Concerns about Elementalist

Bladestrom.6425 · October 23, 2018

@"SoulSlavocracy.4902" said:
@vesica tempestas.1563 said:lets say you do 11.5k dps on a zerg. People in zergs do not stand still in aoe, so basically your 11.5k is spread across all zerg. Even if everyone did stand about like rabbits caught in headlights so your aoe can rain over them for a sustained period of time , that's STILL only 2kish dps per person. You see its not your 2k dps thats finishing people off, its the players on the front line with the burst, your just background noise that looks shiny on a meter or hitting already low players who are pvping.
Ask yourself this, if you were in the front line and you see red circles - what would you do? same for everyone else.Spot on, I should've anticipated and mentioned that, ty for the opportunity. Yeah so players aren't static, they'll move out of damage, but imagine 1 weaver with 11.5k dps, 2 scourges with 8k dps and a handful of revs all within 6-9k DPS and spread that out over a radius of 600 and at least a few things are going down because the damage output is greater than frontline sustain output.

Weaver is the final nail in the coffin, it can't down things alone, that's correct, but you down things so much more effectively when it's present.

1v1 - your dead1vx - your deadzerg caught at front - your dead5 v5 - people aint gonna stand in your little red circles - your gonna get pressured and dead.

so on and so forth, that's a shit build.

Basically the single solitary scenario where weaver staff contributes is the aoe spam from the back, which is the circles of red spam blob v blob gameplay that anet and players do not want for obvious reasons.

solemn.9670 · October 23, 2018

salty comment retracted

LazySummer.2568 · October 24, 2018

@steki.1478 said:
@LazySummer.2568 said:
@steki.1478 said:
@LazySummer.2568 said:
@steki.1478 said:
@LazySummer.2568 said:nobody cares about weaver dps when minstrel fbs and chronos can literally stand inside meteor showers and emote as long as their boons dont get removed by scourges/spellbreakers. weavers are useless without the help of various other meta classes.

Then you're casting your meteors on wrong targets. You have no business in damaging tanks when your biggest nuke has DR on it. Meteors still hits squishier targets quite hard and those are the enemy damage dealers; remove pressure and enemy supports have nothing to support.

Supports are useless without damage dealers. Damage output is useless when enemy still rolls over you (there's no boon rip/corrupt/cc). Necros are useless without proper support. It's all team play, no class can work on their own in a wvw blob.

Staff weaver performs perfectly fine in big zergs, the issue is that lots of skills are worthless/too slow and its main pressure comes from 1 or 2 skills. It makes sense on hammer rev since it doesn't have many dps skills, but ele has like 10-15 of them. The issue is that it's forced into semi support (any water skills, whose heal is quite low on dps builds) in every build so it sustain has to be awful to compensate. The issue is that despite having 95% of damage output from only 3 fire skills, you still need to swap attunements for CC, while almost completely losing damage output (due to damaging skills being unreliable) - with ~15 skills across 4 attunements you're basically doing the same thing rev does with 4 on just 1 weapon. The issue is that self boon sustain is weak/non existing. The issue is that good condi cleanse comes with huge loss in damage (water/arc traits) and/or loss in self sustain (ether renewal is both channel and weak heal; cleansing fire's offensive part has no use, but you're essentially losing a defensive utility skill).

Winds nerf didn't impact eles negatively, it made all ranged builds better since there's a lot less projectile hate now. Dome wasnt stipping boons after 5 seconds anyway, it was mostly a zone control at that point, which is gone now.

I'd rather have meteor shower on shorter cooldown, channel time, duration, less hits, but with weapon skills that are more responsive and execute faster instead of waiting 24 seconds to press 5 and run around trying to squeeze 10% of meteors' damage output with my whole kit and pretending I support allies (at least CC is great).

@certain people in this thread: There's balance issues and l2p issues, don't mistake one for another. Ele is not really designed for spamming 5 buttons off cd like all other classes, so don't treat it like it's made as such. It's supposed to have high effort/reward ratio, but you make it sound like you want reward for no effort by complaining how weak ele is.

yeah because scourges and firebrands are perfectly balanced where one just has to put down a shade and spam all F keys and wells, and nobody -- from fbs/chronos to squishies including eles can just face tank it, while as fb you just afk until they happened to get your boons removed then you spam utilities skills and pull out your broken tomes.

keep preaching l2p when the """"learning"""" part is basically you not following the tag and camping at the sides hoping nobody sees and have your zerg do all the work of:

drawing enemy's attention away from you
removing boons for you
buffing you with stability/fury/might/quickness/barriers
ccing enemies for you
removing chill & weakness from you

no other classes are that reliant on the team and being able to sit in a highly telegraphed, long channeled, high cd skill and barely take a scratch no matter which target or build is quite kitten in my opinion

After latest patch you don't even need to be part of squad to be effective. You get your own might and fury, it's just a lot slower without rev (who gets permanent boons with no effort). It's not main zerg who's drawing enemy's attention, it's ranged zerg who's damaging and zoning enemy. You're not even in range of enemy boon rips, if you're getting corrupted you're playing backline wrong. While I agree that quickness does make meteor shower a lot more effective, you can get healed from just walking through melee squad; you have your own defensive skills and stability (which you really only need for safe meteor). Chill/weakness is problem of every backline build, not just ele (those traits are quite ridiculous actually; cc reflect, taunt and weakness procs really need to go, or at least have range cap).

Ele (and shiro rev) is barely reliant on team, that's why it's capable of clouding around enemy with almost no problem. Try doing that on necro and you'll see what I'm talking about. If you can survive retaliation, you don't need your team to babysit you at all.

That's your opinion, and my opinion is the reverse. There's no way you can get meaningful fury/might/stab yourself unless you sacrifice your defense/offense or exchange one of those boons for the other. The fury from Raging Storm trait is not even real because it requires a critc in the first place and only lasts 2s on a 3s icd. Air trait line is also quite trash compared to Arcane in my opinion because you miss out crucial cd reduction for your attunments, perma swiftness, and need to camp air to be able to move anywhere, but it's still probably personal preference (and no, I'm not wasting time doing the switch build thing just to move around and then switch back every time). The best fury you can get from standard dps staff weaver is from either Unravel or blasting your fire fields with Persisting Flames. Taking Unravel means giving up either mist form or lightning flash and you're that much easier to get caught and die without these 2. The easy 10+ stacks of might from Pyromancer's is just that much better than Persisting Flames it's really not even an option. Having stability for safe MS is quite useful when zergs are constantly moving and there are a lot more opportunities to cast it when you do have it, especially when defending against enemy siege, otherwise it's really just hoping for your zerg to distract enemy's zerg for you again until you can actually use your MS.

Stay near revs before fights so you get boons. Walk near tag when you get low on hp/boons.

Necros can poke with their 1200 ranged staff & 900 ranged skills quite well, and they have their own spammable condi clears and barriers to poke if they wanted. Plus, chills & weakness don't affect them as much as it does to power weavers. In fact, no other specialization in the entire game, including core ele and tempest, gets countered by chill as hard as weaver does because that's just how weavers work -- they need to constantly switch attunement to be effective but they also get locked out of all attunements whenever they switch (also why alacrity is so much more effective on weavers). If I see some staff weavers running around by themselves trying to harass our zerg as necro, all I have to do is spam my marks, especially chill & fear on them. There's no way they can channel their meteor shower without getting hit by my shades unless they do the lightning flash/burning retreat trick, and the telegraph of meteor shower is so huge and slow anyways all i have to do is walk out of it and maybe dodge/barrier once to take no damage.

Their 1200 poke barely does damage, it's mostly used for cc, condi spam or condi transfer. If you walk to them then you're basically dead since other 1200 range classes are much more effective at zoning than necro. You dont play range wars with 1 ele, you do it with 5-15 builds with 1200+ range so gl doing something vs them as necro.

The only downside I felt when playing necros is their incredibly slow movement because they don't generally have access to perma swiftness and less stunbreaks compared to weavers so it's that much easier for me to get chain cced and killed, but really these 2 issues don't matter as much considering that it's mostly solved by actually being with the tag. I'd also gladly make this trade to be able to just spam skills regardless of targets and still do actual pressure, or play the blood variant where i get to not only play as support that has powerful barriers and incredible rez for my zerg but also still pressure the enemy because boon removal is just so useful.

And ele issues are solved by being near revenant. Easy 10 might and perma swift/fury, you have your own defenses anyway. You cant stun lock ele due to stability and evade on stun breaks and they can always mist form behind the tag. Basically your only issue is lack of heals, but again, you walk near tag/out of combat and continue what you were doing before.

Every time I play ele in both WvW and sPvP it's really just me feeling like I'm getting carried by my team the entire time. I could care less about some artificial numbers on a 3rd party tool that's inflated from hitting downs most of the time, and these downs are even usually generated with the help of the team. Ele is just neither a play maker nor a true team support to me but instead some class that begs for its team to do all the work so it can look at some big numbers and feel like it's doing something.

In small scale I agree: glass cannon builds dont have high enough burst to compensate for their low mobility/sustain and bruiser builds just dont have damage pressure to handle enemies. But in large scale eles and warrs are what makes plays happen. Warr is the obvious reason due to bubble/boon rip, but ele is often underrated and probably not played properly to its full potential. When you get a ranged squad of 10-15 (mostly revs and eles, but rangers can be quite deadly as well with their 10k autos and unblockable bursts) you can easily control where enemy blob moves with constant meteor spam and they cant do anything against you since you are mobile and have more range than them (unless enemy also has a strong ranged force). In that situation you're the playmaker since it takes only 3-5 good meteors on top of corrupts/bubbles to wipe wipe enemy blob (even if enemy has stronger melee blob that would wipe yours, you have much better ranged damage; I had a blob once with 30 necros and 2 eles that couldnt wipe anything despite having lots of currupts - the damage just wasnt there). I agree that damage is worthless without boon removal and CC, but boon removal/cc are pointless if you have 0 damage pressure, and necros for example have quite lower damage potential than eles/revs.

There needs to be balance between all these roles in wvw and that balance exists at the moment. The problem is that certain classes have much more roles than other ones and ele's role is based on rng.

all i got from your post is you're suggesting the following conflicting points:

ele is self sufficient and doesnt need any other classes' help to be effective in wvw
but it just needs a rev
but it also need boon removals from necros/warriors
and heals from zerg (guardian)

might as well just bring a fb, scourge, and a chrono in your 5~15 man ranged group at this point so you actually get useful boons such as stab/aegis/resistance/quickness and boon removal so your poke actually does something and you can safely MS anytime you want.

and no the balance is still pretty poor when, in a general, fbs and scourges are still what's making up most of the zerg and those 2 are always required in any zerg (with spellbreaker coming in close as 3rd) whereas all other classes are all nice to haves

ScottBroChill.3254 · October 24, 2018

my problem is that ele's potential is held back by the fact that you're bringing at least 2 attunements that don't fit you're stats and becuase of that everything has to be watered down. Ele provides nothing to the group besides damage, and thats ok in a static scenario that is well prepared for like raids or fractals, but all that extra "something of everything" it brings is useless because if any of it was useful along with being able to do decent damage than ele would be over powered. To me there aren't many solutions to the problem of ele having to bring everything in its arsenal; damage with fire and air, control and defense with water and earth, and support spread throughout. My only solution would be to make ele traits have more skill add-on effects that allows the skills that you enhance to be stronger than they currently are, but the skills you dont pick will be weaker. This way things like healing might not be a big part of water skills unless you trait for it, and so on. Universal necessities should be located in arcane, like condi cleanse.

These arguments about ele being op, or strong is a little ridiculous. Ele has a lot of outplay ability so I know where the point is about you get what you put in, but its more so you can play really good as ele and possibly survive decently, but no one is going to die to and you wont make much of an impact unless the oponnent is severly less skilled than you.

LazySummer.2568 · October 24, 2018

@"SoulSlavocracy.4902" said:with a 60-65% crit chance (your crit chance should be somewhere around there unless you don't care about having good dps) you're getting at least 25 seconds to an unlikely but still possible theoretical 40seconds of fury every 60 seconds. I know this because I've done calculations and never had a problem with it, mostly because this trait in WvW is just to make up for not having a rev in your party and optimally your commander should be pairing revs and weavers in the same parties. I have almost 80-90% fury uptime whenever I'm in a squad >__> it's always there when I look down at my boons.

I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from for Raging Storm, but suggesting that the fury uptime is great by staging some hypothetical scenario and pulling out some numbers doesnt really make much sense to me. The literal upper bound due to 3s icd is 60/3 x 2 = 40s, assuming 100% critc chance, not 60~65%, and neither 40s x 60% nor 40s x 65% gives you an AT LEAST 25s but an AVERAGE of 24s~26s. This is also assuming you're successfully landing 1 attack on an enemy every second. Plus, the fury gained from that trait is not even useful for your first burst on MS, which does the most damage, and enemies usually react to you after they've gotten hit once.

Also, perma swiftness - you are playing Weaver right? You know you get swiftness every time you cast a dual skill man? When I'm running alone to catch up with a zerg I dual skill, dual skill, burning retreat backwards, dual skill, dual skill ... perma swiftness and very fast travel time and if you see a roamer coming your way you'll have time to switch attunements, and if you don't see the roamer coming, well you're surprise-ganked either way.

Suggesting perma swiftness from spamming dual skills is as silly as suggesting something like an engi is great because it can have perma stability from running flamethrower trait. It is not very useful in practice because:

You're likely not in correct attunement to be able cc or cast your offensive fire spells at crucial moments
Wasting your dual skills randomly on nobody
All of the dual staff skills have a high cast time and 1 you cant even use because it roots you in place
Possibly getting slowed down when your 1200 range dual skills hits random critters just for you to travel

I tried the stabbing up before casting MS a few times and it's a cool gimmick, but it's really just a gimmick. I get ~90% of my MS casts off just by doing the burning retreat-meteor shower trick. Saves you from slotting a stab skill/weaver trait and allows you to cast MS from 2000 range .... 2900 if you combine it with LF.

This is not a cool gimmick; the burning retreat trick is a cool gimmick. Having stability is actually good because it allows you to cast it in nearly all situations, including the enemy seeing you, except a very specific situation where their boon removal class saw your stability and quickly comboed their removal with a cc to interrupt you, which happens even less when you're the one surprising them by popping your own stability. Neither Lightning Flash nor Burning Retreat is reliable in the case where you want to MS enemies that are sieging your gates/walls and you have to run up to your walls to get LoS, but stability easily allows that (burning retreat isnt even possible most of the time in this case because you not only have to aim your MS in a fraction of a second but also position your back correctly so you don't just fall off at the wrong side, whereas LF requires a really fast look behind and hopefully you aim it correctly to prevent no valid path).

steki.1478 · October 24, 2018

@LazySummer.2568 said:
@steki.1478 said:
@LazySummer.2568 said:
@steki.1478 said:
@LazySummer.2568 said:
@steki.1478 said:
@LazySummer.2568 said:nobody cares about weaver dps when minstrel fbs and chronos can literally stand inside meteor showers and emote as long as their boons dont get removed by scourges/spellbreakers. weavers are useless without the help of various other meta classes.