scerevisiae.1972

spear is amazing in PVE, just it sucks in the other 2 game modes. this is the core of Anet's problem, they seem incapable of designing/balancing.

to be honest i forgot pistol even existed. haven't seen a pistol ele once in game.

just run one of these builds TBH: https://guildjen.com/gw2-wvw-builds/ also watch exzen's vids for FA weaver gameplay if you go with that, though it is definitely a high skill floor & cap build.

IMO spear is lacking supprting traitlines more than anything, like, it needs some level of customisation, along with a design pass over some of the more obvious "pure filler" skills. i think abandonning the traits/specialisations in order to pump out more (much lower quality) expacs in order to create more gemstore SKUs was a terrible thing for the game but no going back now. what could be done however is shoehorning some new weapon mechanics into existing traitlines. eg: edgings look a lot like glyphs -- just make them glyph skills and tweak existing glyph traits?

> polished product > extremely poor design choices made at times kind of contradicted yourself there. arguably, balance and engaging choices are the #1 most important design factor in any game, and if 60%+ of the weapons designed have zero appeal in one or more of your core game modes, sorry but you fail as a gameplay/mechanics designer.

this. it blows my mind that Anet are unable to make an Ele weapon that's decent in WVW. warhorn - fail, never been good sword - ok for solo until nerfed into the ground and everything else powercrept to hell hammer - fail, who even wanted another melee weap spear - fail, terrible solo, but not as good as staff in zerg 4 expacs and WVW eles still stuck with the original 12yo weapons. Anet are hands-down the most incompetent devs in gaming. Seriously, achieving some semblance of balance between weapons to give players some choices IS NOT THAT FREAKING HARD WTF.

doesn't matter how "fun" the weapon is if it doesn't have the tools to be competitive in competitive game modes. currently spear is too low damage for the level of utility/survivability it offers.

what if you have zero interest in the story or homesteads and just want to experience the content you've paid for without being forced through the story? portal scroll please.

leaving aside the ridiculousness of someone wielding a spear then deciding to pull out _another_ spear when they dive in the water. or the ridiculous game design in the first place that lets players carry around literal tons of weapons and armour in their backpacks like its nothing. i think in this case though it's pure laziness and the huge drop in game quality we've seen in recent years in GW2 where everything is now low-grade budget knockoffs: budget legendaries with copy/pasted models & particle effects, budget expacs with no specialisations or new mechanics, no new WVW content in years etc. The primary goal of expacs for Anet is to provide new cash shop SKUs (first mounts & gliders, then even more useless stuff like skiffs, fishing rods, chairs and now homesteads) The game has basically been reduced to a cash shop with (now tired & unoriginal) copy/paste gameplay attached.

there's not much of a difference between the fully edged and lesser edged versions of skills so i'm finding them not worth the opportunity cost of staying in the same element. seems like a major oversight. the damage in WVW is already super low so better to chain the 2 & 4 skills together and ignore the 3 and 5 skills for the most part. worthless skills (not worth the time to cast): fire 3 - too slow / low impact fire 5 - too slow, low damage (players just walk out without even taking a tick of damage) earth 2 - crap dmg earth 4 - crap dmg earth 5 - crap effect, crap dmg air 2 - crap dmg except on downs air 3 - only useful when kiting water 5 - only used to setup a water field to blast overall whole weapon set feels like a worse version of engineer nades, only engie nades can all be cast behind you, and engie has stealth, tons of superspeed and leaps, plus loads of other utility on ther kits and weapon skills. which is depressing considering entire ele spear kit is worse than or equal to 1 core engineer skill. ele spear should have OMGWTF damage to compensate for its relative lack of defense. comparing to ele staff: less/equal AOE damage - staff fire 5 (MS) >> spear fire 5, other AOEs are much less CC: staff: air 3 (knockback), air 5 (stun), water 4 (chill field), earth 4 (knockdown), earth 5 (immob), versus: spear: air 4 (float), air 5 (daze), water 4 (pull), less defense: staff: fire 4 (evade + movement), earth 3 (reflect) spear: water 3 (evade + movement) in short, spear in its current state sucks (WVW perspective). lack of block/reflect/projectile denial really cripples the kit. WVW ele still going to be staff, sceptre, dagger, same as 12yr ago. pretty depressing.

i thought it was clear but to make it even more clear, the animation is fine, it's the sound that's driving me crazy.

I mean the one where the character twirls their spear + super irritating sound plays. Please remove or at least add a player option to turn off idle animations/idle animation sounds. 2 hours playng the expac and i already want to alt-F4 cause of the stupid idle animations making the game unbearable.

I'm also troubled by what seems to be a consistent trend of bad design & balancing of expac ele weapons. IT's also clear the forums aren't being read nor is feedback being considered as multiple times now there's been little to no changes between beta and release other than really minor number tweaks. Hammer/catalyst is the best example ofthis where 18+ pages of almost exclusively negative feedback went unaddressed and hammer remains the same ultra-niche, PVE-golem-benchmark weapon it was at beta. The only thing to do at this point is take your money & time elsewhere. There are plenty of better games around.

yeah the damage in WVW is REALLY bad.

the damage is god-awful