GMT is still GMT, however - and anyone calculating their times based on GMT±X will probably have an easier time working from it.
What would you people think about this: what if confusion would prock only on all utility skills and weapon attacks with double damage but not prock on auto attack?
This would make it even more devastating to Eles, who (in the majority of builds) can’t rely on autoattacks for damage and need to be constantly casting 2-5 weapon skills and switching attunements to be effective.
The vast majority of macro accusations are just against people who have well-practiced combos and sensible keybinds so they can execute these combos.
If you still think someone’s using a pre-set list of commands in a macro... report for botting. That’s how botting is defined, right?
You have to select the skin - I just got my 12k as well (congrats btw) and was a bit confused until I realised it’s just coded the same as the earlier chest that had a choice between two.
Just click the vambraces and you can accept the chest.
I don’t think costume brawling contributes to achievements (daily or the community one), either.
The mystic forge in HotM never used to contribute to dailies, and was fixed in some patch last summer.
While it’d be nice to get a fix for this, at least the monthly salvage is very easy to get even if you don’t play very frequently!
There definitely is one – if you cancel casting right after the first meteor falls, you’ll get maybe one further hit per second, which is very noticeable compared to the barrage from a full channel.
Conjures actually bring great utility - the only one I’ve not seen people reasonably use anywhere is the Earth Shield (apart from maybe as another gimmick on stupid bloody Skyhammer), and there’s a chance that it might start getting used if someone gets the new Air trait working:
Frost Bow: AoE nuking, wherever you take it. Good control with #5 (and a bit of chill on #3).
Lightning Hammer: powerful damage output/blinds, popular in PvE.
Flame Axe: Might stacking, mobility, other utility from blast finisher.
Earth Shield: yeah this one’s iffy - it’s got control and defence, but I’d like to see its cast be a stunbreak (doesn’t even have to be instant-cast) or maybe some stability on it.
FGS: heavy damage and mobility, wheeee.
The whole ’1 or 2 skills’ thing actually fits pretty well with attunement dancing - you’re probably not regularly using all your CDs in each attunement, saving some utility for when you actually need it... so you can treat the conjure as an extra attunement, to be jumped into for use of a few more skills relevant to your situation.
I’m really pleased with the improvements that were made to these utilities, and I definitely don’t want to see them go, particularly for a completely different type of skill.
However... I’d kinda like to see us getting wards again, yeah. The main issue I see with creating such skills is that most of their effects already exist:
- Guardian consecrations
- Necromancer wells
- Ranger traps, to an extent
Traps and wells already existed in GW1 with roughly similar functions to what they do now... but it looks like Guards inherited a chunk of the old Ele’s support abilities, with the ward name on their 2-handed weapon #5s and the ward effects on their consecration skills.
Channeled skills, if interrupted or cancelled before their channel is complete, go on their full cooldown.
In the case of Meteor Shower, the longer you channel the skill, the more meteors will drop in total - if you cancel or are interrupted before completing the cast, only a fraction of the total meteors will fall.
If you cancel before any meteors have fallen, the skill will go on the normal cancel/interrupt cooldown instead of the full 30s.
Bunker guards are going to have so much fun trying to cleanse party conditions…
Nah, they’ll just run Plex themselves.
I would probably leave the game if I ever saw a guardian run perplexity runes. They are pretty useless with them.
It was mostly a joke, but I’m kinda wondering if the new GMs for guards could allow condi builds with, say, plex runes and sigils of doom/earth. High burning damage, retal scaled with the condi damage, couple of rupts (shield/sanctuary, maybe?).
Could be utterly useless, like.
From the OP, it sounds like they’ve got the total mapping listed at 100%, just not the reward chest.
I mapped LA on my engi during the final Scarlet event and didn’t get a reward (either for regular city or an explorable area - and there was me hoping for l80 exotics), had forgotten about that until now.
This is either a bug, or your mailbox is full - don’t the gifts get mailed to you, not appear in a chest?
This is similar to something that’s come up regarding Stone Heart (new GM Earth Ele trait which makes you immune to crits while in Earth Attunement).
The trait will most likely multiply crit chance of the incoming attack by 0, so that attacks with 100% crit chance (like the Thief’s stealth attacks while traited with Hidden Killer) still function, and just don’t crit.
It’s likely that the sigils are also using up a charge of AP, to increase their crit chance to 100%, which is cancelled out during the roll for crit by the 0% base chance of the sigil effects.
Whether this is intentional or just an unintended consequence, I don’t know - and whether it’ll be seen as something that needs changed is unlikley.
So at some point in the past I remember patch notes about the delay on casting downed skills, in an attempt to stop folks from ‘wasting’ their #2 skill.
I didn’t really have problems with it for a while, but over the last few weeks I’ve noticed it happening rather a lot – and it really affects my survival chances, as an Elementalist.
I’ll be alive, then get burst down, and immediately in Vapor Form if I was trying to cast any #2 skill – but should I want to cast it immediately after getting downed (such as to move closer to allies or get back into a point to delay its capture) I have to wait for the delay.
Bunker guards are going to have so much fun trying to cleanse party conditions…
Nah, they’ll just run Plex themselves.
Server reset isn’t necessarily the same time as your midnight - for example EU servers reset at 1am BST right now (was midnight GMT up until our daylight savings kicked in on Sunday). Where in the world are you, and are you NA or EU?
Also... you didn’t miss out on much for not completing your monthly. Some luck, some now pretty useless salvage kits? Not exactly a king’s ransom of loot, and with only 3 wins left to get that means you only lost out on 2-3 achievement points.
[snip]
The problems start showing up when someone who has powerful control through lots of confusion can also already deal significant damage – either through condi or power, but usually condi since it’s improved by the same stat.
It’s similar to (one of several problems with) Hambow Warrior – they have a huge amount of control when they can also dish out heavy damage (and then there’s the sustain and cleanse on top of that). Pin down, currently a barely telegraphed immobilise, followed by a stun chain… it’s a really powerful combination of two aspects of combat, with each attack in the chain doing a lot of damage on a character specced for it.
Ash, your link was wrong - the thread might’ve hit the full page of posts, and be directing you to page #2 when you try to open it because it thinks you’ve read all of page 1.
Anyway, this link should work if you want to read it:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Sigils-Ele-and-Engineer-punished/page/1
Yeah I’d definitely go with Battle, with possibly Energy for EA or Fire/Air for damaging procs if you want to dish out damage.
One I’ve toyed with, and am interested in seeing the new version of, is Doom. 50% poison uptime (more if you have any +condi duration) is pretty powerful heal reduction, and could really help us against Warriors with their currently stupid sustain, and what will still be very powerful passive regen.
TBH I don’t know what Anet’s planning with Aquatic Benevolence. In WvW, zergs heal from blasting water fields and not from the Healing that the skill with water fields give. Sure, a "Healer" role Ele with Aquatic Benevolence can blast his own water fields too but like you said, a single DPS elementalist will outdamage the heals of a pure support Elementalist.
I can actually see it being useful in sPvP sometimes, since the incoming damage can still be high but is much easier to handle than the pitched battles of WvW... but iunno if it’s worth building for over other things.
Using all available finishers miiight be a bit overkill, like, but it’s possible to get pretty high burst heals on allies as you get to a point with Geyser (quick cast) or land huge numbers of finishers (4-5 is pretty huge personal blast number) in the longer lasting Healing Rain.
Whether it’ll be worth taking over Cleansing Water largely depends on the rune/sigil changes, as well as balance on other classes - if condi hasn’t been toned down at all I’d be likely to stick with CW.
(edited by cheese.4739)
All sigil recharges are seperated assuming the sigils are different types. You can’t stack two of the same sigils for double the benefit.
So no, two Sigils of Energy will be wasting a slot.Elementalist has two less sigil sockets because they have twice as many weapon skills. More than a fair trade.
Aye, sigils of the same family won’t stack (so no dual Energy, and you can’t cheat by using Major and Superior Energy together) but all other cooldown sharing is getting removed – so you can use a bunch of on-swap or on-hit sigils and they’ll all proc independently.
That we lack sockets due to having more skills is arguable – since our skills should be balanced against other folks’ skills, rather than the gear we can use – but another possible reason for the lack of sigil slots is that Eles and Engis are expected to swap attunements or kits very regularly, so on-swap sigils are going to proc close enough to on-cooldown.
Or, of course, it could be an oversight based around the single-weapon setup of these classes, that has been quietly ignored!
This probably isn’t with regards to sPvP, since we can’t hit 1500 healing power there (300 traits + 165 runes + 798 amulet = 1263; chucking on that weird Air trait that turns Precision into Healing adds very little to that since there’s no Healing/Precision/xxx gear.
Considering hwo the Ele Earth trait doesn’t even work with an existing trait (Lingering Elements), I’m not surprised that the rest turned out to be useless as well.
Srsly, how hard is it to either work out balance for LE on the eixisting traits, or to update the tooltip description to say "THIS ONLY WORKS ON FIVE POINT MINORS, BY THE WAY. LOL BALANCE."
Do you have numbers on how often Skyhammer matches end up 4v5 (or other ’with leaver’ scenarios) compared to those on other maps? From my experience, something like 1/5 of Skyhammer games are pre-ruined due to leavers, while most others at least play out to completion - even if they end in 100-500 stomps due to poor teamcomps or folks leavinf for any other reason.
We got statistics for how badly folks trying to flip dyes on the TP did - can we maybe get statistics for how badly folks who roll Skynammer do? Or how much the win rate is down to 4v5s, or class balance, rather than player skill?
EDIT: added link about flipping dyes and how easy it is to obtain/analyse statistics
(edited by cheese.4739)
I... don’t see Perplexity going well for any Eles. We struggle against conditions -> our cleanse/healing is un-nerfed.
Oh look, but you’re now given a whole bunch more confusion to deal with. Confusion that completely destroys your (hahaha you thought it was now functional) Signet, or any kind of burst (or defence) you thought you had.
Welcome back, 0/x/x/30/30 Ele. Cleanse and vague, uninteresting utility is still what you do best.
Why does Confusion proc on skill use, rather than on hit?
Retaliation, its counterpart, procs every time the buffed player gets hit, not every time someone aiming a skill at them casts their skill.
Confusion should only work on attacks that land, rather than skill use - this will make dodges or invulnerability on confusion-based builds much less useful, and stop players from hiding in stealth or using other immunities while their foes are affected by the condition.
2. The reason warrios can do stuff whilst endure pain is active is because it is only immunity to physical damage, not CC or conditions. Mistform, elixir S, and renewed focus are immune to EVERYTHING while active
A warrior running two stances with stability can be immune to everything for 4s, apart from maybe boonstrip + non-fear CC. This is a problem.
How they can use two stances at once is hard to understand, anyway - the skills really ought to cancel each other, as they did in GW1, so that obtaining full immunity isn’t possible for such a heavy-hitting class.Right and now that warrior has just used all 3 utilities and are now on a 40 sec/60sec CD. Are you gonna die in those 4 seconds?. If so i suggest changing your build up and getting some toughness. Or just kite him until endure pain is over
The War can be running full zerker gear and stunlocking, or otherwise dishing out massive damage, while invulnerable. And regenerating health at a ridiculous rate.
They can res an ally or apply strong AoE pressure to a capture point while at no risk themselves - forcing others to use their precious utilities to survive, too.
Have you ever played Ele against a decent hambow? Or even a bad hambow? Speccing for toughness means you’re even more vulnerable to condi and still die in just a few hits (while dealing very poor amounts of damage) and their survivability utilities are all on much longer cooldowns than the Warrior’s stances.
(edited by cheese.4739)
There are enough under deserving people abusing insulting gestures in wvw in completely unjustified scenerios. Example: when i win a 1v2 and then get rolled over by a 5 man a few seconds after, then they are proceed to laugh and jump on my body. What? Or when im winning a fight, 1v1, 1v2, etc, and then they get saved by their zerg, and proceed to do the same thing. You knew u were gonna lose u jerk lol. Im in TC, and people spam laugh, etc waaaaay too much. Gets annoying fast.
Honestly, u want to say chicken @ the warrior, but wont it just result in all the warriors doiing it to u?
Yeah this is one problem – folks will corpsehump in the most undeserving situations. Won while vastly outnumbering your foes? Time to jump up and down! Woo that was very skilful.
2. The reason warrios can do stuff whilst endure pain is active is because it is only immunity to physical damage, not CC or conditions. Mistform, elixir S, and renewed focus are immune to EVERYTHING while active
A warrior running two stances with stability can be immune to everything for 4s, apart from maybe boonstrip + non-fear CC. This is a problem.
How they can use two stances at once is hard to understand, anyway – the skills really ought to cancel each other, as they did in GW1, so that obtaining full immunity isn’t possible for such a heavy-hitting class.
It mostly depends who you’re fighting, and what build they use. Rangers, for example, tend to pew pew pew and take many small hits to kill you – Necromancers and Engineers also usually do a few, as well as some Thief builds and your DPS Guards.
The only folks who’ll reliably kill you in a couple of hits are probably your Backstabbers and most Warriors, who we’ll likely always struggle against – I guess Stone Heart might help a bit with its anti-crit, but there’s not much you can do against stunlock chains on shorter cooldowns than all of your defensive skills.
P.S. found …i tend to ignore stuff that starts with “when struck”
Iunno, “when struck” can be a pretty useful trigger, since you’re likely to get hit quite often in combat. The things that ruin them are global ICDs for attunements or foes hit.
Ta for the link, sorrow.
Looks like both Blinding Ashes and Elemental Contingency are... terrible. Duelling Ele will continue to have huge disadvantages against Mesmers and Thieves, and these traits are pretty ineffective against foes with so many attacks they can hit with.
At least we might be able to beat (non-condition) Warriors now, if nobody else.
Wooo. -_-
Edit: oh, cool, and Lingering Elements is still a pretty pointless minor, with the Earth and Water effects being the only ones with even silghtly useful effects. Yey for 15 point traits in the profession mechanic line!
::comparison to Fast Hands::
(edited by cheese.4739)
I’d like some of the Alacrities to be Adept tier (wasn’t the Water one Adept in the past?), but that could arguably be too powerful - builds like 20/20/20/10/0 or 10/10/10/10/30 would give reduced cooldowns on all skills with access to Master traits or the arcana line’s utility.
I like the Deneb’s idea, but getting the number balance right could be tricky, as the 20% doesn’t go into 6 or 30 nicely.
Another idea (though it may be terrible!) is to make Alacrity a minor trait, maybe for 15 points - they’d not be too accessible (could only take 10 points in arcana if going for all 4) but it’d open up a whole bunch of options for Master trait choices.
0 10 0 30 30 d/d eles usually use frost armor and switch to earth when they need to take a punishment, this trait seems useful in such scenarios but the problem is that it would require giving up 30 arcana, losing protection on attunement as well as evasive arcana (and fury). I don’ t really see any usage for this trait.
Earth V: Elemental Shielding
Gain protection when applying an aura to yourself or an ally.
Adept trait in the Earth line, gives you protection whenever you cast your Frost or Shocking Aura skills, or gain an aura through a combo (executed by you), other trait, or runeset. You can take Air I: Zephyr’s Boon for some fury and swiftness, too.
Please put anyone wielding an instrument in the mists on a seperate team from everyone else, so we can kill them.
Thank you,
<3 cheese
Yeah, we’ve already got a couple of signet-aura Blinding Ashes build ideas, along with conjure builds.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Glyph of Elemental Power with Blinding Ashes - it should allow an Ele to proc the blinds every 5-8 seconds using only one skill. Might be worth rolling GoEP (maybe alongside GoEH) with 30/10+/x/x/x for a while, to see how well the skill might work in future should the other Glyphs get some love.
I’m sad that I can’t run with 30/20/0/30/0 - it might be possible to get some use out of the fire attunement Glyph of Elemental Power with Blinding Ashes, since it’s got the 5s ICD on its conditions anyway, and Inscription with Cleansing Water is the only way to get regular cleanses on a Glyph build.
(Yeah I’m really hoping that some of the balance changes include Glyph improvements, because they’re fun to run and a great concept. Not expecting it... but hoping.)
I’m gonna do 30/0/30/0/10 s/f conjures so hard, and it’s going to be great.
Burn on crit, cleansing fire, and blind on burn, with stone splinters, alacrity, and stone heart in earth, renewing stamina in arcane tree.
Alacrity just so that when I drop my conjures I can use magnetic wave and obsi flesh for added utility before I conjure for more damage, and thus have time to conjure without being in danger.
s/f for the above skills and for the extra armor+blind as even more defense (together with a 3-hit auto for more crits)
I will try staff as well because it has some great utility, but I will have worse heals without almost any blasts.
I might even use zealot, but I’ll probably go berserk eventually because I won’t be healing excessively. If only there was p/p/v gear, for better defense against conditions while maintaining damage and crit chance.
I’d look more into something like 10/30/30/0/0, with auramancy and tempest defence. I’ve not listed a weapon set since you’re expecting to have a hammer or axe in hand most of the time… but with Tempest Defence I guess either Dagger mainhand for the other Shocking Aura, or Staff for the other Static Field?
At any rate, should give reasonable protection/fury/swiftness uptime from regular aura use – I chucked in the glyphs because GoEP’s near-perma-weakness will go really well with the protection and Stone Heart.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQBFSxoAapDjG8RDAhCDMeIyIAIe8QFSA-TIAA1CnA
Pretty weak to condi, with limited cleanse, but it could potentially shut down a power build while still applying heavy pressure.
Rerollers are getting ’nerfed’ because we’re slowly getting non-cosmetic unlocks added to sPvP. They’re apparently intended to be a form of horizontal progression (all old skills/traits/gear options should still be available) but also they’re soulbound, so you have to unlock again on each new character.
This has been brought up, and at least one dev has responded saying they’d look into how many people reroll frequently.
Spend all your glory, yes - we can’t earn it any more and there won’t be anything new to spend it on introduced.
There’s a vendor near the gear merchants in Heart of the Mists that you can get cultural and dungeon armours from, and you should obtain/craft as many skins as you think you’ll ever want because we have no idea how we’re going to earn PvP rewards in future.
For coin (as far as we know, now the only PvP currency) you’ll want to make and sell dyes - they’ve just spiked in value, due to one of today’s blogposts outlining the new account-bound skins wardrobe (which skins from the PvP locker will become part of), so even common blue dyes are worth selling now rather than reforging.
You should probably look at this page for unique skins you might want, or google around for some of the more in-depth posts about it. You can salvage dungeon armours for higher-tier tokens than your current rank.
Edit: tidied up a bit
(edited by cheese.4739)
So yeah, the map sucks, really hard, due to the massive differences in CC balance between classes, the ridiculous power of the hammer, its many bugs, and insta-gib mechanics.
Here are a couple of (mostly serious) ways it could maybe be improved, if we’re still going to be stuck with it in soloq:
1) Make the hammer less poweful. This change could involve making the hammer:
- dodgeable
- only damage
- only KD
- friendly fire
I really like the last one, it’d make it a much more tactical weapon rather than a free win at a point.
2) Remove the glass panels from the capture points, and wall in the hammer better.
The map looks really cool, and (occasionally) you’ll have someone get knocked off the edge while fighting somewhere – but the massive power that pulls and fear provide at the capture points and hammer is the reason so many hate combat on the map.
3) Keep the glass panels, but remove falling-to-death.
Make it a small drop to an area under the map, which players can walk back up from to re-contest the point (I guess a more extreme version of the midpoint on Kyhlo?). CC and positioning will still be very powerful, but won’t be awarding points for kills over and over again. Downside: even more frustrating for players to get pulled/pushed over and over again, as it can happen more frequently.
So yeah, some actual serious suggestions, because if we’re going to be forced to have this map in queue, we might as well push to get rid of some of what’s bad about it.
The bigger problem: people can ’afk’ and pop back to the game to cast a few skills every minute or two - or keep the game window up to hurl abuse at their team/their opponents - and this doesn’t give them any black marks. Dishonourable isn’t an issue for them, and we don’t have sensible reporting options that cover such activity.
Stranger: I got a stack of dishonourable last Tuesday, before I’d restarted my game - I must’ve been loading the map up as the patch was released, and it was (as far as I can remember, pretty fun) 5v5 game...
But I’d had connection problems at the weekend, and already waited out one of my stacks of dishonourable, and definitely played all my other games on that day to completion. So the patch made me unable to play PvP for about five hours at peak time when I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Wait, can you still hit people with your full strength, with broken bones and internal bleeding? I would’ve thought that such physical injuries weakened you somewhat.
For Staff, I quite like the look of this, actually:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQFAWnMISLD2zAmOArEGAIPg5FWGPEZEAKFiB
Auramancy for high protection uptime, no crits while attuned to Earth, high cleansing. If the new Earth trait works with Lingering Elements, maybe drop the cleanse and go for Master-level arcana - maybe Renewing Stamina, though the only reliable crits are those two Arcane skills. Probably Elemental Attunement for guaranteed protection (so high anti-burst) when attuning to Earth.
Gear-wise... that depends what we get. Vitality + healing power are probably the main things wanted, if we can’t get a good set with these I’d say stick with Cleric’s.
and that’s one issue with Staff: it’s combo-tastic, but we have a very limited number of combo skills on the weapon itself, as well as not many finishers to choose from among our utilities.
It’s already got a good number of finishers compared to other professions and weapon sets. Staff is a field generator first and foremost, which is also where its power lies. The fact that it gets finishers at all is a bonus, and an important one, but it shouldn’t be overdone.
So you argue that Staff should be useless on its own, if the finishers are a bonus?
If a Staff user wants to trait for more useful combos, such as auramancy or Persisting Flames, they also need to bring enough finishers themselves to create those combos – other players’ finishers won’t cut it.
While the OP’s autoattack-blast suggestsions are just silly, the Ice Spike one has come up before and I still think it’s a good one – an Ele can’t hang in Water Attunement for too long (lest it be unavailable when they want to switch back), and the skill does have a lengthy cast time, so enemies should fire off interrupts just as the Ice Spike cast finishes to rupt the field and prevent the Ele from healing.
Normal damage is what happens with 0% crit chance, sorry for not being clear on that.
Just for clarification: I meant the major trait selection, not a full reallocation of traits.
However the CC-reliant gameplay on the map means that many players can’t change out major traits to something more suitable, and actually need to get into another tree entirely.
Elementalist stability sources:
- Armour of Earth, utility skill
- Tornado, elite skill, locks out other skills
- Armour of Earth, procs at 50% health for Earth’s Embrace adept trait
- Rock Solid, 2s of stability whenever you attune to earth, master trait
The only two reliable sources of stability are a long-cooldown utility skill, and a master-level trait in the Earth line (which isn’t very commonly used for any build not running Rock Solid already). Without trait point reassignment many Ele builds become extremely vulnerable to the instagib mess that is Skyhammer.
I share your concerns of this map for competitive play, but I am also convinced that many complaints simply stem from inexperience, as it is always easier to blame external circumstances than to admit that one’s gotta learn and improve.
Many of the complaints probably are due to inexperience, but that doesn’t mean the map should stay in rotation. CC skills just aren’t fairly balanced between professions - and nor should they be, as only one aspect of combat - and this map turns those CC skills into instant kills at 3/4 of its main combat zones.
(edited by cheese.4739)
So what happens if a thief’s trait is said to Guarantee a crit hit, but the ele trait says you can’t get crit hit?
Will the game explode?
Guaranteed crit = 100% crit chance
No crit = 0% crit chance
100 * 0 = 0
Even if ‘guaranteed crits’ actually give a higher than 100% chance… such as maybe a 200% chance, which would cancel out with a 50% crit chance reduction to make 100%? That 200 * 0 still works out at 0.
Ice Spike : This skill works identical to Dragons Tooth in that there is a delay when cast before it hit’s its target and they both inflict a comparable level of condition, however Ice Spike does not blast. This should be a blast finisher with that in mind.
No. It would mean you could get 2 blast finishers in a single healing rain or frozen ground (3 if you prep an eruption, 4 if you also add in arcane wave). Way over the top.
Actually we can already do a huge number of blasts in one field:
1) Eruption
2) Brilliance
3) Wave
4) Evasive Arcana-Earth
5) Flame Axe
And since Eruption needs to be precast and the others are utilities, you can actually get 2 Flame Axe blasts if you’re very quick in that Healing Rain.
This does require heavy trait and utility investment, and that’s one issue with Staff: it’s combo-tastic, but we have a very limited number of combo skills on the weapon itself, as well as not many finishers to choose from among our utilities. The only one I haven’t yet mentioned is Lightning Hammer’s AA chain… and that’s because it’s unreliable at best for getting off blasts.
One important thing about Ice Spike, should it ever be considered for a finisher: it’s got a long precast, same as Eruption, and delay before it hits. An Ele casting both in succession would be clearly setting up for a serious combo, and ripe for interruption – and we don’t have much access to blocks or stability without long cooldowns or the option of switching back to Earth Attunement (which has just been left for the combo).
I can’t think of anything that’d be more highly telegraphed than an Eruption+Ice Spike, with their impressive animations.
it does provide a check to positioning skills, stability awareness and adaptability – after all, weapons, skills and traits can be adjusted before a spvp match starts.
While we can’t currently change traits before a match in response to enemy team composition, this is hopefully coming soon – either that, or a full lock of all equipment setup as soon as players queue for a game. I’d probably be fine with either, just not the current mess that stops us from resetting/reallocating traits in PvP maps.
With regards to positional awareness: the map could be designed to strongly reward this without involving instant-kill mechanics.
Consider the midpoint on Kyhlo: you can knock people off, and it takes an appreciable amount of time to get back up to the point, but you can:
- position yourself to only get knocked back (towards a treb side) rather than down to the lower level
- time stability/dodges well to avoid the knockback
Battles over that capture point can be pretty fun, and people don’t constantly make threads complaining about it. The problem with Skyhammer is that such knockbacks/pulls instantly kill the CC’d player rather than just giving a combat/positional advantage to the CC’er, thereby making skills that can move enemies around far more powerful than they were ever balanced around being.