Opinion on future changes to ele

The process is very simple because it's rather easy to please the masses : throw at them a carrot while sweeping the truth under the dirty rag and with that said this is what gonna happen to ele in the upcoming patch :

1) The devs will take some "random" staff skill ( my bet is on ice spike) and they will decrease cast time by a small infinitesimal fraction and increase the dmg by insert huge percentage number that will hook majority of players while few Math savvy will see immediately that the actual numbers have gone up by a mere 100 pts or so (" increased dmg of skill XX by 200%....base dmg number left outside notes ops like from 100 you go up to 300 before counting enemy toughness/boons...WOOOOOOOOOOWWW...such massive buff)2) They will come up with some absurd but lol temporary in truth change to some utility that will "help" staff ele to add few thousand pts to their golem burst benchmark in order to top the golem race...I mean the magic benchmark contest to reach raid paradise3) The pve race will be up in arms to praise the devs, fantastic job, all is fine in the valley of honey and wine.....for at least a year or so..before they start to nerf back everything bringing the ele down to a worst state than now ( they can and they will )

Meanwhile let's throw a bone to those sad pvpers...

-increase dmg of sword...but to maintain balance ( we can't an "unbalanced class in PvP can we?! ), riptide CD increased to 15s and earthen vortex to 12s or so..maybe something else but they will target these two skill regardless

• Twist of fate CD increased to 60s
• -Increase dmg of dagger dualskills..ofc by a HUGE percentage number aka irrelevant , meanwhile clunky animations will remain ofc
• scepter...haha..just kidding

That's all! The aim is to please the pve crowd and that will "silence" the ele subforum..at least for a while...and I will change my name soon to Nostradamus

Sounds similar to the ele tears when they do some irrelevant small nerf... Yet aptly accurate.

I think they'll buff weaver back to a healthy spot for PvE. Too many tears if they don't. Question is if it takes 3 or 6 months. If it takes longer, I guess weaver is being replaced by expac3 powercreep.

@"Arheundel.6451" said:-increase dmg of sword...but to maintain balance ( we can't an "unbalanced class in PvP can we?! ), riptide CD increased to 15s and earthen vortex to 12s or so..maybe something else but they will target these two skill regardless

• Twist of fate CD increased to 60s

You are joking, but this could happen some day

Weaver is more balanced than ever. Some other class aren't and that's why Weaver is trash nowadays. The Weaver does not need a buff. Overtuned class need a nerf.

@Theros.1390 said:

@"Arheundel.6451" said:-increase dmg of sword...but

to maintain balance

( we can't an "unbalanced class in PvP can we?! ), riptide CD increased to 15s and earthen vortex to 12s or so..maybe something else but they will target these two skill regardless

• Twist of fate CD increased to 60s

The fact is that Anet keeps "balancing" ele damage to be on par with other classes, but the problem is that, at the end of the day, ele remains the squishiest class with the least defensive mechanics in the whole game. If you go full zerker you have, what... 11k hp? top that with light armor and enormous cooldowns/mediocre healing skills and you have a bad profession. Elementalist was supposed to have monstrous damage from the start, because of these characteristics, but now that they tone down in order to "balance" the damage in comparison with other classes, you are left with a subpar profession that is outclassed by other, far more forgiving ones (looking at you, deadeye and holosmith).

@Knuckle Joe.7408 said:

@Theros.1390 said:

@"Arheundel.6451" said:-increase dmg of sword...but

to maintain balance

( we can't an "unbalanced class in PvP can we?! ), riptide CD increased to 15s and earthen vortex to 12s or so..maybe something else but they will target these two skill regardless

• Twist of fate CD increased to 60s

If it has the same DPS, but higher burst then weaver will remain high-end meta.If it has the same DPS but considerably more cleave (which the other options don't) then it will also remain fine for high-cleave situations.

Weaver doesnt' need drastically more DPS than other classes. It just needs clear advantages over these other DPS classes. Giving one class a blanket of "more dps" than the others results in a stale meta. Even DPS classes do more than just AFK dps... And if not, game design is glorifying DPS golems as raid bosses. Time to buff those so we can't just ignore almost all mechanics and DPS race them down.

I know for sure that I wouldn't be pleased by this sort of stuff. It wouldn't even please me if they reverted every single nerf from the previous balance patch. After making ele the worst class in the game, I expect them to put in way more work than that. Of all the professions, they thought that mesmer was the one that needed a rework, because 'muh theme'. How about they focus on reworking professions that actually need it. You know, the professions that have completely outdated design and mechanics that make them unbalanceable. I am referring to necromancer and elementalist.

If the balance team cares so much about golem DPS, then there needs to be another reason why ele is as squishy as it is. If ele does the same damage as everyone else, then it's like having a stat deficit. And the active defenses of ele certainly don't make up for it, not when they require the heaviest investment that any class has to make. Also, if ele is supposed to do the same DPS, why are the attacks so telegraphed? Are the rest of the disadvantages not enough? Ele is just sub-par at everything at this point, and even if the next patch makes ele have 1k more DPS than everyone else it still won't be a meaningful fix to a profession that is plagued by problems. It's not going to be enough when you can't land your damage against other players, and it's not going to be enough when you have to get rid of all of your offensive power to survive against them. Also, lol at tempest. One of the worst support specs right now and it hasn't been touched since PoF release.

The traits of Elementalist are not actually that bad. The only gripe that I have with them is that our cleanse is too reliant on having the correct traits, and that too much of our damage potential is tied to the numerous damage modifiers that we have. Elementalist desperately needs more baseline capabilities. An untraited elementalist is pathetic when compared to other untraited professions, especially since the moment that they made the healing skills weaker baseline to scale with healing power. Many of the skills are slow for no reason. For example, would it be broken if the first tick of lava font was instant? It wouldn't add any DPS to the theoretical optimal raid rotations, and it would help out a lot in PvP and WvW. It wouldn't even make lava font that strong there, it would just be an average skill. Then there is the boons; we have never got access to a new boon from elite specs, and our boon generation only got a mediocre boost from them. Meanwhile most other classes have severe boon power creep, some even generating full might stacks with a couple of buttons. May I remind everyone that boons were initially supposed to help make up for ele's squishiness? This is why core ele used to be one of the best boon classes, besides core guardian. But now many other professions do them better as well, while having every other advantage that you can imagine.

Now that elementalist doesn't have any advantages left, the devs need to stop trying to fix a gangrenous wound with a band-aid. Elementalist needs a rework at this point. At the very least, all the weapon skills need to be looked at and re-balanced to be up to date with all the power creep that PoF brought.

Well anet always seem to balance things the wrong way because they tend to address the effects not the cause.

The tempest stayed top dps for almost the whole duration of the HoT expansion which mean that initially the elementalist didn't need an e-spec with damage modifyier traits to be top dps. The issue with tempest was totally different in the sense that tempest's support was supposed to lie around aura but auras ended up being a poor part of the spec.

When weaver and PoF were launched, the elementalist ended up with a new spec with more damage above an already solid base of damage which created a so called power creeping effect. The issue is that instead of addressing the problem which were the traits that increase damage on the weaver's spec, they nerfed the core, downgrading builds that used to be effective to an ineffective state.

To "fix" the elementalist, anet would need to:

• revert the changes that weakened the core and tempest just before and since PoF, (which would please everyone)
• work on the auras so that they become valuable for other profession instead of making them a one trick pony thing of the elementalist, (something that nobody care about)
• replace the dps traits of the weaver's traitline by utility traits, (something that would set ablaze the elementalist's community)
• and, indeed, work on sword's and dual attunment's skills so that they pack up more power and are easier to play. (something that the OP seem to see as a joke)

Ideally, the weaver traitline should give the weaver mainly personnal survivability and maybe some hard CC, while a few of the dual attunment skill should become "burst" skills instead of the relatively weak and cluncky to use skill that they currently are. The base idea of the weaver wasn't wrong but anet should have never pushed the spec into something perceived as a "dps" spec, putting the damage onto the traits was their biggest mistake.

@"Dadnir.5038" said:Well anet always seem to balance things the wrong way because they tend to address the effects not the cause.

The tempest stayed top dps for almost the whole duration of the HoT expansion which mean that initially the elementalist didn't need an e-spec with damage modifyier traits to be top dps. The issue with tempest was totally different in the sense that tempest's support was supposed to lie around aura but auras ended up being a poor part of the spec.

While I totally agree about all you've said here . I have to slightly disagree with the fact that ele "doesnt need damage modifyier". It's actually cause core ele has ALREADY a lot of damage modifyier making him deals a lot of damage. That's why you used Fire - AIr - Arcane as a core ele before HOT. Both of these trait lines has at least 1 damage modifyier or two.

Tempest brought one more (which was stupid tho) and weaver even more (not less than 3 damage / stats modifyiers)

When weaver and PoF were launched, the elementalist ended up with a new spec with more damage above an already solid base of damage which created a so called power creeping effect. The issue is that instead of addressing the problem which were the traits that increase damage on the weaver's spec, they nerfed the core, downgrading builds that used to be effective to an ineffective state.

Plus they brought new strong DPS skills as dual skills. Overloads were already big dps skills (and not utilities)

@Dadnir.5038 said:When weaver and PoF were launched, the elementalist ended up with a new spec with more damage above an already solid base of damage which created a so called power creeping effect. The issue is that instead of addressing the problem which were the traits that increase damage on the weaver's spec, they nerfed the core, downgrading builds that used to be effective to an ineffective state.

Unfortunately that's how the Arenanet balance team work.Hey Weaver is doing too much damage, let's nerf Meteor Shower and Lava Font!Same with Deadeye, DE is doing too much damage, let's nerf... Dagger auto damage!

It's the same all the time.

Except ice spike already has a high damage modifier...

@Infusion.7149 said:Except ice spike already has a high damage modifier...

Nerf

OP is a prophet.

Skills to fix in future:-Phoenix-dragons tooth-ride the lighting-churning earth-shatterstone-rock barrier-dust devil

We all speak into the void...