Guild Wars 2

Flamfloz.6732:

But I precisely don’t expect the community to go out of their way at all – in fact, they shouldn’t go out of their way and do videos, or websites, or posts on GW2 guru forums. This is way too much effort, way too much work. And for what?
They should just use the tools proposed by ANet, namely forums and the ventrilo chats to potentially optimise the chances of reaching a developer.
Everything outside of this is going out of their way and is just a bonus (this is a good thing, I like variety, but not the preferred/most efficient thing).

They want to do videos, they want to post on websites and forums. This is what they want to do.

They want to be part of and be respected within the community. As this forum is poorly designed, has very controversial moderation and seemingly has little to no impact for posting on it people aren’t motivated to do to much of it. Often the better solution is to hold the discussion else where with more reasonable moderators and a better community for the discussion.

So yes you are asking them to go out of their way, you are asking them to meet on dev’s schedule you are asking them to analyze, suggest and improve gameplay privately with no recognition of their contribution (let alone paying them for it).

You are asking them to use do something other than what they want to do. Thus you are asking them to go out of their way.

I’m pretty sure ANet are well aware of the various things they need to do to improve the game, and they have a todo list probably longer than your arm.

Most of this vocal community here would disagree with you.

Hell, their design director seems to disagree with you.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Collaborative-Development-Request-for-Topics

They seem to be unsure what they should be focusing on design wise. Which makes sense as their previous steps haven’t made the pvp part of the game any better and the general consensus is that it is now worse.

They are trying to crowd source their design, geting their community to do the work for them and you young forumling will get the wonderful experience of maybe having one if your ideas implemented…while the people who are getting paid to come up with ideas, do analysis and implement improvements will make the money. Money you will likely spend more of, as ‘collaborating’ to develop the game is a hook that will keep people here a bit longer.

Hopefully this is more than just a hook, but even if it doesn’t end up being more it is a savvy campaign to pull in some more money.

The problem isn’t even to know who should talk for who and how, the problem is with ANet and is a problem of resource allocation, as in: not enough resources are allocated to the development of the PvP features.

This is an argument that has been floating around, but it doesn’t explain the crowd sourcing design idea of theirs, nor does it explain the bad choices made over recent patches.

Having few resources shouldn’t lead a good designer to making a worse game, just decrease the speed of making it better.

Edit: Additional note on ‘collaborative design’
You’ve given up any right to any idea you post on this forum. https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/
Scroll down to section 6.
There is even a potential -although very unlikely- liability issue for their dev team reading/listening to design ideas from other sources.

Flamfloz.6732:

Is it the best format to communicate with the already busy ANet developers?

I let you be the judge, but as I see it, these videos seem better at communicating with the player base (and getting a following of players) than communicating ideas concisely for the developer.
Having (good) players talking to a large portion of the player base in an accessible and amusing format (the “video rant”) is needed and there definitely is a market for this (thanks Helseth, you did this very well and I enjoyed watching them), but again apparently the developers have another preferred channel if you want to communicate with them.

I’m not sure why you expect the community to be going out of its way to ease the communication with the devs.

The opposite is what you should be expecting.

hooma.9642:

whats the excuse for blaming or ranting about missing stuff on youtube, twitch or in forum but refuse to do a dialog with the devs?

Well for one the players aren’t being paid to design this game and the devs are. If they wanted to pay the players I’m sure that would open up the dialog more and assist with getting them to design the game for them.

If the dev team needs the players to learn how to craft a valuable experience then Anet is paying the wrong people to be on the dev team.

Complaining that the people who pay to play your game won’t show up weekly to tell you how to do your job is a complaint the community should have zero sympathy for.

Then it wouldn’t be an exception…

and of course you wouldn’t, the point of an exception is that general rules cover general cases, not specific ones. If you can make an reasonable argument for a specific case not being relevant to toward the reason the rule was created it should be an exception.

This is the entire idea of an exception, and this is a concept that anyone working on anything rules related should understand. The reason not to have exceptions is because you can’t trust the people who judge the system to be reasonable. In such a case there is a good argument for not having exceptions, this would almost be one of them except* in this case you do give some exceptions so…

and cause I didn’t use this word enough, exception exception exception.

Support
Support is a word I cringe at. It isn’t specific enough in meaning but unless I want to write a few more pages on various ‘support’ mechanics I’m stuck using the word and being a bit vague. Support actions protect allies or enable allies.

Elementalists look like they should be pretty good at protecting allies. Their Water build. has lots of AoE cleanse and condition removal. However, because of the various reasons I mentioned, it is pretty much never ideal nor easy to group up so this gets lost in how the game flows.

As for enabling allies, they have very weak CC. They are probably the weakest class in regards to holding in enemy in place allowing allies to beat them up. While their AoE can be dodged out of it can also be very easily walked out of, so they aren’t particularly great at getting people to spend dodges either. The area in which they are supposed to excel (combo fields), don’t really function as I think they hoped they would. They certainly don’t create the situation like Set and Spike like they stated they would be. While its true they can drop a fire field and get 1, 2, 3 or even more spells off to stack Area Might they are using really big spells to do so. They can drop Dragon’s Tooth (assuming the target is in the field when i cast), Phoenix and Arcane Wave to stack up some good area might. The cost is just all there of those spells probably not hitting or if they hit then you probably had an ally hold the target in place, and now that you have a lot of might stacks some of your biggest damage spells are down and your ally has less ability to hold them in place so the target an run while you have your might up.

Their fields end up being a bit of burning damage and some times a bit of might. Fire is the only field (besides arguably water) they can regularly lay out and none of them have a particularly large effect anyway, just a small bonus on top of what the skill does.

Without going into to much detail as this is getting long they are overshadowed by most classes both in protecting allies (even thieves with shadow refuge is generally far more useful than anything ele’s can do) and enabling them.

Play complexity affects skilled players as well
Their difficulty to play doesn’t just affect new players either. Humans have a limited capacity for attention and memory. Elementalists take more of it than other classes.

For example: A dagger thief (I use thief as they are the other extreme, the class that requires the least cognitive processing – this doesn’t mean they are thoughtless to play) only has to worry about pressing a single button while chasing a fleeing target. During this time the thief’s player has more attention to allocate to other important aspects of the game, such as: the mini map, which capture points are being contested, looking around to see what other threats exist in the immediate area or paying attention to the animations of the threats in the area so they can be ready to avoid certain abilities.

Good players will interiorize much of the elementalist as they play the more requiring less active thought. Our brains will short cut some commands.

For example: I notice that a ally is being stomped and I need to interrupt that. Most players will have to think about how to get to a interrupt before then using the interrupt. This process can cause a delay due to both the thinking aspect and the motor function aspect. Better elementalist players will short cut this and instead of going through a process of “ok switch to earth so I can then earthquake” they will essentially automate the ‘switch to earth’ step requiring less thinking to execute this task.

However, there is a lot to interiorize in this game, and a lot of things that will demand attention despite that interiorization. Because elementalists demand that attention it will, even for master elementalists, be harder to play well than other classes. They will be more prone to error as the number of actions they have to take is greater and their are more process in which they need to allocate their thinking.

Blind Cooldowns
Another aspect of them being difficult to play that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention is their blind cooldowns. All classes have these due to weapon swap, however elementalists have 4 aspects to swap between and each of those aspects has higher than average cool downs and the class itself is largely dependent upon switching elements.

In the above scenario where I want to swap to Earth to Earthquake and interrupt I also need to consider when I last used Earthquake and estimate what its cooldown is now, as I can’t see it. With a 45s cooldown it is hard to be precise in this estimation. Being off by 1 second can completely negate the entire purpose of switching into Earth and it will lock me out of the element I left for 9-15 seconds.

This isn’t just true of Earth spells, most elements have long cooldown abilities.

No, they aren’t that bad. The problem is that they aren’t good and to become a adept, let alone a master, at elementalist is a difficult and time consuming process. Then even good elementalists will make more general Guild Wars 2 game play mistakes than other classes because of the limitation of our cognitive processing.

They don’t do anything better than any other class. They have no mentionable comparative advantage.

Below I touch on just a few problems they have.

What aren’t they good for?
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Point Holder
Water builds are really hard to kill. Probably even the hardest thing to kill in the game. However, being hard to kill alone isn’t particularly useful., and they aren’t enough harder to kill that they can on an entire extra opponent and live. They sacrifice so much damage to be hard to kill that they also can’t really kill anything (part of this is due to how attunement swapping works and the Arcane Trait lines effect on that). When compared to Point Hold guardian builds they are probably harder to kill but they lack versatility. They lack some of the ally support that Guardians have, they lack some of the damage output that Guardians have, they require more space to survive than Guardians (often resulting in them having to move off a point for a short time, which good players will take advantage of and start taking/neutralizing the point) and most importantly they lack the pushes that Guardians have. These pushes allow Guardians to not only defend a point well but also take points. The Point Holder Guardian build is also one of the best Point Capture builds in the game as well. This is not true of the Water-Point Holder Elementalist build.

Burst damage
Simply they don’t do the same burst damage as Warriors or Thieves. They also can’t do their bursts as often nor as reliably and it is easier to avoid. All the while they are easier to kill.

Their advantage in this area is that a lot of their damage is AoE. Which sounds goods but due to various game mechanics and decisions isn’t particularly useful.

AoE damage, in other games, can be great as it creates a difficult situation for healers. They have to spread their heals around to try and keep all of their allies alive which puts more pressure on them and makes it more likely for them to make a mistake. Obviously in this game there isn’t a healer role, and everyone has a self heal. So instead of AoE damage putting a lot of pressure on a single enemy it puts a little pressure on lots of enemies.

However, it also doesn’t frequently hit lots of enemies for a significant effect. The dodge mechanic greatly reduces the efficacy of AoE, especially Elementalist AoE which generally has a delay from cast to damage. I could get into this more but it is pretty self explanatory. Dodge avoids damage and moves you out of AoEs.

There is also no reason for enemies to bunch up. The only time enemies should bunch up is if they are both melee and hitting the same target. Capture Points can be held by a single enemy (I’m not saying this is a bad decision, I’m saying it is a decision that is an indirect nerf to AoE damage in general). They only need one player to stand on the point to maintain its capture level. If they the team with more players started changing the capture level players would have a reason to bunch up and AoE would be more effective.

I really appreciate your explanation of tactics and strategy thank you.

I’d be curious to know your decision making in fights a bit more, why and when you use certain spells in a little more detail.

Very use video, thanks again.

So just using Stone Shards out DPS’s all of fire over 60 and 15 seconds when it is optimized and everything hits (including Dragon’s Tooth)?

I knew it was the best sustained DPS spell ele’s have but didn’t realize it compared so well everything else in rotation.

Is it easy for you to compute the time frame in which each of the above options has its highest DPS?

It’s probably just couple seconds with a Dragon’s Tooth, an auto attack and Lightning Strike but I want to make sure.

Appreciate your work, thank you.

I’ve been imagining how I’d have design elementalist with the GW2 current one as a base concept.

I think that I have an elegant solution to fixing conjure weapons and elementalists loss of range versatility due to not having weapon swap. As well as preventing the idea of a swap weapon on elementalist from getting out of hand.

Conjure Elemental [Weapon(s)] (one conjure spell per weapon combo)
————————————-
Replace your Weapon Skills of your current element with [weapon combo] weapon skills of the same element
.
This lasts until you hit swap weapon which destroys the conjured weapon, you can change elements and return to the conjure weapon element without losing the changed skills.

CD: 120, starts after you destroy the conjured weapon

Interesting. Can you give more details on how you are doing the math and the results of it. The hard numbers vs the % increase for example.

Also how can an Elementalist remove the CD on switching completely? Or did you do the math on that just for theory?

How does optimized stance dancing look damage wise compared to only using Stone Shards?

What is the highest burst damage they can output for each of these options you’ve created with just weapon skills within 15 seconds? How does that compare to just spamming Stone Shards?

Lots more questions along this vein if you have interest in running the math. I assume you already have some speadsheets or something set up to help you?