Preliminary Skill Update Notes - 23 April 2010

Good Job Anet and TK! Eventhough its only a preview, there is some really promising stuff in there. And it really feels like there is some communication and Anet is listening to its player base. This makes me feel alot better about the future of GW.

I know some people think this will make the mesmer overpowered in PvE, but I dont. Remember old school Ritualists? Now that they have a buff they are brought into current meta, and I'm sure this will be the case for Mesmers. Even though im getting tired of the only way to farm the traveler trophies is SoS spirit spammer. I see the new niche for mesmers as a team player. Again, Good Job and keep up the good work!

Why? Its awesome that you may actually have to remove hexes in Pve

Um, have you tried DoA? You need like 5-6 hex removals in the team and even then you can't keep up with what they're throwing at you.

Yes, and I've never had any problems with Wind Riders and nearly any of the mesmer foes in the game. Mindblade Spectre, perhaps, but overall I don't see most these improvements as in issue. Many players are also looking for challenge in PvE.

Nerf physicals and buff Elementalists already damnit ... as always with these PvE updates, I can't hate ANet's motivation and execution, but I hate how they miss out on the real problems.

With cons and PvE skills, DoA is not THAT hard. Some places may become hard after the buffs come. I find it a feature.

Elementalists can out heal/prot monks, speed clear, farm certain stuff really well, and pop AP AoE nukes/blind pretty heavily despite not having armor ignoring damage. Eles can even E/N for physical buffing. I say at least they're good at something.

So after this update mesmers will be able to mitigate damage through aoe interrupts/knockdowns/slow while providing some average-high aoe armor ignoring damage and degen on a fast rate (shorter recharge)?

Plus hm monsters are now somewhat interruptable...

This may be a bit biased but is every caster class out there supposed to outdamage elementalists (in hm)? *sigh*

I can confirm this update is made of win

Testing changes to Wastrel's Worry, I can say it will make for very fun builds with the numerous changes made ;o
It's definitely one of my favorite of the new additions (Although to get full use out of it, you really need the right skills)

I'm sure this is one update to please everyone but the Naysayers

My girlfriend's first char was an ele. Frankly, i never thought of it as 'the ultimate nuker class', even though we came straight from Lineage 2 and she chose ele because she thought it is the main DD around, similar to SH/SPS/Sorc mix. Elementalist here, in GW, is a mage controlling the elements - pretty much that. I do agree that they need some tuning in HM (perhaps an enchantment in ES giving them some armor penetration or some ES means to induce cracked armor) but they're not focused around damage only.
To be honest, i always found meteor to be the best AoE interruption skill available up to this point - much easier to use than regular mesmer interrupts, with decent damage, low e-cost and AoE knockdown, unconditional. And it's really versatile.
When i thought about actually playing my farming ele, i've already prepared two builds for him - fire damage build for NM and some HM, and earth/water support/crowd control build for most HM. Even my ele heroes are not built around SF, but rather wards or AoE freezes/kds.

psychic instability looks to be sooooo much win.

the thing is snares/wards/interrupts aren't really needed if you can kill the foes before they get to attack/use skills, so they are kind of optional yes they help if you take them along but raw damage is better 90% of the time, hell this one of the main problems mesmers have/had. When i created my elementalist i didn't think of her as the queen of damage but as a good damage dealer but i guess i was wrong
but this is getting out of subject, back on topic i'm glad to see that anet is holding this every-2-months-skill-update-schedule (last update was in February) but as others said there might be a bit too much power-creep in this one

Am I the only one that noticed that PD already interrupts skills?


Edit: Also, keep all of these changes away from PvP please, they are so insanely overpowered.

Not recently enough to even remember anything about it, but I was speaking in general terms, areas and missions

Try playing monk when you go up ageist them, you get shamed every 2 secs >.< however generally they're not that hard as long as you can kill them fast enough. Hopefully with these new changes they'll get some extra damage and then they'll be the horror of Pve.

On a side note, I love how everyone went right to wind riders rather than other NPC mesmers

Well... it's on its way... but it feels dirty.

This. If you increase the damage of Mesmer skills themselves linearly, the need for a player with 13+ points in a Mesmer attribute wont be as beneficial as bringing another class with a Mesmer build. I really hope they are going to address this issue by reworking the Fastcasting attribute to give the Mesmer a unique and useful advantage that can't be emulated by other classes.

Other than that, I'm happy about some of the skill updates, especially Stolen Speed and Empathy, but I'm not really a fan of the increased damage updates as it usually is very tantalizing to run them with other classes. But that's just the fear of them possibly being abuse by other classes and ending up having a contra-productive effect on the Mesmer's class speaking out of me. If they tie the effectiveness all Mesmer skills to FC to a certain extent, that's great. If they increase the recharge time of all Mesmer skills, but give FC a scalable HSR on them, even better. We'll see. Anyway, I'm psyched about how the update will turn out.

It's not included in the coming update but:
'Major changes to the smiting line'

Looking forward to that one.

As for the mesmer changes, you have to start somewhere and things can be toned down a bit when needed.

I like hearing this because:

1. Mesmers have needed this for a long time. As far as how well the updates will help them I can't say because my experience with Mesmers is limited.

2. They give the general timeline of the first half of May to roll out the update, but they make it explicitly clear that because of the extensiveness of the update, they cannot guarantee anything.

3. They explicitly communicate they are targetting PvE and will update PvP later on. Imagine all of the qq that would have gone on if they simply updated PvE but did not communicate this plan.

4. They say that they are working on other areas of interest (Dervs/Scythes, Paras, and Smiting), in parallel even though they will not be rolling out soon. It's good to hear that they're listening and trying to take up issues that players have pointed out.

Better late than never I say. Lindsey and the current support team are finally getting things moving in the right direction so let's give them kudos where kudos are due.

Probably because they are common and often come in really large groups. A pack of them with these new buffs might easily paralyze and slaughter an AI team due to its inability to spread out.