Guild Wars 2

Considering that they don’t even have a raid or dungeon out yet for the xpac I doubt we will ever see SAB again.

nearlight.3064:

As a proud owner of howler, I care that warhorn is arguably the worst new weapon introduced by the expansion.

When the elite skill is rushed out barely a month before the release and literally not tested (and is terrible) it’s kinda obvious they didn’t care about making a good elementalist elite spec.

It must have been the one at the bottom of their priority list.

Warrior didn’t get worse, they problem is that they keep buffing classes that were already too strong.

briggah.7910:

I can’t even enjoy wvw anymore.. There are bugged NPCs that shoot at nothing and it keeps some of our towers and keeps constantly contested..

It’s EotM all over again: New beautiful map —> catastrophic implementation.

They didn’t fix or adapted WvW to support the new map, and they didn’t fix the issues that have accumulated starting with the meaningless scoring system.

The whole expansion is on the short side (only 1 pvp map, bad WvW implementation, rushed Tempest spec). The Guild Halls kinda make up for that. It seems to me that the Living Story 2 may have initially been planned as part of the expansion (Silverwaste and Dry Top).

I’m unsure about the delayed stuff. So far with this expansion reviews are going out and there is not a single new dungeon or raid, so that’s a big and important aspect in a MMO where HoT is completely lacking.

New map is fine beside a lack of waypoints, it’s all the core issues he mention that are the problem, and also having completely unreliable server machines that choke and lag out as soon as there is a battle in Stonemist doesn’t help.

They need to fix population issues, add PPK, change PPT, add rewards for ranks, add waypoints in the new map, make EotM a server map, bring back Alpine BL and stop having 3 copies of the same map.

Auras don’t stack anymore, it’s due to the last batch of ele nerfs.

Gibe.8172:

The warhorn may be useless, but who cares?

Me, as both a customer and a player, I care (or used to)…

MadRabbit.3179:

I was one of the stronger opponents to Tempest during beta. A lot of my opinions still stand about the overall design and mechanics; however, I’ve accepted it’s here to stay, so I won’t waste any more time sharing those. There is a number of things I was wrong about now that I have had time to play it for a prolonged period of time and experiment with builds. I’ve gotten a more balanced opinion on the spec, so here is my feedback. Mostly going to focus on the negative, because the point here is to improve the spec.

1. Warhorn is kittening awful. I’ve not even going to try to make suggestions about how to improve it. It’s so awful on paper that I haven’t even bothered to work it into a build. Plenty of feedback in like dozen threads on the first page of the forums, so won’t go into it.

2. I find that staff ends up being the most viable for tempest, because it has the most abilities with cooldowns that exceed the overload cooldown, even after cooldown reduction on specific attunements. Even more so, these are the abilities that are the most valuable, like static field, gust of wind, magnetic aura and both water fields. In fact, honestly, these abilities are the main reasons you swap into air, water or earth, so getting locked out of these attunements for 20 seconds is manageable. On the flip side, dagger/dagger, which works off a mechanic of flipping quickly through attunements and using multiple abilities on short cooldown gets penalized the most by this, particularly if the elementalist specs into cooldown reduction. I don’t really know how to fix this; dropping the cd to 15 seconds might help, but then again, the divide between long and short cooldown abilities is so great that it doesn’t really do anything. It doesn’t do much when 3 of your abilties are under 15 seconds and the other 2 are over 20.

3. It would be nice to see the trait elements that are absolutely essential to successfully pulling off an overload without dying (protection on overload, stability on overload, swiftness on overload) built into the mechanic itself and the traits leveraged with other bonuses that give the spec a much needed increase in power.

4. It would also be nice if, at least, one grandmaster trait, provided some type of utility that increased damage for usage in PvE. Lucid Singularity could stand to go away; it only has value in PvP and nobody is going to take that over Element Bastion, because you can’t play Tempest as anything else except a bunker without ending up in a ball in a dark corner, wrapped in a blanket and sobbing uncontrollably, thanks to all the power creep of the other elite specs. Element Bastion provides some usefulness in PvE, but you aren’t going to run the shouts necessary to get full value out of it. All the shouts except for Feel the Burn have no value in PvE compared to taking Ice Bow, Gylph of Storms, a signet or a cantrip for increased survivability and mobility when pulling off overloads.

5. The blast finisher component in Earth overload is absolutely useless and here is why. We don’t have an instant cast utility skill that applies a field that we can use to combo with the overload. Literally, all of our fields are in other attunements and their duration makes it mathematically impossible to cast, swap attunements, charge the overload and then complete it’s cast time in order to hit our own field. The only value would be using it to hit another person’s combo field which to successfully do would require coordination over teamspeak. Even then, it’s difficult, because most combo fields have cast times while most finishers are instant. Coordinating a blast finisher with a cast time longer than the cast time of most combo fields is hard. Getting rid of it and replacing it with blind on pulse or increasing the protection duration to 2 seconds so you get stacking value with each pulse of the overload would make it much stronger.

6. The heal and condi clear on water overload needs to be increased in order to really make it worth using in PvP. In my experiences, the heal and condi clear per pulse just can’t keep up with the amount of damage and conditions being thrown around right now.

7. Air and Fire are pretty great. No real complaints there, but Air is kind of weird. It’s weird to have a damage focused overload in an attunement that largely provides control utility except for mainhand dagger. Particularly with a weapon like staff when the attunement is pretty much all about blinds, knockbacks and AoE dazes. It’s hard to justify sitting in the attunement for 5 seconds and do mediocre damage just to overload for damage and those situations where the crowd control is useful are rare in PvE. The only time I really use it with staff is when I am in air attunement already from traveling in open world and run into something with it off CD.

8. The design of Latent Stamina is in direct competition with the spec’s core mechanic. Does taking a trait that gives 3 seconds of vigor and 10 endurance on swap into water make much sense when the core mechanic increases the attunement cooldown by 20 seconds? The answer is no, Karl. No, it doesn’t.

9. Gale Song could stand to have some short amount of protection added to it. Edited: Actually, forget that. Just add an aura to Eye of the Storm so it procs the aura traits. It’s currently the weakest shout, besides Rebound.

10. Tempestous Aria is kind of in a weird place. Vigor and regeneration has so much value in PvP, it’s hard to take it as trait. In PvE, only one of the shouts provides enough value to give up an utility slot for.

11. Rebound is just impractical. The margin of error is so high that it ends up being an AoE aura on a very long cooldown. It would be great if we can scrap it all together and replace it with some kind of elite spec that adds some actual burst damage value to PvE.

12. Stability on shout would be huge. The biggest con I faced when I worked on builds for PvP is my traits and utility choices left me with very little stability, which was pretty bad for a bunker. Facing off against a juggernaut flamethrower engineer who is slowly widdling you down while decapping you constantly while his own stability leaves you with no real way to decap him is a pretty miserable experience.

And that’s about it. All in all, I don’t think it turned out that bad. I think does provide the potential to improve existing builds. However, so much else is way stronger right now, the spec often feels very underwhelming in comparison.

I agree with everything you listed. I think most of us are in consensus here that Tempest doesn’t quite work.

Jski.6180:

Xillllix.3485:

MyPuppy.8970:

I would add that warhorn skins and animations are not that inspiring either. The rest has already been said. Better luck next elite spec.

I’m not going to play the same old build for 2 more years until they make a new elite spec for the elementalist that could only “perhaps” be half-good and 1 new pvp map.

Other games are going to be released very soon.

See that your problem you wanted tempest to replaces ele for you and that is not what elite spec where made to be. Ask for new things for ele tempest is not an ele +1.

Any way WH fills a support roll and if most ppl play ele type class for its dmg then ya it would be the worst wepon for them but the WH is still on an ele type class so to call any wepon the worst on it is a major miss judgment of what your talking about in the first places due to weapons on this class type having at least 6 skills where on other classes type they have 2 to 3. The WH on war or the forces on others etc.. are the worst weapons.

My problem is that for the price of the expansion I expected much more for my class than a rushed elite skill, recycled animations and an undigested concept which implementation is as clunky as unreliable. I wanted something new and flexible, like what the Chronomancer, Scrapper or Reaper have.

If you start crunching dps numbers the first thing you’ll realize is that Tempest is crippling you down. You’re better just equipping water or arcane with fire and air.

MyPuppy.8970:

I would add that warhorn skins and animations are not that inspiring either. The rest has already been said. Better luck next elite spec.

I’m not going to play the same old build for 2 more years until they make a new elite spec for the elementalist that could only “perhaps” be half-good and 1 new pvp map.

Other games are going to be released very soon.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Those same valleys and paths make for superb chke points to fight large forces. I see the new maps as much better at funneling players together for good fights.

We had plenty of great fights yesterday. You get the fights you make. The new map has much more varied results, not every fight is the same.

MadRabbit.3179:

Axialbloom.8109:

- Non-instant Shouts: They interrupt Overloading. Rebound also fails to save you due to this.

I am hoping this is a bug

Nope the lack of synergy between overloads and pretty much every skills (even dodges) is by design and it’s the main thing players have been complaining about since the first beta. If I use tempest I only equip insta-cast skills, everything else I consider it “unusable” .

Used to be good but burning got nerfed (both might and possible stacks) and now it’s worse than every other classes.

Even condi guard is better., and then condi mesmer and engi are just leagues above..

Agrias.9547:

I love my tempest so far, I have no issues with how it works other than maybe the Elite skill. I think a lot of you are trying to get the warhorn viable for PvP, which I have yet to PvP with tempest, but in PvE, it’s the best experience I’ve had thus far out of all the new elite specs.

I don’t understand why you would use Warhorn for PvE when with a scaff you can AoE 6-7k meteors, 10k ice spikes etc at range while at the same time having defensive ccs aoe support and good regen. Even with the Tempest trait line Staff is way better than warhorn.

You can only get 1-shot while overloading so many times until you decide you’re never playing it again.

In PvP I play Scrapper now, it’s just way better; it doesn’t feel like you have to fight against the class mechanic, it all flows together.

For PvE I guess Tempest works sometimes since the AI is really bad.

Yep warhorn for elementalist isn’t worthy of the quality of the rest of this expansion:

Waterfield you have to run after, firefield you cant blast with phoenix and doesnt work with traits, broken boon sharing, air skills that only work in straight lines, no good defensive utility for a offhand, super long cooldown, super low damage, not viable for condi builds, slow animations, delayed hits to target, list goes on and on.

Would have been way better if they listened to the beta feedback.

I think what Stronghold needs is way more maps.
There should be as many stronghold maps as conquest maps to choose from.

kitten that was the best map.

It’s strange that ANet gave the Guardian better traps than the thief or ranger.

I mean in WvW my 15k hp ele just get 1-shot by the traps.

They just need to nerf mesmer. Moa was already broken OP and now they can do it twice…

You can prevent crashes with memory buffers. Somehow Anet let their game crash instead of reducing the amount of effects/textures to prevent the crashes.

I really like it.
All the problems are WvW problems:
- Fix the population problems, merge tiers or find a better system
- Make waypoints show up in towers as soon as you capture them
- Fix the PPT-PPK systems

The new map is amazing I find, last night I had a blast, the fights were much more varied than on the old map.

However it would require 3 things to be perfect:
1- full maps, a better server tier system (merge) or removal of the duplicated maps
2- waypoints in towers and keeps as soon as you capture them
3- people giving it a chance

Jekkt.6045:

i was trying to switch to revenant because i got bored of playing d/d ele for more than a year.. then they nerfed revenant.. so i went back to ele and started playing support tempest. then they removed minstrel amulet :^) i could go back to d/d ele but i’m not gonna do that. i could play celestial tempest but it just doesn’t feel rewarding.

Try Scrapper with 4 gyros and slick shoes, it’s a lot of fun.

So I’m in a GvG guild, we just got our arena and honestly it just looks too small, even for 15v15 GvGs. I’m sure it’s great for 5v5s or 10v10, but not 15s and certainly not 20s.

There is no room to maneuver: range classes will be able to reach you no matter where you are, and AoE classes can cast all over the place when they are in the middle.

It would have been better to make it too large rather than too small.

That said, I thought Anet said there is a new bigger arena coming for guild halls. Is this coming out soon?

Cynical.2097:

With all of the confusion, frustration, and dialogue related to the Temptest, Can we get some development team feedback? It would be nice to hear if they hear the woes or if they believe that we have to ride it out. I think a lot of the frustration is that the community is unsure of the direction. A little transparency goes a long way. If we are told things wont be looked at, then we can begin to grieving process and move on. While things remain up in the air, chaos ensues.

I understand that not all players have conflicts with the traitline; however there are an overwhelming amount of posts about the disappointment of some of the added features and the lack of synergy they provide to the base class. While people continue to work to defend the traitline, I am in the category of finding it lackluster.

tldr: Tell us what you’re thinking so we can find some solid footing.

I don’t think we can expect much when even making a fire field work properly is more complicated than expected. I have over 5000 hours on ele and about 10 hours on engi and I had more success in pvp last night facerolling my skills on Scrapper (with marauder amulet and some random build) than I’ve ever had with tempest. Yeah you can bunker up but there is just nothing new there.

How can they compare an elite that gives you stealth for 30 seconds with another one that basically does nothing beside an aura? Why did the balance team let that one slip through?

Brando.3891:

I love elementalist and i cant stop playing it, but seriously, why did they made such a shameful spec?

I think at the source it’s a lack of communication with the community and the concept artists, perhaps a lack of time invested in the fine-tuning of the skills (rebound specifically and warhorn) and a misunderstanding of how the class is played by the best players.

Perhaps 10% of the elementalist like to play bunker builds, I know I don’t; dagger and focus are better offland.

grahf.7540:

That’s good to hear. Maybe at the same time you can increase the spread speed of Wildfire too? Like many of the WH skills, it’s just so slow.

FYI, this is something we’re aware of and do indeed want to fix. The issue with it is a bit more in-depth, however, so it’s taking a bit longer.

How about 3 seconds of quickness after a successful overload?

I don’t think they’ve designed the warhorn taking into consideration scepter.

Anyway it doesn’t work as it should be.

It is a bit small for the price when you look at the world map, but it’s well made. We got beautiful large guild halls and a new WvW map too.

I would have expected 2-3 more PvE zones and 3-4 more pvp maps.

I think a lot of work went into the little details, like the new guild crafting and the Guild Hall interface, instead of going into the quantity of areas to explore.

So far I would rate it a 7/10, removing 3 points for the lack of pvp content and because the elite for my main’s elite profession, Tempest, feels rushed out and isn’t good at all for anything else than bunkering in pvp.

Stand The Wall.6987:

What I dont understand is why they had to completely remove the old maps. Its really stupid from a business perspective as well as a big middle finger to the creators of the old borderlands. Are they gonna remove each and every kittening borderlands map with each new update? Why cant they have a different borderlands map for each world? Thats so much time and money wasted.

They should have EotM as a third borderland map with Alpine. Then we would have 4 maps instead of 1 and 3 copies of the other. Before doing anything with the new map (which is fine btw, it only needs more waypoints) they should change the server system and PPT/PPK scoring mechanics.

No it’s too bad of a weapon. I unlocked tempest because I main ele and now I’m playing HoT (starting over) on revenant, it has a much better designed elite profession.

raiaknl.6348:

So the Halloween event started, great.
I went to the vendors to see the rewards and had a bug in my head.
The vendor sells an item to craft Gift Of Souls, ok… So… What the hell is gift of souls? How am I supposed to know about it without going to Dulfy, wiki, forum?? The game doesn’t provide me ANY information.
Am I doing the whole event? Is there a path that I can follow so I don’t lose anything from the event? No, it’s just there on LA and I have no idea what’s going on…
Then I see in chat “I’m crafting the event wings”, wait.. You can craft the event wings? It isn’t in the vendors, how am I supposed to know that I can craft some wings with the event theme?
And then after some research I found out that I need to get the recipe to craft the 1st part, then gather some materials to finish the 2nd part and discover the other recipe to let me craft the other part to complete the 1st one, mix it on the MF and get a recipe to craft the last part of the 1st part and discover the super recipe to craft the ultra part to finish the first recipe of the parts… (well, you got the idea of my point).

So, why the game does not provide me informations? Why do I REALLY NEED wiki? I don’t mind using wiki, but give me some info about “this item craft gift of souls”…

Last thing, I thought I would do the event, get some tokens and buy rewards with them, final rewards… Not crafting recipes that I need other 40 recipes to maybe craft a themed wings.
If the vendor sells the wings and it costs 50 tokens, i’ll farm the event and get the wings, but Gw2 is way too complicated on this aspect.

Yes you are right: The instructions in GW2 are really minimal. Just for combat for example, combo fields aren’t explicated anywhere. Crafting is not something GW2 does really well, it’s functional, but often more complex than it should be. If the game included the wiki page for each craft-able item or a step-by-step guide for the hardest items it would certainly help.

Where is great wiki resources online however and dulfy has great guides.

Nageth.5648:

Cool, this is a new one for me. The host is supposed to be coherent! (got it while sitting at a wood node, must have been a confusing tree or something)

Not new for me, lacks coherence all the time.
Did you try textures to low? I know its ugly, but it reduces the crashes a lot.

I think we’ve all been turning in circles pointing at the same problems from different perspective.

I think many knew how innefective it would be when one week we see the Dragon Hunter developer 1-shot Savnir with a few traps, and then a few weeks later another dev getting down to 1 health point with Tempest while fighting Svanir in a never ending battle.

If Tempest is meant to be a “support” role then was is the Tempest designer barely surviving against Svanir? 2 reasons:
1- Support roles aren’t necessary in this game, their value is way below dps and cc roles; the best defense is damage and the rally mechanic
2- Tempest is just overall bad:
- skills have no synergy together to make combos
- the tempest line has less defense and damage modifiers than arcane and water
- the trait line has no synergy with the other trait lines
- warhorn is lacking what make a melee class viable and is too slow
- shouts are not worth replacing a cantrip
- auras are over-estimated
- there isn’t anything new, or anything at all that the class couldn’t do better with the other trait lines
- etc, etc, etc… the list goes on with stuff like the new “Elite” skill and the lack of verticality with warhorn skills.

So I don’t know, a simple demonstration like: “This is what tempest is good for, look how it works” could perhaps have sold us the idea, but as it is right now, once elementalists get pass by the “it’s new” hype and start crushing down numbers as well as pros and cons, they will go back to their old d/d and staff builds.

Is there even will at Anet to improve tempest? The feedback of BW3 was completely ignored anyway so if that is an indication, and judging by how some of the animations and skills feel rushed or recycled, probably not.

Anyway, one thing is certain: we can’t blame the amazing community feedback during the 3 beta weekends.

Hannibal.5739:

There is no such thing as “balance”.
MMORPGs been out for quite some time & in the few yrs I’ve been playing them I’ve never heard of PvP being balanced.

I think that right at the moment when turrets engi were nerfed we had a chance at a balanced esport.
For me that is the turning point where everything balance-related went the wrong way exponentially, starting with the stability changes, to the condi change favoring stats/passive gameplay over skill, the separation of traits and stats, the boon duration nerf and the power creep favoring cheap 1-shot builds with the global stat boost (not all stats were equal in the first place). Then the new trait lines with merged traits and finally the elite professions (which have been made by different people and range from amazing (Reaper) to terrible (Tempest).

It is my opinion that all these changes were made too fast and that they greatly unbalanced the game.

SolarDragon.7063:

Rebound is definitely a lacking elite, it’s basically another shout utility that doesn’t go off for several seconds.

Lacking is a way to say it I guess. I think they need to scrap it, start over again and take their time to make a good elementalist elite for once.

Any idea when is the Guild Hall issue going to get fixed? It’s really game breaking.

Also getting 50% less crashes with textures to low (it still crashes about every hour)

It’s even worse in WvW. I think the core issue is that the Tempest trait line is bad.

Arcane has both better damage and defense
Water has more defense, cleanses and damage modifiers as well
Earth has just the most defenses

I tried Staff Fire-Air-Tempest and Air-Water-Tempest for 2 days. It was kinda “ok”. Then I went back to my old build and wow, what a difference; damage and defense went way up. Arcane is just so much better than Tempest, just the boons on attunements are alone better than the whole tempest line.

Oh so that’s whats happening. I was wondering why nothing was working in the guild halls. How come this wasn’t tested? UI testing is a pretty basic thing.

The source of the problem is the “new” trait system.

Back when we could equip 5 trait lines and multiple adepts/master traits per line the current system would have functioned. Every trait you would unlock would fit somewhere in the line (you could equip 3 adept until the masters and grandmasters are unlocked).

As it is right now, there is no point in equipping your elite profession until you have unlocked all the traits because you will be wasting trait slots. So anyway, unlocking your elite profession can’t feel rewarding that way.

tokyoshoe.6308:

Do we know yet if already invested HP #’s will be recalculated? Or is this just a cost decrease on stuff you have not bought yet.. moving forward?

Doesn’t change anything since they are soulbound. You’ll just end up with extra useless HP. Anyway this means I have to rank up 50-75 times in WvW for all my 7 other class… Still gonna take years…

babazhook.6805:

I was fighting some of those champion bosses at heropoints with others. I was dishing out good damage(10 k andvup per attack) yet found survival fine with those dodges . in each case I was rezzing other classes that had dropped or was the only one that did not drop and run back to the wp to reenter the battle.

The dodges and stealth along with the weapon evades does increase survival significantly over what my non DD thief able to do.

There certainly work to be done but it not all doom and despair.

I had fun playing it today even if I was quite bad at it, contrary to Tempest which hasn’t improved at all since BW3 and still has basic underlying issues preventing it from being good.

Overload experience of today:

About to fight a reaper, start overloading air, noticed I am barely doing any damage even if I am running a marauder amulet with a dmg build, interrupted, then BAM, 12k Gravedigger —> dead

Went to play Chronomancer…
Overloads are such a bad design.

I agree with your suggestions btw.

What happened to Skill/Class balance in this game?
It seemed that at the end 2014 everything was almost perfect, finally we had something that could be considered an eSport.

Now it feels so broken, and it’s not just the new professions, overall condi damage and burst damage was already off the chart. I’m not going to give examples, I think it’s fair to say that many people feel the same way: When a class takes 5-6 seconds to do 10k damage and another does the same or more in half a second something doesn’t add up, specially when the armor type, defensive mechanism and health pool favor the later.

The game competitive balance has been, in my opinion, getting worse and worse in the last 6 months. When people are getting 1-shot all over the place the game is just not fun anymore. If people rage-quit or stop playing pvp then everyone end up losing.

I’ve seen worse balance in other games, but it’s not an excuse to ruin the delicate balanced you had accomplished in the first 2 years of GW2.

It feels like everything has to be re-balanced from scratch.

I think the solution would be:
1- Unlock the elite professions for everyone
2- Make the new zones HP unlock the masteries

Also it really sucks playing a new elite profession in pvp for a few hours, then thinking “ok, gonna go do that in WvW” and then realizing you would need to farm 100 hours or PvE just to keep playing the same build.

The map isn’t that complicated seriously I don’t understand why people are saying that.

The only thing is that it’s big and require some waypoints in the towers as soon as they are captured.