So now the dust has settled, people's thoughts on the new elites?

[Shena Fu.5792]

I don't feel any excitement for any of the new elites.

Feels like Anet's ideas have run dry, and has met the limits of design space for professions system. No revolutionary gameplay or dynamic added to the game. The new elites are either just imitations of previous elites or other profession, or have no distinction from their core class.

Bladesworn = Holosmith
Mechanist = Ranger

Catalyst, Virtuoso, Vindicator, Untamed = very little difference than their core profession.

Specter may be the only new elite that adds something new to the game (albeit very niche, not revolutionary or mindblowing). But the shroud is obviously imitating Necromancer.

What could be the underlying causes of these uninspired elites?

Skill system too rigid. Skills too similar or not impressive. Inter-skill combinations and interactions are intentionally absent, limited, or toned down.

I don't even need to read what the new weapon skills do. I just randomly smash them, and things die. The same way as before with older weapons. There's no new thought process when using these weapons.

Trait system also rigid and simplistic. Also mostly thoughtless when choosing traits for a build. The process of picking traits doesn't induce excitement.

The items may be the most rigid system of all. Still the same attribute permutations (berserker for power, viper for condition). Yawn.

Part of it could be my jadedness. But it can't be denied that GW2 systems are too rigid and conservative. Compare like Magic The Gathering. 28 years and still producing novel, revolutionary ideas and ways of thinking and approaching the game. Path of Exile every league brings original skills, items, and content that encourage radical ways to engage in combat and to planning builds. Alas GW2 will never introduce such transformative, evolutionary ideas.

[draxynnic.3719]

Having now tried the final wave of elites...

 

While there are definitely issues, the new elites do seem to be noticeably stronger than most of the first and second wave. My litmus test has been "throw a build together that seems sensible and throw it at the beasts" - none of the current wave have even struggled against this test even on the first time around, compared to previous elites where I was often barely winning or even losing as often as not.

 

Mind you, it's possible that ArenaNet has been applying feedback on the prior elite specs to the current ones too. We'll see when the November beta rolls around.

 

Spectre seems to be the best of them. Untamed I think I'd need to get more experience with to really judge it, but it certainly has potential. Mechanist feels like the weakest of the three with its elite specialisation mechanic active and since it's also the one most susceptible to losing that, I'm sceptical about it, but at worst it's the median of the EoD elite specs (at least until and unless Willbender and Vindicator get some more polish).

[Tabootrinket.2631]

Overall :
This batch of elite specializations is pretty disappointing and uninspired compared to what we had for HoT and PoF.

The only elites that gave me a good first impression are : Specter, Mechanist and Bladesworn.

Virtuoso seemed to feel kinda good gameplaywise (I'm not a mesmer user) but why bring out music related vocab when the spec merely uses daggers ??

Harbinger started with a concept that hyped me up. Using a pistol, hell yeah (why not for both hands though ?)
However,  the spec felt boring and the pistol forgettable somehow.

Catalyst is a disgusting piece of garbage.
Ele is the butt of the joke and even devs aknowledge it live on streams now.

As for the specs I didn't mention, I don't have a particular opinion on them. I didn't test them extensively, I don't really have a big affinity with those classes in general.

 

I feel like the development of EoD specializations was rushed. The specializations look like scraps of ideas patched together, and now they are trying to make them function.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Tabootrinket.2631

[Shou.6510]

Gonna skip this entire expansion

[otto.5684]

Virtuoso is my favorite so far. I like the animations. But I am biased here. I always liked the magical daggers concept and I love mesmer overall design.

 

Harbinger. It did bot work for me, but I did not understand it well.

 

Catalyst, I think I am one of the few people who liked it. But there are a boat load of issues.

 

Spectre, I liked it, but I felt it was undertunned damage wise. Also, not sure if the single target healing will be enough to justify using it in instanced pve.

 

WB, it was just sad. Redundant, boring and dysfunctional. It has some cool ideas, but the execution was pretty bad.

 

Vindicator, my least favorite. This thing sucked. The utility design is terrible. You do not create a utility switch mechanic inside a utility switch mechanic. This is a design disaster. The dodges felt weird with no animations. GS was alright.

 

Blade sworn, I liked it. I did not give it enough chance to understand all its mechanics. We need a way to customize the gun blade.

[Jski.6180]

Anet truly hates ele and every thing added to ele feels very "we have to do something but any thing will do."

[SkyCake.4216]

I'm cautiously excited for the upcoming beta. I really enjoyed Specter and think it still needs some work. But, a lot of the other e-specs need more than some tweaks or adjustments. Some, such as Catalyst, need a whole lot more! This upcoming beta will give us an indication of how much Anet is really willing to change and what feedback (if any) they deem is appropriate. I worry that nothing will really change and they won't release a blogpost about it. 

I get they said something about breaking all the rules. But, it's kind of strange that the theme of these elite-specs is "I don't normally play [profession], but I really liked this e-spec!" 

[Skyroar.2974]

Each expansion so far has had one or two elite specs that felt rushed and put together at the last moment, but EoD seems to be significantly worse in that regard. Most of the new ones have really uninspired, copy-pasted, hastily thrown together utility skills, weapon skills and traits.

 

Willbender has almost nothing going for it. Most of its new skills are slight variations of mobility + damage. It has almost no interesting trait, almost no interesting new skill besides the F3 rework and one or another, and no depth.

 

Virtuoso should be dual-wielding daggers, it fits thematically, but that would be expecting too much from what seems to be a low-budget, low-ambition expansion. It has interesting utility skills, an interesting F4 rework and dagger #3 is also cool. That's about it. Everything else, be it skills or traits, is kind of uninspired or underdeveloped. But hey, having 3-5 exciting new skills to use already puts it above Willbender.

 

Vindicator is clearly more polished than the above two, but is based its main gimmick, revenant-inside-a-revenant, is fundamentally unfun, clumsy and unnecessary. The spec would benefit a lot by simply splitting the new legend in two. I mean, the original F1 legend-swapping is already a far superior version than the new, legend-specific F3 skill swap, so why have both co-exist together? It's "innovation" for the sake of innovation. It doesn't make the class better. It also doesn't do anything to fix the class' core problems. It's an annoying gimmick that will frustrate the two different audiences that the new legend is tailored for (support vs offense). Besides that, half of greatsword's skills are uninspired, generic and boring, and I dislike how the #4 block skill takes away from the weapon's gameplay flow. At least Ranger's greatsword, which also has a block, was heavily taiolored towards damage with skills #1 and 2, and contextual utility with #3-5. Revenant's seems like it was meant to have a longer damage rotation, and then the dodge is just "there". Feels like filler, with no regards for playstyle and smooth gameplay.

 

Catalyst profession mechanic is possibly the worst of every spec across all expansions so far. It's like a worse, less interesting, less impressive, less flexible version of tempest's F skills. The hammer #3 skills are conceptually interesting, but failed in execution because of the hammer's dual range nature. Hammer having no combo fields is bizarre. The only interesting utility skill was the ice-themed one. Yet another abstract, filler elite skill. I'm in awae at how the profession that had some of the most epic and visceral elite skills at launch got abstract, filler elites three times in a row. It's like Anet has no idea what to do with this profession, or how to appeal to its audience. Besides the countless flaws, hammer should offer an interesting skillset to play it once it is properly polished, but catalyst is nothing without the hammer, besides perhaps a worse, low-budget version of tempest.

 

If I were to rate my expectations based on what I have seen so far, it would be a 4/10.

[Kodama.6453]

1 hour ago, Skyroar.2974 said:

Catalyst profession mechanic is possibly the worst of every spec across all expansions so far.

Still better than the original scrapper "class mechanic", tbh.

[draxynnic.3719]

1 hour ago, Skyroar.2974 said:

Catalyst profession mechanic is possibly the worst of every spec across all expansions so far. It's like a worse, less interesting, less impressive, less flexible version of tempest's F skills. The hammer #3 skills are conceptually interesting, but failed in execution because of the hammer's dual range nature. Hammer having no combo fields is bizarre. The only interesting utility skill was the ice-themed one. Yet another abstract, filler elite skill. I'm in awae at how the profession that had some of the most epic and visceral elite skills at launch got abstract, filler elites three times in a row. It's like Anet has no idea what to do with this profession, or how to appeal to its audience. Besides the countless flaws, hammer should offer an interesting skillset to play it once it is properly polished, but catalyst is nothing without the hammer, besides perhaps a worse, low-budget version of tempest.

Catalyst kinda feels like they tried to throw in too many ideas without considering how they'd all work together.

 

Consider the jade sphere, for instance. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it was rebalanced so that it actually works - say, it keeps the energy mechanic, but you don't lose energy when cancelling it and it has no recharge, instead you can always use it as long as you have a certain minimum energy (five seconds' worth, say). This would make it much more usable (including not being a complete sadface when the fight moves away from the jade orb), and provides for an interesting principle of putting it down to provide a valuable boon (well, apart from fire, maybe that should be something else rather than Might) and switching attunements in a deliberate fashion in order to apply whichever of those boons is the most important at the time. They then throw in a weapon skill that's based around switching through all the elements in a short time period. And utilities that ask you to dip into a specific element just to activate the utility.

 

Or that "convert combos into auras" set of traits. That could be a fun alternative to tempest for being an auramancer... if it was combined with a spec that was designed around setting up and executing finishers, with a weapon that has lots of fields and finishers in every attunement and maybe even utilities that let you put down fields outside of those associated with the element you're attuned to. What has it got? Neither. Hammer has a few (mostly high-recharge) finishers and no fields, and the utilities aren't contributing anything to pulling off combos.

 

They really need to identify the one thing that's supposed to be Catalyst's thing and build everything else around that. At the moment, it feels like it's being pulled in several different directions and none of them are actually supported well enough to properly function.

[Obtena.7952]

Catalyst is the worst spec for me. Conceptually, it's fine ... put a sphere out, finish it, get some effect/boons. But it's pretty clear to me it's design is very sensitive to the parameters of the skills and traits to make or break it. Right now ... it's break. For the complexity of the spec mechanic, finishing a sphere takes too long to get, works too infrequently and results in too little an effect. Risk/reward is just way off. 

Edited November 11, 2021 by Obtena.7952

[Avatara.1042]

The Catalyst is like they designed all the negatives and sacrifices, and then forgot to add the positives.

[LucianDK.8615]

23 hours ago, Avatara.1042 said:

The Catalyst is like they designed all the negatives and sacrifices, and then forgot to add the positives.

The Harbinger understands such suffering.

[Zacchary.6183]

Even though I am biased towards thief, Specter blew away my expectations. Traversing Dusk and Consume Shadows are what's going to define the elite's HPS. While the spec's damage is mostly relegated to core and shroud, its AoE healing is god-like. The healer role portion of the spec works well with power builds since Consume Shadows overheals and the amount you heal is based on remaining shroud HP rather than healing power.