staff Ele is the same as always – essentially a healbot that’s hopeless at solo roaming, weak in small group stuff, but is a great force multiplier in larger group clashes due to its CC and water fields.
I gave the trait a good run too. I found it stupid OP vs condi necros and quite useless everywhere else. It was amusing being able to run over necro marks but definitely not worth 30points in an otherwise crappy tree. Not sure I would spec it if it were an Earth 10 point trait – the Armour of Earth on 50% HP is better.
Personally, I’d rather see it thrown out or reworked into a more worthy GM trait, eg: 33% chance to reflect incoming conditions back to source while attuned to earth.
Another example of something I would spec 30 earth for: apply 1 stack of torment for each stack of bleeding or vulnerability you apply. <- might make condi Ele viable.
may i suggest playing one. go ahead…hop on a thief…get in that zerg. you will see how good you arent not being mean…just the truth. if u main on warrior/guardian u will be embarassed how bad you are when you finally play thief. thief takes skill. so we can be very good but still close to useless in zergs/bigger fights.
Thief (SB + D/?) is actually pretty awesome in zergs… you just can wear zerker and expect to get away with it.
Spammable blast finisher, spammable AOE poison, spammable AOE weakness, high mobility, high AOE dmg… zerg thief is a lot stronger than people give it credit for.
if you like non-stop, unpredictable small- and/or large-scale fighting, do WVW. solo roaming, 2vX, 5-man, 20-man organised and/or full-scale zerg fighting have very different requirements in terms of skill/twitch, situational awareness, build requirements, game knowledge, etc.
if you like repetitive and predictable small-scale fighting in circles match after match, do sPVP.
only 1 new skill per class. I think new elites would have had a greater impact, or a new skill per weapon with choosable weapon skills.
warrior hammer is still a better DPS weapon than axe in practice, because applying damage with axe is way harder/hit-n-miss. would rather see Evi doing less ROFLDMG!!!11 but with much greater leap range.
why did you buff phantasm builds? they really didn’t need buffs.
I don’t think you know what you’re doing with Ele, the arcane and water changes completely contradicted your stated objectives. To me it’s patently clear the skill floor of the whole class needs to be raised, even if it means lowering the ceiling.
diamond skin was a terrible trait. Numerous players warned you it would be and it is.
The 20pt condition cleanse in fire shouldn’t have been a cantrip trait.
The missing
Ele needs a defense mechanic that isn’t based around 20-30 water. eg: a caster-only version of Elemental Attunement could be made baseline, with healing ripple instead of soothing mist, and a trait added to restore the AOE version. then you could move a water field from staff to focus.
Build diversity on Ele is really horrible. cantrips, water and arcane are good; fire, earth, air, focus, glyphs, signets, and conjures are all pretty terrible. condi specs aren’t viable. weapons are overly pidgeonholed into roles.
I’d also like to know why Ele was overall nerfed in the most recent patch, and/or why the stated goal of the patch was to decrease reliance on arcane (and by extension, build diversity) but whose nerfs actually achieved the exact opposite in practise?
however i fear that they’ll completely exclude players from the development of any new game mode, and consequently, it’ll turn out half as good as it could have been. Because the lessons of counterstrike, team fortress, and the whole moba genre aren’t obvious enough.
I feel that the game meta would be so burst focused without it that it would be incredibly boring.
You have it backwards. Downed state is what allows burst classes to exist. If you removed or disabled downed state, you’d be obliged to re-balance time-to-kill to be longer, eg: increased HP across the board by 10%.
Downed state is the stupidest thing i’ve seen in 25 years of playing PVP games, and is probably the core reason why sPVP has failed spectacularly. The game would have been considerably better without it.
Instead of finding reasons to remove it (there have been many raised), ask yourself, what does it actually bring to the game that’s positive or beneficial to the PVP side of the game?
Water would do an AOE chill, Fire would burn targets, Air would periodically strike targets, and I can’t remember earth (I think it was increased defense).
The removed it doing something in favor of spending trait points.
And I have no Idea why they thought this was good change.
They probably need to go back to something like that. Just making a caster-only version of Elemental Attunement (exchange healing ripple and soothing mist) would be a good base.
Agreed, of course, that in pvp and wvw you need more survivability, and for that reason you’re probably going to roll 30 in arcane anyway, and the patch hasn’t changed anything wrt that at all.
Ironic that the stated goal of said patch was making it so people didn’t have to spec arcane.
Well, technically, since our cooldowns are generally longer, we do benefit more from cooldown reduction traits than other professions. 20% of 40 seconds is 10 times as much as 20% of 4 seconds…
that’s a pretty ridiculous argument. Skill CDs are balanced around being roughly equal in power:CD ratio. A reduction in CD (of any amount) of skills you can access 50% of the time is clearly weaker if you the same reduction applies only to skills you can access 25% of the time.
Besides that, Eles are obliged to switch attunement far more often than other classes, who generally switch weapons at a far lower rate, so access to those CD-reduced skills is further reduced.
So in the case of Eles, there’s a good argument that CD-reducing traits should also reduce their respective attunement CD.
If you look at any pve meta build right now, basically all of them have 0 arcane. That’s not to say EA is bad or anything, but do realize: lots and lots of players are surviving without it.
Congratulations you can survive a AI in a simplified game… PvE is kind of a joke in this game that is why Anet doesn’t balance builds and classes around PvE its all to very simple. They revolve balances around PvP, whether that includes WvW or it is just just sPvP is beyond me.
^this. You can complete PVE easily with 0 trait points. This thread has always been about arcane/water being by far the best lines for PVP/WVW.
In order to really open up builds, Ele needs better defense options spread across glyphs and signets, focus and staff skills, and/or fire, earth and air traits.
Glyphs can be traited to give (defensive) boons. They can also cause chill, weakness and/or blindness. The elementals can also heal and/or apply protection. There’s plenty of defensive options in glyphs.
all the vaguely defense-related stuff in glyphs is based on random chance – it’s not reliable. the elementals are terrible, die easily and are more or less completely ignorable.
what glyphs need IMO is:
a cast-time reduction
better trait support (move inscription to 10pt and add a new 20pt trait)
Downed state in PVP zones. Adds nothing to the game but detracts a lot. It’s annoying, disrupts the flow of combat, introduces imbalance and farcical rally situations.
Fixed weapon skills. Far too restrictive for me, pigeonholes weapons into roles & can causes whole weapons to be ruined because of just 1 bad skill.
No resource system. Has caused GW2 combat to be all about spamming skills/dodges.
Removal of skill capturing (signet of capture). One of the best & debatably most game-defining features of the first game, I cannot fathom the logic of why it was elided from GW2.
Addition of ascended gear after release. Massive PR blunder. Pushed the game into a grind corner it has yet to escape from.
1 Wrong, encourages not dying in big fights. Rallying is an important part of PVP.
2 I see what you mean but current system allows ANet to more tightly control skill design
3 No, potion spam anyone? Remember grind farming for potion mats in other games just so you could PVP or Raid for a few hours.
4 Agree, I liked skill capture, but really, doesn’t fit current skill model so I manage
5 Agree, bad call
You guys casually mention all sorts of features where you don’t appreciate much of the cleverness behind their design. Many of the things people want to remove are cornerstones of a larger concept.
By “resource system” i mean an energy/mana-like resource, rather than just using simple cooldowns.
For WvW if I look at the popular builds for classes I play there is a very common thread.
Mesmers now usually run 20-30 points in their toughness tree.
Thieves run majority 30 points in their toughness tree.
Warriors run 20 minimum in their toughness tree.
I don’t play guardian but I think many builds go into their toughness tree.
Necromancer- I actually run 20 into toughness now but many necros don’t but Deathshroud somewhat helps them with that.
Ele- Is the class that normally doesn’t dip into it’s toughness tree for many builds. Definitely not 30 points in.
it’s because the earth line is so crappy. IMO there’s 1 trait worth taking in the whole line, Rock Solid. The rest of the line sucks.
In regards to D/D I would like to see something like rock barrier added to dagger mainhand. It makes alot of sense for melee.
I think that some specialized attunement specific traits should be done away with and a few more general use traits added. General use traits are always popular for all classes the less stipulations the better which means the trait is more versatile.
Couldn’t agree more. Single element-specific traits are bad because realistically you can only benefit from them ~25% of the time while not being any more powerful than other classes’ traits in similar positions. This is one of the reasons why arcane traits are popular – they nearly always apply, regardless of what attunement you’re in.
As i’ve been saying for weeks now, Elemental Attunement is a class-defining trait. A caster-only version of it should be baseline, then you can have a 20pt trait for the AOE version.
alternatively, remove, move or combine the existing 5pt element traits with the elemental attunement buffs, caster only, and have an arcane trait that makes them AOE.
ie: you’d need to go 5/5/5/5/10 in order to get the current EA behaviour, but you’d be able to pick and choose which EA buffs you had.
not quite as much of a buff as making EA baseline but keeps the basic functionality accessible.
idk I think ARCANE SHIELD is a pretty good defensive class mechanic
full glass double arcane shield build was so much fun
allow me to re-quote:
In order to really open up builds, Ele needs better defense options spread across glyphs and signets, focus and staff skills, and/or fire, earth and air traits.
and again so it’s clear:
glyphs and signets, focus and staff skills, and/or fire, earth and air traits.
i’m finding the new heal decent with staff zerging but it’s pretty crappy otherwise. It’s only utility is the blast finisher, the scaling with number of targets IMO doesn’t work well.
BUMP US UP TO THE MEDIUM HP TIER ALONG WITH THE MESMER
I strongly doubt they would consider that as it breaks their class/armour symmetry.
I’d rather see improvements to defense through class mechanics. Mobility used to be the class mechanic, combined with water/arcane traits and cantrips, but Ele mobility has been decimated, with no compensation.
Ele will always be dependent on water traits and cantrips because it is missing a fundamental class defense mechanic comparable to clones/stealth/aegis/shadowstep.
In order to really open up builds, Ele needs better defense options spread across glyphs and signets, focus and staff skills, and/or fire, earth and air traits.
Inscription is Air 10 and is powerful in a glyph build.
I am yet to see an Elementalist, in any aspect of the game, since release, who is using a glyph build. Taking glyph of storms into AC exp by itself doesn’t count.
Everyone agrees, even Anet. However pushing good water/arcane traits higher in the tree only increased water/arcane dependence.
What they should have done is made a solo version of Elemental Attunement baseline, with a trait to restore the AOE version, move cleansing water back where it was, then focus on making some decent traits in fire, earth, and air. Cleansing fire and Diamond skin have both proved to be crap.
“So instead we decided to force you to play a terribly-balanced and fairly pointless tic-tac-toe-level mini-game that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the rest of the combat before you can win or lose.”
“We also think it’s fun to fight 2 or 3 guys solo, to play so well you actually get all 3 of them into downed state, and if they can hit a deer in time, they can pop back up with 25% of their HP for free!!1111”
DESIGN FAIL.
Hit a deer
sPvP
lolwut
sPVP is still going? I thought this was the balance forum.
“Why should we debuff you, take away experience or make you run around for 5 minutes as a ghost instead of playing the game?”
“So instead we decided to force you to play a terribly-balanced and fairly pointless tic-tac-toe-level mini-game that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the rest of the combat before you can win or lose.”
“We also think it’s fun to fight 2 or 3 guys solo, to play so well you actually get all 3 of them into downed state, and if they can hit a deer in time, they can pop back up with 25% of their HP for free!!1111”
Yeah, I love this article. Was thinking about it all the time, I was reading this thread! It made me become a better player and stop searching the reason for my defeats outside myself! Good post! +1
Btw., wanted to also say, that downed state skill sets are part of the whole kit of a class.
How would it be, if I answer: “Give all the classes the same abilities in down state” with “Give all the classes the same abilities”? Now that would be a fun game, wouldnt it?
If a mechanics is not fun, its a valid reason to complain about it. But if you are complaining just because a mechanics is costing you a victory, then you are never going to learn counters and play to your full potential.
I choose not to play sPVP at all, specifically because of downed state. I refuse to play a PVP game where after beating someone, or being beaten by someone, you’re forced to play some ridiculous mini-game with completely different skills and rules to the rest of the combat.
It’s like having to play a game of tic-tac-toe in order to kill someone… fanbois will say it “adds depth to the combat” but I just find it ridiculous. If the core combat needs more depth then add more depth to the combat.
I think it’s certain that downed state is responsible for some portion of why sPVP failed to gain any traction, the only question is how much.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if they added a DS-disable to custom arenas.
For elemental attunement I think that if they ever gave it to use inherent that it would be a nerfed version. No more 5 second base.
The thing that makes Elemental Attunement powerful is its AOE effect. If a self-only version were baseline and a trait added to restore the AOE effect I don’t think there would be a balance issue, it would simply reduce the need to go 20 arcane to get it.
The other thing that needs addressing IMO is the need for 20pts in water, which is harder, because IMO it’s absolutely key to Ele survivability. Ele does not have an innate defence mechanic like stealth/clones/aegis, 20 water is it. You could say that mobility used to be the Ele defence mechanic, but that got nerfed into the ground to the point that you simply don’t see D/D Eles anymore in WVW.
All of the “reduce recharge on x element skills by 20%”. Every other class that takes these gets another large bonus, like range increases, bonus stats etc., but elementalists only get the reduced cooldown, which doesn’t particularly help anyway when you have a minimum ten seconds before you can switch back to an attunement and many cooldowns are less than that.
Yeah, have always thought the *Alacrity traits should also be reducing their respective Element’s attunement CD, ie:
X Alacrity: “reduces recharge of x element skills by 20% and reduces x attunement CD by 2sec”. Stacks with arcane CD reduction.
The core problem afflicting Ele is the lack of any sustain outside of water/arcane due to having no innate defence mechanic comparable to stealth/clones/aegis. You just have to spec water, and Ele is not Ele without Elemental Attunement.
I’m using “worst” to mean “most in need of changes”. My sentiments are from a WVW solo roamer/occasional zerger perspective.
Elemental surge (30 arcane). Seems strong, but is very underwhelming in practise, partly because of how much survivability is lost by having to take arcane utilities. Not worth 30pts in current form.
One with Fire/Flame barrier (5/20 fire). Filler is the only word that comes to mind.
Arcane Precision (25 arcane). 10% chance on crit to proc ~400 dmg for 25pts, WTF? What’s an on-crit trait doing in a boon duration line anyway?
Diamond skin (30 earth). OP in PVE and 1v1s vs full condi classes, and useless everywhere else. Compared to http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Automated_Response, the HP threshold is 2.5 times smaller, and immunity is at high HP when low HP would be so much more useful. Should be a10 or 15pt trait.
Geomancer’s freedom (20 earth)/Stop, Drop and Roll (water 20). http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dogged_March offers the same reduction as GF, but grants regen as well, and it’s a 10pt trait. On the highest base defence class. SD&R is even worse.
Honourable mentions:
Inscription (air 20). Not good enough to make glyphs attractive.
Zephyr’s speed (air 5). +10% speed only out of combat. for 5 more points, other classes get full 25% speed.
Well, of all classes I play (listed in sig), Ele is by far the least flexible, has the worst trait and weapon choices, and is overall the least effective class I play overall, while simultaneously requiring the most effort.
The Elemental Attunement change was poorly thought out, which is shown by keeping Lingering Elements in arcane 15. Now putting just 15 in arcane is completely useless.
I always through Lingering Elements was useless anyway?
If the attunement-specific traits (like +20dmg vs vulnerable when in water) worked correctly with LE it would have been a great trait in concept.
So, I gave diamond skin a second chance for the case where I might have missed something, but no, first impression was right, it’s a terrible trait due to how laughably easy it is to take an Ele below 90% HP.
Which, again, leaves arcane and water as they only trait lines worth taking to 30.
Won’t ever buy a B2P game again, 90% of the developer focus in this model is creating crap they can sell. I’d rather pay a subscription and get real content and attention to balance.
The amount of new content since release that I have actually enjoyed has been close to zero.
Almost no substantive balance or diversity improvements have been made in a year, with the notable exception of WVW and art, the game could not have disappointed me any more than it already has.
Agree, “We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds" did not happen at all in 2013, unless by “regularly” they meant “once a year”. They threw out most of the core principles of the manifesto too so i’m not surprised.
Committing to a roadmap of development and not sticking to it is never a good idea.
1) remove downed state/rallying, keep ability to rez from defeated, but not in combat
2) reallocate 80% the living story content developers to fixing existing traits and making new skills
3) remove or raise the AOE cap
4) ditch the fixed weapon skills concept, there should be a pool of skills for each weapon that you can choose from, with some weapon skills accessible to any class that can use that weapon (ie: weapon-specific skills as well as class-specific weapon skills).
5) allocate more resources to balance team, the pace they work at is ridiculous, the worst of any game i’ve ever played.
not being mean…just the truth. if u main on warrior/guardian u will be embarassed how bad you are when you finally play thief. thief takes skill. so we can be very good but still close to useless in zergs/bigger fights.
