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.

Elites that should not be elite:

Signet of Midnight?

(lol, they recently Un-Elited Throw Dirt, PBAoE Blind...)

Sure, Signet of Midnight is 20 second recharge and no energy... but you still blind yourself. Maybe it'd be ok for a Mesmer (what do they care if they're blind?)... so I dunno. If someone has an amazing use for it, I'd like to hear it.

I thought I had one, but it fizzled when I learned that Determined Shot only recharged your Attack Skills.

Yes I think some skillz are weak even after I have 14 points distributed to that skill, it just doesnt do nuf dmg to be Elite or worth using even at its max.

I read somewhere in the guides that you can only have one Elite skill amongst the 8 skillz, so there Vermilion Okeanos explaination didnt really mean anything lol

Actually, he's saying exactly what's in the guide that you read. If it wasn't elite, you could use it with a skill that is elite and create a devastating combo. Making it elite limits the potential of devastating combos happening.

As for Throw Dirt and Signet of Midnight, here's my view. I can understand the Signet of Midnight since it's free and if used in a melee build would be really good. Throw Dirty would only be important to a primary ranger since its Expertise based, and since rangers attack from the distance, not many rangers are going to be running towards the warriors and tanks to blind them (specifically cause they probably don't want to risk getting attention and being killed off). Best way to use if it was a R/W with sword or axe. And with a 45 second recharge, I think that rules out its power to be abusive. Even with the PBAoE part, I'm sure once used the enemy team will be aiming for the ranger very quickly before it can get recharged. You can't just look at what the skill does, but also what it costs, recharge, and the possible builds that can abuse its powers.

When I first saw Signet of Midnight, I thought "Hey, this could come in handy sometime." Then I saw it was elite. I thought, "WTF, why would anyone use this as their elite skill." But as was mentioned, why does a mesmer care is he is blinded, he is going to be casting spells all the time. What about the warrior or ranger that you just blinded? Blindness might make most warriors or rangers pretty much useless while they have the skill on. 20 seconds later you use it on them again, at only the cost of blindness to yourself which you don't care about. Seems like it would pretty much be able to shut down a character whose main purpose is to attack. It also doesn't say how long the blindness lasts for ...

However, Pant, why is the mesmer attacking the warrior in the first place? His abilities are better served against a Monk or Caster. Sure, if Signet of Midnight was not a "touch" attack, it might be useful to stop a warrior before moving on to the called target. However, the Touch part puts you right up near the wrong side of the hurting stick.

Sure, you could quickly run over to him... but I think Signet of Midnight could use a little revision. This skill, currently, is better suited for... well, for replacement with a better elite.

What if the warrior is attacking the mesmer? Mesmer uses Signet of Midnight for protection and quickly refocuses on the caster his team is taking down. If anything, I think increasing the recast time would solve the elite problem. Longer recast = no need for it to be elite.

Um, what about the Illusionary Weaponry mesmer? Correct me if I am wrong here, but I believe blindness does not affect IW because IW cannot miss. If signet of midnight was not elite, an IW mesmer could blind a warrior using signet of midnight and get in melee range without getting any damage.

I think your weapon must "hit" for IW to do its dmg. I am pretty sure block stances protect vrs IWs so I imagine blindness would too

No, Illusionary Weaponry... hits. It always hits. Come Hell or high water, Illusionary Weaponry will hit. Blindness? It connects. Evasion stances? It connects. Countering stances? It connects. Skills that say "Your attack does no damage"... it connects. Your opponent is hiding behind a fortress of angry kittens! CONNECT'D! See what I'm getting at?

Nothing, nothing can affect the damage an Illusionary Weaponry swing does, nor it's 100% hit rate.

Yeah, that's what I thought too, because our ward against melee didn't do jack squat against multiple IW warriors. We had to resort to the ol kiting tactics to evade them

I've played an IW build some the last 2 betas and I loved it whne people tried to blind me. I just kept hitting them and they couldn't do anythign aobut it, except break the enchantment.

Actually, nothing that effects attacks effects IW because IW is treated as a spell. Things that effect spells, however, will also effect IW. For example, Mark of Protection and Shielding Hands effect IW damage, just as they would any other spell. Also, things that effect swing rate, such as Shadow of Fear, will likewise effect the rate at which IW damage is dealt.

It's actually rather close to 250 damage against a soft target (106 or so from the Lightning Surge and 140 or so from the Orb / Chain Lightning). The combo does let you kick out some serious burst damage, no doubt. It's one of the few worthwhile tricks an Elementalist can pull in PvP these days.


I'm hesitant to advocate Elementalist nerfs in general, just because the class is lagging so far behind the others - stupid tricks like Surge/Orb or Surge/Chain are all it has. The only thing I'd really want to nerf on Chain Lightning is the energy cost - exhaustion just isn't relevant when you're dealing with stupid burst effects, you need to hit a reasource that matters. The damage and cooldown are perfectly reasonable. Same with Obsidian Flame - it can dish out some stupid damage spikes, so why is it only 5 energy?

But look at something like Orb, which is pretty much your baseline Air skill. Against a soft target it's going to be dishing out 137 damage per cast, over 2.75 seconds once you consider the aftercast. A Ranger with a top notch bow is going to be doing an average of 29 damage with just normal shots - add in attack skills and Tiger's Fury, and you're easily looking at a damage Ranger kicking out 90-100 damage in those same 2.75 seconds - for less energy on a higher defense character. Sure an Elementalist with level 16 Air is going to kick out some scary hits, but they really aren't all that impressive compared to the baseline.

If anything in Air needs a nerf, it's Lightning Surge. I wouldn't touch anything else, and I'd go through and buff up most of the line in fact.


You might have noticed that it's presently the best Warrior elite there is, however. Hundred Blades is outstanding and completely worthy of its elite tag.


Granted, I think the elite mechanic is as awful as ever, and that it's just being used to dodge balancing the game instead of implementing unique, expansive mechanics. But, as has been said, we aren't going to get rid of it at this point, so we might as well get used to the elite sledgehammer.

That said, I really don't care about bad elites, because there are going to be a ton of them. You limit people to but a single, overly-powerful skill, then give them a choice of several generally useful ones, and only the very best will ever be used. The difference between a mediocre elite and a poor elite is negligible - neither will see appreciable play.

Peace,
-CxE

Obsidian Flame costs 5 energy because it causes exhaustion. Exhaustion is a poor balance mechanic, much like Elite skills, and they are just slapping it on everything left and right. Sure, you can get some decent burst damage, and maybe even kill someone, but in any long-term fight (anything over a minute) you're destroying yourself with every cast. GW is becoming more and more about long, drawn-out defensive based fights, with power healing and enchantments being the key to winning, and Elementalists are becoming the anti-thesis to that.

Sure, there are a small handful of Elementalist tricks, but those are the only things keeping the class from being in complete gimpdom at the moment.

This is only true to a certain extent. If you'd make certain skills non-elite some serious balance issues would arise. The ones I can think of are Thunderclap + Marksman's Wager, 100 Blades + IW, Fevered Dreams + Victory Is Mine. Elite skills are a decent way to make certain abuses unlikely.

Now this was just to defend ANet because my personnal views on this are very different. What I think ANet should do is completely take out all the elite tags and make enchantment removal and hex removal better as well as boost energy regain. If you look at the list, you'll see that a lot of the elites are enchantments and hexes. What would happen is that the community would start to create much more rich strategies involving these interesting skills but also have effective counters to them with a larger energy pool. Naturally more and more teams would bring counters and everyone would get better at disenchanting and calling hexes. The way elites are now is kind of like if your king in chess would act like a queen but you wouldn't be able to use your queen after the turn you'd use your king (or something weird and distasteful like that). Personnally I liked seeing IW+100 blades. It went to show you that good ideas would go a long way. And if ANet would have kept it this way, teams would start bringing disenchants and a balance would have been achieved. Same applies for Thunderclap + Marksman's, people would just bring more disenchants. You see someone stacking on Healing Hands and Healing Seed ? Disenchant them, it's that simple. Your buddie's getting beat down by Life Siphon and Life Transfer, dehex him... that simple. I think Elites should only be kept for nukes or skills that do similar effects than the general ones but with larger numbers (ie Power Attack could be elite and deal 30+ damage instead of a mere 20+ but with a longer cooldown).

The way it's going now is that we'll eventually all be limited to crappy DPS and bland builds. The more elites, the less combinations are possible for your character. This is sort of the opposite of what we are supposed to believe when playing the game.

I am wondering if Anet is going to change Grenth's Balance. It is a pretty crappy elite now, especially with the last change where you can't use it against the guild lord anymore. 60 second recharge to equalize your health against one enemy? And you already are taking a lot of risk by lowering your health to use this spell.

And to think that BiP and Chiron's Balance caused the elite mechanic to be born... how sad.

SoM is a great spell.

That's the way it should have been in the first place. Buff up everything in general, not just removal options, so counters for anything can occur naturally. Design the game so that even if people constantly come up with new "broken" strategies or combos, there will always be effective "ways out", rather than relying on incremental fixes/nerfs as people figure out new ways to play the game.

Right now they're just addressing the symptoms on a case-by-case basis as they come up, rather than going to the root of the problem (not enough effective counters). What we're getting now is more skills slapped with the Elite tag, longer recycle times, higher energy usage, exhaustion, lowered damage, etc. While symptomatic nerfs are the easiest way to keep things predictable (this is exactly what they do in WoW, and they outright admit to it), it doesn't make for a very good competitive game. If things keep going the way they are, high-level PVP just won't be all that deeply layered or interesting.

For starters, go around buffing up damage amplifying/healing prevention Debuff spells (spells like Barbs) and enchantment removal (spells like Rend enchantments, Desecrate, Drain Enchantment). Drastically lower their costs and recharge. Right now power healing, enchantments and hex removal options are so much more effective, there's no point in bringing any debuffs/enchant removals unless you're playing some noob team.
Why bother bringing something like Scourge Healing, Barbs or Defile Flesh when a single Monk removes all that in a fraction of the cost (both in time and energy) it took for you to put the skill in play?

Get rid of elite tags, starting with all the garbage ones. Skills like Plague Signet, the elem Mind skills, which no good players would touch even if they weren't elites need to be opened up first. If a particular combo is being used a lot, look at the counters. If the counters are too costly or circumstantial to bring along then they need to be improved.

Similar to ranger skills. Less experienced rangers laugh at Poison Arrow because they have had Apply Poison since level 11 and it works on every shot for 24 seconds. But Poison Arrow stacks with preparations, while Apply Poison can't stack with a second prep...