Update - Thursday, December 8, 2011

This update is a good thing. People saying otherwise are just afraid of change.

We now have more balance between professions and Eles look like a shit load of fun now. Can finally see Eles making their way into 7 hero meta setups. I especially love the change to Master of Magic.

Bye bye Whirling Farmers?

no noob, it might add a couple min to our doa! that would be unacceptable.

while its good to see a new skill update, I am highly disappointed that anet is still releasing updated skills for one prof at a time. Rangers and Paragons probably had it worse off than eles, and they aren't getting... well anything .

On the upside, glad to finally see some more nerfs to rit armor-ignoring damage, especially to SoS. I love playing my rit, but i hate the feeling that I have to use SoS, or else im gimping my party because, quite honestly, SoS is incredibly boring.

I would RAGE at that!

For PvE it's fine. The changes are ALL game-breaking for PvP. EVERY skill listed there needs a split.

How does...

Destructive was Glaive - damage reduced by 15%
Ancestor's Rage - damage no longer ignores armor, affected by DwG armor penetration and HM enemies have lower armor now
Spirit Rift - damage reduced by 7%

...Result in no more glaiveway?

The result to me sounds like enemies survive maybe 2 seconds longer.

Double Dragon

480 damage + burning anywhere between 3-10 seconds says hi.

I don't know if you noticed but DWG is mostly used by peeps looking to get their statue and 1 torment weapon for HoM. This won't make armbraces skyrocket at all. Only thing that could do that is a nerf to SF. Besides a Team Mesmer spike takes 30 min while DWG takes 1-2 hours? 1 hour being a very good team which is rare as balls for pugs.

Everyone say hi to Shitter Flames.

Two eles using this skill (like, say, on a king of the hill match in HoH where targets can't kite) will do over 800 adjacent damage in 8 seconds (ignoring the aoe fire condition) while remaining free to cast. All of this damage will be done in tiny 30 point packets so most of your prots will be largely useless.

And Double Dragon isn't even one of the most broken skills, most of them are WORSE.

These changes are fine for PvE but introducing ANY of them in PvP would be an INDESCRIBABLY poor choice.

All you need is one ele because it's a doublecast skill. Just cast it on a sin or a derv to stack their DPS and spam attack skills to keep reapply that burning.

Its pretty much gonna have to require high ass armor vs fire.

Plus even more X seconds because they have more health now. Do not forget that the HM changes makes for a double nerf. However, I don't think that will make "glaiveway" useless.

That, I might agree with.

1) Too much AoE condition-spam. Lots of easy cracked armor, easy weakness and easy blindness. Hello, dervishes!
2) Skills that do too many things at the same time. Hello, dervish elite skills.

However, there's also some things to consider, compared to the dervish update:

a) Dualcasting skills require proper positioning and teamwork; some of the skills sacrifice damage for utility; some rely on AoE which make them more relevant to PvE; some are more conditional for the extra effects; Chain/ Invoke are not as spammable;
b) They are mostly elite skills.

Dervishes were/ are, in comparison, more mindless, and they are way to efficient at doing way too many things at the same time, and they do that with half of their skill bar, not only with elites.

BTW, I'm the only one to realize that Star Burst might be one of the strongest of the new skills? It's 100+ AREA damage. I just read through the preview a second time, and the skills that seemed to be initially stronger to me are adjacent-ranged or single target; and the ones that seemed weaker at first glance are nearby area. There's a lot of suble details that make it hard to evaluate them. But ya, area damage is a very relevant AoE effect in PvP. It's a touch skill, though. Hmmm. Seems fun, actually.

EDIT:
There's some subtle details to consider, though. 1) It's adjacent, so it won't hit as many as Savannah; 2) It's an enchantment , and it'll be easy stripped. (At least, it says "you and target ally are enchanted".)

And half of the damage comes from you, and not from the other ally; you can't be, however, too close to the mobs, or as an elementalist you'll die: and dead, the enchantment goes puff.

What change hasn't? From what I can tell, it seems that the main problem that could arise is the increased synergy between each elemental attribute. We'll probably be able to squash in a lot and a lot of utility into one build. I can't help but feel that another defensive spike is gonna spring up. We'll just have to wait and see.

Better than Ancestor's Rage!

I'd recommend re-reading most of the skills. Too many of them are able to do things like spamming large damage, aoe knocks, and huge aoe conditions spamm all in one skill. Even a year ago, ONE of these effects would make an elite VERY powerful. These skills let you pack HUGE utility and HUGE damage into a single skill which is bad for the game. Look at gust: A nearby range AoE bull's strike that also deals 70 nearby range damage and gives you and a target an unconditonal 33% movement speed buff for 10+ seconds. Any ONE of these effects is VERY powerful, all three in one skill is simply depressing.

Actually it doesnt "double nerf" DWG. DWG deals armor checking lightning damage with 25% armor penetration. That means it deals full damage on 80 armor targets and close to 25% more on level 60 targets.

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I think they may have leaked these skills on purpose to see what the community has to say about them. Skills such as Shockwave seem game breaking and need a split. Shockwave should prob cause just weakness. As for the fire skills I think they can be dealt with by high armor which is something serious PvPers already equip themselves with.

How do you figure? Unless I missed it, they did not specify anywhere how much armor was getting reduced or hp was getting increased.

Well, at least hammers and scythes should show a noticeable difference.

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I'm not going to make any comments regarding PvP. Other than that perhaps some people are overreacting a bit.

As for PvE, the key change is the armor/hp change, and a-net didn't provide the numbers to analyze. Everything about this update hinges on how well they tuned those numbers.
(FYI: I probably wouldn't have traded hp for AL like this, but, if I had to do so, I would have set AL to the same 60/70/80 that players get and increased hp by ~(0.34*Lvl + 0.34)hp for each point of armor lost.)

None of the skill changes strikes me as particularly earthshattering. All of the "big nukes" still have bad recharges. Skills that show some promise might be Glimmering Mark (assuming the recharge stays at 10), Mind Burn (assuming the lack of exhaustion in the description is correct), Water Trident (which might replace Invoke+Chain Lightning depending on how much difference near vs adjacent really makes in practice), and Mirror of Ice (if you can work out a reliable way to have the proc hex in place).

Mist Form... [edit: has a least one remarkably broken build that I can think of.]

The blind+weakness on Shockwave makes me almost think PBAoE might not be totally, completely suicidal... and then I remember the the 1/3 downtime and snap out of that little delusion. Hey, a-net, couldn't you at least make the weakness last the full recharge? It might also help if I didn't have to split Earth+Fire to get decent PBAoE damage options.

Overall, I've got a strong suspicion that Searing Flames is going to be the big winner at the end of the day.

Most damage done by melee classes in PvE comes from armor ignoring bonus damage from skills, not weapon damage so they'll be pretty much unaffected i expect.

See, even that would be too strong. Any skill which has the potential to do 180 AoE damage shouldn't have ANY additional effects. To make the game balanced at all, you can't have skills that are effective at performing multiple roles at once. Basically skills that allow players to have large amounts of utility and damage at the same time are inherently overpowered. Every single one of the elites changed here do exactly that: they pack massive damage and massive utility into a single skill (often with no downside other than positioning, which is a downside inherent in EVERY skill).

It has been speculated quite a bit that armor will be reduced to what profession the mob is.

I like how the "Reducing Armor Ignoring Damage" actually hits none of the most powerful armor ignoring skills. MoP, SW are both just chilling on the sidelines.

Also, skills like Fireball being "too powerful" if they were at 1s cast is hilarious. Does Anet not know about Liquid Flame?

As for Double Dragon: The description doesn't necessarily imply that you will take 2x damage if both players are next to you, it could be if either player is adjacent then you take 30 damage flat. Also, SoA = weeee 0 damage per tick. And SoA has 1/2 the recharge. Shielding Hands also works fine. Its definitely very powerful, but not gamebreakingly ridiculous like some skills are. Sadly, power creep is the name of the game.

Horribly imba skills I saw in a quick look over:

Gust is ridiculous (Position yourself and another player right and you WILL knock down at least half of the enemy team). Potentially bringing back the W/E btw? 2 Frontliners alternating this easily have 100% uptime on +33% speed boost along with large dual-AoE knockdowns every 6s. Works fine even with 0 attribute spec, though of course going for a conjure would work excellent as well and turn this into a fairly annoying constant nuke as well.

Star Burst - 112 damage IN THE AREA damage on 7s recharge that also causes burning and gives energy? In the Area is just a ridiculous range for anything dealing damage. Can't wait to see 6/8 well spread out players get spiked out at the same time by E/As or something. Keep your +vs fire shields handy. Time to curb stomp PvE some more btw.

Mirror of Ice - 6s of 2x nearby slowing, and if it hits someone already hexed then it recharges in 6s? You thought snares were annoying before, this is pure hell. Nice, fast and hard to interrupt too.

Stone Sheath - So, I can have as much armor as a warrior and immunity to critical hits for 24s? And an ally gets it too? And the recharge is 12s? I think I'll cast this on both my monks and have 3 characters who can never die.