Conjure weapon build and love

[Leo G.4501]

53 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Meanwhile, conjures! Except that the ranged conjures are all bad, because they've been balanced so they're not OP when two are used simultaneously, which has translated into being so bad in practice that nobody who knows the numbers wants to pick them up (elite excepted, but that's balanced with a prohibitively long cooldown). And if an elementalist does need that standoff capability for longer than short bursts, you either need to carry two (goodbye utility slots, hope you don't need too many stunbreaks...) or to hope that they can pick up that spawned weapon at as close to 30s as possible without it despawning first, and that somebody else doesn't pick it up by accident or out of a sense of 'novelty'.

Face it, it's a cute gimmick, but it's a gimmick that's holding back an entire group of skills, a group that without that handicap could be the solution to a problem that elementalists have struggled with pretty much since release. "You managed so it must be okay" is just not a good counterargument.

You're still not making an argument. You're just promoting that you already don't need conjures while, in the same breath, hoping, begging and praying sacrificing something on the alter will grant you the buff your heart thinks it desires but has forlorned since they change the multihits on large hitboxes.

At the end of the day, you're still asking to genericize a mechanic in the hopes to make it stronger and that is why the game has kept spiraling into the same tailspin it's been going, desperately chasing validity in the meta for no reason but to increase a dps benchmark that isn't needed to complete the content. It's futility by definition because, unless the change pushes those benchmarks further, conjures will still go unused at the price of another player's fun.

I can tell you, those players that do get a jolly out of conjures, you just don't care about. It doesn't work the other way around though because players that currently don't find conjures fun simply don't use them and they are likely content with that by now.

[Bleikopf.2491]

What's the opinion on making the second conjure weapon a trait option? So if you pick the conjurer trait in Fire, you drop a second weapon? 

I haven't thought this through, but it seems like it would allow base conjures to get a little more power as the powerbudget now includes a trait (that's currently underused). 

[Leo G.4501]

10 hours ago, Bleikopf.2491 said:

What's the opinion on making the second conjure weapon a trait option? So if you pick the conjurer trait in Fire, you drop a second weapon? 

I haven't thought this through, but it seems like it would allow base conjures to get a little more power as the powerbudget now includes a trait (that's currently underused). 

From the perspective of keeping the unique flavor of the skills, it would work. But meta-gaming min-maxxers will still complain to change the trait into something more useful for them to use.

Even I would argue they could add a little something on top of the trait retaining the dropped weapon feature, tho.

[Bleikopf.2491]

Conjured Weapons are mostly just clunky. Picking them up is a chore. There are may ways to improve them. From the top of my head:

• Reduce the time to pick up a weapon from the ground. Or just remove it. 
• Make the ground targeted AoE more impactful. Conjure Fiery Greatsword creates an impact. Add similar effects for the conjures, so the cast times don't feel so horrible. Add a Geyser to Frost Bow, Eruption to Magnetic Shield, Fire Ring to Fire Axe, Lightning Field to Hammer or something similar. 
• Fix the stat bonuses. In theory it allows to lean into the niche the conjure provides, but.. Healing power and Expertise on Frost Bow? 

[Liewec.2896]

make them have infinite duration but with a cooldown.

so for instance you'd use lighting hammer like you normally would, except it would have infinite duration,

only ending when you reactivate Conjure Lightning Hammer (or the drop bundle button)

the skill could either go on cooldown the moment you use it, or the cooldowns could be reduced and being when you stop using the weapon.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 4/12/2024 at 10:41 AM, Leo G.4501 said:

You're still not making an argument. You're just promoting that you already don't need conjures while, in the same breath, hoping, begging and praying sacrificing something on the alter will grant you the buff your heart thinks it desires but has forlorned since they change the multihits on large hitboxes.

At the end of the day, you're still asking to genericize a mechanic in the hopes to make it stronger and that is why the game has kept spiraling into the same tailspin it's been going, desperately chasing validity in the meta for no reason but to increase a dps benchmark that isn't needed to complete the content. It's futility by definition because, unless the change pushes those benchmarks further, conjures will still go unused at the price of another player's fun.

I can tell you, those players that do get a jolly out of conjures, you just don't care about. It doesn't work the other way around though because players that currently don't find conjures fun simply don't use them and they are likely content with that by now.

So literally every criticism of the playability of every profession can be ignored because it's still possible to complete the story with them, even if doing so requires carefully selecting builds that minimise those issues?

My argument is that conjures COULD be balanced in such a way as to be something that you can bring to alleviate the weaknesses of your primary weapon, whether it be lack of range, lack of defences against a close-in opponent, or whatever. And this is absolutely a problem! I'm currently replaying HoT with an ele, and I still feel compelled to run a scepter pretty much everywhere because sometimes you need range! And that's before we even get into bounties, some of the later strikes, and so on!

Now, you could claim 'but you get through it with scepter, so what's the problem?' Well, wouldn't it be better, even from the most casualist of casual viewpoints, if taking a sword and slotting in a flame axe or frost bow for when you need range was actually a practical option?

At the moment, it isn't. Maybe you get a frisson of novelty when you pick up someone else's conjure (possibly ruining their intention to pick it up and use it themselves) - but that's all it's good for. ArenaNet decided long ago that sharing conjured weapons wasn't actually good for the game and nerfed it out of existence. We can either accept that reality and slaughter that sacred cow so conjures could at least be made useful for the elementalist - or we can consign conjures to forever be a dead utility group that serves only to give a speck of cool factor to new players until they too realise how bad they really are.

Edited April 13 by draxynnic.3719

[Leo G.4501]

10 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

So literally every criticism of the playability of every profession can be ignored because it's still possible to complete the story with them, even if doing so requires carefully selecting builds that minimise those issues?

Not just story.

Haven't there been raids that cleared using only auto attacks or with minimal gear? I'm just saying you shouldn't have to clip cool and unique stuff just so everything fits in meta builds with minimal effort.

[Coldtart.4785]

Add some sort of effect when conjuring a weapon (eg 3s block when using conjure earth shield and rework the cata earth augment to be something else).

No time limit on the conjure, cooldown starts when dropping it and is much shorter than currently.

Normally have the conjure skill replaced with a skill to dismiss the conjure while it is equipped and have a trait that causes this to summon a second weapon that can be picked up with the usual time limit.

[zeyeti.8347]

On 4/11/2024 at 12:04 PM, draxynnic.3719 said:

Oh, hey, the "elementalist already has 20 weapon skills" argument being hauled out again...

The problem is that elementalist actually ends up getting less utility out of twenty weapon skills than most professions get out of regular weaponswap. Most builds have attunements that they just don't use, unless they're looking to trigger Weave Self or something like that. The skills on the attunements you do use have lessened effects so you're just pressing more buttons to achieve the same performance.

And most significantly, elementalist cannot change their range of engagement like other professions can. Other professions can have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon (engineers would use kits to do this. Elementalists can't. The closest is hammer, followed by dagger, but in practice their ranges, projectile speeds, and in dagger's case damage is too low to be anything more than a token.

Conjures could be the tool to resolve this. Use your main weapon when it's practical, swap to a conjure when it's not.

Problem is that it's a cute trick that most people grow out of. Conjures have been nerfed heavily enough, and other professions have been powercrept enough, that the most efficient thing to do if you accidentally pick up a conjure is often to drop it again. Fiery greatsword might be an exception to this, but you wouldn't use someone else's lava axe, frost bow got nerfed to the point where you wouldn't need it unless you really needed an extra CC (and that CC has a long cast time so you hopefully don't need it right away), lightning hammer wasn't nerfed quite as hard as frost bow but has ended up in about the same state, and earth shield... maybe you would use it, and maybe in the process you've taken something that the elementalist needed for their own survival.

It's become a gimmick, but because the conjures need to be balanced according to the gimmick, they can't be balanced so they're actually useful to the elementalist themselves either.

And i do agree with that , so does the conjured weapon atm bring up some utility actually to the already lackluster design of the "versatility" of ele ? answer is no !

I've stood it up in every ele forum , stop making versatile weapon for ele , give a weapon who is good at a specific role in e-v-e-r-y attunement , ele has always been balanced around having 2x the skills the other have and your take is absolutely correct that we use maybe half of the skills with a specific role , but that's not the point in the thread here , ele doens't need another set of 5 weapons skills cause he has 20 others to already use , never said those 20 were actually good , in fact half of them are bad becasue we don't use it, but having atop of them 25-30 skills because we add some conjures in the utility is not gonna solve anything , 

Conjures weapons have a long cooldown and have literally no impact , that's why i thought the idea of not missmatching them with cd of already weapons skills (who are rather lwo cd) but instead making them more impactfull in utility skills (who have a rather longer cd)

If you want to replace the bad weapon skills and fill it up with conjure weapons , then they must work like engi kits without a cooldown , cause you might need them anytime , and i don't see anet making it an engikit ripoff , even i don't see anet taking acre of ele in pve , they cannot think of a way to balance the class properly anyway such proof the super low playrate , ppl don't like the ele that's all and anet seems to not care even nerfing it after pistol release cause good old excuse "ele is gonna be meta again" yeah if 0.5% is a meta number ...

[draxynnic.3719]

On 4/14/2024 at 2:41 AM, Leo G.4501 said:

Not just story.

Haven't there been raids that cleared using only auto attacks or with minimal gear? I'm just saying you shouldn't have to clip cool and unique stuff just so everything fits in meta builds with minimal effort.

People have cleared vale guardian with ten heal tempests (before alactempest) simply outhealing the enrage damage.

Just because you CAN do something doesn't make it good.

Sharing conjure weapons was effectively balanced out of the game nearly a decade ago. We can retain a gimmick that feels cool but in practice has led to almost the entire skill group being dead, or we can hamburger that sacred cow and allow three out of six primary elementalist weapons to be actually used in regions where you might find yourself needing a ranged option (and some of the others be used in regions where you might find yourself mobbed in melee and needing better melee defensive options than staff can provide).

On 4/14/2024 at 10:35 PM, zeyeti.8347 said:

If you want to replace the bad weapon skills and fill it up with conjure weapons , then they must work like engi kits without a cooldown , cause you might need them anytime , and i don't see anet making it an engikit ripoff , even i don't see anet taking acre of ele in pve , they cannot think of a way to balance the class properly anyway such proof the super low playrate , ppl don't like the ele that's all and anet seems to not care even nerfing it after pistol release cause good old excuse "ele is gonna be meta again" yeah if 0.5% is a meta number ...

They don't need to be like engineer kits without a cooldown. Regular weapon swap has a cooldown, after all. What they do need, however, is the ability to keep using a single conjure indefinitely if they need to, without having to worry about some random picking up their weapon because "novelty". And for flame axe and ice bow to actually have clear functions rather than being all over the place with their skills.

It's not a case of "replacing the bad weapon skills" - as much as that's a retort to the "but you have 20 skills" people, it is how ele is balanced, for better or worse. It's more of a case of noting that one of the problems ele has is that unlike every other profession, it has no way to respond to changes in the range of an engagement by swapping weapons. Conjures are a pretty obvious potential answer to that.

[zeyeti.8347]

23 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

They don't need to be like engineer kits without a cooldown. Regular weapon swap has a cooldown, after all. What they do need, however, is the ability to keep using a single conjure indefinitely if they need to

And in order to do that they need a freaking short cooldown , becasue else you will competely negate the fundamental of ele : squeeze as many weapon skills as you could between two attunement swap .... that works for all dps ele , now htemp is another thing 

Anyway this thread is throwing rocks at fish , anet is never gonna change the conjure weapons they definitly let the ele rot like a rat in pve , and i don't see it change in any ways , the rework to make the whole spec equal in efficiency and complexity to all others classes is way to far tunneling.

[Jski.6180]

8 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

People have cleared vale guardian with ten heal tempests (before alactempest) simply outhealing the enrage damage.

Just because you CAN do something doesn't make it good.

Sharing conjure weapons was effectively balanced out of the game nearly a decade ago. We can retain a gimmick that feels cool but in practice has led to almost the entire skill group being dead, or we can hamburger that sacred cow and allow three out of six primary elementalist weapons to be actually used in regions where you might find yourself needing a ranged option (and some of the others be used in regions where you might find yourself mobbed in melee and needing better melee defensive options than staff can provide).

They don't need to be like engineer kits without a cooldown. Regular weapon swap has a cooldown, after all. What they do need, however, is the ability to keep using a single conjure indefinitely if they need to, without having to worry about some random picking up their weapon because "novelty". And for flame axe and ice bow to actually have clear functions rather than being all over the place with their skills.

It's not a case of "replacing the bad weapon skills" - as much as that's a retort to the "but you have 20 skills" people, it is how ele is balanced, for better or worse. It's more of a case of noting that one of the problems ele has is that unlike every other profession, it has no way to respond to changes in the range of an engagement by swapping weapons. Conjures are a pretty obvious potential answer to that.

I like the ideal of making conja weapons more of an wepon swap or at least let you put them up to save duration and let you go back into using your current wepon/atument.

[Leo G.4501]

15 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

People have cleared vale guardian with ten heal tempests (before alactempest) simply outhealing the enrage damage.

Just because you CAN do something doesn't make it good.

Sharing conjure weapons was effectively balanced out of the game nearly a decade ago. We can retain a gimmick that feels cool but in practice has led to almost the entire skill group being dead, or we can hamburger that sacred cow and allow three out of six primary elementalist weapons to be actually used in regions where you might find yourself needing a ranged option (and some of the others be used in regions where you might find yourself mobbed in melee and needing better melee defensive options than staff can provide).

If they are "balanced out of the game", then that means they have spare power budget to boost them up. You don't need to chop stuff off of it to get it rebalanced.  And if you just want to fit them in the meta for  raids, why not look at Glyph of Elementals too? Let's just take those non-meta powers and force them through the raid-group holes at all costs?

I'd be much more receptive to attempting to maintain the little quirkiness to these powers in some fashion than to just chop it off like so many other flavors that have been lost to time over the game's lifespan. And no, I'm not saying maintain all of the old quirks, but this is a very unique and flashy one that I don't think needs to go away just to make conjures good. Like someone said, making the conjure trait affect this.  It's not hard to maintain flavor.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 4/17/2024 at 9:26 AM, Leo G.4501 said:

If they are "balanced out of the game", then that means they have spare power budget to boost them up. You don't need to chop stuff off of it to get it rebalanced.  And if you just want to fit them in the meta for  raids, why not look at Glyph of Elementals too? Let's just take those non-meta powers and force them through the raid-group holes at all costs?

I'd be much more receptive to attempting to maintain the little quirkiness to these powers in some fashion than to just chop it off like so many other flavors that have been lost to time over the game's lifespan. And no, I'm not saying maintain all of the old quirks, but this is a very unique and flashy one that I don't think needs to go away just to make conjures good. Like someone said, making the conjure trait affect this.  It's not hard to maintain flavor.

It happened explicitly because they decided that the 'everyone picks up frost bows and rains ice on the target' gameplay was unhealthy. It would be hard to make conjure weapons useful without bringing some variant of that back. I'd even argue that it's basically impossible to make conjures balanced as something for the elementalist to use on their own without being OP with sharing.

Just as one consideration, sharing is why the cooldown is so long - you can either have two people using the powerful skills simultaneously, or one person can get to use them twice if they jump through the required hoops. Remove the sharing and the cooldowns can be cut in half right away - making them far more practical as a backup weapon.

Sharing is holding the entire group back, and in doing so, holding back the entire profession by extension.

The unfortunate truth is that sometimes the cool thing has to be sacrificed for the functional thing. Mesmers used to have phantasms that were persistent until they or their target died, but were included in the 3-illusion limit - but this created gameplay in PvE where you wanted to have all three out at all times, and thus would avoid clone skills like the plague and only use shatters when you could immediately replace the phantasms. The current phantasm behaviour is much more functional. Guardian spirit weapons used to be a timed summon which would float around doing its thing and could be sacrificed for a strong effect. That was cooler than their current behaviour which is basically just a fire-and-forget spell, but the AI pretty much never placed the summon where you wanted it, which meant that the sacrifice usually wasn't in a good place either. The rework killed the 'bring a collection of spirit weapons' fantasy, but made the skill group as a whole actually useful.

Similar situation here. ArenaNet has decided that they don't want sharing to be a good option. So to make conjures actually practical, they need to be able to balance them withour sharing.

Edited April 21 by draxynnic.3719

[zeyeti.8347]

The sharing of the conjure is not even a cool thing most ele who have trained on their rotation drop the weapon on the boss to get it while in the rotation so if you happen to have a "kitten off dude" like me who instinctively grab the weapon just for the sake to be silly the whole mechanic is just blatant badly designed , but as i said the spaghetti code of a conjure weapon must be a wired cable nightmare for an anet staff member to touch , so better get it over with , i really doubt anet is gonna change drastically the way the conjure weapons work , and it's not something like augmenting the ratio of AA ice bow healing from 0.5 to 0.6 who's gonna change anything.

But i hope i am wrong sincerly and that anet will find a way and the courage to completely rework those "gimmick" (to stay polite) skills.

Ele isn't a strong pick in pve anyway so will the work done on it bring back players like me who enjoyed ele 6years ago and now despite it , i doubt for myself personnaly. But again this is a post where i hope i can say "i was wrong".

[Leo G.4501]

14 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Just as one consideration, sharing is why the cooldown is so long - you can either have two people using the powerful skills simultaneously, or one person can get to use them twice if they jump through the required hoops. Remove the sharing and the cooldowns can be cut in half right away - making them far more practical as a backup weapon.

Sharing is holding the entire group back, and in doing so, holding back the entire profession by extension.

 

The utility doesn't need to change into a "practical backup weapon" as you describe.  Elementalist has functioned from the beginning without an equivalent weapon swap so using that as your baseline to uproot the skill is doing so on faulty premises. Or to explain it more clearly: your argument is starting from the false premise that elementalist requires it to be a certain thing.

And trying to argue that what is holding back ele is conjures is absurd.  To argue that any one set of utilities holds back a whole profession is absurd.

The unfortunate truth is, if you're going to make up truths then how is someone suppose to have a conversation with you? If conjures are made better, they don't have to adhere to a meta-status. They don't have to fill in the hole you think the profession should have filled. At the end of the day, the best option for conjures is to just change them into kits that do huge damage at long range and are swappable like engi kits but that doesn't mean it should happen because you could say the same about practically any professions' utilities: just copy a strong thing and profit. 

[draxynnic.3719]

8 hours ago, Leo G.4501 said:

The utility doesn't need to change into a "practical backup weapon" as you describe.  Elementalist has functioned from the beginning without an equivalent weapon swap so using that as your baseline to uproot the skill is doing so on faulty premises. Or to explain it more clearly: your argument is starting from the false premise that elementalist requires it to be a certain thing.

And trying to argue that what is holding back ele is conjures is absurd.  To argue that any one set of utilities holds back a whole profession is absurd.

The unfortunate truth is, if you're going to make up truths then how is someone suppose to have a conversation with you? If conjures are made better, they don't have to adhere to a meta-status. They don't have to fill in the hole you think the profession should have filled. At the end of the day, the best option for conjures is to just change them into kits that do huge damage at long range and are swappable like engi kits but that doesn't mean it should happen because you could say the same about practically any professions' utilities: just copy a strong thing and profit. 

Again, you're veering into "the profession is not completely unplayable therefore it can't possibly have any problems whatsoever" arguments. The problem is evident the first time you run into something that's impractical to melee for any reason and you get tagged before you can swap off sword (or to a lesser extent, hammer or dagger). 

By that logic, there was no point to the mesmer phantasm rework, or the deadeye rework, or the spirit weapon rework. Nor was there any need for the reworks to the various traitlines that were basically regarded as dead on various professions over the years. There's no need for a turret rework to revive turrets (and possibly make them less of an afk farming tool) because it's still possible to play engineer and get through the story, right?

Conjure sharing is holding back conjures. We know this, because it was sharing that got them nerfed into impracticality in the first place. We can retain sharing, or we can have something that can actually be brought to address one of the major problems with elementalist - that a profession that was marketed as a master of adaptability is in fact the least able to adapt to circumstances.

Sometimes, making something functional requires removing properties that some regard as cool, but which are impractical.

Edited April 22 by draxynnic.3719

[Leo G.4501]

14 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Again, you're veering into "the profession is not completely unplayable therefore it can't possibly have any problems whatsoever"

No I'm not. You have somehow interpreted it as that though.

Closest thing to your accusation I'd be making is "the profession shouldn't be stupidly power crept because you don't like how conjures work".

16 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

 By that logic, there was no point to the mesmer phantasm rework, or the deadeye rework, or the spirit weapon rework.

Wow, you must have dug WAAAY deep into my post history because I did indeed complain about all of those reworks and still hold a grudge about them to this day. But I wasn't against those changes because I preferred the old version, I was against them because they simply removed the option...primarily for lame reasons that ended up neutering other aspects of the game. Instead of using their trait system to diversify how these skills work (the phantasm change was likely specifically done to make room for Mirage), they simplified and genericized.

21 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Sometimes, making something functional requires removing properties that some regard as cool, but which are impractical.

Yes, and it's called "being lazy and not thinking outside the box" as well as "not caring about your original vision".

I mean, the whole horizontal progression system is mostly impractical for a game that needs to retain as many players as possible. Replacing it for a vertical progress system would have kept the game going for longer with less content. 

As lame as you think elementalist is currently, changing conjures to fill whatever niche hole you feel it has is only going to follow with a swath of skill changes and nerfs to other skills that you likely won't like. All for the sake of a utility skill you don't even like and will probably only use for a month after it's changed to replace it with the next thing that gets buffed (and there's spirit weapons peeking in at the finish).   Yay. *golf claps*

[draxynnic.3719]

On 4/22/2024 at 1:04 PM, Leo G.4501 said:

Wow, you must have dug WAAAY deep into my post history because I did indeed complain about all of those reworks and still hold a grudge about them to this day. But I wasn't against those changes because I preferred the old version, I was against them because they simply removed the option...primarily for lame reasons that ended up neutering other aspects of the game. Instead of using their trait system to diversify how these skills work (the phantasm change was likely specifically done to make room for Mirage), they simplified and genericized.

Hahahah. I didn't actually. That sort of deep dive sounds like far too much effort (is information that old even available with how many times the forum has been reset?). I was thinking about things that I didn't like at the time because they reduced some of the cool factor of those mechanics, but you know what? The professions in question are actually better off because of them! Mesmer is more fun when the majority of your damage budget isn't coming from AI that you hope doesn't get randomly destroyed, and you can use a skill that generates a clone without worrying about the DPS loss that comes from overriding a phantasm. Spirit weapons (with the possible exception of shield) have been more fun when they actually have a reliable effect rather than kittening around from one target to the next and you're lucky if it even gets around to taking a swing, let alone being in the right place.

They were probably at a greater level of dysfunction than conjures are now, but if Arenanet has decided that sharing is bad for the game then, initial vision and coolness factor notwithstanding, they need to take that final step and remove it so the skill group can be rebalanced into something you'd actually use. Ideally not in an engineer-kit-style 'use one or two skills and then drop because that's slightly more DPS than anything else you could have in that slot' sense, but in a 'I can pull this out in situations where my main weapon proves totally inappropriate' sense.

And you're claiming that a set of core skills actually being made useful shouldn't be done because it's powercreep? Please. Elementalist isn't exactly ruling the meta in PvE. I'm not as tuned in to the PvP or WvW meta these days, but it's been a while since I've seen ele be what people were complaining about there. I don't think elementalist being able to trade a utility skill slot for a limited ability to do what any other profession can do with a weaponswap or kit - namely, switch between a melee set of weapon skills to a ranged one - is going to overturn the meta. Might as well argue that engineer shortbow should have been frozen in its original 'cool but impractical' beta state because any improvement to a profession, however low the starting point might be, is power creep, right?

[Leo G.4501]

11 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

And you're claiming that a set of core skills actually being made useful shouldn't be done because it's powercreep? 

Oh no, you're doing it again.

I'm pretty sure I did NOT say that. In fact, I'm sure I made a post in this thread about what I think they could do with conjures. I'm coming from the perspective that they don't need to make it a whole avenue of gameplay that revolutionizes the profession but rather, a niche tool that ultimately can lend itself to temp gains just like any other attunement works now.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 4/25/2024 at 5:51 AM, Leo G.4501 said:

Oh no, you're doing it again.

I'm pretty sure I did NOT say that. In fact, I'm sure I made a post in this thread about what I think they could do with conjures. I'm coming from the perspective that they don't need to make it a whole avenue of gameplay that revolutionizes the profession but rather, a niche tool that ultimately can lend itself to temp gains just like any other attunement works now.

That is basically what you said, though:

On 4/22/2024 at 1:04 PM, Leo G.4501 said:

No I'm not. You have somehow interpreted it as that though.

Closest thing to your accusation I'd be making is "the profession shouldn't be stupidly power crept because you don't like how conjures work".

At the bottom line, I think it's better for skills to have clear use cases rather than to have some novelty value only to be ignored when the novelty wears off - and that's where most conjures are now. I don't think they should get to a point where they're showing up in Snowcrows raid builds because they boost your DPS more than the top three non-DPS utility skills available - hopefully I don't need to quote chapter and verse as to why. But I think a good position could be one where, in the notes for a melee build, they say that a particular skill could be replaced with a conjure so you're not twiddling your thumbs during a phase that has some anti-melee element to it. Or an open world (or even competitive!) build uses pistol or staff, but carries conjure hammer or shield to use in situations where the enemy is forcing you into melee and you need some more defensive ability, or when the enemy throws up some projectile hate and you need something that isn't projectiles.

[Leo G.4501]

On 4/26/2024 at 4:02 AM, draxynnic.3719 said:

That is basically what you said, though:

At the bottom line, I think it's better for skills to have clear use cases rather than to have some novelty value only to be ignored when the novelty wears off - and that's where most conjures are now. I don't think they should get to a point where they're showing up in Snowcrows raid builds because they boost your DPS more than the top three non-DPS utility skills available - hopefully I don't need to quote chapter and verse as to why. But I think a good position could be one where, in the notes for a melee build, they say that a particular skill could be replaced with a conjure so you're not twiddling your thumbs during a phase that has some anti-melee element to it. Or an open world (or even competitive!) build uses pistol or staff, but carries conjure hammer or shield to use in situations where the enemy is forcing you into melee and you need some more defensive ability, or when the enemy throws up some projectile hate and you need something that isn't projectiles.

Do I have to pull out the full English interpretation of each sentence now? Jeeze.

Firstly, putting quotation marks around a phrase typically means the writer isn't saying the words but rather is quoting someone or something else. Secondly, the first part of the sentence says "closest thing to your accusation" which I'll just clarify to you, is me making a steelman of your accusation to direct it closer to a reasonable argument rather than a flagrant attack. Thirdly, the quoted phrase should be taken at face value. Do you want the profession to be power crept because you don't like how conjures work? If you answer yes, then that highlights our divide on the subject. If you say no, then there is common ground.

If English isn't your first language then the above is me explaining to you what that meant and I'll further clarify if necessary. If not, well..

As far as the comment about having clear use cases vs novelty, the entire point of me commenting is to create BOTH. Novelty AND use case. Because the game is, first and foremost, a game. And like I've repeated over and over, throwing away fun stuff just because it's not useful now in exchange for power is a faustian deal; it makes something much more useful now but it's merely overshadowed later by something stronger, more useful, more efficient. Skills becoming more similar to other skills making them easier to compare and replace.  And this doesn't go just for skills/utilities but entire games...balance everything to be similar in function as any other standard tab targeted mmo and it becomes just as easily replaced with the next game taking up all the mentions on social media. Sure, you now have more balance and useful utilities, but the result is there's less flavor and no style. Do it enough to enough skills across enough profession and that becomes your reality.

 

[draxynnic.3719]

If your intent was to paraphrase my argument, I'd argue that "so you just want power creep" is far from a "steelman", it's pretty much the definition of a strawman: rephrasing the other side's argument in a manner that makes it easy to discredit. 

Thing is, though, that power creep is relative. If a profession is below the level of others - and elementalist is one of the least played professions despite having a popular theme for a reason - then bringing it up to standard isn't power creep. The power creep has already happened. Now, it's a fine balancing act to bring something up to standard without edging it just a little bit above the standard - and that's how power creep happens - but that's part of why I've been expressing that it shouldn't be something that you bring to increase performance, but that compared to other options of utility skills, it's a tradeoff of maximum performance for a bit of extra utility. Which is a tradeoff that I'd remind you that literally every other profession in the game can make: melee builds can choose to slot a ranged weapon, generally reducing their melee potential a little in order to have a ranged option, and on professions that can perform well with full-ranged builds, slotting a melee weapon rather than a second ranged weapon can give you greater defences when you are pushed into melee at the cost of being a little less effective at range. The results don't need to actually be better than just running general-purpose scepter everywhere, they just need to be a viable alternative.

The problem with your "novelty" argument is that ArenaNet have already decided that weapon-sharing does not fit the game. It was an experiment that was worth making, but in the end, they decided it didn't fit and boonsmited the entire skill group: it's still in the game technically, but it's a newbtrap. They've just killed it by scaling everything down to the point where they're just not worth using rather than removing the factor that made them problematic in the first place. They can either leave it as a newbtrap indefinitely, or they can accept the decision they've already made in balancing and make them into something that actually does have a useful purpose rather than something people play around with a few times for the novelty and then dump like a sack of rotten potatoes when they find out how awkward they are to use and how little you get in return for dealing with that awkwardness.

They used to be Awesome, but Impractical, but now they're just Impractical. You might not like skills becoming more similar to other skills, but I'd argue that conjures being more practical does not mean that they'd be the same as kits: removing the second weapon spawn and halving the cooldown still gives them quite different mechanics to the nearest equivalent. But along with a few reworks to the individual items (such as fixing up the identity issues of the axe and bow), such a change could allow them to be made into something that has a distinct use case without having to be super-powerful, as opposed to the current status where they pretty much only ever get used when they're accidentally overtuned enough to be worth dealing with all the clunkiness, only to be abandoned again when the nerfs inevitably land.

While it's good to have cool stuff, sometimes you get a choice between having something really cool in theory that nobody uses outside of memebuilds due to how impractical or inefficient it is (how often does a typical player deliberately pick up another's conjure weapon with an intent other than trolling?), or something that's... still cool, but also practical to use. I'd like to use the conjure weapons more. They're a cool concept. But in practice, their mechanics are so clunky and so easily accidentally trolled by other players (or encounter mechanics pushing or pulling you away from where you placed the weapon drop) that they're just not worth using. The elite gets used occasionally because it has elite power scaling, but even then I think Glyph of Elementals beats it out in most circumstances nowadays. 

Edited May 1 by draxynnic.3719

[Jski.6180]

Seeing how we maybe getting update for weaker skills maybe we can hope for an conja wepon update!?

I am starting to be of the mind that conja should be like kits BUT only 1 conjn wepon at an time can be on you as if it was more of an wepon swap with an duration (30 sec to 1 min) and an skill cd (1 min).