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PVP Balance Patch - what about ele?


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I would like to start a discussion about the upcoming changes to elementalist.

@Irenio CalmonHuang.2048 said:(...)

Elementalist

With the addition of the weaver and sword abilities in Path of Fire™, the main-hand dagger weapon set has been struggling with its identity. The weaver's sword is intended to be a single-target, high-DPS weapon that relies on direct hits to deal damage. In this update, we're leaning into the dagger's close-range area-of-effect damage and burst attacks.

  • Cone of Cold: The base healing value of this skill has been increased by approximately 20%.
  • Cleansing Wave: The base healing value of this skill has been increased by approximately 20%.
  • Evasive Arcana: The base healing value of this trait has been increased by approximately 20%.
  • Arcane Abatement: Cleansing Wave: The base healing value of this trait has been increased by approximately 20%.
  • Swirling Winds: Reduced the radius of this skill from 400 to 360. The visual effect of this skill now displays a red ring for enemies and a white ring for allies.
  • Vapor Form: Fixed an issue in which this skill would sometimes fail to revive a poisoned player. Fixed an issue in which applying barrier to an elementalist in Vapor Form prevented them from being downed when the skill ended by timing out. Removed an unlisted function of this skill that caused it to apply regeneration to nearby allies.
  • Dragon's Claw: Projectiles from this skill now pierce enemies.
  • Ring of Earth: This skill has been slightly reworked. It now delivers an attack early in the animation, and then another attack upon impacting the ground. Bleeding duration per impact has been reduced from 12 seconds to 6 seconds. Initial impact damage is 27.5% of the final impact. Final impact damage has not changed from the skill's initial value.
  • Magnetic Leap: This skill has been renamed Earthen Rush and reworked.
    • Earthen Rush: Quickly dash along the ground, summoning damaging spikes along the way and then delivering an area attack, immobilizing any enemy struck.
  • Lightning Whip: The range of this skill has been reduced from 300 to 240.
  • Lightning Touch: This skill has been reworked and renamed Convergence.
    • Convergence: After a 1-second delay, lightning strikes the elementalist, dealing damage and weakening foes in a 240 radius while granting the elementalist fury for each foe struck.
  • Invoke Lightning: Fixed an issue in which this skill ignored the Disable Player Camera Shake option.
  • Glyph of Storms (Air): Fixed an issue in which this skill ignored the Disable Player Camera Shake option.
  • Imbued Melodies: This trait now uses the Lesser Sand Squall skill instead of the Sand Squall skill.

(...)

Since elementalist has been subpar since PoF hit, the whole ele community has been waiting for significant buffs. Call them reworks, changes or relative buffs by nerfing others, it doesn't matter. Fact is, nothing has really changed on ele for about 1.5 years now.

This patch will not change anything. Like, at all. Nothing on FA ele, nothing for weaver, tempest. There have been plenty of suggestions not only here in the PVP forum, but on the ele subforum as well.

So, I would like to ask elementalist players or interested community members to write down what you would like to see. I know, I know, I shouldn't ask for realistic changes, but I do it anyway. I do not want to see elementalist buffed to heavens, I just want it to be halfway competitive.

I'll give you a starting point.

For sword:

  • Increase ranges to 180, a multiple of 60!
  • Hand out some cover condis on AAs.
  • Increase some damages on dual skills slightly or make them castable backwards again (for kiting without weapon swap).
  • Increase some evade skill CDs like Riptide but give them more healing/AoE barrier or something OR reduce evade time and decrease CD.
  • Decrease ToF CD to 40s.

For tempest:

  • Give personal stab baseline, make AoE stab traitable.
  • Make auras 5s again, shocking auras ICD to 1s. Rework fire aura.

I'd love fury back in arcane... but that probably counts as unrealistic. I am not asking for PVE or WVW changes, purely PVP perspective.

So, what would you add? What would you not like to see? What about staff, FA?

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I'd have them make D/D Elementalist not as wet-noodle-ey as it presently is. I was never a fan of Tempest, but D/D Ele was my original love in the game.How do they accomplish that? In my opinion, remove two things:

  • Remove the cooldown for swapping between elements for core elementalists, while putting an ICD on element swapping traits.
  • This will effectively remove chill negatively impacting ele weapon swap, which is a hard counter to ele.
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For staff, I would increase the damage of Moonsoon by 40% and increase the bleed duration on Eruption by 0.5s in order to solidify staff elementalist's identity of being the hyper long range AoE specialist. Gust, Monsoon, and Plasma Blast no longer fire behind the elementalist.

For scepter, in order to make the weapon more single target orientated, Flamestrike has been reworked into a new skill named Combustion, which is a single targeted, 600 range skill that takes 0.75s to cast and will strike the opponent after a 0.5s delay, doing direct damage and apply 1 stack of burning for 5s. Ice Shards, Arc Lightning, and Stone Shards have their range reduced from 900 to 600 to be consistent with the new skill as well as the melee mage theme that has been around since game inception. Fracturing Strike and Earthen Synergy no longer fire on a target that is behind the elementalist.

For sword, there hasn't been enough incentive to use double attuned skills, so the damage of Aqua Siphon has been increased by 30% and Rust Frenzy now applies 1s of protection to the elementalist in addition to its previous effects. The healing output of Riptide has been reduced by about 20% and its evade duration shortened to 0.75s.

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@LazySummer.2568 said:For staff, I would increase the damage of Moonsoon by 40% and increase the bleed duration on Eruption by 0.5s in order to solidify staff elementalist's identity of being the hyper long range AoE specialist. Gust, Monsoon, and Plasma Blast no longer fire behind the elementalist.

For scepter, in order to make the weapon more single target orientated, Flamestrike has been reworked into a new skill named Combustion, which is a single targeted, 600 range skill that takes 0.75s to cast and will strike the opponent after a 0.5s delay, doing direct damage and apply 1 stack of burning for 5s. Ice Shards, Arc Lightning, and Stone Shards have their range reduced from 900 to 600 to be consistent with the new skill as well as the melee mage theme that has been around since game inception. Fracturing Strike and Earthen Synergy no longer fire on a target that is behind the elementalist.

For sword, there hasn't been enough incentive to use double attuned skills, so the damage of Aqua Siphon has been increased by 30% and Rust Frenzy now applies 1s of protection to the elementalist in addition to its previous effects. The healing output of Riptide has been reduced by about 20% and its evade duration shortened to 0.75s.

Why limit gameplay and variety by removing the ability to cast Monsoon, Gust and Plasma Blast behind you? The 0.5 second increase on bleeds from Eruption also seems inconsequential and wholly unrelated to your point about staff ele's identity. Scepter is the only 900 range weapon ele has and the only thing your changes accomplish is making scepter ele riskier to play, with no payoff, all for the sake of some nebulous 'thematic consistency', whatever that means

I suppose before yesterday's change, mainhand dagger occupied the space inbetween scepter and sword. It's all well and good to have ideas of thematic design for balance but when that translates to gameplay that isn't particularly fun, I don't understand why anyone would be quite so masochistic as to embark down that path. Oh well, just another day in the ArenaNet office.

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@Usagi.4835 said:

@LazySummer.2568 said:For staff, I would increase the damage of Moonsoon by 40% and increase the bleed duration on Eruption by 0.5s in order to solidify staff elementalist's identity of being the hyper long range AoE specialist. Gust, Monsoon, and Plasma Blast no longer fire behind the elementalist.

For scepter, in order to make the weapon more single target orientated, Flamestrike has been reworked into a new skill named Combustion, which is a single targeted, 600 range skill that takes 0.75s to cast and will strike the opponent after a 0.5s delay, doing direct damage and apply 1 stack of burning for 5s. Ice Shards, Arc Lightning, and Stone Shards have their range reduced from 900 to 600 to be consistent with the new skill as well as the melee mage theme that has been around since game inception. Fracturing Strike and Earthen Synergy no longer fire on a target that is behind the elementalist.

For sword, there hasn't been enough incentive to use double attuned skills, so the damage of Aqua Siphon has been increased by 30% and Rust Frenzy now applies 1s of protection to the elementalist in addition to its previous effects. The healing output of Riptide has been reduced by about 20% and its evade duration shortened to 0.75s.

Why limit gameplay and variety by removing the ability to cast
Monsoon
,
Gust
and
Plasma Blast
behind you? The 0.5 second increase on bleeds from Eruption also seems inconsequential and wholly unrelated to your point about staff ele's identity. Scepter is the only 900 range weapon ele has and the only thing your changes accomplish is making scepter ele riskier to play, with no payoff, all for the sake of some nebulous 'thematic consistency', whatever that means

I suppose before yesterday's change, mainhand dagger occupied the space inbetween scepter and sword. It's all well and good to have ideas of thematic design for balance but when that translates to gameplay that isn't particularly fun, I don't understand why anyone would be quite so masochistic as to embark down that path. Oh well, just another day in the ArenaNet office.

You are not replying to a serious post. It's all supposed to be a parody of how Anet balances elementalist.

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the problem with ele is that you press 20 buttons and achieve mediocre results. their sustain is tied into healing power, which has been successively overshadowed by op e specs for 2 xpacs. shout tempest + reaper meta was okish, tempest had some major drawbacks, whereas the pof elites don't have many. none of this comes as a shock as many if not all of you are aware of these things. ele needs a straight up numbers buff across the board. its not elegant but there is no other way at this point, short of nerfing everything else.

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How about devs try themselves to play ranked and test their ,, ele buffs" vs anything meta related. That would really helped...

More on the topic:Tempest generally needs to have selfsustain on the level of FB, right now it would just explode after gank in competitive atm match.Weaver is just a mess, not trash but we need actually to have options to take offensive traits or amulets without heavy investing in healing power.

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There isn't any kind of an answer to "how to make ele viable", because it's impossible to do so with powercreep from other classes, I would simply nuke everything from the orbit with nerfs and then started patching up slowly to acceptable levels.Wishful changes:Elementalist: Phoenix from scepter fire 3 moved to staff fire 3Weaver:

  • Overall: reduced cast time on auto attacks on sword, increased auto attack range on sword to atleast 180 or 240, 4s global cd of attument for mainhand and 2s for offhand
  • Aquatic Stance: selfish, every Incoming damage converted into barrier and health (65% barrier, 35% health), 25s cd, 5s interval, 4s duration
  • Stone Resonance: enemies that attack you while in this stance will be slowed (2s of slow every 2s) and will get bleed (1 stack per 1 hit, 1s interval)
  • Weave Self: attack speed increased by 15% > Tailored Victory: reduced cast time, remove additional stack of stab
  • Flame Uprising: Increased speed and range to 600
  • Cauterizing Strike: changed into Cauterizing Wave, horizontal slash from left to right in a cone, range 240 (100% damage at 120 range, 50% damage at 240range, burn)
  • Riptide: removed evade and backpedalling effect, slash downward to the ground, creating wall of water blocking incoming attacks from the front for 4s, incoming missile type attack converted to barrier, static placement, range 180, radius 120, (waterfield, healing, regeneration)
  • Aqua Siphon: you "mark" ur enemy with "leak" allowing to siphon their barrier and health to yourself for 5s, range 240, single target
  • Polaric Leap: steal 1 boon (15s cd for just a teleport at 600 range with daze and superspeed is hilarious)
  • Quantum Strike: range 240, reduced cast time, increase damage of this ability by 1% for each vulnerability on enemy
  • Earthen Vortex: range 240, radius 240, cast 1s, spin around to uprise sand from the ground to create blinding and crippling dust that last for 4s, gain barrier for each enemy that gets blinded inside dust area (blind + cripple)
  • Rust Frenzy: changed into Earth's Cruelty, use blunt side of sword to smash enemy into the ground knocking them down for 2s and applying 8 stacks of bleed(4s), if enemy had cripple or immobilize or slow or chill, damage will be increased by 20%
  • No idea for sword twin skills, probably increase range and cast time...
  • Staff twin skills: increased speed travel, removed "pls kill me" root on pile driver
  • No ideas for Dagger twin skills since I didn't use it (clunky)
  • Scepter twin skills: reduced cast time (it's burst weapon after all...)
  • Trident twin skills look fine
  • Traits:
  • Elemental Refreshment: +Dual skills are unblockable
  • Elemental Pursuit: increased attack speed for each inhibiting condition on enemy up to 5 stacks (3% each)
  • Bolstered Elements: +increase stance duration by 25%

This kind of changes I would like to see to weaver alone.

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@"BlazinFyre.2410" said:I wrote a post on the elementalist forums, figured I'd plug it over here as it applies https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/74598/tempest-in-pvp

I have ideas for weaver but they'd require some core trait changes

Yeah, on the ele subforum there were a lot of interesting threads. But after so much time ele is only being mentioned for sarcastic reasons in PvP. And noone was really talking about it anymore. I just felt we should have an ele thread here again. :tongue:

Last time we spammed in the PVP subforum (and elsewhere), we got a response in our subforum, right? Asking for suggestions! It was a huge success!

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@"Mr Godlike.6098" said:How about devs try themselves to play ranked and test their ,, ele buffs" vs anything meta related. That would really helped...

There's a legendary ele god on the Anet balance team and he/she has nothing to prove because he/she has decades of industry experience and was destroying everybody with lava font while being literally unkillable. We plebs just need to step it up instead of making poor suggestions that will instantly break the game for this ele god to be able to easily 1v5 & 500-0 every game.

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@"TrollingDemigod.3041" said:There isn't any kind of an answer to "how to make ele viable", because it's impossible to do so with powercreep from other classes, I would simply nuke everything from the orbit with nerfs and then started patching up slowly to acceptable levels.Wishful changes:Elementalist: Phoenix from scepter fire 3 moved to staff fire 3Weaver:

  • Overall: reduced cast time on auto attacks on sword, increased auto attack range on sword to atleast 180 or 240, 4s global cd of attument for mainhand and 2s for offhand
  • Aquatic Stance: selfish, every Incoming damage converted into barrier and health (65% barrier, 35% health), 25s cd, 5s interval, 4s duration
  • Stone Resonance: enemies that attack you while in this stance will be slowed (2s of slow every 2s) and will get bleed (1 stack per 1 hit, 1s interval)
  • Weave Self: attack speed increased by 15% > Tailored Victory: reduced cast time, remove additional stack of stab
  • Flame Uprising: Increased speed and range to 600
  • Cauterizing Strike: changed into Cauterizing Wave, horizontal slash from left to right in a cone, range 240 (100% damage at 120 range, 50% damage at 240range, burn)
  • Riptide: removed evade and backpedalling effect, slash downward to the ground, creating wall of water blocking incoming attacks from the front for 4s, incoming missile type attack converted to barrier, static placement, range 180, radius 120, (waterfield, healing, regeneration)
  • Aqua Siphon: you "mark" ur enemy with "leak" allowing to siphon their barrier and health to yourself for 5s, range 240, single target
  • Polaric Leap: steal 1 boon (15s cd for just a teleport at 600 range with daze and superspeed is hilarious)
  • Quantum Strike: range 240, reduced cast time, increase damage of this ability by 1% for each vulnerability on enemy
  • Earthen Vortex: range 240, radius 240, cast 1s, spin around to uprise sand from the ground to create blinding and crippling dust that last for 4s, gain barrier for each enemy that gets blinded inside dust area (blind + cripple)
  • Rust Frenzy: changed into Earth's Cruelty, use blunt side of sword to smash enemy into the ground knocking them down for 2s and applying 8 stacks of bleed(4s), if enemy had cripple or immobilize or slow or chill, damage will be increased by 20%
  • No idea for sword twin skills, probably increase range and cast time...
  • Staff twin skills: increased speed travel, removed "pls kill me" root on pile driver
  • No ideas for Dagger twin skills since I didn't use it (clunky)
  • Scepter twin skills: reduced cast time (it's burst weapon after all...)
  • Trident twin skills look fine
  • Traits:
  • Elemental Refreshment: +Dual skills are unblockable
  • Elemental Pursuit: increased attack speed for each inhibiting condition on enemy up to 5 stacks (3% each)
  • Bolstered Elements: +increase stance duration by 25%

This kind of changes I would like to see to weaver alone.

Don't be so pre-firing anet about this. Post-firing anet re-worked a bunch of skills. There's no reason why you couldn't do the same thing in a hypothetical sense. Skill reworks are the only way that you're going to see any decent improvement in establishing flexible playstyles that don't just involve somebody doing a PvE-tier rotation which makes them invulnerable while attacking and passively generating 25 might. There's a very good reason why my "Staff Buffs" thread is almost entirely comprised of skill reworks rather than just "This skill deals +X% more damage (or stuns) and casts faster now."

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I was perusing reddit and saw the changes to ele. Must say that increasing our healing is certainly a good step in the right direction, it was added to weapon that already has a relatively good time surviving. I will probably try it it out at some point down the line, but I just hope Anet keeps on nerfing other classes, rather than powercreep eles too.

I honestly dont know how to buff traits without breaking eles, same for ways to survive fights without stacking health and healing with toughness. All I know is that I look forward to one day equip marauder on D/D and go nuts.

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