Did Eles just become good in HM?

Here I was with my El, getting the WiK bounty. I told myself "hey, why not try it in HM, this one is easy!"

So I went out in HM, ready to be half useless knocking down some foes and doing 25-30 damage as usual. "Oh well, damage is what other professions are for!"

Suddenly... 60? With Whirlwind? "Hey, I said HM!"

Checking... yes this is HM. Weird.


And so I began testing enemies. At least in Prophecies (WiK included) I was able to get the damage my skill description advertised for, minus the profession armor.

So I wonder:

1. did I miss an update which took off the so-called 'level adjustment'?
2. am I deluding myself?
3. did I suffer from the 'Eles are bad and that's all' syndrome and just missed the damage my skills were doing the whole time?

Because well, NM-efficient Elementalist spells in HM, I'm not going to complain!

ele damage in hm is outmatched by any other caster class.

non-armour ignoring damage (almost all the damage done by ele) << armour ignoring damage

also ele is slow, glyph, attunements make him to be slow (lose way to much time casting things to help him with energy management, improve his damage)

let's push things a bit more. why in doa you can't find an ele spike team (using ele spells for damage) to do fr in hm?

In the War in Kryta, many of the enemies had their armour capped at the standard limits in Hard Mode. Not all (the Jades have high armour levels), but most.

In prophecies elementalist damage is actually half decent. You can get 50-70% damage on hard mode even on rangers and warriors before crystal desert (i.e. 20-30 of 40 damage). The reason is because they weren't level 20 to begin with so their level wasn't increased to 28 or 30 (meaning their armor isn't 100 to ele).

Half decent damage doesn't cut it though.

WiK is basically the same as normal mode, the only difference is IMS + IAS for everything (like Dervishes in PVP lol) and more damage (though not for bosses).

Well if I know anything about Elementalists, it is that they are outmatched. However, I do not recall doing as much damage in HM before.
I do not DoA unfortunately, so I cannot answer whether Els are viable there. I guess the fact of them not been taken will have to answer for me.
I do not use attunements either, so I guess my experience is less painful (MoM+N hench is enough to let Energy flow anyway).


This can be the reason indeed (although many enemies I tested were not from WiK but from random Prophecies zones). Most of my HM experience on my El comes from the WiK bounties however. Time to diversify my experience and maybe (maybe not) to acknowledge that Els are as bad as it is said.

For my part, I’ve never found ele damage in HM to be bad per se... it’s just that, as noted above, other classes can do it much better. As for “eles are bad” syndrome, the biggest gripe most eles have is that they’re more or less forced to change roles, as they make excellent mid-line support but fairly mediocre nukers in HM. Admittedly, there’s something to be said for those complaints – after all, you rolled up an ele to play like an ele, so it can be frustrating to see 7/8 skill slots are filled with esoteric rit or monk spells, with one energy storage elite.

thats actually decent, other class can do better than it frankly. When I see people in party say to bring a Nuker. Often, people will think of ele's and that's where i just laugh it off.

I stand by my point is they are bad in dealing the output dmg. Just my 2 cents

All this talk about some classes being "useless" (or more "useful") in HM is just BS. All classes are useful in HM. There may be some differences in effectiveness with some classes using some builds, but the differences are not really worth worrying about.

I joined groups with my ele as ER prot. PUGs still want 2 monks, one running UA and one crappy Healer's Boon.

Best ER backline monk I think = UA +DH+HD, seed, dismiss+deny hexes+gift or d-kiss (enchants lol) +patient (bad with ER due to delay)+ cure hex

Healing burst has less party heal and removals (deny hexes) but better single target heals due to energy regen and more room for prot.

The problem is even if you are a decent ER many ele players have never played monk so they can't prot for crap.

Rangers and non-ER eles are marginal. If non-imba Paragons didn't operate principally on adrenaline attacks (+20ish damage @15, akin to most bow attacks and +30ish for elites and Wearying spear) with 3-7 adrenaline they'd be in this boat too, granted they lack AOE. (Motivation is piss poor though)

They're better than empty skillbars or henchmen but regardless, you can get ~11DPS (sorry, 5-6DPS due to armor of mobs) just by wanding with a non-customized no damage boost staff.

Kanda i wanted to say that ele damage is the lowest in hm compared to other caster classes.
Regarding doa as an ele you will still be able to get in a party but they will want you to play dwg ele. (the exceptions are usualy when it's zm/zb when you have the chance to try the old ways, well you need some luck to find a decent party if you don't have a guild behind you). Since it started to be imposible to find a party to do doa playing with ele skils (not acting like an rt) I kinda stopped doing doa, well i had to do to doa recently to help my father kill mallyx to get the statue but well it was 2 men + heroes (no dwg, you can call me dwg hater ).
My main char is an ele, but to be honest I don't really play to much with her (it's a she ). zm/zb i do with my monk to fast find parties , and i help my father with my sin or rt depending what we are doing.

WiK caster: 60 armor
WiK frontliner: 80-100 armor
WiK jade (caster or warrior): 140 armor

Its like Anet had a good idea, then just decided RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO it, lets screw over the eles anyway. They actually BOOSTED the jade's armors for some unfathomable reason.


Eles definitely get the short end of the stick out of all professions in HM. Paragons and Rangers, while crappy alone, at least can avail themselves to all of the buffs melee's use sans SoH, which means they can deal respectable damage when in the right group. Eles just sit around doing low 20s of damage and crying.

Oh you'll do less than 20 on 140 armor seeing how you will need to push 100 to do more than 20... 140 armor = 25% damage. If you run cracked armor, you still push only 35.4%.

Rangers have it a bit better due to attack skills, but with no AOE other than barrage you'll also be doing about 30ish or so (on 100 armor). You can get +25 before buffs just by using something with + damage, +50 on sloth hunter.

Luckily 140 armor jade stuff doesn't come in bulk usually (at most you see one or two per group), except for the end waves in Battle of Lion's Arch. I'd rather see a few sparse mobs with 140 than every damn mob with 80+

If everything were capped at 130 for one elemental type and 116 vs elemental for non casters I'd breathe a sigh of relief. In PVP you can only push 115 vs type on a ranger + shield = 133 vs type, 100 vs ele ; Warriors 100+16 shield=126 vs type , 116 vs ele.

Ironically if you VQ in prophecies 4-6 man areas before Crystal desert, you can push 16-20 of 40 damage (sans cracked armor) on Rangers, which is akin to WiK. However, you're lucky to push 31 on casters (sans cracked armor).


25/0.25=100... am I missing something? :O

Might want to check that math

Doing more than 20 damage on AL 140 only requires a spell of greater than 80 damage. The highest powered ele spells like Rodgort's barely inches above 30 damage to the jades.


Rangers can take EBSoH/GDW/SW/OoP, so its all well and good there for decent damage. If SoH would just get changed to work on all attacks they would be quite nice, since unlike melee they can take advantage of EBSoH without any troubles. Paragons are in a bind since they have no AoE, but splinter weapon is still effective with their attack speed and imbagon stuff will be going on at the same time of course.

Every time I see a vaettir group popup while I'm playing as an Ele I just type /dance and let my heroes or group members deal with them.

160+ Armor WTFBBQ?!

I think I contribute more by equipping a dark damage weapon and wanding.

Agreed. In a game that offers so many creative options, it's disconcerting to discover people who hate certain playstyles because they don't dot every i.

Hogwash! BS! and other assorted expletives!

Just because in your (limited) opinion, some class is not as "uber" as you think it should be, does not marginalize it. I have characters of each class, and every one of them is perfectly capable of doing most HM stuff with just H/H. True, it's easier with some than with others, but none of them are "marginal".

I find it wrong to be kinda forced to play as an ele with a bar that has 75+% non-elementalist skills and/or to rely on energy storage only cause it's just gives you more energy. This actually make me think that it's something wrong with that class (even if the problem is affecting only hm).

The fact that with the same team setup some classes perform worst then others just confirm that there is an unbalacement between classes.

http://guildwars.com/gameplay/professions/elementalist/

"With magic derived from the very foundations of nature itself, Elementalists can inflict more damage in a single strike than any other profession."

Why I disagree with this part: "Elementalists can inflict more damage in a single strike than any other profession"?

Actually, Zraw did a couple of SF spikes with the new Intensity buff. They said it worked pretty ok, and was a fun side-show to do a couple times, but mesmers still ruled.

It's not *my* opinion. It's more or less a consensus that eles can't do damage in hard mode and that with the Mesmer buffs Rangers got shafted. The only caveat is Rangers are ranged SY! spammers if going R/W.

I have done HM stuff as a heal monk with no PVE skills. That doesn't make it any better than marginal, especially when henches follow target calls and then get confused after 5 seconds and do their own thing.

In fact, I'd say a heal monk is more beneficial than an ele that only does damage (in HM), since the hench options are atrocious. Rangers have d-shot going for them, though.

Actually after HM update I quit GW PVE on my elementalist, until the WiK Update. It's that bad.

According to the Princeton dictionary (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=marginal), "marginal" means:

• borderline: of questionable or minimal quality; "borderline grades"; "marginal writing ability"
• bare(a): just barely adequate or within a lower limit; "a bare majority"; "a marginal victory"

I don't know about you, but the current state of those classes is quite marginal. If your Ele or Ranger leaves you won't think twice about it unless the Ele is an ER or the Ranger spams SY!. If your heal monk leaves, your SY! spamming Dervish/Assassin/Warrior/Paragon or your Panic/Keystone/Ineptitude mesmer leaves you will feel it. If your MOP/MM necro leaves kills take longer and in the latter case, you also lose corpse control and/or body blocks. If your SoS/ST/SOGM rit leaves you feel it. Etc. With melee classes, you feel the loss of a party member even more (due to tank and spank like setups) if your party only has heals and no mitigation.

well let's see with sf (also not the best option if u actually want to get max from intensity in hm):
- first sf burning
- after 2s intensity+sf, now u do damage with sf
- after 4s sf doing damage
- after 6s sf doing damage
- after 8s sf again (probably only burning)
- after 10s sf doing damage
- after 12s intensity + sf
(this is actually imposible to do)

(the seconds are counted from the first sf)

i think intensity was actually nerfed.

I think ebsoh is better then intensity.

But you said about fire. Well I'll chose firewall or even phoenix over intensity.

Also let's see what you actually have to bring to max out your damage:
- weaken armour
- ebsoh
- golep
- el
Also you need an attunement. So here we have 5/8 of your skill bar used only for energy management and increase your damage. Add intensity to it and we have 6/8 so you end up with only 2 slots for damage skills...

More hogwash and BS. You're saying that Rangers are now "marginal" because Mesmers got buffed. But, Rangers haven't changed - if they weren't marginal before, they're not marginal now that Mesmers were buffed.

I think you are being confused by thinking that "marginal" is a purely relative term. "Marginal" is relative to the task at hand, but not relative to other methods. As an example, if your job is to lift a 5lb weight and you do it just fine, you are not "marginalized" by the fact that someone else can lift 400lb, or lift 5lb "faster" - you're both perfectly adequate at the task. If, however, you are so weak that you can barely lift 5lb, you could be considered marginal.

My Ranger has Legendary Vanquisher, which was gotten using (mostly*) H/H and no gimmicks such as Ursan Blessing. So, I would hardly consider a Ranger to be "marginal" at doing HM.

(*there was a couple of areas where I had a guildie (also a Ranger, btw) help me - so it was 2 humans and 6 Heroes.)

You could use it this way, but most people mean "marginal" as a relative comparison of classes. You become marginalized relative to the other class options, in the sense that you get passed over in favor of another class choice. The term for determining whether your character can pass the challenge irrespective of other characters is "viable."

Ah yes, since I H/H most of the time (or just H nowadays), I neglected to consider the Party Nazis. But even then, Rangers and Eles only become marginalized to the Nazis, not to the rest of us.