Jump to content
  • Sign Up

Concerns about Elementalist


System

Recommended Posts

@Frozey.8513 said:For me ever since GW1 Ele has always been the King of AoE. That is what has defined the profession for me. If Ele should be changed, I think this goal should be kept in mind.

That being said I must argue to all the people in this thread complaining about how Ele is not good at anything anymore, now that Thief took the top single target dps spot, that Ele even in it's current state is doing rather well. If you want to talk about professions that actually need reworks just take a look at Revenant or Necro.

Revenant is doing pretty well in PvP, PvE and WvW no need to rework it when it's still good.. Necro is only good at PvP and WvW just needs a little bit more in PvE.. no need to rework that either

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 986
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

@"Frozey.8513" said:For me ever since GW1 Ele has always been the King of AoE. That is what has defined the profession for me. If Ele should be changed, I think this goal should be kept in mind.

That being said I must argue to all the people in this thread complaining about how Ele is not good at anything anymore, now that Thief took the top single target dps spot, that Ele even in it's current state is doing rather well. If you want to talk about professions that actually need reworks just take a look at Revenant or Necro.

They need lots of work too but let's not pretend that ele is any better than those classes. Elementalist is certainly not performing better than revenant and necro if you take a look at all the game modes.

https://metabattle.com/wiki/Elementalisthttps://metabattle.com/wiki/Revenanthttps://metabattle.com/wiki/Necromancer

The latest nerfs really exposed the weakness of ele. Before, staff just had high numbers and everything was "fine". But whenever ele doesn't have high DPS numbers, it becomes a rather pointless class. Not to say that ele's DPS numbers should be buffed to be way higher than those of other classes. But if ele DPS is to be similar to other classes, then ele needs to be given something else to make up for the lost DPS. It intentionally has lots of weaknesses because it had huge DPS. That's how Anet used to balance ele.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Nepster.4275" said:Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utility

Would help more if you qouted the person you are responding to so they know you are talking them, unless this wasnt aimed @ReaverKane.7598 s fairly long response.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Nepster.4275 said:

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has
more
than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find
all
of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And
still
with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.

Scroll down? The numbers for small hitboxes are there...

Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.Actually you do... They have a rating based on sample size, and all classes are at the same rating, so basically equivalent sample sizes...

Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.So does elementalist...

So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utilityI've seen 40k dps weavers on fractals, nevermind raids...The group utility is there if you want it. Core ele and tempest have several group buffing skills. Now pick, take those, or take the damage. That's the same choice other classes need to make.Your basicalyl saying that ele should keep the max damage build, and still have more utility... Well that doesn't happen. A Guardian to keep up with ele damage needs to take everything, even their healing skill (the "meta" max damage build takes the crappiest healing possible, simply because it has the lowest cooldown, thus allowing to spam it for retaliation) with damage in mind.That's not to even mention that unlike elementalist who can take a few different approaches to power damage, if they ever change Righteous Instincts, power builds for guardians instantly die. The same with revenants, they're hanging by a single gimmick, which is an unhealthy state. While Elementalists, no matter the elite spec, they can still have at least 2 different builds in terms of traits and be near the top in dps.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:

The group utility is there if you want it. Core ele and tempest have several group buffing skills. Now pick, take those, or take the damage. That's the same choice other classes need to make.Your basicalyl saying that ele should keep the max damage build, and still have more utility... Well that doesn't happen. A Guardian to keep up with ele damage needs to take everything, even their healing skill (the "meta" max damage build takes the crappiest healing possible, simply because it has the lowest cooldown, thus allowing to spam it for retaliation) with damage in mind.That's not to even mention that unlike elementalist who can take a few different approaches to power damage, if they ever change Righteous Instincts, power builds for guardians instantly die. The same with revenants, they're hanging by a single gimmick, which is an unhealthy state. While Elementalists, no matter the elite spec, they can still have at least 2 different builds in terms of traits and be near the top in dps.

Thats not how most builds function even...i can crank out around 30k dps or more on my condi SB and still have more options available to me than Ele by far. I can do the same thing on my guardian, My thief even has more options to survive than ele and still do more damage. I think if i set i actually set my necro up for end game play i could pull of the same thing.

My Ranger is my main, the amount of damage i can push out on my own discounting all buffs is decent, add in the buffs i get from the group, the stuff i offer the group(stances, buffs, extra strikes, etc) on the condi build i run surpasses the average damage a power Ele does, and still does more than an eles power DPS build. i had my ele set up for fractals and raids because my group wanted the DPS they offered. Since the nerf my group no longer wants me on my Ele despite being able to get above average numbers, theyd rather have me on my Ranger because they offer more and do around the same or more DPS(and god help if you misclick and land in water attunment for ele, your DPS goes down the drain so hard its not even funny), We havent used an ele in our raid group at all since the nerf because other classes can more easily pump out the same or more damage AND offer more utility for the group with more survivability, Ele has to currently choose between having more survivability options or damage while many other classes can do both at the same time.

Ele was sold as being an extremely high damage low survivability class, literally its description, i think it needs to stay that way which it currently is not, it has "meh" damage in practical application(Not against static targets) due to the long cast time, long cooldown, no movement abilities it has, the amount of effort you need to put in to get around the same, or just barely more DPS than other classes is to much given those things. It should do more damage than other classes, it should always be number 1. But it should have little to no survivability on its own if its set up that way, due to the fact it would be doing more damage than other classes, having lower solo viability would be okay, and right now if you go full DPS you will barely push out more than any other class given perfect settings which dont exist in game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has
more
than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find
all
of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And
still
with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.

Scroll down? The numbers for small hitboxes are there...I meant that lets ignore the hitbox size and look at it that way

Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.Actually you do... They have a rating based on sample size, and all classes are at the same rating, so basically equivalent sample sizes...

Im not really into Raidar so yes maybe but we should use that for balance changes, becase as i experienced, if you upload your log after the balance patch it will take it as you did that kind of DPS/boon uptime after the balance patch not sure if its relevant or no

Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.So does elementalist...Ofc it has CC to some point but lets be honest here, while other classes have instand access to CC since they have it on their skill bar and ele needs to switch for it its a DPS loss at some level

So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utilityI've seen 40k dps weavers on fractals, nevermind raids...The group utility is there if you want it. Core ele and tempest have several group buffing skills. Now pick, take those, or take the damage. That's the same choice other classes need to make.In fractals,especially if you have burstly classes the mob dies before the burst ends so you will see the burst damage and not the sustained oneYour basicalyl saying that ele should keep the max damage build, and still have more utiliity... Well that doesn't happen. A Guardian to keep up with ele damage needs to take everything, even their healing skill (the "meta" max damage build takes the crappiest healing possible, simply because it has the lowest cooldown, thus allowing to spam it for retaliation) with damage in mind.That's not to even mention that unlike elementalist who can take a few different approaches to power damage, if they ever change Righteous Instincts, power builds for guardians instantly die. The same with revenants, they're hanging by a single gimmick, which is an unhealthy state. While Elementalists, no matter the elite spec, they can still have at least 2 different builds in terms of traits and be near the top in dps.

Yes ele should keep the max damage, because(lets take guardian for example) you have a healing skill that block everything when you use it, while ele only has a trait that gives you Arcane Shield when you would die and even that on a 40s or something CD, guardian has F2 and F3 for the "oh snap, i screwed up" plus guardian has heavy armor compared to light.And just for so i see things clearly, tell me what kind of "utiliities" are you talking about what ele has? Because the ones that i can think about is protection share while switching to earth and might when to fire, and maybe regen in water, maybe fire field and also ele dies just as fast as a guardian does maybe even faster because you can choose from die to mechanics cuz rooted in Meteor Shower or dodge for a major DPS lossAnd again i dont want anyone to get sore i just want to understand why some people think that elementalist is doing good while getting one shot by any mob and not even doing that god like damage
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Legendofzelda.1278" said:This a general suggestion that I hope the devs were thinking of with the nerfs to ele.I have seen several people in this thread talk about reversing the nerfs to ele. I would suggest instead of reversing the nerfs; make the mechanics of skills and utilities better so that we can do a bit more damage and be more useful in all game modes because mechanics are better not just bigger numbers.An example of changing mechanics to make ele better instead of just bigger numbers: Change to conjures like has been suggested many times instant cast or all low cast time, cd 30s 2 ammo to all conjures except fgs which is like 90 or something no second conjure on ground maybe even if you are holding one the skills become a ground target to put second on the ground. Make conjure elemental skills better to be more reliable and controllable maybe even permanent until killed. These two and more are good suggestions how to make mechanics better (also smaller after cast on allot of skills would be nice to make them more smooth).so ya please don't just make numbers big make skills fun to use, and not feel clunky and then numbers can be tweaked to change to be balanced.

I personally think there's nothing wrong with ele's skills being "clunky" to use (channeled/long animation...etc). It's a big part of what makes it a hard class and distinguishes itself from other classes this way. Eles can have several slow attacks but they just need to do huge impact (big damage, big cc...etc) when they land. Currently a ton of ele's slow skills don't do enough (eg. all staff autos except Fireball, Eruption, Ice spike, Pressure Blast, Shatterstone, Dragon's Tooth, Phoenix, all Overloads, and the list goes on, even many of sword weaver's skills with its 3/4s cast time everywhere). Even Churning Earth is bad. I mean come on, an immovable skill with that huge of a telegraph and no innate protection such as evade or stability should instantly bring glass builds like most thieves' HP from 100% down to 10% when it hits, not do some bad bleeds that take forever to tick and gets instantly cleansed. I think out of every single slow ele skills, currently only Meteor Shower correctly matches its risk with reward.

Some of the nerfs (eg. lava font, air overload) are what's making many of the ele's slow skills useless, so imo they should be reverted.

Conjures are a whole another beast though and definitely needs rework. Currently basically all of its skills are bad and it locks eles from their more useful skills so people only pick them up, use 1 or 2 skills, and immediately drop them. The 180s cd on FGS also don't make much sense to me given the impact it brings. With that long of cd it should be like Sohothin from pof story (with numbers against down so you dont just wipe everything) I think.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:First thing, and this should apply to all classes:There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the kitten. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

Personal bias and factual analysis are used to describe the situation , this creates feedbacks and skewed perceptions tend to lead to reality where 2-3 professions dominate in everything and everywhere. Before coming down with any evaluation, you're supposed to take in consideration both the PRO and the CONS...not just one while conveniently forgetting about the other.

I don't know precisely to what you're referring to when you talk about "ele being high" and that now ele players are simply having a
childish tantrum
for this "small nerf" as described by you.

So may you be talking about pve?....I am not a PvEr but from what I observed there : ele was doing the biggest dmg in a coordinated group and that huge dmg came at the cost of any resemblance of sustain , "kindly" provided by the group, if I remember correctly ele was doing 10k or so dmg more than next class
and this apparently was/is considered broken by the community

Putting your personal bias aside ....care to explain why ele should have the same dmg as the next profession, while having none of the sustain? Where is the balance in that?

Talk about personal bias! Maybe the bias is on your court? I don't have any stakes in this, i play all professions, not really playing favourites. Ele is the one i play the least for two factors: Staff ele, which is the most viable build, is too static for my tastes, and i never really liked the "mage" archetype. But i still enjoy the class, and weaver is a fun change. I think it would benefit the class to have specializations that specialize in a single element or a smaller combination of elements (like a earth/fire only lavamancer, or a air/water Stormancer), that would provide the much needed focus, instead of keeping Ele as a jack of all trades.

Also, note that i never said there wasn't an issue, i just said that it was getting more attention than it merits, with classes like necromancer and revenant having a ton of mechanical issues to sort out, and only a couple of gimmicky builds viable.

Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has
more
than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find
all
of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And
still
with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

If you want all professions to have same level of dmg...they should have also the same level of sustain more or less..this is a sound, logic argument.

Yes it is, and like i said already, in PvP there was only two classes that broke the meta so hard that it became unplayable, and those were Chrono and tempest. Either class could (and still can to a point) be built to be almost invulnerable by sacrificing most of it's damage.

May you be talking about PvP/WvW?..honestly I would be too tired of typing the same arguments again so....maybe you should just tell us how ele is strong and how players are exaggerating for a "small nerf"I think i've covered all the game types in both my posts. Because you know, i've actually played the game with all classes and don't have horses in any race, which allows me to be objective.There's numbers above for pve. To an extent those numbers can carry over to WvW. In PVP, like i said before, ele suffers from the lack of upkeep to core weapons, since sPvP builds have revolved mostly around dagger/dagger or dagger/focus. And because those weapons are still in 2012 numbers, like a lot of other weapons, it's normal that ele isn't as viable.

Again you blame others of personal bias while you're the one with a clear personal problem about eles, to a point where I ask myself why do you even bother saying that you play all classes.....everybody can play all classes...I have a ranger and a warrior with which I am just as proficient as with ele, I have legendary armor on ranger and not eles, legendary weapons on warrior and not ele....I still love ele.

I have asked you a direct question...you didn't answer......

I am using simple logic here and I still fail to get the message across..possibly because it's being ignored for convenience : you keep saying that ele does the biggest DPS and everybody already told you that ele sacrifice everything for that dmg, it would make no sense to sacrifice all sustain on a class that naturally has no sustain only to do as much dmg as the next guy that swom in self-sustain while having more base HP/armor.

You're comparing a full zerk staff ele to a power soulbeast like...are you for real? The staff ele full zerk will explode if you sniff in their direction compare to anything else..I mean zerker ele on anything explode on visual contact but you still claim that not enough reason to have bigger dmg...right......

Now... we want to even agree with you and I repeat : we want to agree with you and bring ele dps down to other class levels...can we have the same sustain also now?.Instead than answering another simple question, you again go on a different tangent saying that ele has great sustain...yeah if he goes full bunker with bunker stats : healing/toughness and vitality because ele has got no innate defensive mechanisms...and now really it hasn't got the dmg to justify this anymore.

Unless I am wrong there never existed an ele build with great sustain doing 36k dmg like a core guardian...but feel free to post a video proving otherwise, I believe here there is a problem with communication because nobody here is asking explicitly to be OP /broken on any level, people are only asking for a competitive class:

-if you want ele to do as much dmg as the rest...then give eles that base sustain they never had [ base sustain is not sustain gained through stats which is available to all classes] ...it's that simple

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@LazySummer.2568 said:

@"Legendofzelda.1278" said:This a general suggestion that I hope the devs were thinking of with the nerfs to ele.I have seen several people in this thread talk about reversing the nerfs to ele. I would suggest instead of reversing the nerfs; make the mechanics of skills and utilities better so that we can do a bit more damage and be more useful in all game modes because mechanics are better not just bigger numbers.An example of changing mechanics to make ele better instead of just bigger numbers: Change to conjures like has been suggested many times instant cast or all low cast time, cd 30s 2 ammo to all conjures except fgs which is like 90 or something no second conjure on ground maybe even if you are holding one the skills become a ground target to put second on the ground. Make conjure elemental skills better to be more reliable and controllable maybe even permanent until killed. These two and more are good suggestions how to make mechanics better (also smaller after cast on allot of skills would be nice to make them more smooth).so ya please don't just make numbers big make skills fun to use, and not feel clunky and then numbers can be tweaked to change to be balanced.

I personally think there's nothing wrong with ele's skills being "clunky" to use (channeled/long animation...etc). It's a big part of what makes it a hard class and distinguishes itself from other classes this way. Eles can have several slow attacks but they just need to do huge impact (big damage, big cc...etc) when they land. Currently a ton of ele's slow skills don't do enough (eg. all staff autos except Fireball, Eruption, Ice spike, Pressure Blast, Shatterstone, Dragon's Tooth, Phoenix, all Overloads, and the list goes on, even many of sword weaver's skills with its 3/4s cast time everywhere). Even Churning Earth is bad. I mean come on, an immovable skill with that huge of a telegraph and no innate protection such as evade or stability should instantly bring glass builds like most thieves' HP from 100% down to 10% when it hits, not do some bad bleeds that take forever to tick and gets instantly cleansed. I think out of every single slow ele skills, currently only Meteor Shower correctly matches its risk with reward.

Some of the nerfs (eg. lava font, air overload) are what's making many of the ele's slow skills useless, so imo they should be reverted.

Conjures are a whole another beast though and definitely needs rework. Currently basically all of its skills are bad and it locks eles from their more useful skills so people only pick them up, use 1 or 2 skills, and immediately drop them. The 180s cd on FGS also don't make much sense to me given the impact it brings. With that long of cd it should be like Sohothin from pof story (with numbers against down so you dont just wipe everything) I think.

You bring up a good point..a skill needing 2s+ cast time should do huge bloody dmg..but not..it barely tickle the enemy like wtf really...if that must be the case then the 2s+ cast time should be removed as suggested several times already.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ThiBash.5634 said:

Eruption (earth staff 2), 1 1/4 cast time with delayed explosionThe reason for that is that you can cast a field over it to combo with. In fact, if you're quick enough, you can cast both Eruption and Ice Spike, then Lava Font, and get 6 stacks of AoE might (and 20 seconds AoE fury if traited). Due to the skills' delays, you can use them in 2 ways. Either you cast Lava Font first, or you cast Lava Font last. That makes them highly flexible.

This is exactly what people mean when they say the class is designed/balance for PvE only.

In PvE, the above nets you a lot damage, vulnerability stack, condi stack, blast mights, fury

In PvP, you either

  • Die before you finish casting that combo (wih a lot of casting/after cast animation). Mesmer needs less than half of the cast time to wipe out your puny 15k HP away
  • Or you will gain nothing (people are not dummies who stand still like AI). You may get the might blast though, of you want to trade HP for that and stand still like a dummy.

And that's how the skills look so good on the spreadsheet, but behave terribly in PvP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PVE: I used to be an ele main UNTIL the balance patch, ele was just OK until then. Attacks are too slow and hardly do enough damage considering this is supposed to be a glass cannon class. Basically ele is getting put in the corner because different modes from different players are saying conflicting things. Ele Has very low health and pretty much dies in 1-3 hits. Mesmers can damage, arent as glassy and has more health. From my perspective, Ele needs a rework, Because I don't think this class can survive with most of the talents not synergizing or being a less of a hybrid. I hope you can do this class some justice, I only log onto it for PVP dailies, since I moved to holosmith.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Nepster.4275 said:Im just curious when and what will the devs do with the information that they got here, a lot of people share some really interesting things would love to see some of them come true

I wouldn't hold my breath, and I'm not casting aspersions on ArenaNet in saying that.

Aside from the fact that there are so many different opinions about what's wrong and what needs fixing, Elementalist is an inherently complicated profession by design. Six years after launch, it's still problematic in a number of different ways.

Not that it's the only one, of course, but that's also part of the problem, because among all the professions, there's only so much developer time to go around. And not to say we shouldn't offer our feedback, because the developers do encourage it and over the years, it's definitely made an impact.

But due to the facts of life of software engineering, it usually takes a very long time for significant changes to make their way into the game.

I hope to see some meaningful improvements to Elementalist in the future, but hope, as the saying goes, is the first step on the road to disappointment.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Nepster.4275 said:Im just curious when and what will the devs do with the information that they got here, a lot of people share some really interesting things would love to see some of them come true

Hard to answer...there doesn't seem a single dev passionate enough about ele to invest time on it...most nerfs are based on public perception, personal bias and whatnot ..buffs are based on internal testing...on golems I presume, take warrior for example....you can see how whoever behind it want the class to be viable at melee range at all cost and against all odds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I see alot of changes are proposed so far, so I'd just like to mention the things I believe we should keep:

The lowest base HP and armor class:

I love this about ele because it gives me something to prove, it factors into buildcrafting and playstyle both.

The attunement profession mechanic:

I strongly believe this to work, but they need to be more specific in their style like (Fire = condi and burn, Air = CC and blind, Water = Healing and condi removal, Earth = defensive boons and cripple/immobilize).

It would also imo benefit us at this time to remove the cooldowns upon attunement swap, given the already high skill cooldowns. Tempest can then put overloaded attunement on cooldown and weaver with it's extra skills invoke a global one. This would truly make ele a flexible combatant, still requiring you to know where your skills are and always give you access to defensive tools.

The elite spec themes:

With Tempest as the healer and Weaver as the hybrid. But both of these needs to be looked at. Tempest need a better tradeoff for actually using overloads and auras need to activate differently and not on hit as they currently do, Weaver need better attunement handling and way more impact on dual skills (the specs main mechanic).

Other notes:

Other than that there are quite a few traits that should be moved around, like 25% movement speed to Arcane line, the Geysir revival one to Water line and such to make more sense and better define builds using the lines.

But to keep ele's flexibility I agree we need to let go of Water only to clear conditions, if doable introduce the ranger mechanic where we can tinker with -% damage and duration of incoming conditions via certain traits, allowing us to deal with them otherwise. I don't believe adding resistance will be beneficial. If we reintroduce the superspeed trait, let it ignore condi for it's duration instead of removing (or remove only 1 type).

Weapon skills desperately need an overhaul also, that would be great! (In the current meta we need ways to apply:

  • Boonstrip
  • Unblockables
  • Instant ranged CC
  • Conditions transferred to self (like use them for own sustain, the more condis consumed from team the more heals would be fun)
  • More ways to mitigate damage not highly dependent on weapon set (why scepter/focus is such a great combo).

I sincerely hope we get a thorough review/rework of the core profession as it's very much still stuck in 2014. But also that we keep what makes the elementalist awesome and competitive. Seeing alot of great suggestions in this thread, so big thanks for giving us the chance to voice our concerns and suggestions for improvement :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PVE-wise, my only major issue with ele is the lack of defense and cc. Sure, i get dodge button, but unless i run focus (restricting highest power dps and healing weapon already - staff) then i don't really have anything else aside arcane shield to use (limited block, but at least it got a stun break). Every other class has...something.

A cc to use (if ele doesnt take focus we get next to none. okay, we get 2 hard ccs in staff air...that i have to switch out of rotation and wait what feels like an eternity to switch back to the element i want after i use it- nevermind if breakbar appears when i only just switched element and the time to break is already gone by the time i get to air), block invulnerability extra dodges retaliation reflects absolutely anything...

I get that ele is a glass cannon, and im fine with it not having many ways to deal with damage- but it has NO ways to deal with damage if you're using it as a dps cus you have to slash your dps (the only thing ele has) to survive. Just a little more would be nice- especially on the matter of CCs, which double up as defiance breakers and a way to deal with damage if used smartly, both of which ele direly needs more access to.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Nepster.4275 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has
more
than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find
all
of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And
still
with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.

Scroll down? The numbers for small hitboxes are there...I meant that lets ignore the hitbox size and look at it that wayEle still has some of the best dps builds in the game? You can put all the restrictions you want, there's classes that need a rework 10x more than elementalist.

Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.Actually you do... They have a rating based on sample size, and all classes are at the same rating, so basically equivalent sample sizes...

Im not really into Raidar so yes maybe but we should use that for balance changes, becase as i experienced, if you upload your log after the balance patch it will take it as you did that kind of DPS/boon uptime after the balance patch not sure if its relevant or noEven so, it's been over a month since the latest patch, it'll be hard to skew the data with that. It'll probably be more than evened out by the number of "pro" elementalists that copy the build from snowcrows and then die every 5 seconds while cursing at their team mates for not keeping him alive when he fails to dodge a mechanic.

Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.So does elementalist...Ofc it has CC to some point but lets be honest here, while other classes have instand access to CC since they have it on their skill bar and ele needs to switch for it its a DPS loss at some levelOther classes? Where the huge CC output of necromancer?

So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utilityI've seen 40k dps weavers on fractals, nevermind raids...The group utility is there if you want it. Core ele and tempest have several group buffing skills. Now pick, take those, or take the damage. That's the same choice other classes need to make.In fractals,especially if you have burstly classes the mob dies before the burst ends so you will see the burst damage and not the sustained oneAnd that's special for elementalist why?

Your basicalyl saying that ele should keep the max damage build, and still have more utiliity... Well that doesn't happen. A Guardian to keep up with ele damage needs to take everything, even their healing skill (the "meta" max damage build takes the crappiest healing possible, simply because it has the lowest cooldown, thus allowing to spam it for retaliation) with damage in mind.That's not to even mention that unlike elementalist who can take a few different approaches to power damage, if they ever change Righteous Instincts, power builds for guardians instantly die. The same with revenants, they're hanging by a single gimmick, which is an unhealthy state. While Elementalists, no matter the elite spec, they can still have at least 2 different builds in terms of traits and be near the top in dps.

Yes ele should keep the max damage, because(lets take guardian for example) you have a healing skill that block everything when you use it, while ele only has a trait that gives you Arcane Shield when you would die and even that on a 40s or something CD, guardian has F2 and F3 for the "oh snap, i screwed up" plus guardian has heavy armor compared to light.And just for so i see things clearly, tell me what kind of "utiliities" are you talking about what ele has? Because the ones that i can think about is protection share while switching to earth and might when to fire, and maybe regen in water, maybe fire field and also ele dies just as fast as a guardian does maybe even faster because you can choose from die to mechanics cuz rooted in Meteor Shower or dodge for a major DPS lossAnd again i dont want anyone to get sore i just want to understand why some people think that elementalist is doing good while getting one shot by any mob and not even doing that god like damage

No class is doing good. GW2 balance is non-existant. But there are classes much worse than Elementalist, and ones that weren't the top dps for 5+ continuous years. It's all i'm saying, elementalist isn't that much worse than it was 2 months ago, or 6 months ago. It does 10k less damage, but that's not a bad thing necessarily. Maybe start trying new, different builds, try to get a support build going... Pretty much do what Revenant had to do, what Necro still has to do, what thief had to do for a looong time since HoT. Chrono, Druid, Warrior and Elementalist were the only classes that never fell out of PvE Raid meta since HoT. All others had ebbs and flows. Now it's your turn. It's not a good thing, but it isn't a bad one either. Metas are supposed to change.

@"rng.1024" said:I see alot of changes are proposed so far, so I'd just like to mention the things I believe we should keep:

The lowest base HP and armor class:

I love this about ele because it gives me something to prove, it factors into buildcrafting and playstyle both.

And it's not ele alone. Guardian and thief share the exact same health pool. Why? Because every single one of those classes have mechanics that allow them to survive in other ways. The thing with ele, is that because it had such a high DPS, people disregarded those to focus singly in DPS. Now it's time to go back to the drawing board.

The attunement profession mechanic:

I strongly believe this to work, but they need to be more specific in their style like (Fire = condi and burn, Air = CC and blind, Water = Healing and condi removal, Earth = defensive boons and cripple/immobilize).

Agreed! This is a major issue with ele. Their identity ended up being all over the place. And that's the same with their elites. They don't really have a role, because everyone (including the devs probably) just expected it to be the top dps glass cannon, with no other identity. But this was never how the game was supposed to roll. The holly trinity shouldn't ever be present, and ele got branded as the "DPS" since core times.

It would also imo benefit us at this time to remove the cooldowns upon attunement swap, given the already high skill cooldowns. Tempest can then put overloaded attunement on cooldown and weaver with it's extra skills invoke a global one. This would truly make ele a flexible combatant, still requiring you to know where your skills are and always give you access to defensive tools.

I'm ambivalent in this aspect. It might happen that to prevent this from becoming too powerful, they'd end up having to increase the cooldowns on other skills.Look how strong fresh air can be. And that's just reseting one cooldown.

The elite spec themes:

With Tempest as the healer and Weaver as the hybrid. But both of these needs to be looked at. Tempest need a better tradeoff for actually using overloads and auras need to activate differently and not on hit as they currently do, Weaver need better attunement handling and way more impact on dual skills (the specs main mechanic).

Agreed. Also a bit stronger support for tempest would be cool. And future specializations might be better off specializing in one or a smaller set of elements only. That will allow the elite to better express an identity, and not end up as a jack of all trades, which has been ele's main issue imo.

Other notes:

Other than that there are quite a few traits that should be moved around, like 25% movement speed to Arcane line, the Geysir revival one to Water line and such to make more sense and better define builds using the lines.

But to keep ele's flexibility I agree we need to let go of Water only to clear conditions, if doable introduce the ranger mechanic where we can tinker with -% damage and duration of incoming conditions via certain traits, allowing us to deal with them otherwise. I don't believe adding resistance will be beneficial. If we reintroduce the superspeed trait, let it ignore condi for it's duration instead of removing (or remove only 1 type).

Weapon skills desperately need an overhaul also, that would be great! (In the current meta we need ways to apply:
  • BoonstripI disagree with boonstrip. It's not really part of the class's identity. Not all classes have boonstrip, and honestly, you don't want to be the next scourge.
  • UnblockablesSome arcane skills could be unblockables instead of crits. It's kinda boring that all arcane skills are for crits.
  • Instant ranged CCA scepter rework would be awesome to introduce some... Like lightning strike could be a stun or a daze. Ice shards could be reworked into an auto-attack chain that chills on third strike, etc.
  • Conditions transferred to self (like use them for own sustain, the more condis consumed from team the more heals would be fun)Again, that's encroaching on Necro territory.
  • More ways to mitigate damage not highly dependent on weapon set (why scepter/focus is such a great combo).Improving earth shield might help on this.

I sincerely hope we get a thorough review/rework of the core profession
s
as
they're
very much still stuck in 2014.Fixed it for you...

But also that we keep what makes the elementalist awesome and competitive. Seeing alot of great suggestions in this thread, so big thanks for giving us the chance to voice our concerns and suggestions for improvement :)Well, here's the thing, elementalist isn't that much worse than a few months ago. Sure lava font's nerf was unwarranted, and it's one of those wth moments that the balance team will always provide us for our dismay and entertainment.I agree that it, like most core professions, needs a big rework and update, and that Arena Net needs to rethink how they approach and develop Elite specs, to reduce the power creep and not create balance nightmares every single expansion or elite release (which hopefully they'll realize they should start releasing outside expansions, because we don't want to have to wait another 3+ years to have a proper roster of elite specs that offer enough alternatives to make true the no-trinity promise.I just can't agree that it's the most urgent class for a rework, maybe top 3, and still i'd be hesitant.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has
more
than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find
all
of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And
still
with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.

Scroll down? The numbers for small hitboxes are there...I meant that lets ignore the hitbox size and look at it that wayEle still has some of the best dps builds in the game? You can put all the restrictions you want, there's classes that need a rework 10x more than elementalist.

Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.Actually you do... They have a rating based on sample size, and all classes are at the same rating, so basically equivalent sample sizes...

Im not really into Raidar so yes maybe but we should use that for balance changes, becase as i experienced, if you upload your log after the balance patch it will take it as you did that kind of DPS/boon uptime after the balance patch not sure if its relevant or noEven so, it's been over a month since the latest patch, it'll be hard to skew the data with that. It'll probably be more than evened out by the number of "pro" elementalists that copy the build from snowcrows and then die every 5 seconds while cursing at their team mates for not keeping him alive when he fails to dodge a mechanic.

Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.So does elementalist...Ofc it has CC to some point but lets be honest here, while other classes have instand access to CC since they have it on their skill bar and ele needs to switch for it its a DPS loss at some levelOther classes? Where the huge CC output of necromancer?

So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utilityI've seen 40k dps weavers on fractals, nevermind raids...The group utility is there if you want it. Core ele and tempest have several group buffing skills. Now pick, take those, or take the damage. That's the same choice other classes need to make.In fractals,especially if you have burstly classes the mob dies before the burst ends so you will see the burst damage and not the sustained oneAnd that's special for elementalist why?

Your basicalyl saying that ele should keep the max damage build, and still have more utiliity... Well that doesn't happen. A Guardian to keep up with ele damage needs to take everything, even their healing skill (the "meta" max damage build takes the crappiest healing possible, simply because it has the lowest cooldown, thus allowing to spam it for retaliation) with damage in mind.That's not to even mention that unlike elementalist who can take a few different approaches to power damage, if they ever change Righteous Instincts, power builds for guardians instantly die. The same with revenants, they're hanging by a single gimmick, which is an unhealthy state. While Elementalists, no matter the elite spec, they can still have at least 2 different builds in terms of traits and be near the top in dps.

Yes ele should keep the max damage, because(lets take guardian for example) you have a healing skill that block everything when you use it, while ele only has a trait that gives you Arcane Shield when you would die and even that on a 40s or something CD, guardian has F2 and F3 for the "oh snap, i screwed up" plus guardian has heavy armor compared to light.And just for so i see things clearly, tell me what kind of "utiliities" are you talking about what ele has? Because the ones that i can think about is protection share while switching to earth and might when to fire, and maybe regen in water, maybe fire field and also ele dies just as fast as a guardian does maybe even faster because you can choose from die to mechanics cuz rooted in Meteor Shower or dodge for a major DPS lossAnd again i dont want anyone to get sore i just want to understand why some people think that elementalist is doing good while getting one shot by any mob and not even doing that god like damage

No class is doing good. GW2 balance is non-existant. But there are classes much worse than Elementalist, and ones that weren't the top dps for 5+ continuous years. It's all i'm saying, elementalist isn't that much worse than it was 2 months ago, or 6 months ago. It does 10k less damage, but that's not a bad thing necessarily. Maybe start trying new, different builds, try to get a support build going... Pretty much do what Revenant had to do, what Necro still has to do, what thief had to do for a looong time since HoT. Chrono, Druid, Warrior and Elementalist were the only classes that never fell out of PvE Raid meta since HoT. All others had ebbs and flows. Now it's your turn. It's not a good thing, but it isn't a bad one either. Metas are supposed to change.

Enough of this! This thread is not about yet another DPS raid contest!This thread is about improving elementalist as class, if you have anything constructive to say about the subject be it positive or negative...DO SO, we can't have every blasted thread on ele subforum be derailed by yet another raid dps talk.

People have pointed out the same flaws in your arguments more than once but you keep coming down with the same chant over and over and over again while ignoring what people trying to say, we need to keep the thread as clear as possible and as short as possible for the devs to digest, we can't have 2-3 pages of you going back and forward with the same bloody argument.

Go on and make your own thread in the raid subforum.. I won't have people attempting to derail yet another ele thread , especially not now when we spent months/years trying to grab the devs attention

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On the subject of the current top raid/group DPS build for weaver:

It seems that a lot of skills from core ele (staff, conjures, gliph of storms) have been nerfed/changed due to how powerfull they were on this specific build in specific group encounters (static bosses with large hit boxes).

The nerf was done in a way that moved most of the dmg on storm skills to the initial strikes and reduced power dmg on other skills.The issues with this are:

  • Storm skills should be area negating skills. By reducing the power over the time they are in effect you remove the flavor of this type of skill making it just a burst skill.
  • Staff fire skills completely lack burning. Reducing the power dmg should be an option to increase/add the burn dmg. This would increase diversity by creating option for a hybrid or condi dmg staff ele (core or weaver)
  • Weaver has mechanics that make its rotation complicated but reward good execution (elements of rage and weaver prowess), this should be encouraged and not nerfed.
  • Main issue with the weaver power dps build is Bountiful Power. With the support from chronos this trait gives up to +20% flat dmg increase. This trait should be reworked to be more in line with the arcana tree and spread its benefits according to attunements (like the other grandmasters) making it still competitive on a group scenario, but not so good that is better than the whole air line on a burst spec.
  • add burn to fireball and lava font, make flame burst copy burn stacks on the target to 5 targets in the aoe: Staff needs more condi dmg. This would open dps options for staff condi dps (maybe even with tempest), hybrid dps (power and condi).
  • Normalize meteor dmg from meteor shower and add burn to each hit, same for GoS:Firestorm: Fire is the sustained dmg attunement. Not burst. Make the storm skills in fire apply a good portion of BOTH condi/burn and power dps in a steady way, not in burst. This will make timing of those skills important in fights, instead of just the first few hits. Leave the burst storms for air one (conjure hammer and GoS in air) so the ele can decide, based on how long the opponent will be in the storm area (or if it has the vulnerable debuff on, making burst better), to go with a burst power storm in air or with a more steady storm in fire. MAKE THEM BOTH VIABLE IN DIFFERENT SITUATIONS.
  • bountiful power change to "gain increased effects for each boon on you based on attunement: fire: 1% dmg, 1% condi dmg; aird: 1% dmg, 1% crit dmg; water: 1% healing, 1% outgoing healing; earth: 1% dmg reduction, 1% condi duration reduction". This trait is too focused on dmg to be on the arcana line. It needs to be more adaptable for this line. Just like the other Grandmasters have different effects per attunement, so do this. This reduces the direct power it gives to dps builds, gives more synergy to hybrid dps builds and a good use to full hybrid builds. It can be used by a full water healing build for groups and becomes a good contender to evasive arcana, where one is constant passive buffs, the other more powerfull active effects.
  • elements of rage remove the flat ferocity increase and add +10% crit dmg to the buff (so, only dmg increase when in the 10s window of dual attunement). So it is a 10% normal dmg increase and 20% for crits, when in the 10s window after a dual attunement. This is comparable with the other 20% dmg from other GM traits, and rewards good rotation and well timed bursts, while weaver prowess acts similar to condition dmg.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

In general: Unravel should have been the F5 skill for weaver.

Mainly for WVW :Elementalist needs more damage to counteract the glass cannon nature , especially on weaver. This way you can run just under half marauder (power precision ferocity vitality) and not do less damage than another class running full glass that can still stay alive better. You'd still have less HP than Mesmer or Necromancer and less active and passive defense. I used to run elementalist in 2012 era along with Mesmer and necromancer (every backline). I now run mainly revenant. In its current iteration, meteor does less damage than CoR (rev hammer 2) and revenants can effortlessly provide fury 100% of the time , along with +33% boon duration and swiftness for scourges ; revenants provide massive condition resistance by use of Pain absorption.

It is a hard sell on tempest unless you have to hit a sieged keep where siege is on the inner side of the wall and nobody plays weaver. There's no other reason to run it over scourge in the current WvW meta , since scourges counter firebrands + condi builds via condi transfer / condi conversion, boon corrupts might/stability/protection, and provide barriers against power-based damage. Going weaver means you just gave up any semblance of utility skills or ability to have consistent small water fields (dual attacks / instead of geyser aka staff water 3) as well (which is why unravel should be F5 so weavers don't need to attune to water twice).

1) Utilities

Lightning Flash , for WVW (the only place it is used) could use a stun break.Mist form is not as strong as before due to the sheer amount of CC and condis flying around.Weaver's twist of fate mainly sees use in WvW. As an evade it isn't surefire. Your other real stunbreak option is Arcane Shielding (3 attacks is close to nothing in WvW), whereas Armor of earth isn't quite viable due to boon corrupt. Stone resonance's barrier isn't particularly strong and doesn't break stun. Other options such as swapping in conjure earth shield for the invuln on conjure earth shield skill #5 (it's not a stunbreak) or mist form mean you do 0 damage in a WvW setting in any form of damage gear because the 3s is a long time to be doing nothing.

2) weapon skillsEle needs lava font reverted to before July 10th patch, for starters. Most of the damage on staff is from lava font for stationary targets , unless you manage to pull off casting a 4 second meteor shower. Unless the devs want eles on staff to just auto things on fire to RNG (random due to on crit) proc burning from fire and arcane traits (on crit), there should be more emphasis on well placed lava fonts. Necromancer marks are 240 radius.

Stoning (staff - earth auto) could use more synergy with the Pyroclastic Blast , Piledriver, & Lahar dual attacks. It's not particularly strong.

The healing scaling is too dependent on soothing mist (passive). The healing on the massive cooldown skills on the weapons should be lowered a bit. Essentially, make elementalist a more active profession.

The problem is staff has been nerfed too hard over the years and everything else has power creep. For example, compare static field (a staple skill for WVW in 2012 through 2014 at least) to the Scrapper hammer 5 (Thunderclap) + Spellbreaker bubbles (Winds of Disenchantment). Static field used to be larger. Scrapper is better at water fields too.

Dagger is not as terrible, but it is no longer as strong an option due to the buffs other classes received. I would start by looking into increasing the damage on water auto as there is no healing component to the water auto attack. Its 0.33 damage coefficient is worse than that of a condition oriented weapon or a utility skill, I feel it could be 0.55 or something even higher like 0.6, maybe have it do additional 10% damage to burning targets. Make it thematic with the idea of Vaporblade.

3) TraitsWeavers gain massive benefit from swift revenge in groups with heralds. I would suggest that the damage bonus be lowered to 3-5% under swiftness and 7% under superspeed. This would reduce the uptime on the trait and make elemental pursuit trait less niche.

Diamond skin could use some resistance application on some conditional trigger.

Gale Song trait for tempests should do something other than break stuns. Maybe it could reduce shout recharge by 15-20%. Utility shouts in general are usually taken for their healing capability with powerful aura trait (water line) and not for fire aura or frost aura.

Frost aura in general ought to have an additional effect such as -10% bleeding damage taken , to counteract the condition heavy focus of the current meta. The Frost Aura skill on offhand dagger ought to chill unconditionally on use.

Realistically the one trait you can count as passive for eles in WvW is final shielding. You're more likely to run tempest defense for damage than for the shock aura. Earth's embrace is more or less unusable with the amount of necros around. Soothing ice is prone to overheal due to not having a health maximum such as triggering at <75% health only.

One with air could probably use 1-2s of superspeed when applying swiftness (while in air attunement) or something that makes it relevant for situations where swiftness is readily available. This change would mean you trade off Ferocious Winds if inclined to spike with the above mentioned changed to swift revenge.

Harmonious conduit likely harkens back to pre-stacking change of stability. An increase in the number of stability stacks (4+) would help since stability can only be removed per 0.75 seconds.

4) summaryIn general it feels like the entire class is currently balanced around weaver with 25 might stacks, every damage trait, and all buffs possible on stationary targets. This is not a realistic situation whatsoever since boons don't stick long in WVW with necros on the enemy teams.

If you've ever thrown marks on a scourge necromancer or anything using conditions and then played an elementalist on staff you will notice the stark difference in survivability and ease of getting damage done. There's players running trailblazer scourges that don't even get dented by elementalists in full berserker.

The only time people tend to ask for eles is to kill siege on walls due to meteor shower ; Fireball reaches cannons others sometimes cannot due to splash damage.

Dagger+dagger core celestial elementalist used to be a thing but after years of nerfs and powercreep it isn't strong now.

Just remember when balancing: risk vs reward. Nobody sane is going to play a high risk character with low reward for playing it well vs other classes.

For PVE:1) Scepter is still basically unusableScepter needs its fire auto AOE reworked to do more damage in the form of burning or power damage. I feel as though the lower the range is the higher the attainable damage should be. The rest of the scepter skills are generally slow to do damage , for example Dragon's tooth & Shatterstone.

Right now scepter is basically being held back due to fear of scepter spikes in PVP I suppose.

2) Staff mostly guttedStaff is pretty bad for PVE in its current state due to lava font nerfs unless there is a reason you can't get in close range. Meteor requires you to channel for 4s , trash mobs are dead by then with any competent group while any moving target is unlikely to be hit by all strikes.

3) ElitesConjure fiery great sword should have lower cooldown. It isn't a gamebreaking elite skill.

4) Weaver , weaver on swordAt the same time, sword needs more offensive buffs and weaver needs to have the swift revenge trait accordingly reduced to maybe 3 or 5%, with the condition of "under superspeed" added using the current damage bonus of +7%. Swift revenge is not as easy to satisfy solo, but in a group with a chronomancer it is essentially surefire.

Weaver sword fire auto #1/#2 ought to burn. Weaver water #2 sword auto ought to scale better with healing power. In every mode, sword should do more damage than dagger or staff because it is inherently riskier and harder to land attacks with.

Weaver's Primordial Stance is used in many meta builds, but I don't see the appeal. It could use some looking at, burn/bleed/vulnerability is not worth the utility slot in my opinion.

Sword weavers have an inherent problem vs enemies such as Legendary bounties in Crystal Desert with Phase shift. Being limited to one weapon and having that weapon limit you to melee range is an issue. Another example is Torin in deepstone fractal or the anomaly once it starts vaporizing pads.

5) TempestTempest warhorn air #5 ought to be quicker to travel. I'd also like to see cooldowns reduced for all warhorn skills not dealing with boons: wildfire, tidal surge, water globe, cyclone, lightning orb could all be reduced by 5s.

Dagger tempest would make use of increases to dagger damage (mainly on water attunement).

Reverting lava font would make staff tempest better off.

Fire Auras should be able to do more in PvE. The duration is too short generally. The same goes for Frost Aura.

Shocking aura (the skill) needs to stun unconditionally on use , it's a liability to require getting hit for the stun to trigger and it's a boss channeling a lethal attack that can only be prevented by breaking the CC breakbar.

Harmonious conduit could use stability increased to 4 stacks.

6) Dagger offhandEarthquake needs to do extra damage vs weakened or crippled targets. It would be an indirect buff to weavers with swords. Current damage modifier is a paltry 1.0. At full berserker's 2556 power the tooltip is under 1K (unless you're in fire attunement you won't have +200ish power on weaver) , which is false advertisement of "massive damage".

Frost aura (the skill) needs to chill unconditionally due to many bosses not hitting when charging up their lethal attacks yet having a CC breakbar.

7) Focus offhandI rarely use it. In the past it was used by others in PvP for the invuln.Flamewall is weak and needs to be looked at.Fireshield needs an additional effect.

SummaryThe litmus test for a PvE ele's effectiveness shouldn't be hitting a stationary golem with every buff possible , mainly because A) strategically raids are reduced to tanking , healing, and DPS-ing at the moment but most other content is not B.) most of the userbase doesn't raid C) unless you have that rigid party composition and uptime you won't achieve that number D.) there's damage from confusion and torment that is never reflected in those sorts of benchmarks as well as huge damage loss for staff eles versus targets that move. Eles (especially weaver) shouldn't be balanced toward only <10% of the content with one of the most difficult playstyles and under sterile ideal conditions.

It should be mainly evaluated in a loose group comp (i.e no dedicated tank + heal strategy) vs moving targets that have CC bars (Vinetooth is an example), in fractals with random players of different skill levels where the objective isn't a boss in the middle that barely moves, in Living Story zones without a party (low boon priority) where enemies will hit without an obvious animation and won't die in 2 hits (so more than 2-3 enemies is likely death if you're not playing well), or in story mode vs a boss with CC bars with no outside help. Most players are facing these situations and every person working on HOT/POF legendaries will be as well. It is ill-advised to alienate 90% of the userbase for a vocal minority fixated on stationary golem damage.

Devs ought to test weaver on half marauder half zerker (to better match other classes HP pool ; Elements of rage makes this less of a damage loss) as well as full damage zerker+scholar+sigil of force, etc : the stat set normalized to other classes' HP pool should perform OK (within 5%) while the full damage glass cannon weaver on sword (130 range) needs to have at least 15% more damage if perfectly executed (i.e. not just camping fire attunement like some people do).

===Other thoughtsI don't agree with some posters stating eles should have stealth and boon removal. AoE is largely a counter to stealth; boon removal should not be a major problem provided there is enough access to vulnerability (vs protection), stun (vs stability mainly), chill (vs alacrity), burning/bleed (counter regen), and CC....will add more when I think of it

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has
more
than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find
all
of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And
still
with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.

Scroll down? The numbers for small hitboxes are there...I meant that lets ignore the hitbox size and look at it that wayEle still has some of the best dps builds in the game? You can put all the restrictions you want, there's classes that need a rework 10x more than elementalist.

Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.Actually you do... They have a rating based on sample size, and all classes are at the same rating, so basically equivalent sample sizes...

Im not really into Raidar so yes maybe but we should use that for balance changes, becase as i experienced, if you upload your log after the balance patch it will take it as you did that kind of DPS/boon uptime after the balance patch not sure if its relevant or noEven so, it's been over a month since the latest patch, it'll be hard to skew the data with that. It'll probably be more than evened out by the number of "pro" elementalists that copy the build from snowcrows and then die every 5 seconds while cursing at their team mates for not keeping him alive when he fails to dodge a mechanic.

Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.So does elementalist...Ofc it has CC to some point but lets be honest here, while other classes have instand access to CC since they have it on their skill bar and ele needs to switch for it its a DPS loss at some levelOther classes? Where the huge CC output of necromancer?

So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utilityI've seen 40k dps weavers on fractals, nevermind raids...The group utility is there if you want it. Core ele and tempest have several group buffing skills. Now pick, take those, or take the damage. That's the same choice other classes need to make.In fractals,especially if you have burstly classes the mob dies before the burst ends so you will see the burst damage and not the sustained oneAnd that's special for elementalist why?

Your basicalyl saying that ele should keep the max damage build, and still have more utiliity... Well that doesn't happen. A Guardian to keep up with ele damage needs to take everything, even their healing skill (the "meta" max damage build takes the crappiest healing possible, simply because it has the lowest cooldown, thus allowing to spam it for retaliation) with damage in mind.That's not to even mention that unlike elementalist who can take a few different approaches to power damage, if they ever change Righteous Instincts, power builds for guardians instantly die. The same with revenants, they're hanging by a single gimmick, which is an unhealthy state. While Elementalists, no matter the elite spec, they can still have at least 2 different builds in terms of traits and be near the top in dps.

Yes ele should keep the max damage, because(lets take guardian for example) you have a healing skill that block everything when you use it, while ele only has a trait that gives you Arcane Shield when you would die and even that on a 40s or something CD, guardian has F2 and F3 for the "oh snap, i screwed up" plus guardian has heavy armor compared to light.And just for so i see things clearly, tell me what kind of "utiliities" are you talking about what ele has? Because the ones that i can think about is protection share while switching to earth and might when to fire, and maybe regen in water, maybe fire field and also ele dies just as fast as a guardian does maybe even faster because you can choose from die to mechanics cuz rooted in Meteor Shower or dodge for a major DPS lossAnd again i dont want anyone to get sore i just want to understand why some people think that elementalist is doing good while getting one shot by any mob and not even doing that god like damage

No class is doing good. GW2 balance is non-existant. But there are classes much worse than Elementalist, and ones that weren't the top dps for 5+ continuous years. It's all i'm saying, elementalist isn't that much worse than it was 2 months ago, or 6 months ago. It does 10k less damage, but that's not a bad thing necessarily. Maybe start trying new, different builds, try to get a support build going... Pretty much do what Revenant had to do, what Necro still has to do, what thief had to do for a looong time since HoT. Chrono, Druid, Warrior and Elementalist were the only classes that never fell out of PvE Raid meta since HoT. All others had ebbs and flows. Now it's your turn. It's not a good thing, but it isn't a bad one either. Metas are supposed to change.

Enough of this! This thread is not about yet another DPS raid contest!This thread is about improving elementalist as class, if you have anything constructive to say about the subject be it positive or negative...DO SO, we can't have every blasted thread on ele subforum be derailed by yet another raid dps talk.

People have pointed out the same flaws in your arguments more than once but you keep coming down with the same chant over and over and over again while ignoring what people trying to say,
we need to keep the thread as clear as possible and as short as possible for the devs to digest
, we can't have 2-3 pages of you going back and forward with the same bloody argument.

Go on and make your own thread in the raid subforum.. I won't have people attempting to derail yet another ele thread , especially not now when we spent months/years trying to grab the devs attention

First off, you have as much authority in this medium as i have. So maybe go order an hamburger or a pizza, if you're in an ordering mood.

Second i did provide feedback on ele and corroborated with a lot of other people's points. I just finished by saying that Ele shouldn't be the priority for a rework.Also, i pointed out that a lot of the issues with ele, are common with all classes and comes down from the power creep of elite specs, the lack of upkeep on core skills and weapons and the lack of direction in it's classes, with both elite specs keeping ele too much of an open build without any focus.

It was yourself, that took that as an offence, where none should be taken, and accused me of being biased, which prompted me to defend my point, with actual data (at least that which we have available). I don't have any horse on the race, you guys clearly do. But as far as broken professions go, ele isn't even near the top, and i don't think it should be a priority for a rework.

Plus, i purposedly ignored your previous reply at me, because it's basically wrong, full of misrepresentation, projection and assumptions.Disregarding all your acuusations, you claim that a 36k dps guardian has more sustain than an ele, and yet you offer no proof of that.Here's a newsflash, it doesn't. First, there's no such a thing to my knowledge, i've never seen such a high benchmark for guardians at least for the current patch.Second, every single skill in that build, INCLUDING THE HEAL is devoted to keeping retaliation uptime and do damage, just like on a ele dps build. You think aegis is there for sustain? Nope, if it drops, there goes 20% of core guardian's damage. It's like scholar's runes, except we also have scholar's runes, and we can't lose aegis. That means every stray aoe hit will drop 20% of the dps for a core guardian. Yeah, it's awesome!

Is a guardian more independent, and can they get close to optimal damage without external boons? Yes it can, thanks to it having some good trait synergy. Not that ele doesn't have it, just not to that point, which, again i agree needs some revision.

But you only give examples that can compete with elementalist... What about Necromancer? You accuse me of ignoring your points, which i probably did... When people are rude i tend to just ignore most of what they say. But you didn't address that point, or the fact that ele still can outperform most other classes in PvE and WvW. It does require more specific builds, and doesn't work as well now as it did before PoF in PvP, i'll give you that. But then again that's probably a consequence of tempest and chrono having been so broken in the past that they broke pvp.

I never said that a ele can have great sustain and still be top dps, actually i said just the opposite, no class can. Oh and again, guardian has the same health pool as a elementalist, so does thief. In fact that's a pain point with deadeye, it has to be rooted to do max damage, which negates the mobility that justified their lower health pool.You say ele has no sustain outside stats... That proves me that you don't know the class enough to be here doing this kind of feedback.I'll skip core stuff like obsidian skin, like most of earth and water traits, and i'll go directly to the traits and skills that allowed tempest, along with chrono, to become unkillable in PvP. Note that all classes had access to the same stats, but only chrono and tempest had the skills to become unkillable, and that's pretty close to literally.You'll never see any class in this game do max damage will keeping high sustain, that's simply not how the game works.

Finally, i'd warn you that you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. The vision you have for ele won't ever come to pass, since you can't really have a class have everything, and performing how you seem to think it should.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:First thing, and this should apply to all classes:There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the kitten. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

Personal bias and factual analysis are used to describe the situation , this creates feedbacks and skewed perceptions tend to lead to reality where 2-3 professions dominate in everything and everywhere. Before coming down with any evaluation, you're supposed to take in consideration both the PRO and the CONS...not just one while conveniently forgetting about the other.

I don't know precisely to what you're referring to when you talk about "ele being high" and that now ele players are simply having a
childish tantrum
for this "small nerf" as described by you.

So may you be talking about pve?....I am not a PvEr but from what I observed there : ele was doing the biggest dmg in a coordinated group and that huge dmg came at the cost of any resemblance of sustain , "kindly" provided by the group, if I remember correctly ele was doing 10k or so dmg more than next class
and this apparently was/is considered broken by the community

Putting your personal bias aside ....care to explain why ele should have the same dmg as the next profession, while having none of the sustain? Where is the balance in that?

If you want all professions to have same level of dmg...they should have also the same level of sustain more or less..this is a sound, logic argument.

May you be talking about PvP/WvW?..honestly I would be too tired of typing the same arguments again so....maybe you should just tell us how ele is strong and how players are exaggerating for a "small nerf"

I find it funny that you go around with throwing personal bias complaints around when earlier statements of you like "We need to give that intimidating aura back to the class, how is even possible that a midget armed with a rifle scare people more than somebody who manipulate the very force of lightning ? I don't see any other MMO where people laugh/ignore a burst elementalist/mage..." are exactly the same and are anything but "factual" analysises. I agree with many suggestions here, but yours sound often like you aren't the special snowflake you are apparently supposed to be.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

But you only give examples that can compete with elementalist... What about Necromancer? You accuse me of ignoring your points, which i probably did... When people are rude i tend to just ignore most of what they say. But you didn't address that point, or the fact that ele still can outperform most other classes in PvE and WvW. It does require more specific builds, and doesn't work as well now as it did before PoF in PvP, i'll give you that. But then again that's probably a consequence of tempest and chrono having been so broken in the past that they broke pvp.

I'll skip core stuff like obsidian skin, like most of earth and water traits, and i'll go directly to the traits and skills that allowed tempest, along with chrono, to become unkillable in PvP. Note that all classes had access to the same stats, but only chrono and tempest had the skills to become unkillable, and that's pretty close to literally.You'll never see any class in this game do max damage will keeping high sustain, that's simply not how the game works.

I don't know why you keep going on about ele being good in WvW when it's currently one of the worst class in WvW. It's bottom tier in roaming on par with necros and also not that great in zerging, though better than top roaming classes such as mesmers/thieves/rangers for sure. It's only good at killing siege and doing high dps on undefended lords/guards but in a zerg fight it pretty much gets hard countered by firebrands and spellbreaker bubbles. So many times I'll meteor shower a blob and see bunch of big numbers pop up but nobody goes down thanks to fb giving protection and sustaining through them. Scourge's barriers also work pretty well against meteor shower too . All of your good ccs gets also gets countered by fb who has easily access to stab. In fights where there's a lot of moving and neither zerg wipes to 1 or 2 pushes, I've pretty much came to realize that I just can't move with the tag because I pretty much cant do any counter pressure when there's bubble and stability flying around and I have to be off to the sides channeling my MS hoping nobody sees me and interrupt it much less have a hammer rev one shot me.

With this many fb running around I've pretty much given up on playing ele in WvW and switched to scourge and guess what? I actually feel like I'm doing a lot -- removing boons, especially stability and then ccing enemies with fear and I'm also keeping my squad alive through barriers. So many times I see bunch of red circles on choke coming from meteor shower I just laugh and put on my barrier and run right through, and if the ele is trying to channel it without stab I just put a fear mark on him for immediate cancel. This all hoping I dont die to retail too

and i dont understand what you mean by tempest and chrono being unkillable? invulnerable? guardian and engi have invuls too and mirages have something close to an invul with choice for free action.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@LazySummer.2568 said:

But you only give examples that can compete with elementalist... What about Necromancer? You accuse me of ignoring your points, which i probably did... When people are rude i tend to just ignore most of what they say. But you didn't address that point, or the fact that ele still can outperform most other classes in PvE and WvW. It does require more specific builds, and doesn't work as well now as it did before PoF in PvP, i'll give you that. But then again that's probably a consequence of tempest and chrono having been so broken in the past that they broke pvp.

I'll skip core stuff like obsidian skin, like most of earth and water traits, and i'll go directly to the traits and skills that allowed tempest, along with chrono, to become unkillable in PvP. Note that all classes had access to the same stats, but only chrono and tempest had the skills to become unkillable, and that's pretty close to literally.You'll never see any class in this game do max damage will keeping high sustain, that's simply not how the game works.

I don't know why you keep going on about ele being good in WvW when it's currently one of the worst class in WvW. It's bottom tier in roaming on par with necros and also not that great in zerging, though better than top roaming classes such as mesmers/thieves/rangers for sure. It's only good at killing siege and doing high dps on undefended lords/guards but in a zerg fight it pretty much gets hard countered by firebrands and spellbreaker bubbles. So many times I'll meteor shower a blob and see bunch of big numbers pop up but nobody goes down thanks to fb giving protection and sustaining through them. Scourge's barriers also work pretty well against meteor shower too . All of your good ccs gets also gets countered by fb who has easily access to stab. In fights where there's a lot of moving and neither zerg wipes to 1 or 2 pushes, I've pretty much came to realize that I just can't move with the tag because I pretty much cant do any counter pressure when there's bubble and stability flying around and I have to be off to the sides channeling my MS hoping nobody sees me and interrupt it much less have a hammer rev one shot me.

With this many fb running around I've pretty much given up on playing ele in WvW and switched to scourge and guess what? I actually feel like I'm doing a lot -- removing boons, especially stability and then ccing enemies with fear and I'm also keeping my squad alive through barriers. So many times I see bunch of red circles on choke coming from meteor shower I just laugh and put on my barrier and run right through, and if the ele is trying to channel it without stab I just put a fear mark on him for immediate cancel. This all hoping I dont die to retail too

and i dont understand what you mean by tempest and chrono being unkillable? invulnerable? guardian and engi have invuls too and mirages have something close to an invul with choice for free action.

Let's use this opportunity to discuss and propose changes for eles hoping for the best, anything else would just derail everything...let's move on

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...