Elites skills that shouldn't be elite.

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...