TheDarkness.6947

This might be an unpopular opinion. I don’t want a new espec for ele. In fact, I don’t want any new especs at all in the next expansion. There is already way too much there. The competitive modes are already nigh on impossible to really learn unless you’re willing to treat the game like a full time job. Instanced PvE seems to come down to DPS and which classes can deliver the most OP boons with the highest uptime. Classes are starting to blur together (thief shroud?), and some of the EoD espec themes feel like a thematic stretch to me (necros chucking bottles?) Instead, I’d like them to take a huge pass at what’s already there. Make sure each espec (as well as core) can bring something unique and highly desirable to each type of content. Make sure that each trait and utility skill for every class is worthy of consideration and feels like you’re really giving something up by taking the alternative. Really balance what’s there. Add unique animations to things that are barely noticeable. That seems like a massive amount of work, but I think the game would be better for it. Adding more especs is just going to add to the clutter and make more existing specs/traits/skills irrelevant. Of course you can’t put this kind of stuff in a box and sell it. Personally I’d be happy to just buy content and whatever the next mastery / horizontal account progression system is. But if they really need to sell something in terms of characters, maybe some universal trait lines that could be used by any class are an idea. Or maybe some additional interesting trinkets or other consumable clickies. Also, please fix staff. And conjure weapons.

If you had fun with it while leveling, I think you can have fun in open world end game content, and you can definitely build to have plenty of sustain. My perspective is someone who has been playing less than 2 years, so not a long-time nostalgia player. For me what made ele come to life is celestial gear, for the simple reason that it makes all of the skills feel impactful and worth using. If watching ARCDPS and trying to max out damage is what excites you, a more focused gear set like TB might be a better choice for you. For me cele gear maximized fun. I’m ok with the idea that pulling my weight can be about more than just DPS - like CC, healing, cleansing, sharing boons, etc. even though some of that isn’t as easily measurable as DPS.

Totally with you on this. Tempest is the only ele espec I really like. The others, for me, involve too much manic button pushing and timer tracking to really get the best out of them. And I’m not really into the weaver and cata themes. The recent tweaks to tempest and some of the ele weapon skills like OH dagger have put tempest in a pretty good spot for me. It might not be meta in any game mode, but it’s not terrible in any of them, and is fun to play with a pretty good variety of build choices. It could prob still use a few tweaks but I hope they don’t do any major reworks that force it in a given direction.

Completely disagree with this part of your reasoning. Ele already has too many specs that strongly encourage piano playing just for the sake of it,. I much prefer the concept of switching attunements to strategically deal with the situation as it changes from moment to moment. If that means camping an attunement until you deem its time to swap, that feels like better, more thoughtful game play to me than constantly swapping attunements because the traits or espec mechanics encourage it.

I think these are good ideas. Ideally I’d like to see bigger changes, but I think you’re right - it’s unrealistic. Maybe these would get things moving in the right direction again and draw more people into sPvP.

Question. I typically solo Q, but I was able to duo Q with a friend for a small handful of matches last season. One thing I noticed when duoQ is that the summary screens after the match showed for both teams which players were duo Q’d. I’ve never seen this when solo Q’d or at least I’ve never noticed it. Does it only show who was duo Q’d when you are also duo Q’d?

Much like our votes in this thread.

Seems to me that a key factor impacting build diversity is that there is a huge amount of predictability in the matches. For example (speaking of regular season only, here): There are only 7 maps. They have been around forever and are known inside and out by veteran players The game mode is always conquest/king of the hill The secondary objectives on each map are always the same. Some of them can be impactful on the game outcome, others not so much You can always see the opposing team’s comp before the match and can switch characters to adjust The number of players per team is always 5 There are no random mechanics in play (e.g. like fractal instabilities) There are no random or rotating NPCs (unless you count player controlled bots lol). The maps that have NPCs always have the same ones, in the same places, at the same time stamps, and with the same objective and outcome I think shaking these things up would introduce more build variety. Of course it would require a lot more developer investment than tweaking skill coefficients.

In somewhat happier news, getting the backpack requires no specific rating.

What resources are being expended on it?

Sure I’ve always wondered. No answers for you though.

Interesting poll. I checked almost all of the boxes except for “revert nerfs”. The only reason I didn’t check that is that I wasn’t playing prior to the mega-balance patch, so I don’t know exactly what that would mean. I don’t have personal experience with whether it was generally better or worse. I do think there are some ridiculous nerfs in PvP mode (e.g. 300s CDs on traits). And it’s a bummer that build diversity is so low. Probably some new maps / game modes would help with that. While the current maps do have some secondary objectives, I don’t think any of those change what you build for, really.

The thing is, I don’t think just increasing the gold would bring any new players into PvP. Let’s say they increase the gold/hour so that it is on par with Drizzlewood - a really big increase. Let’s say you are currently farming Drizzlewood, AB, Dragonfall, etc. for gold, and you hear that you can earn the same gold/hr in PvP. Do you switch? To switch, you’re essentially asking a person to sit in long queues, run a build that perhaps they don’t want to run from a limited selection of builds that actually work in PvP, endure a long, steep learning curve just to not suck, feel bad 50% of the time when you lose, be humbled at how well you actually are not playing your character, deal with toxic players, etc. Why switch? The carrot for PvP is ascended and legendary gear, with the main competition being fractals and raids, I’d say. So what I think might work is to decrease the time/level of effort required to get those items from PvP by some amount. For example, decrease the number of shards required for ascended gear, increase the number of pips awarded to the losing team (which indirectly increases gold/hour), lower the requirements for achievements like ascension, improve the cosmetic appeal on legendary PvP armor with some FX. If people hear it’s now faster to earn ascended and legs in PvP, maybe that would be enough carrot to attract some new players. Maybe in turn the population goes up, the match quality increases, the matches are more fun, and more people want to stay after they get the rewards they came for in the first place.

I don’t think playing PvP has made me toxic. Unless you consider not engaging with the chat window at all to be a toxic behavior. PvP does make me feel frustrated and annoyed. I feel like the game mode is pretty pointless outside of being a gear farm at this point, since maybe only 1 in 10 matches are actually fun and feel competitive. The other 9/10 essentially just feel like a coin toss where the MMS decided which team would win before the match even started. But I don’t take it out on other players. In most cases I assume it’s probably not their fault - most of them are probably doing their best to win. It’s just the state of the game mode. So if you spew toxicity into the chat window, I assume you must have had that tendency to begin with. Or maybe you’ve been enduring PvP much longer than I have. I’m planning to stop playing once I have the gear I want unless the state of the game mode significantly improves.

You’ll be forced to “practice” for a while in unranked until you reach a certain number of rank points to be able to play in ranked. It’s prob somewhere between 30-60 unranked matches depending how well you do. Part of the challenge as I see it is that there really isn’t a great space to practice, learn, and grow at your own pace. As others have said, once you start playing ranked, you’ll be mixed in pretty quickly with players who have played thousands of matches over many years. Kind of like learning to swim in the deep end of the pool. I don’t think unranked is great for learning either, though. You’ll frequently face 5-man pre-made teams there that are well coordinated and will dominate the match. Who knows what they’re doing there since unranked rewards are terrible… practicing for ATs maybe. As others have said, many of the problems PvP currently has are rooted in low population. So I say jump on in, welcome, and just try to have fun. Bring a friend or fifty if you can.