Guild Wars 2

To be frank I’ve only come here to vent about how this bunking mes/mes/rev/rev/x meta is such bullkitten. I’ve been playing the game since slightly after release, and exclusively pvp’ing for the majority of that time as well. Best balance was achieved just before the april trait/burn revamp. There is SO MUCH lack of developed skill in attack/defense balance between individuals, and their team-play, and the game has moved onto the sort of clusterkitten of invulnerability/block spamming, while CC’ing the kitten out of the enemy. There isn’t any skill involved in any of it anymore, and its just sad. (Of course I say that knowing that whoever is BETTER at being carried by this bullkitten will still win, but come on… It’s not fun AT ALL) Zero balance whatsoever and it’s getting to me. I won’t be playing queue until a balance patch is released. And a HEAVY one at that.

Thank you and have a lovely day.

HELP IM STUCK have been for like 15 min haha XD

It is the game. History will tell you that much. :P Every time a new patch comes out it gets thrown out of whack.! haha! But its both the game and the players. Every time a patch comes out players have to adjust to the changes to find out what works and what doesn’t work, so yeah, some people are just dumb for running the same things when new builds are available, but then again, we don’t want everyone to be REQUIRED to run overpowered stuff, or there would be no diversity in gameplay! So its up to the Community and ANet both to balance it after every patch!

So I play elementalist more than any other class and I’m just here in hopes that ArenaNet will see my post and consider it, as well as receive reaffirmations from other players!

Okay, so I’ve been trying every amulet, trait combo to attempt to create something viable, but none of it’s working. I pretty much played either Fresh Air scepter/focus, or dagger/focus celestial before HoT, so naturally I attempted to create a zerker/marauder/sinister/viper build using tempest. All I can say is that warhorn, for these , is just not going to happen. The cast times on defensive moves is to high to react before losing half of your hp, and the speed and damage of the offensive moves is not enough to strike an enemy down before they do you. (even overloads, as the charge time is too high) so I tried swapping in focus, in hopes that obsidian flesh would give me the time i needed to charge up air overload and do some damage, which works..! kinda… once the 4 seconds is up you have a remaining one second on overload, and then the actual cast time. This is where i have a problem, because for the overload to do good damage, i need to have a defensive measure to not die while casting it. which means I must either run blocks, or have a good armor rating. neither of which is possible while maintaining good damage stats. :/ anyway I eventually got an OKAY build going where I would run arcane (mid mid low), air (mid low mid), and tempest with runes of surging to try to create a jerker version of auramancer, seeing as auras provide defensive measures. (shocking, magnetic, and almost perma-protection from arcane and armor of earth) Nope, still not enough. i have 15 seconds of magnetic aura and 12 seconds of shocking aura, but there’s too much stability on the enemy team to make shocking aura do anything at all, so i still die channeling overload air… not every time, just very frequently. its just sub-par.

The next decent build i worked up out of this was a, quite frankly, burn exploiting settler amulet build. you all know the drill for this build I’m sure, balthazar runes, smoldering sigils, burn duration traits, and lots of burn application skills to overwhelm enemy cleansing. it’s lame as hell, but it works. with this, even with the low health pool, I could heal up so quickly it didn’t really matter. Thing is, though, that the mobility and cooldowns of the defensive warhorn skills are far below the effectiveness of the existing focus ones again.

NOW MY MOST IMPORTANT POINT> the trait line opportunity cost. (if you will)
The pre-existing celementalist trait combo is incredible. It works together perfectly. I play water (top top top), earth (top top top), arcane (mid mid top) and the traits work so well together, especially the grandmasters, that removing any one of them makes no sense at all. Because the current meta game involves an INSANE AMOUNT OF CONDITIONS AND CROWD CONTROL, and for some ungodly reason Anet keeps introducing more forms of cc without removing any. running diamond skin is so incredibly advantageous in PvP, and when coupled with the water trait line, if you’re good at timing heals, which i like to believe I am, the second you fall below 90% when fighting a condition based enemy, you can heal back up to prevent more condition pressure. A second armor of earth then aids me against overwhelming enemy cc (which is very much the meta these days), as well as cantrips cleansing condis, makes me almost immune to condis 1v1, and makes 2 or 3 v 1’s possible when the enemy is heavily condition based. So I’ve established i cannot replace either of these with tempest. The arcane trait line also aids in survivability then in giving me mobility and dodge capacity, as well as addition heals and damage. I have swapped out the arcane traitline for tempest, in an attempt to run auramancer, like many have said is good, but it is still not NEARLY as good as normal celementalist.

Long story short, there is a dramatic loss in running tempest (mostly in survivability) as it forces you to replace a perfectly balanced trait combo, or forces you to wait for an overload to achieve dps, making yourself vulnerable for a good 9-10 seconds (a huge time) waiting for the skill, and its channel. (which of course limits your dps as while because you’ve been using bs skills for 5 seconds waiting for an overload)

I know I’ve missed a lot of points, but to cover every scenario would take pages of text. Discuss with me! I’m very set in my way at this point but maybe I’ve been missing something key!?

Thank You!
-Scott