Skill changes?

As they should... the game works better when you need more classes to do well... not when people find a way to stack the hell out of something and stagnate competition. I hope eventually it's balanced enough where it comes down to whether your individual players are better than the other teams, not that one team is ganking you with their cheap new trick all the time.

someone said it earlier, but dont take that list on IGN as the be all and end all of the changes, wait to see what else is being rolled out, one thing i really do hope is that spirits get changed in a big enough way to stop people blocking the relic on unholy temples with them. *blood boils at the thought*

i was always a little dubious of the fact that you can run through your own spirits, but not the other team's...

Maybe the voices for spirit nerfing were a lot louder?

Seriously though, I think I came into the game after the air spiker fad. But now that you mention it, that makes sense if you got three or four people all hitting a group with chain. Ah well, I guess I can deal with these changes. I didn't pick e/n to be gimpy or twinkish, heck I run blood not death on my secondary.

Thanks for the info.

spoken like a tru warrior.

but then again we expect no less from you

I for one welcome our new skill-nerf-buff overlords.

Anyway. From the description of NR, it doesn't necessarily rule out AOE removal of Enchant or Hex. Personally I'd like to see NR to remove 1 hex/enchant, then double cost of maintained enchantment. If we just concentrate on anti-enchant, than the anti-hex aspect of the original skill gets taken out all together. Removing only 1 hex/enchant will also limit the effectiveness of Oath Shot + NR to spam mass removal.

Panic seems like a really nice skill now. I'm glad I've capped it recently while running Hell's Precipice again.

Putrid Explosion seems like a really terrible skill now. With 5s casting time, no one will ever bring it since every necro will be casting Wells. This also gives plenty of time to people to "run away from a corpse"...which also makes Putrid even MORE useless. The only "good" point left about Putrid is the 0 cool-down time.

I also agree with the posters above that other enchant stripping skills need a slight boost. Shatter Enchant for example...would be made a lot better if its recharge time becomes 20 rather than staying at 25. This makes it comparible to the enchant cool down time and thus become a sustainable enchant-remover. Rend and Lingering Curse are just fine because of their mass-removal ability.

5 second recharge, not casting time.

Unless people die faster than 3-4 seconds apart, it'll still be useable.

: Person dies. Putrid. 3 seconds later, another person dies. Other person starts 3 second well. 2 more seconds later, Putrid recharges. Person casts Putrid. Well fails.

Considering how few matches I know of that last less than 40 seconds, it's not a huge nerf. It just stops chain casting, which is probably a good thing, considering how powerful it is.

Of all spells in the world if tyria, they had to dink with divine boon.........damnit damnit damnit.....

So okay, you can have more than 1 type of spirit down, just not more than 1 of the same spirit.

...and to think I soiled my pants for a reason...

Regardless, with nature's bent over a table and spanked as hard as it is, it really does open up a slew of awkward enchantment chains, which will, I suppose, expose any other skill imbalances in due time, and further evolve the metagame, so...maybe nerfing renewal isn't so bad after all.

I just got 56% of my skills back with a vengeance. My Mesmer is practically singing! Beware PvP, I come for you...

Positive change, thanks ANET,
cmb

Agreed. The changes in NR and Panic make Mes a very attractive invitee for PvP play.

First things first, I am looking at things entirely from a pve perspective, so bear with me.

/cheer @ Fireball changes. A staple of one of my builds, being able to spam it that much more easily is going to have some interesting reprocussions. If other fire spells have recharge dropped, it may even result in my switching secondaries (I use e/r for s quickness for constant nukes)

/cheer @ spirits The wailing lord/griffons quest in FoW became that much more doable.

/cheer @ nerfing chain lit. This is going to mean less air eles in general, which means less air eles in pve (especially fow/uw) thinking they are the best ele build ever as they are great in pvp. Also less damage from those ruddy smoke phantoms and their cousins on crack the portal wraiths.

in general

/cheer @ anet

I really can't wait to see the buffs they made to enchantment removal...

Spirit Changes - Kudos on the changes to the spirits, but I think they were a little bit too heavy handed, they could have merely made the spirits incorporeal and let spirits still be spammable. With spirits no longer under the effect of Fertile Seasons and since only 1 copy of each will only be allowed soon, they are just a wee bit too easily brought down.

Elementalist Changes - As someone more knowledgable than I already stated, Elementalist already had enough problems with their supposedly "top-rated" damage dealing to warrant this change. If anything the soon to be former chain-lightning is what the other elementalist spike damage spells should have been like - Absurdly powerful at the cost of being horrificaly mana inefficient. Unfortunately, I doubt Anet would ever make any changes to it, as too many people would protest any buff to elementalist, since "OMG BIG NUMBERZ ON SPELLZ" is all they see.

Smite Changes - yeah divine boon and draw conditions technically aren't skills on the smite line, but they are mainly used in conjuction with Zealots fire to smite. All I have to say is this changes squat, smiting is still going to be absurdly strong.

Agh they had better boost enchantment removal soon. At least now necro's can do a lot better in PvP. Well of the profane and then the whole hex line comes back thank god.

I was to. I asked around a bit on Fianna vent last night to try and get a feel for why that particular change was made, and the general reaction was 'because we don't know how our game works.'


Removal just needs to be cheaper across the board. When I say removal, I mean Necromancer removal - Mesmer stuff doesn't even really count as removal, it's a bunch of conditional nukes and conditional energy management. But having to fight enchantment stacks with Chilblains and Lingering Curse is wholly insufficient - skills like those, that can really punish people for overloading on enchants, need to be priced to hurt.


Hex Removal isn't great but the tools are at least there - a few copies of Smite / Inspired, maybe a Remove Hex, a Convert somewhere. The difference is that it takes an awful lot of resources to hex stack someone out, and all of that gets nullified by a Convert. You really can't set up crazy hex webs like you can with enchantments either - really all you can do is pile crap onto someone until they're useless. Now I'll revoke my statements once the power hex stacking builds come out (and Panic has given people a *great* reason to make those), but until then I don't think that hexes are nearly the concern that enchantments are.


Yes and no. The Fire line, for instance, never bypasses armor so it's easy to compare. Air has 25% armor penetration but exactly how that works is pretty well understood. There are a few ignore armor effects, but remember that Warriors and Rangers have those too, in the +damage from the skills they use. I think it's pretty comparable, really.


That would be the fundamental problem that's lead to the imbalance. Any idiot can get 16 in their elemental attribute and start cranking out the damage. The problem being, of course, that the 16 attribute is the *ceiling* of Elementalist damage. Lightning Orbs are going to dish out 140 damage against Monks with a 2.75 second cast time and there isn't a whole lot you can do about it. Warriors and Rangers are more complex than Elementalists and have a ton of damage, speed, and other buffs to work with, and can *easily* create a character that puts an Air Elementalist to shame. Basically Rangers and Warriors are going to continue to get better, while Elementalist damage is going to say the same until they start to introduce new mechanics that give Elementalists more flexibility.


I'll agree with this for a small handful of spells - Fireball and Meteor (post buff), Lightning Strike, Obsidian Flame, Water Trident. The rest are just some combination of overcosted, slow, or just plain underpowered. A lot of Elementalist skills are balanced amongst themselves, but in comparison to what other classes get for their energy they're just overcosted junk.


See that's the thing. Elementalists are good at spikes, right? Well, not really. They're good at spikes that consist of *a single spell*. After that cast times and recharge times completely hedge them out compared to Warriors or Rangers who simply attack faster.

Let's look at very short, spike style timeframes - say, two seconds. The very best an Air Elementalist can do within that time is a Lightning Orb followed by a Lightning Strike. Against a Monk that's 210 damage, 140 from the Orb and 70 from the Strike at level 16. Really easy to calculate, 210 damage over 1.75 seconds for 120 spike DPS.

Then you have a pretty boring Kindle Arrows/Quick Shot guy. Nothing special, with 12 Marksmanship, 10 Wilderness, and a little bit of Beastmastery for Tiger's Fury when they spike. Normal bow attacks at 12 attribute deal ~34 damage per hit. Kindle at 10 adds 17 per hit. Vampiric adds 5.

Generic spike is Dual/Quick/Distracting/Quick, takes 2 seconds from first hit to last. You get 3.5 times normal damage, plus 5 times the buffs, plus like 14 damage from the Distracting Shot. For those keeping score that's 34*3.5+17*5+5*5+14, or 243 damage over 2 seconds, or 121.5 spike DPS.

So Air Elementalists and non-optimized Kindle/Quickshot spikers hit just as hard. Now which character would you rather have? A Ranger with tons of interrupts and other disruption on top of that? Or an Air Elementalist with absolutely nothing of substance after that particular spike?

As I see it, the *only* reason to run a 'normal' Elementalist is because there is more block and evade and other physical hate than you can avoid, so you start running markedly inferior characters just because they can get around it.


Meteor Shower and Maelstrom? Definitely. Those skills are dangerous, not as much for damage, but for the disruption and havoc they bring to the battlefield. Firestorm shouldn't even be mentioned in this conversation - that skill is flat out unplayable in PvP, the damage is abysmal and the only reason you should ever use it is because you can train big mobs to clump up and stand in it in PvE.


In the cases where skills are appropriately costed, definitely. The problem is that Elementalist damage is slow. Hence you can't look to them for damage, as much as wide-scale disruptive elements that are unique to the class, like Meteor Shower or Maelstrom. A few of their damage skills are decent enough to fill in the time in between, but there just aren't enough to make a viable character.


The Elementalist can deal just as much if not more damage with the Smiting line than a Monk, since you have the energy to power it. You should try it, Zealot's Fire is the best element.


I would too, but that's because it's on the opposite end of the scale. I expect my teammates to be terrible in PvE. Rangers aren't going to deal damage, they're going to plink away with their vanilla Storm Bow and not really accomplish much. Warriors are going to tank and not deal damage. The Monks will run in circles and cast Heal Party occasionally. The Elementalists will probably be terrible as well and do dumb stuff like spam Flare, but at least most have enough sense to realize the Meteor Shower is a good spell and casting that at high attribute once per fight is more than enough in PvE.

So it's different in that PvE is balanced around minimal standards of competence, while PvP is balanced around good players with good builds and tight play. It's a *completely* different world.


When Nature's Renewal was introduced the entire ritual mechanic was *completely* different. They were one shot spells, much like the Res Signet without the morale recharges, that affected the *entire* map for five minutes. No spirit, you couldn't take it down, you just had to deal with it for the 5 minutes until it expired as it was effectively uncounterable. Back then Nature's Renewal taking down enchantments wasn't a real problem since it was a one time thing - it was to make sure that people had to put their Bonds and the like back up, to actually punish enchantment based builds.

Then, in the interest of making things a bit less one shot, the changed rituals to give Death Penalty instead of making them one use. They were still effectively uncounterable, though, and that mechanic was ultimately abandoned for spirits.

Spirits solved the problem of counterability by making a killable totem that controlled the ritual in an area - now the ritual could be taken down, and tactical placement became important. Death Penalty was removed. Besides some issues with skills like Fertile Season (which, I might add, recieved a buff around this time) the mechanic worked alright, but Nature's Renewal never actually removed enchantments throughout testing. It'd slow down casts and the like, but the stripping never translated well from one shot global effect to an AoE spirit effect.

Nature's Renewal was barely tested at all in its fixed form before going live. Well all saw the consequences of that. Was Nature's Renewal doing what it was originally intended to do? Look back at the original implementation, when it was a 5 minute, one shot effect, and tell me. I would argue that what the spirit will do, post nerf, is the most accurate reflection of that original vision that the game has had since they started changing rituals.

Peace,
-CxE

ensign i don't know if you missed it in my post but i agree with you 100% that this new version of natures renewal is the most accurate reflection of what it should be and probably what the devs wanted it to be from the start.

and yes... i remember when the spirits were nature rituals and there was that mesmer skill to remove it I'd carry it to arenas (good old days...)

With the changes to Spirits and Fertile Season...I wonder how the FS death we usually encounter in PvP work. Just a reminder to those who are not familiar with FS death...basically when the last FS spirit gets killed/dropped, everybody's life gets decreased to the normal level. However, if your life is already low while under FS, you'd die immediately when FS gets taken out.

Now, lets talk about a theoretical situation with the Spirit killing another Spirit issure. If Ranger 1 drops a FS, then Ranger 2 of the same team drops another FS. FS-1 will be destroyed and FS-2 will be put up. However, will the players experience a sudden drop of health (and thus die) before coming HP comes back up?

I wasnt around for the earlier versions of NR, but all I can say is that spirit groups are certifiably dead. *Hopefully* The undisclosed changes include buffed enchantment removal, so it may prove interesting to watch the tombs metagame develop. Then again, if they didnt, it may not.

Ensign I dont know if you missed my post or simply had no comment, but I spoke directly to one of your earlier points (elementalist balance) and though it was a general post to everyone, it was more aimed towards you than anyone else since you were the one who brought it up. I was looking for some input.

I really didn't have anything to add at the time since I was on a different topic entirely. I'll look over it now.


Terrible idea. Elementalists are already the kings of one-hit kills, and this sort of change would turn them into a 'one hit kill or bust' character class. You'd basically have one of two scenarios - one, that the one hit kill skills are good enough to base an instakill build around, or two, those skills are completely unplayable. Because, really, that's all they're good for - you get your one good hit, and after that's up you'd have virtually your entire build neutered until the temporary buff fell off.

The trouble, overall, is that one hit kills are fundamentally unfair and thus undesirable, but once you start looking at the two hit kill timeframe, say Orb into Strike, Rangers and Warriors have stepped in with builds that just deal more damage over the course of ~2 seconds than an Elementalist can. So all the Elementalist has going for him is that one hit kill, which can't be allowed, which leaves him with, what? In the game as it stands, Elementalists are 3rd string damage outside of that one spike. Then you look at how bad their energy is, how they're designed as a burst class, and the horrendous lack of depth their skill lines have - they're just not playable damage dealers unless the better options are seeing too much hate.


I personally don't have a problem with Exhaustion - I think people really fear Exhuasting themselves down to 20-30 max energy and I really don't know why. It's a much smaller drawback than a lot of people think it is. The only skill that it's really problematic on is Obsidian Flame, which is priced like a spam nuke but can't be used that way because of the Exhaustion. I don't think it's nearly as big a problem as each line being composed heavily of expensive, underpowered crap that we're supposed to care about because we have Energy Storage.


The problem with Water as an offensive line, is that it only has a grand total of eight skills that can deal damage, two of which are elite, and four of which are complete and utter shit. Of the four playable ones, you only have two that you actually want to use - Water Trident and Maelstrom. After that you can run Ice Spikes, which is weak but, hey, you need *something*, and Shard Storm, which, bluntly, is awful, but it's just on this side of the Conjure + Wand standard so you could run it if you're desperate. That's it. Try and make an offensive build out of that. Guess what - you can't. A 'good' Water build isn't really a nuker, but a hybrid Mesmer that can't run Energy Drain. I like the character thematically but it just doesn't have the power neccessary to cut it in PvP. Not when the competition is a Quick Shot Ranger that spikes like an Air Elementalist, and also has access to snares, interrupts, and outstanding energy debilitation.


I don't think that's possible. They're really driven themselves into a corner with the 'all into one attribute or bust' character models so anything that's supposed to work cross attribute has to really shine and not just be some dumb trick. I really don't like those sorts of skills anyway because if they're any good they feel like we're being force-fed builds, and if they're awful they just look even worse.

What Elementalists need, bluntly, is a reason to run Elementalist skills. I can't stress this enough - Elementalist damage is *terrible*. The skills I want from the Elementalist in my builds are disruptive or defensive in nature (Gale, Blurred Vision, Wards), and I'd rather stick those on a Smiter than actually pump up Elementalist lines.


Bah, I don't want a class full of unwieldly, conditional combos. I just want an Air skill that can deal damage comparable to what you get from Dual Shot, or, heaven forbid, Eviscerate. Somewhere along the lines Elementalists stopped being the glass jawed, energy intensive damage machines, and they just need to get back to that.

Peace,
-CxE

Maybe something that would help would be to give the ele some AoE attacks that are not DoT in nature. Something akin to Fireball perhaps but with a larger AoE and an energy/recharge along the lines of Fireball's old stats.

I totally agree about the weakness of ele skills though. Once I turned my PvE E/Mo into a smiter I never looked back. Give me an intelligent warrior to smite off of and I'll put any ele skill based "nuker" to shame. Monks are overpowered straight across the board now that I think about it. :P

I don't think there's any real problem with the DoT nature of Fire skills. The problems are simply that said DoT is too much energy and too long of a cast time for too little damage. I'd happily play Firestorm in PvP if it did, say, 33% more damage and had a 3 second cast time. Ice Spikes would be great at 10 energy and a 10 second recharge. Strike would be outstanding if it did 85 instead of 70 - Orb would be solid (but still dodgable) at 170 per hit and 10 energy to cast. Why do you expect someone to pay 25 for an Earthquake? Are we supposed to get excited by Deep Freeze when it has a pathetic AoE? It's clear that packs of Elementalists are something that they fear taking over in PvP with lots of huge frontloaded nukes, but right now they're just a joke.


Isn't playing an Elementalist so much more rewarding once you realize that you don't have to use Elementalist skills? An Elementalist / Monk can crank out the Smiting and Protections like no one's business - an Elementalist / Mesmer can power out top Mesmer harassment all day. Just splash in the broken skill and a few of the better pieces of support (Gale, Wards) and you've got a top notch Elementalist ready to go.


I wouldn't go that far. The damage being dealt by Zealot's Fire is a bit extreme, but it isn't that far out of line with what Warriors and Rangers are dishing out. It just looks overpowered compared to what an Elementalist can do...but so does just about everything, really.

Peace,
-CxE

Well thats what I was going for... trying to fix eles so they can deal more damage without having 1-hit kills. Like you said, there arent alot of solutions.

The thing which makes rangers and warriors deal so much more damage is that their skills are cheaper and recharge faster. Good elementalist skills dont recharge fast and arent cheap. Maybe if they buffed more basic spells like stone daggers or lightning strike (or maybe even flare) they would have a re-usable attack that, while not comparable to a war/ran in a damage chain, would be able to fill in and provide daage equivilent to normal attacks from wars/rans.

Or perhaps the design of damage king is flawed fundamentally. Elementalists could be modded to fill a more supportive role: adding their damage when needed, but having numerous defensive and supportive spells to use too. ELementalists have some of that already: wards, elemental armors, etc. but additional spells like

"fierce wind" (for lack of a ore imaginative name) could cause all nearby arrows have a %chance to miss.

"Flameskin", which grants the enchanted person +25 AL vs Fire and sets any foe the enchanted person is near on fire.

Im sure ANET could coe up with better, but those are just examples. Elementalist could fil a supprot role. But if that happens, the problem is we have 2 damage classes, 1 healing class, and 3 support classes (ele, necro, mes) Seems like overkill.

Perhaps this is just my perception, but I think that a related problem is the underpowered nature of the "primary attributes" of the other casting classes. Divine Favor is something only a healing monk REALLY cares about, a prot or smiter can live without it. Fast Casting has done very little to impress me. I've looked at the charts, I see the difference... but does it really help a mesmer more than Energy Storage? Soul Reaping is potentially powerful, but conditional by its own nature. ES always gives you more energy, no strings attached.

Granted none of this directly addresses the problems with elementalist skills and their damage potential. But maybe if these attributes were more powerful/useful, people would play those classes and the elementalists could find their own place in the game. Or more likely... disappear entirely I suppose. :P

Elementalist spiking can be useful without being a potential one hit kill. You're ignoring its most obvious use as a finisher... Say you have some guys apply mass degen, monk has to make some choices and now a few guys are at half health, THEN you spike to death.

Spiking needs to take more of a support role rather then being the sole killing method of a team build, and for the moment it does this fine. It will still do it fine after chain lightening gets nerfed.

Ensign has hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, his points about elementalists and their lack of productivity is showing through to other classes. I recently made a post about this in the strategy discussion board called "Elemental Necessity." Elementals (And I use the term elementals referring to pure elementals, not beefed up smiters) no longer hit hard like the glass cannons they're described to be. Necromancers are even worse, because they've been stuck with soul reaping. If you want to see a gimped PvP attribute line, look no further than soul reaping. It has absolutely no skills in it, and unlike what it was intended to be, is a pitiful excuse for an energy battery outside PvE. With Putrid being nerfed (And a well deserved nerf at that), what is the reasoning behind bringing a necro? A BiPer? That's all I can think of. It's not the necromancer skills that suck so much as it is they cast a few skills and sit there and wait for their energy to recharge.

Now let me finish with my point. The point is that we currently have 2 classes out of 6 that are arguably doing a pitiful job of doing what it is they do. So we're left with 4 classes to play, and some of these classes are only effective in a handful of builds. I, personally, can't see a greater need to be corrected in such a great game.

P.S. - Please, don't get off topic with rants about the effectiveness of elementals or necromancers, as there are plenty of other threads to agrue that.

There is also an option to run 2 eles spected in diferent lines instead of 2 eles spected in the same one.


Isnt the way all conditional combos work anyway?

Air dmg still looks good. What drove air spike out of metagame was the energy managment, NR/QZ completly raped eles. AoE spells could probably use some buff though to make them more usable (reduction in recharge/cast time perhaps).

Buffing up dmg this much would drive everyone into using ward stacking or winter/mantra of frost combo. Prot monks wont be able to keep up with target switching or count down spike+lingering. Not to mention how insanely good these skills would be in combination with Echo under Attunement.

SR servers its purpose when you got corpse targeting skills, such as wells or self heals in some cases. Speaking of which, im hoping to see some changes in corpse targeting skills in this new patch. Casting time in particular. All the spells that target corpses should have the same casting time to give a chance any of those skills be included into a skill bar.

Frenzy+Eviscerate+Executioners will spike better if buffed with JI/SoH than what the ele can offer without using lightning surge, and surge has its own problems.

As far as damage goes, yeah Eles got the short end of the stick. Not only are they very weak to energy denial (ether renewal can be countered) but their damage doesn't make up for it as has been said a number of times.

Besides wards and a few disruption stuff, their only real good use is for ether renewal abuse with other classes skills and water eles. Water eles don't exactly do good damage but they are the best attribute line by far at controlling the battlefield. Some amount of mobility control is practically mandatory for any gvg and water eles provide the best amount of it.

They need to approach the other angles, to make sure that Elementalist damage is 'better' damage than Warrior or Ranger damage. Fire damage, for example, is both AoE and DoT, meaning that while they can potentially put a huge amount of damage into a single spell, it won't neccessarily spike harder because the total damage dealt is so diffuse. Something like Ice Spikes or Water Trident could deal excellent damage, but also has those slows and knockdowns tacked on that pushes it over the edge.

Air is harder in this regard, because it's supposed to be 'single target' nuking but it simply isn't very good at it - only Chain Lightning was really any good in the line, and now that's gone. Air skills should probably have higher armor penetration, and they need secondary effects as well - interrupts and conditions are good in this regard.

At least that's the way I can see them being competitive. Just trying to do raw damage isn't going to cut it.


I'm not really concerned with that for spikes - I'm concerned with how much damage I can pack into, say, 2 seconds. Warriors and Rangers just have great attack speeds and attack speed boosts, while Elementalists are stuck having to go through the entire cast animation every time. Give Elementalists a Tiger's Fury for casting speed and I'll shut up on this argument right now.


Right, then you have that sort of breakdown when what you really want is somthing like 3 damage classes, 2 healing classes, and 1 support class. Support tends to just get splashed in so you'd end up with a bunch of builds that were really just Warriors, Rangers, and Monks, with a few Mesmers for support.

Not all that different from what we have now, really.


Certainly. Smiting Monks don't care about Divine Favor much, and a lot of Mesmer skills cast fast enough that Fast Casting really doesn't matter. Necro is really splashable. You'd happily run any of those as a secondary to an Elementalist - unfortunately your character just happens to continue to get better the less Elementalist skills you run.


I don't think they'd ever disappear entirely - there's still great stuff like Wards, and Gale, and Ether Renewal is still retardedly overpowered. But there's not a lot to 'em so if the perks of running some of the Elementalist secondaries weren't there anymore they'd be reduced to niche secondary professions. Still present, but not really.


Sure, it's still useful as a one hit spike to finish then. The point is still the same, I feel - that Elementalists are good when they only have to cast one spell to finish off the opponent, not two.


You're adding a whole lot more to that than you need to. An average Eviscerate / Executioner's Strike at 16/10 Axe/Strength will hit for 81 damage. Two of those back to back, without a speed buff, hits for 162. That's over one and a third second, for a spike DPS of 122 - just over the 120 a one-two Air punch can deliver. Forget Frenzy, forget JI, and forget SoH. Eviscerate/Executioner's hits harder than Orb/Strike, unbuffed. And no, that isn't counting the Deep Wound.

Peace,
-CxE

With NR out of Enchent removal, and Putrid down to 5 second cooldown....

Maybe, just maybe.... People would start to like Well of Profane =O

You are right, I overcompensated. The sad thing is that when you add in the other 3 skills you realize how much of a joke air is compared to buffed warriors. Warriors are only kept in check (barely) by the fact that there is such a depth of warrior hate, especially the absurdly good ward against melee. Eles are already kept in check by energy denial, and while a fair portion of warrior hate works on rangers, you usually don't want to overload on it because heavy offensive warrior/ranger teams are not too common (I bet they will be if ER stays the same though). Edenial on the other hand severely cripples 5 classes and hurts the 6th moderately, so its not like its specifically ele hate.

If eles could buff their spells at the expense of energy or something, perhaps an enchant like the boon effect, and signet of humility couldn't completely lock any good energy management down with QZ, then air and maybe fire eles would be useful. Till then, I'm taking an ele only for Ether Renewal, wards/earth defense, or water snares.

LOL, I would love to see a caster version of tiger's fury for casting.

I'm thinking that there's a nerf in the offing for Ether Renewal though. Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly in favor of that, but I think when we see the full list of changes... we just might find that it got whacked by the nerf bat too.

From the looks of things right now, it looks like I'll be going back to playing my warrior a lot more after this weekend.

Interesting debate. However I don't see defense being factored into the discussion much. Doesn't that affect the comparisons? I mean there are a lot of anti-Warrior defenses in the game, as there are anti-caster. It would be a complex analysis, but in general how frequently can each of these compared classes get the optimal results?


Sure, Warriors are an afterthought target most times, but if enough are doing this kind of damage regularly (while Air eles are nerfed a bit) they may get more attention early on and there are a lot of generally unused tools that can keep their DPS in check. Especially now that NR is toned down... players will slowly work enchants and hexes into their builds, and many of those affect Warriors. Still, barely any Warriors maximize the damage in ways like you've described, so the need to control them isn't yet an issue.

Also, skill access convenience is an issue here it seems. To get those Axe combos to work, the Warrior must get to a target, work up the adrenaline, and then unleash the damage. The Ele only needs to aim from a distance and fire. Not saying that this dismisses any of the arguments so far, but I think these issues do have some kind of affect on the field of play.

The use of 16 points in your weapon's attribute is becoming more and more talked about, and I think you'll find that any warrior worth his salt (Most especially axe warriors) has kicked his weapon skill up to 16. So yes, I think you most definitely should expect the kind of damage Ensign is posting, because that's the realistic expectation of what your enemy will bring to the table. On the other hand, you're heading in the right direction when you assume warriors are going to start drawing more attention.

Here's the catch - In the past, monks were forced to mass heal their elementals to keep them firing. Now, they'll just bring hex removals to have the same effect on their newly discovered damage dealers, the warrior. The warriors aren't going to require the degree of healing that soft targets will, so there ya have it. No team is going to let such a valuable asset be hindered, so you're going to see a "behind the lines" fight between teams, with one team trying to hinder the enemy warriors and the other team keeping their warriors cooking. But remember, this is only my opinion and a prediction on what I see is to come.

And yes, eles need only to aim and fire, but so do rangers. But the trick is, rangers deal more damage in the long run and are harder to kill. So what I see happening is teams composed of warriors, rangers, monks, and a mesmer. I believe the rangers will provide the steady stream of damage while warriors will be running around spiking the called targets. This is all hypothetical though and only my opinion. We'll see what happens as time unfolds.

I can't say that I agree with this. Air Spike fell out of the metagame once people started preparing for it - it is not a strategy that deals with even a token amount of resistance well at all. Drop a Fertile Season in the back, GG. Stick a Mesmer on one of your spikers so he can never get his part of the spike in, GG. Run something like Elemental Resistance on your Monks and Mesmers, GG. The damage over even short periods of time from Air Spike was really pathetic. Playing against it was pretty simple, really - either you were prepared for it, they can't one hit kill you, and you cruise to victory, or you didn't prepare for it, you get instakilled by Chain Lightning, and you go back to the staging area. There wasn't any in between.


Buffing up damage that much (around 20%) would put Air Spike on par with what a buffed Warrior can do. Ok, not really, the buffed Warrior would still be a bigger threat. I really don't think a lot of people have an appreciation for just how much damage a good Warrior or Ranger will kick out.

But let's just follow this train of thought. If Air Spike did enough damage to potentially one-hit kill an unprepared target, then teams will have to prepare for it and bring proactive defenses and plans of attack for Elementalist teams. To that I ask, what's the problem? Teams already have to bring plans for the Warrior and Ranger spikes they already see. Would making Elementalists dangerous enough to bring into the equation really be a problem? Making teams bring a copy of Fertile to diffuse the first couple spikes, or a Mesmer that can take out a spiker to let the Monks keep up, to a Ward, or a bunch of other things you can do to beat up an Elementalist spike group - is forcing a team to bring at least one of those answers too much to ask? It would seem so, because Elementalist gank teams appear to be balanced around not being able to kill unprepared enemies. That's really a shame, because most people do bring the defenses they'll need, and while Elementalists are going to start hurting to spike out an unprepared team, Warriors and Rangers don't seem to be having much problem taking out even prepared teams these days.


Well putting Protective Spirit on after the initial volley was never an effective plan against Chain + Lingering, or even against Warrior or Ranger spikes these days. You need to get it up before then, you need a proactive defense like Aegis or a Ward or a Fertile. In the case of an Elementalist spike team, *one* Mesmer can almost singlehandedly beat their build. They need everyone functioning properly to instakill, and if you lock down even a single opponent, it's GG.


Honestly, I don't think either of the proposed skills would be worth echoing. They aren't anything special like Chain Lightning was (the big draw of that skill wasn't just that it spiked hard, but it spiked hard on *several targets*), and don't deal damage that any experienced team hasn't seen already. Attunement is decent but nothing to really write home about - it's comparable to the other energy management options available.

Peace,
-CxE

wtf!! i was playing just now and there was an announcement(blue font) that pvp extreme will start in about 2 hours!! is that a joke? did somebody screw up at anet? i should capped a screenie but it said that the announcement is already at guidwars.com, but it still aint.

official changes are up

whee

Oh damn, looks like Prot bond didn't escape the nerfbat massacre



PS: You can check the full list out here.

that's based on the 0-15 scale, it did get nerfed.

That's what I said, doofus!