Preliminary Skill Update Notes - 23 April 2010

Elementalists still have good options for damage, farming, speed clears, and can very easily equal or exceed a monk. Mesmers needed far...far more done than an elemetalist who would only require a couple skill changes. This update is more than a couple skills. Only looking at the "armor ignoring" aspect of mesmers just shows how little many players know about them.

ANY profession can call for discord.

"Hey guys! Hey, there's this profession called mesmer. The don't do anything themselves but they can ping targets super well for necromancer heroes. Soo amazing!"

Why just elemental damage? Higher armor means less damage, be it physical or elemental. If that's too much, remove the extra levels from HM monsters. Or bring cracked armor. Keep it simple.

So....hopefully Thursday this is going to happen?

Not that I don't enjoy afk'ing Nine Rings or anything (oh, wait...), but it would nice to have some content or skill updates the week of the anniversary. Just saying. It would be nice for at least one of my friends who re-installed because of the anniversary+GW2 info to actually stay and not go, "Seriously, nothing's new?" and then uninstall again.

I know Linsey's sick, but "supposedly" she doesn't even do these anymore, so hopefully?

Well, son of a bitch. Are we seriously getting no new content for the anniversary?

That's just terrible PR.....

Not in HM PvE, not compared to physicals at any rate.

Just to note, we got a lot of GW2 info - nothing to celebrate GW1 anniversary maybe, but still a nice thing to see actual game footage, screenshots, get to know some of the mechanics and read about professions and races tomorrow.

I have the feeling that GW2 will be a completely different game. Personally I would have prefered once or twice a year a new GW1 chapter, despite the fact that more and more skills would give more and more balancing issues. I don't care. Hero skills, PvE only skills, its fun! The more the better! And I hope the upcomming skill balance will buff gameplay

Obviously some numbers need to be adjusted but I'm glad they're looking into it. My favorite part of the preview is the focus on energy cost and "pay out" of spells. However, I hope someone is making sure that if any skills are also changed for PvP that it isn't a hex a skill that can be abused like Seeping Wound.

Remove the extra armour and double/triple/quadruple/quintuple their HP to make it just as "hard" to justify HM. That way every class require nearly the same effort to kill something whether or not its armor ignoring damage. This deal with the underpowered Ele damage and relatively overpowered armor ignoring damage like discord all in one stroke.

Been there, suggested that. Where were you?

Why just elemental damage? Because physical classes deal armor ignoring skill damage and only the weapon damage is reduced by armor.

Let me explain.

The damage from basic attacks is usually pretty low, alright. Look at the damage the weapons have listed and then cut it by about the same percentage as your elemental spells always seem to go down by.

However! Physical classes get most of their damage not from those weapons, but from attack skills and critical hits. Attack skills' damage is armour-ignoring. That's why, for example, Assassin dagger attacks tend to be terribly weak on their own, but once you add in attack skills (and SoH, why not), the Assassin suddenly becomes the best damage dealer in PvE.

This means that elemental damage characters suffer from HM armour, whereas physical damage characters don't (even though their physical damage does, because it's not actually where they get most of their damage).

tl;dr physical characts do mostly armour ignoring damage, elementalists don't

Personally I hope the same thing happens in GW2. I like that physical characters in GW are the damage dealers and the classic "mage" character serves best as support instead of "nuking."

Remember how they changed how certain monsters were using recently buffed skills.

So I think we won't have to fear Rider Mobs like they were a mob of Vengeful Aatxes.

At least we shouldn't.
I suggest everyone assumes paranoia and goes and vanquishes mesmer heavy areas ASAP. The Ascalon area, Rata Sum environs, certain parts of the crystal desert should all be ultra-high priority.

With Wind Riders, don't aggro a ton of groups at once like you would with every other situation...?

There's no "extra armor", armor increases with level, so the "bonus" monsters get in HM is just due to their higher level.

The problem is Eles not being completely viable as damage dealers. So THAT's what they need to fix - even though I don't really see a reason to, since it's not a problem with the class itself, but rather a problem with people misunderstanding the class and its capabilities, led astray by the archetipe of the "Mage"... Whatever...

Also worth noting that while attack bonuses for physicals is armor ignoring:

- None of these bonuses reaches the base damage of most Ele spells. As an example, @14 Fire Magic, Fireball would deal 105 damage to a 60AC target. That's ~52 against a 100AC target, which is still higher than most of the damage bonus offered by attack skills.
- There's a heapful of counters to physicals, for a reason
- Armor ignoring damage usually has some downside, being it the hi-recharge or cost, or conditions to be met for it to apply

About point 1), the problem with a spell like Fireball is not the damage dealt, but rather it's cost and cast time when compared to most attacks.

They should look into ways to make Ele spells more suitable for HM - easier ways to apply Cracked Armor, more useful secondary effects, etc... Also, I'd rather have the cheapest spells such as Flare or Stone Daggers deal armor ignoring damage and their recharge tuned accordingly, but anything else is fine with me as it is now. The lack of raw damage is easily negated by the multiple ways of supporting the party with utility, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

With two of the four elements BUILD on dealing damage, It's expected that they be actually good at that, but it's a laughing stock even in NM anymore.

So there's Infusers, which probably should not exist in the first place, and Bsurge. So if you got rid of the ridiculous Bsurge, seeing as you are hardly even using ele skills for it, you have Bsurge, and believe it or not, everyone doesn't like playing Bsurge.

The trouble is that people do not want to roll elementalists to heal or support the team. they make them because they want to blow things the frak up, and be a glass cannon. Sure, ok, Eles are undeniably meant to have solid support builds as well, but should we really be -forced- to do a roll most of us don't want to play? Yes, it's hard mode, it's supposed to be hard, but Elementalists are forced to change what they do in a much more radical direction than any other class. Physical damagers just.. try to do more damage. Support casting classes like necros.. support in different ways.

Even Ritualists are sitting there blowing stuff up with Splinter and the newly buffed damage skills doing a much better job than eles in HM.

-I almost guarantee you most enemies in HM or even end-game NM have over 100AC. The problem also is that ok, sure, the base damage of the spell is close to, if not over an attack from a physical, but Fireball has a 2 second cast time on a 3/4 second aftercast. Most physical attackers could have attacked 2/3 times by then, and took a dump on ele DPS (which you slightly touched at, but is a huge point nonetheless)

-That a lot of enemies either don't carry, or can be easily cured by your team.

-Not for physical characters? I personally am NOT a fan of simply giving eles armor ignoring damage. good, solid Armor Penetration maybe...

There's certainly nothing wrong with it in theory, but being forced to heal above all other things is not something elementalists, of all classes, should be doing.

I have never found problems with Elementalists.
You can kill almost anything just with fire.
Just a couple of changes when dealing with destroyers, fire elementals and some HM areas, and you are set.

We may not deal as much damage to a single target as others, but we still have most of wider area of effect damage-dealing skills.
Hey, even in GW2 'Area of Effect' is an Elementalist thing.

Of course, I would never be against any Elementalist buff.

Very nice, looking forward to it. Now my pre-Searing Mesmer can have some fun with Empathy. Not to say that pre-Searing Mesmers don't have enough fun as it is.

if i had no concept of the archetype of 'mage' and i looked at the skills eles had, i would think that they are a damage dealing class. out of the 34 fire skills, only 1 of them doesn't deal damage (which i don't think really it counts because its an attunement). fire is supposed to damage you say? okay fine, lets take a look at some of the supposed "support" magic lines: 17 out of 30 water magic skills are damage dealing skills. thats still more than half. the other half are self-defense and snare skills--which for the most part are completely useless for pve. water is a pvp attribute? fine, lets look at earth magic: they still have 18 out of 35 skills that deal damage.

might i also remind you that nuking was actually quite viable, if not the standard role for eles pre-hard mode. some of the variations of the original tank-n-spank builds (pre-factions) consisted of meteor shower eles (and also firestorm before the aoe scatter).

GLF duo Gwenway

Migraine, that spells death to players...

Screw Mesmer i want para updates !

Be careful what you wish for. Ever since the paragon was invented a "paragon update" has been synonymous with nerf. Bet you that next update they will nerf TNTF and SYS, compensate with some weak partywide buffs(10 second mending for all or similar) and call it all a buff!

TNTF already got a nerf.

I agree that Paragons and Dervishs need updates too. But they did say that wont happen this time around and, they are working on it. In other words check back in 3 1/2 months.

It seems like after NF came out, Anet decided a Dervish and Paragon were bad ideas. But its most likely other classes were exploited in a way to make them obsolete. Its difficult to make them truly unique. They both have a very interesting niche to fill that isnt being done as well as it could be. IMO, the Devish would be alot easier to fix than the Paragon. And I dont think its an easy fix for either.

After viewing the GW2 weapon preview, I didnt see a spear or scythe. I think its because they didnt want to run into the problems we have now. So it seems to be tough to make them both be effective and not over/under powered compared to other classes. Mainly because the Dervish is competing against Warriors and Assassins and the Paragon is competing against Monks(and now N/Rt healers).

They should buff the hell out of both of them in PvE, nobody will care after GW2 comes out. And I would love to see the QQ posts about them being overpowered and destroying the game.

to be fair, save yourself and TNTF put any monk prot bar in shame. Even a good one with battle awareness.

Maybe something like (all assume controlling attribute of 15, variable numbers are in italics)-

Lightning Strike 5e 1s 5r
Strike target foe for 50 lightning damage. This spell has 25% armor penetration. Add +20 damage if target foe is wearing heavy armor (AL 80+).

Flare 5e 1s
Send out a flare that strikes target foe for 65 fire damage if it hits. If target is burning, adds 1 second to remaining burning time.

Stone Daggers 5e 1s
Send out two Stone Daggers. Each Stone Dagger strikes target foe for 33 earth damage if it hits. If both hit, target is Dazed for 1 second.

Ice Spear 5e 1s
Send out an Ice Spear, striking target foe for 70 cold damage if it hits. Ice Spear has half the normal spell range. If target is moving, target is crippled for 1 second.

My idea was that each of the 'basic spam' skills should have a benefit other than damage, but that to take advantage of it, you need to keep spamming it. That would make it something you do to lock down one target for defense or to kill an annoying enemy (assuming you can get the job done before you run out of energy). As for the Air skill, as they don't have a basic spam skill, I thought it would be nice to get a damage bonus for hitting an enemy with metal armor (i.e. 80+), which is in theme for lightning.

Mind you, I don't expect anything like this till GW2, but it would be neat to see as like a 'preview' in GW1. In the same line, I'd like to see similar changes to the 'basic spam' skill of EVERY class, just to be fair. But I play ele the most, so I comment on that.

Maybe this update will make HM not so easy anymore. With all these hexes and anti-caster skills, I don't know what it might do to Discordway. HM will actually be HM for once.

Hopefully with this update makes it easier for pugs to shutdown a mob, which would help for some of the retarded areas like DoA and some dungeons. Next up, Ele HM balance, Dervish balance, Paragon balance, Ranger balance....2 down, 4 more to go...

None of the skill updates actually happened, apparently. Descriptions were updated inadvertently.

The team is checking into this now! Sorry for the confusion.

I thought a skill update at 2 AM was a bit weird.

And now I feel like a kid who peeked at his Christmas presents...

Here is hoping for the update to be released today(if it is finished of course). For a breif moment i was in love with frustration+powerspike, the damge was just silly, especially when you interupt an enemy WoH thought would have saved them, instead that monk is dead ^.^

I just went to the Master of Damage and Akolyth Sousuke using "Aura of Restoration", "Fire Attunement", "Searing Flames" (Elite) and "Glowing Gaze" at Fire Magic 12 dealt roughly the same damage after 3 minutes as Jora did with 12 in Axe and Strength only using "Flay" and Murakai`s Reaver.
With "Mind Blast" instead of "Searing Flames" he dealt 1500 damage less than Jora.

Just checked the leaked update, they really want mesmers to use illusionary weapon :/

I'm not familiar with this 'Flay' skill, does it affect all nearby foes as well? Or did you just try comparing an AoE that can (and in PvE often does) strike multiple foes with the damage output of a Warrior against a single target?

Why buff armor for Illusionary Weapon if it still doesn't have a use?

I think the idea is it would actually allow a mesmer to be on the front lines without dying horribly.

I am actually happy about the IW buff, i want to use it, dont care about being "optimal" in nm PvE.

A lot of these skills seem strong, but that's the point. It would be a tragedy if the skill updated failed to do what it was intended. After seeing some of the screenshots, it's not power creep at all. Power creep isn't buffing, it's making a making something imbalanced like what we have now.

I don't see any or much mesmer like abilities being taken away. Most of this should have been done a long time ago. PvE splits are an awesome idea, not for power creep exactly, but to adapt skills for a very different environment. It just happens that there was past power creep and it won't be going away.

Still want to know what's being done to fast casting and energy? Will fast casting lessen after-cast, shorten the recharge or inspirations skills, or finally provide energy? One of you TK break the NDA sum moar.

I'm guessing flail. He's comparing using master of damage numbers, which means Searing flames was hitting 2 extra adjacent targets. What he's saying he saw was that a warrior auto attacking with IAS on 1 target did similar damage to an ele using Searing flames on 3 targets over 3 minutes.