Man this is so weird, I came back to gw2 just like 2 days ago, and when I left Eles where like completely OP and dominating SPVP, some teams even ran three of them.
sledgehammer nerfs over 5 successive patches + huge buffs to other classes over the same period dropped them from best to worst. D/D in particular has pretty much disappeared.
Besides drastically reducing the particle effect spam, the other major turnoff to watching GW2 matches is the whole downed state/rez/rallying mechanic. It breaks the flow of combat and trivialises death, which prolongs fights, and further contributes to the appearance of a mindless spamfest.
The best thing that GW2 could do is entirely disable downed state in PVP and raise base HP across the board to compensate. Could be trialled as a custom arena option.
If you contrast the style and sophistication of game play in WvW now versus what it was shortly after launch, there is absolutely no comparison … and it’s all for the worse. A very intriguing concept for strategy-based PvP has been systematically trashed by subversive changes instead of needed fixes and enhancements. We’re not talking occasional bad decisions here … we’re talking an ongoing pattern of cluelessness that surpasses anything I’ve seen anywhere else in MMO-land. When I finally throw in the towel and abandon this mess, it will be with a great deal of sadness for what could have been.
It’s not cluelessness – they know kitten well what we’ve have been asking for – it’s arrogance. If suggestions don’t align with their own personal vision of the game, the idea is discarded, regardless of merit.
eg: Instead of bringing sPVP capture points into WVW, they could have used those map-making resources to create a whole new borderland so we can (eventually) have 3 unique borderlands instead of 1 common BL map. OR they could have made an epic PVP dungeon to expand on the current JP space similar to Darkness Falls in DAOC.
It’s patently obvious that bloodlust favours the winning side far too strongly. As has been suggested numerous numerous times before on this forum, it would make a lot more sense if the outmanned and bloodlust bonuses were switched, or if bloodlust was merely a magic find or other non-combat bonus.
D/D was heavily overnerfed (like in 5 consecutive patches), that’s why they’ve pretty much disappeared. You can still bunker them but they’re a fraction of the fun they used to be.
Firstly, elementalist is not your typical MMO style mage. I honestly consider it a battle mage of sorts. You will never get away playing a single element as an elementalist. Its just not how the class works. In order to successfully play ele you need to learn to swap and use your combo barriers. If yo want a single element mage; go play rift or wow.
Second, if you are specing into full assault. Yes, you will be squishy beyond reason in pvp. Its the sacrifice for maxing out burst to be so high. Cantrip builds are absolutley superior survivability in this game as an ele. The healing power we are cabable of is nuts. Which really goes back into my first point of attun swapping. Simply swapping to water is a 2.5k heal+another 2k regen. Not counting all the defensive 33% shields we get. You can even spec into an additional arcane shield that auto procs at25%…
Third, do research before making false claims. If I had come to the forums first to check the state on elementalist. I would have never rolled one with the amount of crying on how bad they are. Luckily, I youtubed videos and came upon a player named “excala” who is absolutley amazing. Even gives guides along with high quality WvW and Spvp (non zerg)
Finally, learn your class. Stop being scrubby and constantly crying. Ele does fine when played properly. Its about managing all the stuff you get as an ele and using it at the right times. High skill ceiling is fun, ele is where its at.
You must be new here; here’s a guide by your hero Excala. Class subforums are all about talking about how underpowered the respective class is (except maybe the Guardian subforum).
Your claims would be valid a few months ago. They’re not so much anymore. The cantrip build you mention. That’s ONE build that might have been able to hold out in the current condi meta pre-nerf.
Swapping attunements does indeed bring your survivability up on par with the other classes… if you spec for it. Most people including eles seem to forget they don’t get any healing if they don’t spec for it. The devs agree with you about attunements. That’s 45 points (15 water, 30 arcane) required to survive aside from bursting down your opponent before they can kill you. You also need 1k healing power if you want to heal 2.5k, but unfortunately, you won’t be doing any damage.
The requirement of arcane and/or water outside of full burst builds is a design flaw that hurts the ele’s build diversity and has been brought up constantly since the game was released. You can pretend these problems don’t exist or outright ignore them, but they won’t just go away. I currently just ignore them as my elementalist continues to be my main character since early access, but most people have already rerolled another character.
You should do your research on the state of the elementalist before making outdated claims. While it’s not as bad as a few people make it out to be, we’re not exactly in a great spot either having dropped from taking a top place in a tpvp team composition to having no place.
We don’t want to just release a ton of new game modes, so the reason we don’t talk about all of them is we’re basically testing a lot of them, and then we’ll see which ones work the best together.
Why not make them available for players to test, make suggestions & judge their worth? Devs/QA are never going to do as good of a job as a mass of players. You could turn off rewards and make it a custom arena option.
I’m very concerned by the lack of QOL improvement for weak/underused Ele weapons & traits. Your criteria for balancing seems to still only come from sPVP performance. Outside of sPVP, GC Ele doesn’t exist, leaving only the bunker/buffbot role in WVW & PVE.
Specifics:
focus — lack of mobility/healing vs dagger, fire #4, #5, water #4, air #4 all very weak
conjures — the limiting factor is how clunky they are to use
glyphs — traits are weak, elementals are weak
staff — needs to lose some AOE and gain some single-target dmg
I think the focus desperately needs a movement skill. Reasons:
mobility is key to main-hand dagger effectiveness, lack of any mobility on focus means that D/F will only ever be a niche set.
sceptre has no movement skills at all, and
focus will always compare poorly to O/H dagger because of RTL.
Water #4 for example could be a 600 leap with a trail that chills (ice field) or heals (water field).
Otherwise, as everyone agrees, the fire skills and air #4 (swirling winds) need love but i think these matter less than making sure focus provides some kind of mobility.
Suggestions for fire would be making flamewall add 2s of burning, not 1, and make it destroy projectiles. Then air #4 could become a PBAE blind that also grants swiftness.
Reduce the number of conditions removed by magnetic wave to 2 and focus would be a pretty good place.
No way, the complexity is what makes this class appealing, dont take it away!
Complexity makes the class hard to balance and un-fun for new players.
You can have both though, make it so that Eles can choose to specialise in 2 elements or can spec arcane to be decent at all 4 attunements how it is now.
eg: speccing 30 fire/30 earth makes those attunements have a 5sec recharge at the cost of making water/air attunement have a 15sec recharge, something like that.
The current design forces attunement switching, which isn’t fun to everyone, raises the skill floor to the point where there are “Ele sucks” all the time from new Eles. Ele is pretty horrible to level for new players, which for a game trying to be accessible and casual-friendly is a big design no-no.
Not to mention the forced versatility requires Ele to be a relatively low-damage class to stay balanced.
First off, the skills used do a lot of damage on their own. The combination of all those 4 things makes the combo a very potent one. If people got used to seeing it, yes they will instantly know how to counter it but if you make them waste all that stuff before you try to land such a combo, it’s just glorious.
Sure you need 4 skills but it was a fun combo for me to land.
They don’t individually do a lot of damage sans CE, meaning if they “waste” stuff to avoid CE and succesfully do so, you didn’t really gain anything because unless you went from Fire into Earth, you’ve wasted 3 finishers, two of which actually contribute better to fast spikes than the slow one you’re trying to pull off. Again, burning your Grandmaster trait slot for nothing but some extra immobilize is not even close to being optimal.
CE’s cast time will forever make it somewhat useless unless they make the damage OP or turn it into a channeled effect skill.
Yeah Churning Earth would make a lot more sense if the bleed application was channelled along with the cripple, with the spike damage portion applied at the end.
I’d lean more towards PVT armour with divinity or traveller runes, zerker weapons and a mix of celestial/zerker jewellry.
Same traits and utilities as Puandro’s build above except I much prefer Armour of Earth over Cleansing Fire for reliable stability. For roaming I prefer mango pies.
Ele has the worst elite choices of all the classes IMO. The sooner we can choose to slot another utility in the elite slot, the happier the whole player will be.
Just revert the CD for RTL back to 15sec but make it only 900 range.
The healing and defense of D/D have been nerfed into extinction, might as well make it fun again to play at least. Hit and run is the only thing D/D can really do now and it needs the mobility back.
I’d much rather have Air #1 become a single target attack and #2 become chain lightning, and both actually hit hard.
Strongly agree that staff needs to gain some semblance of single target damage potential & yours is a good suggestion for sure. Staff air #2 surely does suck in terms of opportunity cost & effect.
The suckiness of staff air #1 vs a single target (it’s fine vs 2+) needs to be addressed as well.
Zerker D/D, most fun build 0 15 0 25 30 pre nerf. Too bad there is so much lag here in Aus that I can’t play it anymore (well, I don’t bear it anymore).
Unfortunately, with the way Ele was designed, it’s very sensitive to latency, so combined with excessive nerfs (in WVW), I can’t bear playing mine anymore either.
It’s not you. Ele is just really UP at PVE and horrible to level. Just another item in a long list of game elements that have been poorly and inflexibly designed.
A number of good suggestions IMO but some comments:
Staff Ele is already annoying as hell to play because of all the long delays. Not to mention dragon’s tooth and shatterstone on sceptre. Bloody annoying. It’s also a bad model to follow as it widens the gap between PVE and PVP skill effectiveness.
Perhaps a better model to follow for AOE damage (IMO) is to apply a damage falloff to number of targets hit, eg: 1 target hit = 110% base dmg, 2 targets = 100% base, 3 targets = 90%, 4 targets = 80%, 5 targets = 70%. Alternatively, falloff based on distance from geometric centre of AOE as it was in DAOC.
Agree with others here, staff Ele is basically a buffbot in WVW. Sure there is some AOE dmg but it’s only good against static targets due to the skill delays. My mesmer, thief, necro and warrior are all better at actually applying AOE damage. Hence, buffbot.
The sad state of Ele is perhaps best illustrated by the experience of a couple of nights ago when zerghumping in a group of ~40 and the cmder called for fire fields and there was not a single Ele present.
I think it’s blatantly stupid to proceed with the orb buffs when 95%+ of forum responses are steadfastly against, & even more stupid to kill off a grassroots competitive PVP mode like GVG when Anet’s version of competitive PVP (sPVP) has totally flopped.
What i noticed when playing Wow is that the patch notes on the public test realm were always posted up. I can tell you that about 50% of them never came to live or got toned down severely. The community also had time to respond…and point out things that the dev’s may have missed or overlooked
This. I think it’s crazy in 2013 not to be involving your customers in the development process. Bugs cost money, and players work for free.
In most cases, you don’t need to split skills, but rather just design them better in the first place.
Eg: 100 blades – very OP in PVE, balanced in PVP/WVW:
solution – make 100b usable while moving, decrease the damage to compensate, rework/tweak the animation as req’d.
Ele focus has been crappy since beta and remains one of the worst weapons in game.
Specifics:
no mobility. I can’t see the weapon as decent without the addition of at least 1 mobility skill, eg: water #4 (freezing gust) could be a 600 leap like dagger #3 (burning speed) that chills.
both the fire skills are really, really crappy. fire #4 could e.g. grant might to allies crossing, and destroy enemy projectiles.
air #4 (swirling winds) is a good candidate for a rework e.g. PBAE dmg + blind. It should probably also grant swiftness.
the damage coefficients across the board are too low.
They don’t want elementalists to be best at anything. Mine is the best at collecting dust while I “just press 1” on my guardian. My engineer makes a much better jack-of-all-trades, so elementalists aren’t even best at being mediocre at everything…..
This concept also has to go. The concept of a versatile-but-mediocre class has never worked in any MMO and it doesn’t really work here. There needs to be more traits that allow specialisation in an element and/or role at some cost to versatility, eg: each of the 20% faster attunement recharge traits ought to be made to also decrease that attunement’s recharge timer by 20% at the cost of increasing the recharge timer of the respective opposite attunement’s recharge timer (eg: fire spells & attunement 20% faster but water attunement recharges 20% slower).
The damage from conjures and other weaponry of the like had an unintended increase from the patch on September 3 as a side effect from another change, so this fix was just to correct that bug. It’s not to say we’re against increasing ele conjured weapon potential in the future.
It wouldn’t matter to me if conjures did 100% more damage than current, the implementation is so clunky and irritating to use I wouldn’t use them anyway.
Please improve their usability. Ele already has bugger-all real build options as it is.
No is one asking to be able to slot t3 traits in t1 slots which is how it was in beta…..
We’re asking to be able to slot ANYt3 traits in ANY t3 slot and vice versa for everything else.
Then it just becomes the stats you want when picking a trait tree.
Yes. There’s never been enough real choice or build depth in this game. I think the fixed weapon and elite skill slots are the real culprit though – the usability of a weapon is entirely pre-determined by the set of skills it has. I feel each weapon needs to have a pool of skills to choose from. These could even be intrinsic to the weapon instead of the class, eg: 2-3 greatsword skills that any class that can equip a GS can choose to slot.
In general I also think traits are too weak and/or too narrowly defined.
Allowing utilities in the elite slot would be another substantial improvement in build depth for minimal development cost.
No is one asking to be able to slot t3 traits in t1 slots which is how it was in beta…..
We’re asking to be able to slot ANYt3 traits in ANY t3 slot and vice versa for everything else.
Then it just becomes the stats you want when picking a trait tree.
Yes. There’s never been enough real choice or build depth in this game. I think the fixed weapon and elite skill slots are the real culprit though – the usability of a weapon is entirely pre-determined by the set of skills it has. I feel each weapon needs to have a pool of skills to choose from. These could even be intrinsic to the weapon instead of the class, eg: 2-3 greatsword skills that any class that can equip a GS can choose to slot.
In general I also think traits are too weak and/or too narrowly defined.
Allowing utilities in the elite slot would be another substantial improvement in build depth for minimal development cost.
Mechanically, I think the game has been, and continues to be, crippled by bad design decisions, e.g.: no resource mechanic/spammy gameplay, terrible UI, visually messy, downed state in PVP, lack of player choice/customisation/viable builds/sloooooooooow balancing, lack of compelling content.
Lastly, I’ve never seen a games developer treakittens player base with such thinly-veiled contempt.
Seems like the simplest solution to skill lag is stop rewarding people for balling up into giant lag producing blobs. You could, crazy as this sounds, reward people for being more strategic, tactical and skillful.
ANET created packed server issues by ignoring the obvious impact coverage had on PPT, then they went out of their way to do everything they can to reward blobbing in every aspect of WvW.
Surprise, we have skill lag!
This. There are design-based solutions, they choose not to use them.
The other thing is their server tech appears to be pretty basic, 1 instance = 1 physical CPU. More advanced MMOs have server tech that dynamically partitions the world into separate areas that are served by separate CPUs, which dramatically improves server performance of players clustering in a single area, eg: SM takes.
There are a bunch of games using this approach these days; Darkfall for instance, I’ve personally played in battles with ~1000 players in a single area the same size as_SM, with minimal lag.
Eles might be fine if you restrict the discussion to a specific build (30 air GC) in the least-played & therefore least-significant part of the game (sPVP). In every other way, Ele is pretty kitten underwhelming:
conjures still a joke
glyphs still a joke
signets still considerably weaker than cantrips
high arcane, high water still required (noone roams/zergs/GVGs as 30 air GC)
focus still sucks
D/D has basically disappeared
Please consider the majority when dropping wtf-bombs like “Ele is OK” as this is sure to further the (noticeably already high) level of resentment of players towards yourselves.
More skills that have (direct) damage procs on conditional events would be a good start, eg: Spinal Shivers on necro. Other examples: target takes dmg when gaining or losing a condition (eg: Fragility in GW1), or skills that consume all stacks of bleeding to do a single spike of damage.
The key thing here is basing the conditional damage portion of the skill on the subject’s condition damage.
You’d have to reduce the condition spam and passive condition removal a bit, but IMO that would be a good thing.
I have (PVP) friends who refuse to try the game solely because of downed state and the rally mechanics.
I bought the game on the strength of GW1 without even knowing about DS, if I had known there was a stupid 4-skill minigame you have to play when you lose, I’d probably have given it a miss as well.
I can’t think of a worse, more disjointing and detrimental combat mechanic in any game i’ve played since I started playing games 25 years ago.
. Too bad there is so much lag here in Aus that I can’t play it anymore (well, I don’t bear it anymore).