Scar.1793

Your comparison is off. Just as example, a WoW expansion (base edition if you want to compare to base SotO) is 49.99€. Are you saying that by missing ~30€, you can justify having a half baked expansion that is more of a small DLC than actual expansion ? Yes WoW has more manpower due to the playerbase being way higher and the subfee, but I don’t remember HoT or PoF being bare bones at release and having to wait months of patch cycles to actually get the « expansion » features. To be honest this doesn’t look good for the long run. Since new games will keep coming with better and fresher gameplay. If anyone want GW2 to do well it has step up its game. But Anet abandoning GW2 then failing on their old « secret » project… then coming back to GW2 their tail between their legs… it just shows the lack of passion/enthusiasm by the company to evolve with their flagship game.

If that is how you feel I can’t help it. It’s just my POV and experience after boosting an ele, gearing it up, learning to play it, only to find it’s absolute pisspoor compared to other classes. Went back to warrior since it can properly use a sword and has a ton of fire VFX as berserker, which was exactly what I wanted. To top it off, not only it’s easier but more fun and effective at what it does (aka applying burning).

I’m fine with Mace getting some love because it’s honestly crap in PvE. But so is sword, without Flaming Flurry it would be a massive poop as the current sword skills are very underwhelming. Final Thrust being decent only once a target reaches -50% hp. I do think a lot of warriors weapons need some tweaks to make them more impactful and fun to use, even outside zerk mode.

Might be a silly question but between the Vigil, Priory and Whispers, which faction gets more actual impact overall in the game ? I have tried Whispers long long ago and outside of a cool charr friend and very few « secret » shortcuts/rooms, they didn’t have much going for them. I did read that the vigil gets more interactions with their leader appearing frequently in the storyline (outside of vanilla). Since I play warrior, I’m inclined to go with Vigil but I wanted to get some opinions about those groups.

yea it was set as "mature", idk why but I changed the link ^^

So I just wanted to let you guys know I went with it, took me a bit of time to set up and change my ascended armor stats, find new trinkets... but I got everything up and running. Been a real real blast so far and it's exactly what I was looking for at the end of the day. Despite Elementalist having some pros, there are too many downsides imo compared to a condi warrior where I'm genuinely having a lot of fun while feeling stylish with tons of fire VFX. I even did some WvW with the same PvE build and even though I still need to get a proper hang of the rotation/playstyle, I still managed to sit down a few thieves and rangers : most memorable moment was a 2v2 with a scrapper friend and they got deleted real quick. Next round they made me go in down state but with Vengeance I just came back and finished off the ranger lol, that was really funny. All in all, It's been a breath of fresh air and I've come full circle, started GW1 and 2 at both releases with a warrior and came right back to it. Here's a few pictures : https://imgur.com/a/TqMP5nx

Hey guys, So as I'm moving away from Elementalist and Revenant, I was looking for a profession that could properly use a main sword. I saw that Beserker can use a sword/torch setup and while it's condi, testing it a bit on the PvP golem made me realize it's actually funny to play. I used to play a condi bunker pvp build way way back in the day, and playing now reminded me of how fun it can be. I'm just curious about how condi beserker does in PvE (Outdoor & instanced group content). Is the ramp-up super slow ? It didn't seemed like it while I was testing a rough rotation, felt super smooth even if I have to weapon-swap to longbow. Could anyone with some experience on that type of build give me their thoughts about it? Maybe I should look for another profession but the visuals of beserker are genuinely cool. Even the skills are kitten !

It's genuinely a strange design philosophy. Like, why would they not improve other ways to play which would not only retain players instead of frustrating them, but you'd also get a much more better rep and in turn, attract new players.

That was my realization few days ago. Not saying I'm a master, but I sure am not a beginner. It's just that after having played other professions, you quickly realize the main issues with elementalists. I'm still on the fence but I may just end up going with holosmith despite my aesthetic issues with it. Or maybe another profession like condi warrior idk. I'm not at all a metaslave, in fact I often stray from it playing stuff I find fun/look good visually. But kitten man, there's a point where it's just not enjoyable to be gimping yourself so much. I don't know, in FFXIV and other games, you can have balanced classes and some are harder to play but can pay off really well if you know what you're doing. While not making those classes overshadow the others because they all bring something to the table. I just don't see it here for Elementalist. Elementalist started with much less HP because the excuse was "they have more skills to toy with". So not only your damage is spread out through multiple skills, now you also have professions having access to just about the same amount of skills AND having more HP, better sustain, better armor and better overall damage that isn't hard to get. I get it can be hard to balance it all, but how about some bare minimum ? It only takes someone playing and testing the professions to quickly notice something's not right here. I feel your frustration and it's indeed very puzzling when I look back at GW1 elementalist, which is a real and efficient caster. I don't understand what's so difficult to make a few targeted tweaks to allow people to enjoy what they want to enjoy. Elder Scrolls Online manages that and they don't have locked weapon-skills. I don't understand why even a decade later they can't make every weapon at least viable. Instead we get these a few weapons dominating all and that's it. You'll be lucky if they shake things up in a few years. Hey ! Thanks for your videos, it's what made me want to try Elementalist. Was a good run for me despite my conclusion of it lol. I do wish they actually gave a toss about the profession instead of balancing by looking at benchmark videos and not playing/testing the profession.

Holosmith would have been a good fit for me but there are some aesthetics I really don't dig (like the Photon Forge removing your backpiece and adding this meh texture on your character). But for an alt, it might be def worth a look ! As condi build, scepter does way more damage than sword (basically every ability adds burning and those specific burns do a ton of damage, sword pales in comparison), I guess I'm just frustrated that I can't play as condi with a tiny bit of vitality/toughness to somewhat make up for the lack of survivability. It's not necessarily the gameplay itself, because I actually find it super entertaining, but it's just lame when you're here playing piano and doing pitiful damage. To be honest I wanted to play condi because I saw some videos of a player using sword and focus (I wanted to use both weapons), and being rather tanky and doing ok damage. It does work in Outdoor PvE, but in instanced content (I'm just doing fractals for now) I can see that the damage is just not there compared to my old revenant for example. Guess I'll have to make a sacrifice and use an offhand dagger instead (I'm actually pissed because I made a focus legendary lol), Incinerator will do and it's gen 1, not too expensive/annoying to make. Seems using trinkets to add some vitality might not be a good idea either with Ele power builds since it will remove some damage (or at least crit chance). Ele should get an HP bump and some QoL though, because compared to other professions, there is just no valid reason in my mind why their HP would be so low VS a necromancer who not only gets insane base HP but also a second HP bar while doing crazy damage.

Some context : I have always been playing Warrior and Revenant, played a bit Necro and Thief. Came back recently after a long break. So here are my impressions of Elementalist. ____________________________________________________________ I will start by saying this : the Elementalist profession is deeply dissapointing despite having an interesting gameplay. After coming back from a 7 years break, I wanted to try something new. I wanted to make use of my fiery dragon sword and a profession that would use sword as its main weapon set. Elementalist seemed like the right choice since there was no weapon-swap, you had access to many skills with a single weapon-set AND it had access to fire skills which would fit my theme & style. Despite the many complaints I saw on the Internet, I wanted to give the Elementalist a fair try. I boosted one, learned to play the condition Weaver rotation and found it very enjoyable. It's ok in outdoor content but in content like Fractals, I was starting to notice that the damage wasn't really there. Sure I could do some 23k up to 27k burning ticks with boons (with a mix of mainly viper gear + a few trailblazer for some survivability), but overall after some testing and comparisons.... it's just pathetic. And I know why, because despite sword being melee, despite being geared for condition damage... YOU, as a player, are forced to go with a scepter instead. How and why a gameplay/balance designer would decide that a ranged weapon should do way more damage than its melee counter-part is very puzzling to me. But I'm not really surprised, since it was terrible balance that made me quit the game years ago. I'm still wondering how these anomalies are still happening. It feels like balance decisions are just a "whac-a-mole" philosophy along with viewing some benchmarks and deciding professions fates based on that. With some overpowered professions left untouched for years (would be better and more positive to just bring up all the others to the same level). ____________________________________________________________ All in all, I put a lot of effort on my Elementalist but I just don't see the point. Why bother when any other profession can do what you do but much better and with ease. If I could, I would have gone with Holosmith but I hate shields, the super flashy Holosmith stance (which even makes you lose your weapon-set using holograms instead) and there's not much fire going on there. I was going to try Power Catalyst but the survivability will be worse. Full glass canon with 14K HP max, while others can get at least a base of 17K with no sweat and better sustain. Today there is just no good reason to have Elementalist have such low base HP pool. Other professions have access to just as many skills and their damage aren't so spread out between them. Why is it so hard to get Elementalist to a proper level as the other professions ? Just a few key and targeted tweaks would fix so many issues.

Please think about increasing Elementalist's base HP, there's really no good reason to have it so low compared to Mesmer, Necromancer and many other professions who just have access to as many skills as Elementalist (and Ele have to work on their rotation to pull good numbers). The class is really suffering from it. Improve Elementalist's sword condi damage : this is an obvious issue when you compare it to scepter. Why would a ranged weapon do much more damage than a melee weapon, both with condi damage when you're fully geared for condi damage. It's hard to understand the design philosophy behind this besides generating frustrations. Improve Elementalist's focus, it sees very little to no play in PvE, it does need love. Dagger and Warhorn (latter even copies some of Focus' abilities) surpass it by far.

Expansions most of the time add whole new continents, brand new game features and complete storyline. Story that gets some follow up with patches. Soto has nothing of an expansion. It’s just a season pass (you’ll have to wait for the content) or more accurately, just a small DLC that isn’t finished. It’s hard to sell a half-baked DLC disguised as an expansion when it’s not finished and at the end doesn’t really add much to the table besides more class balance nightmares (as if Anet didn’t have troubles with balance patches and getting it right).

How about a skill that does more damage the more you charge it (stay pressed on the keybind, limited to a certain time until it goes off on its own) then it fires once you release. It’d give more player agency and not make the skill totally useless in PvP situations.

Are you sure about that ? Because from what I’ve seen it’s exactly what happened ever since they introduced E-specs and new weapons.