nerf overpowered searing flame?

I play an ele myself, I don't use SF but I understand its power. Yes its damn good but with just a single caster that guy stood no chance. Imagine four of him tacking the spell on you at the same time, then you will see the issue. The general complaint is about multiple eles running the SF build and causing massive AoE damage. Thank god eles got a boost, too bad everyone is complaining now. :P

On another note, being impartial on this bring extinguish or QZ before you complain.

No reason to nerf it, it is a very powerful skill, but look what it did for eles in PvP. They are no longer now just utility characters, they can actuallly add a bit of pressure to a team. Furthermore, it is a buff to a skill line that was not used too much in PvP before nightfall release.

As far as the skill ruining HA, since when has HA not been dominated by gimmick builds? You used to face IWAY/Blood spike now you face searing flames, HA is in the same state that it was before as far as build selection is concerned. Nerfing searing won't force people into not bringing heros, their heros will just be less effective until they find something else that works well with the AI.

ANet should add exhaustion if it hits a burning foe or something... it is VERY strong, but overpowered (it IS an elite, keep that in mind)? Nah.

Rampage As One, however, is overpowered imo (make it a stance dammit)

But the all-round best 'fix' ANet could do for HA, is just leave heroes out of it... GW isn't a real CORPG anymore, it's just an RPG with multiplayer environments and outposts.

Personally I think the reason searing flames is so popular is because

ITS EASY TO USE.

You just spam the skill over and over and stuff starts dying. No wonder everyone loves it. Searing Flames requires little more than the mind of a 4 year old to figure out. You just press the icon over and over and things start burning. Half the Searing Flames teams I face get so caught up in tapping SF they forget all about their energy management or that I rended off all their attunements. Seriously if you want to see a noob SF team just drop Quickening Zepyhr and mind wrack them all. They will probably kill themselves.

There are plenty of counters to SF:

1.) Diversion
2.) Signet of Humility
3.) Xinrae's Weapon (Never seen this used but looks promising... if its even in NF)
4.) Ward Against Harm
5.) Mantra of Flame
6.) Quickening Zephyr
8.) Attunement Rending

Well while we're at it we might as well nerf shock thumpers and maybe Incoming Paragons, infact why not just nerf every skill and use a modded version of the dragon arena where the skills do 1 damage a hit instead of 1 hit kills except Wammos who still get the 1 hit kills and perminent mending (lol). SF is easy to counter with the right build, its also easy to beat with a good team. eles were meant to be the original big hitters that why they got such weak armour and as soon as they finally get some improved skills which almost restores them to how they should be people cry nerf nerf nerf. Interupts and spell blockers are there for a reason u know . Although im sure that the main arguement isnt really about SF at all i think its more about the fact that heros are there which people dont like cause there smarter than henchies and have generally betta skill sets (depending on the player obversly) which makes them a greater challenge and allows more people to enter the battles.

lol..like i said if it's not overpowered, will it be overused in the first place? use your common sense, and stop defend yourself from abusing it :P

umm...mind you when i say it's overpowered, doesn't mean i can't beat it or you so called bad player, in fact i can beat them as hell easily. It's just no fun everyone using same build, especially the heroway.

It's overused because the AI is not good at spreading out, and because the AI can actually run searing flames effectively. Also, most players are too retarded to bring or understand caster hate.

Yes, it "overused" should equal "overpowered" but unfortunately, most HA players don't seem to have a brain.

Look at VIM. Overused? Hell yea. Overpowered? Not really. I can count on one hand how many times I've lost to VIM... ever. Pre-OoA IWAY falls under the same category, as do many other gimmick builds. I'm not sure why people ran VIM in the first place (easy to use?) but it certainly wasn't because of the build's win percentage. Searing Flames might have a slightly better track record than VIM, due to the huge influx of PvE players into HA who have no idea what to do about elementalists pouring out AoE damage and lose...

If you think I'm defending my own abuse of Searing Flames... just watch us on observe some time, eliminating two SF teams on broken tower one after another and winning 45 seconds before time. The only way I'm abusing SF is getting free fame out of Zhed Shadowhoof over and over again, which is kinda boring.

Then why not simply kick heroes out of tombs instead of calling for a nerf on one of the few decent damage skills eles have?

If Searing Flames stays at 2 recharge I'll might just create a thread demanding that some necro elites have their recharge changed to 2 seconds. Some are much more conditional than searing flames and don't have the same damage or aoe.

But searing flames deserves a bit of a tweak because if nothing else after you've used it a few times you feel like you've lost a few brain cells from the mindless spamming.

You guys all missing the point of searing flame, yes, it does good damage, but fireball do same, yes it burns, but rodgort invocation can do that, with searing flame the point is you can save skill slot, me n few friend ran searing flame spike and glyph of sac shower spike build with 3 ele, 1 ranger trapper with Energizing wind, with first make chaos with 3 shower down in same time and just burn to death

Ok Faer

So if you watch the observer nowdays you will see low ranked teams bringing two of those guys and putting very high pressure on a good team who is trying to outmaneur and outskill by doing some very "meta" tricks...and sometimes they fail which is kind of silly.

Some of the counters poeple suggest help but can't hold on much longer vs the dual SF combos.

Extinguish quickly deplenishes Ele's energy pool (there is no attunement to protection and Protecting Gaze :P)
Armor and skills VS fire help but the major strenght of the skill is the wide and quick spreading of a burning effect.
So the only sure way is - kicking the hell out of the caster - Divertion, Distraction, pressure on him, KD-ing... the bad thing is those are active counters and work on paper but are not that easy to use on the battlefield, especially vs experianced team.

As an elementalist myself I suggest increasing it's recharge by 4. If not the whole thing I said - it will at least bring some sort of variety in the builds.

/not signed.

I can see the discussion Anet devs must have had about the skill.

Dev 1: Wow, this is a great skill, Eles will finally be more threatening in PvP like we wanted them to be originally.
Dev 2: Yeah. So what should we call it? Rodgort's Fury?
Dev 1: Not bad...wait! How about...Searing Flame! Because of all the whining on forums it'll cause...
Dev 2: HAHAHAH! GENIUS!

Get it? Because it causes fl- eh, nevermind.

It's a great skill, and Eles needed stuff like this a long time ago, but meh, we all know Anet will nerf it, and Eles will go back to utility, and whiners will find something else to scream about. OMFG NERF MEZMERZ OHNOEZ TEY ITNTERUPTD MY SPLZ!!11one!

"Why Nuking Sucks" - A thread around here.

And then suddenly, nukers can nuke.

And trouble ensues again.

SF is powerful, perhaps really too much. But unlike some other team builds, SF is somewhat easy to shut down. For example, just signet of humility will cause severe problems to the caster.

Energy management for SF also isn't all that great. At least one attunement is still almost required. Not to mention that SF is a spamming build, which brings in every spam counter.

It's somewhat different going against real players, but I'd warrant that most SF you encounter are heroes. And AI has simply too many weeknesses.

Now, SF does hit hard, especially with two casters. But shut down the caster, and they become a wasted group spot. And shutting down casters was never that hard. SF, unlike perhaps some other notorious builds, or some which are still powerful, is very fragile. Just spreading out a bit cuts damage to 1/3 or 1/4. But most importantly, SF can be countered by any of the commonly available counters: interrupts, mesmers, knockdown, daze, anti-caster hexes, ...

Oh come on people... come to your senses!
Its WAY overpowered!
Its like people saying IWAY wasnt overpowered.

Think about the other Ele elites (except for Sandstorm wich is also overpowered) and well talk again ok?
Sry for beeing rude, but some of you dont have ANY sence of pvp

It's not overpowered. Elementalists finally get a legitimately good damage elite and all of the sudden every r2 HA player floods guru calling for a nerf.

Sucking less is key.

i'm an ele, and i agree its extremly overpowered

it should be on par with the old ele skills lets see...

um that would be ether prod and heal party......

sorry but most of the complainers are relatively new.

you have missed so many threads/posts that compare elites of eles with those of other professions and say

*why cant eles have some decent elites*

a good reference is ENSIGNS number crunching proof that the ele elites suck.

if you have no idea of who ENSIGN is dont even bother trying to argue.

not to mention IZZY the dev king of balance

EDIT

linkie

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s... nuking+sucks

conclusion, read the rest for the backup to the conclusion

I had never read that summary before. Awesome and very eye-opening. As my main character is an Elementalist and I don't play much PVP or GVG (as in at all) it's kind of unsettling to know that a warrior can ultimately dish out more damage than the Ele's who are supposed to be the damage dealers.

Searing Flame is powerful yes, but no more so really than any of the other fire skills (most of the others don't set you on fire but there are several that deal as much if not more damage). It's the Glowing Gaze combo that really makes that shine and even then the weakness of that build is energy management. Even getting 10 energy back you're still spending 5 to cast Gaze and you'll get some back if you run with fire attunement, but Searing Flame is an elite and that knocks out my usual Elemental Attunement so energy becomes even more of an issue depending on what other skills I have tucked away in the build.

Personally I'm seeing alot of disadvantages to the Searing Flame build WITHOUT bein interrupted or targetted for other energy drains. It can be shut down relatively easily with just a few combos. I'd hate to see it get changed too much. It really would be useful in a PVE context which is where I'll end up using it.