Guild Wars 2

It needs to be removed altogether. Dunno what genius came up with the idea, but putting a class without cooldowns in a game where everyone else is limited or gated almost exclusively by cooldowns is just plain dumb.

It’s not only almost impossible to balance (cough Black Powder Heartseeker abuse cough) but also creates insanely dull gameplay (that *swooosh*swooosh*swooosh*swoosh* when a Thief starts chasing spamming HS makes me want to facepalm everytime).

To be perfectly honest, the entire profession probably needs a complete rework, that very concept of stealthing and backstabbing is horribly outdated for a game that wants to offer decent PvP.

Simon.3794:

i’m sorry but this game isnt balanced around unbalanced WvW

And that is what’s really dragging this game down, balancing an entire game around the most negligible game mode is pretty much screaming for disaster. According to google trends, wvw on average is about 7 times as popular as spvp. Considering the spvp part of the game is completely alienated from the rest of game anyways, their decision to ditch the most popular, most played pvp mode in favor of something that has no relevance whatsoever is just flat out ridiculous.

Conclusion: ‘Unbalanced WvW’ has no point, as WvW should be their main priority in terms of balance. When people’s complaints are related to the unbalanced state of WvW, these are still very legit complaints (in fact about the most legit complaints we can have).

silentnight warrior.2714:

What i didn´t understand here?

The fact that BOTH had ways to deal with each others damage, BOTH win some fights, BOTH had ways / skills to beat the other one.
And from your post its easy o see that your frustation is with eviscerate so i belive you lose some fight because of it.
So what i didn’t understant?

Razor already summed it up perfectly:

Razor.6392:

The fact that the ele, and any other class, has to severely outplay a warrior while landing multiple of their hardest hitting skills, while warrior only has to hit 1-2 successful combos to win?

I think that’s what you didn’t “understant”

You should look up what risk / reward means.

To put it plain and simple:

• If I hit a perfect RTL into Updraft into Burning Speed into Fire Grab combo, that puts me into a good position.

vs.

• If he hits Eviscerate I’m done.

silentnight warrior.2714:

So you were saying that without eviscerate that warrior could not win against you. But it was ok for you to win against him.
Right….
And even with eviscerate you win some and lose some…

You need to work on your reading comprehension.

Paavotar.3971:

Axe builds are pretty much all close combat pressure builds. So if you stay close to axe warrior, you’re gonna feel the pressure. Warrior is and always was a kind of class that is good at trading hits, so if you start to trade hits with warrior, you are going to end up dead on the ground.

So if you meet axe warrior, try to stay in mid range of them from where you can easily land skills on him but he can’t land anything on you. Every now and then get close, do some form of CC (make sure he doesn’t have somekind of stun break / immunity ready to break from it) and do quick burst of damage and back off again and keep that pressure on. As long as you can keep up roughly 400dps the warrior won’t be able to regen from the burst.

Oh and watch out for some form of CC from warrior, they rarely do eviscrate without first hitting you with shield bash or axe throw which traited with leg specialist will immobilize you.

so, TL;DR; tips to beat evis warrior:
Don’t trade hits.
Try not to stay too close for the heavy pressure.
Constant damage on him.
Do quick in and out hits after he has used stability/berserker stance/endure pain.
Spike, spike, spike.

Maybe I’m just dumb, but how do you evade melee range combat on a D/D ele while still applying 400+ DPS?

The thing is, I don’t have problem with the constant pressure. What seems kinda odd though is that a build applying constant steady DPS to keep up pressure is also able to spike for 50% of someone’s HP on a single skill, that just sounds like bad design.

Yea, that skill is pretty stupid. Took a rather long break some months ago, came back recently, had to kinda get back into the game, catch up to changes etc.

So I ran into this warrior while solo roaming in WvW, started like the typical fight against warriors as D/D ele: Dodge a lot, heal a lot, cleanse a lot but eventually you will outlast that guy and if he doesn’t decide to run even kill him. Then all of a sudden this guy jumps on me and pops a good 50% of my HP in a single skill.

So I’m staring at my toon’s dead body with my mouth wide open, kinda irritated about what just happened. Apparently, that Warrior player believed I put up a good fight, group added me and we did some 1v1s. Well, lets boil it down to this: Eviscerate is pretty ridiculous. Won some lost some, but it never really felt fair. As the ele, there really is no room for error whatsoever, you kitten up once you’re pretty much dead, whereas the warrior really only has to hit Eviscerate and that’s about it.
Out of all the duels I think I won as much as one (1) where I ate an Eviscerate to the face, usually not dodging it was an instant death sentence though, while landing even multiple of my heaviest hitters weren’t anywhere near a guaranteed win of that duel.

Dunno, but it just doesn’t feel right when one guy has to be on the absolute top of his game to have a shot a winning vs. someone who needs to land a single skill to win..

I’d swap some of that soldier’s gear for valkyrie/cavalier, maybe go for 2 air instead of 2 earth. As you’re already running pack runes I’d try to get the max out of that Fury.

Alternatively, if you got enough spare gold I’d switch pack runes for strength runes, on tanky builds they tend to work better than pack.

Warrior is the class you’re looking for.

Staff ele is zerg-only and nothing but a free loot bag on his own. D/D is kinda able to roam and also not completely useless in group/zerg play, but you will need to put up with the fact that a Warrior does everything you do.. twice as good.

The reason is ANet tends to allocate their most competent people to working on the next expansion/chapter, because that’s where the money is for them. This leaves us with the least competent people for the live system, all the way down to internship level at times. Their balancing team is a prime example for that; these guys should have a controlling instance above them at least, something to prevent them from completely messing up the game. This controlling instance doesn’t exist tho (some community manager in the german forums even pretty much literally told us balance guys are free to do whatever they want, regardless of community feedback and whatnot), so no wonder these guys are running rampage on the game. Figure in most of them are playing Warrior or Thief pretty much exclusively and lots of the weird & absurd stuff about the current state of ‘balance’ in GW2 explains itself.

- Warrior: Highest base HP in the game, highest base armor in the game, best mobility in the game, best CC in the game, …. Undisputed king of WvW, can we finally start bringing that profession on par with all those other lowly peasants in the game?

- Elementalist : Lowest base HP, lowest base armor, no inherent defense mechanics. Giving them back their mobility would be a start at least. Then proceed to fight the lacking build diversity by actually improving the bad stuff, instead of bringing everything down to the same level of suck.

To be perfectly honest I don’t really care about cooldown reduction on Armor of Earth and whatnot as long as RtL stays on 40s cooldown. The butchering of that skill was the dumbest thing they ever did (and the list of dumb stuff they pulled is quite impressive to say the least), and the fact it’s still not reverted to 20s or even 15s after the range got ‘fixed’ is baffling really. Tweaking stuff like Armor of Earth doesn’t even remotely make up for them pretty much invalidating Ele as a roaming class, which was the sole reason a lot of people rolled an Elementalist in the first place.

Shadowlord Pain.8946:

Hello everyone! I’m coming off of a 6 month break from GW2 and have some questions. I love WvW and I’m looking to run a havoc squad on my server FA. What group make-up have you all found successful for 5-10 man groups? I play a staff elementalist at the moment and have a Guardian as my alt. I’m really looking to flip camps, take towers when possible and give support for the larger groups taking keeps. Any feedback is appreciated.

Stack as many Warriors as possible. Fill remaining slots with Guardians. Add an Elementalist. Voila, you’re done.

I played WvW twice since they introduced leagues. Well, ‘tried’ to play is more accurate I’d say.

I dunno if it’s PvE’rs who block the maps or a giant influx of WTJ’rs after our server managed to rise in ranks again, but right now there’s queues on all maps at times we never had any ever since people mass-left the server because they were tired of playing vs. Vizunah. Both times I managed to endure the queue time and get on a borderland (I have no hopes of ever getting into EB again at this time) the only things I really experienced were absurd skill lags (to the point where I couldn’t even get around the map any faster than a crippled snail because my skills wouldn’t activate at all literally 50% of the time I spent in WvW) and Warriors. Warriors everywhere.

Hands down, that’s it for me. Waiting 20+ minutes to get onto a borderland, only to have your gaming experience ruined by massive nonstop skill lags and ridiculous class imbalances just isn’t enough for me to log on (funnily enough, these two things seem mutually reinforcing: with nobody being able to activate skills your quadra-signet warrior suddenly becomes the strongest build in the game causing a flood of quadra-signet warriors to storm the borderlands xD).

1 – Skill lag
2 – Item spiral and the need to PvE in order to keep up with it (e.g. some ascended gear not obtainable by WvWing exclusively/for the most part)
3 – Queues

canadez.5328:

They had a chance to give some value back to BoH and failed (Laurels really?). But lets be honest did anyone really believe that they would do it right?

You don’t need to log in daily to get BoH. What counts for them is users that log in daily, and Laurels encourage you to do exactly that. That’s why all the good stuff in the game requires Laurels, it’s just a business decision.

Problem isn’t the lack of solo tasks, problem is the map size.

Camps + sentries already are good solo tasks, the problem just lies in the small maps resulting in giant zergs not being punished for doing those objectives. If your WXP train just capped a tower/keep and is now on its way to the next tower/keep, there’s hardly a reason to not just waltz over any supply camps and sentries on the way, because the loss of time by doing so is irrelevant most of the time.

That’s a problem they need to address, they need to actually punish massive zergs for doing small objectives in some way, to bind them to those big objectives. Also, sentries really should be able to kill an unguarded Dolyak, because otherwise there’s hardly a reason to actually kill & cap them (other than WXP, ofc).

The Baws.5164:

I don’t want to dedicate loads of time to something then find out it’s nerfed and no longer good for what I want it for

You should not play GW2 then. The Guild Wars brand is traditionally known for their devs very, errm, … controversial idea of balancing a game.

That being said, the Warrior class has historically always been a strong PvP class in GW1 and pretty much mandatory for most competitive 8vs8 team compositions (which isn’t true for all classes), so that probably would be your best bet for a rather ‘nerf-proof’ class (it will get nerfed sooner or later, but chances of getting entire builds/playstyles destroyed are less likely than with other classes).

Can’t really say yet, but I guess I won’t continue playing WvW which ultimately means I will quit the entire game altogether.
There’s some big titles coming up, and if only one of them delivers half of what they promised I see no reason to further stick around WvW/GW2.

There’s just too many things going wrong with GW2. I took a long break few months after release, came back and really enjoyed WvW again. Was kinda excited about those WXP ranks. Found out it’s an endless grind. Meh. They bring in ascended weapons. More Grind. Meh. Won’t take too long until they bring in ascended armor I guess. Even more grind. Meh. Everything in this game seems to just evolve around grinding out <whatever> endlessly.
I’m not really into PvE content, but even on that front GW2 fails to deliver. Is there any end-game content at all?
As far as living story goes; stopped participating in that a long time ago. Was kinda excited about it at the start, but everything just seemed so boring, repetitive, uninspired and.. well.. grindy after a while.

sPvP is a joke hands down, and pretty much dead anyways. Did never have any media/esports attention to begin with, yet these guys are still screwing up balance in their most successful PvP mode (WvW) with their delusional idea of getting sPvP into a market they have no business competing in.

I have no idea how the creators of GW1 managed to drive its successor into the ground as hard and as fast as they did, but it happened, sadly. I enjoyed GW1 for half a decade, GW2 hardly lasted a few months.

At times I wonder if they’re deliberately driving their game into the ground. The amount of sheer incompetence these guys are showcasing is absolutely unreal, and it’s hard to believe they’re not pulling this stuff on purpose.

lordkrall.7241:

.. One of the main reasons for the limitations is that it is built on a modified version of the GW1 engine, ..

That’s the entire point. People need to stop believing they’re playing a 2012 game. MMOs have immense development times, so by the time you release your game, your engine is already guaranteed to be outdated.
What makes things so much worse for GW2 is the fact that they didn’t actually develop a new engine for GW2, but instead ‘updated’ their GW1 engine, which due to be being an MMO, was pretty much already outdated in 2005. Essentially, GW2 engine is the GW1 engine with an added z-axis (yes, GW1 was two-dimensional and only pretended to be 3D) and that’s about it. Welcome to your 2012 game .

Kalan.9705:

I think it’s great that living world exists, even if I’ve never seen any relevance to myself at all as a WvW player. I am however concerned that there is so kitten much spare dev time that living world content can be made every 2 weeks and thrown away as disposable content and yet….

There’s been no new content in WvW for nearly a year.

No! fixing horrible bugfests after months, like culling bugs not displaying 70% of your opposition and allies, is not new content.

No! disabling rather than reworking a major mechanic like orbs (partly because it was exploitable, and also detrimental to fun) is still not new content.

No! still having massive skill-lag bugs that can leave one unable to activate some or all skills for minutes at a time is not in any way new content, even if it ever gets fixed.

No! adding horrible vertical power grinds that make one have to replay the same content (for decades apparently) to not have massive disadvantages like 2.5k less hp, isn’t new content. It’s just an endless grind to repeat the same content. (Also doesn’t it contravene the whole design promise to have skill matter more than grind?)

No! Having a few of the armour options finally available to wvw players, and many still entirely unavailable, this isn’t new wvw content.

Why is there no new art in WvW in a year?
Why is there no new zone in WvW in a year?
Why is there no new subzones or meaningful changes to existing zones?
Why is there no new NPC’s or environment changes?
Why is there no new objectives or mechanics?

Why is WvW, which is such a popular game mode I frequently have long long queues to even enter it, treated as ‘dead-world: no new content’ by A-net? Is no-one in design & art working on WvW at all? Couldn’t you spare even a single 1 of the now bi-weekly updates to do anything for WvW players?

I’ll try to explain.

First and foremost, you need to understand that A-Net is a company, and companies want to make money. There may or may not be other (minor) interests as well, but essentially it always boils down to this: $$$.

As a non-subscription based game, the live system of GW2 does not grant them the same amount of revenue a subscription based game would. In a subscription based game, you want to make sure to allocate a sufficient amount of manpower to enhancing the live game, providing new content, features and whatnot. In a non-subscription based game, you don’t want that. You want to have all your highly talented and experienced people working on the next expansion/chapter/add-on, because this is where the money is, while the live system basically costs a lot and generates only very few $s.

WvW suffers the most, because it generates the least profit for A-Net. It puts a huge stress on servers and provides little to no income. There’s hardly any gem store stuff WvWers would buy, and WvW itself has never been more than an afterthought & marketing aspect to A-Net anyways, while PvE has by far the biggest amount of players and they’re still desperately trying to get into e-sports money with sPvP. So PvE and sPvP get at least some dev attention (for the PvE part still only a fraction of what a subscription-based game would get tho) and WvW gets the short end of the stick and is just flat out ignored for the most part: As soon as they ‘fixed’ the gigantic culling issue (and introduced the gigantic skill lag issue) they pulled away what was probably the last active developer on WvW and replaced him with a designer. I wouldn’t be surprised if that designer (Devon Carver) is the one and only person ‘working’ on WvW exclusively (more or less) at the moment.

I wouldn’t completely rule out all possibilities of getting REAL new content for WvW in the future, but one thing’s for sure: It won’t be for free. If you ever want real new content for WvW, expect to pay for it (in the form of an expansion/add-on or w/e).

Snowreap.5174:

Supposedly ArenaNet is working on something big for WvW but I have no idea what it is.

New arrow cart masteries?

Another week of idiotic matchups – another week without an update from the idiotic dev? Well, we’re heading 1k replies (biggest WvW thread in history?), maybe finally hitting that mark will give that troll a reason to crawl out of his cave and re-ensure us his new system is working like charm and doesn’t need any adjustments whatsoever. kittening kitten.

aelflune.8590:

Sometimes I really wonder if thief players are that dumb or they’re just trolling.

They’re really that dumb.

DevonCarver.5370:

While I do try and take time out to respond to posts in our forums, it is also the case that time spent on the forums is time not spent getting something else done. Right now, we have a lot of balls in the air, so it’s less possible for us to post frequently.

lol.

(15 chars)

Dese.1382:

Are there more people playing sPvP then WvW?

Nope. But ANet seems really desperate to get into that esports business, which is ridiculous really. Take a look at the games they gotta compete with and wonder what ANet’s been smoking. You can’t bring a Toyota Aygo to a drag racing competition and expect to finish top3…

Well, it’s getting ridiculous really. I never understood why they decided to implement this horsekitten to begin with. Yes, the old system had issues, but at least it produced somewhat balanced matchups (especially after free transfers came to an end). Then for some odd reason they decide to cater to a minority of players complaining about stale matchups, and introduce one-sided blowout matchups week after week. As had to be expected, kitten hits the fan and forum goes wild, but now their stance is to just ignore all of that and pretend everything’s fine? ANet logic I guess.

For me personally, I’m pretty much done with WvW and GW2 as a whole now. I used to log in and WvW pretty much daily. Last week I found myself logging in twice, only to think “ah kitten it, why even bother” and immediately log off again.

Atherakhia.4086:

I’d argue this isn’t even the problem as I see nothing wrong with perma-stealth in theory.

Before you continue defending your favorite griefing class & favorite broken mechanic with made-up arguments, I’d suggest you do some googling to find forum posts, blog posts & articles from leading game designers of the world’s most successful online games explaining why long term stealth mechanics (still a weaker mechanic than the on-demand perma-stealth our GW2 Thief has access to) are detrimental to gameplay.
I have this gut feeling these guys invested a lot more time than you thinking about stealth mechanics, and for some strange reason all of them come to the same conclusion: You shall not implement long duration stealth mechanics in your game. A lot even go as far as saying, in hindsight, they should have never implemented any kind of stealth at all in their game.

Ashlov.3819:

The easy solution is for ANet to give every class a mechanic that’s equally frustrating to Thieves. Then we can all go around trolling and griefing each other.

I’d like to pick up on this. I thought a lot about it, but I really can’t get my head around how anyone with half a brain could ever implement something like the GW2 Thief in an MMO. You found the right word already: Griefing.

Players griefing other players is something every MMO tried to fight and avoid in the past (for obvious reasons), yet ANet thinks it’s a great idea to put a class into their game that is soleley designed to grief other players.

From a WvW player’s perspective:

In a 1 vs 2+ scenario: You’re dead. Nothing you can do unless you’re standing right next to a tower. Thieves have immense melee range damage, access to snares, pulls, gap closers + ranged damage and obscene mobility. Even when running the tankiest of builds, they will keep you in in-combat speed 24/7 and whittle you down. Anyone not running a tanky build or not having their defensive cooldowns up will just explode instantly.

In a 1 vs 1 scenario: Griefing akittens best. The Thief will do whatever he wants and you just can’t do anything against it. Even if you completely dominate him, he will just stealth out, reset the fight and come back at you a few seconds later. You will have to endure this torture until one of the Thief’s 546 attempts of killing you will finally succeed, or you managed to limb into one of your towers in in-combat speed.
Your only chance of ever killing a decent Thief is when that guy forgets where he put his keyboard.

In a 2+ vs 1 scenario: Hilarious and tragic at the same time. Multiple people running around in circles swinging their weapons at air and tossing AoEs around like crazy, hoping to kill something they cannot see.

tl;dr: Creating a slippery, high mobility, roflwtfbbq damage class with access to perma stealth in a game that has no counterplay to stealth. Excellent work GW2 Game Designers, thumps up.

16 pages, 788 replies and ANet is just ignoring us? Really, ANet? Really?

You guys could at least quickly jump in here and admit you pulled an ANet* again. But the way you handle this fiasco feels like you just don’t want me to buy your gems?

[* Pulling an ANet: kittening things up in the absolute worst way possible.]

DevonCarver.5370:

The concept of tiers has little meaning at this point and you should try to stop thinking of matchups in those terms. Servers are matched up by proximity of rating, not proximity of “tier”. If the tiers have ratings that are within the range of the random adjustment, they can end up fighting each other. This is going to result in blowouts, no doubt about it. However, we are not going to make changes to this after just 2 weeks of the system. There are things we can do. We will almost certainly end up adjusting the total added to each server rating to group the matchups a little more closely. First however, we need to let the ratings adjust by having more varied matchups like these. If you look at EU, which is using the exact same system, you can see matchups with numerous surprising results. The same will likely be true by the end of the NA matchup.

TL;DR: We are going to wait at least a couple more weeks before changing any of the math behind the new system, but it is very likely we’ll decrease the size of the variation at some point.

You do realise you’re losing players left, right and center while you’re sitting there scratching your groin?

Dunno if you guys ever think stuff through before implementing, so let me explain: What the new system is doing right now is bringing the ratings closer together. This is the logical result of putting this new system into place after the ratings had been inflated by the old system for so long. What this means is: Blow-out matches are actually getting more and more likely with every week the new system is running, b/c generally speaking, higher ratings will decrease and lower ratings will increase. This means, at the very least the size of the variation should be adjusted every week.

Now horribly imbalanced match-ups were kinda fun for maybe a week or two, but it’s getting pretty kittenin old pretty kittenin fast. Waltzing through deserted borderlands PvDing for 7 days straight, only to get steamrolled by a server that is constantly throwing twice the amount of people at you the week after isn’t exactly everyone’s definition of fun.

You better fix that kitten ASAP instead of doing nothing. Or maybe this is just ANet’s solution to queues and skill lag? Get rid off players → problems fixed?

Swim.6830:

makku.2508:

Well, the Water 1 skill travels back to you , so for an ANet I guess it’s only logical to apply the GoEP conditions to you as well when it ‘hits’ you on its way back.

You guys really thought you’d get a buffed elementalist skill for free? It always comes at a cost.

Next up – if you use GoEP while not stunned, it stuns you for 3 seconds!

This needs to be fixed tho, srsly.

Might just be intended. I think it’s a great change actually. I remember when they massacred RTL to 40s CD and some people claimed it’s a good change because you now have to use RTL more carefully. Well guess what, same applies here! Water 1 won’t return if it hits terrain before reaching max range, so everything’s fine really. You just gotta use it more carefully and make sure there’s terrain to hit in front of you when using water 1 with GoEP buff in effect.

Edit: Also, this change only affects mainhand Dagger, neither Staff nor Scepter. So it creates build diversity! All hail the ANet masterminds, another brilliant change!

Well, the Water 1 skill travels back to you , so for an ANet I guess it’s only logical to apply the GoEP conditions to you as well when it ‘hits’ you on its way back.

You guys really thought you’d get a buffed elementalist skill for free? It always comes at a cost.

Demon.5082:

makku.2508:

A stun break is an instant emergency reaction. Just like our cantrips. GoEP is a long term strategic skill. Putting these 2 things together is not ‘confusing’, it’s just idiotic. That’s why you can keep scratching your head for days and weeks to come without getting an idea about how to utilize this skill as both a long duration buff and an instant stunbreak to full potential, because it’s just not possible.

I agree that it makes no sense but if the sensible thing is not balanced then it has to be changed right? :-P

Well, depends. The one big thing causing more and more annoyance for me is the following: Elementalist is actually the best class in this game design-wise: The gameplay has a great flow to it, it features traitlines of nice synergy (not counting the useless stuff) and everything an elementalist does is nicely telegraphed to the player himself as well as everyone else (fancy explosions ‘n stuff, you always know what’s going on when fighting with/against an Elementalist. Mesmer? Unless you play Mesmer yourself, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on, and then you’re dead. That’s bad design actually.) So instead of applying the most idiotic changes to Elementalists every other patch, they should finally get their act together bring those other extremely poor designed classes (Mesmer & Thief are like the epitome of how to NOT design a class, but almost every other class is severely lacking as well) up to the level of Elementalists (not speaking of relative power as in class balance here, just pure design issues), and lots of problems would already be solved.

In all honesty, I’d prefer if they just took away 1 or even 2 stunbreaks and then be done with it, instead of shifting them over to the most idiotic skills ever in a cheap and incompetent attempt of creating build diversity (‘oh let’s see… if ima take it away here and instead add it… hmmm.. there… voila, diversity!’), corrupting design cohesion along the way.

Demon.5082:

For those of you crying about losing stunbreakers, most classes manage with 1 (yes 1) stun breaker. Eles had a singular cantrip build with 3.

Loving these comparisons.

Think about this:
- Some other classes have access to pretty strong unique defense mechanics (Stealth, Death Shroud a.k.a. 2nd HP bar, Blinks, Clones).
- NO class in the game except for elementalist features the lowest base HP pool combined with light armor.

So they could as well bring Necros down from 18.3k to 10.8k base HP, because… well, Eles manage to do with that amount too?

Demon.5082:

While I agree that putting a stunbreaker on GoEP is a bit confusing, you guys are bashing a skill you have NO IDEA about. GoEP gives you conditions on ALL ATTUNEMENTS based on which attunement you were in when you cast it.

So I cast GoEP in earth attunement and my lightning skills now cripple (and it cripples a lot). I feel this glyph is really under-rated and now with the new weakness buff, you can use it in air to give all your spells a weakness proc. Very powerful when facing GC thieves/warriors.

Still scratching head about how to use it as a stunbreaker since not using it prefight is wasting buff time.

Oh I do know how it works, and I believe ARM does as well. I think “burning (already in fire), weakness (already in air), …” was meant as: Regardless of in what circumstances you use the Glyph, it will never provide anything we do not already have access to via certain skills in specific attunements.
The Glyph grants you either burning, weakness, chill or cripple based on which attunement you cast it in. But, that’s kinda redundant, because we already have low CD, on demand access to all of these conditions.
While I agree having your air skills cripple (or chill, or burn) comes in handy at times, that’s highly situational and is furthermore completely overshadowed by the giant lack of synergy between the Glyph’s inherent effect and the additional effect of breaking stuns.
There. Is. No. Synergy. None at all.

I mean, there’s a reason we have all our stunbreaks on cantrips: They synergize well with their effects; IT MAKES SENSE TO HAVE THEM THERE. Breaking a stun while going invulnerable makes sense. Breaking a stun while cleansing truckloads of conditions makes sense. Breaking a stun when teleporting somewhere makes perfect sense. Breaking a stun to get a long lasting buff causing a chance of inflicting conditions on your skills? Not so much.

A stun break is an instant emergency reaction. Just like our cantrips. GoEP is a long term strategic skill. Putting these 2 things together is not ‘confusing’, it’s just idiotic. That’s why you can keep scratching your head for days and weeks to come without getting an idea about how to utilize this skill as both a long duration buff and an instant stunbreak to full potential, because it’s just not possible.

ARM.3912:

Ehecatl.9172:

ARM.3912:

Taking away two stun breakers from d/d, IMO that is the final nail in the coffin since the class cant survive without mobility.

Nobody is taking stunbreakers away. They are just being redistributed to different skills so builds that aren’t completely cantrip focused aren’t royally screwed whenever they get hit by a stun.

By definition they are taking stunbreakers away. You would have to be an Anet to run a glyph that gives you burning(already in fire), weakness(already in air), chill(already in water) and cripple(already in earth). If you want to run a glyph that gives you what you already have, and lose out on a teleport that actually keeps you alive be my guest. Oh, and kiss earth 5 goodbye. Since you are running glyphs now good luck landing that one.

While I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said, it’s even worse actually:

Even if (for reasons unknown) I wanted to use a Glyph that gives me what I already have, I’d at least want to get these things whenever it fits, and not wait for the enemy to stun me so I don’t waste my stunbreak. #ANetLogic shrug

Well, whatever. I guess we should be glad they didn’t go full Anet and put the stunbreaks on conjured weapons or sth.

My guess is they will also nerf/rework/remove Zephyr’s Boon to get rid off perma fury and swiftness on D/D.

What I expect overall is:
- Less survivability from cantrips. They’re prolly gonna move at least 2 stunbreaks from cantrips over to glyph or signets, so we’re forced to choose between a stronger activated defense CD but without stunbreak (cantrip), or some mediocre passive/active effect with a stunbreaker (signet/glyph). Overall, defense & survivability from utilities will be lower.
- They’re probably gonna tone down our offensive boons as well, removing perma fury on D/D and probably finding some way to limit our might stacking as well.
- Further, some aspects of Water and Arcana might get hit as well, most likely condition removal and our access to vigor and regeneration.

Dedlaw.9130:

So what you’re really saying is that bugs are everybody’s fault for not mass quitting?

You’re almost there.

There’s several reasons bugs occur in the first place: Poor code, QA lacking, …

Publisher / producer / … will define a certain standard of quality. They will release anything they want to release the second it matches or exceeds that standard.

If that standard is too low, it’s the customer’s (that’s us) responsibility to communicate this, and take appropriate actions to make sure the standards get raised, so we can use the service we’re paying for with an adequate standard of quality.

Wasn’t really that hard to understand, was it?

Dedlaw.9130:

Aww that’s cute. So now it’s all our fault?

Have you ever seen the WoW community upset over something that got broken in an update? At times it could border on riot. Did that make a difference in preventing future mistakes? Nope. Why do you think it will make a difference here?

Of course it is. WoW community getting upset didn’t change anything because raging on forums isn’t enough, lol. Blizzard probably couldn’t care less about some teenagers raging on the internet, as long as they still renew their subscriptions.

There’s a difference between expressing you’re not satisfied to the people responsible for that, and actually making them feel you’re not satisfied.

If these WoW kids would have cancelled subscriptions instead of just raging and using their daddy’s credit card to get another month of WoW, then yea, things would have changed.

Beldin.5498:

makku.2508:

Concerning the ‘lolz you guys obv never played MMOs before, MMOs are always buggy lolol’ -part: There’s exactly 1 reason stuff gets released with such bugs: People like you. If everybody was up in arms whenever they screwed up like that, stuff would change and future releases were better. Luckily for them, there’s enough people like you.

I don’t think you have ever programmed anything and tried to test everything that users can maybe do wrong. Because you can spend much more time with that then with the programming, and in the end the users will still make something that you never in your wildest dreams could have imagined.

So the choice is more to live with bugs in updates, or get new updates maybe once in 6-12 months instead regulary. And even these updates will have bugs of course.

Excuse me, but how is the bug this entire thread is about related to anything happening on the user’s side? I explicitly wrote ‘such’ bugs, what part about ‘such’ did you not understand? Stuff like this has nothing to do with unexpected user actions and whatnot, it’s either laziness or sheer incompetence on ANet’s side, and neither should be tolerated.

Lighter.5631:

This is just a minor bug, what some of you guys are saying is just ignorant and illogical.

some thing like “Yeah, this is ridiculous.”
“Probably bug not surprised Anet rarely tests stuff”
“Anet … Pathetic …”
just for a bug like this.
these comments are like the most idiotic comments ive ever see for ages, like you guys never played any games or any MMOs.

It’s actually of a far bigger scope than your limited mind could ever imagine.

There’s 3 reasons why this could have happened:

1) They don’t test/verify stuff at all. Like in, never, really. Someone changed a value somewhere and didn’t even bother verifying it had the desired effect. He changed something unrelated or unused, and that error went through without anybody noticing.

2) There’s some mysterious issue going on that prevents changes that were made, tested & verified on their development systems to work as intended on the production systems. They seem to not be aware of this issue.

3) They have some serious problems with version control. They rolled the wrong version to the production systems and so the changes they thought they’d apply never happened.

Considering how quite an amount of changes went through undocumented in the past (‘stealth nerfs’), I’d say version 3 is most likely. Regardless, none of these 3 are ‘minor bugs’, but serious issues really.

Concerning the ‘lolz you guys obv never played MMOs before, MMOs are always buggy lolol’ -part: There’s exactly 1 reason stuff gets released with such bugs: People like you. If everybody was up in arms whenever they screwed up like that, stuff would change and future releases were better. Luckily for them, there’s enough people like you.

In all honesty, I just want them to stop their attempts at fixing us, at the very least until they fixed their balancing team. Even with all those bullcrap nerfs they threw at us (RtL slaughtered, Evasive Arcana only a shadow of what it used to be, …) I still manage to draw some amount of fun from playing my Elementalist. It’s getting less and less with every patch they release tho.
I live in constant fear the next balance patch is gonna be my last one. My Elementalist is my main character, I invested pretty much 90% of my playing time, 95% of the gold I spent and 100% of the laurels & badges I spent into that character. The day I stop playing my Elementalist is the day is stop playing this game.
Now obviously it would be nice to have lots of options in terms of traits and traitlines, BUT: I actually like my 0/15/0/25/30 spec, and I’d rather stick with that spec for eternity instead of those idiots screwing it over to force me into alternatives.
As people here have already said, since the Elementalist is the ONLY profession in the game cursed with the lowest base HP, the lowest base armor and no inherent defense mechanic at all, it’s an absolute must to spec decently into defense just to be able to compete with other profession and not go belly-up the moment they look at you. That’s why people will stick to Water + Arcana & maybe Earth, regardless of what ANet does to the other traitlines.
What’s then gonna happen is pretty obvious: ‘Hey guys, didn’t you get the meme? We don’t want you to play Water/Arcana, that’s why we reworked those other traitlines. But I see you’re still using Water/Arcana… soooo, enjoy those nerfs to Water/Arcana, and better switch to Fire & Air now! Hope you learned your lesson!’

No, thanks. Just leave our traits as they are right now, and stop messing around with us please.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

You do realize that you’re not required to complete the new achievements, nor are you required to purchase anything from the Gem Store… right? They’re all optional.

You do realize that EVERYTHING in the game is optional? If there was a giant bug preventing you from going any further than lvl79, that wouldn’t be much of issue, right? Because reaching lvl80 isn’t required, that’s just optional, right? If you couldn’t visit certain dungeons, not much of an issue, right? I mean, you’re not required to visit those dungeons, right?

Get a brain dude. We bought this game, we are paying customers. If they do something with the game we don’t like, we have a right to complain and should be heard. Whether or not the things we complain about are “optional” or not doesn’t even matter.

To be perfectly honest, I still haven’t found anything I liked about that event. Worst event ever so far.

- I never really noticed those small paper dragons, probably because I was royally annoyed about the obscene amount of pinatas one has to grind for that achievement, so I never really payed attention. Will try to pay attention next time, still lots of pinatas to grind!
- Dragon Ball is kitten. Went through the torture of completing 20 rounds of it, only to find out it doesn’t count towards the shattered wings achievement. Well done ANet. (Not!)
- Didn’t even bother with that Moa racing after reading forums and map chat.
- Killed tons of holographic kittens, still haven’t finished that achievement. Mindless grinding again, holy kitten.
- Opened chests, never found anything remotely exciting.
- Did lots of fireworks to finish that achievement. Enjoyed the first couple of fireworks I fired. After the 50th, not so much anymore. Mindless grinding, again.
- Was excited to witness the big LA fireworks. Nobody really seemed to know when that stuff was gonna happen, the schedule they posted obviously was a lie or something, overflow maps seem to not get that firework at all? Whatever, in the end I afk’ed in LA (finally managed to not be put into overflow) for like 3 hours straight, tabbing out to desktop watching LCS stream. Got the achievement when I tabbed back in at least, but missed all the fun.

Utterly disappointed.

It’s getting annoying really. Regardless of how much you dislike Riverside’s style of play, at least we’re not flooding the forums with whiny posts all day long. If we meet a playstyle that’s giving us problems, we adapt or die trying. And that’s about it. No need to jump on the forums and cry everyone else a river. (pun intended)

Reminds me of this special kind of people that joined a round of BF:BC2 Rush as attackers and instead of actually participating in the battle for objectives just camped their kitten on some hill in their base going for Saving Private Ryan headshots with their sniper rifle, crying about baserape once the defenders stormed sniper hill and kicked their butts.

If you guys don’t like PvE content on your maps, don’t like objective-driven gameplay, don’t like siege weapons and stuff; I fear WvW just isn’t the gamemode you’re looking for. If sPvP also doesn’t fit your idea of PvP gameplay, then sorry to break it for you, but GW2 as a whole just isn’t the game you’re looking for.

Equality.9023:

Is the sky always falling with many of you? I read nerf nowhere in the conversation!

You do not have to read nerf anywhere for ANet to apply nerfs.

GW2 Balancing nomenclature:

a) We nerf something by absurd amounts (like increase cooldown by a 100% and cut damage in half): Call it a ‘nerf’.

b) We nerf something by a small amount (think of a 5% damage nerf): Call it ‘untouched’.

c) We don’t nerf something (as in, no change at all): Call it a ‘buff’.

There you go, maybe you can figure out now .

Is AG an all-female server by any chance? The amount of whine and drama you guys (girls?) create in these threads is astounding really, and only matched by popular top model TV casting shows.

Looking at their ‘balancing’ history it’s quite understandable elementalists live in fear and terror whenever a new ‘balance’ patch comes around.

Seems like the big problem we have is that dagger weapon, both main and off-hand and especially when dual wielding those things. Devs seem to have identified the Elementalist’s dagger as a weapon they generally don’t like (well, ok, let’s be honest: they kittenin hate it). They probably won’t stop whacking away at us with their nerf bats until people finally stop using daggers on Elementalists.

I’m not too sure they won’t touch Zephyr’s Boon. I’d love to to be optimistic, but for some reason I have that gut feeling they won’t really touch the useless traits and instead rework our popular traits to bring them all down to the same level of suck.

Feels like I’m experiencing less skill lag as well. I’m not much of a zergling myself, but I remember times when I ran into massive skill lag (game pretty much unplayable) while roaming solo b/c 2 or 3 giant zergs clashed somewhere on the map. Haven’t experienced anything like that for some time now; but recent ‘balance’ patches made me play a lot less than I used to, so maybe I’m just missing out on these things due to less time spent playing.