Guild Wars 2

When there is a game such as ESO just on the horizon you don’t nerf your weaker class.
I will not start a thief from scratch because I have too much time invested in my ele. I’ll just “move on” when the time comes and discover another game’s lazy attempt at balancing instead.

hyjaxxx.1584:

something isnt right.

Same here, makes you wonder if they really test these nerf.

Deitydarklight.8403:

Since they nerfed eles the wrong way and pretty much screwed all other niche ele builds…it’s been the same for me since I use bunker ele anyway, it just has lower mobility and I would imagine people would now run earth armor to replace mist form. People are cheering for this nerf to eles but I’ll give it a few weeks before we get a flood of qq from bad players, I guarantee it.
You’ll still get a flood of qq that eles are op from bad players, I guarantee it.

I dont know, I stopped playing the game just now because the ele class [as I perceive it] is broken and I got killed too many times in stupid conditions (like under the new “improved carts”) even with a new toughness build (over 1600 toughness and a mesmer takes over half my health in 1 hit). I’m a strick WvW player, and this is no more fun.

Maybe I’ll give it another go in a week, or two.
Until then: bye everyone, I gave this update a fair 6-7 hours try. But I needed a break to do some work and this nerf over justify it.

Kaleden.9386:

IIRC, we can still use Evasive Arcana and Attunement swap bonuses while Mist Formed – this means that you can still cleanse additional conditions and heal while running away. What I can no longer do is use my healing slot or prepare a Lightning Flash to gain additional ground.

The stun break, mobile invulnerability, and “stability-like” stomping/raising are still good reasons to use this Mist Form. Its usefulness may have been toned down, but it’s still plenty useful.

If ArenaNet intended to hit bunker builds with these changes, then I’d say we have a lot more nerfs incoming because these barely scratch the surface. Learn to adapt or die, it is the Elementalist’s modo after all.

Lightning flash will be the next spell rendered useless. You can see it coming a mile away, what Anet is doing right now is removing skill combos (chained skills) from the elementists bag of tricks. By removing the mistform-utility-heal they broke over 20 possible combos as well as the possibility to heal, finish someone, or use items while in Mistform. They can break a dozen more by nerfing lightning flash if that is what they want, but if they get there I will no longer be playing this game.

Trashbob.2743:

hf…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEml669YJHY

NIIIICE now THAT is proper balance. Just make sure that they cannot heal in Mist-form in case one elementist in the zerg could reach the top, that would be unbalanced.

You also cannot resurrect someone in mist form anymore (that really helped everyone in WvW and keeps the battle running) and you cannot finish someone down in mist form (I loved doing that – removing it is unjustified considering the thief can still finish people while invisible)

Thyophelis.8035:

Thank you very much for your advices. I play the ele since release and have some tricks in my bags. Yes we are spoiled and that s why we were in the top three roamers. You can get away even as a guardian if the enemy doesn t persist to chase you, but if he persists you wont get away, that s why you see 0.2% of the solo roaming population beeing necros and guards. This is what saddens me, we have had a whole aspect of the game removed and the left over roaming classes will be the ones with access to stealth. Closest tower would have been spawntower and i chose the water route in hope they would give up, and actualy got quite some distance between me and my attackers. exept well, the bloody bear… but honestly running always to the nearest tower is not what i understand under a roaming class.

If you hit a rabbit when you use RTL you do not have to wait 40 seconds…
yay! However that will probably get nerfed in the next patch, it’s too overpowered.

Kaleban.9834:

Since Eles now have less mobility than half the classes in the game and no special defenses like stealth or distortion, does that mean we get the Warrior’s health pool and armor value? No? Oh. Well then how are Eles supposed to survive in melee combat with abysmal mobility, no escapes, and even more reduced healing ability?

Anet apparently wants you to make a bunker build, because they do not want you to stay alive the same way you are used too. So you can expect not less but more bunker builds because that’s what everyone is going for now after this disastrous patch.

Personally I’ll just move 10-12% of my power and precision into my health and vitality. It sucks but that’s all I can do, played last night and died much more than usual. So I either stop playing the game or boost my eles health to around 18500 and see if it can stay in a zerg battle and not run away.

It’s funny how with RTL they are supposedly preventing you from running away but with Mist form they are forcing you to run away. Apparently they cannot make up their mind abound it.

One thing is certain in my opinion, they are in a process called normalization. The spells are getting compressed into a limited range of effectiveness. Overall it makes the game less fun to play, because everything end up doing the same thing and only the visual effect is different.

So what have you guys replaced Mist-form with? I tried glyph of storm during a 1 hour huge zerg arrow-cart-farming session; got lots of bags…. yay (I guess that’s what the game is about now and no longer about jumping into a hectic battle).

Kurow.6973:

Since when is it balanced to take on 3-5(sometimes more) people and never have your hp drop below 80%, and freely disengage whenever you feel like it? LMFAO!!!!

You talking about a specific build with maximized stats. Guardians do the same and no one complains. For the rest of staff elementalist playing the game “normally” we have no way to survive anymore besides staying behind everyone else.

Hard to say what their intention was besides having elementists die even more on the WvW battlefield.

r z.7261:

This change should have been for spvp only and left pve and wvw alone.

EXACTLY
they totally broke some balanced class builds for WvW and PvE

I never got a commander badge because I felt too squishy as a staff ele, then after 2 months of playing I realized that I could heal while in mist form (yeah it took that long). For me that was a discovery, I started to move forward in zerg battles instead of playing only defensive and nuking from behind.
I could somehow foresee myself as a possible commander if I maximized my vitality and toughness stats, but now I realize it will only make me endure 1 or 2 more hits. since I would have no way to evade anyone.

They might as well sell commander badges only to guardians, warrior and thieves (thieve can be really great commanders). A commander that takes 5 seconds to cast a meteorshower in front of a zerg and dies after 5 hits is useless besides for what he or she writes in the chat box.

I’m going to get rings that boost vitality, healing and toughness to compensate for mist-form unreliability and will have to take a 5-10% damage output reduction.

Ralathar.7236:

As a staff ele in full rampagers I am one of the last people alive in any confrontation. A fellow guildie is hybrid, not even full bunker, and he is also one of the last alive…but one of the first into the fray. Don’t let people lie to you, ele’s have not had any survivability issues. They have bad players that are not using proper positioning and active damage avoidance. I laugh at every battle I am in the thick of things and outlive all the tougher people around me.

Your may be one of the exceptional players at surviving I can believe that, but lets not pretend everyone that play that class can survive as easily. I played hundreds of hours and have high level equipment and a build I developed. I could stay alive as well until the end of a zerg battle when I was beside the amazing guardian commander we have, and could cast mistform-heal at the worse moment (to heal from stacks of bleeding for example), else I would have died way earlier in the battle. However in reality and in 90% of the case the Elementists die easily, in 1vs1 they rarely survive, and with a staff they have no chance at all.

Now you cast mist-form and you still bleed to death and there is nothing you can do about it for 3 seconds, it’s broken.

Seriously, confusion is the one thing unique to mesmers, I play an ele and I don’t want it nerfed and never felt it was overpowered. So many unnecessary nerf and unjustified boost.

Forzani.2584:

defrule.7236:

Do people not want resistance at all when taking towers?

No. It slows down the karma/xp train.

Perhaps that’s the real reason, they want people to get less rewards in game, to be more dependent on spending real cash on the TP.

I’ve rarely seen some aspects of an update so badly received by the community. Anet has taken a wrong turn here, if they do not listen to their community they will lose it faster than they realize.

It’s a 1 second decision, the instant someone decides it’s enough, that they will no longer boot that game again and drag it in the recycle bin.

I just hope they fix these new exaggerated boost and nerf.

They’ve certainly made the ram pretty useless. Might as well go as far as possible and make cata.

Legacy.7360:

All the D/D Tank builds that were YES… extremely OP when played right are QQing. This is a ScreenShot worth taking.

Those Tanky/burst builds finally got some “balance” put into them. No more chasing a Elementalist every single fight he isn’t winning.

the FOTM is on the /Ranger Forums. They love to see Ele tears.

Gooday.

it’s not because there is a specific build supposedly overpowered that you should just break the class for everyone else playing with a normal balance.

Chimaster.8165:

HUGE BUG: RTL and Mist Form totally useless, been playing this class since launch and now my play style is ruined.

Yes my play-style is ruined as well, and I run a balanced staff ele and sometimes run with d/d.

Ride the lightning is now bugged as well: you have to repress the up arrow on your keyboard to keep moving forward after using it, the glitch it makes is horrible.

Mist form doesn’t remove conditions: therefore your stuck for 3 seconds with stacks of conditions and cannot even use a signet or heal yourself. Basically you move while “invincible” (as your massive health pool of 14k-16k is depleted from these conditions) and die when you come back to physical form.

I don’t know who is responsible for these buggy-broken nerfs but that is just sad. Go read the Elementist class message board and try to find five persons who are happy about the changes of the May patch. You will not find that many.

We are not trolling, what they have done to this class has dramatically decreased our ability to stay alive, and we already had the lowest health and thinnest armor of all classes. If you played an elementalist in PvP or WvW you would know that we were not OP, but the complexity of our class forced us to play very well with what we had. Now they didnt just change the stats on our skills, they changed up how they worked together (or prevented them from working together), therefore breaking our combos.

1- Mistform
Over-Balance aside, Mist-form is now totally broken for the following unique reason:
It stops incoming damage but doesn’t stops conditions. If you are stacked with bleeding a fraction of a second before entering mist form you are stuck losing health for 3 seconds without being able to heal or remove conditions. Therefore Mist-form becomes a death-trap, not helping but placing you in a situation where you see your health fall down and cant do anything about it.
What a mess.

2- Ride the lightning
It’s now broken, not just from a balance perspective but it glitches as well: when the spell is over you have to repress the arrow key on your keyboard else you stop moving. Find another game on the market where holding the up arrow key does not move your character forward….

So, my verdict after complaining, testing, trying builds in PvE and WvW is:
Overall patch = Great
Elementist balancing = total failure which will have grave repercussions on the gameplay and balance of that class.

Rookni.2469:

This is not only a hit in the face for DDs. As a staff ele in WvW I use mistform and heal or utility to reposition myself all the time on the field.

The devs are just throwing out random kitten now not even thinking about balance.

Exactly! Spot on. They broke the mechanic of playing with a staff or even worse commanding with a staff.

I would recommend the following for Anet: get 1 player of each class with a balanced build against Melandru boss and see who dies the most and is the hardest to play. I can guarantee you its the staff elementist.

Kebab.4013:

Uhm… Why do people think that buffing arrowcarts to this extend is going to make it possible for few people to fight big zerg? Who can build most arrowcarts, 10 people or 50?

Just last night a few people from my guild (about 10) farmed badges from a zerg about 4-5 times our size with a minimum amount of carts. You just get them stuck somewhere and shoot away.

With these new arrow carts we may have been able to keep the tower 15-30 minutes more.

Chaosky.5276:

Oh wow, RtL is even worse than I expected.

Scepter/dagger doesn’t even have have reliable access to Swiftness, how am I supposed to get close enough to use my fire attunement skills?

I wanted to make a thread titled: “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo” but then I changed my mind…

They will have to fix this back to how it was eventually.

So this is how you hope to win against Darkhaven… interesting. I guess more people in SF means more badges for us

Khalic.3561:

Makes us much worse at chasing other people who are running away too. It’s OK for them, just not for us.

Are you talking about visible people or invisible people?

Minion of Vey.4398:

Next patch, RTL moves you 600 range on a 1 min cooldown, direction chosen is random.

People complain about ele mobility anyway.

Next patch Firestorm aoe is limited to 1 enemy and has a 8 sec cast duration.

Its probably easier to fix the fact elementists have to keep their inventory open at all time (to move around faster) by making RTL useless than by offering weapon swap out of combat (like the players asked).

Now I just wont bother changing to knifes when approaching a zerg, Ill just keep my staff.

I will not use mist form anymore. I am making a new build with 120 more toughness and 2000 more hp and will use the 3 conditions-removal-skill instead of Mistform. I will do less damage with my staff (we already did less than any other class except when nuking a frozen zerg) but I have no choice. It will just be less fun but perhaps that way it will be possible to join the fight and not just stay behind.

The only thing that could compensate for these nerf would be to give us a weapon swap ability. What they’ve done is mostly remove features of the game, it’s not balancing in my opinion. It’s extremely short sighted. The impact of this will be that many eles are just going change their build and boost healing vitality and toughness to compensate for the removal of mistform-healing in a zerg battle.

Arcane shield is gone in less than 1 sec in a zerg battle and next thing your immobilized and dead.

Talking about WvW here:
There is no right time to heal when just standing there, we already have about 66% the health you have and die in 2-3 hits and we always die first when we are not behind.

The problem with this nerf is that it doesn’t affect stats, it affects the core of the playing mechanics. Now all we can do is hide behind, or do more bunker builds instead of balancing stats. They are breaking their game.

The point is that if you played the ele with balanced stats (staff or d/d), you pretty much relied on Mist form or healing in any zerg battle (I do), else your dead in 2 hits.

Also against a thief: your hit from an invisible source and lose 66% of your health – Mistform-heal, counter.

Now the ele is kitten against stealth thief even more, and useless in zerg battles unless hiding behind everyone else. They really kittened it up good.

Well they’ve made healing pretty useless since by the time its cast you’ve lost twice as much health.

They are just encouraging more bunker builds, and it’s precisely what I’m going to consider right now.

They’ve even reduced the range…. kitten.

They took a cool skill and made it crap disregarding our playing style and habits.

This is an horrible update for the ele class. I totally hate it.

- I always healed and use utilities in mist form, it’s one of the things the ele could do that was “cool”.

- I got a focus only to stop siege projectiles, now its useless.

-RTL nerf… wtf are the developers thinking? There is other thing to improve before nerfing that.

Basically all these nerf are aimed at stopping a specific d/d build, and have been made by disregarding people who play the class with balanced stats, that use a staff and that have developed certain playing strategy (like the mist form casts).

No thanks for this kitten.

Life.1576:

Slomo.1029:

Ok I Did It.2854:

All these changes and yet Ele’s will still beable to Vapor Form through the portals into keeps/towers etc when in downed state and cannot be attacked, this is the only class that has the ability to escape downed into a safe location. Are you going to boost the others classes so we can escape into a portal to avoid death too????

Holy poo, calm down a bit.
Anet is really trying to make all classes the same to prevent any interesting compositions in groups or different options of playing your own class.
RTL with 40s cd1 if you dont hit anything? Better place a TON of ambient creatures around on the WvW maps. And take every single skill from thief and warrior that can help their mobility! And take the rush from the snow leopard too!
Better take the support out of the staff ele too! Oh wait, he cant remove more than 1 condition with his 45s cd water field!
At least its a buff to necros and engies.

Confusion nerf is ok, retaliation nerf not needed in any kind or form. Warrior new super-trait wont find any use because of the placement.

Guildies were calling me crazy when I said ele will get really boring soon and I rather try to lvl a guardian now. Cant do anything wrong with a guardian! Never in this game!

This update is really putting eles (and i mean here staff eles) at a disadvantage.
I am not a very advanced elementalist and have only recently started playing elementalist/GW2 but mist+heal when it comes to fights is the only thing that helps me stay alive – otherwise where is the fun in running all the way back from a wp just to get wiped again? Aoe’s are capped at 5 which makes things even harder to strive in fights in general. Staff eles are like paper and they dont need to be degraded in their defense.
Feel free to prove me wrong but if that’s the scenario then we should all switch to thiefs and rangers….

They broke staff ele for good. It’s a shame I spent so much money in this game and now they hit with a nerf right at the core of my playing style (mistform-heal). Actually Mist-form and heal are part of the core mechanic of playing an elementist. By nerfing that Anet is telling everyone that they don’t know what they are doing.

About the Elementist changes:
I profoundly disagree with changing something that is at the core of playing a class. And you did just that to my class (I play mostly with a staff and ONLY heal in mist form – Else the hit you take cancels the heal and your dead just after wasting the cast).

The elementist health is already inferior to every other class (they usually get killed in 1-2 hits), their casting times are slow as hell, and now they cant even heal without running away from battle. I know you made this game but now your getting way over your head breaking things. Do you realize what your doing?

Please Explain why:
A thief can become invisible for many seconds and kill you while invisible with 2 fast hits, and that is fine…
BUT: The ele taking 5 seconds to cast a spell that does half as much damage and healing while inv (but visible) for a much shorter amount of time is considered overpowered.

You are actually making your game less and less balanced. Thank you for the effort, but no-thanks for the result there.

Secondly: Focus stopping siege projectiles… well why not? the CD is already slow enough, at most you can stop 1 treb hit if your lucky. I got a focus for that specific situation, but now its considered “cheating” or a unwanted feature?!
I don’t get it, someone in your office had a nightmare about a swarm of eles chaining the block-projectiles skill? It doesn’t happen in reality.

This is a kittening disaster.
Impossible to kitten up a class more than that.

How the hell is the ele supposed to heal now? This means we will have to run away from battle pretty much as soon as it starts.

VERY disappointing, the ele is already getting destroyed and the first to die in pretty much every situation.

Gab Superstar.4059:

KinkyGiraffe.4123:

Gab Superstar.4059:

Did… Did IoJ just golem rush a full paper SM where there was absolutely no one defending it?

O.o

….

O.o

Yes, the same golems that were going to be used on durios and bravost until silly ol’ dh decided to push mendons so the golems were used to rush a fully upgraded jerrifers and knock down the 2 rear gates of lowlands keep STILL FIGHTING FOR THIS KEEP

EDIT: The whole time we were hitting DH, DR the little sneaks go and take our hills and hit Ogrewatch or Veloka…even after we saved your corner by hitting DH hard and letting you lot have SM tsk tsk DR tsk tsk

You didn’t “let” us have SM. We went in there and took it from you right as IoJ were about to cap it.

I was there the whole time defending SM, I am certain DR attacked first. When we wiped the first wave of them and pushed them out the broken wall IoJ came rushing our gate up north and broke in.
We had to split our forces in two.
I remember casting a firestorm in the Lord room on both IoJ and DR. At that point DH had already decided to flank you and take back SM later. Then I crashed…

This is horrible. The game ALAYS crash in battles around the Guildmaster when you take a Keep of SM, or in large zerg battles.

How is that supposed to be cool?

Since the culling update world vs world crashes all the time on mac.
Could you confirm that you are aware of this problem please, since it’s been almost a month?

DstBits error must be fixed asap

Thanks!

Any news on a fix for this? We mac player are left in the dark with a version that crash all the time in WvW.

Well done DR and IoJ, in all honesty it looks like DH had no strategy for this reset (besides the “everyone runs to SM”) and we had to learn the hard way like last week.

The lack of coordination on our server tonight is impressive.
But we will get back on top eventually…

If we played like tonight on a higher tier we would never be able to recover from it.

Game always crash since culling patch on mac in WvW.
It didn’t crash before the culling path, now its unplayable.

I’m very unhappy about this. Every large battle ends with a crash to desktop and a wait in queue.

On a reset night this is particularly bad (tonight I already crashed 4 times to desktop), it has more impact on the outcome than any sort of nerf or buff. please fix this as soon as possible, it’s been almost a month of the game crashing ceaselessly.

The WvW frequent crash seems to be animation related…

The fact that now pretty much every commander will say “stack on me”, which is in theory an exploit of the AoE limit, shows how much developers have messed it up by limiting the AoE target amount. They wanted to nerf something, result: they broke the WvW strategic aspect of having area damage and created another exploit to be used by people.

In fact, the zerg who stack the has statically more chance to win a WvW battle, while it should be the opposite. Way to break your own game while also breaking the classes affected by this.