TheDarkness.6947

Revs seem really strong. Heavy armor, good health pool, high damage at range. There must be a weak spot in that armor somewhere?

Thanks for saying so. PvP in GW2 does seem like a rough one to break into. Sometimes it’s pretty discouraging. Although those times you feel like you were on your game, rotated well, and did some good stuff for your team, it’s a good feeling.

Yes I think the hero point trains still happen fairly often, just watch the LFM panels in Verdant Brink and Crystal Oasis. Before you jump in a HP train though, I would do these things. 1. Get the raptor mount from the first PoF quest 2. Get the first glider mastery from HoT 3. Run around the PoF and HoT maps and get the waypoints unlocked You will prob have a hard time keeping up on the HP trains unless you do those things. They move really fast.

Probably chilled. But I think I hate getting pushed and pulled around more than any actual condition.

As a new player, I definitely agree there’s a ton to get your head around. So many things you have to commit to instinct rather than having to think about them - if you’re even aware of said things at all. Not just the build diversity/complexity, but also map complexity, secondary objective complexity, etc. The fact that the complexity is going to see another multiplier in 2022 with new especs seems crazy. From my perspective, though, the ability to get a quality matchup is possibly the most limiting factor in getting better right now. I feel pretty confident that despite having a ranking and matching system, I’m getting matched with players with far more experience than me on a fairly regular basis. I feel fairly certain, based on the comments I see in team chat, that this is an equally bad experience for the higher skilled player as it is for me.

Anet isn’t a parent though. It’s a business. They’re going to focus their development money on the things they think will drive sales and revenue so that they can stay in business. If PvP isn’t that popular, they aren’t going to focus a whole lot of development effort on it. It stands to reason then, that the way to get Anet to give PvP more love is to it is to get more people playing it. It looks to me like they’re making an effort to do that by giving players who might have come to GW2 for the PvE content an incentive to try PvP out with the reward tracks. If those players that do try PvP out are greeted with contempt from the vets, do you think they’re going to stick around? I don’t think anyone is trying to be a bad teammate. I think maybe you long term vets are taking for granted just how much you know about PvP and how many hours/years it took you to learn it all. Jumping into PvP fresh in 2021 is a pretty tall order. There are 27 especs to understand how they work, not to mention all the build variations and the actual strategies of conquest itself. No one’s going to jump in and be good right away. My point here is that you’re looking at players who are far below your skill level as an annoyance, rather than an opportunity to build the popularity of this game mode and maybe get some new development done on it at some point. Maybe if you spent that energy helping players below your skill level to get better and encouraging them to stick with it rather than being toxic, you’d start to see PvP’s popularity increase.

So let me see if I’ve got this straight. I’m assuming Anet puts items that have zero value for PvP, like legendaries and ascended gear, into the PvP reward track to try to draw players in from other game modes. People who otherwise wouldn’t try PvP. I’m assuming the idea behind that is to try to keep the PvP population healthy enough to keep the game mode going for you. This might be a bad assumption but really, why else put that stuff in the reward track when all pure PvP really needs for rewards is cosmetics? From what I can tell from the often long queue times, plus getting thrown back in the queue 3+ times when the 10th player doesn’t accept, the game mode does struggle for player population. And you guys are purposely toxic and go AFK mid-match to try to drive those players who might decide they like PvP well enough to invest in getting good at it out? Well played.

I voted yes. Me buying EoD isn’t really contingent on what they do with ele. However, I will say I really wanted to play ele when I started this game and have found it to be disappointing enough that I just re-rolled a necro. I know that many say weaver is good. Haven’t tried it because I don’t really want to run a light armor, low health pool character as a melee. What’s the point of having to evade 4x as often as other professions just to stay alive and do the same damage? So yeah, I hope it’s not another melee weapon. For that matter, I hope it’s not another terrible ranged weapon like staff…

That’s an interesting thought. I’ve often wondered if greatly reducing the CDs - even eliminating CDs for weak skills -but then moving to some kind of spell point system that throttles the amount/power level of skills you can cast in a given period of time would make ele easier to balance without making it all clunky like it is now. That’s kind of how rev works isn’t it? I think part of the clunkiness for me is that sometimes you have to wait on a CD to even see if the skill you might need is on its own separate CD. It’s like you have to think in past, present, and future at the same time to master ele lol.

So here's what I don't understand. People seem to think that anet hates ele. But if you look at it - look at the HUGE number of skills and all the accompanying animations they've developed for it - someone(s) has done a LOT of work here. Probably more than any other profession. Heck, weaver added like 50 new skills. Somebody at anet loves or at least did love ele. So what happened? Did the dev that championed it leave? Does s/he just get ganged up on and out-voted by by the other devs at the balance meetings? You'd think with the huge amount of work that's gone into ele, they'd want people to play it rather than complain how bad it is. So, why not make it more accessible to people who want to play it by making it either A) not so terrible or B) not so punishing to learn. I'm honestly not sure whether A or B is the truth at this point. But it's definitely one of them.

At least in the US, there are roughly 2000h in a full time work year. So, just treat ele like a full time job for (9000/2000) 4.5y and you won’t feel like so much of an anti-hero playing one? I believe those say ele is very survivable and has high damage output at the skill ceiling, because I don’t personally know. And I do appreciate that the class is deep enough to not get boring. But if this is the case, I’d really like to see them find a way to lower the skill floor without affecting the ceiling, so that someone who is unable to treat it like a full time job can have some fun playing it earlier on in their multi-year journey to “gittin’ gud”.

If you ran a tempest to plat then I’ll concede that you probably understand it better than I do. I suppose you’re right. The damage isn’t terrible. But it’s certainly not spectacular enough to merit being so squishy, at least on tempest. If the damage is where anet wants it, then I suppose more sustain would make playing ele feel a lot better.

I vote for changing the in-game description of elementalist to this.

Don’t you think you should be able to fart some big damage, though? I mean, obviously other professions can do that, because I’ve been hit by it. And I bet they are doing it without spending nearly as much time micro-managing staying alive - because they have a higher health pool, better armor, good passive sustain, or all of the above. So if an ele can’t put out some massive damage during the moments it manages to stay upright, what’s it’s special thing? That you have to micro-manage every aspect of playing it to get average results? We could say that other professions are over-tuned, but they just did several rounds of balance passes. So, personally, I would say that’s the new normal, and that ele is under-tuned.

That could help I guess. I have been able to knock a foe or two around with tornado, presumably because I can move around and manually pulse it a couple times, and occasionally sneak one inside a brief window of stab gap? I’m not even sure why I pulled this toon out of Nabkha where it was able to gloriously fulfill its obvious destiny of opening 3 chests and logging out. I guess some part of my brain really wants to reconcile why anet says ele is in a good place, and yet playing one feels so bad to me. All I can figure is that they are basing “good place” on the notion that they have quelled any and all complaints that anything about ele is too strong.

So I guess my observation in PvP is that to trigger LR, you actually have to knock someone down. I’m assuming there must be some professions with an “endless candy bowl of stability to share with friends” skill or trait. Because the overwhelming majority of times I’ve used this skill, it doesn’t knock anyone down. I’m actually not sure I’ve knocked anyone down with it ever. So my “massive” #4 earthquake turns out to not do anything at all. Baby - there’s an earthquake and nobody cares. Well, that’s not strictly true. It does do these things: 1. It does somewhere in the vicinity of 10 damage, as we’ve established. 2. It goes on a 30 second CD. It’s going to be 30 seconds before I can use it to do pretty much nothing again, assuming I live that long because- 3. I think it also makes a giant sucking sound that enemies can hear. I think this alerts enemies who were previously oblivious to my presence that I am there. You know, enemies that can actually deal massive damage. I dunno, maybe this spell would be better if it also granted protection or something. So that when you have to run away from the enemies you just alerted to the potential for a free fallen hero chest, you can enjoy the run for a little longer…

Indeed, saying Mesmer is strong compared to ele will almost certainly result in anet nerfing ele some more. 🙂

I haven’t been playing long enough to have tried all the professions and know exactly what these skills are, but I’ve encountered a couple of builds that can one shot an ele from full health - over the course of couple seconds of channeling. I’d say that’s massive damage. I don’t think ele can return that favor to anyone, including another squishy ele, with one single skill. It’s possible I’m wrong on that last point and would be delighted to be enlightened if so.

It's a fair comparison in that case. I guess that's my struggle with ele though. They are so squishy. Good gravy, why can't they have a couple really strong attacks...?

I’d save the word “massive” for something more like engi’s flame jet. I’m not sure ele has any skills that I’d classify as having massive damage. It’s more like they have a bunch of skills that if you can click them in rapid enough succession can add up to massive damage. Maybe. I don’t know because I personally can’t click them fast enough to make that happen.

It’d be great to see one of the conjure weapons be an actual long range weapon that does decent damage, especially since staff is so poor. Frost bow seems like a good candidate.

Sounds about right. Rebound I think could feel elite if it would just grant the auras immediately and unconditionally rather than tied into a long delayed IFTTT. At least casting it would be guaranteed to do something useful then.

I guess so. I pointed it out mostly because it seems like a particularly shiny example of how you’d think ele would play from reading the profession description and abilities, versus what it actually plays like…

Perhaps I'm beating a dead horse here, but... Is there any chance we could get some love on conjure weapons? They feel like they were intended to fill a big gap in ele's toolkit, namely not being able to do an actual weapon swap and therefore sometimes being stuck with a weapon not very useful at a given range. But it also feels really difficult to justify slotting conjures in their current state. Why do I have to ground target to cast and leave one on the ground? It's super clunky. I know there are some traits/mechanics where there's a bonus when an ally picks it up, but does anyone actually use that? Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like a mechanic from a former game era, rather than some awesome team combo you can do in the current game. Couldn't they just be instant cast into your hands? These weapons seem decent, probably mostly due to the stat boosts, but they don't really seem OP in any way (am I wrong?) Is there a reason they have to disappear from my hands after 30 seconds? Can't they just remain until I swap back to my regular weapon? It makes it very difficult to get accustomed to using them when they vanish and then are on cooldown. 30 seconds isn't even long enough to read all the tool tips let alone get a good feel for using them. What do others think?

Earthquake The actual amount of massive damage my earthquake deals against a golem in the PvP lobby with my current power gear is 13. (Edit: 13 was a crit). Beware my earthquake and it's fingernail chipping potential?