ROMANG.1903

I don't want any skill to be useless. I want it to be useful for what it was meant to do in the first place, deal with packs of mobs. But it doesn't need to be buffed by the entire group, that's the part that makes it overpowered. If the duration of copied conditions was increased in trade of having it only copy the necromancer's conditions, that would be perfectly fine in my eyes.

You're saying yourself that the game evolved to make the skill more powerful. Players don't dictate the meta, players *find* the meta, which is dictated by class design and balancing. I wish that were true, I wouldn't be here talking about it. Clearly you have never tried to find a CM group with a non-meta build. Players don't want to think about the game, group composition or mechanics. Even if you effectively perform equally, they will not take you, because doing it your way requires 5% more brain power. You make it sound like that's a tradeoff, but in group content, there will always be a group. You can't make a class straight up better than the others and justify it by "it's only strong when you're playing the game normally". I can't think of any other single skill that benefits so much from your allies, excluding support of course but that's because you base your entire build around it. Epidemic would be just as good as a trash-clearing skill if it copied only the caster's conditions, but at a higher efficiency. That way you don't demand players to base an entire group composition around it to buff it as much as possible. Only recently has this allowed us to straight up ignore a boss's mechanics, stand inside every AOE, ignore adds or mechanics that damage you if you don't deal with them, because we can just spam heal through their damage and keep DPSing the boss. We've been really smart to come up with these tricks, but now we're using them to turn off our brains and sleep through the content, while excluding anyone who wants to actually have fun by doing anything slightly out of the ordinary.

Yes? That is the basis of how you direct player behavior? Players will always go for the most optimal option, you can't expect them to do things differently when there's one, clear, better way to do them. So yes, this is a perfectly valid reason to nerf a skill. Oh well, why do we even have mechanics at this point? Might as well have every boss be a HP bag with a different coat of paint. That's gonna make the game interesting and fun to play! Except I was responding to you, who said changing the skill in PvE would harm WvW. So, which is it? Because in both cases, I still think it needs to be nerfed for the health of PvE. I do not think that "players took a long time to figure it out" is a valid argument to leave an overpowered mechanic in the game. I don't understand you. What does, to you, qualify as "abuse"? Because this skill alone is dictating the meta. It is abuse because there's no other way to be as effective with the same ease. It is effective because people abuse its mechanic. It's happening, currently, right now.

I also think the support/healer role in general (which includes Firebrand) needs to be tuned as to not monopolize the build options. I mean, a year or so ago it was all about chonomancers and druids, and now no one wants to see them? They all deserve to be viable. Except, I never played support. Not even in the lowest skill tiers of the game. So I do not think it is my place to discuss these topics. But if you make a post about Firebrands needing to be tuned better to make room for others healers, you will have my full support. However, I do main, and exclusively play in fractals, a burst DPS Weaver. My performance in this game, mechanical and numerical, is one of the few things I am confident about. Yet I witness first-hand the exclusion of burst DPS builds in CM fractal runs. We could easily CC the adds in Sunqua, it doesn't take much. But players want the easier, slightly less demanding option of "stack around the support and do your regular roation, ignoring all the mechanics". That is on top of unbelievable KP requirements which already gatekeep newer players out of this content. I have my own opinions on that too, but I wanted to keep this post focused on a single topic. As for World vs World, there are almost no utility skills that are useful in every game mode. And currently, in order for Epidemic to be viable in WvW, it needs to be overpowered in PvE. That is, in my opinion, even less healthy for the game.

I know this sounds bad. I know everyone, including me, loves to play with their unique class tools. I wouldn't be suggesting this if Epidemic alone wasn't effectively excluding burst builds from CM fractals. The last thing I want is to turn this ability useless. But currently, it virtually makes entire builds sub-optimal. I do not know for sure how to fix the ability. A couple of things I can think of are, reducing the transfer area, or limitting the condition transfer to only those that were applied by the necromancer using Epidemic. A more fanciful approach... Would be to go the opposite way entirely, and give one class a way to do the same thing as Epidemic, but for burst damage: Apply a debuff on the current target that, for a few seconds, duplicates all direct damage to 5 ennemies in a 900 area around them, at 50% effectiveness.

I got teleported into the Heart of the Mists while flying above its portal in Lion's Arch. I was flying several meters above the head of the nearby lion statue with my griffon, unmistakably waaay outside the portal. In case this matters, I was flying due north.

Make the "Snap Ground Target to Current Target" option skill-specific instead of being an all-or-nothing deal. Since you can't set a ground-target ability as an auto attack, my suggestion would be to make Ctrl+Right clicking on a ground-target ability toggle "Snap Ground Target to Current Target" on and off for that ability alone, independently from the others abilities.

Personnal Outfit Slot A Personnal Outfit works just like a regular outfit and can be swapped for free. It is assembled by the player using armor pieces, which can be changed using Transmutation Charges. Every character starts with one Personnal Outfit slot, which replaces the current wardrobe. Personnal Outfits always appear on top of the Outfits list. Additionnal Personnal Outfit Slots can be bought in the Gemstore. My personnal suggestion would be to make the slots account-wide instead of character-specific, though each character should still be able to customize their slots separately from others characters on the account.

Then my suggestion makes even more sense: Reduce the ability's radius, concentrate the damage on a smaller area so that the difference between large and small hitboxes is minimized. Then you can ajust the numbers to make it just right.

That would be nice if only they reworked conjured weapons to work more like kits. Currently they are really clunky to use, with a limitted time and a second "charge" that can be taken by an ally and disappears after a while. Elementalist could be so fluid and fun if they just worked like engineer's kits...

I am making this post from a PvE, DPS point of view. Staff Elementalist is the perfect answer to those who seek the archetype of a classic mage in Guild Wars 2. But... It's virtually useless except for tagging mobs in farming squads. I remember back in the ancient times, with the old talent system, there was a trait that increased the area of all our staff skills. I never took it, because that meant Meteor Shower would have more chances of missing the target... And this trait, if memory serves, has been made baseline. Which I liked for most weapons, except it did kinda ruin Meteor Shower. I've heard that for a time, staff was actually pretty great, unfortunately I did not experience that, as I was on a break at the time. I've tried Core, Tempest and Weaver with staff. The later definitely has the most interesting rotation of the bunch, but it's still very underwhelming in terms of performance compared to Sword/Dagger. All that just to say, staff needs a buff. One easy, substantial buff (besides just changing the numbers) would be to make Meteor Shower more narrow so that it has more chances to hit the main target.

A little bit of everything can be just as good as a lot of a single thing. You can start casting a blast finisher and swap to your desired attunement for the combo field. If the well didn't change based on your current attunement, it would just be Tempest 2.0. I mean yeah, play Tempest, drop your air "well" and do your DPS rotation?

For years we've mastered the elements without any help, none of our utility skills involve us using a tool of any sort (we make our own conjured weapons). But now we need a gyro to do it for us? A gyro that summons a spirit that summons a combo field? I know this is just the animation but it feels very convoluted (looks a bit like the devs were undecided between a spirit and a gyro so they just put both, and now the animation is very clustered) and, in my opinion, unfitting of the class. I'd rather have us directly invoke ancient spirits, without a gyro looping around, it feels a bit silly...

Fishing and skiffs are a nice little touch, but let's be real: It's definitely not an expansion-level feature. I won't be buying skiff skins nearly as eagerly (if at all) as I do mounts and gliders. Maybe if a really good boat design comes up, but that doesn't seem to be possible unless ANet is willing to drastically alter the shape of the skiff through skins. And even then, one or two would suffise. I also don't like that the main ability is a boring speed boost: Abilities that you just have to spam on cooldown are not an engaging gameplay. As for fishing, I was really hoping they would manage to turn this dull feature into something interesting, but the bar slider misses the mark for me. At this point, just make it like gathering nodes and don't have us bothered with unnecessary minigames.

I agree ANet tends to overuse these lighting effects everywhere, instead of letting the scenery breathe. But removing them alltogether is worse in my opinion: The fact is, the game was made to look good with these effects.