Guild Wars 2

The best part is being able to trade around the agony resist from class to class. That should also drive down the absurd +10 agony infusion prices as there will be less demand for them now that people can share their AR gear among toons.

The issue is that in the beginning warriors weren’t even that popular. It was 1.5 years of neglect and letting the guardians and warriors stew in their dominance that has led to such a saturation of those classes.

Rangers and classes of the sort, as well as necromancers are among some of the most popular classes, yet in their state Anet was complicit in the dwindling of the class’s population.

Engineers and Necromancers in particular are a whole new level of class neglect. How can you implement a power necro, who’s the only class with a noncleaving melee weapon, whose single target melee weapon does less damage than others classes melee weapons that CLEAVE, and they get stuck with the only single target ranged weapon with a range limit of 600, a horrendous autoattack only rivaled by ranger’s mainhand axe autoattack, and virtually no group support that stands out from other offerings. Their core mechanic, conditions, are less effective on boss mobs so a necromancer applying weakness or blind or chill to a boss is still not as effective as a guardian applying protection and aegis/regen on the group.

Sundar.1735:

Zenith.7301:

I spent the last hour looking for a fractal 50 group that didn’t post “Heavies Only” or needed 2 guardians.

Not that anet gives a kitten . This warrior/guardian supremacy has lasted for 1.5+ years and they haven’t done crap to fix it.

Part of the problem is that many players live in denial and pretend that the heavy armor professions aren’t overpowered (in PvE) as they have in this thread. Guardians are basically the monks of this game as far as elite level areas are concerned. The more guardians you have in a team at high level fractals the easier it becomes, the fewer you have, the harder it becomes.

But it’s not just guardians. Warriors too. After 2 guardians you are bringing 2 warriors and a mesmer, and even then you can eliminate the mesmer and go with 3 warriors.

And the kicker is that after 2 hours I finally found a group composed of 1 ranger, 1 warrior, 1 guardian, 1 mesmer, and 1 ele (me). We breezed through the 50 fractal faster than some of those heavies only groups I’ve had (where im the only light armor and they grudgingly can’t be bothered to kick me, though some still do).

The problem is that people like me, who also have a guardian but prefer an ele, are not being considered at all! Our skill isn’t even being tested for the first fractal and they can kick after if there’s failure on my part!

Nope, straight out ban on non-guardians and warriors, and if I am to start my own 50’s group, guess which groups fill up before mine, if mine fills at all? You guessed it, the group started by a guardian or warrior.

Hell, I’m a freaking conjure ele, the highest DPS class in the game, and I have a hard time getting into PuG’s. It’s why I haven’t even bothered on my ranger, because it would just be getting kicked left and right.

And guess what, that ranger in our group was pretty good. The water field with a long duration is good, the spirit is good. If you need to range bosses like mossman or archdivinert temporarily, it is that ranger who’s pulling the highest damage, and his melee damage is good. His pet can block projectiles, and with his short cd knockback he burns through defiance stacks pretty quick to get in interrupts when necessary, making bosses like the ettin really easy to lock down.

I mean, ranger is still full of issues, but it’s not a huge setback.

And then there’s the issue that even if I can play my guardian and warrior if I can’t be allowed into any party for hours as an ele, the agony system at 50 does not let me.

70 AR is freaking expensive. I don’t have ascended armor, so it cost me about 160 gold total to bump from 55 to 70. On a single toon because AR for some reason is account bound! AR alone is a complete anti-alt system and for higher level fractals you’re locked out to one toon, and if you picked the wrong class you’re going to be spending significantly more time looking for a group than a warrior or guardian.

The new lv50 fractal is also absolute garbage compared to those lv 48/50+ dailies. Prior to the fractal update if you knew how to dodge agony attacks, you could forego AR. But the lv50 fractal does an intermitten agony pulse in combat that completely negates the skill factor in making AR gear optional. AR becomes mandatory at lv50.

I spent the last hour looking for a fractal 50 group that didn’t post “Heavies Only” or needed 2 guardians.

Not that anet gives a kitten . This warrior/guardian supremacy has lasted for 1.5+ years and they haven’t done crap to fix it.

Dirame.8521:

Zenith.7301:

Dirame.8521:

Zenith.7301:

Dirame.8521:

Muchacho.2390:

Ugruk.4069:

This grandmaster traits were designed with pve in mind, dont get your hopes up that they will change them.

One of the devs even said that the mesmer one that gives distortion when you kill a target is good for pvp because “teamfights” topkek

Well the necro got some gm that are purely pvp oriantated. Boon removel is useless in pve so is regerneration in ds…

Regeneration in DS is very useful in PvE. That extra survivability is always nice.

Survivability in top end PvE comes from guardian aegis and reflects, not regen, ever.

Mobs do such high hits that regen will never allow proper recovery, so the best defense is to kill them as fast as possible, and reflecting those 5k+ hits back on them is the current best defensive tool.

Unholy Sanctuary is simply not good.

Regen in Death shroud though? Literally, your main health isn’t taking any hits so it works.

Um, 2 hits from a high fractal mobs pretty much depletes your life force pool.

I don’t think you understand how hard high level PvE mobs hit. Let’s put it this way: harder than a warrior, and necro has no access to vigor so you don’t have too many dodges.

New traits will allow you to gain toughness in DS so that 2 hit may turn into 3 and its DS it’s supposed to take hits for you so get 2 shot out of DS as long as you stay alive is a good thing. Your DS just did it’s job.

Yay 1 extra hit for 30 trait points in toughness at the cost of significant damage loss that would mean far less hits taken from boss since you killed him a lot faster.

I think it should be pretty obvious to you why the PvE meta is damage oriented, not defensive oriented. All you need to survive is a guardian pumping wall of reflection/shield of absorption+aegis+prot and everyone just zergs the mob down.

It’s why nobody wants a necro.

Azukas.1426:

What aspect of the thief do yall not wanna nerf???

PW is bad because of the same reason Warriors are bad.

IQ requirement is at the level of an ape

Aspects of the thief I don’t want to nerf. The boonstrip. The teleports. The boon sharing on steal. Shadow Refuge rezzing. Venomshare for team fights.

You know, crap that you can’t abuse like stealth from BP, spammable backstab through blinds and blocks, spammable Blurred Frenzy that hits twice as hard and stuns, ridiculous burst damage.

Nerf the reset capabilities of the thief. Nerf the stealth access. Nerf the burst damage. Buff their sustain and group utility.

Wintel.4873:

Zenith.7301:

I don’t think he needs you lecturing him about that; he’s likely got far more hours than you on the ele, and I know him to have done plenty of fractal work.

A boss in fractals will barely be standing reliably on all your lava fonts anyways, and this was a comparison about AUTOATTACKS. I don’t think he denies therelative strength of the fire staff skillset.

The point is that an ele needs to dedicate over 50 traitpoints, be made of toilet paper, and not even use his weapons in favor of conjure utilities to even start competing with classes who have a much lower barrier of entry to high DPS.

That is, if you’re not using conjures, you aren’t competing with Warriors or Guardians. Which are pretty much functional off the gate, and the advantage of a LH ele over a warrior isn’t that high when we take into account DPS contribution from banners and the warrior himself, while the ele virtually gives up every thing to just do competitive DPS.

His attunements are completely locked out while you use conjures, and if you need to support your group with heals or fire fields from your mainhand weapons, it means losing/not using conjures in that time frame and essentially doing significantly less DPS while all the warrior and guardian need to do to help their team immensely is some quickly dropped ground utilities while they continue to do their average DPS rotations with their own weapons.

Knock it off with the “got more hours on Ele” assumptions, you don’t know me and I don’t care who he is, stop speaking on his behalf.

Would be extremely helpful if this game had DPS meters to give any remote idea of how classes perform compared to each other instead of people just throwing around vague hints.

OK, so you think that after 1.5 years nobody has figured out the DPS potential of classes. Cool.

The point is, pointing out Lava Font in a discussion about autoattacks contributes nothing. On a moving opponent or something like Archdiviner, where he’s constantly chasing after someone, your major source of sustained damage is the autoattacks.

Wintel.4873

Umm fireball is balanced around having lava font + flame burst on the target….throw in meteor and it completely DESTROYS lightning whip spam in dps.
Lightning whip’s main advantage is mobility, much easier to hit moving mobs with. But on a stationary mob nothing beats staff fire or might-stacked S/D.

D/D is never a good option for PvE unless you are solely after mobile DPS and handling like a melee class (which zero survivability to back it up).

I don’t think he needs you lecturing him about that; he’s likely got far more hours than you on the ele, and I know him to have done plenty of fractal work.

A boss in fractals will barely be standing reliably on all your lava fonts anyways, and this was a comparison about AUTOATTACKS. I don’t think he denies therelative strength of the fire staff skillset.

The point is that an ele needs to dedicate over 50 traitpoints, be made of toilet paper, and not even use his weapons in favor of conjure utilities to even start competing with classes who have a much lower barrier of entry to high DPS.

That is, if you’re not using conjures, you aren’t competing with Warriors or Guardians. Which are pretty much functional off the gate, and the advantage of a LH ele over a warrior isn’t that high when we take into account DPS contribution from banners and the warrior himself, while the ele virtually gives up every thing to just do competitive DPS.

His attunements are completely locked out while you use conjures, and if you need to support your group with heals or fire fields from your mainhand weapons, it means losing/not using conjures in that time frame and essentially doing significantly less DPS while all the warrior and guardian need to do to help their team immensely is some quickly dropped ground utilities while they continue to do their average DPS rotations with their own weapons.

the sober ninja.6539:

Zenith.7301:

So cry me a river about thieves’ survivability when power rangers and engineers have significantly less survival and none of the effective burst.

Lol engineers have survivability issues? What game are you playing?

POWER ENGINEERS POWER ENGINEERS POWER ENGINEERS.

NOT ALL ENGINEERS ARE CONDI BUNKERS WITH PISTOL SHIELD AND 2K+ TOUGHNESS

Prysin.8542:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, no. Eagle Eye is not a damage upgrade. If you’re hitting people at 1500 range, they don’t know how to sidestep.

5% is a direct damage upgrade. Bow damage does in increase/scale after the third step (1000+). Therefore, the range is a bonus, the 5% is the real damage increase. And that 5% applies to ALL ranges, not just 1500 (1800 cuz bugged targeting system).. It is by far a damage upgrade.

In PvP burst has a far greater value than a 5% damage increase, and spotter is a good crit% increase, that also applies to your group. It’s not even a contest.

If you want to be selfish and essentially be a crappier ele with no group support, by all means go eagle eye and snipe single targets among the zerg. I’m sure that will have real impact on teamfights.

Phadde.7362:

@ Zenith: I’ll agree to disagree; It doesn’t seem like I was able to make you understand what I meant, and I don’t believe that a further discussion will lead us anywhere.

Edit: I noticed that you mention Conjure… Which build do you play? I love Evasive Arcana and everything that it brings to the table, and I actually barely ever play without it. Rest of the Traits is mostly spend in Air magic.

Perhaps we’re different views because we play different builds?

Evasive Arcana is not a DPS build.

We’re talking at least 25 points in fire, 20 in water for 10% extra damage avbove 90% health and 20% extra damage on vulnerable targets, and at least 10 in air for bolt to the heart. Another 10 on earth for the extra damage when within 600 range from target.

I’d like to see how can you just autoattack people with at best 15k hp as they autoattack you back for similar amounts. Because thief sword auto easily hits for 2.5-3k autoattacks, and they can lock you down with pistolwhip.

Dirame.8521:

Zenith.7301:

Dirame.8521:

Muchacho.2390:

Ugruk.4069:

This grandmaster traits were designed with pve in mind, dont get your hopes up that they will change them.

One of the devs even said that the mesmer one that gives distortion when you kill a target is good for pvp because “teamfights” topkek

Well the necro got some gm that are purely pvp oriantated. Boon removel is useless in pve so is regerneration in ds…

Regeneration in DS is very useful in PvE. That extra survivability is always nice.

Survivability in top end PvE comes from guardian aegis and reflects, not regen, ever.

Mobs do such high hits that regen will never allow proper recovery, so the best defense is to kill them as fast as possible, and reflecting those 5k+ hits back on them is the current best defensive tool.

Unholy Sanctuary is simply not good.

Regen in Death shroud though? Literally, your main health isn’t taking any hits so it works.

Um, 2 hits from a high fractal mobs pretty much depletes your life force pool.

I don’t think you understand how hard high level PvE mobs hit. Let’s put it this way: harder than a warrior, and necro has no access to vigor so you don’t have too many dodges.

nGumball.1283:

Zepidel.5349:

No it IS pay to not grind. I was fine with the cash shop at the beggining, becuase gold gave you no stat advantage, running dungeons gave you exiotic gear in a very respecatable amount of time to discard worries that being able buy gold with real money to buy full exiotic gear was a problem.

However with ascended gear the grind for a person starting with no gold is…. absolutely immense, its a freaking mountain to climb compared to the hill that exiotic gear was.

Thats when the real money to gems conversion became Pay to Not Grind.

I will never EVER obtain a full set of ascended gear simply by doing things I like (End game dungeons / SPvP ) , my chances of winning the powerball are higher.

There are two ways to get ascended gear.

1. Pay real money
2. Spend HUNDREDS of hours in a champ train praying to god almighty i get decent drops, and maybe lightning could strike twice and a precursor could drop.

so… pay real money… or spend hundreds of hours doing something I’d rather not do. That’s not playing the game that’s grinding and you know it.

That’s how MMOs are though. The only option is to make the gear obtainable using different methods though all will end up being time-consuming, being considered grind.

No, playing the game is not grind. Raiding is not grind. It requires constant skill and execution.

Grinding in a champion zerg train requires neither, and in no other mainstream MMO are you able to get legendaries without playing the game, rather just buying them outright via an auction house.

Phadde.7362:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, I don’t know what you’re smoking. Mathematically, healing signet is the highest constant healing throughput ingame. If you’re having survival troubles on your warrior with a 18k hp base pool, a built in dodge on your greatsword attack, and a heal that actually passively outheals active cast heals with a cooldown, you’re doing something seriously wrong.

You just think ele survival is good because either your blind spam works on trash or you’re hiding behind a reflect wall. Once you are facing bosses whose hits you have to eventually tank if you don’t range, like Mossman or Archdiviner, you’ll actually know what survivability means.

“If you’re having survival troubles on your warrior”
Definitely not, but (i.e.) if your group wipes with you still on your feet, suddenly your survivability becomes a dire issue.

Have you ever played an Elementalist? (Or more importantly, @ 80 for a few dozen hours?) You’re making a brittle case.

Um, I play berserker conjure meta, I don’t need you to lecture me on the kind of cheese, lame tactics you use to disguise the fact that your innate survival is zero.

Again, just because your survivability gets carried by a guardian and blind spam on mere trash that is not blind immune, does not mean ele survival is alright.

But by all means shows us a video of how well your ele melees a high fractal, 50 preferably archdiviner or mossman without guardians spamming aegis/reflect on your sorry kitten . Ditto for dredge.

P.S. Everyone’s survivability becomes a dire issue when their group dies in any situation when mobs can hit you for 4k an autoattack and bosses even more.

Yeah, no. Eagle Eye is not a damage upgrade. If you’re hitting people at 1500 range, they don’t know how to sidestep.

Dagins.5163:

Yeah, buffing everything will surely make build diversity, just like devs did with warrior. Everything works as long as you have a healing signet and 20-30 points in defense. But this is called power creep and it has nothing in common with balance.

So long as 10k base health exists and there are classes who can take out over 60% of your health in one hit, ele will NEVER skip 20 points in water.

So long as classes can sustain hits that easily take 1/4 to 1/3 of your health pool, and you don’t have stealth/blind spam or 8k more base HP and supremely more healing alongside short cd CC (hi warrior skills), eles will never make it back into the meta with any builds that isn’t valkyrie/PVT.

Whine all you want about power creep, but their nerfing of warrior healing signet by 8% and leaving Cleansing Ire untouched clearly shows that there’s a higher chance of bringing classes up to speed than knocking others down.

And let’s be honest, not even at the beginning of the game was ever an ele build not containing 20 water ever viable. Ele berk builds were never consistently taken, and all the OP builds were either valk abusing boon stacking for high fury uptime (which was nerfed), or PVT/Celestial cantrip dagge/dagger in WvW.

But by all means complain about what hard time other classes have and that with enough nerfing eles might start investing in a traitline that isn’t water and arcane just so that they don’t get 2 shot and the only skills allowing them from not being 2 shot are on 75+ sec cd’s. Even at 50 sec cd an ele will never be viable in a teamfight as a squishy class you get trained to the ground, particularly by thieves and warriors, far more often than every 50 secs all the while necros and engineers are also peppering you with condi bombs.

They nerfed ranger endurance regen, while feline grace stayed untouched. Feline Grace still stacks with vigor and provides thieves with a metric ton of dodges.

Same with warrior. Signet of Stamina still exists and now warriors can actually dodge more than rangers.

Power based rangers only have 5k more hp than thieves but have none of the dodging, garbage defense, and none of the burst.

So cry me a river about thieves’ survivability when power rangers and engineers have significantly less survival and none of the effective burst.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

You seriously think you will land frostbow 5 on any living being? And what do you do after a frostbow 4 and your opponent is alive? Pelt them with frostbow arrows for 400 damage? Tickle them with earth attunement autoattacks?

Celtic Lady.3729:

Technically, as long as you can convert gold to gems and vice versa, nothing is P2W since you can get gold by playing the game. So they can put anything in the store they want.

You get gold from playing the auction house or running the zerg champion train.

If you rely on fractals and dungeons for income, your gold increase comes at a glacial pace.

Just to buy a stack of 5 transmutation stones I’m looking at around 12 dungeon runs.

A fractal 48 daily gives 1 gold 30 silver alongside a couple of mats that might bump you to 2-3 gold total for a 1+ hour run.

Gold income is not done by playing the game. It’s done by farming it or playing virtual trader.

WvW certainly doesn’t get you gold to get ascended crafting done in any reasonable amount of time.

Phadde.7362:

Zoid.2568:

Elementalist still have the worst survival and they are a light armor class. My main is a Warrior and i have a Necro, Ele and Ranger alt at 80. My Warrior is superior in PvE content.

As someone who plays all of these professions except the ranger (and really seeks to become as good as possible at them), the Elementalist have the best survivability, once you’ve spent a relatively vast amount of time actually learning the profession to its fullest.

The Warrior doesn’t even come close once you’re “fairly good” at the Elementalist. Problem is, that even that takes quite a lot of time.

Yeah, I don’t know what you’re smoking. Mathematically, healing signet is the highest constant healing throughput ingame. If you’re having survival troubles on your warrior with a 18k hp base pool, a built in dodge on your greatsword attack, and a heal that actually passively outheals active cast heals with a cooldown, you’re doing something seriously wrong.

You just think ele survival is good because either your blind spam works on trash or you’re hiding behind a reflect wall. Once you are facing bosses whose hits you have to eventually tank if you don’t range, like Mossman or Archdiviner, you’ll actually know what survivability means.

Dirame.8521:

Muchacho.2390:

Ugruk.4069:

This grandmaster traits were designed with pve in mind, dont get your hopes up that they will change them.

One of the devs even said that the mesmer one that gives distortion when you kill a target is good for pvp because “teamfights” topkek

Well the necro got some gm that are purely pvp oriantated. Boon removel is useless in pve so is regerneration in ds…

Regeneration in DS is very useful in PvE. That extra survivability is always nice.

Survivability in top end PvE comes from guardian aegis and reflects, not regen, ever.

Mobs do such high hits that regen will never allow proper recovery, so the best defense is to kill them as fast as possible, and reflecting those 5k+ hits back on them is the current best defensive tool.

Unholy Sanctuary is simply not good.

1) Base HP raised to mesmer’s 15k. This will make the 20+ points in water truly optional.

2) Reduce cd of Arcane Shield and Erath Armor to 30-35 seconds. Do the same same probably for Mist Form.

The glyph and signet utilities need better defensive options. The Earth Signet in addition to rooting could grant protection for a short time. The Air Signet could cause weakness in addition to blind.

The glyphs just plain need help because most of them are just bad, especially the summoned elementals and elemental storm.

A lot of the ele utilities like the glyph utilities could use a halving in cd, as could signets.

Eles by virtue of their squishiness need much more constant access to stun breakers and blocks if they are to compete.

3) Allow healing in Mist Form again. It’s pretty absurd that a warrior stance allows them to be immune while still attacking and being able to heal, but the squishier low HP class suddenly is banned from it.

4) Spread condi removal outside cantrips. Both the glyphs, signets, arcane utilities, and conjures should each have a stun break, and a condi removal option.

5) Make base Attunement cd 10 seconds, and change the arcana line to simply buff the effectiveness of lingering attunements. Make lingering attunements baseline.

6) Reduce the cd of Fire Grab, retool arcane utilities so that ele burst capability is not tied to them. Make it so Fire Grab always crits on targets with burning.

Arcane utilities should function like any other utilities, changing up playstyle not just being a substitute for the innate lack of burst on ele weaponskills for a squishier class.

7) Cap boon duration. Part of what made the ele OP before was the sheer boon stacking. You can raise ele base survival and damage output because by capping boons people no longer need to cheese out arcana and boon stack runes to actually function.

8) A warrior should never be healing passively for far more squishier classes need to activate abilities for. Hell, Signet of Restoration requires constant skill usage to still be only a fraction of effectiveness, and Ranger’s Troll Unguent, a delayed heal with a cast time and downtime, still heals for less.

9) Buff elementalist autoattacks, especially for scepter. The only remotely viable high sustain build with some tankiness that can go in the frontlines in WvW is a dagger/dagger cantrip variant. This really kills spec diversity when your only weapon that can do sustained damage is a dagger/dagger build unless you have the luxury of sitting behind a zerg spamming fire staff (note, fire staff’s sustained damage drops to crap once anybody, especially mele, pressures you).

I think that with these few changes elementalists would actually consider the other traitlines.

A lot of people have been trying to change up traitlines, but I feel they miss the point of why the other traitlines are not taken.

And the simple answer is that without 20+ trait points in water the ele just dies. Miserably.

People also are forced into arcana because the ele does no sustained damage when he’s not attunement swapping because ele autoattacks are really bad in general for most attunements. Moreover, several key survival skills for the ele without arcana have longer cd’s and overexpose the ele, or his offensive/cc skills are locked out when needed.

Really, just play with 12 sec cd attunement cooldowns. It’s really bad and it feels like forever because if I switched out of fire and air, and I’m stuck with water and earth, their offensive capabilities are so terrible that my pressure just dropped to 0 for well over 10 seconds, which is plenty of time for opponents to recover and reset on you.

Something in particular needs to be done for the attacks on water and earth attunements so the ele can maintain pressure. For water in particular the autoattacks just need to be increased by a lot, especially staff and scepter. For earth either more condi application or the base damage needs to be increased.

Rather than look at traits maybe we should be kittening about the fact that our highest damage weapon, the mainhand dagger, does less damage than warrior mainhand axe and doesn’t even cleave.

A single target weapon should do significantly higher damage compared to a cleave weapon.

PW is a Blurred Frenzy on steroids that also happens to be a spammable stun.

One more thing a thief can do better than a mesmer.

Well, norn cultural would work if male norns weren’t this deformed tall dwarf with slumped shoulders and skinny legs with a weird huge gap between them at the crotch area. Male norn proportions are just wrong.

So your best bet is male human, with either braham’s armor or the pitfighter/gladiator armor.

I think fireball also has no cleave limit though whereas lightning whip is only 3 targets max?

I just wish they made all attunements have good autoattack damage, especially the wimpy water and earth ones (though fire is still pretty bad outside staff).

The whole appeal of the ele was the thought of variety, yet in practice what we got is cycle out of all elements outside fire as soon as you can, and even then fire’s kinda meh outside the staff so people bring you for the conjure cheese like FGS on a wall or abusing frost bow for the #4 on large hit box targets.

I miss my gw1 ele.

Nimbl.8957:

Don’t think anyone said d/p want viable or even the build wasn’t. But you aren’t going to 1v3+ with it even if you pop your signets early enough to still have them a second time and you have lyssa for buffs. Not against good players at least

FYI standing in blinding powder does nothing for you if you get a c&d steal backstab combo, the thief will not be blind I hit it every time. Also c&d hits if you know how to do it properly even without steal it may be avoided from time to time but I have no issues with it. And I still hit 18k back stabs without 15-18 stacks of might granted not as often as I would with those stacks.

Anyway to return the thread to the topic in the subject line yeah, nerds inbound adjust or fail basically is what it boils down to.

Edit: spelling

You don’t just passively sit on BP. After each backstab attempt you drop it on your target, and they’ll be blinded. BP also doesn’t just blind when you drop it. You fire a projectile that blinds your opponent on top of dropping the blinding field itself.

I don’t know how you’re hitting CnD because the tell is pretty obvious, even on asura. If you’re hitting CnD, it’s because you’re catching people unaware.

There is a reason why D/D thieves disappeared and D/P thieves quickly took their place.

Rage.2017:

We are talking about wvw and not about spvp, these are completly different worlds and spvp is not affected by the nerf. A d/p trickery glassy thief in wvw is a 1/2hit for any decent thief.

You are kidding me, right? The 4 sec revealed time is on spvp, not on WvW. If anything the spvp thief struggles more to make his build work.

A D/P trickery thief still has hidden killer. What you don’t have is 30 in the power line, just 10 for the poison. Average D/P trickery build cruuk style has 15k HP. It’s not a 1 shot.

And it’s hard to believe reading all this “what if you mess up/something goes wrong talk” from the dude playing D/D. Because as far as I’m concerned, if you miss the CnD, you’re dead. Any decent engineer or warrior will walk all over you.

D/P is superior to D/D on all accounts except some sad gimmick highest cnd>backstab combo that anyone should have learned to dodge by now.

By all means go into the Thief forums and try convincing anyone that your D/D is better than D/P.

Nimbl.8957:

So riddle me this. What are you going to do when you get stunned? No stun break, so you better never make a mistake. And your 15-18 stacks rely on signets and refuge + rolling. Not saying it doesn’t work but in order to do it you become a 1 trick pony.

You do realize one of the signets (infiltrator, traited for lowered cd) is a really short cd stunbreak shadowstep, and that you can pop the signets in advance, getting the might ahead of time, and the signet has recharged by the time you do your backstab combo? And that the build makes use of the lyssa for the stability and much of my time spent outside revealed is inside a black powder?

The refuge is there for extra beefed up backstabs if im facing a bunker. You can pull off at least 2 backstabs with high might stacks easy, and if your target isn’t a bunker they are dead.

It’s not a 1 trick pony. It’s a spec built for patience and making your hits count. Cruuk was a rank 60+ player in spvp you don’t get to rank 60+ by playing one trick ponies.

I know it is hard imagining that anything besides the usual shadowstep+shadowrefuge+signet of shadows can exist, but I assure you there are plenty of viable D/P variants, and this one can abuse more defensive stat allocation because of its might stacking capability.

Heizero.9183:

Stone Heart will be a very strong GM trait. You don’t have to camp earth for it to be effective.

For example: Fighting a warrior, you get bulls charged, and he is about to lay down the 100b hurt on you. You swap to earth attunement while you are laid out on the ground and make his entire attack nearly useless.

The same can be said for most big spikes. If you get into a tight spot against a big burst build Stone Heart is your get out of jail free card.

I don’t understand how you don’t see the merit in this.

Um, because if you go 30 points that far into a stinker line like earth, you might survive the spike but you are virtually useless.

If you put 30 into earth, and 20 are mandatory in either water or arcana, you got 30 points left to distribute between fire and air, so you are basically crap at any offensive potential.

Rage.2017:

@Nimbl: I have over 1700 hours of experience on my thief and 80% of my play time i roamed in wvw facing 1v1/2/3/4 and toughness is helping me a lot in such fights cause i dont want to be a 1hit like all the zerker thiefs out there which i do 1hit with only one backstab. There is a big difference between 2000 and 2700 armor in wvw. And while having 2700 armor i still have 18k life, 3800 attack and 117% crit dmg, but this is an other story.

@Zenith: i guess you didnt play your d/p thief for a while now, did you? there is no perma-stealth to maintain perma-15-stacks-of-might. And if u are going to get the might through activating 3 signets then gg. i play my d/d ele in wvw every day with only 45% boon duration so the feature update wont hit my boon duration that hard. i am pretty happy with my ele right now and ofc with the dmg (75% crit dmg) and i was happy with the dmg when i had only 30-50% crit dmg.

10% of overall dmg is not that much, it’s like doing arah without undead slaying potion or sigill, not a big deal at all…

All the change did is that you can’t renew stealth from stealth itself. With a revealed time of 3 seconds it’s still kitten easy to might stack through BP backstabs and with some might from dodge rolling and stealth+signets you only need 1 VP+HS to get 18 stacks of might for your backstab.

If you can’t wait 3 seconds in between backstabs on steroids (while still having a tanky build since you use hidden killer), you got problems.

D/P thief is meta 1v1 thief. There’s a reason why in spvp high rank as well as duel tournies in WvW all thieves run D/P.

Cloak and dagger only hits noobs or helpless pet classes whose dumb AI can’t dodge.

BP also completely shuts down some classes like warrior, which is one of the threats to a thief.

Nimbl.8957:

@rage. To each his own I guess. I roam and take on 1vX with 0 toughness I can take the opening back stab from full zerk thief and be just fine. Just have to be on your toes. Divinity runes………

But yeah 15-18 stacks permanent might on a thief? Not since October boss log over to that thief and link us some time/date stamped video of those permanent stacks pls because I would love to know how that’s done.

You don’t need it permanent. You need it for the backstab. you carry 2 signets and a shadow refuge or shadow trap. You use might on dodge roll food with the endurance regen buff that stacks on top of feline grace and the might on dodge trait so you don’t have to take vigor on heal.

You’ll have 15 stacks of might easy for any backstab you do.

Rage.2017:

Zenith.7301:

Rage.2017:

You don’t have to explain the d/d ele to me, cause i play a full ascended d/d ele myself and i exactly know how it is dealing dmg. That is not answering the question. An ele does not need as much crit dmg as a thief cause the ele can maintain much more might stacks in a fight. And while my non-zerker-ele is dealing high dmg in wvw, it also has many defensive utilities like protection, vigor, heal etc etc. You can’t just compare different classes and playstyles.

And I play a D/P thief so I’m pretty sure you’re full of it when you’re telling me that a valk D/D ele with some might stacks is doing the damage of a signet might stack stealth spam build D/P thief.

My Cruuk style stealth stalling build can easily hit 18 stacks of might before a backstab, signet boosts notwithstanding.

I play d/d thief, not d/p and those 18 stacks of might last only for 5-10 seconds, while a scepter/dagger ele with battle-sigil can easily maintain permanent 20-25 stacks of might, d/d ele can maintain 15+ permanent stacks of might.

Which is why you don’t know what you’re talking about. For one, D/D sucks, and D/P stealth based signet build can safely maintain 15 stacks of might for pretty much backstab it does. It doesn’t matter if it lasts 10 seconds because my backstab will take off half the health of even a full bunker and I can shortly follow it with another backstab and the eventual heartseeker finisher.

But by all means bring your D/D or a scepter dagger ele and see how well he does when he’s not running boon duration runes on valk gear.

And PS say goodbye to 70%+ boon duration next feature patch.

Nimbl.8957:

First the nerf isn’t just 10% flat damage. That 10% is all added up by a 30% roughly crit damage reduction. So the thief who relies on those high Frits to get the kill will be losing out on more damage than a warrior who isn’t resetting and re-opening.

@zenith we get it you play fresh air ele and don’t know/want how to play anything else. Time to learn dude because it is about to be in the past if the nerf really is as bad as theory craft says for fresh air.

@rage. You shouldn’t be using cav gear as a thief anyway. Valk armor zerk trinkets. If you are dying it is due to bad positioning or lack of attention toughness doesn’t do anything for you when you are only getting about 1-200 of it max. That is like running full zerk with yack runes.

I am with you guys I don’t like the fix they are inserting when it is to fix their bad encounters in pve since the only pve I did was to complete a legendary. The devs know that they are hitting a lot of sets other than zerk and either will buff them or don’t care and we have to deal with it. Go play condi, get a dif gear set, whatever because no amount of our opinion will change the fact that anet is on par with some of the worst game devs I have seen in the past 3-4 years. You have all played other games and seen the qq about this class, that build, this ability and then it gets nerfed into the ground. You want perfect balance? Only make 1 class 1 set of gear and no build options. You want decent balance? Don’t put pve and pvp in your game if you can’t separate the gear and abilities from what they do in pve from pvp.

New mmos releasing in the next couple of months just bide your time for one of them.

I’ll quit ele before I go play a staff on a zerg and stand on walls. Scepter/dagger was the only truly glassy playstyle I enjoyed.

I don’t want to play some kitten proof d/d cantrip crap god knows that’s been force fed to most eles for over a year and I’m sick of being forced to play a bunker unless I’m a thief or warrior or mesmer.

They say this change is to open up spec diversity, but berserker only needed nerfing on some classes and setups (admittedly the lightning hammer ele alongside warrior and thief and guardian reflects), not all of them.

You never saw people complaining that berserker engineers or necromancers or rangers were driving down diversity.

Rage.2017:

You don’t have to explain the d/d ele to me, cause i play a full ascended d/d ele myself and i exactly know how it is dealing dmg. That is not answering the question. An ele does not need as much crit dmg as a thief cause the ele can maintain much more might stacks in a fight. And while my non-zerker-ele is dealing high dmg in wvw, it also has many defensive utilities like protection, vigor, heal etc etc. You can’t just compare different classes and playstyles.

And I play a D/P thief so I’m pretty sure you’re full of it when you’re telling me that a valk D/D ele with some might stacks is doing the damage of a signet might stack stealth spam build D/P thief.

My Cruuk style stealth stalling build can easily hit 18 stacks of might before a backstab, signet boosts notwithstanding.

Wethospu.6437:

First of all, you seem way too emotionally attached to your scepter build. Things change and stuff gets nerfed. More faster you willing to accept that, more easier this will be for you.

As a I already state above, every nerf has a collateral damage. Only way to avoid that is to never make any changes. I hope you are not trying to suggest that.

If your class has issues go make suggestions about it because personal insults don’t really help anyone.

It’s easy to not be emotional over anything when your class of preference has been in peak performance since the inception of the game and currently dominates in all its game formats, with only the guardian offering competition in terms of inter-format performance.

And please spare me the constructive feedback spiel. I’ve been here since beta, playing ranger, necromancer, and elementalist since release.

1.5 years of constructive feedback since beta, and it culminates on an underwater combat patch for the “big ranger patch”, taking a sledgehammer to the ele down the run, and both ranger, ele, and necro are not much better off after all this time.

So, yeah, by this point it’s pretty clear they can’t be bothered with balancing the classes given the glacial pace and minute scope they apply balance changes to bring classes up. So I will respond to people like you with my “hysteria” because it doesn’t make a difference how collected an argument I can offer.

It doesn’t matter. My kitten new grandmaster traits are a 15% block chance of ranged attacks, a blind on burn, making longbow projectiles actually hit moving targets like rifles do baseline, and more useless weak healing deathshroud tied traits or healing on condition damage on a power line.

I’m pretty much done pretending like offering calm feedback will lead to thoughtful implementation of traits instead of whatever gimmick they decide is a fun concept for them.

Taku.6352:

Chaotic Storm.2815:

Zoid.2568:

Elementalist still have the worst survival and they are a light armor class. My main is a Warrior and i have a Necro, Ele and Ranger alt at 80. My Warrior is superior in PvE content.

The Elementalist need a huge buff in survival. They have to sacrifice too much survival to be able to do damage or they have to sacrifice too much damage to be able to survive. Same with Ranger as well. Elementalist still has one of the best supports though. Necro is close to Warrior imo.

Edit: The Evade on Burning Speed is a good buff to Ele survival.

Never understood how that worked. logically as the weaks class defence wise. We should be producing top class dps as a counter balance. yet some how we aren’t.

Except eles have the highest DPS of all classes…

Except when it’s blind immune dredge and Lightning Hammer blind spam won’t save you. Or bosses that ignore blinds altogether like that lovely Archdiviner and Mossman fast melees.

Ele dagger/dagger were designed specifically for this purpose, giving you slightly superior range on a melee weaponset.

Except all ele autoattacks outside staff Fireball are terrible, and their only source of sustained damage is via a conjure supported by 50 traits worth of damage modifiers to do the damage a warrior approaches far more easily, requiring less group support, and having more flexibility.

Ganathar.4956:

CutePicsHunter.7430:

I would also include next traits to category
It’s a GM trait but it doesn’t deserve a 30 point investment;

Elementalist

• Earth: Stone Heart
  Attunement-based traits are awful just because ele needs to rotate between all attunements in order to do something, and when you’re walking around with earth attunement and spamming literally useless auto-attack, you’re, well… not so useful.
  If you’re going to implement THAT sort of traits, then you should remove cd on attunement swap, or make minor grandmaster trait grant no cd on associated attunement. So if you put 25 points into fire, you should be able to use fire whenever you want.

Stone heart is in fact a build defining trait because it encourages to stay in earth. A really good way to stay in one attunement is to make a conjure build and stone heart may be enough to make such a build possible in PvP. Some experimenting is needed but a new build could arise due to this trait so let’s just wait and see.

Um, no.

Conjures are pure garbage in pvp, and in pve you only use lightning hammer and fiery greatsword, none oif which you’ll be taking advantage of in a bunker stat setup.

In fact, you have two sources of stability on really long cooldowns, with plenty of boonstrip from necros and thieves, so your bunkering capacity is still crap compared to an engineer or guardian, whose defenses are not made obsolete by boon stripping.

LOL, a long kitten channel with a clear tell on a class with a weaponset that makes them a sitting duck to thieves and warriors if their team doesn’t babysit them, is OP.

OK, OP, you clearly have got your priorities right.

Rage.2017:

blakdoxa.7520:

Power – Berserker, Valkyrie – nerf reduced by high critical hit rate
Precision – Assassin – KO
Toughness – Cavalier – KO
Celestial – KO

This is basically it. Assassins (hilarious that it’s not even mentioned), Cavalier, and Celestial are taking huge hits because they were already pieces without high power. Celestial may be getting a “buff” (lol) but defensive stats will never make up for the damage lost from having reduced critical damage. Overall, the impact on damage will be severe.

Berserker users won’t be affected as much as long as they maintain high crits. The same applys to Valkyrie for those few specs that are able to achieve high crits through traits, upgrades, food, and/or fury.

I was not talking about pve (i use full zerker for pve for obvious reasons).
I need few cavalier-pieces in wvw for more survivability and i will have the same crit chance which i have right now. The power-difference is not that high between full valkyrie and a mix of valk/cav and the crit chance is the same anyway. At least for my playstyle valk/cav are getting the exact same dmg-nerf as zerker is.

Btw: If i would not use the hidden killer trait, i would not use cavalier — before and after the feature patch.

You would not use cavalier because you have the luxury of stealth/blind spam.

Other classes unlike thief and warrior don’t get the luxury of constantly available mitigation tools while being glassy, so they need to stack toughness.

I think it should be pretty obvious to you as a thief that an ele in zerker can even die to a single backstab of yours with some might stacks.

The difference is that your backstab by itself hits rather hard and can be used often.

The ele’s burst operates differently to thief and warrior. Ele burst comes piece-meal. You need to weave several high cd skills alongside two utility spells, and hope they all crit, to do actual burst.

And this potentially higher burst is all they have because unlike warrior and thief ele sustained damage is garbage once they’ve done their burst, so if they don’t kill something with that high % crit dmg bonus, they die. Elementalists unlike a thief coming out of stealth can’t just do a high sustained damage via autoattack+poison in between revealed timers before the next backstab.

Eles don’t get resets, and they don’t have any staying power or offensive pressure once the arcane utilities are blown or a fire grab misses and goes on a 36 sec traited cd.

And the difference between a non-thief/warrior using cavalier and berserker is the amount of sustained damage they do when their skills that guarantee a crit are over and they need to wait the long cd’s for them to be back up. Their sustained pressure nosedives, their spike capacity which compensated for the low sustained damage is gutted, and the spec is knocked out of viability.

Rage.2017:

As a “Hidden Killer” thief I do not understand how valk/cav gear is getting a bigger nerf than zerker. I will stick to my playstyle and my gear, crit as often as I do now, but deal 10% less dmg. Why should I regrind a new ascended set and switch to zerker after the feature-patch? Or am I missing something?

You’re missing the part where you have the “Hidden Killer” just like warriors have plenty of fury uptime and crit chance increase modifiers. To you it feels like you’re just running zerkers like warriors do, because your kittened class is that ridiculously better off, but that’s not the case for all the other classes.

Especially not the ones who don’t have spammable skills with immunity to chill and burst attacks that can be spammed through blocks and blinds until it actually lands, and need to make whatever burst they’ve got on a 30+ sec cd count when it lands.

They could have just allowed conditions to benefit from vulnerability and crit chance, and the whole scaling problem could have been fixed.

Then they could have had the much easier task of scaling down condi application on skills accordingly for some classes.

Wethospu.6437:

Is “scepter ele” a gear piece?

Scepter ele build’s reliance on cavalier/valk to function is the gear piece that’s being hit as collateral damage to berserker. It wasn’t overpowered, other wise most other classes/builds would have run valk/cavalier in WvW (they don’t).

What part doesn’t pass through your little warrior brain? Have you even bothered to pvp as a scepter ele? No? Go away then.

Valk/Cavalier was necessary for the ele because unlike your warrior tards our 10k base HP gets you 2-3 shot in a hurry by anyone even wielding knight gear in WvW.

So eles had to stack around a minimum of 1600 toughness to even function, while maintaining that really high burst capacity that had a long cd but served a function in skirmish teams. That is, high ranged burst damage. The ele could compete with a thief for the finisher/chaser spot, even if it could not burst as often, because what burst it had on a 20+ sec cd was higher burst than the thief and enough to threaten condi bunkers.

When ele burst gets nerfed as collateral while their sustained damage and HP pool shows no signs of getting fixed on a feature patch, you just took a viable skirmishing build out of the picture entirely and forced all WvW eles to go staff zerging.

Scepter ele was not a weak skirmishing build. It was a build that just had enough pressure to cross the threshold of the few power builds that can function in skirmishing. And with the nerf you’re basically better off going knights dagger/dagger.

Berserker was kittened on some classes (still will be, on classes like thief and warrior roamers with some knights/berk mixing), but valkyrie and cavalier sacrificed enough damage output. In pvp we operate by thresholds, and the lowering of cavalier/valk output below the threshold where they can secure kills consistently against condi bunkers was a huge collateral hit to build diversity.

After this change there will be 2 categories to skirmish/roaming specs:

Thieves and warriors with their higher base damage, high burst, and strong defensive/escape tools, and condi bunkers like the engineer and BM ranger.

Eles will be pretty much out of the picture, as will be some power based ranger specs and rifle power engineer variations. Essentially, all power based offensive specs that didn’t have strong and constant innate mitigation/avoidance tools and relied more on raw stats to make it through.

Wethospu.6437:

Yes, relying on overpowered gear pieces may eventually get you nerfed. It’s still less than what berserker is losing.

Yeah, clearly scepter ele was OP, especially in PvP where eles have virtually disappeared.

kittening brilliant commentary.

Sube Dai.8496:

Basically the HP pools have not been balanced in line with all other changes to classes.

Warriors should have had theirs nerfed when they got active condition removal.

Necro’s should be forced to sacrifice more HP for their utility skills.

Ele’s probably need a bit more.

Everyone else is fine.

Necro is fine. They have no vigor. If you reduce necro HP you make them even more useless in PvE.

I can’t see why anyone would ever take Cavalier or Valkyrie now over Knights if for some classes like the ele you wanted to raise your survivability at the cost of slightly less crits.

Some builds already in a precarious situation, like a scepter burst ele build with some cavalier is now nerfed to hell, and unlike classes like thieves and warriors who can burst much more often, scepter eles relied on landing that high a burst to even have a chance at killing a condi bunker.

If an ele fails to kill wiith a phoenix+firegrab+arcane util+air sequence, his burst goes on a 20+ sec cd and all he can do after is just die because scepter’s autoattacks suck and have no sustained damage.

I think most people just want the legendary for the free stat switch on demand.

You know balance in this game is screwed when a dev asks you to give them a solution with the least development time requirements.

Clearly balance is not a priority for allocation of resources. More important things like RNG skin tickets from black lion chests need to be made.

Balancing the game is not something that can be monetized, so as a F2P it’s down the list of priorities.

They are immune to chill, and they are immune to interrupts.

Initiative is basically what every class should have gotten.

Bargaw.4832:

Eles have access to protection.

Only with a 10 point trait in arcana or a 75 sec cd.

zone.1073:

Have you considered that perhaps the reason why certain classes have trending builds is due to the meta itself? In your example, many warriors use healing signet, cleansing ire, longbow, but is it because these are overpowered or imbalanced, or is it a direct answer to the meta of extreme AoE condition pressure from tanky builds?

What if the meta shifted back to high burst glass cannons, where encounters are decided in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. Warriors would not be able to keep up with the fast tempo using sluggish heals from healing signet or low direct damage weapons like longbow. Therefore, the rise of greatsword will take place due to its high burst, high mobility, and versatility. Etc.

Don’t single out a few traits and abilities and say that just because everyone uses them, that they are perhaps imbalanced. A class should have access to all the tools necessary to adapt to a meta shift, and perhaps these are the tools that are being utilized to adapt to this meta. You can’t blame players for finding a way to survive and thrive in a meta. Warriors are, in your terms, “pigeon-holed”, not primarily because of the shortcomings of the warrior class itself; they’re pigeon-holed due to the overall meta forcing them to build a certain way to survive the meta.

It won’t happen because warrior and thief also happen to eat the glass builds you theorize could pressure them out of the meta.

Let’s be honest here, warrior are top dog alongside guardian in all aspects of the game. The only reason people dont complain about guardians is because guardians don’t directly kill them, but they’re just as broken in being necessary in a group comp.

insanemaniac.2456:

Zenith.7301:

insanemaniac.2456:

oh so theyre using utility slots on defenses but that doesnt count as speccing defensively in your twisted world

and each of those classes only has condi removal traits in defense lines…

Cleansing Fire on fire line….

And they have the option of using utility skills instead of much more expensive traiting sacrifices, an option rangers don’t have.

You’re just dense.

no im not, youre just mad that nothing looks good at face value when you dont have all the information and too stubborn to keep the kittening at a minimum for 3 weeks.

Keep fooling yourself. I’ve been here since beta and rangers know better than to fall for the hype. Our “big patch” turned out to be an underwater combat improvement patch.