Elites skills that shouldn't be elite.

I just wanted to discuss about skill that you think shouldn't be elite.

Myself, I think that the air skill Lightning surge really is worth it as an elite skill. Indeed, not only do it cost exhaustion, take 3 sec to do the damage but it also do not have the standard 25% air spell armor penetration. The knock down make it a nice skill but I really don't think it's worth the elite tag. Here's the comparaison between lightning surge and lightning orb.

Lightning surge
Description: After 3 seconds, target foe is knocked down and struck for 14-83 lightning damage. This spell causes exhaustion.
Energy Cost: 10
Casting Time: 2 seconds
Recharge Time: 10 seconds
Skill Type: Hex
Linked Attribute: Air Magic

Lightning orb
Description: Lightning Orb flies towards target foe and strikes for 10-82 lightning damage if it hits. This spell has 25% armor penetration.
Energy Cost: 15
Casting Time: 2 seconds
Recharge Time: 5 seconds
Skill Type: Spell
Linked Attribute: Air Magic

As you can see, their damage is pretty similar BUT, lightning orb have armor penetration, a shorter recast time, do not exhaust, act instantly, cannot be removed and is not an elite. On the other side, lightning surge cost 5 mana less, do not need a line of sight(which is rarely a problem anyway) and cause knockdown.

All in all, I think that both lightning surge and lightning orb are about as useful, one is an elite and another is not.

I was just talking about Lightning Surge with Zrave the other night. It's not at all a poor elite. In fact it's extremely good at the moment. Abusively good. The key is not to look at it compared to Lightning Orb but in conjunction with Lightning Orb. Every spell has a .75 aftercast time, time spent after a spell's activated where you're still going through the animation, so when you look at their 2 second casting time what you actually get when you cast Lightning Surge then Lightning Orb is a 2.75 second gap or nearly exactly how long it takes for Surge to go off. Lightning Surge serves to add damage to the next skill you cast, creating a massive spike of damage that's hard for a healer to deal with. Surge is a hex, you'd have to eliminate that within 3 seconds which is hard considering the casting time of most hex removal skills and the reaction times of the average human. And when you have two or three characters lobbing such volleys then you have an opponent taking massive damage in the span of seconds. Since it's spike damage - damage all once - you can't outheal it as you can with sustained damage because you don't have the time.

With Superior Runes and Glyphs of Elemental Power you can get a spike of 200 odd damage from a single character, three of those flattens anyone. The only recourse are things like Reversal of Fortune, Divine Intervention, or Protective Spirit which are designed to counter-act massive, all at once damage, but it's hard to keep those on a target when you don't know which teammate the enemy will target and you have maybe a second to react once they do.

No, Lightning Surge can be very nasty. If you want a sorry excuse for an elite skill in Air look no further than Mind Shock.

But what other elite can you combine Mind Shock with to cause serious problems? That how I look at at a skill to figure if it should be Elite or not, and it should be how ANet does it, though I'm not always sure they do.

Water Trident combined with what other elite makes a devastating combo? I don't know, I can't find one. Mind Shock? Nope, don't see one there either.

The only thing making a skill elite does is make it unable to be used with other elites. If that doesn't fix an abuse issue then IMHO it shouldn't be elite.

I'm an Air elementalist and i can attest to lightning surge being pure ownage .

Some skills are only elite because in conjunction with other skills they are good like migraine which is a worthless elite unless you are using arcane conundrum also.

Yes lightning surge alone would be a dumb pick but lightning surge and lightning orb are almost inseparable the knockdown from surge makes the orb always hit.

I know lightning surge can help doing burst damage, but the thing is that it have too much downside for it to deserve to be an elite skill. Basically, you could use lightning strike( which with his armor penetration is very near damage wise to lightning surge) for basically the same result. Heck, considering, just as you said, the human reatcion time, you could use chain lightning and get better result if you were 3 firing it at the same time. Anyway, I'm not saying that lightning surge is not a good skill, only that compared to some other elite skill, it's benefit is really small. I toyed with it a bit in the last beta and while using it with lightning orb is nice, you end really fast with tremendous exhaustion.

Also, in last beta, you could get up to 40% chance of improved casting time with some basic item. Assuming you can get them in release, any spell can basically create the same damage burst as lightning surge without the downside, and that 40% of the time.

Anyway, the discussion is not on lightning surge but on which you think is not worth the elite tag. Oh and I agree, mind shock is pretty laughable, it's basically the shock spell with range, but with less damage, causing exhaustion, requiring you to have more mana then the ennemy and taking up your elite slot.

Lightning surge does more damage than lightning strike and it nocks down but most of the time you use it on soft targets in which case it does almost double lightning strike. I can see if you were using it on a ranger you would be doing 50 damage with surge and 35 with lightning strike you would have a problem but elementalists are not made to go after rangers .

for a useless elite skill look at Virulence if you want to weaken somone its usually a warrior and hes usually attacking one of your guys why cast disease on him also when its just going to spread to your team.

I had been using Lightning Surge for ages now... I can tell you, if it werent an elite... people are dead... Seriously... I am lacking of time now, so I will skip the detail. (got to run)

Lighting surge, even at 14 Air is still pretty weak. Also I think you're overlooking the effects of exhaustion. You're not going to be able to use LS much in a sustained fight, especially in Tombs. There are plenty of better ways to deal damage without it, and better spells that cause exhaustion that aren't elite (Obsidian Flame anyone?). It's definitely not a skill I'd use while holding the Hall of Heroes.

Meh, Elementalist damage is pretty gimped at the moment, save for a handful of mediocre spells like Water Trident and a couple Earth spells. Too many of the decent spells cause exhaustion now, while having poor recharge and energy cost for mediocre damage. They really need to fix the Fire line for PVP, and make skills not suck (Searing Heat for example).

Grenth's Balance is another skill that should no longer be Elite. It's been nerfed and nerfed again. A long time ago it used to be decent for Monks (infuse), sacrificial spells and reducing the health of high hp targets, but with the recent max-hp based change and high recharge it's just too crappy to justify taking it over any of the other Elites.

Now that I am back... the biggest reason for lightning surge to be an elite is that so you CAN NOT combo it with other elites... The moment that it is allow to chain combo with other elite and others all together is not a pretty sight... it basically just throw off the balance of the 4 elements.

what make Lightning surge great? the 3 sec.

the only thing that I wish they change is... make it into a hex instead, for the armor ignoring factor.

Hmmm, most elite are not really based around damage, so what elite combined with Lightning surge could be worst then it combined with lightning orb which I think is the highest single target spell?

Anyway, I repeat, the discussion is not about lightning surge but more about ALL the elite you find weak for their tag!

As Sausaletus said earlier, I'm of the opinion that lightning surge is actually too good right now. The 3 second delay allows for damage spikes of over 200 damage, which is just too hard to counter right now. It needs to be nerfed in damage and remain elite.

As for the comment above about using chain lightning, that also needs to be nerfed.

I also think that the focus of this thread is a little off. I am of the belief that every line should have 2 or 3 elites, to promote choice and strategic options. If one of them is obviously weaker than the others, they should be buffed instead of losing elite tag.

ya i know they made Hundred Blades an elite skill which SUCKS!!! i mean all i have to do is get ppl down to get a good shot at slicing off their heads

perhaps the biggest change need to be done is the word "elite"... Many skills being elite is not because they are strong, it is because if they were added with another skill in another line of skill... it would throw off balance of the game, and therefore... they are labeled "elite", where we should really call them... "single" or "uniqe" or "balance" or something...

when people hear the word "elite", they expect the skill to be sokme almighty skill or something.

They should just get rid of the Elite system altogether.

The whole concept of Elite skills was a poor stopgap measure in the first place.

You are only going to see more of the skills you take for granted slapped with the Elite tag as people come up with unalpha-tested combos (and I know there are a ton), further limiting the amount of decent builds available in the game.

Does this mean you think Final Thrust should be an elite?

The fact that Final Thrust cost 10 adrenaline and that you lose all adrenaline afterwords makes it very hard to use in combo with other powerfull warrior skills, now if it was energy based, I would elite it just so that you couldnt flourish it for 200 dmg to an opponent that was below 50% health.

This is exactly the reason you have 2 or more warriors both using final thrust. Get on teamspeak and snych up when you use them. Count down: 3,2,1- Final Thrust- and boom, your target should go down.

Cleave should not be elite.

But you have to get that target below 50% health in the first place. That takes that most precious of resources: time. That gives the opponet, the opponent's healer, a chance to react, a chance to heal and to buff up that target before that final shoe drops. Lightning Surge+Orb is problematic because it can happen at any time and there's little way to stop it beyond making sure everyone in your party has Protective Spirit or soemthing otherwise poor like that skill running constantly. Otherwise, a pair of Air ele on your team can just pick a target and drop them in about three seconds. With that damage all arriving within a span of .25 seconds.

Put it this way, Final Thrust is that last push to overwhelm a target's defenses while Surge+Orb is an opening gambit. Being able to devestate the other team before they can respond is a problem. Having a way of punching through the defenses they're able to rapidly erect is not.

Well, I'd agree with Hado. Never get rid of elites at this point, though, so we'll have to put up with it. The elite mechanism is awful and a poor excuse to avoid proper balancing. By their very nature elites bring more power into a system and can introduce vast potential for abuse. Because, of course, you can't make every skill elite. There seems to be a cap on elite skills, there are only so many per each profession. And that number's somewhere around 15. Useless elites get debuffed and stripped of their tag and good, abusive normal skills get buffed and slapped with the tag so that there's at any given time a set amount of skills.

Because each profession has about 75 skills that means 1 out of every 5 skills is going to be elite. Given that most skill lines are about 10 to 20 skills, Zrave's ratio is about right. Although it depends on the line. A big line like Domination with about 22 skills should have about 4 elites. A small line like Swords with about 9 skills should have, at most, 2. Then there are things like Energy Storage which has 2 of 3 skills as elite but that's a primary only line so it can get away with being a bit odd, especially given what those skills do.

You cannot have a pair of elementalists using lightning surge because its a hex this is why i think the skill is balanced. Even if you did have a pair using lightning surge/mind shock, which my guild did try, it was only successful for killing off 2 or 3 targets which is enough but.... The big downside to this was after the initial battle in gvg we were building up exhaustion and it severely gimped our team. We ended up deciding that it was only worth having one guy do this combo and the rest had high damage over time builds.

Now this combo plus final thrust is $$ but it is all but impossible to pull that timing off since the warrior has to wait for adrenaline and the caster has a 5 seconds setup time.