About elementalist as PvP class

[Waffles.5632]

On 2/27/2023 at 12:21 PM, apharma.3741 said:

As long as you stay in earth. Right now it's not that much of an issue, we saw no-one using earth traitline in EU mAT (partly because earth shield exists and partly because earth line is not good) but more importantly it's about what you give up to do this. If you sit in earth you're not a threat on most builds and you're not really supporting, if you were to support in earth you would need shouts which further requires you to have a trait this powerful otherwise you'd get trained down faster than a mesmer vs 5 thieves. You would also be giving up ally cleansing in favour of being anti-power with protection on aura. Which then leads us all straight back to the "use condition damage and it melts".

By the way if we're talking about denying mechanics, skills and traits the game is full of this. Stability denies all on interrupt traits for mesmer and all on CC traits for other classes favoured by not needing such a requirement. Superspeed....or even swiftness denies mesmer shatters, clones simply won't catch you. My favourite that's been in the game: Stealth denies a lot of classes ability to fight back if their weapon requires the skill be cast on a target.
I dunno I just haven't seen stone heart be much of an issue in PvP where ele has low base health and is limited in how high it can be pushed, coupled with all the drawbacks. I also haven't seen an ele camping stone heart for long periods either like some claim is an issue.

 

I tend to agree with this too. Stoneheart in a vacuum is stupidly OP, but in practice it requires ele to sacrifice a fair bit. It definitely sucks if you're power and run into a stoneheart ele but honestly that's why condi classes exist too. It would be extremely rare for any pvp comp to be completely power and have no condi presence at all I feel.

So while stoneheart may objectively be the single most powerful trait for pvp, there are a lot of limitations put on it for balance.

I personally would still like to see stoneheart get changed into something more healthy for general pvp balance, but it's not breaking any games IMO.

I feel good eles are always switching attunements too so there's 3 out of 4 chances to get crits on them.

Edited March 1, 2023 by Waffles.5632

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

Catalyst is still proving to be broken strong.

At this point I'd say it's still T2 OP.

Teams in ATs are still running triple Ele comps and boy is it GETTING OLD.

It's really janking the game up man.

To deal with Eles you have to run Eles, it needs to stop.

[apharma.3741]

He shoots, he misses.
To deal with eles you bring necros.

Enable necro and watch ele's switch to water and leave little puddles on their way to spawn.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

On 3/1/2023 at 3:53 AM, apharma.3741 said:

To deal with eles you bring necros

Yeah, if you do Power Reaper & Condi Harb, you can roll over Eles.

But that's the thing, no one single build should require complex team configurations just to be able to deal damage to it.

[apharma.3741]

You're kinda missing the point Trevor, the point is to enable elementalists counters a bit more while toning down it's ability to ignore it's counter.

[Dreams.3128]

Remember when people used to say "just bring necro" when ele was being a problem? Or just bring Rev to eat them? What happened to those people? Necro still does it's job and not a complete throw class. Now suddenly people respond with: "Oh, we shouldn't HAVE to bring these classes." The heck happened to folks over the years???

Edited March 8, 2023 by Dreams.3128

[Zuko.7132]

57 minutes ago, Dreams.3128 said:

Remember when people used to say "just bring necro" when ele was being a problem? Or just bring Rev to eat them? What happened to those people? Necro still does it's job and not a complete throw class. Now suddenly people respond with: "Oh, we shouldn't HAVE to bring these classes." The heck happened to folks over the years???

Necro gets bursted way too easily right now in competitive play. It’s solid for ranked though.

[Dreams.3128]

23 hours ago, Zuko.7132 said:

Necro gets bursted way too easily right now in competitive play. It’s solid for ranked though.

I should've specified in ranked, because most of the folks on the forums aren't even in the actual mATs outside of select few.

[Dr Meta.3158]

24 minutes ago, Dreams.3128 said:

I should've specified in ranked, because most of the folks on the forums aren't even in the actual mATs outside of select few.

Most of the folks on the forums don't pvp. Most of the good pvp players don't visit the forums. The few that do often get labeled as crazy and outlandish because they experience pvp on a completely different level than few players on the forum that pvp. There's still people that think mechanist is overpowered. 

Anyway, necromancer used to be able to pressure elementalist and guardian due to their overreliance on boons but over time elementalist's boon generation has increased while necromancer's boon corruption has decreased. Mesmer has more boon ripping capabilities than necromancer and is a stronger counter to elementalist than necromancer from the combination of boon rip and high, easily repeatable burst damage and precise dazes on defensive attempts along with the semi capability to ignore blinds and enough defenses to counter their burst attempts. The exception being occurrences when facing stoneheart.

That and also as @Zuko.7132said, mesmer doesn't have to worry about being deleted in the opening to team fights when going in without lifeforce due to not being locked out of defensive abilities by the game itself.

The crazy part is, before catalyst got nerfed, even mesmers couldn't fight them so most definitely no necromancer could.

I'd also prefer is necromancer didn't naturally counter elementalist inherently. Expanding in that, it would be great if every class could fight every other class on the basis on skill not class matchup considering this isn't overwatch where you can just switch heroes on a whim. Even Overwatch is trying to move away from that system after realizing how harmful that balance design is after seeing how much it wrecked the game's fun and their popularity focusing on it so much in the Overwatch league.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Dr Meta.3158

[apharma.3741]

49 minutes ago, Dr Meta.3158 said:

Most of the folks on the forums don't pvp. Most of the good pvp players don't visit the forums. The few that do often get labeled as crazy and outlandish because they experience pvp on a completely different level than few players on the forum that pvp. There's still people that think mechanist is overpowered. 

Anyway, necromancer used to be able to pressure elementalist and guardian due to their overreliance on boons but over time elementalist's boon generation has increased while necromancer's boon corruption has decreased. Mesmer has more boon ripping capabilities than necromancer and is a stronger counter to elementalist than necromancer from the combination of boon rip and high, easily repeatable burst damage and precise dazes on defensive attempts along with the semi capability to ignore blinds and enough defenses to counter their burst attempts. The exception being occurrences when facing stoneheart.

That and also as @Zuko.7132said, mesmer doesn't have to worry about being deleted in the opening to team fights when going in without lifeforce due to not being locked out of defensive abilities by the game itself.

The crazy part is, before catalyst got nerfed, even mesmers couldn't fight them so most definitely no necromancer could.

I'd also prefer is necromancer didn't naturally counter elementalist inherently. Expanding in that, it would be great if every class could fight every other class on the basis on skill not class matchup considering this isn't overwatch where you can just switch heroes on a whim. Even Overwatch is trying to move away from that system after realizing how harmful that balance design is after seeing how much it wrecked the game's fun and their popularity focusing on it so much in the Overwatch league.

To do that you'd have to balance around build types and their strengths and weaknesses.
For example catalyst is a boon based build that gets stronger the more it's able to build up and maintain it's boons especially might, it's natural counter should be boon removers and it's hard counters would be corrupts.
Unfortunately necromancer has corrupts baked into the class by default so it's by default got the skills to counter catalyst across all specs unless catalyst can effectively overpower the corrupts like we have now. Woops we just fell into an arms race didn't we?
Then we look at classes like guardian, engineer and even elementalist itself that have little to no effective boon removal across all their specs and so cannot access the counter to this build type.
One answer is to have multiple strengths and weaknesses but we're now balance is getting quite complicated and there's still no guarantee a class or two won't be left out. Another thing that can be done is use the plethora of runes that are effectively useless to add these kinds of abilities to the classes that lack them, for example cantrips remove 2 boons from nearby foes etc, unfortunately there's been a bit of cross contamination going on there with skill types so this is a bit of a mine field too.
At the moment in PvP necro is feelsbadman so maybe the best way as I said earlier is to specifically target necro in PvP to make it a bit better and make sure ele is toned down to not be able to ignore it's natural counter. Then you have mesmers chrono, necro and spellbreaker to some extent able to push catalyst a bit further out of the meta.