Guild Wars 2

Downed state is a stupid mechanic and ruins PvP. Rezzing in PvP zones should break on any damage.

Just double the AOE cap and see how it goes. 5 is too low anyway.

It won’t have that big an effect in the general case, as you rarely have more than 5 people in the AOE anyway, however it will have a significant effect on turtles.

Report it in-game

Slic.2406:

Oozo.7856:

Of course he was culled out in that situation. The fact that he would try to pass off rendering and culling issues as players not being aware of their surroundings is flat out dishonest. What we need are mature players providing proper feedback, not people defending their own class with laughable crap.

Ask yourself. How come ALL OF THEM ARE VISIBLE TO ME? 99% of the time, this means I am visible to THEM. In fact, you can see some of thm turn towards me, you can see a mesmer and ranger at the front start attacking me. I am 99.9% certain I am not culled in that clip, I am visible to pretty much everyone’s client, because they are ALL visible to me throughout the entire video.

Please stop defending players that are clearly bad, and stop giving anet more excuses to water the game down.

Yes, player culling exists, but player culling is NOT the issue in this example of brain/eyesight lag.

The server updates your client is receiving has nothing to do with the updates the players around you are receiving. Especially when you’re moving rapidly. That’s one thing.

Second, their server code may well ‘optimise out’ stealthed players (i.e. de-prioritise updates for stealthed players) when there are many other players within the same area.

The proof is in the pudding – even the mindless zerg can manage to spam 1 on an enemy thief < 900units in front of them, but they don’t.

Without server logs it’s impossible to be sure but the fact you got away scot-free is fairly suggestive of culling.

Slic.2406:

1) The end proves EVERYTHING. I am unstealthed, within attack range of at least 10 ppl behind me, and come into range of at least 10 ppl in front of me. You even see some of them turn right towards me. I am unstealthed most of the time, so there is no WAY they would not see me render. As the video says it’s an EYESIGHT and BRAIN lag issue. Do not confuse player mistakes with a class being too strong at something.

If anything, the end proves the opposite of what you’re saying. Any purely visible class would definitely have caught some fire from the guys behind you. Given the number of players in the area, you were likely culled out from some, if not all of them.

The problem is server culling, not stealth.

More than 1 viable build, aka a full trait review, they are not balanced at all

Improve auto-attack damage across the board to lower skill floor a bit

Elite skills that are at least on par with weapon skills

Removal of downed state in PvP.

OP is probably a troll, but he does have a point – in GW1, Ele was a damage-focused profession, just like the mage archetype of every other fantasy MMO in existence.

GW2 Ele is not a damage dealer in its current form, it’s a support/dps hybrid, so I don’t really blame anyone for being disappointed.

Even a AP-POM-pyro mage in WOW does a ton more damage than power/precision Ele while also being a lot more survivable. So something is off.

Not to mention that everyone at 80 is basically playing the same type of build: tank/support/outlast with cantrips.

Because everything else basically sucks.

So yeah, Ele does have issues.

The class just isn’t very well balanced yet. It’s behind the curve at low levels and even at the 80 with exotics level, it’s still a little behind the curve. The only build with any traction at end game level is full tank, with defensive traits.

It’s a fun class, but they totally ballsed up the balancing in the nerfs after BWE3.

No not really, until you’re 60+ and can spec/gear for a decent amount of toughness. D/D is your best bet for PVE but you will still need to give up 1-2 utility slots for cantrips or glyph of storms (earth) just to perform at a similar level as other classes using auto-attack.

Ele’s are still pretty badly balanced. The only people disagreeing aren’t playing the other classes.

I think ioj are simply recognising that jq are the weaker side.

BTW I especially enjoyed trebbing to death the 9 ballistas you guys set up at faith supply camp. I don’t think you guys even got to fire them?

Yes, myself and others have noticed a fair amount of censorship going on, which is why we prefer to use/read the gw2guru forums.

It’s a shame they can’t respond to bots as fast as they delete forum posts…

The obvious fix for conjures being terrible (because they lock your other attunement skills out) is simply for them to replace the skills of only 1 element, so that you can continue to switch attunements ie:

• fire axe, fiery GS replaces only fire attunement skills
• frost bow replaces only the water attunement skills
  etc…

IMO churning earth should just be instant cast. the 3 second cast time just feels wrong.

I still think downed state is the worst-designed game mechanic in my 25 years of computer gaming.

Please remove it completely in PvP or make rezzing break on any form of damage.

Antiriad.7160:

The thing is, RTL is now additionally bugged. 7 out of 10 times I used it, it stopped my character movement and didn’t resume until I released the movement key and pressed it again, a huge annoyance.
Also, stealth nerf is baaaad, Assrenanet.

I noticed this too. Happened to me a lot last night.

I noticed another change – when you use jump plus RTL going across or into water, you no longer travel the full distance, you stop as soon as you hit the water. Pretty annoying.

No, ele still needs work, particularly staff single target, lifting the aoe cap from 5 to 10, and tweaking of a few skills: dragon’s tooth should easier to land (homing or ground target), earthquake should be instant cast, fire shield should be worth casting, burning speed should be a leap finisher.

I think d/d is in reasonable shape, but overall I think ele damage doesn’t scale as well as it should with spec, which is of course why everyone specs tank builds.

Webley.1295:

Eles can burst damage to

not really.

1) D/D can burst
2) S/D can burst once every 45secs, or whenever your enemies are dumb enough to stand still
3) staff can’t burst at all

IMO the issue here is staff and the fact all but 2 skills on it are AOE, and even the 2 non-AOE skills (water 1, earth 1) are very weak. When wielding a staff, Ele’s are totally pidgeonholed into a support/AOE role.

Likewise with D/D, only 2 skills do damage at 600+ range. It’s a terribly limiting design.

Staff ought to get at least 1 skill that can do decent single-target dmg, good candidates would be air 1 & 2. Air 1 for e.g., the first hit could do double its current damage and then each subsequent hit do 50% of that. This would keep it as an AOE skill but prevent the current pidgeonholing.

D/D likewise, earth1 is a good candidate to be a 600 or 900 range skill.

There is certainly also a case for something to be done about not being able to build an Ele to specialise in a single attunement and the mandatory 10+ points in arcane.

A good solution I think would be to make the # of trait points in an Element also contribute towards reducing the attunement CD of just that attunement, so that you could for e.g., spec 30 fire, 30 earth and your attunement CDs for both fire and earth would be considerably shorter than air and water. Arcane would obviously continue to shorten all attunement CDs. In the current game, without points in arcane, your 30 points in fire will basically be inaccessible to you 3/4 of the time.

Right now the entire class is a bit of a mess as frequent attunement switching is mandatory, just to get the class to perform at all, yet the majority of traits benefit only a single attunement and without a major commitment to Arcane, these points are wasted most of the time.

The basic concept is good but skill/trait design is pretty poor.

I don’t think we need weapon swap, we just need staff to have 1-2 decent single-target damage skills (eg: buff air 1 to do much mire damage on first hit, and reduce damage of bounces, eg2: make air3 knockback do decent damage)

Staff having only 2 really weak ST dmg skills is the real problem.

TWMagimay.9057:

@Selo: 5/5 fire aoes, 4/5 water aoes, 3/5 air aoes(and 1 muplitple target skill), 3/5 earth aoes. I’d say that’s a pretty good ratio of aoes to ST, especially for water(the one you’ve only seen autoattack from, dear pro ele). I’d also like to have a look at your crystal ball. You know, the one that tells you what server ppl play on, how much pvp they do, how old they are.

staff:
5/5 fire AOE
5/5 air AOE
3/4 earth AOE
4/5 water AOE

There’s only 2 ST damage skills in Ele staff, and they are both (earth 1, water 1) very low damage.

IMO it’s a terrible design to have an essentially AOE-only weapon on a class with no weapon swapping.

Staff is not a DPS weapon, it’s a support/aoe weapon. Yes it would have been nice to have 1-2 staff skills out of 20 (eg, air 1/2) that could be traited to do decent ST dmg.

Blazer Hellsing.9184:

mjharrison.3209:

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re working on another upcoming PvP stuff update detailing what our plans are in the near future for SPvP, as well as posted a blog post that summarizes what’s coming shortly

The OP’s point (which surely you can’t have missed) was that the communication to date has been devoid of any real detail, and if I may say so, fairly condescending. I’ve read hundreds of posts about balance issues, the wvw snowball effect, downed state being really unbalanced and generally horrible in pvp, spvp stagnation… but to date, none of these have been materially addressed, it’s always “we’re working on it”, or “balance is fine”.

Well, being transparent would mean providing actual balance data, earnest discussion of problems and the solutions being trialled, etc. The communication to date seems more motivated by an intention to placate rather than inform.

He said that they don’t share what they have in mind before they have tested it so they don’t have to go back on their word, read the thread before posting. Also “arenanet doesn’t communicate with their playerbase” something that complainers like you like to imply, is false… this thread is direct proof why

He also claimed that transparency was important, please read the thread before posting.

Spend 20mins looking over the dev blogs for eve online if you want to see an example of a developer that clearly cares deeply about keeping their player community informed.

Agree with all your positives and negatives. I think the downed state removal is the most important one. The focus of the combat should be the actual combat, not on Downed Wars.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re working on another upcoming PvP stuff update detailing what our plans are in the near future for SPvP, as well as posted a blog post that summarizes what’s coming shortly

The OP’s point (which surely you can’t have missed) was that the communication to date has been devoid of any real detail, and if I may say so, fairly condescending. I’ve read hundreds of posts about balance issues, the wvw snowball effect, downed state being really unbalanced and generally horrible in pvp, spvp stagnation… but to date, none of these have been materially addressed, it’s always “we’re working on it”, or “balance is fine”.

Well, being transparent would mean providing actual balance data, earnest discussion of problems and the solutions being trialled, etc. The communication to date seems more motivated by an intention to placate rather than inform.

The best solution short of disabling DS for PvP is to make rezzing break on any damage in PvP zones.

The obvious solution to downed state (short of simply disabling it for PvP) is to make rezzing break on any damage.

@the person who said they don’t understand why pvpers hate downed state:
Pvpers hate downed state because it strongly favours numbers over skill.

nono, orbs are too easy to take already.

DAOC did it right:
1) make orbs harder to take in the first place – shouldn’t be able to ninja it in under an hour. Taking an orb ought to be a multi-stage process taking at least 3 hours minimum.
2) you can only put 1 of 3 orbs (in DAOC, 2 of 6 relics) in the really well-defended location, orb 2 of 3 can only go in a medium-defended keep, and orb 3 of 3 can only go in a comparatively lightly-defended keep.

orb problem solved.

Have been really disappointed with Ele on the whole, compared to how Ele’s were in GW1.

That said, I do enjoy D/D a lot, but I think all our other weapons have critical flaws:

staff:

• it was a terrible idea to make 18/20 skills on it AOE (the ones that aren’t AOE, earth 1, water 1, are terrible single target damage anyway)
• emphasis: staff needs at least 1-2 decent single target damage skills. the obvious candidates are air 1,2. air 1 for example you could double the damage of the first hit and halve the damage of the 3rd jump. it’s still AOE, but at least it doesn’t do laughable single target damage.

scepter:

• dragon’s tooth animation is too long, it’s ridiculously dodgeable to the point of uselessness. You need to burn a 40sec+ CD or devote a utility slot to immobilise just to have a chance at reliably landing the skill. WTF were they thinking.

The class is just poorly designed ATM. Damaging abilities are overly telegraphed, and/or are delayed to a ridiculous degree. Numerous talents apply to a single element yet the skill system mandates frequent switching – specialising in a single element is not viable.

I think downed state is the worst mechanic/design i’ve experienced in 25 years of gaming.

Downed state is bearable in pve but it simply doesn’t belong in PvP at all. The best solution would be disable downed in PvP zones. The second best solution would be to make rezzing break on any damage in PvP zones.

There’s already plenty of things that need fixing in the game, please don’t waste resources on downed state.

473623

Rolling a warrior for WvWvW….What is wrong with you? While elementalists may fail at sPvP, they were literally built to be monsters in WvW. You have AoE literally coming out of the kitten which will shred through zergs like nobody’s business.

come on… Staff Ele does have numerous AOE options but none of the AOEs hit very hard, and then only on the bads who are so bad they don’t see the big red circle(s).

D/D is fine but the only thing staff Ele is any good at in WVW is healing and forcing dodges for the real DPS classes to kill.

“folding” happens every week in WVW – just have a look at http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA every week.

It happens because present WVW mechanics heavily favour the already winning side, plenty of other threads have more detail.

Mikitten058:

@mjharrison
1st time Ive seen someone call GW2 this. So apparently it’s a Very small group of “people”.

The people I play with call it “Downed Wars” when they really mean “let’s do some GW2 PVP”. I agree it hasn’t hit the wider audience yet, but give it time.

yeah Ele is good at stomping once every 90secs. Ele is crap for spiking in the Gw1 sense though.

It’s the best attempt so far at displacing DAOC RVR for the world PVP crown but I agree it falls short on numerous levels, the main ones being:
1) downed state, the stupidest MMO mechanic ever – the side with more people ultimately wins, every time.
2) orbs are too quick to take – most WVW players don’t even know it’s happening. In DAOC, it took roughly a week just to get to the point of opening the relic gates, then 2hrs or so to get the relic, and game-wide message were issued when a relic was taken — relics were actually fought for. In WVW, it can be all over in <1hr, and most people don’t even know they lost an orb until after the other side already has it.
3) there’s zero downside/cost/impact to owning 90%+ of the map – supply scales too linearly with empire size.
4) outmanned buff is a signal to the losing team that it’s time to go PVE farm, not retake objectives – the complete opposite of its intended effect.

Raffie.7865:

Seems like justs about everyone wants GW2 to be almost exactly like a MMO they played and liked. Silly people…..

There’s a reason why no MMO in history has implemented a downed state mechanic — it’s because it doesn’t add anything to the gameplay.

I’ll give credit to Anet for trying something new, and while it’s fine for PVE, downed state is utterly, stupidly, game-breakingly out of place in PVP.

I mean, people are already calling it Downed Wars…

buzzkapow.8465:

mjharrison.3209:

Supply exploiting
Every week i see people from other servers cross-realming to use up the supply of their opponent by building siege in completely useless locations just metres from the supply depot in SMC and other difficult-to-take keeps. IOJ did it to CD this week, and ET did it the week before.

Maybe drop the accusations from this. pointing fingers weakens your argument, even though i agree with most everything you’ve said. It’s this last part i don’t agree with, mainly because i’ve never seen it happen, and i’m on IoJ.

How would you expect to see it happen if your server is the one doing it? What happens is one guy transfers over to CD with stockpiled siege blueprints from jumping puzzle mesmer farming, ports to SMC/orb keep (which CD owns), guy then keeps building siege in the most useless spot possible right next to the supply depot until the keep’s supply depot is empty.

I have multiple screenshots of these mass siege buildups.

Oh and it’s not restricted to IOJ, it’s rampant. I don’t have the link atm but a guy from IOJ on these forums admitted doing it. It’s obvious IOJ is doing it though as it was done to both SMC and main CD keep this week as they were both taken by IOJ the following morning after witnessing the supply depot draining.

aaron.4317:

Downed state doesnt counter spike builds, it counters smaller forces that out play you.

This is exactly why it is so ridiculous to have downed state in WVW — it grossly favours the larger, not more skilled, group, and trivialises keep attacks/defenses so that an attacking force can just keep rezzing and hitting your door.

It should be removed in PVP or rezzing should break on direct damage. Defeated players should be unrezzable 20 seconds after being ‘defeated’.

Minion of Vey.4398:

Considering how fast some of these burst builds out there can drop people, the game kinda needs downed.

I was iffy on downed state at first but it has grown on me.

Obviously, if they removed downed, they would rebalance TTL (time-to-live) to account for no downed.

The addition of downed state is why burst builds that kill in <2sec are allowed to exist.

Downed state should be disallowed in PvP zones. It’s ruining the game.

I think there’s quite a few issues with current WVW:

The stacking effect of orbs is too great versus the ease of getting an orb (bad map design)
In DAOC, it was a difficult affair to get an enemy relic, often taking a week of sustained effort whittling down enemy keeps to open relic gates, and system-wide messages were issues when a relic was taken — in WVW it’s far too easy, and most of the time, other players don’t even know it’s happening.

Outmanned
The outmanned “buff” is widely taken by losing teams as time to go PVE farming and/or quit, the complete opposite of its intended effect. Just get rid of it, or change it to be some kind of “Determined” buff that makes NPCs for the outmanned side far tougher.

Supply denial
Once a side loses all its keeps/towers, the losing side has no chance of coming back due to current supply mechanics and the relative ease with which the winning side can protecting the supply camps flanking the losing side’s main keep. The already dominating side has such a massive supply advantage over the losing side(s) that a comeback is just not realistically possible. This is because…

Supply scales linearly with empire size
in the real world, the biggest limitation of empire size was essentially logistics – the difficulty of supplying the front-lines with food, weapons, replacement troops. In WVW, there is no downside to owning the majority of the map as long as you keep your adjoining supply camps capped. A better system would to increase the supply cost of upgrades/siege weapons as a function of distance from your server’s spawn point. Supply dolyaks should also drop a small amount of supply when killed.

Supply exploiting
Every week i see people from other servers cross-realming to use up the supply of their opponent by building siege in completely useless locations just metres from the supply depot in SMC and other difficult-to-take keeps. IOJ did it to CD this week, and ET did it the week before.

Get rid of it, it doesn’t add anything to the game, but will cause cultural problems.

DAOC was much better I think, but WVW was at least a good try (unlike downed state, which was always a terrible idea).

Switching the outmanned & orb bonuses is a pretty reasonable suggestion.

Other things I can think of are:
- supply accumulation rate and supply cap per keep both drop as your empire expands
- NPC guards and gates get considerably tougher as the number of keeps you own drops

on a side note:
- add a DAOC-style Darkness Falls-like dungeon that links all the BGs with multiple exits in EB, with the main entrance accessible only to the current leader.

Downed state does not belong in PVP at all, for all the reasons the OP has listed.

I hate the entire mechanic with a passion to the point where I hope GW2 fails badly so that no other game will ever attempt to mimic this cheesy, annoying mechanic again.

I already felt like thief was most OP class, your data makes it pretty much incontrovertible.

According to anet, balance is perfect and you all need to L2P. Their PvP blog proves it.

When 20/20 staff skills are AOE, is it really that surprising that there is really only one way to build a staff Ele?

How about just disabling downed state in PvP zones?

Least then they could focus on fixing the game instead of wasting any more time on balancing something that most pvpers hate anyway?