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Concerns about Elementalist


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@Arcaneus.6931 said:

@"Jski.6180" said:Your best bet is to unlock tempest and weaver and use what build they have core ele is effectively a dead class.

Super important to understand about gw2 is there are no mages classes as there no dmg types to start with. You can get effects that look like different dmg types though condis and unshockable but you realy do not find these effects on ele vs other classes.

IMO what you said makes as much sense to me as having all heavy armor classes 1 melee weapon and the rest being long range only. Just think about it if that was the case, would you still enjoy it and say " that's the way it is because its GW2 "?

I think it also devalues the armor types too Heavy, Medium and Light and their respective professions. Why bother making them options in game in the first place if majority of the classes are required to play at melee range to get any decent performance with the aid of elites and traits that makes Light armor just if not better than heavy armor classes at melee.

It was base off an older system of traits that was removed yet the armor types and hp amounts where not changed as well.

GW2 is full of old out dated systems that where only partly updated or not updated at all. Ele is the class the suffered the most from anet "forgetting" to update things before moving on the next new thing.

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@Arheundel.6451 said:

@"Jski.6180" said:Your best bet is to unlock tempest and weaver and use what build they have core ele is effectively a dead class.

Super important to understand about gw2 is there are no mages classes as there no dmg types to start with. You can get effects that look like different dmg types though condis and unshockable but you realy do not find these effects on ele vs other classes.

IMO what you said makes as much sense to me as having all heavy armor classes 1 melee weapon and the rest being long range only. Just think about it if that was the case, would you still enjoy it and say " that's the way it is because its GW2 "?

I think it also devalues the armor types too Heavy, Medium and Light and their respective professions. Why bother making them options in game in the first place if majority of the classes are required to play at melee range to get any decent performance with the aid of elites and traits that makes Light armor just if not better than heavy armor classes at melee.

Long story short....
all you said makes perfect sense
.

NO! having a mage class in a MMO acting like a melee brawler is simply speaking "an awful idea", nobody know who came up with such an absurd concept but well......it's is what it is and here we are suffering the consequences of that decision

For my tastes, I've always loved the melee weapon play styles on ele. Dagger is a blast to play on core/tempest and I especially love playing sword weaver. That doesn't invalidate any of what seem like perfectly valid complaints to me, however. The fact is ele could really benefit from having medium baseline health. Both staff and scepter really need improvement and are currently the worst choices most of the time. Core ele is bottom tier in every game mode. Weaver was over-nerfed in competitive play. Conjured weapons are terribly designed. The list of areas for improvement with this class is long.

For what it's worth, I support the idea of the next ele elite featuring a ranged weapon. It's not my preferred style, but the melee options for ele are where the class feels best currently. They should work on improving ele's ranged game.

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:

@"Jski.6180" said:Your best bet is to unlock tempest and weaver and use what build they have core ele is effectively a dead class.

Super important to understand about gw2 is there are no mages classes as there no dmg types to start with. You can get effects that look like different dmg types though condis and unshockable but you realy do not find these effects on ele vs other classes.

IMO what you said makes as much sense to me as having all heavy armor classes 1 melee weapon and the rest being long range only. Just think about it if that was the case, would you still enjoy it and say " that's the way it is because its GW2 "?

I think it also devalues the armor types too Heavy, Medium and Light and their respective professions. Why bother making them options in game in the first place if majority of the classes are required to play at melee range to get any decent performance with the aid of elites and traits that makes Light armor just if not better than heavy armor classes at melee.

Long story short....
all you said makes perfect sense
.

NO! having a mage class in a MMO acting like a melee brawler is simply speaking "an awful idea", nobody know who came up with such an absurd concept but well......it's is what it is and here we are suffering the consequences of that decision

For my tastes, I've always loved the melee weapon play styles on ele. Dagger is a blast to play on core/tempest and I especially love playing sword weaver. That doesn't invalidate any of what seem like perfectly valid complaints to me, however. The fact is ele could really benefit from having medium baseline health. Both staff and scepter really need improvement and are currently the worst choices most of the time. Core ele is bottom tier in every game mode. Weaver was over-nerfed in competitive play. Conjured weapons are terribly designed. The list of areas for improvement with this class is long.

For what it's worth, I support the idea of the next ele elite featuring a ranged weapon. It's not my preferred style, but the melee options for ele are where the class feels best currently. They should work on improving ele's ranged game.

I am not against the idea of melee mage sort of magic knight archetype..the problem is Anet wants to keep the idea of glass cannon mage....while forcing the class at melee range, you haven't got the tools most of the time to survive a barrage of attacks at melee range, they force you to heavily invest in specific stats to work with the class at that range.

-Too stats dependant at this point-Extremely high CD on defensive mechanics, you must facetank dmg between 1 huge CD and another-Dmg level is extremely low and require the execution of perfect combos to accomplish anything

Playing ele atm is like playing a Dark Soul Character in a Kirby game where people reach their goals by pressing attack and defense buttons only.......it's completely absurd, today I have played necro as main for first time, it took me like few hours before I was topping stats in every PvP match and died only once....due to a core necro pressure, at the same time once I was fighting a thief, ranger and a weaver...and the weaver was gone after a single F1-5-4-2.....

The absurdity of the class design in this game is mindblowing....it's like people modding their own version of Skyrim......

Few years ago you didn't have to go through firing circles to do the smallest thing...a lighting flash+burning speed combo was enough to put pressure on people...now you need to chain burning speed-convergence-dragon's breath-firegrab and something more to put the same pressure...at the same time you have to dodge for your life because a couple of hits from a necro can down you almost....

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i started to play ele since not even a week, and i think it is a pretty easy but powerful class. also balanced, as weaver u just need to know your cycles and combos.

but to make it do damage and use its range, u need pacing and quick fingers; also u first and foremost need some stunbreak equipped, since it is pretty glassy. just has a ton of options to disengage, you just cannot facetank or jolly slaughter stuff in melee like necro does. but yeah, necro is one of the strongest classes.

its damage only feels mediocre, because thief specs, ranger specs, mesmer, warrior, guardian or reaper can mass-stack a crazy ton of quick damage. still, a big meteor shower surely does its job.

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@Bamisama.6853 said:

its damage only feels mediocre, because
thief specs, ranger specs, mesmer, warrior, guardian or reaper
can mass-stack a crazy ton of quick damage. still, a big meteor shower surely does its job.LMAO I love how you just negated your own point with that line.

In conclusion, it only sucks because everything else is better. Thank you.

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@Bamisama.6853 said:

@"kamikharzeeh.8016" said:

its damage only feels mediocre, because
thief specs, ranger specs, mesmer, warrior, guardian or reaper
can mass-stack a crazy ton of quick damage. still, a big meteor shower surely does its job.LMAO I love how you just negated your own point with that line.

u kinda misunderstood that. thief and rangers and mesmers have no/barely any AoE and are therefore completly useless as offensemodes in Wvw. dps warrior is similarily selfish and therefore also has less value in a largescale format.

that was plainly about sheer paper damage. which makes eles damage FEEL lesser than it really is. u can cyle through your weaver combos and pump out one damage circle after the other. herald+scrouge are the meta aoe classes.

i might have forgotten to mention that i only play Wvw. in pve, everything really does damage. idk about the meta, but openworld bosses are usually pretty weak, it matters not what u play to kill stuff there. ele is just squishy... which is its basic downside.

i think the ele specs are kinda balanced, in latin the "aurea mediocritas". nothing bad about that.

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@Ganathar.4956 said:

@Junkpile.7439 said:Why not give elementalist more hp and damage if they don't use any elite spec lines? Funny play ele when you have under 14k hp and 2k armor and still damage is horrible. I really hope that dude who got idea add barrier in game and give it only to the elite specs doesn't work for anet anymore.

IMO we chose elementalists because they are cloth class and for better damage at long range so you can kill your enemy while keeping a distance, that's how its supposed to be that's why we choose cloth class, I don't get why they go and make it melee oriented, if I wanted a melee class I would have gone for heavy armor classes. I would rather them have more long range damage options at least then their squishiness would be understandable. Currently its just feels absurd to play a cloth class at melee and long range, no wonder they die so easily.

I get that a lot of folks default to mage being ranged spell caster and not much else; but I take personal offense at that limitation!
proudly waves spellsword flag
lol

In all seriousness though, the fact that both melee and ranged are so lacking is because they don't really commit to either side. Like, Weaver should probably get more health if your gonna ask players to get in close, and Tempest/Base Elementalist really should be able to distance cast better at this point. Hell, I think having Tempest be the go to ranged caster, Weaver being the melee caster, and Elementalist being the half-and-half would be better.

Either that, or make it possible to really spec into ranged or melee roles with our trees.

It's less that people default to elementalist having to be exclusively ranged. It's more that currently ele is almost exclusively a melee class, with the lowest hp pool and armor and with no gimmicks like mobility or stealth to compensate. The theme of a cloth-wearing spellcaster is also usually ranged, but that obviously doesn't mean that melee shouldn't be an option. However, it does mean that the ranged options better be good as well. Right now the ranged option have no survivability, no way to escape or kite anything and also the slowest attacks in the game. Very underwhelming design that didn't even cut it in the core game, much less now.

I think it prob has to do with staff being aoes that it is so slow and cumbersome.

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Staff has its strong points and weak points.Many AoEs, quite some utility and high range. This makes it good for e.g. WvW, where I play a Staff Backline Build.Long ticking fields, big AoE and high range make it good to keep pressure on the enemies there.

However, its design is behind the current state of GW2:

  • The slow animations, aftercasts and cast times make it feel incredibly clunky compared to the otherwise relatively fluid gameplay of GW2. It becomes more apparent if you've played D/D Elementalist before, which has fluid gameplay as a big selling point.
  • The slow ticking fields make it important that your target is as immobile as you are on staff. Meteor Shower - the golden child of Staff Ele - is infamous for rooting you into place. This isn't only a pvp/wvw issue, it can also be felt with the tremendous amount of world boss monsters that want you to jump over their shockwave attacks. The damage also has been nerfed over and over again.
  • Last but not least, the utility is just not there anymore compared to what other classes/specializations bring to the table nowadays. I remember my first days in WvW as Staff Ele, where my job was to place a Frost Field on the enemies so that my Frontline can leap into it to combo into Frost Auras. I also had to place a lot of Water Fields for them to blast.

Nowadays my job consists of DPS - I cannot even burst properly because the AoEs tick so slowly, and if the enemy moves out them I do barely any damage at all.I understand that my viewpoint is biased and very anecdotal, but I hope I could outline where I see the design just being outdated to the contemporary gameplay of GW2.

Edit: removed quote; I think I misunderstood the intent of the previous poster. Still, my points stand.

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Every WvW interaction vs ranger results in completely underwhelming results. Just run damage meters and look at log when a ranger wrecks you. I chased on at 10% when I had a group and figured 'surely 10% ".. But evaded 3 stances of attacks and burst me down - was about a 6 second fight. lol Very tiresome looking for "best WvW builds" and getting wrecked by most classes. Before saying how amazing the ele abilities are look at raw numbers others can pump out. that's where no amount of cool traits help.

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@Bleikopf.2491 said:However, its design is behind the current state of GW2:

  • The slow animations, aftercasts and cast times make it feel incredibly clunky compared to the otherwise relatively fluid gameplay of GW2. It becomes more apparent if you've played D/D Elementalist before, which has fluid gameplay as a big selling point.
  • The slow ticking fields make it important that your target is as immobile as you are on staff. Meteor Shower - the golden child of Staff Ele - is infamous for rooting you into place. This isn't only a pvp/wvw issue, it can also be felt with the tremendous amount of world boss monsters that want you to jump over their shockwave attacks. The damage also has been nerfed over and over again.There are several classes with core weapons that are in the same boat; Core Warrior Sword F1 is exactly identical; rooted in place for 3 seconds. This is too painful to use on mobs in pve anymore because of how much more dangerous mobs are to facetank.

Some of these weapon skills just need to be unrooted to see how they do. I know that would make a huge difference for warrior sword and ele staff...

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@Opopanax.1803 said:

@Bleikopf.2491 said:However, its design is behind the current state of GW2:
  • The slow animations, aftercasts and cast times make it feel incredibly clunky compared to the otherwise relatively fluid gameplay of GW2. It becomes more apparent if you've played D/D Elementalist before, which has fluid gameplay as a big selling point.
  • The slow ticking fields make it important that your target is as immobile as you are on staff. Meteor Shower - the golden child of Staff Ele - is infamous for rooting you into place. This isn't only a pvp/wvw issue, it can also be felt with the tremendous amount of world boss monsters that want you to jump over their shockwave attacks. The damage also has been nerfed over and over again.There are several classes with core weapons that are in the same boat; Core Warrior Sword F1 is exactly identical; rooted in place for 3 seconds. This is too painful to use on mobs in pve anymore because of how much more dangerous mobs are to facetank.

Some of these weapon skills just need to be unrooted to see how they do. I know that would make a huge difference for warrior sword and ele staff...

Oddly ele is the only core class in the game that is simply weaker then its elite spec. There realty is no reason to run core ele you can fine reason to run core any thing else in the game. It has a lot to do with core eles weapons being on its elite spec and being so importen to the class / elite spec.

Its best to think of ele less of a mages and more of an wepon master.

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@Jski.6180 said:

@Bleikopf.2491 said:However, its design is behind the current state of GW2:
  • The slow animations, aftercasts and cast times make it feel incredibly clunky compared to the otherwise relatively fluid gameplay of GW2. It becomes more apparent if you've played D/D Elementalist before, which has fluid gameplay as a big selling point.
  • The slow ticking fields make it important that your target is as immobile as you are on staff. Meteor Shower - the golden child of Staff Ele - is infamous for rooting you into place. This isn't only a pvp/wvw issue, it can also be felt with the tremendous amount of world boss monsters that want you to jump over their shockwave attacks. The damage also has been nerfed over and over again.There are several classes with core weapons that are in the same boat; Core Warrior Sword F1 is exactly identical; rooted in place for 3 seconds. This is too painful to use on mobs in pve anymore because of how much more dangerous mobs are to facetank.

Some of these weapon skills just need to be unrooted to see how they do. I know that would make a huge difference for warrior sword and ele staff...

Oddly ele is the only core class in the game that is simply weaker then its elite spec. There realty is no reason to run core ele you can fine reason to run core any thing else in the game. It has a lot to do with core eles weapons being on its elite spec and being so importen to the class / elite spec.

Its best to think of ele less of a mages and more of an wepon master.

That is not unique to ele.

Mesmer, Thief, Engineer to name 3 off the top of my head.

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Core ele suffers from a few things.

First being that all their utilities that are useful lean towards defense. Generally you are stuck with cantrips which makes you stuck with water.

Healing and protection are too valuable to give up because damage is too low to go glass cannon. This makes arcane hard to give up.

Signets and glyphs see almost no play because stun break or avoiding damage is too hard to pass up.

Signets are good on their own if cc wasnt such a problem. Signet of air and sometimes fire are only ones worth having. Signet of water passive is great. Its active should be doing double its current heal or scale by 2.0 healing and increase its active by 5s to compensate. Signet of earth passive should be 10% less damage. Its active effect isnt that great either, but idk what id change.

Glyph of renewal, should be 20s. Glyph of storms should be 30s flat cd. Reduce blind spam and vuln duration to compensate. Damage overall should be higher on them. Glyph elite is good. Glyph of elemental power is offensive but a stun break.

Either change cc mechanic or give ele better access to stability if you want them to use other utilities. If you had a trait that gave a barrier on signet use it would encourage people to drop water for earth.

3s of protection on aura is prob okay in pvp. Arcane would become less of a necessity for protection. (Glyphs provide great protection uptime on their own).

The days of air water earth or fire air earth ele wouldnt be far off if they took the time to consider these changes. Frankly having rock solid provide 1s of stab every attunement swap and written in stone provide barrier on signet use would solve a lot of problems core ele suffers from ( remove cd reduction in place of barrier).

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@Opopanax.1803 said:

@Bleikopf.2491 said:However, its design is behind the current state of GW2:
  • The slow animations, aftercasts and cast times make it feel incredibly clunky compared to the otherwise relatively fluid gameplay of GW2. It becomes more apparent if you've played D/D Elementalist before, which has fluid gameplay as a big selling point.
  • The slow ticking fields make it important that your target is as immobile as you are on staff. Meteor Shower - the golden child of Staff Ele - is infamous for rooting you into place. This isn't only a pvp/wvw issue, it can also be felt with the tremendous amount of world boss monsters that want you to jump over their shockwave attacks. The damage also has been nerfed over and over again.There are several classes with core weapons that are in the same boat; Core Warrior Sword F1 is exactly identical; rooted in place for 3 seconds. This is too painful to use on mobs in pve anymore because of how much more dangerous mobs are to facetank.

Some of these weapon skills just need to be unrooted to see how they do. I know that would make a huge difference for warrior sword and ele staff...

Oddly ele is the only core class in the game that is simply weaker then its elite spec. There realty is no reason to run core ele you can fine reason to run core any thing else in the game. It has a lot to do with core eles weapons being on its elite spec and being so importen to the class / elite spec.

Its best to think of ele less of a mages and more of an wepon master.

That is not unique to ele.

Mesmer, Thief, Engineer to name 3 off the top of my head.

Well memer has different shatter effects eng has its F5 elite skill as for thf i do not know i know some ppl dislike the longer dodge time and well ele core gets nothing at all vs its elite spec.

This IS unique to ele oddly the one class that lacks any other type of uniqueness.

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@Jski.6180 said:

@Bleikopf.2491 said:However, its design is behind the current state of GW2:
  • The slow animations, aftercasts and cast times make it feel incredibly clunky compared to the otherwise relatively fluid gameplay of GW2. It becomes more apparent if you've played D/D Elementalist before, which has fluid gameplay as a big selling point.
  • The slow ticking fields make it important that your target is as immobile as you are on staff. Meteor Shower - the golden child of Staff Ele - is infamous for rooting you into place. This isn't only a pvp/wvw issue, it can also be felt with the tremendous amount of world boss monsters that want you to jump over their shockwave attacks. The damage also has been nerfed over and over again.There are several classes with core weapons that are in the same boat; Core Warrior Sword F1 is exactly identical; rooted in place for 3 seconds. This is too painful to use on mobs in pve anymore because of how much more dangerous mobs are to facetank.

Some of these weapon skills just need to be unrooted to see how they do. I know that would make a huge difference for warrior sword and ele staff...

Oddly ele is the only core class in the game that is simply weaker then its elite spec. There realty is no reason to run core ele you can fine reason to run core any thing else in the game. It has a lot to do with core eles weapons being on its elite spec and being so importen to the class / elite spec.

Its best to think of ele less of a mages and more of an wepon master.

That is not unique to ele.

Mesmer, Thief, Engineer to name 3 off the top of my head.

Well memer has different shatter effects eng has its F5 elite skill as for thf i do not know i know some ppl dislike the longer dodge time and well ele core gets nothing at all vs its elite spec.

This IS unique to ele oddly the one class that lacks any other type of uniqueness.

Yeah that is kind of the point of ele not to be unique but to be a jack-of-all-trades which ruines any form of uniqeness it could have.

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@skunkstank.6128 said:

@Bleikopf.2491 said:However, its design is behind the current state of GW2:
  • The slow animations, aftercasts and cast times make it feel incredibly clunky compared to the otherwise relatively fluid gameplay of GW2. It becomes more apparent if you've played D/D Elementalist before, which has fluid gameplay as a big selling point.
  • The slow ticking fields make it important that your target is as immobile as you are on staff. Meteor Shower - the golden child of Staff Ele - is infamous for rooting you into place. This isn't only a pvp/wvw issue, it can also be felt with the tremendous amount of world boss monsters that want you to jump over their shockwave attacks. The damage also has been nerfed over and over again.There are several classes with core weapons that are in the same boat; Core Warrior Sword F1 is exactly identical; rooted in place for 3 seconds. This is too painful to use on mobs in pve anymore because of how much more dangerous mobs are to facetank.

Some of these weapon skills just need to be unrooted to see how they do. I know that would make a huge difference for warrior sword and ele staff...

Oddly ele is the only core class in the game that is simply weaker then its elite spec. There realty is no reason to run core ele you can fine reason to run core any thing else in the game. It has a lot to do with core eles weapons being on its elite spec and being so importen to the class / elite spec.

Its best to think of ele less of a mages and more of an wepon master.

That is not unique to ele.

Mesmer, Thief, Engineer to name 3 off the top of my head.

Well memer has different shatter effects eng has its F5 elite skill as for thf i do not know i know some ppl dislike the longer dodge time and well ele core gets nothing at all vs its elite spec.

This IS unique to ele oddly the one class that lacks any other type of uniqueness.

Yeah that is kind of the point of ele not to be unique but to be a jack-of-all-trades which ruines any form of uniqeness it could have.

Every class is jack of all triads they have been for a long time. Oddly ele is now the least jack of all trades of all of the classes now too.

You missed my point comply the core ele has nothing over tempest and its the only core class like this now after they reworked other classes and elite spec. My point is that anet is actively forgetting about the ele class at any level tempest and weaver for real reworks.

I cant see this changing for any elite spec anet adds in. Its kind of over for the ele class it has been for some time. There is no hope. Every update is only proving this point.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi,

I'm coming here to explain my point of view as a pvp/wvw main ele. Maybe someone from anet will read that and think about.

Well friends we are suffering, ele is doing things but it's never the best at it, it's most of the time the worst, except maybe aura share but nowadays wars are better support.

Let's decompose this analysis based on specs and weapon.

First of all core ele, not much to say it's just not doing fine at any spot, there are tons of class out there doing way better than core ele.

Secondly tempest, the eternal healbot, it's funny but it's just about spamming auras, there are no any game breaking skills (maybe tornado) as other support class has. Also it does little to no pressure on enemy team. You can also play dps LR tempest, it's funny but against good players you'll never land any successful overload, rip.

Finally the weaver. Oh man how hyped I was when they revealed sword on ele, I was thinking of it as a melee bruiser with lots of damage and mobility, the result ends up to be disappointing. Weaver mechanics is really good, but man, weapons skills...

So let's now go into the deepest issues of eles, weapons!

Daggers: I use to love DD ele, it was my first crush on the game back in 2012 and now it's just meh. The burst is low (if you are not full glassy which mandatory), mobility suck, dagger offhand is not used at all and main hand it's the best we have (we'll come to scepter). Daggers used to be the offtank weapons of ele, giving you damage, mobility and sustain, sadly it's been overperformed by almost everything.

Focus: The best offhand weapon out there, simply because dagger sucks. The main issue there is you don't have any offensive offhand on ele. Still I think focus is our best weapon

Scepter: Here we are, the most painful weapon. I used to love playing FA core ele, the scepter felt damn good and offers lots of counterplays. The burst was all nice and it has some blind which help. But again, as daggers, it's now completely under performing, after all nerfs to FA weaver you full burst is not able to kill anything. I played it again recently and it was just so bad, damage is low, mobility is non existent, defensive cd are just useless... This weapon is a shame on this state and because of it burst ele is just bad. And please, don't come up with the "yes but It could one shot someone so it needed to be nerfed". There are legit a ton a things that can one shot in this game, lot's of class can 100-0 in few seconds with the right combo, the difference was that zerk FA weaver was squishy as hell when reaper, reve, holo are tanky and thief/mesmer can stealth and got better mobility.

Staff: not much to say, never been meta in pvp, in wvw it's meh.

Warhorn: funny but skills are not good compared to focus

Sword: skill are slow, so slow, animations takes forever which makes damages so easy to dodge. This weapon needs to be rework. All autos attacks are slow, fire 2 is nice but too slow to land, water 2 needs to be something else, air 2 is fine, earth 2 we need to be able to move while using it.... I'm not going to comment all the 3 skills it's mostly about slow animation. It's even worst if you compare to other classes swords like rev or guardian.

Lastly I would also address some specific considerations about how low are damages on this class, disclaimer I don't care of pve meta, I think that PVP, PVE and WVW must all have separate meta otherwise ele is just impossible to balance. But please, nowadays any class got more damage than ele, the LR weaver requires you to go zerk to do something and because you are that squishy you get oneshoted by anything. I don't find it fair, on reaper, holo or reve damages are so much higher, any skill can be a 4-5k crit while on ele it's 2k max? If you beat someone that means you have to outplay him several times while he only has to hit you once... As I said anything ele does something does it way better so what's the point of this class? It's been underperforming for years now, since 2015 the only viable build at high elo was the aurashare support. Sure fire weaver had a spot but if a team had to choose between weaver or holo/soulbeast they put a cross on the ele. FA weaver was sometimes shinning when there were no good thief or mesmer but now it's pointless to bring such garbage... Other classes elite spec got reworked (reaper, berserker, scrapper, ...) but ele stayed the same, tempest hasn't moved since 2015 and weaver since 2017. Staff and Scepter got nerfed and that's basically it. The only rework we had was on.... AURAS, yes of course, let's change a bit the only thing that's viable... This rework was minor to nothing, hasn't change the playstyle, hasn't bring anything new, it's just meh.

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@"korioaurel.3041" said:Hi,

I'm coming here to explain my point of view as a pvp/wvw main ele. Maybe someone from anet will read that and think about.

Well friends we are suffering, ele is doing things but it's never the best at it, it's most of the time the worst, except maybe aura share but nowadays wars are better support.

Let's decompose this analysis based on specs and weapon.

First of all core ele, not much to say it's just not doing fine at any spot, there are tons of class out there doing way better than core ele.

Secondly tempest, the eternal healbot, it's funny but it's just about spamming auras, there are no any game breaking skills (maybe tornado) as other support class has. Also it does little to no pressure on enemy team. You can also play dps LR tempest, it's funny but against good players you'll never land any successful overload, rip.

Finally the weaver. Oh man how hyped I was when they revealed sword on ele, I was thinking of it as a melee bruiser with lots of damage and mobility, the result ends up to be disappointing. Weaver mechanics is really good, but man, weapons skills...

So let's now go into the deepest issues of eles, weapons!

Daggers: I use to love DD ele, it was my first crush on the game back in 2012 and now it's just meh. The burst is low (if you are not full glassy which mandatory), mobility suck, dagger offhand is not used at all and main hand it's the best we have (we'll come to scepter). Daggers used to be the offtank weapons of ele, giving you damage, mobility and sustain, sadly it's been overperformed by almost everything.

Focus: The best offhand weapon out there, simply because dagger sucks. The main issue there is you don't have any offensive offhand on ele. Still I think focus is our best weapon

Scepter: Here we are, the most painful weapon. I used to love playing FA core ele, the scepter felt kitten good and offers lots of counterplays. The burst was all nice and it has some blind which help. But again, as daggers, it's now completely under performing, after all nerfs to FA weaver you full burst is not able to kill anything. I played it again recently and it was just so bad, damage is low, mobility is non existent, defensive cd are just useless... This weapon is a shame on this state and because of it burst ele is just bad. And please, don't come up with the "yes but It could one shot someone so it needed to be nerfed". There are legit a ton a things that can one shot in this game, lot's of class can 100-0 in few seconds with the right combo, the difference was that zerk FA weaver was squishy as hell when reaper, reve, holo are tanky and thief/mesmer can stealth and got better mobility.

Staff: not much to say, never been meta in pvp, in wvw it's meh.

Warhorn: funny but skills are not good compared to focus

Sword: skill are slow, so slow, animations takes forever which makes damages so easy to dodge. This weapon needs to be rework. All autos attacks are slow, fire 2 is nice but too slow to land, water 2 needs to be something else, air 2 is fine, earth 2 we need to be able to move while using it.... I'm not going to comment all the 3 skills it's mostly about slow animation. It's even worst if you compare to other classes swords like rev or guardian.

Lastly I would also address some specific considerations about how low are damages on this class, disclaimer I don't care of pve meta, I think that PVP, PVE and WVW must all have separate meta otherwise ele is just impossible to balance. But please, nowadays any class got more damage than ele, the LR weaver requires you to go zerk to do something and because you are that squishy you get oneshoted by anything. I don't find it fair, on reaper, holo or reve damages are so much higher, any skill can be a 4-5k crit while on ele it's 2k max? If you beat someone that means you have to outplay him several times while he only has to hit you once... As I said anything ele does something does it way better so what's the point of this class? It's been underperforming for years now, since 2015 the only viable build at high elo was the aurashare support. Sure fire weaver had a spot but if a team had to choose between weaver or holo/soulbeast they put a cross on the ele. FA weaver was sometimes shinning when there were no good thief or mesmer but now it's pointless to bring such garbage... Other classes elite spec got reworked (reaper, berserker, scrapper, ...) but ele stayed the same, tempest hasn't moved since 2015 and weaver since 2017. Staff and Scepter got nerfed and that's basically it. The only rework we had was on.... AURAS, yes of course, let's change a bit the only thing that's viable... This rework was minor to nothing, hasn't change the playstyle, hasn't bring anything new, it's just meh.

You summarized the reasons I don't play this game anymore even though I have 3 other main along with ele....waste of time and effort

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Anet please stop blaming ele, the problem is not the ele, the problem is the game itself. The elementalist was a hard class but if you played it well you had great results. I said that it was because the weaver is easy to play, is all about spamming and rotation, no more tactical thinking, no more adapting to the situation, just spamming, try to defend against a ranger burst with skill 4 from earth if you are attuned on air/fire. Now the elementalist (without weaver) is still a hard class but other classes, that are easy to use, have greater or the same performance. I see this as a intentional dumb down, how come someone engi who is using just the skill 1 from the flame thrower can kill a elementalist that is using 20 weapon skills? how come a perma invisible deadeye can kill a elementalist with 2 shoots and the only protection for the ele are 3 seconds of reflect? perma invisible vs 3 seconds of reflect, rofl... how come a warrior can burst on a ele while totally invulnerable but the ele cant use Obsidian Flesh to defend anymore? warrior would outrun you anyway, much faster, easier to use, almost perma invincible and all you have are 3 seconds of pointless invincible running, Obsidian Flesh had its purpose but some small minds just wanted to wreck it. Why do i have to use rune of speed or air traits on an elementalist to be able to run from almost any other class? why only tank builds with mega low dps work on WvW (fresh air full zerk will die from retaliation from the zerg)? why the ele has no chance from close distance against a engi that has almost all the benefits automatically provided?

So why do i have to use 25 skills to do the same thing that other classes do with 6? So the problem is not the elementalist, is the direction that this game is going to, to be made easy to play for as many people as possible.

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@Alex.2908 said:Anet please stop blaming ele, the problem is not the ele, the problem is the game itself. The elementalist was a hard class but if you played it well you had great results. I said that it was because the weaver is easy to play, is all about spamming and rotation, no more tactical thinking, no more adapting to the situation, just spamming, try to defend against a ranger burst with skill 4 from earth if you are attuned on air/fire. Now the elementalist (without weaver) is still a hard class but other classes, that are easy to use, have greater or the same performance. I see this as a intentional dumb down, how come someone engi who is using just the skill 1 from the flame thrower can kill a elementalist that is using 20 weapon skills? how come a perma invisible deadeye can kill a elementalist with 2 shoots and the only protection for the ele are 3 seconds of reflect? perma invisible vs 3 seconds of reflect, rofl... how come a warrior can burst on a ele while totally invulnerable but the ele cant use Obsidian Flesh to defend anymore? warrior would outrun you anyway, much faster, easier to use, almost perma invincible and all you have are 3 seconds of pointless invincible running, Obsidian Flesh had its purpose but some small minds just wanted to wreck it. Why do i have to use rune of speed or air traits on an elementalist to be able to run from almost any other class? why only tank builds with mega low dps work on WvW (fresh air full zerk will die from retaliation from the zerg)? why do i have to use

So why do i have to use 25 skills to do the same thing that other classes do with 6 but a lot worst? So the problem is not the elementalist, is the direction that this game is going to, to be made easy to play for as many people as possible.

If weaver is so easy, why are you worrying about reflect on earth 4 to counter ranger burst when you're in air/fire? Just rotate earth to proc protection (arcane), giving you access to the evade on earth 2 and the projectile hate on air 4. Then you still have the reflect on earth 4 on your next rotation into x/earth if you need more projectile hate. Being unable to access earth 4 on demand the way other builds can and instead finding a way to set yourself up with what you need not just now but 4 seconds from now is part of the challenge of playing weaver.

Not that I am supporting elementalist's position in the meta. It was really irresponsible of them to drop this bomb on competitive modes and then walk away after promising they wouldn't do that. Unfortunately, elementalist didn't come out ahead in that deal and there doesn't appear to be any relief on the horizon with EoD being the focus for the foreseeable future.

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:If weaver is so easy, why are you worrying about reflect on earth 4 to counter ranger burst when you're in air/fire? Just rotate earth to proc protection (arcane), giving you access to the evade on earth 2 and the projectile hate on air 4. Then you still have the reflect on earth 4 on your next rotation into x/earth if you need more projectile hate. Being unable to access earth 4 on demand the way other builds can and instead finding a way to set yourself up with what you need not just now but 4 seconds from now is part of the challenge of playing weaver.

You are right, there are some other ways to handle a ranger charge (like dodge twice and sh** like that) but that was not the point.

The way i see things is that the weaver is a bit of YOLO, if is working is working, if is not working than you're **. Thats why the most builds from pvp that work focus on spamming the rotation than running away if is not working, nothing impromptu, no change of tactics, no try again, no new tactics, just... tap that ass then hit the gas. And thats exactly what i liked about the core ele, it can adapt to all kinds of situations. It is not perfect on any situation but was quite good for most of them, thats why celestial builds were so great and, whats the most important, it was fun... since Anet added the specializations the notion of fun was replaced with the nothin of win, and not any type of win but the win easy win.

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@Alex.2908 said:

@"AliamRationem.5172" said:If weaver is so easy, why are you worrying about reflect on earth 4 to counter ranger burst when you're in air/fire? Just rotate earth to proc protection (arcane), giving you access to the evade on earth 2 and the projectile hate on air 4. Then you still have the reflect on earth 4 on your next rotation into x/earth if you need more projectile hate. Being unable to access earth 4 on demand the way other builds can and instead finding a way to set yourself up with what you need not just now but 4 seconds from now is part of the challenge of playing weaver.

You are right, there are some other ways to handle a ranger charge (like dodge twice and sh** like that) but that was not the point.

The way i see things is that the weaver is a bit of YOLO, if is working is working, if is not working than you're
**
. Thats why the most builds from pvp that work focus on spamming the rotation than running away if is not working, nothing impromptu, no change of tactics, no try again, no new tactics, just... tap that kitten then hit the gas. And thats exactly what i liked about the core ele, it can adapt to all kinds of situations. It is not perfect on any situation but was quite good for most of them, thats why celestial builds were so great and, whats the most important, it was fun... since Anet added the specializations the notion of fun was replaced with the nothin of win, and not any type of win but the win easy win.

I think weaver is the best example of what an elite spec should be in terms of its impact on play style. It represents a dramatic change in feel relative to its core spec. Compare to tempest, which is pretty much just core ele with access to shouts and overloads. Central to that is this tradeoff. Being locked into your attunement choices with half of that choice predetermined by your previous swap, able to access only part of your kit from your current attunement configuration.

Having said that, I completely understand that this "locked in" feel is not everyone's cup of tea. If you love core ele, you might not love weaver. That's just how it's going to be the more dramatic the departure is from the core design. That's also not an excuse for the various legitimate complaints players have regarding weaver and elementalist in general!

Don't overlook the positives that come with the trade, however. Consider the previous example:

I'm getting my face rapid fired by a ranger while in air/fire. What do I do? I could just dodge, rotate attunements, and cast air 4 for the projectile block. It's a 0.5s cast, but the barrier generated from dodge combined with passive signet healing should result in negligible damage. It would probably be best to rotate to earth regardless, as protection will reduce any damage that does land and the evade on earth 2 is there as well if I need it. However, I could also rotate to water and use riptide to evade, heal, and close distance. Or if they're close enough, polaric leap for the interrupt and gap close, rotate fire and attempt to land a gale -> pyrovortex to turn the tables!

Compare to core/tempest. If I rotate to water or earth to use the skills I have there, I don't get to access those offhand air skills anymore. I do get to use the offhand skills of that attunement on demand, however. That's the tradeoff. Neither one is "better". They're very different, which I think is a good thing! I wish more elite specs felt this impactful.

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