AliamRationem.5172

Reading comprehension, my friend. I said that celestial is "pretty niche outside of sustain builds for solo play", which would be those things you listed and not raids/fractals/strikes, where only some support builds ever use it. My challenge to you was to explain why this is a problem. I disagree with your reasoning on that. First, celestial is a condi set. It doesn't work very well for power builds. It has the 3 required power damage stats, but the amounts are so low that it really kills your damage output and, unlike condi, power builds don't usually benefit significantly from the condition stats to offset that. Even for condition builds, it isn't always the best option. For example, when I solo champions I use either trailblazer or viper because the damage is better than celestial. Either I need the sustain from trailblazer or I don't. The only reason I would use celestial is if I need to sacrifice damage for more recovery (healing) than trailblazer is capable of. But in practice I don't need to do that, so my celestial template gathers dust. Even your example has holes in it. If for some reason I wanted to play a condition damage healer in open world, celestial might be the best option for some builds, but not all of them. Builds that rely heavily on a single condition would do better damage using a rune to compensate for the lost expertise. Some guardian builds work for this, but you can do it with elementalist as well. Do we need to continue? It's not a universal best option as you claim. What it is is a passable-to-good option for most builds that has plenty of sustain. This makes it a good choice for the boost, but again, not necessarily the best all-around.

I've done full fractal CM runs in trailblazer and using non-meta builds. It doesn't really say much about the stats being problematic. More that power creep is insanely high compared to years past.

Right or wrong, the decision to have distinct roles in PvE was made years ago. Nobody wants to play a healer that isn't effective at keeping allies alive. That's why defensive stats are worthless in group PvE.

And those stats are literally worthless in most cases, which is why cele isn't problematic in PvE.

They should do it as a trial week. Switch WvW over to the amulet system for 1 week and see what happens.

Sorry, I get the argument for WvW, but PvE? Celestial is pretty niche outside of sustain builds for solo play and why would that be a problem? I don't get it.

It's even more common when you make posts that ask questions like: "Is ele really as bad as they say?"

Pretty much the way of things when it comes to ele, isn't it?

On a positive note, I like Zojja's voice actor and there were some emotional moments in the SotO storyline involving her that worked for me. I feel this is something GW2 (and most video games) struggles with, either due to poor writing or weak voice acting (or both!). It's not an easy thing, but I think you guys had some success there, especially in the scenes involving Zojja toward the end of the first story release.

I only play condi sword/focus weaver. It's not remotely meta, but it's what I like. I still do enough damage to hit the required DPS checks in CM fractals where I've done enough that I'm almost to fractal champion. I've done all the raid wings and bosses, I have raid legendary armor, and I've even done some of the CMs. Same for strikes. I'm not out there to be on the level of the snowcrows guys. I'm mostly a solo casual type that happens to run instanced PvE content with my guild sometimes. For what it's worth, I've also done enough PvP to hit rank 80, finished a season in platinum years ago when people actually played PvP, and I've done enough WvW to rank 2900 almost entirely from solo roaming. All on non-meta ele builds. All of that should tell you that it's a perfectly viable class even when not played with the optimal builds. It's not bad and I might even call it a great class, although I admit I may be biased. Still, it is not without its issues and some of them are pretty frustrating to me because they just seem unneccessary. As I've said before on this forum, at this point it feels like ele is designed under rules that none of the other classes are following. It has some unnecessary limitations that might have made sense years ago, but no longer do. Things like weaver having to give up a utility slot to access CC in a timely fashion, tempest having boon support on a 180 radius and tied to completing 4 second long channels, etc. Other classes have as much or more power in these areas with none of the limitations and I think it's way past time they addressed that.

It's not just about the numbers. He provided specific examples. For instance, the fact that might generation on support tempest is linked to a 4 second channel with only 180 radius. Compare to herald, which passively generates might at 600 radius. Alacrity is likewise tied to these long channeled casts, so if you have to dodge or otherwise cancel the cast during that 4 seconds your boon uptime suffers greatly. Meanwhile other supports don't have to deal with this at all. These aren't just "Oh well, my DPS is 1k lower than that other guy's benchmark." issues. They make the class objectively worse at performing the role and where you might expect there to be some sort of advantage in exchange for that, there isn't. And this is a common problem for elementalist specs. They can do the job. But they tend to be limited in ways other classes aren't and there's just no payoff for that, which makes experienced ele mains wonder why? Why does only this class deserve to be so limited? I also provided some examples from weaver. Such as the fact that I have CC like other classes, but due to the mechanics of the spec it's often 4+ seconds out of reach when I need it and the solution to that is a utility skill that does basically nothing other than let me drop my weaver mechanics for a few seconds so I can access those skills in a timely fashion. You might think it's obvious that such a skill should be a cooldown that is always available because, again, why should this class be so limited? There's no good reason for it. But though we've been asking for unravel as an F5 for years, it's never made the list.

Is asking someone to answer the question posed a problem for you? If so, get over it. As you say, this is a community discussion. You start the thread, we discuss. Asking questions of other players to clarify points is perfectly reasonable.

How did you get this from reading that post? He's making perfectly valid points specifically comparing tempest support to other supports that were updated around the same time and he's 100% correct that tempest has some glaring disadvantages that shouldn't exist. And your response to that is...well, some guy (me, actually!) put up a video of faceroll tempest doing 20k DPS on a champ solo just pushing buttons and facetanking (By the way, they're nerfing the damage on that build significantly.)? What does that have to do with the price of tea in Cantha?

That's the funny thing about your feefees. They don't need to have any relationship with reality. The reality is open world builds and LI builds weren't even a thing years ago. Now ask what you should do if you're a new player struggling to survive in the world and instead of "go zerk or go home" you'll get "Try celestial!" Likewise if you're a new player and you want to get into raiding but don't want a "simple" 72-step rotation, people will recommend classes and builds that are very easy to play but still perform well (e.g. reaper). The game has only become more accessible and the community more willing to provide alternatives to the hardcore mentality over the years. As for SotO, which is what I thought we were talking about before this turned into a discussion of "Things FFXIV does." for whatever reason? Again, two strikes. Two dead easy strikes at that. Where's all this so-called hardcore content? I'm not seeing it.

Is this a problem only for ele though? You have a healer, so unless you're out of position or the attack literally 1-shots, at worst you dodge to buy a second for your healer to catch up. But most mechanics don't 1-shot and if they do failing to avoid that isn't going to be a great survival strategy on any other class either. Maybe I'm just used to CM where everyone dies if they ignore mechanics, but I don't feel like it's difficult to survive on my viper weaver and in fact just having earthen vortex in my rotation makes me feel like I'm ahead on the defense game a lot of the time.

How do you figure? Open world grinding = hardcore? Or is it the two whole strike bosses they released? What's hardcore about SotO?

They can't slow down. They only have 1 year and $25 worth of content to deliver.

Have you tried condition builds? Running fire/earth with trailblazer or celestial stats and focus offhand you have a ton of defense even without taking any defensive traits or utilities. Here's a sample of a trailblazer fire/earth sword/focus weaver build taking out a champion, a veteran, and a bunch of normal enemies all at once while staying above 90% health. I didn't get hit much here thanks to the strong defensive kit on sword/focus, but with over 3k armor and 20k health you don't have to worry too much about taking damage.

I definitely wouldn't want to see it simplified. My issue is the unnecessary limitations. For example, I'd like to see unravel as an F5 on weaver so that if I need CC or utility skill on 4 or 5 now and not 4 or 8 seconds from now, I have a cooldown that allows me to do that. Another example is the lack of boons on weaver. If it had better DPS than classes that have access to boons, then I'd be fine with it. It's just one more unnecessary limitation that doesn't make sense the way the game is designed today.

In my experience, playing ele isn't a problem that way. Pickup groups ask for specific roles, not specific classes generally. As long as you can perform adequately (as determined by their standard), you'll be fine playing whatever class you like. The problems with ele are more like "Why I gotta sweat and have all these limitations when those guys just roll their face across the keyboard to do the same thing with all sorts of utility safety nets?"

You have to understand some of the nuance here. Ele is not a bad class. There are just some things about it that don't make a lot of sense given the way classes are designed since EoD. For example, weaver. It was designed at a time when the devs wanted to run with this idea that classes should have tradeoffs. But they've long since discarded that notion. But weaver remains with no boons, no utility, and a tricky rotation that leaves it locked out of accessing CC and other important skills in a timely fashion. For that you would expect it to have some advantage, but that isn't the case. It's still a top tier DPS, but other classes with none of these limitations do just as much damage. As for open world/story content, as you say any class is perfectly viable and ele is no exception. Here's a sample clip of the weaver build I like for solo play. While I'd love to see some of the issues with this class addressed, I still find it fun and effective.

Weaver just doesn't make sense with the design of today. Classes are too versatile and have no tradeoffs for it. Meanwhile weaver has huge tradeoffs with no more payoff than any other class. I like the feel of the class, but it seems like everybody else is playing by a different set of rules.

I don't think that's accurate. First, because GW2 isn't limited to utlizing a single core and second because there's more that factors into the difference in performance between two CPUs than just clock speed and core count. I'd have to imagine a 10th gen i7 could handle this game fairly well. It's a high end CPU not even 4 years old at this point. We haven't had a reply from the OP, but they say they run the game at "mostly medium settings", which could mean, for example, that they're running everything on medium but have character model limit/quality on highest. That could produce this kind of issue even for high end CPUs today. Like I said, I have a 7800X3D which is one of the best CPUs you can get for gaming and GW2 in particular, but I still get framerates in the 20-40 range on the really demanding events if I don't turn character model/limit quality down.

So don't. Just accept that fans gonna be fans and you're on the GW2 forums. Is GW2 story high art? Not by any reasonable standard. But if you're going to find people that think it is anywhere it'll be here. You're not going to convince anyone here.

First, welcome to GW2. Yes, it's poorly optimized. Yes, your hardware should be more than sufficient to produce decent framerates on a 10+ year old game. Having said that, I don't think you should be getting 20 FPS with nobody else around even if you have your settings maxxed. However, if you mean it dips to 20 FPS during events or in crowded areas, there might be some adjustments you can make that would help. Specifically, the big framerate killers are character model limit and quality. For example, I have a 7800X3D and a 3060ti. If I keep those two settings on highest during ley anomaly, my FPS drops to 20 even though my normal FPS is anywhere from 100-250 just running around in the world. By reducing them to low and keeping everything else maxxed, however, it jumps back up to 60 FPS. I used ley anomaly because it's the worst performing event I've seen in the game, which means I get better results everywhere else. So, if you haven't already, try reducing those two settings and see if it helps resolve your issue.