Guild Wars 2

Except it’s hard to kill fast in earth. I guess you could do bleeds with scepter and a condition build, but you have little cover conditions.

cursE.1794:

Toss in water fields, condition clears, regeneration, self-blasts, protection, aura-sharing and the Ele is definitely on top imho.

That doesn’t even work in theory. Tell me how to toss in water fields and share auras at the same time. It’s useless to mention a list of features that will never be accessable in the same build.

Besides, if staff ele was the best support in the game, why is the support class in 95% of all groups a guardian? Because no one knows about it? I dont think so. And if you talk about open world, regeneration, water fields and self blasts are something that a full zerker staff ele already has. Some protection, 2 seconds of stability and 1 more condition clear is not worth to go full healing at all, which would be the only reason to make this trait we’re talking about useful.

You have a lot of conflicting info in your response. I’ll illuminate some of it, but I doubt it’s worth discussing with you beyond this…

1. Water fields are not trait dependent — you have them with Staff, period. So you can have water fields and aura share. Simple sequence: Earth #3, Earth #2, Water #3 (aura share, prot, water field, blast, heal). Not sure why this is confusing.

2. Protection comes from multiple sources. Elemental Attunement doesn’t require any investment in Water to get it. If you are thinking only Elemental Shielding + Aura Share then yeah you need Water traits.

3. Stability doesn’t come from the healing line at all (purely Earth)

I totally agree this new trait blows with the current game mechanics (I listed multiple reasons why I feel this way in a previous post). However don’t down play Elementalist as a bad support role. I also dispute your 95% figure… nobody knows the figure. It’s also very easy to play a Guardian compared to an Elementalist — maybe that’s why you see more.

cursE.1794:

No one will ever take an elementalist as supporter into dungeons because the classes support capabilites are much less effective than what guardians have. For example, eles dont provide stability for the group. So in terms of dungeon runs, this trait is completely useless. And in open world, staff eles should do damage instead of healing. So I don’t see why this trait would be of any use, unless they increased the amount of healing in some tremendous way.

I’d argue that Staff Ele is the best support in the game, as well as the best CC. Rock Solid provides 2+ seconds of stability every 10 seconds. That’s a pretty high up-time.

Toss in water fields, condition clears, regeneration, self-blasts, protection, aura-sharing and the Ele is definitely on top imho.

Kamui.3150:

Have it also affect self healing, and have it cause Water fields to last 2 secs longer, THEN we might have something.

That at least sounds useful.

Most of the healing in my WvW guild raids comes from blasting water fields — that’s everyone blasting, not just the ele. I happen to slot two blast finishers myself, but that’s a small part of the total blasting that’s occurring. This skill doesn’t improve the blasts executed by my team mates. If it did, then it would be very useful in WvW raids.

The other heals (staff water 3, regeneration, attunement switching) will be 25% better but it’s not game changing. I doubt anyone would notice tbh.

Seriously if you want Healz to be a viable role you need to revamp combat so there’s lots of damage flying around — not giant, slow spikes that a monkey can dodge — and if you don’t dodge it, it kills you so healing is no good anyway.

I don’t see anyone taking this trait because:

1. It competes with two very good GM traits in water
2. It doesn’t work solo
3. Little impact in WvW Raid situations
4. GW2 combat is not designed to support a dedicated healer

I’ll be honest… these look like quality of life improvements and some increases to build variation. I don’t see anything that extends the life of the game, or provides more content to keep the community entertained.

There’s a lot of hype in the blog posts. It feels like a bit of a sell job on how awesome it’s going to be.

I hope I’m wrong and it introduces months of new play…

PsychoDM.5279:

I don’t get the hate for this new GM trait. Ive been playing as a semi support ELE and I’m looking forward to more healing power!

And you realize this trait won’t boost the healz from blasting your waters…. and this trait won’t boost your self healz…. so…. ??

In short you make your buddies heal better. If that works for them, then why did they need you in the first place?

As has already been stated this trait is a bit lack luster because:

1. Does not impact your own survivability
2. Does not impact blast finishers in water fields

I read the trait as “my buddies will heal themselves for 25% more”. If that’s not the case and it only boosts the Elementalist’s healing power, then I’d add yet another reason for lack-luster trait:

3. A pure healing role is not a viable role in GW2

I just finished crafting my 5th ascended armor piece — five more days until I finish my wupwup armor entirely. At that point my toon will be full ascended.

I will say with 100% honesty that the ascended crafting is the most annoying crafting I’ve ever experienced in any of the MMOs I’ve played. There’s very little satisfaction in achieving the end result, and it’s designed to string out the experience over months (yes months if you dedicate yourself to doing it 100% by crafting).

Post how you feel about crafting in this topic. These are all opinions so refrain from attacking others — just post your own feedback. Not that it will help — I have no gas left in my “help fix GW2” tank.

I find it funny that I’m getting more satisfaction out of making this forum post than I felt crafting my ascended gear.

EDIT: confused

And this:

“When [Living World Season One] ends [on 4th March], we’re going to take a break for a little bit and then we’re going to do one really big feature patch that is more akin to what people see from some of our [MMO] competitors,” said Johanson, "where they bundle a lot of features together into a really big patch every now and then.

“We’re going to provide that experience and have this huge feature build that has a whole lot of gameplay-changing elements, a lot of quality of life improvements, a lot of features bundled together into one big patch. And that’ll come some time not too far after Season One completes.”

Reference: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-14-you-thought-that-was-it-for-guild-wars-2

So this was the first update after March 4th. I would expect the feature patch before WvW Season 2, or after it — but not during the season. If they take the tournament seriously, then they will not introduce potentially imbalance issues mid-tourney.

I searched back through some forum topics and the best I found was this:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Feature-Build-Balance-Preview/first

I know I heard march, but maybe it’s what Vol said. I’ll search thru iinterview websites next.

So the best we have officially is “after the first Living World season ends”, which could be 2015 for all we know.

I thought the said the “feature” patch is march. Honestly I thought it was today, but it’s nowhere in sight.

EscataFlayer.8470:

Honestly, change the skill. Every 25% health mark you hit, (75% 50% 25%) you remove 5 conditions from yourself. 15 sec cool down. It gives the benefit of condition protection and defense, but you aren’t over powering either side. No too heavy on preventing all conditions, allowing more conditions to be placed, no struggle to kill a target just to apply conditions, and a good balance to allow self sustainment for the ele to heal itself and not have to stay at a certain tier of health.

Thoughts?

I think would be more powerful than Diamond Skin — maybe OP as it should be easy to push your health back above one of those thresholds (and thereby gain the removal again when you tick back down from all the condi’s).

Confirmed again that it includes poison. Still trying to get a scenario with another condition to see if it’s all conditions that are broken or just poison.

Staff Ele is my absolute favorite in WvW for all roles except solo roaming. Solo roaming on staff is very difficult — although there are players who will win 1-v-1 with staff (I’m not one of those players, and it’s not easy regardless).

Staff ele can do a lot with a team (from 3 players up to 50+). I like to slot Arcane Brilliance and Arcane Wave along with Earth Armor and Mist Form. Having two blasts that you can trigger on your own is amazing with Staff. Staff Earth #2 is another blast source (although not quite on-demand). I don’t take evasive arcana, but that could provide yet one more blast.

The AoE capabilities of staff are epic. The CC is amazing. The support in the form of healing and blasting-fields is probably the best in the game.

The amount of supply drained is too high imho. The reward completely outweighs any risk.

Reduce the supply drain amount per “tick” — all the way down to a single supply. This requires 10+ ticks of the poison cloud to remove all supply.

Reduce the player cap so this isn’t draining for the entire zerg. However make it so the cap-logic always grabs players with supply.

There’s still value in this skill, but I do agree with the OP that it is too powerful in its current state.

The Cleansing Water trait for Elementalist should remove a condition whenever Regeneration is applied to yourself or an ally.

It does not work underwater with Trident Water #4 when underwater.

I’ve suspected this for a while but confirmed it yesterday with poison in Mount Maelstrom fighting Naga underwater.

Zero loot. There definitely appears to be a bug. This is not a legitimate issue with tagging. There’s some type of block problem — it’s like a DR or time gate that’s broken.

Zlociutki.9165:

Is it fair that Dynamic Tempered Spinal Blades infused version cost 250 ecto and for colored version cost is only 10 Pile of Crystalline Dust.

I have wasted 250 ecto to get my beckpack to infeused version and now the cost is 10 Pile of Crystalline Dust is it fair?

Colored Ascended Variants:
1 Dynamic Tempered Spinal Blades + 10 Pile of Crystalline Dust + 1 Glob of Coagulated Mist Essence + 1 Gift of Ascension in Mystic Forge

Tempered Spinal Blades ascended:
1 Tempered Spinal Blade, 250 Glob of Ectoplasm, 1 Gift of Ascension, 1 Glob of Coagulated Mists Essence

I would like to get beck my time and 240 ecto.

Did your 250 ecto version use 15 ascended mats? I’m pretty sure you came out on the cheap end (even if you compare to ascended leather, the 250 ectos is almost break-even).

I think Moa is underpowered… it could use a 5-target AoE of 600 radius at 1200 range. Now that would be worth talking about.

And yeah, this thread is just QQ from players too lazy to read the skill description on the wiki.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

As i said, this for being a more melee based heal is rather pointless having a Blast finisher when the ONLY weapon that has more than 1 field is the RANGED staff. If the other weapons were actually give more choice when it came to Fields then this heal would be GREAT, as it is – its wasted potential for all weapons bar the ranged one which is silly considering its a melee heal.

You keep taking the selfish approach that the blast is for your own fields. It is just as useful for the fields of your team mates. That was already mentioned in this post as well. So you can still get benefit from it as a D/D in a team.

Of course if you like to roam solo then you’ll have to learn to appreciate the heal as opposed to the finisher.

GW2 is not F2P. I see this tossed around and it’s not accurate. GW2 is B2P.

However they seem to be using the gem shop to make expansions F2P. So in some regards it is both models. I would have preferred a pure B2P as was GW1, including purchasable expansions.

Columbo.5924:

ThiBash.5634:

I’m more upset with the fact one person cried about this and got an instant dev response than the actualy change. It feels so degrading to always be ignored when you present ele issues, whereas a single complaint from the recieving end gets adressed straight away…

This is probably the strangest fact about the announced change. The bug forum is bursting full with far more important issues and THIS gets fixed? If they did (miraculously) solve all the other issues as well I would not say anything, but how likely is that?

Bugs have different priority levels and ease of repair. I’ve fixed low priority bugs that were simple fixes because they were exactly that — simple. I’ve also postponed high priority bugs that were incredibly difficult to fix.

From the original forum post, it seems that this was a simple scripting error which didn’t require any changes to the code base. That would make it something trivial to repair.

I wouldn’t look much deeper than that regarding why this is getting fixed so soon over other bugs. In fairness they have fixed issues nearly every patch. They are getting thru it, although slowly.

Honestly Moa is probably one of the legitimate L2P issues in this forum.

If you can’t recite the 5 Moa skills by heart — then it is most definitely a L2P. How can you possibly expect to survive as a Moa if you don’t know what the skills are?!?!? I guess you could button mash all your keys but you shouldn’t deserve to win the match at that point.

Great ideas.

Disregard the nay-sayers, they’ll belittle any good idea.

This is a nice QoL feature.

Mystic Forge recipe that upgrades the lvl 1-79 stones to a level 80 stone.

Honestly the lvl 1-79 stones are a waste. I don’t know anybody that uses them, and they pile up like crazy if you do map completion and stories.

I know you want to sell the lvl 80 stones in the gem shop, but maybe some semi-expensive recipe in the forge to consume the junky ones.

Mattmatt.4962:

THIS:

Fire: Condition Damage
Air: Direct/Burst damage
Water: Healing
Earth: Defense

Just get rid off this.
We ALL complain about the fact that beeing the squichiest class, we have to spec defensively and that then we can’t deal reasonable damage. With THIS stupid side of view, how do you want the ele to be able to balance offense and defense ? It’s impossible cause with this you split defense and offense.

Agreed.

Ash has one goal in GW2 and that’s to make his specific D/D build super powered. All his suggestions are aimed at achieving that goal. If there’s an aspect of Elementalist that doesn’t help his build, he wants to change it (at the detriment of other builds).

How do players feel about a crit reduction stat. You see this in other MMOs in various forms. It’s essentially a PvP type of stat that reduces the opponents crit chance or crit damage boost.

It’s a counter to stacking high precision and +crit damage.

We have an equivalent in the game right now which is “reduced condition duration”. That stat is a counter to stacking +condi dmg and +condi duration.

This thread makes me want to go moa trolling in hot join on my Mesmer.

Nike.2631:

I think it was absolutely core to the design of this new gear that you GET INTO LIONS ARCH AND DO SOME HEROING to get the shiny. The blade backpacks are for heroes, not the shopping network.

I thought this was pretty funny… “the shopping network”.

I’m also overflowing in these and I’m rather baffled at those who are having trouble. I’ve heard the drop rate from the supply bags has been changed so that might contribute to the problem.

I’m at the point where I’m also destroying them. I’m getting roughly 100 bags per LA run. I use a staff ele so there’s lots of tags. I usually hang out were the Mystic Forge use to be as three events spawn often there. In addition there are some miasma events nearby east, west, north, and south.

Your big healz are water field blasts which you can even blast yourself. Two blasts is easy, three blasts is possible with some coordination of your attunements.

If you are using the water auto-attack to heal then you probably need to stop doing it. I play a support/sustain elementalist and I still get plenty of tags simply by rotating through fire and earth. You want to rotate anyway in order to distribute your on-attunement buffs and trigger any on-swap sigil effects.

This is just my opinion and I’m sure others will have more to add.

Kyon.9735:

hihey.1075:

Kyon.9735:

I agree, it’s really needed. Whether you play elementalist or not, it doesn’t give the player time to react until they realize they’re being hit by 5k~15k Metoeor Shower crits in pvp/wvw.

1) Don’t zerg (in WvW).
2) 3,5s of casting animation, interruptable and punish-able (in pvp).

Anything else you’d like to know?

Am I supposed to laugh or what?

Oh please, I’d like to go to your PVP world where Staff Eles would free cast in the middle of a cap point where everybody can see them instead of positioning himself someplace where he won’t be interrupted during that 3.5 secs. Or do you play that way? Go inside a cap point and start casting Meteor Shower where your enemies can stop you with 1 CC or even get instagibbed by thieves?

P.S. I don’t even join zergs anymore. I just go to WvW to solo/2~5 man roam with friends.

I thought it was quite funny… and a great response to your rather obnoxious tone.

The red circles are needed, especially to differentiate friendly MS from the unfriendly version.

Lastly I’ll add use stability if you can’t rip off your MS without getting interrupted. I suspect you know that but since you were playing that card as some sort of defense, I’ll bring it up.

The lightning auto underwater will do good damage if you are up-close on the target. All three bolts will hit. It’s the highest dmg I’ve found from the wep skills underwater.

Earth auto is good for the bleed and is a close second (first if you are not up-close).

I only use fire/water just for some of the situational skills (fire field, blind, regeneration, mobility).

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I do find it funny, Adding a Water Field to a weapon, which is pretty much all i suggested

Wrong — Disregarding your other forum topics (which are a bit of a treat), you suggested a whole pile of stuff in this topic alone:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Personally i think Elemental Surge should be buffed to include Boons as well. the good old basic ones from Inscription so when you use one you get the same duration boon as you would from Inscription.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

With Staff being a RANGE weapon it doesnt really need to have 2 Water fields, so i would be more than happy if one got moved to D/D the weapon set that is 100% melee.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

…buff the heal and remove the healing increased part.

Arcane Brilliance is excellent just the way it is. Fire it off in the middle of a zerg battle in melee range and the heal is epic. On top of that cake you get a blast finisher and AoE damage as frosting. It’s borderline OP.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Demand!? i havent demanded anything.
The simple fact is, the MELEE heal is BETTER on a RANGED weapon. Does that make sense to anyone?

If it is a heal for anyone, of any weapon set to use, buff the heal and remove the healing increased part. Even then, thanks to the Blast finisher it will STILL be better on Staff.

The healing increase is CLEARLY an advantage for melee… you are a broken record, yet making no sense.

The blast is an advantage for fields, and staff has more field — granted. But everything else about the heal is an advantage for melee, period.

This point has been made again and again. If you refuse to accept it, fine, that’s your problem. But the skill is fine exactly the way it is. Your proposed changes make it worse for everyone not playing in “Ash” world.

notebene.3190:

So the only way to save up 500 blade shards is to do the event 33 1/3 times? :|

No not even close.

I have over 3000 blade shards and I’ve run this event about 20 times max (I’m being generous as I think it’s closer to 15 times). I also have the achievement rewards for the meta (100 supply bags) and the heirlooms (50 supply bags).

It’s seriously not that hard and I’m going to have to destroy blade shards now since they don’t have any monetary value and I’m out of storage space.

You are not forced into a weapons set to make the most out of a heal.

Honestly Ash if ANet made all the changes you demand around D/D it would ruin the profession. I’m referring to this topic and some of your other topics (burn stacks?).

D/D has it’s strengths. If you enjoy D/D then learn to play to its strengths and stop lobbying for an amalgamation of weapons.

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

The patch notes are clearly a fake. This was posted by the devs on the balance forums:

TimeBomb.3427:

I’ll say that internally staff Ele has turned out to be strong, scary strong against condi meta. The glass cannon specs seem to be unchanged but the tankier dps specs have seen substantial improvements. Enough? Arguable. At least ele will now bring the cleanse support it has needed. Will the Signet of Resto change be enough to make it super strong? Arguable, but it’s definitely a viable option now. Do you want to lose the cleanse from ether renewal? Probably not.. but dagger specs see a nice sustain boost from using RS. Additionally, our changes has brought a new role to ele and it’s one hell of a role! I’m sure plenty of people will have tons of fun messing around with what they can do on ele now.

These patch notes show nothing for staff. Nothing for ‘support condi cleanse’.

They’re bogus.

That was my thought too… but given past history I suspect the notes are accurate. Which would imply the staff, on its own, is pretty much the same. A 10% condition reduction for a 5 second skill you can use every 30 seconds doesn’t sound “scary good” compared to the current.

So I read the leaked patch notes and I don’t see anything that specifically buffs the staff such that it’s “strong, scary strong against condi meta”.

You could argue the magnetic aura buff which reduces condition duration by 10% is a buff… but that by itself doesn’t make the staff “scary strong”.

I don’t want to link the leaked patch notes as that appears to be against forum policy. However you can find it as the second link down if you google “gw2 leaked patch notes”.

It’s a difficult problem for ANet because the Ele can have an incredible amount of sustain. It’s the same reason a Guardian is at the bottom of the HP bucket with us.

Other games seem to do a better job delineating the roles. In other words you can build for DPS, but the game design ensures you’re horrible at sustain. You can build for sustain, but the game design ensures you’re horrible at DPS. This dichotomy doesn’t exist in GW2 for Ele.

You can solo-escort the dolyaks with staff and two blast finishers (Brilliance and Wave) along with Rock Solid, Elemental Attunement, and Cleansing Water.

Also Rock Solid helps with the pesky interrupt aetherblade auras. Start your Meteor Shower and switch to Earth after 1 second (right before meteors start falling). The stability from Rock Solid will let you finish the channel.

I’m having zero issues in LA — in fact I thought ele was one of the best professions to play, especially for the escort events. I’m coming from the perspective of staff.

It seems to me the new content in LA is designed to be anti-glass. The mobs live a bit too long and hit a bit faster which puts glassy toons at higher risk.

If you want to be a condition clearing beast, then yes 30 water is going to be required on Staff.

However, I don’t feel pigeon-holed into Water otherwise. In fact there’s a popular DPS staff build that doesn’t use water (although don’t ask me what it is exactly as I do love my Water traits).

Why’d you make a new topic? You already had a topic showing this outdated trick here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Video-Staff-Massive-DPS-10-20k-Meteor

Hopefully the Moderator will merge these topics, or delete this one.

I found the info from Tyler surprising because no where in this topic is there a single buff to staff:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Feature-Build-Balance-Preview/first

On top of that, I’m already scary efficient at removing conditions on my Staff ele (with Water traits).

My best guess is maybe the “elite signet” leak might be reality, allowing more frequent switching into Water attunement.

Because Celestial is what I want — I picked it not for crit damage alone. I value the other stats as well. Even if it receives ZERO changes other than the ferocity state, I’d still pick it.

Nevermind… I just crafted them up and the answer is YES!

The wiki does not list celestial as an option. However Dulfy states “you can pick whatever stats you want”.

Does anyone know if Celestial is an option?

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

yeah, for a 40 second cool down skill i think a 3-4second water field would be fine, have it proc 1 second of regen every second and it would be quite balanced. It would give D/D a bigger reason to use it.

If Elemental Surge got the Inscription addon so that not only does it proc those conditions but it also procs the same Boons as Inscription does for Glyphs then Elemental Surge combined with Arcane Brilliance could become a GREAT heal.

The problem is that same skill is also used on Evasive Arcana. With that trait and your proposal you’d get a water field every 10 seconds on dodge in Water, along with the regular water field from dagger 5.

If you want water fields, run Staff — that’s the short of it.

You started talking about Arcane Brilliance and then wandered off into how you need more water fields.

Arcane Brilliance provides a blast — independent of weapon. If you can’t find a way to use that with D/D, it’s not the fault of Arcane Brilliance.

Lastly you get bonus healing for nearby foes which is an advantage when using D/D.

@Manuhell: it’s hard to prove your point when 37.5% of the professions don’t line up with your hypothesis (warrior, thief, guardian). Likewise it’s hard to argue that Ranger and Elementalist are not the top two most needy professions (even if they are the two of the top three most played).

Furthermore, if you view the results as a list of classes that need the most “buffs”, then the classes at the bottom really make sense.

So in short, I wouldn’t belittle the results by saying ’ranger won because everyone plays ranger".