Please, do something about condition elementalist builds for instanced content

[tiagotatico.6304]

I get it, doing 46k on golem was not what anet wanted with the hammer elementalist, however the damage was the only justification to play in comparison to other popular condition builds like cvirt, after the nerf the best set of weapons for tempest will be dagger/warhorn and for cweaver will be scepter/warhorn, both those classes will be doing less damage than cvirt while not offering 10% of what cvirt offers besides the damage, here are the main points for this:

1.) A condition elementalist build cannot flex a slot without a heavy damage loss (~3k), and even if it could that is no good utility anyway (besides on tempest), if only conjured weapons didnt had the horrible cast time and you had to pick it up again ..., for instance a cvirt takes a small hit (~1k) and has access to portals and feedback, which are very usefull on some encounters, besides that you could equip mantras that have cc, giving stability for a group, healing conditions, etc ... Not only that but cvirt gets to flex the elite skill losing only 800 dps while cweaver and tempest gets around 4k loss.

2.) Lack of CC available on its rotation, since EoD every instanced content, and some on open world too, that anet has made requires a good amount of CC, usually the cc of elementalist is located on air and water and on the offhand usually, but the condition builds uses fire and earth, so for cweaver you never have cc available on your rotation, you have to swap to a element that does not apply any conditions and then swap to another element, this means that you have to predict when you need to cc and delay your rotation according, losing dps, and then losing even more to swap to air or water, and all of that you still do a very small amount of cc, on cweaver the most efficient way to cc when you need is to make sure you are main hand on earth when you need, but earth auto sucks, you want to spend the least amount of time as possible on it, so it means that when you know that a cc is going to happen you want to hold on fire, swap to earth, swap to air, swap to fire, and then you have a cc, this requires quite a bit of preparation and raises the skill floor by a lot besides the natural difficulty, even if you dont care that much about damage and camp earth when you feel like a cc is going to happen you still have to plan because the cc is on the offhand. This is only one of the problems, the other is the actual cc amount, talking about the cweaver, air/earth 3 = 150cc, warhorn  4 = 150cc, 300cc on total, on tempest its about the same amount of cc but its a little bit better because it has more of ease of access, since you dont have a global cd on the attunment swap, now lets compare with cvirt, it has 250cc from bladesong dissonance, chaos signet for 300, sword 4 200 and focus 4 150, a total of 900cc, this is not even talking about using moa, adding 600, since the elite does not add that much damage anyway, and even if a elementalist takes the heavy loss for the elite and use tornado, it does not even match the moa signet and have a horrible usage, you have to be on tornado mode and the skill 5 that does most of its cc have a huge forward movment, meaning that you will be put out of position, and moa is instantly, you cast and forget

3.) Reliance on boons, after the nerfs cvirt and cweaver have the same condi burst damage profile, tempest has a more slow ramp up, however this is only possible for cweaver thanks to weave self, where you loop faster trought the elements and gains damage modifiers, however you have to somewhat follow a rotation to do so, but if you lost alacrity or quickness your rotation will fail, you want to set up your weave self rotation to have the highest uptime possible before going for perfect weaver, it means that if you lose one of those 2 boons your rotation will likely be incomplete before the time to reach perfect weaver and you will no longer have the condi burst.

4.) Reliance on meele range, this is more of a problem for tempest than weaver, but you have a lot of skill that requires meele range, for cweaver you have the primordial instance that adds around 3k ~3.5k, wildfire and and dusty storm, while cvirt loses only the f5 skill, but he can just spend the blades in another way, on tempest is even worse, pretty much all of your skills are bellow 300 range, and this is bad for a condition build, because, usually, on conditions fights the boss moves a lot, like fractal 100 and 99.

You may argue that the points 3 and 4 are merely a skill issue and i should get good, however we have a third party website called wingman, where people from endgame content post their logs, and you have some info from all that data collected, for one despite having a benchmark of 46k and cvirt having 42.5k, cvirt beats cweaver on most of the content, and most important, on the hardest content from instanced content (fractal cm 99, fractal cm 100, KO cm, XJJ cm, OLC cm, Dagda cm, Dhuum cm, and the list goes on), so this cleary means that many things (including point 3 and 4) besides the golem benchmark should be taken into consideration when choosing to nerf or buff a elite spec.

For the what i think it should be done: buff focus, this weapon was the offhand option before soto release, however you guys addressed the warhorn problems by nerfing weaver and cata, meaning that focus, and other weapons, got worse, focus has a much better cc, also while we are at it unnerf warhorn cc, make it so warhorn air 4 can hit multiple times, add cc to earth, its thematic possible that, when you throw a stone on someone, he gets knocked so maybe some cc added on earth, also please, add cc to main hand, rework elemental weapons, they can work like a kite, ammo, work like a normal skill where you use and go instantly to the elemental weapon, from which you can use weapon swap to return to your main weapon, that is many options but the current one is just bad, im not sure how you will address the point 3 and, 4 and 1 in part besides simple increasing the dps to match real encounters, but seems like this is not an option, so you will have to do a heavy rework or just accept the dps difference on golem, it dont have to be done by buffing elementalist, in my opinion condition virtuoso is a outlier, so it can be nerfed. Looking at elementalist performance on competitive mods (PvP, WvW) some of those solutions can also help on those mods, such as the elemental weapon and cc main hand and on earth so you kill two birds with one shot.

That is it, sorry for the long post 🙂

[tiagotatico.6304]

and i did not even mentioned the difficulty of the build, too many problems 😅

[AliamRationem.5172]

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.

[Mascarun.7910]

Take the damage out of elementalist and you are left with a sad elementalist. A lot of nuance to elementalist must have been purposefully ignored for them to consider a nerf this big for condi hammer tempests/weavers. Even if they nerfed virtuoso, the future is bleak for hammer; it will become a weapon with no purpose in instanced PvE, or at best very niche.

[Guybrush.4762]

The current dps output for condition hammer Tempest/Weaver is probably too high for its own good and tweaking the number is the logical and healthy decision. I would love to see some damage traded for a bit utility. Because, well... big numbers is pretty much the only selling point of the build at the moment and addressing that relative lack of utility is also - in my opinion - a logical and healthy decision for the game. The tempest variant for example provides some might and is durable, that is it. The proposed nerf represent about 9-10% less dps loss with the current rotation which will put the dps number lower than what appears to be the dps target for condi builds. I guess Anet plan may be to nerf it "too much" and hope people will find a better rotation to push it upward just enough... we will see what happens but so far the future new rotation seems to be "play dagger/scepter + warhorn instead until pistol is released" which is a bit sad to be honest 😄.

Edited January 16 by Guybrush.4762

[soulknight.9620]

Dont worry in a day or so a SC member or a different elitist/MegaOmegaProPlayer will pop by and tell you that:

1) nerf is justified, eles cant do the same dps as a "normal" class,

2) the rotations are sooooo easy, you just need to git gud,

3) ele has tons of utility scattered all around its 4 attunements, you just need to learn to use it (git gud (2) ),

4) ele has tons of CC scattered all around its 4 attunement, you just need to time your rotations (git gud (3) ),

5) ele has the best survivability built in, you just need to find it and learn to use it (git gud (4) ),

6) reliance on melee is not bad, you should stack anyway (not like thats the point but w.e.),

7) ele has loads of self boon generation/ all other classes depend on boons too. You just need to spec boon generation (at the cost of all your dps) and/or bring personal boon generator friends to play comfortable. Its not like any other profession can upkeep self quick or anything in full dps build, right? 

8 ) Weaver should not be different to other specs/classes or have a unique role/perk/gimick cause well every class/spec should be able to do every role and that support focused tempest should pump up more dps than selfish weaver. 

9) Stop proposing changes to ele so that it can perform like other classes, cause I/we/they/them like to: a) play this underperforming class and suffer, b) im a sc member and i can get 50+k dps on a golem so im fine with that. 

10) Nerf it cause it is powerfull in spvp/wvw (its not like we are talking pve balance but whatever). 

Did i missed anything? 

[DaKillaOfHell.5907]

17 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Dont worry in a day or so a SC member or a different elitist/MegaOmegaProPlayer will pop by and tell you that:

1) nerf is justified, eles cant do the same dps as a "normal" class,

2) the rotations are sooooo easy, you just need to git gud,

3) ele has tons of utility scattered all around its 4 attunements, you just need to learn to use it (git gud (2) ),

4) ele has tons of CC scattered all around its 4 attunement, you just need to time your rotations (git gud (3) ),

5) ele has the best survivability built in, you just need to find it and learn to use it (git gud (4) ),

6) reliance on melee is not bad, you should stack anyway (not like thats the point but w.e.),

7) ele has loads of self boon generation/ all other classes depend on boons too. You just need to spec boon generation (at the cost of all your dps) and/or bring personal boon generator friends to play comfortable. Its not like any other profession can upkeep self quick or anything in full dps build, right? 

8 ) Weaver should not be different to other specs/classes or have a unique role/perk/gimick cause well every class/spec should be able to do every role and that support focused tempest should pump up more dps than selfish weaver. 

9) Stop proposing changes to ele so that it can perform like other classes, cause I/we/they/them like to: a) play this underperforming class and suffer, b) im a sc member and i can get 50+k dps on a golem so im fine with that. 

10) Nerf it cause it is powerfull in spvp/wvw (its not like we are talking pve balance but whatever). 

Did i missed anything? 

 

 Yeah, you forgot the "but then my class/profession xyz isn't good anymore!111"

[tiagotatico.6304]

6 hours ago, Guybrush.4762 said:

The current dps output for condition hammer Tempest/Weaver is probably too high for its own good and tweaking the number is the logical and healthy decision. I would love to see some damage traded for a bit utility. Because, well... big numbers is pretty much the only selling point of the build at the moment and addressing that relative lack of utility is also - in my opinion - a logical and healthy decision for the game. The tempest variant for example provides some might and is durable, that is it. The proposed nerf represent about 9-10% less dps loss with the current rotation which will put the dps number lower than what appears to be the dps target for condi builds. I guess Anet plan may be to nerf it "too much" and hope people will find a better rotation to push it upward just enough... we will see what happens but so far the future new rotation seems to be "play dagger/scepter + warhorn instead until pistol is released" which is a bit sad to be honest 😄.

also another problem is that warhorn is meta for every buid on elementalist, like every build, support, any type of dps, i want my dagger and focus back 😞

[MAROCTHEBOW.5287]

TBH hammer could of just been easily nerf within Flame Wheel (the condi side) by 1-3% and we wouldn't be having so much of an issue with it, its just that they aimmed the nerfs at 3 random skills instead of the one they buffed in the previous patch.  The nerfs in the upcoming patch feel randomly targeted with no thought about it other than "oh it has condi duration.... better nerf it" instead of thinking why the weapon got to its position, its like they forgot what they did 2.5 months ago in the last patch.  Oh also this nerf is so overboard as well on Flame 2 specially that it gimps the weapon hard after you swap off fire.

If they just aimmed at Flame Wheel instead and lower the dmg by 2-3k instead of 4-5k, the weapon can sit nicely next to the one-handed weapons as a choice.  Giving Elementlist players the choice between Hammer, Sword, Dagger, Scepter and Warhorn (as always).  But instead they wanted to butcher it so much that now it can't compete against the one-handed weapons and specially how good Warhorn is as a off-hand weapon (it offers more cc and tools than hammer does).  All this patch has shown me is that they still haven't changed and lie to their players with information on how they are listening (plus highlighting they forget their previous changes specially how they are handling Mirage atm). They should listen to the community more and on top of that, show us that they listen instead of being so closed off because it isn't helping anyone both in the developer team and the community relations.

Edited January 16 by MAROCTHEBOW.5287

[MercurialKuroSludge.8974]

Ele Competitive is 1 thing...
Ele PvE should get tune ups, absolutely.