Guild Wars 2

Warriors are ment to deal one-shots. L2P.

It’s a core problem with the skill design of elementalists. Instead of getting 4 full weapon sets, the elementalist has access to 20 “half-skills” (either being half as effective or having double cooldown compared to similar skills of other classes).

If every attunement bar was “self-contained” the 12s attunement cooldown (or even the old 15s cooldown) would be justified. Engineers have also niche weapon bars (Med Kit, Elixir Gun), but can switch on a 1s gcd.

Somewhen in March

Healing Signet: Based on player feedback since the patch preview, we decided to increase the passive base heal to 450 per second. As compensation the cast time has been reduced to 3/4 sec and the cooldown to 15 sec.

@necro gap closers: Dark Path. It combines Burning Speed’s cooldown with RtL’s range and Magnetic Grasp’s reliability.

Switch to Focus for the “channel” skill points in orr. The 5s invulnerability (combined with Arcane Shield, if necessary) is usually long enough to get the skillpoint without cleaning it first.

Burning scales with condition damage (and Might stacks as they give +35 power and condition damage): 328 + Condition Damage / 4 per second at lvl 80.

For the stacking, it is even worse: Burning only stacks in duration, even across players. Meaning that if one player is able to keep burning permanently up, all other burns are wasted. The stack-limit is only there to prevent unreasonalbe high durations of burning on one target (>1min), but dps-wise a 10s perma-burn is the same as a 1min perma-burn.

And no, high condition-damage-burns have no priority over low condition-damage burns.

I agree that there should be some compensation for low base health and armor, or at least lower the difference in HP tiers without further balancing.

Elementalists have 1047 attribute points less than a warrior. (18372 – 10805)/10 + (1211 -920). To put that into perpective, a maxed trait line gives 600 (2*300) attribute points. The PvP soldier amulett gives 569 toughness and vitality to a total of 1138 defensive stats. Basically, warriors get soldier’s defensives for free.

I don’t think that the stat difference should be given as bonus to other attributes, though, because of the following problems:

• Some classes would get “better” bonus attributes, leading to endless discussions (“Class X got feriocity, but my class’ stats are wasted in healing power!”)

• In the long run, the bonus attributes will get negated by later balance updates: Class X has bonus power → X deals too much damage →Skill coefficients get nerfed and make the bonus power useless.

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

I still hate the fact that auras are supposed to be OUR thing, yet mesmers have pretty much exclusive access to the best aura in the game. Chaos Armor is way above and beyond what any of our auras can do. It’s the best aura in the game and we don’t have access to it. I’d argue it’s better than all of our auras combined (at least fire + ice those pretty much suck).

Also why the frack don’t we have a glyph that gives us an aura depending on attunement? Instead of the trainwreck that is glyph of elemental power?

You gave me two ideas. The first one is actually not new: Glyph of Elemental Shielding, Instant, 60s CD. Gain an Aura based on your current element. Breaks stun.

The second is: Make Chaos Armor mechanically an Aura. It doesn’t matter that the elementalist doesn’t have direct access to it, but blasting a ethereal field for partywide fury+swiftness+protection would be a nice option.

Auras are a nice utility+defensive mechanism (well, except fire aura) and offer great synergy with traits (fury+swiftness, protection, can be shared). The down side is that we barely have access to them.

+1 for fire aura on fire attunement.
+1 for reworking fire aura.

The Lost Witch.7601:

As you can see: The more toughness you add, the less effective each point of toughness added becomes.

No, this is just wrong. Thoughness scales as linearly as Vitality in sense of “you need X toughness to survive an additional hit”.

Let’s say you have 10000 HP, 1000 Thoughness and are taking 1000dmg hits (That’s 1,000,000 base damage before toughness). Obviously, you survive 10 hits. For vitality it’s easy: You need 100 Vitality to survive an additional hit.

Now let’s move to Tougness. To survive an additional hit, you have to reduce each hit by to 909 (10000HP / 11 hits). To get that damage reduction, you need 100 Toughness (1,000,000 base damage / 909 actual damage = 1100 Toughness). To survive 12 Hits, you need 1200 toughness (1,000,000 / (10,000/12), or just 100*12), to survive 13 hits, you need 1300 Toughness, in short: each 100 Toughness grants one additional hit, just like vitality.

TL;DR: Although it’s unintuitive, Toughness scales your effective health linearly.

Btw: There is a game, where the total damage reduction scales directly with armor: Skyrim (or The Elder Scrolls series in general). This has the odd effect, that every point of armor becomes more important the more armour you already have. Think it through: To double the effective health, you need a damage reduction of 50% (thats 416 armor). To double your effective health again, you only need 208 addional armor (that brings you to 624 armour/75% damage reduction). To double that again, you only need 104 additional armor (936armor/87.5% damage reduction.

TL:DR: Scaling the damage redution linearly with the armor rating makes every point of armor more valuable, the more armour you already have

Huh, only one attachment per post? Did I miss something?

We completed the Thaumanova Reactor fractral, but we did not get the chest nor the ready check for the next fractal. There was no way to progress further and we had to cancle the fractal run. Things that might be helpful:

• Dessa said that that we completed the fractal and she might get us out there.
• A wipe and starting from the control point again did not help.
• Shutting down the additional collider did not help.
• The debuff destroying the plattforms did still occur periodically, even if we were not on the boss plattform
• The boss chest is displayed on the map, but we can’t reach the chest.
• We completed the tasks in the following order: slime boss, live subject lab, cooling chamber (we did that with only two cooling rods), anomaly, wipe, and finally the collider in the labyrinth.

Attachments:

• Us standing on the plattform without the anomaly
• Map with all colliders completed and the boss chest.

Okay, thank you. I wanted to ask here if others noticed problems with the new patch as well.

Hi!

Has anyone else noticed FPS drops since the wintersday patch? I have 15fps while standing still and 3-5 while moving. It doesn’t matter in which map I am, how crowded the place is, how many effects are on screen, or how low or high I set the graphics options, or if the antivirus is activated or not. Yes, even activating subsampling didn’t help. Yes, it was better before the patch.

Specs:

• Intel Core i5-4500
• 8 GB RAM
• GeForce GT 740M
• Windows 8
• If I missed something essential, it’s a Lenovo IdeaPad Z510

Yes, I know that my specs are far from optimal (as is gaming on a notebook in general), but I just want the game to be playable (~20fps in dungeons, less in WvW/Lions Arch) again.

BeaverVaulter.9437:

Yeah, I agree that it would have made sense to have your first title be Apprentice, then “upgrade” each year.

I guess in a few years I’ll be proudly showing off my Apprentice Toymaker title to all the newly-minted Grandmasters.

They could call the first title Grandmaster Toymaker and offer every year a downgrade: This year master, next year Adept ….

But tbh, I like OP’s suggestion more ^^

Julie Yann.5379:

I agree that the warrior reign on PvP is supreme, but it’s PvP, having one class stronger than the other doesn’t have a detrimental effect on the gameplay experience.

“Fixed” to help my point: I’ve never understood why that argument apparently only applies to PvE but not to PvP. Objectively, the effects of an overpowered class are the same in PvE and PvP: that class will get more usage than other classes.

The effects on the game play experience are same: You have the choice whether you play your favourite class even at the risk of gimping your group or you adapt and play the current favour of the month class as well. In PvE/WvW the second option has a time gate for levelling/gearing that class attached to it, whereas in PvP you can switch freely.

The “PvE balance is unneeded” argument just boils down to “my gamemode is better” which is an opinion, not a fact.

That said, I really like to read arguments why balancing resolves only around PvP from devs.

I don’t like invuln capping. The elementalist has access to 3 invulnerabilieties: Obsidian Flesh, Mist Form and Vapor Form. With these, the ele can hold a point 1v5+ for at least 10 seconds. Plus the time he stays alive. It’s just an annoying and cheap mechanic and eles definitely won’t be allowed to keep that.

If the elementalist gets overused in tPvP after that change, I foresee a dark future for eles:

• First, there will be completely unrelated nerfs, which do not affect the new bunker at all, but hurt elementalist in PvP/WvW: a higher cooldown here, lower damage there, 30 icd on aura share.

• Then, the invuln skills itself will be nerfed: obsidian flesh locks the skill bar, mist and vapor form duration gets reduced by one second. In addition to +5-10 second cooldown on each, of course.

• Finally, the week before the next big PvP turney, ANet decides that invuln capping is a cheap mechanic and will be removed again

• In each of the balance updates, warrior and a random underused class gets buffed.

• In March/April 2014 I’ll link to that post to say: Told ya.

or just implement underwater stomping…

Getting two major attributes (power, precision, vitality, toughness and the class-specific attribute) on one trait line will never happen.

Not balanced enough. You should use two different weapons, and replace the heal glyph with the signed and one cantrip with a conjure. Alternatively use fiery greatsword as elite and replace one cantrip with a glyph.

I like your rune choice, but it is a bit … gimmicky. I’d go for the celestial set. Yes, I know that would be 6 equal runes, but celestial runes do everything better than your current set.

Edit: I just noticed your traits: You took 3 III traits. With that excess of III you’ll never achieve true balance.

The idea behind Basilisk Venom is that it’s unbreakable – hence the elite status. I can imagine that Basilisk Venom gets un-nerfed, but at least we should know. And if thieves cannot kill glass eles anymore in that 2 seconds of uncounterable stun, I would also be not against that change.

It seems to me that powerful aura (water XII) got an internal cooldown. Today I couldn’t chain Shocking Aura (dagger air 3) and Fire Shield (focus fire 5) anymore for AoE swiftness. Anyone noticed something similar?

Edit: Okay, maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I’m only concerned about an ICD on aura share, the boons from Zephyr’s Boon (air I) and Elemental Shielding (earth V) work and stack just fine.

This would be less of an issue, if they sticked to the promise that everyone at level 80 has perfect gear. If alternate gear sets would be cheap and we could retrait on the fly then condition users could just get a set of power gear. Even zerkers should invest into a soldier set for tequatl for exchanging crit/crit damage for something useful.

But instead, we got a new time-gated item tier.

Mrbig.8019:

You can counter backstabs, blocks, Marks to reveal thief position, invuln.

The last time I’ve checked, Marks are only available to one profession. Blocks and Invulnerability may be a counter to ele burst (or any burst for that matter), but not to a stealth attack, because a failed stealth attack does not reveal the thief. When I pop arcane shield for a stealthed thief, I see that: BlockBlockBlockBACKSTAB! What saves me from that damage? Correct, a random/predicted dodge.

ResJudicator.7916:

snip

I fully agree with the concept, but I think it would not only require number tweaks, but also skill redesigns, because most weapon sets currently lack a skill shot.

kirito.4138:

Super simple like this? lol

IF ( Blue.pcount + Red.pcount = 10 ) {
reset_map();
start_match();
}
ELSE {
system_msg(“—> Crash <—- \nException: c000005”);
send_report(ArenaNet.log)
Exit_GW2();
}

Wow, one of the worst pseudo-codes I’ve ever read. It’s not only oversimplified but also buggy (4 vs 6 would also be possible), causing uneeded crashs (why not wait for players if the game is not full) and if you did something meaningful in the ELSE statement, it does not account for the case that there may be too many players in the game (perfectly possible due to lag/race conditions)

Even if this suggestions was perfectly implemented, it would be 100 times worse than the current system.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Exactly, ele was the strongest profession in PvP for about 8 months out of the 13 the game has been released.

As if ele was viable the first 4 months when RtL (and Magnetic Grasp) have been 3 seconds self stuns. Also, it was the first class forced into defensive builds in a glass canon meta. That barely qualifies to be the “strongest profession”…

Mrbig.8019:

But air/arcane burst allows no counterplay, you can do it even while dodging, the only way to evade it is BY RANDOM DODGING or by foretelling ( lolwut)

Funny, that’s the exact same counter that Backstab/any attack from stealth has.

Again: Fresh Air buffed the ele’s sustained damage by 400dps at max (2k every 5s). Technically, Fresh Air only made damage between the actual burst combos less useless. But it gave eles a reason to try glass canon builds with dual arcanes again – something we saw the last time in the beta/at release.

I’d rather have the damage from Arcane Wave completely removed and its cooldown halved. An 15s instant blast finisher would actually be useful.

People will always find a way to farm pvp rank/glory/whatever. In GW1, people used the /dice command to deside which party has to /resign. After taking that away, people used the /rock /paper /scissors emotes. After disabling these emotes in PvP, the infamous Red Resign was born.

I really want to get Skyhammer fixed and the worst offenders banned, but I’m sure it won’t take long until the glory farmers find another way to exploit pvp arenas.

Just remember that crafting ascended weapons is also time-gated and it’s save to assume that that will hold true for armor and jewelery. It does not matter which time-gated resource (crafting cooldowns or laurels in that case) you use, imo.

That said, I’m still hating time-gated equip.

MIrra.3604:

I theorycrafted the following setup:

1 – Support/Bunker Guardian

1 – Mesmer

3 Warriors

That’s the PvE meta since release…

“Also, we had full ascended armor on the test servers”

Also: Give Focus a try. It’s definitely a niche weapon, but use it for projectile hate. Focus makes the Uncategorized Fractal (harpies), Volcanic Fractal (lava elemantals), Snowblind Fractal (ice elemental), the wurm in every TA path, the spider in TA up … so much easier just with Swirling Winds. Plus you get better versions of Cleansing Fire and Mist Form in earth attunement, and a long KD (good if you coordinate defiant stacks), an aura to share (on a too high cooldown) and a (too small) fire field.

Yes, ele is lacking damage-wise, but not utility-wise.

Okay, I’ll try again: It does not matter if there are permanently 2-3s or 50s of poison/burning on the target. Poison/Burning can be constantly reapplied and will still have 100% uptime. The 5-stack limit is only a cosmetic chance and will – without nerfing proc chances and/or condition durations – not decrease overall condition damage.

Honestly, I don’t think that the patch will change much. The problem for burning is not that it stacks in duration, but that it can be reapplied constantly via on-crit traits, combos with fire fields and sun spirit. Perma-burning will still be possible. The extra burning duration gained through stacking and “nerfed” away is already wasted when the target dies.

“Hey we have a class with ridiculously low hp and armor that actually needs defensive traits and 3 defensive utilities to survive the glass canon meta – nerf cantrips!”

I don’t think that eles actually have been the best bunkers in the game at any given time (but second to guardians), they were just the first class pigeonholed into a bunker spec.

Wow, what a long read – but it was worth it. First of all, please bold the trait names to break the wall of text. Maybe add an empty line between trait tiers. Your thread would be wasted if nobody reads it. That said, I’m impressed by your work and your thought you’ve put in here and I actually agree with all your suggestions.

One comment on Zephyr’s Focus: A recent patch added a visible buff it that trait is active. I recently used it with S/F and the only skill which activates it is Arc Lightning, but I guess it works with Churning Earth and Meteor Shower and Ether Renewal as well. I’m still not impressed by that trait.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The waves of Scarlet’s minions are depleted by killing creatures that emerge from the portals. Kills count, not necessarily events.

The pirate and molten waves are depleted by completing events.

Is there any reason for that inconsistency?

First of all: Conditions tick during mist forn as well. With 30 in water, and using 2 traits it mist form does cure a single condition. Also I can’t believe that there’s an invulnerability discussion going on without mentioning Blurred Frenzy. 2s evade on 12s cooldown while dealing damage.

I’m concerned about the balance when PvE/WvW gets a higher item tier than sPvP. The game is balanced around sPvP with exotic stats and we can already see huge damage differences between sPvP and WvW just because of ascended trinkets. With full ascended gear, the game definitely needs a lot more sPvP/PvE+WvW splits. Another fix would be buffing sPvP stats to ascended and use that as new base for balancing.

Airwolf.5287:

Chain Lightning up to 5 targets (how cool would that be)

No. If something, Air needs more single target damage, even on staff, imo.

Yes, I’m guilty of standing useless with 3 other players on a cap point – but only thrice a day. I try to avoid that for the remaining games.

The point is, that the water field gives an AoE heal to skills that would not heal otherwise. I just want to point out that you don’t need to stack healing power for a zerg support build. The water field does the work. Not your heals/your healing power. A full berserker healing rain helps the zerg as a whole as much as a full cleric one.

Softspoken.2410:

Maybe if there were better auto attacks, but longer lockouts on switching? Not recharges specifically, but instead of being able to swap attunements every 3 seconds, once you go into water you’re stuck there for 5-6 seconds instead of hitting frost armor, cleansing wave and moving on. The idea is to make people commit to entering an attunement, instead of just committing to leaving it.

I really like that idea. I think it’s easier to balance than the current system, because there is no cycling through all attunements and only using the strongest skill any more.

Yes, I was overly drastic, but it’s important to understand that the zerg healing support comes only from the water field and not from the actual heal. A water field can be blasted multiple times (say 5 times) for AoE heals (each have a cap of 5) totaling into 25 healed people. But: The blast heals don’t scale with the field owner, but with the blaster – the elementalist’s healing power only affects 5 people (which is still good in small groups).

Thanks for the comment, JSharp. It’s nice to see a dev response once in a while in the profession forums.

I’ve seen complaints that at seemingly random times getting hit by Liadri’s whip causes the player to become uncontrollable/immobilized and whirling around (not sure if it was here or on reddit).

I think it happens when you reflect an Entropic Lash hit. I used Magnetic Wave for the condition cleanse and was stucked with that whirling attack (which deals damage and bleeds as does for Liadri) shortly after that.

The whirling animation does not stop when you are downed by the AoE or the Visions of Mortality, but at least it ends after dieing.

I also made an ingame /bug report with a screen shot of the combat log (forgot to make a screen shot for the report here)

Edit: Sorry for the inaccurate title, but “Liadri: Player uncontrollable after Reflecting Entropic Lash” was too long. “kills player” was the only phrase that came to mind and is short enough and the character being uncontrollable is a death sentence anyway.

“I can’t believe I made it.”

Happened to me too. I was in a poorly populated overflow and the “zerg” couldn’t clear the way to the chest fast enough.

Because it hasn’t been nerfed, it does not mean that it’s actually good. Direct healing in PvE/dungeon is worthless, because no amount of healing will safe you from a one-hit-KO or heal enough for a second near-OHKO. Direct Healing in a zerg is worthless because it only affects 5 people. The zerg support comes from the water fields, because it is a source of multiple aoe heals.

The “support/bunker” spec actually only ensures your own life and helps a lot in a small group. Not more. Not less.

Fade.1743:

If lightning whip did more damage than other abilities on a single target…why would anyone use anything else?

When something else is needed. Below 50% health? Switch to water to sacrifice damage for healing. You saw a thief stealthing? Switch to earth for protection to mitigate some damage from their initial burst. You need AoE instead of single target damage? Switch to fire. That’s what I mean by tactical switches. Rotation switches are just auto-attacking with more button presses….