Guild Wars 2

Vena.8436:

Without the cap, you’d instantly kill yourself to Retaliation

add 1s internal cooldown to retaliation. then remove aoe cap. problem solved.

I’m total fine with people running around in zergs. But what I totally hate is that Anet favours zergs with two things:

1. AOE Cap
2. Instant reviving without penalties

Anet should remove the AOE cap and add penalties to revived players (e.g. -50% stats for 1 min after being revived). This wouldnt prevent zerging. People will always run in zergs because the more you are the less you wipe. But the system should not favour large zergs even more.

Removing AOE Cap would also remove those stupid hilarious Zergballs because people would have to spread out when combat starts like in any other freaking RVR based game.

Zergballs are the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in 12 years of MMOs.

I’ve played DAOC RVR for such a long time. In DAOC there was no AOE cap and it worked very well. People learned very fast not to stand in a large zergball during combat. Instead they just spread out at the beginning of a fight to prevent being an easy target for AOEs.

Were AOE professions to strong in DAOC RVR due to no AOE cap? No.
Did all just have played AOE professions in DAOC RVR? No.
Did no AOE cap has prevented zergs in DAOC RVR? No, but…
Did smaller zergs had a chance to win against larger zergs? Yes!!

Zergballs in GW2 are the dumbest things I’ve ever seen in a PVP oriented MMO. AOE caps have to be removed for WvW!!

Kanadaj.8510:

With a Valkyrie armor or some other defensive set you sacrifice out-of-stealth crit rate and thus DPS, but mistakes or being outplayed becomes less punishing. It’s just so kitten easy for nearly any class to destroy someone with 12k hp and no bonus thoughness, when compared to someone with PVT armor and -33% damage from protection.

I wont call valkyrie armor a defensive set. With 2/3 offensive stats its clearly an offensive armor set.

The difference is due to stealth thieves have to opportunity to totally ignore toughness because you can dish out massive single target burst damage in like no time.
Other professions have to rely on toughness and vitality, so they dont implode on spike damage.

Take a look at this D/D eles build posted in the video. He massively stacks toughness to get a ~30% damage reduction. He also got 16k HP while ele being on the lowest HP pool (like thieves).

So at the end he got 22% more damage reduction than a thief running around in full valk/zerk ignoring all toughness (medium armor is ~8% more damage reduction for free compared to light armor).

Its not the boons alone which make the difference.

The downed penalty only applies to the downed state itself. You dont have any penalty after being revived back to live.

The problem in WvW is that reviving is much easier than killing a downed player. 5 players revive 1 downed player in like no time. At the same time 5 enemies need much longer to actually kill a downed player due to the massive HP in downed state.

I cannot agree more with the OP: there should be real drawbacks to getting downed + revived in WvW.

The more you outman your opponents to more you profit from reviving.

Convenant.7092:

Please make it so when a player is revived from downed state; he has 50% less stats.

great idea.

was the same in daoc 12 years ago and worked pretty well.

The whole point of wvw is to control objectives against enemy players because without enemy players wvw would only be another form of pve.

Therefore WXP should mainly come from killing players. Taking objectives should only be granted WXP if the objective was actually defended by enemy players. The amount of WXP should be calculated by taking into account the number ratio of attackers vs defenders. So 40 attackers taking a tower from 5 defenders results in a very low WXP bonus.

… You’re waiting in front of your workspace’s main entrance yelling ANY1 PLS THROW A FLAME RAM !???

loseros.5912:

Yeah, imagin 30 supply each… a zerg of 30 it’s a mobile fortress warehouse… 900 supplys lololol

And where do you take those 900 supplies from? Supply camps are capped at 100, so you would either wait or claim 9 camps. Or you could suck your home keep or SN from full to 50%.

And then you kill a doliak and all supplies go from 30 to 10. lol

Dont forget you have to take those supplies from somewhere. If this new ability stacks to a total of 20 supplies, this would mean 5 players could suck supply camps from full to zero.

The more supplies you can carry the harder it will get to actually acquire those supplies.

Watch all those 1vsX ele vids carefully and you will notice that the ele rarely ever downs + stomps anyone. Most of those vids just show bunker eles fighting forever without dying and killing anyone. So at the end the’ve achieved nothing.

Dog.1472:

Removing a cheap escape option in no way “ruins” any build. It will make it so that one class is no longer immortal. Please, explain how running away is an integral part of your ability to fight 1v1 and isn’t in any way a cheap mechanic. I can imagine how healing nerfs could ruin builds, but please, tell me how many people you are able to kill because of your ability to run away.

You cannot make one mobility skill require a target and let all other mobility skills as is.

If you think RTL should only work on targets then you must also change all the other mobility skills the same way. So this change would also effect warriors Rush, Savage Leap, Bulls Charg, thiefs Heartseeker or Guardians Leap of Faith.

I dont like this idea because it would make blinks to powerful.

Dawdler.8521:

I estimate ~10 months to get full supply bonus if you’re a casual player, if the requirement continue to rise.

I dont think those abilities have much of an impact. We’ve played months just for the sake of fun. WXP doesn’t change anything. Its all in your brain, bros!

SilverWF.4789:

because we all already spent a freakin 7 months in hope what it will have some price in the future updates!

I for myself have spent 7 month in WvW because it was awesome fun, not because I was in hope of some retrospective progression.

50% bonus to supplies is awesome, no matter how hard to achieve. What did you expect?

A 30 man zerg with +2 supplies can built e.g. 2 more arrowcarts with it. IMO this is great without being overpowered.

Me too.

Server: Drakkar Lake

swinsk.6410:

I am running valk armor, divinity runes, berserker everything else.

I just got ascended back piece and rings/ammy for thief as well. Only missing earrings and now my class gets nerfed.

I feel like that since our class is losing at least 20% the amount of time in stealth due the nerf that there won’t be a spot for the “balanced” thief anymore.

It’s denoting to thieves to call such a build ‘balanced’.

To all other professions this build is ‘almost glass canon’.

Maybe some day thieves have to equip some toughness, like every other profession in this game. lol

Dasorine.1964:

what I don’t get is why people think stealth has no counter, when it has plenty and is in fact basically the only thing that can be countered without using any skills at all.

Stealth has no counter. Damage doesnt end stealth so its not a counter to stealth.

It is not difficult to predict where thieves are when they stealth, coupled with its short duration you can feasibly know where they are at almost all times, what does that then give them?

Its not difficult to predict the position at the exact moment when the thief uses stealth. After then its completely lottery because the thief can move in every direction 360°. You have to guess in which direction he has moved but you’ll never know because you dont get any feedback whether your skills actually hit or not.

Even if you use CC directly at the beginning of stealth, you dont know if the thief is actually CCed or if he just dodged and runs away loving at you.

A real counter to stealth would remove stealth from the thief, so he can be seen and cannot use backstab on you.

There are plenty of counters in the game, e.g. damage and heal, stability and cc, boons and boon removers, conditions and condition removers. And there are some skills without a counter, like different kinds of immunity (block etc) and stealth.

The difference is, all those immunities are on huge cooldowns + have drawbacks (cannot use skills), whereas stealth is repeatable with no drawbacks.

I see two solutions for stealth: either add a real counter to stealth or make stealth non-repeatable like any other non-counterable skill (like block, mist form etc).

Coldviper.6794:

The CC is hardly all that impressive or unique being that it’s so easily countered by blinds and people who know how to press dodge when I’m flying in the air or pulling it back for a charge smash.

I dont see why Hammer is more vulnerable to blinds and dodges than any other melee weapon?

Interesting ideas, but Im afraid those chances could come with imbalancing issues.

IMO those are the main problems about ele traits:

1. Fire/Earth/Air traits are much more weaker than those in Water and Arcana. I think many people would sacrifice traits from water/arcana if only there would be viable options in the other trait lines. E.g. I would sacrifice healing for more burst damage. But the fire traits are horrible.

2. All our anytimers are sooo bad compared to other professions. The damage is mediocre and we got no chains. I play both ele and warrior, both with balanced item builds. My warriors 1h sword crits for 2k/2k/4k (+ bleeds), my eles air1 crits for 1.4k/1.4k. Thats pathetic.
IMO those bad anytimers force us to go deep into arcana to reduce attunement cooldowns. Our 2-5 skills are mostly on high cooldowns which is ok, because we have 20 skills. But after using 2-5 you are forced to swap attunement because skill 1 is a waste of time. So you feel to be forced to go for 20-30 arcana to reduce attunement cooldowns.

Solutions:

- bring our anytimers damage en par with the other professions + add chains
- completely rework fire traits (the whole line is crap)
- rework few traits from air + earth to bring those lines en par with water/arcana

I’m sure we would see many new and less healing oriented builds after those changes.

Red Falcon.8257:

teg.1340:

Its very obvious that you never actually played an ele before.

Yeah that’s a comfortable escape from truth.

The proof Ele is faceroll is my gf.
She’s terrible at PvP, mouse clicker and all that, but when I gave her the cookie cutter D/D spec she’s topping charts in sPvP and plowing through people in WvW.
When a build makes a terribad player into a killing machine that only takes a rotation it’s obviously skill-less garbage that needs to be nerfed.
Thief easymode is getting nerfed this patch, D/D will too.
You can go full dishonestly intellectual on me but it won’t stop Anet from fixing the gimmick.

Killing machine? KILLING MACHINE? lol

Sorry bro, thats hilarious. Bunker ele is indeed great at point defence, so are other bunker professions. But bunker eles are in no way a killing machine. And point defence is only a factor in sPVP. WvW and PVE is totally different.

But you are right, that surviving as a bunker ele is quite easy. you just have to jump around and when things go wrong switch to water then air and RTL away.

The hardest part about playing ele is to actually kill stuff. By killing I dont mean hang around your team mates while they do the damage.

As a DD ele in WvW I use earth elemental for soloing supply camps. The rest of the time I use fiery greatsword which is awesome both for damage and mobility. Sometimes I use Reaper of Grenth for 1vs1.

Tornado is total garbage unless you are hanging around at a cliff.

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Number of uses isn’t so much the problem as much as the cooldowns on the skills are. You end up either prematurely dropping the weapon every time, or waiting on 20 second cooldowns, which no elementalist has the time for in combat.

I often find myself running out of uses before the 1 minute is over. Generally its a matter of how much I use the anytimer. FG 1 does great damage compared to the anytimers of our real weapons.

But the greatest part of FG is Fiery Whirl. 900 range okittens cd is awesome. Keep in mind that you cannot be hit while whirling around. So you can use whirl to evade hits. You can also combine whirl with FG5:

- whirl through your enemy
- as soon as you cross the enemies, press FG5 + click on yourself
- FG5 will then immediately be triggered when whirl ends

I would equip fiery greatsword 100% of the time, if I could.

People often forgot that most of DD eles skills do crap damage compared to other professions like thieves, warriors or mesmers.

Slippery is all we got. Taking it away makes the whole class entirely useless.

Fiery greatsword is indeed awesome. I use it all the time in WvW. I usually swap all 4 attunements while using fiery greatsword to get benefits of all the boons. I stay in water until attunement cooldowns are ready to swap again.

Fiery greatsword disappears after 60s or after using 15 skills (including anytimer) whatever comes first. The second weapon on the ground also disappears. But you can pick up the second greatsword from the ground before it wears off to get another full 60s/15skills.

Im using 0/10/0/30/30 with a balanced item set. Fire traitline is subpar, so forget about traiting for fiery greatsword.

you have to dodge like a mad man, so you can save up armor of earth + mistform for stomping.

the vid is blocked in germany btw due to music rights

The grass is always greener on the other side.

I’ve played both warrior and ele for a couple of month in WvW. I can say that both mechanics have pros and cons. Sure, cripple/chill is extremely annoying for a warrior. But you dont really know how annoying immobilize is, because of mobile strikes.

As a warrior if you use a gap closer while crippled/chilled, you move forward for 1/2 the normal range. As an ele if you use RTL while immobilized, you dont move forward at all while RTL goes on cd. It can be extremely hard for an ele to free yourself from immobilize when it has been cloaked with 1-2 additional conditions.

Dont forget Anet has already mentioned they want to give warriors more access to condition removers, so in the future it will be easier for them to get rid of cripples and chills.

LordByron: Mistform breaks stuns but it seems you dont really know what stuns are. Maybe you should google that.

Hint: Immobilize, cripple and chill are not stuns but conditions.

Rednik.3809:

Savage Leap + Bulls Charge + WW + Rush = 3150 range bye bye

Cripple (i don’t even talk about chill) while condition remove on cd = bye bye mobility.

The same is true for Ele and Immobilize.

And DD ele got no range cripple/chill. You have to be on top of a warrior to snare him.

I’ve played warrior for month in wvw. With Charge on a 16s cd + Mending a warrior is pretty good in getting rid of snares + immun to immobilize due to Mobile Strikes.

LordByron.8369:

there are only 2 stability skills (the only usable is on 90 seconds cd….)….afaik
And mistform doesn t break stun nor remove conditions.

For gods sake, get your facts right before posting stuff.

Mist Form breaks stun + removes conditions via Soothing Disruption + Cleansing Water. Armor of Earth can be brought to 72s cd with Cantrip Mastery. Other professions stability skills are not that much lower.

Have to agree with Timelord. Add in bulls charge (he havent used it in this vid) and he would have been gone. That would have been another 900 range.

Savage Leap + Bulls Charge + WW + Rush = 3150 range bye bye

I find stealth stomping far superior compared to stability/mist form/elixir s stomping because all those skills are on huge cooldowns while stealth is not. You’ll eventually miss those skills for your own defence when things go bad. And they take a utility slot while stealth… well not.

The maximum number of thieves allowed to join a WvW map is now capped at 10. All other thieves will be ported to a special overflow map called Gankstar City, which is a copy of Queensdale with FFA PVP.

Happy ganking.

To all of you who use WASD + 12345 for skills:

How do you use your skills without moving the middle finger from W to your 1-5 keys? Are you some kind of octopus?

Im using QERFG for normal skills so my middle finger never has to leave the W key. With this setup I can constantly run + strafe + use skills. For attunement swap I use MOUSE5 + ERFG. Fits perfect!

@LordByron – After reading your first post in this thread its very obvious why nobody takes you serious. Its ok to have your own opinion about things. Its a matter of how you offer you opinion.

@xiv – Unfortunately your vid is blocked in Germany because of music rights.

Red Falcon.8257:

Autumn.8043:

I actually find the Ele easier to play than other professions. class.

Totally agreed.

Ele has a large amount of passive or easily accessed failsafes that make them ignore stuff other classes would otherwise need to carefully and timely deal with.

Protection/Shielding automatically negates big hits that you would otherwise need to timely react to.
Plentiful condition removal, mostly triggered by swapping or in-rotation, allows to basically avoid managing conditions that other classes have to instead do.
Long stability allows to ignore CC that other classes instead need to stunbreak.
Healing up also comes easily and passively from just rolling, your usual rotation and resto signet procs.

Basically you can focus on your rotation (rotation class is pretty easy) and disregard conditions/damage/CC/burst, while applying your CC/damage by simply playing your rotation.

Other classes need to manage all those aspects every second of the fight with more limited tools and hit buttons based on what they actually need to do instead, which takes a whole different level of skill.

Its very obvious that you never actually played an ele before.

If a thief just spams heartseeker, dont try to run away from him. Face him, dodge backward and strafe left/right, use cripple and chill and try to stay above 50% HP. Dont save your cantrips for later. Its ok to pop Mist Form or Armor of Earth right at the beginning of the fight. Thieves are most dangerous in the first couple of milliseconds.

Usagi.4835:

To be honest, if you’re going to be suicidal and rush headlong into a zerg, like the other classes, you should be punished for that. The down skills don’t really stop you from dying and it’s really a lot to do with luck but Vapor Form, to some degree, negates that and allows eles to escape either back into a tower or back into their zerg where they can get rezzed.

In a typical zerg vs zerg fight (open field) there is at least 1000 range between both zergs. So if you rush into the enemy zerg as an ele and die, Vapor Form wont rescue you. The range of Vapor Form is not long enough to get you back to your own zerg most of the time.

Sure, Vapor Form is strong but overrated. The only OP thing is running through gates.

If you dont trust me, try it by yourself. I WvW alot with my ele and many times when I die I dont even use Vapor Form, because its as useless as most downed skills in this game.

Boon Hate is in no way a counter to D/D eles. Almost any profession has access to boons. My warrior runs around with perma swiftness, fury, might and vigor. If Boon Hate would give a flat 3% damage per boon. This would result in a constant 12% more damage. Now factor in group play in WvW. Many boons are group based so in WvW my warrior has way more boons than those. 3 more boons on me would result in 20% more damage.

Now think about backstabing thieves with access to Boon Hate and a 20+% damage boost. lol

Boon Hate at least in WvW is no counter to a certain builds. Its more a constant damage boost against anyone. Worst idea ever.

Counters to certain playstyles are fine, but it should force skillful playing for both players. Think about CC + stability: If someone activates stability you have the opportunity to save your CC until stability runs out. This doesnt work with Boon Hate because at least for eles boons are activated automatically. You cannot prevent boons if you notice your opponent has activated Boon Hate.

Dalo.3941:

I play a lvl 80 warrior aswell. Saying that they dont have the utilities to mitigate/cc dmg is 100% bullkitten. Hammer is pure CC with solid dmg. Axe/shield combo brings offensive AND defensive abilities. Aswell as constant vigor signet. Warrior has more then enough active skills to mitigate dmg aswell as passive features, with heavy armor and highest base hp pool.

I wouldnt call it “more than enough defensive abilities”. Warriors lack access to most defensive boons. Signet of Stamina is just 25% endurance regen (vigor is 50%). So for constant vigor you have to go for warhorn + boon duration. So you wont have a shield unless you pick up a second 1h set.

Most warrior builds have to rely on mobility skills as their main source of defence. IMO this is totally fine, because on the other hand warriors deal massive amounts of damage (even with weapons like hammer).

This is a computer game. No profession is really hard to play. Its a matter of practice. Some professions are faster to practice, other professions need more time to practice.

It really depends on the player whether he find practicing eles hard or easy.

What I find hard about playing an ele compared to the other professions is becoming aware of all the cooldowns. Ele has some strong skills on huge cooldowns. At the same time only 1/4 of your cooldowns are visibile. You have to remember 3/4 of your cooldowns so you dont accidentally switch to the wrong attunement.

For example: You need to interrupt your opponent in the next couple of milliseconds while being in either water or fire attunement. Now you have two options: Switch to air for backdraft or switch to earth for earthquake. Which one is ready?

Compare this to another profession, e.g. a sword/shield + hammer warrior. You are on sword/shield and need an interrupt. The decision is easy: just look at your skillbar. Use shield bash when ready, otherwise switch to hammer.

tl;dr IMO an ele is indeed harder to master than other professions due to the fact that cooldown recognition is much harder. While to the other professions 50% of their cooldowns are visible at any time, an ele has to actively recognize the cooldowns of their skills.

The difference between thieves and eles doing 1vsX in WvW is that decent thieves are able to actually kill + (stealth) stomp enemies whereas bunker eles just cannot be killed because when things go bad they RTL away.

You never see a bunker ele actually kill + stomp enemies nearly on such a high rate than thieves do. Look at all those vids out there (e.g. daphoenix). You rarely see them actually kill + stomp stuff in 1vsX (sorry bros, no offense).

Will thieves bandwagon to bunker ele after march patch? I dont know. But when they do I predict they will regret.

wish.3102:

Eles can use mist form to stomp, engineers can go tiny and be completely untouchable to stomp, warriors and guardians can use stability to stomp. All of these are more powerful than invisible stomping.

Nop. Stealth stomping is far superior:

All those abilities (i) block a utility slot and (ii) are on huge cooldowns whereas stealth is a perma repeatable weapon skill. In the same 75s an ele can stomp once with Mist Form a thief stomps a gazillion times out of stealth.

Guess what? All those professions rely on those utilities so you cannot just waste it for stomping. This is WvW, not a kind of 1vs1 sandbox.

Stealth stomping gets even worth in large scale battles. Its easy to see visible stomps even in a larger zerg so you can react to it. But its nearly impossible to recognize every thief stealthing for a stomp.

Or you can just throw away your full GC build and pick up some soldiers/knights gear, like every other profession in this game.

Xirin.8593:

teg.1340:

They are also mentioning a possible nerf to Mug damage.

The proposed change to revealed is fine, but IMO revealed debuff should also be applied:

1. when thief uses any damage skill
2. when thief get downed
3. when thief use stomp

1 is ridiculous

2 and 3 would have to be applied across all classes, like the impending stealth change is.

The opposite is true.

1. Its ridiculous to get hit from a target you cannot see.
2. Its ridiculous that a downed thief in SR stays invisible for a gazillion seconds.
3. Its ridiculous to get stomped from a target you canot see.

It would be ok as long as its active (not passive trait) and its not for thieves.

Yep. I’m at 40% crit damage and 42% crit chance (62% with fury). With 25 stacks of bloodlust + a few stacks of might, churning earth crits for up to 6-9k. Dunno about Firegrab because it misses most of the time.

They are also mentioning a possible nerf to Mug damage.

The proposed change to revealed is fine, but IMO revealed debuff should also be applied:

1. when thief uses any damage skill
2. when thief get downed
3. when thief use stomp

Thx for the vid taugrim.

I ran the same daphoenix bunker build in WvW for month (soldiers + clerics). But I find the build dealing do low damage for actually killing opponents fast enough while roaming. At the same time while being extremely hard to kill it took me forever to take down my enemies. And the longer the fight goes chances are good other people engage combat. What started as a 1vs1 often ends in a 1vsX or Xvs1.

So not Im going for a more damage oriented item build.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/?1|8.1n.h1h.8.1n.h4|0.0.0.0.0.0|1c.71h.1c.71h.1c.b1h.1c.b1h.1c.a7.1c.a7|1n.67.1n.67.1n.67.1n.67.1n.67.cc.67|0.a1.0.u35b.u56b|3a.8|e

Its a combination of soldiers armor, knights weapons + trinkets and ruby gems. I just switched clerics trinkets for knights a few days ago so I cannot say how much I miss the additional healing power.

What do you think about this? Are you satisfied with your damage output? Do you have plans for a more damage oriented build?

First you cannot imply that heavy boon = bunker. Thats definitely not the case. So the proposed trait wouldnt be a counter to bunker builds.

I dont like the idea of a passive counter to a certain playstyle. Counters should be active skills to enforce skillful play.

You have to take into account that many boons are group buffs. So at least for WvW you have multiple boons on every player most of the time, no matter who casts the boon. So in WvW the proposed trait would be less of a counter to boon stacking builds. It would be more of a general damage buff to certain professions.

You also have to take into account that at least elementalist have to rely on boons to survive. Sure boons are powerful, but ele has the lowest HP + the lowest armor of all professions. Giving a passive counter to a whole profession isnt fair.

Its like giving a passive “can see stealthed enemies” as a counter to thieves.