ATMAvatar.5749

Warrior needs some love, sure, but there's no need to get hyperbolic about it. Power Bladesworn is the second-place DPS right now. The closest Elementalist spec is condition Weaver, which is still just over 3K behind. See: https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks And, while Warrior is the second-to-last in terms of representation, Elementalist is still worse. Bladesworn and Spellbreaker together out-represent Elementalist as a whole, and Berserker out-represents all but Tempest when comparing one-to-one against specs. See: https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity Here, I feel a slight jab is warranted: Elementalist has been last-place in representation since February 2020, while Warrior's only been in the dumps since this June, and at no point was Warrior below Elementalist through this period (though it got really close!). That said, the shape Warrior is in strongly indicates that intrinsic stat differences aren't really what's holding Elementalist down.

One of my biggest gripes with staff is how long it takes for most skills to do damage. Meteor Storm takes a second or two before the first meteor drops Lava Font takes a second before the first pulse Ice Spike takes a second or two before it hits Lightning Surge doesn't damage until the cast time is completed Eruption takes a second or two to finally erupt ...and every projectile takes a second or two before striking the target Literally the only staff skill that provides instant damage is Flame Burst, and before August, nearly all its damage came from the burning. As a result, most specs can do massive damage before staff even gets started. The mediocre damage is already problematic, and the delayed damage just makes it feel even less powerful. I'm not going to lie: the spec still needs significantly more damage to be viable, but it also needs to do its damage much quicker or it will always feel clunky.

Honestly, unless (and perhaps even if) you're doing CMs, play what you like. Even the T4 fractals aren't particularly difficult or DPS-sensitive.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/acronym https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abbreviation Acronyms are a strict subset of abbreviations. Thus, FBI, CIA, and IRS are both acronyms and abbreviations.

I was a little surprised at how much damage Shock Wave does now. I've seen crits nearing 18K. I don't expect that to last very long.

The tragic irony, of course, is that if you look at the wingman profession representation stats, elementalist actually needs an almost 500% increase in players to even be represented equitably (currently ~2% of players).

It is unlikely there will ever be compensation for one spec being more difficult to play than another. It doesn't matter if that difficulty comes from health pool differences, armor class differences, rotation complexity differences, ranged vs. melee, etc. In my experience, MMOs in general (GW2 is no exception) suffer what I call the "little brother" effect, whereby players will complain about minuscule DPS differences without any regard for other factors like difficulty or utility. The player doing 39K DPS will complain it's unfair someone else is doing 40K DPS, even if the first player is ranged, has a 20K health pool, wears heavy armor, has a 2-button rotation, and provides every boon under the sun, while the second player is melee, has a 12K health pool, wears light armor, has a 20-button rotation that falls apart immediately with the slightest mistakes, and provides absolutely nothing else to the group. As a result, I argue a primary goal should be to minimize difficulty and utility differences between specs, and by extension, professions. That isn't to say everyone should be identical - the difficulty can (and should) manifest itself in different ways between different specs (e.g., one spec is heavily position and range dependent, another has to juggle resources, another has longer rotations, another has to manage procs, etc.).

I have one character for each profession, and each character can have several jobs, so I have several chefs. For sure, I have a primary chef, though. Part of the issue is that my main is not my cook, but it is the only character with infinite gathering tools, so I generally bring it to my home instance for gathering nodes. However, it would be useful to have access to my bank (via the oven) inside my home instance. For example, I always forget to pick up 25 quartz crystals beforehand to fuse at the Krait tuning crystal, and it would be super convenient to have access to my materials right there. Since I don't have such access, I don't generally bother fusing crystals.

Were the home instance oven available account-wide, I'd say yes without hesitation. Being character-specific, I'm not as sure.

Given how balance patches go for ele, they'd probably cut damage in half to account for the fact you have twice as many skills available 🙃

Air overload makes my dogs bark. Does that count?

Sunk Cost Fallacy

I've had an inverted experience. Despite joining LFG 30-60 minutes before the meta starts, I think I've had 1-2 wins out of roughly 15-20 attempts, and of those failures, only a few were even within a single-digit percent left on Soo Won. In nearly every attempt, I see 1/3 or more of the squad downed to every slam attack. In every other attempt, more than half the break bars are left unbroken. In 1/3 to 1/2 of the attempts, the RNG gods conspire against us as well, getting overly frequent bites, swaps, and overlapping tail+CC phases. In a handful of attempts, the groups couldn't even figure out champs needed to be downed at the same time. Alas, these are group problems, and not for lack of one or more people explaining the fight beforehand. While I'm far from perfect, I don't personally have any trouble with the mechanics. There's little I can do to affect others, though, so I feel pretty helpless. Sadly, given the time expenditure and win rate I've seen, the meta would literally need to drop precursors to even be worth my time. I've given up for now, hoping the RNG is fixed/improved, the time investment is reduced, people learn to do better, or some combination thereof. It's too bad, as I do actually kinda like the fight.

For those not in the know, it's a reference to the I am Rich app on the iOS store that was $1000.

I won't disagree with the efficacy of this group setup, but it is a rather sad indictment of the current game balance that you have to construct groups around a few very specific builds of specific professions.