Update - January 5, 2012

Warrior is my main and its an awesome but under appreciated class. Mainly because so many new players give them a bad name. I am lucky because my monk is close to GWAMM and I can work on my 3rd character which is the Ele so I can appreciate this update. Getting GWAMM and 50/50 with a warrior though was fun.

The whole point of SG was that it gave 75% block and once it blocked it did an AoE heal with a 1 second recharge. The high energy cost was irrelevant to ER prot eles so it became a staple. Anet obviously tried to kill two birds with one stone in the SG change. One was to try and hamper the 3 melee plague in PvP, the other to make hurt hero ER prot.

You can't possibly be this stupid. You cannot possibly consider that a legitimate argument.

AP builds are, by far, the strongest offensive option for casters beyond spirit spamming and minions.* The Elementalist is not in a unique situation in that regard, it never was. I've explained why AP builds dominate and why this update was never going to change that, so I won't bother repeating. Where Elementalists fell behind was in tiers below this top tier and the majority of complaints stem from that because the majority of players don't really play in that top tier of builds, or feel that their arbitrary definitions and constraints should apply in some way (e.g. E/A AP builds aren't real Elementalist builds).

*They may even best those two, but summons are harder to gauge in terms of offense.

Now as for heroes, we have a different set of circumstances that better reflect the skill situation; notably we don't have PvE skills. We also lose much of our ability to create ridiculous combos due to the AI, but we tend to look at bars in vacuums anyway.


The Invoke+Chain Lightning template on a hero was good because it was efficient. Those two skills were enough together to create a decent offensive hero that could serve as a reliable platform for something else; notably Fallback but an Elementalist has the energy (just about) for other options. The actual damage from Chain Lightning and Invoke may have been weaker compared to single casts of ESurge or whatever, but Invoke has a very generous cast time and both it and Chain have excellent recharges; the build needs nothing more for decent offense.
Now this update has nerfed that build; you can still run Invoke or Chain Lightning in a build, but running both cuts the reliability of the hero that made it useful and only running one severely reduces it's offensive power.
As for other Elementalist options; well not many were really introduced that can compare: not many Elementalist skills offer the efficiency that Invoke Lightning and Chain Lightning had. Rodgort's Invocation was always had some potential but it's position in Fire Magic always held it back, there was nothing else in Fire Magic worth looking at really, and its energy cost was always debilitating. This update helped a little in that regard; Fireball got its cast time reduced. However, Elemental Attunement + Rodgort's + stuff in fire was never as good as Invoke+Chain Lightning and that would still be true if Invoke wasn't hit.
Some of the new elites may look promising, but they're invariably going to have to be coupled with very weak non-elites and so the strength of such options plummet; Shatterstone in particular comes to mind.
The top option for Elementalist heroes was hit in a way that destroys the aspects that made it good. Options below it were buffed yes, but not to the point were it's a straightforward replacement.


You play an Ele better than a Warrior?
Ever since the Rit update came along, I've consistently found playing a caster in a h/h caster ball easier than playing as a melee character, but since I've always believed I truly suck at playing melee, I've never given it much thought.

SG healing was nice but it was largely a filler skill. The real reason to bring it was the spammability, something that other skills can also provide. Having to run either Invoke or Chain now is a much harsher blow to it's efficiency than losing SG was to ER.

Regardless of all that I really don't feel like getting into an argument over this, so we can at least agree that they should have just split the skills right?

You dont understand my argument. Using an elite skill from your secondary profession is not a legitimate way of analysing the DPS of your primary profession.

I consider the use of non primary skills, especially the elite to make an effective build for your primary class to mean that there is something simply wrong with the primary classes skill choices in the first place, and this is the issue that needs addressing rather than telling people that they are wrong to be using anything other than AP, ER or Invoke on their ellys.

If AP is the most powerful option for casters, then use it on your heroes as well.

AP works well for skills with long recharges, but for something with a 6s recharge its ridiculous. Get yourself a 40/40 weapon set and use this:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ebon_...dard_of_Wisdom

That gives 100% half skill recharge.

So learn to adapt, just like everyone else have always had to.

The real problem with Invoke/ Chain Lightning nerfs, is the lack of alternatives to substitute either of them. However, for a player, I found out that the new Blinding Surge works almost as good as Invoke for spammable spikes, although it trades some of its power (it's weaker than even Chain) for a lot of blind, as well as it's more circunstancial (not effective against casters). The heroes, however, don't use the new BS as a spike skill.

Thunderclap has potential, but other than coupling it with Chain Lightning, there's nothing else decent to put on the bar, and heroes needed at least one more efficient and spammable spike skill here, or as an alternative, some efficient utility skills. Air magic line offers neither for PvE.

Air and water magic suffer the most from lack of good non-elite skills, and this prevents their new elites to be put to full use. Invoke had the advantage that, alongside Chain Lightning, was sufficient; AND heroes AI knew how to use it well enough too.

Meanwhile, fire and earth elementalists have gotten a clear, strict buff. Fire damage is back to NM level, although I'm not sure how strong that might be on high-level areas. Earth damage is back too, and its best elites were buffed. The new Fireball is an extra spammable skill of choice, the new churning earth is win in HM.

So far, I think an earth elementalist is superior to an Ineptitude Illusion mesmer. It has about equal damage, more so if you take EBSoH with yourself, it has about as much (if not more?) melee control, it has much better crowd control, and can deal full damage without depending on melee foes, being more general. It's lovely.

I think so too, my party is taking much less damage with UG + Eruption than it did with an Ineptitude mesmer.

Does Churning Earth knock down foes in HM without speed buffs?

Also I forgot to check with glimmering mark, but I think the AI automatically casts spells on the same target afterwards which removes it, making this a useless elite choice if that happens, something else that could have been easily fixed with a skill split.

Thats nice, however most people in that thread, and in this one agree that dropping your mesmer heroes for invoke ellys was a far worse option due to losing out on so much shutdown, and any damage difference is so minuscule to not be worth it. Hence there is nothing about this update that harms hero builds in any ways, all it has done is give you so many more options with elly heroes.

All HM foes have speed boosts. CE was already a decent skill before, now it's better with less casting time and less armor from foes. The only exception is when used alongside snares. No idea how well heroes use it, have to test it out.

My earth hero's bar is the following:
- Unsteady Ground
- Churning Earth
- Eruption
- Ward Against Melee
- Ward Against Foes
- Glyph of Lesser Energy
- Earth Attunement
- Aura of Restoration

The melee AI runs straight into the Wards, and the hero knows how to spam its nukes once they are there. I'm not sure if they waste their Churning Earth during that moment, though.

Still, my results are excellent so far. This build almost completely disables melee. Even with Ineptitude mesmers dedicating half of their bar and their elite for anti-melee, I found out that melee foes could still kill my party very often, especially when battles lasted long enough and against intelligent bars.

WoC healers waste their time removing conditions from Eruption, the wards aren't removable, and you can't do much when KDed. In between recharges, Ward of Melee does its job decently, and it's not even takes much until UG recharge again.

After the melee are taken out, or even if you're fighting only a full-ranged mob, this hero still deals enough damage, and now that's where Churning Earth shines the most. It also happens that the casters AI is dumb enough to attack sometimes, but I prefer unconditional damage plus the occasional KD against them than the conditional damage from ineptitude.

If you're an elementalist yourself and take EBSoH, the earth hero really shines. Double Dragon with you then becomes godly. Your melee opponents take the extra 14 armor-ignoring damage for 8 seconds from two different sources. Resulting in about 224 damage extra from EBSoH alone! With the Heat series and Meteor against the casters, and you have excellent crowd control while you destroy melee.

Finally, with a MM, both you and your earth ele + EBSoH shine at nuking, and Double Dragon can then be cast on whichever minion you want, although minions can die quickly here. I wonder if a true MM is better than a Minion Bomber in this context, especially now that minions natural strength is also higher.

Gonna test this out.

I think I'll remove my water magic hero and swap obsidian flame + magnetic surge to those two wards, that seems like a much better idea.

I'll also swap Starburst back to Searing flames and mimick that instead, as Starburst is rather lame for heroes and I didnt like having to run around to cast it (same with lava font which I swapped to snowstorm).

I think that blinding Surge would also be better than Glimmering Mark, because the AI seems to cast something right after it.

I was unsure about Ward of Melee, but I think I prefer the redudancy for extra safety. At least for heroes, because you never know when they might screw up. Ward Against Foes has been key, though.

I do think, however, that Obsidian Flame is a great skill against armored foes, but being single target limits its uses to some foes like, bosses, or those Jade Armor, etc.

EDIT: I went to the far shiverpeaks to kill minotaurs. I know it's such an easy area, but it was just me with double dragon/ heats/ EBSoH, Vekk with the earth build I mentioned abouve, and Livia as a necro rit healer. We did kill mobs of 5 minotaurs in very few seconds, and our health bars were always full with the occasional healing. Considering that they are enemies with high armor, I was pretty satisfied by how fast I and Vekk killed them. Sure, EBSoH + Double Dragon making it activating 16 times in 8 seconds is strong. But if against 96 armor that's what happened, then you can imagine against 60 armor casters, 70 armored assassins and 80+ dervishes and warriors. Heh, even rangers with 100 elemental armor, which is just 4 more, and aboust as high as you'll face in general/ casual hard mode... Still, being an easier area, don't want to give much credit to it.

The earth ele really needs a 40% recharge weapon set, though. It's their main weakness so far, even though UG is easily available. And they do cast Churning Earth on foes within Ward Against Foes. Ward Against Melee might be switched to something more spammable if the area is not hard enough, but I don't know what it could be.

EDIT 2: My necro had weaken armor too.

I ran into the new Star Burst doing Raisu Palace HM yesterday, and I also want to try it out and fool around with it. Could be fun

god, double dragon needs a new active animation, it gets pretty hectic if there are 3-4 dd eles

Every other attributes aoe is mostly not limiting while only air has nothing (except those 2 kd ones)

And thats 36dmg with lb title on? lol

If you compared a SF E and an (old) IL E in terms of just pure DPS, then yes, the SF E did more DPS, even against single high armored targets. Even with IL's armor penetration, it couldn't match the DPS provided the armor ignoring burning and the quick recharge of SF. However, the reason IL was better was because it was more flexible and had more potential.

Let's take for example, a case of 4 SF E's vs 4 IL E's. In this case, using the same set up as above, the IL E's would deal more DPS. In HM, a huge chunk of SF's damage came from burning. Unfortunately, burning doesn't stack. If you have 4 SF's, you don't get 4 times the burning. You have DPS that just go to waste. On the other hand, the IL E's don't lose a bit (though the long cast time of CL did hurt a bit).

Then there are PVE skills like EBSH. This cuts what, 3 seconds from IL's recharge (I don't remember the exact recharge atm)? Then there's SF where the recharge is cut by only 1 second. And so what if SF recharges faster? What are you going to do? Burn them faster? SF's fire damage caused on targets already burning was nothing to write home about in the old HM.

There's also the fact that this is a team game that consists of multiple damage dealers. Let's say that a SF E did 40 DPS and an IL E did 30 DPS. While this may seem like a huge advantage, when you have multiple allies killing things, SF's burning isn't going to do a whole lot before things die. On the other hand, IL again, doesn't miss a bit. Then there's the fact that for speed runs, IL can bring more utility skills where a SF E relies heavily on energy management skills.

Also, I'm on board with this hate for exhaustion. Heroes simply cannot play smart enough to handle exhaustion. I have tons of fun builds that I would love to put on my heroes. Unfortunately, the AI simply cannot handle many of these builds. This update just changed a ton of skills to be highly ineffective on heroes and the exhaustion problem is one of them. Seriously, what's the point of exhaustion in PVE? Why not just reduce the damage, increase the recharge, etc. IMO, there's no valid reason to have exhaustion over reduced damage, increased recharge, etc. I thought this update would allow me to give my E heroes tons of fun DPS builds. Unfortunately, I don't have a single new DPS build for my E heroes that I would enjoy.

I don't see the problem with the new exhaustion. 5ex on a single skill is irrelevant to most PvE, and to a lot of PvP, the exceptions being when you have to fight for a long time without a single break. The real problem is that two spammable skills with 5ex in the same bar is indeed a problem, and that nerfed one.single.build, but even then, this could be fixed in a different way.

Other than mixing Invoke with Chain, how many DPS builds does this prevent your heroes to take? Maybe if you be crazy enough to mix Obsidian Flame + Earthquake + Dragon Stomp, or something.

EDIT: Or maybe Mind Burn, I can see a problem with that. I don't know how the heroes would use it. But there's already Searing Flames for a similar alternative to that.

SF now beats old IL's DPS so badly it isn't even funny, even without burning it still wins easy. Thats because it can be spammed faster and also activate EBSoH faster.

Against 80 AL enemies, IL/CL hits ~27 DPS with EBSoH. SF hits ~30 DPS before you include burning. Not even considering the fact that can hit a lot more than 3 targets, and Fire has Liquid Flame as well (not calculating it since it's not for DPS, but for spike).

You mean EBSoW? Well, 1s recharge SF makes its damage go up 50%. 3s recharge on CL/IL only makes its damage go up by about 40%ish.

Yeah, Exhaustion absolutely doesn't work for heroes and it only works for players on seriously powerful skills that you will only use once, maybe twice per battle. CL/IW are not that, they are spam skills.

I just tested Invoke Lightning + Chain Lightning on Zhed Shadowhoof against Master of Damage. He spammed those skills until the exhaustion bar was about 40% filled, then slowed the pace down, and he NEVER casted those spells when his exhastion was about half of his entire energy.

Are you people sure the AI suck that much at using exhaustion skills?

This seems like good news to me, especially for those who want to give (only) one spammable 5ex spell to their heroes (ex. Chain, Mind Burn) and are afraid their heroes getting burned out of energy.

I'm really curious as to what makes you think that. Invoke has been by far the most popular midline template in the last four months, behind only Onslaught and RC in terms of overall frequency. Dual Invoke spike has been the most popular team build of this period.

Tested it again, heroes won't use Invoke/ Chain lightning skills ever if their exhaustion bar is at half of their energy bar. My eles have 81 energy, and they only use those skills when they have 50e max, to reduce it back to 45 max. If they have no other skill to use by then, they'll just wand their enemies down.

So no problem putting some Mind Burn or something on them, right? They'll slow down and then stop using it before it becomes a problem (45+ energy is more than enough for a spellcaster with good e.management).

EDIT: So, at the beginning, they spam those spells mindlessly. Then they'll use it every 15 seconds.

And this only applies if they have TWO spammable exhaustion skills. With chain lightning only, and more options to use (ex. Lightning Orb), their exhaustion rate is soooooo slow, that the 5ex cost of Chain Lightning and the likes is nearly irrelevant.

If after 5 battles the hero barely casts your exhaustion causing spell, is it really worth him carrying it anymore?

I can certainly see one 5 exhaustion spell being fine, but then you have an air build with just chain lighting for damage. What are you planning on doing with that? Potentially MoM can work, but your other non-elite damage options aren't great either.

If you only have one exhaustion skill, yes. It'll take forever to fill the exhaustion bar, unless they can't use any other skill, and any slight break (ex. walking inbetween mobs in pve) will probably reduce the exhaustion stack to 0.

EDIT: The air magic line is a bit underpowered now that we can't have Invoke and Chain, and this applies to both heroes and players. Honestly, for now, only fire and earth heroes are worth it, at least until we get better non-elites for air and water.