protection) I feel bad at the end of the day, so I still run full power with marauder staff and 2 assassin trinkets, power food and seaweed, maxed damage modifiers build with a rotation that has the potential to trigger them all.
I know how much everyone is just focused on support now, I just hate the pewpew range meta, I still have some hope left that raw spike damage, at the right moment and place, is what wins a fight. I like to control the battlefield movements, and I need to feel when I cast a meteorshower that it actually forces the enemy to get out of the way.
I run Tempest/Water/Air.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
They have Raid of the Capricorn coming back, but without water…
So they took the best part out of it and tried something new, I have doubts that it will work. Hopefully they will have re-balanced all the skills and traits tomorrow so that the game feels less frustrating.
The Desert BL is really great work artistically, but conceptually it’s so wrong for very basic reasons:
- It requires more players than the servers can handle to be fun. It should have been smaller
- 3 copies of the same map per tier requires more players to fill than there are in the entire tier
- When a map is too large it takes too much time to run to a fight, easy fixes possible, propositions were made during the beta, but they won’t do it apparently
- Too much kitten in the middle of the way between objectives, choke points are too small. Why is there a huge rock in the middle of what should be a flat battleground near garrison?
They need to bring back the condi stack limit and nerf them by 20% at least.
They also need the old stability back because you can’t rely on it anymore, specially in WvW.
Finally they need to remove taunt, it’s annoying as hell in WvW.
Oh and they need to buff IceBow for pvp, 50% would feel about right.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
Game will pick steam again when LS3 comes and the new WvW team are gonna make WvW great again^^
I can’t wait to see the huge WvW overhaul they’ve been working over a year on. It must be a complete game changer and it is going to bring so many people back, hopefully the GvG scene as well will return.
There is just no hype at all, and that is due to the lackluster trailers.
If you have seen an ESO dlc or FF14 update trailer then it’s hard to be excited with a gw2 trailer where its just a series of still scenes fading-in with some narrator discussing a vague threat. I remember one patch update trailer for FF14 was showing almost over 5 minutes of new content.
Watching a GW2 trailer is just going to make you wonder what the game is about, it’s ok artistically but I don’t think it will bring in new players.
3 colors is the best they could do. I don’t think we can expect more at this point, they say they have a WvW team, but besides the artists that do map design there doesn’t seem to be a lot of people working on WvW considering they started to work over a year ago on a WvW overhaul and got barely anything to show for it.
When was HoT released again? Wasn’t WvW supposed to be “the focus” after HoT’s release? …
Yep they killed the GvG scene with the condi cheese creep. Maybe that’s what they wanted, after all GvG just cast a shadow on their own pvp modes as it was community organized and more fun/competitive.
Combat is not about being good anymore, it’s just about running the right build and having passive ticks do the job.
It’s a shame but it looks like Anet stopped playing their own game. I don’t think they’ve notice how bad the situation has become with conditions and all their unjustified nerfs to power skills.
Like when they do balance they completely destroy skills in a manner that nobody ever use them again, instead of doing incremental balancing like Blizzard does or other MMO companies. Nobody uses turrets anymore, good balancing! Nobody uses Ice Bow anymore, good balancing! I don’t know how they can justify that.
1- Bring back the ORB please
2- Mix the maps, merge the population of EotM with WvW (add EotM to ppt maps)
3- Remove siege disabler
4- Balance the game so that smaller talented groups can defeat bigger groups of bad players like it was for the first 2 years of the game, as it is now numbers play too much of an importance in comparison to skill
5- let us catapult asuras above walls
6- Bring back the matchup forums
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
Can we please get a working Mac Client [Merged]
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: Xillllix.3485
Getting the same problem on a mac. Launch the game, don’t see the launcher.
It used to work fine until today (we just bought HoT so i’m guessing it’s an issue with it…or the latest patch…i dunno).
Force-quit the process a few times in the Activity monitor, usually it launches after a while.
There was, but still a lot of other tweaks that need to be made, it was still kind of an annoying map to be on, especially ground roots and plants that got in your way too often and you have to go around, hell even the regular pve maps weren’t that bad.
Just hope there’s more work being done like to help the north towers be useful, the middle area revamped, a lot of the ground clutter cleaned up, and we’re just not waiting on programming to get abl dbl to work together.
They needed to remove a lot of the stuff in the middle of areas where people fights, like the huge rock south of garrison and the cliffs/walls everywhere. The waypoint system also needs to be quicker. I think the keeps and towers need waypoints that spawn 10-15 minutes after you capture them.
Otherwise it had a lot of potential.
I assume you’re asking for 2 alpine home bl, 1 desert home bl, 1 eotm, 1 ebg?
While it might be a good idea to get the eotm population into the wvw side, just keep in mind that the sides are filled with players from all servers under those colors, when you break that back down to individual servers it may not be much gain.
Yes that’s exactly what I’m proposing for the maps. But for EotM it would be the server population not the overflow server-merging system.
Instead of having polls for months without the game changing at all I think we should have things to try, specially if they bring variety to a game mode that has seen better days.
They cannot run simoultaneous maps at the same time yet. They already said it in another thread.
Well they need to get to work then. I mean they should have anticipated this years ago when they started work on DBL.
This is a lot of work just for one month. For one thing, EotM is not a per-world map. All the green worlds go on overgrowth, all the red worlds on bad lands, etc.
There is also the issue that EotM was never designed to be a traditional WvW map and doesn’t really work in that format.
Sure ANet can do these kinds of experiments, but dev time is a precious resource. We could end up squandering all of it on one experiment after another and never make real progress.
If you want variety you can just got to EotM as it is right now. My WvW guild occasionally does this just to relieve the routine.
EotM was designed to be a WvW map, it’s only at the last minute that they decided to make it an overflow map to deal with queue times.
The vast majority of players voted for a borderland variety, I think we should try it now as the vote is fresh, and if it works then they can keep it that way until they have a third borderland map ready.
As I said they have to change the spawn point assignments depending on the server scores, but the rest is functional, they just have to make the EotM score count.
kitten that kittening bullkitten kitten EOTM.
Thank god for the kitten censorship.
Then you can go on any of the 3 other maps. I think giving a purpose to EotM wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Hey Anet,
since we are desperate for some variety could we try something that doesn’t require any design modification and is a cheap way to change the game?
For 1 month:
1- Remove the EotM overflow servers
2- Add the EotM to the world map of WvW above or below EBG
Give the Overgrowth spawn to the server that had the less points the previous week and Badlands to the server that had the most points.
3- Add 1 DBL map again to the server with the most points the previous week, since it is a harder map to defend
For 1 month we would have 4 maps to play and a united population. Isn’t it at least worth a try?
I think it would be a better chance to save WvW than making polls about random things the players never asked for.
I don’t like how in every video they just flash 1 second of scenic frames and then fade to black over and over.
It would be better just to have an uninterrupted glimpse of some action or story.
Can we please get a working Mac Client [Merged]
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: Xillllix.3485
It sure would be nice to have actual support for Mac, specially 4 years after the release.
Blizzards games have mac ports that work flawlessly, maybe you could ask them to help you or study their methods.
…then will there another poll to remove them? I think it’s only fair.
We also need a poll to know if player want’s them back after they remove them. And then a poll asking us if we think that was the right decision and if we want to remove them again or would prefer it to be a random feature based on a weekly, monthly or season schedule.
This way they could have many more years working on the “huge overhaul” they have been working on now for over a years.
They already ruined ALL my builds so from a hype/hope perspective I have none. Anet just doesn’t know how to balance this class and create build diversity.
And they’ve pretty much been doing the opposite of what elementalists have been asking for since launch, by listening only to what other classes had to say about elementalists.