Guild Wars 2

Yeah, that’s almost definitely the 360 radius + the 180 radius, giving it a 540 radius (1080 diameter) marker ring.

To test better you might want to look at where the meteors fall - you shouldn’t see any landing with their center outside the range indicator.
You can do this by casting the skill somewhere, and while it’s channeling hitting 5 again to bring up the AoE indicator where you cast it. Watch the storm - no meteors will fall outside the green ring.
Another way to check is to turn off Blasting Staff, and watch the AoE circle shrink while your target indicator doesn’t.
___
EDIT: okay so I just did those tests - AoE circle is always the same size. Possibly the Blasting Staff AoE circle is bugged and not displaying the actual effect? Testing this now!

I’ve been running zerker Staff, both pre- and post-patch, and wow is it fun. I don’t die stupidly often and I output ridiculous damage. I get downed constantly, sure, but Lava Tomb is an incredible trait for a Staff nuker.
I can solo NPCs on Foefire/Niflhel in seconds, I can clear a node my allies are fighting on with MS, I can take out most other zerkers incredibly quickly (though smart Thieves still just evade/blind everything, and smart Wars still have stupidly good sustain with those invincibility stances).

MS circle is slightly annoying, but considering you’ll plan to use it over an entire capture point anyway... the change (actually a fix, for consistency with other skills) only really affects midpoint on Foefire.
Ferocity removes a little bit of our DPS, but it also affects everyone else, which is definitely good considering how squishy we are. There are also the ’new’ runes and that second sigil slot on your weapon - both excellent changes.

I’ve not actually gotten round to playing with bunker/support Staff yet, but it sounds pretty good with the new traits from either Water or Earth - and it can bring very high group condicleanse with the un-nerfed Cleansing Water. Cleric’s or Celestial amulets could go really well for them.

ElenaDragon.8401:

Nabrok.9023:

The reason it isn’t there is because they don’t want people using HotM as a quick bank and then returning to their previous location.

I’d be ok if they removed the return to previous location function, leaving only the LA/Gendarren portal.

It’s pretty easy to use WvW for this already.

Your home citadel has TP, bank through crafting stations, the crafting stations, and if you hold your keep you get a mystic forge too - with bank/guild bank there with the right upgrades.

It doesn’t work for worlds with perma-queue wvw maps... oh wait, now there’s Edge of the Mists, which still offers most of those services (though crafting is still unique to home map citadel). Edit: Oh, sorry, I was wrong, there’s no bank. Busier WvW worlds are still screwed.

EotM update even removed the need to log out of your character and then back in to return to your original, non-WvW location.

So yeah, there’s no reason not to have a bank/TP in HotM, nor was there one to remove our mystic forge access. We can’t craft PvP stuff anymore but we can still chuck all the crap from champ boxes in there, no?
Anyone who wouldn’t already be using other maps (such as going into PvE) isn’t going to magically get sucked in if they have to go there for bank access. If anything they’re just going to resent it more.

BlackBeard.2873:

Chaith.8256:

I suspect that some forms of A.I were blanket buffed (even player spawned A.I) when the update to PvP NPCs happened.

Fight the Guild Lord, Chieftain, Svanir, 8 Profession dummies in the mists, etc. They were all blanket buffed – I think there was some carry over on to specific A.I player abilities.

I think it has something to do with this. The hotfix for pets helped with some things, but I feel like some NPC’s and the like are still hitting rediculously hard.

I was fighting a profession trainer (the ele) and got 1-shot by 5k vapor blade (an ele auto attack) and arcane wave for 10k. I seriously wish I could hit a 5k vapor blade JUST ONCE. :-)

I thought the profession trainers were doing an awful lot of damage. I guess the HotM map needs the buff because the Foefire and Niflhel NPCs are there for build testing.

butch.8136:

^ Replace with? I wouldn’t want to pop in a match where they’re going 400-50 and get stomped for 1 more minute.

Yeah I’d say instead it applies a stack of dishonour at the end of the match, if they were ever in the base for more than 15-20s. Don’t want to ban anyone who has to afk for a minute during one match, since most of us do have some kind of a life outside of GW, even if it’s just answering the door for parcel deliveries.
Should people start trolling more carefully by, say, standing outside the base… hopefully their teammates will still all /report, and hopefully the reports might get dealt with.

At any rate, it’d be nice to get some statistics of how frequently current reports result in any kind of punishment- complete silence combined with frequently afk-ing players still visibly disrupting games leads to a skeptical, frustrated playerbase.

A problem with the football analogy: only a tiny minority of them make much money, and most footballers actually play more because it’s fun than because they’re getting paid. That’s... kinda how it is now, with high-end tournaments giving out the rewards, and everyone else getting not much apart from hopefully good games.

somsom.5201:

This happened to me too.

Breakdown:

*was in the middle of a tPvP game(near the end)
*received pop-up message about new build
*match ended
*kicked to launcher patching
*loaded back into the game
*got a message that the match was ready
...
How is the match ready when I didn’t even queue again?

New builds *really* mess things up - a couple of patches ago I got a stack of dishonour for a match that I played from start to finish.
The stack was applied at the start of the match, and I was actually playing ranked PvP with the debuff active (since I’d already gotten a couple of other stacks the previous weekend).
I wasn’t allowed to play PvP for like 4 hours after the patch launched because of the debuff.

We had this bug on Tuesday (soloq Spirit Watch), one team won and then we couldn’t really leave. Submitted tickets but not heard anything about it.

Thunderclock: noooope. Y’know how you get pulled into ranked matches? Well, if you log back in while the map’s still up during this bug, you get pulled back in. On any character, even after restarting the client.

Aza: try to get everyone to log out for a bit, game might cancel if there’s nobody in the map. Not really sure how we fixed it.
Just make sure you’ve all submitted bug reports!

Carighan.6758:

Pleurodesed.7625:

So what you’re saying with those words is that a zerg should remain to be untouchable by small groups, which is what ressing causes. Killing a zerg player is extremely difficult and gives no reward, since there’s no effect to it.
But having your small group steamrolled won’t take an effort and it’s guaranteed it’ll have to rally home; maximizing the reward.

So I believe your premise makes the risk-reward ratio unfair to the extreme.

This makes immediate sense, because superior numbers give flexibility and both offensive and defensive security in combat.

Yes, most games actively try left and right and centre to not allow this pretty natural mechanic to show up. Usually by hard-capping their combat at very small sizes.
If you have actually large combat though, the bigger fish will usually eat the smaller one. And that’s entirely natural, and expected. The rezzing/rallying adds the defensive part. To be fair, it wouldn’t be needed if we had collision detection I think.

There’s also the bit where yes, a huge group really ought to be untouchable – but it doesn’t have nearly the same mobility as several small groups. You can turtle up and hold one objective with a huge zerg – or try to move around the map with it – but five roaming parties will very easily backcap everything else in the meantime.

Individual rewards are much higher for the zerg, and I don’t like that – but it’s a different matter entirely.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Pawstruck.9708:

I think blind on burning is freaking awesome. Get an ele and a thief in a dungeon and never get hit by anything ever.

But if you’re already 30 in fire persisting flames is automatically better

Also that it only procs on single targets is a nuisance.
Great for duelling, I guess, but kinda terrible otherwise.

MotherKitten.6795:

Making tempest defense work against basilisk venom seems important to me. What am I missing that the pessimists are seeing?

Nothing, they’re just upset that they weren’t given a great big ’kill everyone’ button.

Do y’alls srsly want to become the next OP thing? We might just be back out of the nerfs due to D/D bunkers, we really don’t need another load of the things.

The only nerf to anything Ele was boon duration runes - but that’s pretty minor compared to the huge rune nerfs for other classes (Lyssa? Perplexity?) along with the ways the frustrating meta builds got dealt with.
Edit: oh, wait, sorry - and the exploit with FGS+teleport got fixed. What a shame, what a massive blow to skilful play.

Guys y’know how you were told over and over and over again to use up all your glory? And that it was going away for good after this patch?

There was even the long wait before today, during which you couldn’t earn more glory - did you not take this as a hint that you’d not be getting any more and you might want to spend it now?

l2read.

So yeah, there are a bunch of positive changes coming from the changes to PvP, once y’alls can get over the whole wardrobe stuff (but srsly, account-bound dyes more than makes up for the skins, and it doesn’t cost you to dye).

- match win reward chests are back, and even if you get an unlucky streak you still get rewards, though at a slower pace.
- hambow is a lot less powerful, and it doesn’t look like they destroyed everything else about Warrior in the process. Other meta-builds have been nerfed in what seem to be pretty good ways, so we might finally move on from the mess of the past several months.
- megaserver means PvP lobby isn’t empty all the time. Could turn out to be a nuisance if folks regularly go "omg <player> was so bad they play <something I don’t like>", but eh, we have block buttons.
- the new rewards mean that more people will come into PvP, and hopefully more will stay. Sure, matchups will be terrible for a couple of days while MMRs of newbies get themselves sorted out, but we still need a larger population - hopefully the unification steps will bring it.

And of course, a couple of bad things:
- Skyhammer. Yeah. Why?
- still no proper reporting for PvP issues like not-participating--but-occasionally-casting-skills players.
- Edit: oh, we’ve got no access to the bank, though at least there’s a merchant for folks to buy salvage kits at. No bank is pretty bad.

There’ll be a few ones, but for the moment I’m only making one real change to mine: chuck a Sigil of Doom on my Staff.

Wow, poison uptime, wheee.

Yes.

Tomes of Knowledge, and Scrolls of Knowledge.

Tomes give you a level, scrolls just give you the skillpoint. Scrolls drop much more frequently from champ boxes than tomes - surprisingly enough.

Y’know how there’s that bug that Necromancers have, where on losing Death Shroud their heal/utility/elite skills are all locked out (even stunbreaks)?

If that effect isn’t currently what happens to downed skills for a second when you get downed, it probably should be - a lock on all skills, not letting you use them, from the moment of getting downed until the 1s of invuln has worn off.

Vannt.7253:

His mailbox is 0/10. So it’s not overflowed.

Definitely not a full mailbox, Syncez :P

Could be anti-goldselling, though - there’s a definite limit to what new accounts can send, and probably receive too.

Oh, no, that’s the restructuring of the Ele downed skills, because Grasping Earth is utterly useless for preventing a stomp - the #2 and #3 skills got swapped over, and Grasping Earth got given more damage and some bleeding.

Everyone gets the delay on all skills when they get downed, though - it covers the period for which you’re invulnerable. I’m not even asking for this to be extended - just for there not to be a moment in which you can trigger the #2 before the lockout.

Paying attention to health more might work if there weren’t so many heavy-hitting skills, by the way. Or if combat wasn’t so fast-paced. Not using the #2 skills just in case something hits you? That shouldn’t be an issue that we have to deal with.

slsharpshooter.5631:

I’m not sure if it is even implemented because the skill has no cool down when you get into downstate. They should fix it or increase its initial cool down to 2 seconds.

Aha, found the patch notes:

Made it harder to accidentally waste the player’s downed 2 skill when the player becomes downed while trying to use their weapon 2 skill.

And there’s a definite delay on skills when you get downed, it just doesn’t stop you from casting your #2 straight away.

I’m completely against it in PvP/WvW - it should at most refresh the stack with the highest duration condition (so not overwrite a 4s with a 1s), as folks have said above.

The sheer amount of condi flying around any battlefield, along with the inability to dodge while immobilised, make it an incredibly powerful condition that will usually last its full duration anyway. It’s difficult enough to deal with and easy enough to apply that it doesn’t need any stacking to be very effective.

If you want healing, you need blast finishers - there’s no point in speccing so heavily for healing power otherwise.

I’d recommend swapping out heal and a signet for Arcane Brilliance and Arcane Wave... maybe chucking the Conjured Flame Axe on your utility bar, too (since its #2 is yet another blast).
Arcane Mastery is probably more useful than Blasting Staff in this case - your blast finisher effects’ ranges aren’t increased by the trait, and you’re going to be doing buggerall damage so won’t really need it for hitting foes with.

At this point... yeah you need to decide if you want to keep the earth trait line, or shift 20 of those points to Arcana for Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana.
If sticking to Earth, I guess Diamond Skin (largely for anti-snare when retreating), or you could play with the new Stone Heart - but as a Master trait I’d definitely take Rock Solid because yey stability.
However, Evasive Arcana gives you TWO more sources of healing - the dodge in Water Attunement, and the blast finisher from Earth. Chucking an Energy Sigil on your weapon (if they’re still worth taking) would complement that well.

So I’m pretty sure that at some point in the past, we had a patch implementing the 1s block on skill use when downed, so that players wouldn’t accidentally use up their defensive skills immediately.

It doesn’t work.

I very frequently find myself in Vapor Form as soon as I’m downed, since I was trying to cast a #2 weapon skill – and it just so happens that a good number of my kills come from using Lava Tomb effectively by waiting out its internal cooldown on it while downed then triggering it through Vapor Form.

Because of this, the delay seems to be utterly useless, since it’s really quite easy to activate the skill immediately on getting downed… and should I actually want to Vapor Form immediately (for example, to get closer to allies, or into a capture point) then I’m stuck waiting for that whole second.

I expect this affects Elementalists more than most, particularly those of us running Lava Tomb, but none of these skills have particularly long cast times and are designed to really help prevent a stomp in most situations.

Be more realistic – it’ll be while under 30%. Maybe under 20%.

100% * 0 = 0%
200% * 0 = 0%

Unless Stone Heart subtracts percentage (which would allow >100% crit chance to still sometimes crit), this should work fine.

Lupanic.6502:

cheese.4739:

Avead.5760:

But still those ccs..they need at least bigger casting times.

fix’d
Flamethrower’s Air Blast certainly does, since there’s absolutely no downside to it – the Rifle at least also CC’s the Engi slightly, and can be reflected.
An instant rupt instead of the knockback on Air Blast I could probably deal with, but an instant knockback is unreasonably powerful – it’d be an incredible utility skill even without the other utility from the kit.

FT is soo bad and only the knockback is good. If you nerf the knockback you can remove FT from the game.

There’s the insta-blind and fire field – and even as a rupt Air Blast could see use.
Sure, nobody would take FT for decap builds ever again… and so we’d lose some decap builds. Oh no, what a shame, how will the game survive?

Why have you got your offhand weapon held in your main hand, with your mainhand weapon sheathed ready to be drawn by that same hand?

re: buffing 2 rather than nerfing 6:

Who said I was making the game worse? I was just pointing out a flaw with a method of thinking, stop making people look like something they are not, it’s makes the forums worse

While I generally disagree with Swagg’s obsession with removing every non-keybound effect from the game:

The problem is that underwater combat is, if anything, even less balanced than the CC party that is Skyhammer. Have you ever tried killing a Ranger underwater? Or fighting a minion Necro?

Underwater combat is cool, but needs a lot of work to be at all fair.

T raw.4658:

and someone went and made sure anet fixes it before going live

w2g bran w2g

Heh, you think it’s not been mentioned already? Several times?

Yep, noticed this last time this was a daily - they give credit for Daily Puzzle Jumper, but it looks like the flags for puzzle discovery haven’t been added to the entrances (likely because the puzzle jumper daily is linked to the other jumping puzzles achievements).

Atoss.1056:

Maybe in pve you can get that number but in pvp or wvw no chance, unless enemy is some newbie with 0 condi cleanse or condi duration reduction.

Or if you have good covering conditions that you can regularly reapply – pretty hard to do as an Ele. Group support makes it pretty easy, though.

But yeah, condition damage will always give you only the potential output, because your enemy can always cleanse it away – it’s wise to bear this in mind when landing your conditions.

So what, you can tie down their Ele and Guard on one point with a condi-bunker applying pressure (because yeah, full support Ele + bunker Guard probably won’t be able to take that down) then outnumber their team at the other two points? Or if their ’ultimate defense group’ moves away to try and help out other points, it’s a pretty easy backcap?

Sure, S/D could get to be powerful outside of FAir, but it’s unlikely to be anything like as broken as the old D/D bunkers - and definitely not as horrible as the current mess that is hambow/decap/pistolwhip.
A powerful support build will only be useful with allies, and if at all balanced won’t be able to apply any pressure on its own.

Also remember: every profession is getting changes this patch, along with all runes and sigils. New builds might turn up, old builds might resurface... but it’s in a completely different meta.

We just have to hope that, should anything turn out to be game-breakingly strong, it gets shaved quickly and regularly until it’s in line with everything else.

We have stupidly strong burst through Scepter/Dagger Fresh Air builds - using instant-cast skills, and the Fresh Air grandmaster trait, it’s possible to get very high burst damage in PvP (though it leaves the Ele with a long cooldown period).

For AoE dps... yeah, Staff definitely wins. Full glass cannon staff does incredible damage in all areas of the game... and will die as soon as it’s breathed on. A true GC.

silvermember.8941:

butch.8136:

Guess I’ll have to find myself a pretty staff for my ele. <3

I wouldn’t be making shopping plans for a new staff just yet, with arenanet anything can happen.

Eh, the skin can also be used on Necro, Guard or Mes, it’s not like it’d be a waste if it was only played on the Ele for a week.

Another possibility - damage and knockback are seperate hits, and you’re only blocking the damage component.

Your trooling abilities are subpar, oZii.

We could really do with many UI improvements - why we’re so limited as to what we can move about, I don’t know.

If "it would be too complex" is an issue, then have a default and a couple of presets in the options menu, and let everyone who apparently can’t drag boxes around deal with what we’ve got.

Customisability is something we could really do with, since the UI is at best clunky and obstructive - the unnecessary flashiness is really getting to me, with these ’improved’ right-hand panel animations and daft flashing elite skill things just distracting from what’s already pretty cluttered and hard-to-follow combat.

Proven.2854:

Won’t Sc/D bunker be possible to run again now? Signet of Restoration and Cleansing Water are all it really needs, right?

Edit: Yeah, what Avead said :P whole bunch of other nerfs happened too.
Also a decap Engi will be hell for a bunker Ele, since stability is... hard to get at.
0/0/20/30/20 is likely to become standard for it, maybe Boon runes if there’s a good set of them available.

While I’m looking forward to seeing more Staff Eles around, I’m really hoping we aren’t getting overbuffed into becoming flavour of the month and OP - I don’t think I could handle getting flamed with "l2p a balanced class noob" directly after so many months of "just reroll you stupid ele".

Avead.5760:

But still those ccs..they need at least bigger casting times.

fix’d
Flamethrower’s Air Blast certainly does, since there’s absolutely no downside to it – the Rifle at least also CC’s the Engi slightly, and can be reflected.
An instant rupt instead of the knockback on Air Blast I could probably deal with, but an instant knockback is unreasonably powerful – it’d be an incredible utility skill even without the other utility from the kit.

The skill isn’t unblockable (I can safe-stomp a lone guard with Arcane Shield, for example) but:

non-targeted - can you show that Protector’s Strike works against other non-targeted AoE?
two targets hit - can you show that it doesn’t only block the first person hit by an attack? It says it "damages foes that strike protected allies". In that case you, the Guard, may be protecting yourself and then the block’s down for your ally.

chris.6583:

cheese.4739:

I’m running zerker Staff (suicide bomber) in soloq, and get so much qq from foes I nuke to death while downed, or from allies who don’t seem to notice the 4 foes I killed while they were trying to res me.
Nobody’s on my side, and I still win, and it’s so much fun.

rly? can you post your build?

TL;DR: kitten cheese you talk too much

Its current form:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQFAWnMISLD2zAmOArEIACPCghCGF6QowCIKF2B-TkAg0CnIwRhjDHDOScs4MEB

Flame Axe is great for might stacking, mobility, and the pretty great damage from Flame Leap; Arcane Shield lets you get that MS off (or just plonk down a Lava Font on top of yourself when there’s a Thief trying to burst).
Brilliance/Wave are primarily might stacking, though can get some pretty great heals from Brilliance in busy midfights. Tornado... yeah, that. Nuke, cast ’nado off point, run in and knock everyone over.

It’s useful if you want to shy away from fights, stay back, unleash AoEs to aid your allies in a point then double-Burning-Retreat away... but it’s so much more fun to lay down the damage then run in. You haven’t lived as a zerker staff until you’ve gotten downed, then caught someone stomping you in a damage-boosted Lava Font + Lava font + Meteor Shower.

Most zerker staffers seem to go with Scholar runes and Vital Striking; I avoided those, knowing I’ll get focused hella hard anyway so might as well make use of it. Extra damage while downed, Lava Font while downed, extra damage while near a foe.

Once downed, just try to save Vapor Form until 6 seconds in if you possibly can - that’s 1s invuln, 6s downed, 3s Vapor Form... and you’re downed again and have placed another Font.

In soloq it’s pretty great, anyway - the broken meta builds (hambow with that Endure Pain stomp or Vengeance stomp; any Pistol Whip Thief who can catch me alone and isn’t stupid) are nasty, but I can hold my own in many 1v1 situations and defintely contribute to teamfights through huge dps or might sharing or drawing focus (and *then* outputting the huge dps once enemies think I’m no longer a threat).
My #1 frurstration in soloq right now is definitley folks who don’t pay attention to ally health vs enemy health, and either don’t res, or don’t stomp, or do try to stomp but in entirely the wrong situations - but I guess at least a few of them are thinking ’oh look that idiot ele got downed again can they not just l2p I’m not even going to res them’, because people are selfish dafties.

It could potentially be *really* fun in teamq, with a team that knows what to do while downed and with whom it would be much easier to communicate position and strategy... but I’ve not had a chance to play in a proper premade yet.
Everyone I know well seems to have gotten sick of the horribly infrequent balance updates and left.

Anyway yeah, um, oops. I’ve been meaning to record some games and put together a video, then make a full post about how much *fun* the suicide bomber is. I’ll try to get on that soon. Maybe.

elprimo.4398:

cheese.4739:

elprimo.4398:

Yep, ligering elements would be op if it worked with every attune bonus. Those 30/30/30/30/15 builds would be too OP.

Don’t be stupid.

It’s clearly 10/20/0/10/15, with 15 points left.

Actually, you can take Stone Heart if you drop the Attuned to Air 10%, I guess just make it 10/0/30/10/20 with Stone Splinters and Rock Solid in Earth.
You’ll get a 10% plus 20% damage increase for 5 seconds every time you change between fire and water attunements while your foe has vulnerability.

It’s most definitely far too powerful, would get so much qq from people you died to.

Made my day.

This is actually pretty relevant to my build right now.

I’m running zerker Staff (suicide bomber) in soloq, and get so much qq from foes I nuke to death while downed, or from allies who don’t seem to notice the 4 foes I killed while they were trying to res me.
Nobody’s on my side, and I still win, and it’s so much fun.

Wouldn’t work with these traits, though – while downed you can’t gain attunement-based buffs, and Lingering Elements is (even more) useless too.

There’s a tl;dr at the bottom; only the last line is really relevant to the thread.

One thing I’ve noticed is that if your character stops holding whatever gathering tool is being used, and is forced to revert back to their weapon(s) while harvesting, whatever is being gathered will likely be ruined. Stop harvesting and recast it, or better yet, deal with the mobs and then try again.

This one is similar to using any persistent emote then casting skills.
If you had your weapon drawn on starting the emote, you can cast any instant-cast skills you want (including swapping kits or attunements for Engi/Ele) without interrupting the action – but if you started the action with your weapon stowed, it’ll be interrupted when you draw your weapon to cast the skill.
For Eles and Engi weaponswap mechanics this means that the character’s appearance changes if they were wielding when they swapped to the emote – Elementalists can still gain the wrist-auras from attunements and Engineers will still swap out their backpack/weapon slots.

A couple of cases in which this is interesting:
- using teleports
Instant-cast teleports like Mesmers’ Blink will get you to draw your weapon… but if you’re running with your weapon stowed, then Blink somewhere, you’ll draw your weapon and appear to glide along, stuck on the first frame of ‘weapon in hand’ (or possibly the last frame of ‘draw weapon’?).
- doing persistent emotes like /dance or /sleep
If you activate an emote, your weapon will disappear for the duration of the emote. Using any form-changing skill (like the Elementalist utility Mist Form), or just swapping to and from town clothes, will bring your weapon(s) back into your hands if you previously had them drawn – allowing, for example, a charr to do their haka while waving pistols around.

Oops, long-winded-post-thing. Um.
tl;dr mess around with your town clothes you can look silly
Oh, and it might be worth checking if being in combat when you start mining nodes fixes the problem – or at least having your weapon drawn.

CountzuCrytus.7256:

I remember Echo Arcane Echo Meteor Shower= Triple Meteor Shower in GW1

This was used for soloing Shiro (well, you took one of the warrior henchmen, but all the damage came from the Ele player).

You set up a few defensive spells (for blocking and for dealing damage when you blocked), echo chained Arcane Echo → Echo, then Echo’d the special skill that Kunnavang gave Elementalists that did huge AoE damage. That’s 3 casts of it.
Your Warrior henchman has been banished by now, leaving a construct that attacks you in melee – they should die almost instantly to the nuke, giving you a morale boost and recharging all your Elemental Storms or whatever the skill was called.
Chain them again, refresh your ward/shielding, whoosh.

Reliable HM top-reward run, can take 6 players with you. Only time it should really mess up is when Mhenlo interferes like the eejit he is in all the Factions missions.

elprimo.4398:

Yep, ligering elements would be op if it worked with every attune bonus. Those 30/30/30/30/15 builds would be too OP.

Don’t be stupid.

It’s clearly 10/20/0/10/15, with 15 points left.

Actually, you can take Stone Heart if you drop the Attuned to Air 10%, I guess just make it 10/0/30/10/20 with Stone Splinters and Rock Solid in Earth.
You’ll get a 10% plus 20% damage increase for 5 seconds every time you change between fire and water attunements while your foe has vulnerability.

It’s most definitely far too powerful, would get so much qq from people you died to.

It blocks the next attack directed at any ally in range - could the Guard have priority, and block the knockback while their stomping ally gets hit by it?

Also it’s not a projectile or physical strike, as has been said - it’s an untargeted AoE effect. It might be worth testing on other untargeted AoE effects.

Are you saying you should be able to stand in front of your teammate while they stomp and block the aoe push back of the Guard’s downed state?

This I see no problem with - it’s a deliberate use of a skill to aid an ally, in the same way as popping an AoE stability or landing blinds on the downed foe are.

They haven’t mentioned any big ones, might be a couple of cast/aftercast tweaks but I’d not expect many.

Since there’s the big rune/sigil shakeup, and those new traits, I would hope that any significant weapon changes were nerfs to the meta-defining builds right now, and maybe small improvements to underpowered sets (like D/D since it got nerfed so kitten hard and pulled the rest of Ele down with it).

Most of our +%dmg traits don’t work with LE, as has been said - I personally don’t see how making them do so would be OP, since to make use of several you’d need to burn through several attunement cooldowns (and not have any Arcana investment, since you’d spent points on the traits...) while only getting 1-2 seconds of the increased damage.

Stone Heart I can see being much more powerful if it worked with LE, though there will still always be at least 5s of downtime if the player switches out of Earth - I guess if it turns out to be poor it can get buffed in future, and I’m definitely in favour of starting new skills out weaker as opposed to creating new OP builds right out of this horrible meta.

Oh, I missed Lightning Surge.

I use this one primarily for its damage, or sometimes supporting an ally with a stomp. Definitely unreliable in all situations, though the AoE blind/damage combo is good in theory.

I’d much rather it stay as-is with regards to damage and cast time... and for the blind to be swapped with weakness.
Much better damage mitigation than a single blind (that pretty much requires you to predict a skill two seconds before it’se cast), could make the condition only apply to the target if it’s judged to be too strong AoE.

My thoughts on them all:

Chain Lightning:
I’d just like to see a bit more of the damage frontloaded, so that it’s not useless against single targets.

Water Blast:
Eh. Somehow my rotation almost never leaves me sitting in water anyway :P
Giving it actual damage potential is probably best, since the game doesn’t really allow for ’tanks’ so much and so sitting back healing up the melee fighters isn’t really a good plan.

Lava Font:
I’m pretty sure this skill should stay as it is - it’s got a very short cast time, which would need to be increased if it did damage instantly. It’s a powerful area-denial spell, since it can do so much damage - getting someone to waste their dodges getting out of it, or give away the positional advantage, is fine by me.
Super quick cast fire field, easy to chain into/from other skills, yes please. Slow cast but instant-ticking? Ew. We have enough easy-to-rupt skills on Staff as it is.

Gust:
It can hit semi-reliably at close quarters, but isn’t great, no. Not entirely sure if I’d prefer a wider AoE effect, quicker cast or faster projectile (or some combination of these) to make it easier to land. Leaning just towards the first one I think, we don’t want to end up getting called OP for instant-cast knockbacks.

Eruption:
That’s a pretty interesting idea, though I definitley would lean towards putting most of the damage/bleeds on the end of the skill - it fits thematically with the blast finisher, anyway. Don’t see it being OP in ESurge builds, since more reliable immobilises are available with instant casts through the arcane utilities anyway.