Ensign's Elementalist Threads

[Corporeal Ghost]

I'd like to preface this by saying I have nothing but respect for Ensign and the enormous amount of work he put into trying to improve this game, even after being largely ignored. Anything I say here is a dispute against his points, largely due to either new general knowledge or new game mechanics, not his person or intelligence.


There is no question that Warriors deal higher baseline damage than elementalists. However, what this damage means has changed drastically since Ensign's posts. Armor is higher by 20-40AL across the board, healing is vastly more efficient, both in terms of energy and cooldown, more defensive characters (quantity, not necessarily orientation) are run in a typical build, and it is now possible to win a match without even killing a Guild Lord, with the other team on full morale, if somewhat less likely than it was a few months ago. It has become so cheap and easy to mitigate damage that most damage is utterly meaningless. Pressure is virtually non-existant as a strategy rather than a side-effect of poor opponent play or skill disparity. Essentially, DPS is irrelevant; the only damage that matters now is spike potential.

This isn't to say that the most damage is necessarily the best. Certainly there are other factors: going under Spirit Bond; the character's versatility in a match (IE, splitting); low telegraph potential; vulnerability to disruption; sidestepping shield sets; associated activation costs (primarily recharge, but also energy and cast time); necessity of a deep wound; and probably some more things I'm forgetting.

Now there's obviously more at work in most matches that simply spiking out the other team, or you'd see a lot more omegaspike winning. In terms of offensive output that actually matters, however, spiking is at very least the clear forerunner, and often the only reason anyone dies in a match.

Where I'm going with all of this is that eles are, at least in terms of offense, infinitely more useful than they were at the time of those original posts. Ensign even gives the reason in one of them: Eles are mechanically structured to favor utility characters with spike support, which is essentially everyone who is not on the backline's role outside of a few niche builds.

The game's original balance clearly leans away from strong ranged damage options, and looking back over the years at various broken and generally agreed-upon non-fun eras, we can see why pretty easily. No one ever said "I sure hope we're playing against double orders rangerspike on Dead!" The game is structured such that movement is very important, and that melee damage is the easiest to defend against (even if it is not from a physical weapon--think how easy it is to counter a touch ranger, even if he had high DPS in some hypothetical world). It follows that melee damage needs to be the highest, and while other damage can and should exist to fill certain roles, it becomes problematic if it surpasses melee damage. Deep Wound was sort of an equalizer in this regard. Yes, it's incredibly overpowered, but that's not really the point. Up until paragons, it was only reliably available at melee range. Phantom/Shatter was in the game, but came with a pretty heavy telegraph.

What I've taken this to mean is that ranged classes need to fit into non-damage niches. For the most part, this is true. It only becomes problematic when we have ranged builds that simulate warrior-level DPS and when ranged damage hits a critical mass such that a melee character is no longer necessary to initiate fast-recharge (this is its own issue) lethal spikes. I don't think a lot of this was readily apparent at the time Ensign posted those two treatises, and while they certainly hold a lot of truth, the conclusions are no longer supported by all of our information.

That is, elementalists are indeed a utility class with a boatload of energy, okay ranged spike support, and generally lower DPS than warriors. The primary difference between his points and mine is that he wants (wanted) to explore what happens when we break this convention and allow strong caster damage at range, and I've seen the resulting metagame and think we're better off with leaving damage on the melee classes.


Addressing the issue of elementalists being only situationally good, I think this was an intended part of their design. The elementalist "money" skills are only useful a relatively small percentage of the time, but they are incredibly effective at what they do, perhaps more so than anything else but Domination, which was balanced by a similar mechanism. This is actually the balancing mechanism not only for the individual strong ele skills, but for the entire class. That is the cost of bringing a Deep Freeze (or whatever): In exchange for perhaps the strongest snare in the game, you're saddled with a character who is sub-optimal outside of the situations where he has the ability to break the game wide open.

[LifeInfusion]

This thread needs to be reviewed. Ensign's numbers were about 2 years ago which is basically when I played last. Now that they have split the PvE and PvP skills, things have changed much.

Just look at Ritualists' Signet of Spirits or Masochism in PvE. It shows you what kind of difference a skill can be in PvP and PvE. Before I thought they were going to just *tweak* skills, but some skills don't even have close to the same function.

[Killed u man]

Got myself to crunch through it, and going to reply section by section:

There is no question that Warriors deal higher baseline damage than elementalists... ...Essentially, DPS is irrelevant; the only damage that matters now is spike potential.

This has always, to a certain extend, been true. True pressure builds only existed during a handfull of times where certain mechanics were broken off the charts. The problem with pressure builds is that you want your pressure to stick. And for that to happen, you more often than not have to rely on gimmicky shutdown so the enemy team will actually wipe to your pressure. Think of NR/Tranq GvG days, hexways (in just about every reincarnation relies on gimmicky skills, including Soul Bind and SV and dom shitskills -backfire etc-). There was condition pressure which relied on Signet of Humility shutting down RC or getting a dshot on said skill. People realized this even during Prophecies days, and pure pressure builds have only been rolled out very few times before solely because the spike works better in GW. Maybe if the baseline health for a level 20 character was 150-200HP higher this would have been different, but then you're arguing with the game design rather than with Ensign's post...
DPS becomes relevent once you start getting kills. It decides how fast you can score the next skill (similar to skill recharge with pure spike builds), and how fast they will totally crumble. Reasonable DPS alone won't kill a team, spikes will.

Now there's obviously more at work in most matches that simply spiking out the other team, or you'd see a lot more omegaspike winning. In terms of offensive output that actually matters, however, spiking is at very least the clear forerunner, and often the only reason anyone dies in a match.

For starters, you should realize that any spike is a spike. Omegaspike, bloodspike, ritspike, mesmerspike or whatever other spike builds, they all rely on the same mechanic, which is spiking stuff down. It has been proven time and time before that when a spike is strong enough, it can, and will, steamroll through GvG. The recent mesmerspike, or ritspike in it's days, is the undeniable proof of this. The main reason why Omegaspike isn't rolled out anymore is because the spike itself isn't that incredibly strong anymore. (Rangers got nerfed, paras did, some elementalist skills did)
However, if you were to create a decent, clean, spike build which can score a kill atleast every 10 seconds, there would be no doubt you'dd farm ladder, and AT's given they don't fully buildwars you.

The rest of the post is generally true. Elementalist have gotten exponentially better since Proph, and Warriors (recently) got nerfed -RIP PR, WE- back to pretty much a lesser Proph bar. (Evisc did moar damage back then) Part of that increase in power for elementalists is the redicilous buff to snares and fire aoe.

Where you're getting at, however, is exactly what Ensign, JR and other people have been getting out aswell pretty much since Factions release, which is to revert the powercreep that happened over the past 4 years. Things were undoubtingly better when Elementalists had only Lightening Orb to spike with, but Elementalists aren't the root of this problem. You're talking about days when warrior's didn't have flail available, and when blackout was a staple in every builds to score skills, solely because there was so few damage to get kills with in the first place. Back when party healing wasn't about pooping a 106 number every 2 seconds, but about carefully deciding where you spend your energy. (Eprod did have a shitton of energy, but that bar had Windborne, Bflash, HP and other big energy skills)

Ever since NF, spiking is about overloading the opposing team with damage on the same target, whereas during Proph days it was about creating windows of opportunities where you had to have everyone squeeze the maximum potential out of their bars.

[Kattar]

This thread needs to be reviewed. Ensign's numbers were about 2 years ago which is basically when I played last. Now that they have split the PvE and PvP skills, things have changed much.

Aye. That's why you don't take game advice from posts that old. Builds are the same way.

[Master Fuhon]

They weren't following Ensign's argument when they started buffing ranged damage. It was their own skill balancing directive that wanted to alter the flow of pvp by increasing values everywhere. They've buffed pretty much everything. Along with ranged attackers, we have also been through powerful incarnations of FGJ fueled high adrenaline attacks, Warrior's Endurance, Primal Rage, Strength of Honor stacked with Conjures/Barbs, etc.

It doesn't help that there is an ongoing large absence of math and good reasoning from the post Ensign/2006 era. Saying Warriors weren't buffed by powercreep is a blatant distortion because the entire game is not a 1v1; the Warrior attack and defense synergy was definitely improved. In the old game, melee were held back by having to run back and forth to lineback everything off the monks. Not to mention they actually healed themselves of degen on the frontlines because monks were disabled so often when they stepped up (kd, interrupt, blackout, e-deny); and you had cripple and blind sticking more often with a condition cover.

[Edwards]

Originally Posted by Master Fuhon

It doesn't help that there is an ongoing large absence of math and good reasoning from the post Ensign/2006 era. Saying Warriors weren't buffed by powercreep is a blatant distortion because the entire game is not a 1v1; the Warrior attack and defense synergy was definitely improved. In the old game, melee were held back by having to run back and forth to lineback everything off the monks. Not to mention they actually healed themselves of degen on the frontlines because monks were disabled so often when they stepped up (kd, interrupt, blackout, e-deny); and you had cripple and blind sticking more often with a condition cover.

Not to mention Flail and Enraging Charge. (Not that I'm complaining. Warriors are probably the most balanced and interesting class in the game right now.)

What I would complain about is that instead of addressing the power creep that they've introduced to the game, Anet is focusing on new and exciting ways to break game balanced by changing Mesmers, Dervishes, and Paragons.

[urania]

i am amazed at some people's undying devotion to GW.

[Corporeal Ghost]

Trying to keep this brief and on-topic. I'll probably fail.

(edit: failed)

Power creep is a completely separate issue...sort of. There is no doubt that both classes have seen extensive power creep over various points in the game, but it's more a symptom than a problem. The problem is that ANet has changed their balance philosophy but kept their basic game mechanics the same. For example, the game is set up such that having all high damage come in at melee range is desirable, but they keep trying to make ranged DPS viable, even after seeing what it does on multiple occasions. Even if in some magical dreamworld we could get all of the power creep peeled away, we'd quickly be back in the same morass if they did not realize that they need to balance based on the structure of the game, or else they need to change that structure to fit what they're balancing the game to be. So yes, it is a problem that eles have undergone massive power creep, but this power creep is rooted elsewhere. It is a symptom, not the ultimate problem that everyone has been pointing their finger at for the past year or two.

I don't know. I feel like this is pretty obvious to most of the people that think about it, but a lot of people run around and blindly parrot "power creep" as the source of all problems, some of them being unaware of what the term actually means (right up there with "bar compression").

Originally Posted by Master Fuhon

They've buffed pretty much everything. Along with ranged attackers, we have also been through powerful incarnations of...(powerful warriors)

Non-hammer warriors are back to square one, except they are relatively much weaker than they were. Armor and non-warrior damage have both increased, maintaining a sort of equilibrium with each other, but pushing warriors down. Warrior counters are much stronger (Freezing Gust, Blinding Surge, etc etc). Monk energy is much more robust, further devaluing the autoattack. Warriors are still plenty good, and perhaps this is a testament that they were overpowered before, but most feel that was a very payable price for the dimension they added to the game beyond knocklocking someone every 10 seconds or so.

Originally Posted by Master Fuhon

In the old game, melee were held back by having to run back and forth to lineback everything off the monks. Not to mention they actually healed themselves of degen on the frontlines because monks were disabled so often when they stepped up (kd, interrupt, blackout, e-deny); and you had cripple and blind sticking more often with a condition cover.

Despite all of this, they still dealt a far higher percentage of the damage coming out of a team than they do now, and I'll wager they actually pumped out higher absolute numbers. Essentially all of those factors are interconnected and cancel out with each other and increased armor levels. Monks are no longer as vulnerable, so they CAN push up for the frontline and don't need to be linebacked for nearly as much. Even with blind and cripple sticking much less, warriors still have much lower DPS given everyone is at warrior-level armor now. Monks no longer have to deal with absurd dom skills, but the number of hammer warriors and the rate at which they put out knockdowns is much higher (Gale had higher short-term rates, but was not sustainable).

Borat, I'm not even sure how to respond to you without creating multiple new threads' worth of material. But I'm going to try.

Spike builds are just builds. They are not inherently more powerful than other builds. You're just remembering the overpowered examples, but not the ones with gigantic holes in them (IE, fastcast air spike), and you're also disregarding overpowered pressure (triplesmite, Grenthtrain) or split (Recall, Shadow of Haste) builds. I'm guessing this is because since about 2008, we've only seen overpowered spike builds due to the nature of the evolution of the metagame and the actual balance of skills. Spike builds are easier to run with a minimum of competent people (caller, monk, runner being the bare minimum), which I think also contributes, but this does not make them more powerful; it simply makes them more successful at mid-low levels.

DPS is a piece of pressure. It doesn't create pressure alone. I'm not sure where you got that idea. If DPS alone created pressure, you'd see more of it now than in 2005, rather than almost zero. Additionally, pressure does not require spikes. People usually throw them in because there is little reason not to in most physical pressure builds (and they're often used simply to coordinate offense and to deplete energy rather than actually kill stuff), but they're definitely not necessary.

Originally Posted by killed u man

t has been proven time and time before that when a spike is strong enough, it can, and will, steamroll through GvG.

Originally Posted by killed u man

However, if you were to create a decent, clean, spike build which can score a kill atleast every 10 seconds, there would be no doubt you'dd farm ladder

These statements are actually universal. Take the word spike out and replace it with pressure, or hex, or Searing Flames. They all hold true. There is nothing inherently more powerful about spike; the spike-dominant metagame is the result of the direction ANet has taken balance combined with the shift in mentality often blamed on tournaments to play to not lose rather than to win.

Originally Posted by killed u man

spike builds(...)all rely on the same mechanic

Sort of...but there are so many subsets of spike builds that play and are countered very differently. This is why you see rawrball winning half a dozen gold capes when people literally knew exactly what they were going to run, but Rift couldn't make it past the first round of the playoffs.

Originally Posted by killed u man

Ever since NF, spiking is about overloading the opposing team with damage on the same target, whereas during Proph days it was about creating windows of opportunities

Spiking has never been about either of these things. It has always been about coordinating a critical mass (not an overload; simply enough to kill) of damage in once place fast enough to beat the other team's reflexes, and "sneakily" enough that they can't stop it before it hits, or powering through their responses with unblockables and enchantment strips.

Damage overload actually suffers from incredible diminishing returns when the primary strategy is to spike and play defense, as it almost universally is today. Window-of-opportunity shutdown-based play wasn't really spike-oriented, although spikes were certainly a tool that could be used in these types of builds.

Originally Posted by LifeInfusion

This thread needs to be reviewed. Ensign's numbers were about 2 years ago which is basically when I played last.

Did you even read my post? This is literally the entire reason this thread exists.


Karla, I'm honestly not sure how I'm supposed to answer that, or whether it's even supposed to be a positive or a negative. But yeah, even given all of its flaws, Guild Wars would still be one of the best games on the market if the playerbase wasn't so incredibly jaded, complacent, and...not present. And the mechanics are so deep and intertwined that speculating on them is almost like solving a puzzle, which is often rewarding enough in its own right. Somewhat interestingly, I don't even play anymore unless I get a phonecall that says a full team is waiting on me.

[urania]

hehe, it was more an observation than anything else. also, i do agree with you on what you say regarding still GW being on of the best games out there and i also believe gw2 will pale in comparison (at least in its pvp aspect), its just sad to see how its been left to rot away so i cant really be bothered to make comprehensive balance and the like discussions anymore, really.

[axe]

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

Trying to keep this brief and on-topic. I'll probably fail.

(edit: failed)

Power creep is a completely separate issue...sort of. There is no doubt that both classes have seen extensive power creep over various points in the game, but it's more a symptom than a problem. The problem is that ANet has changed their balance philosophy but kept their basic game mechanics the same. For example, the game is set up such that having all high damage come in at melee range is desirable, but they keep trying to make ranged DPS viable, even after seeing what it does on multiple occasions. Even if in some magical dreamworld we could get all of the power creep peeled away, we'd quickly be back in the same morass if they did not realize that they need to balance based on the structure of the game, or else they need to change that structure to fit what they're balancing the game to be. So yes, it is a problem that eles have undergone massive power creep, but this power creep is rooted elsewhere. It is a symptom, not the ultimate problem that everyone has been pointing their finger at for the past year or two.

I don't know. I feel like this is pretty obvious to most of the people that think about it, but a lot of people run around and blindly parrot "power creep" as the source of all problems, some of them being unaware of what the term actually means (right up there with "bar compression").

First of all your whole post was a very good read.

I want to touch on the "power creep" problem though. This game has suffered a great deal since the Glory days and IMO the game took a nosedive when HA was turned into 6v6

The ENTIRE REASON it was changed to 6v6 was because of the "power creep" issue in that Anet themselves did not know how to best go about fixing the problems that they added in Nightfail.

What happened as a result of the new builds that came from these changes was that the game rewards Titles,Drops became the only reason to play, where as before the reward for playing the game WAS PLAYING THE GAME because it was actually fun.

We are now forced as players to try to squeeze enjoyment out of a game that just cannot hold a candle to what we were used to playing before Nightfall. This is when the best players left the game.

Now that we have a new fleet of players that want to take the top spots, but yet play through some of these types of meta's that focus ONLY on winning, rather than improving or playing for the pure enjoyment of the game, these players are so focused on winning (read title farming and item farming, zkeys, etc..) that they cheat to win. This is proven directly by the blatant Match manipulation of HB, GvG, and the EXTENSIVE use of bots, which sends a CLEAR message

"This game is not fun to play, lets NOT play, and yet advance our titles"

That is what I conclude when I see people no longer playing the game, and yet grinding and farming.

To me the simple fact remains that Guild Wars in its entirety was more fun to play before Nightfall and the power creep issue was basically "admitted" when an 8v8 format had to be reduced to a 6v6. The GvG mechanics prevented to an extent the need to switch to 6v6 itself. IMO 6v6 HA was admitting that there was a clear balance problem in the game.

They have changed the Mechanics to suit the balance changes as you have addressed but the bottom line is that today, this game is simply not as fun to play as it was. Leading to the population declines and further problems such as the effectiveness of spike builds based on reasons that you mentioned. But also because of the desire only for the rewards of winning.

In other words a 2 min match for +1 title increment is better than a 15 min game.

[Master Fuhon]

I haven't been into PvP for a while, so I feel kind of dumb trying to talk about the modern game which is mostly played off observer, but I feel even dumber reading what the current Campfire/Riverside stuff has devolved into, so I'll go with this. The game stopped thriving when it couldn't retain its playing bases anyways.

The discussion about 'damage' wasn't to be construed as talk that plain DPS on anyone, anywhere, with no regards to healing, was king in the game. Target selection is king. Spiking, focus fire, collapsing, diversionary pressure, disruption, lockdown, picking on NPCs. Whatever form it takes in the game, know what to look at and what you should be acting upon. Alot of what the 'offense' does stays the same in nearly every kind of contest: you act with what the rest of the group does to benefit from the strength of numbers, or you act individually because of either a mismatch or because it's unexpected.

There are alot of issues about strategies being assumed in alot of posts that are made about this game. Yes, caster 'DPS' is higher, if you choose to count all of the modern builds that run less effective strategies, the ladder compression that has put such differing skill levels so close together, and the fact that the game has been heavily tweaked to optimize the 2/3 character frontline and 2/3 character midline. DPS defensive support value was higher in relation to healer support way back. But even so, some guilds in late 2005 dropped the self heals off melees and ran more midline monk skills to support the damage, so it's visible exactly how this theorycraft turned into warriors being more effective and it's reflection on the modern game. This strategy originally couldn't reliably beat the shutdown-splits where single players ran off to take care of the NPCs or threaten the base, which is related to GvG having a separate tiebreaker from the other formats. And so winter 05/06 gameplay was predominantly overloaded with multiples of: warriors, ranged spikers, energy denial, knockdowns, characters running off to solo NPCs, and so on. And then Factions brought out the two emerging strategies that took over; teleport split and victory or death farm.

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

they still dealt a far higher percentage of the damage coming out of a team than they do now, and I'll wager they actually pumped out higher absolute numbers.

It's far more common today to see more evenly matched teams running: just enough hexes to occupy removal, just enough condition spam for the heal party/RC, just enough physicals to get use out of block, just enough of a spike for WoH/infuser/deep wound removal to take care of. Back then it was all superior runes and more offense the better. But that's just because of the way the backline has been rebalanced that doing this is effective. And it's the reason why you can conclude that there is a discernable percentage of damage that warriors and casters deal in comparison. The old data is so heavily skewed with air/hex spike, triple smite, IWAY, triple surge/burn, blood spike, or weak builds done for surprise, (all those damage bursts done on Frenzied targets using Healing Signet), and 2 monk backlines. It's not valid to neglect that sample data and think that the game was designed with a balance of frontline and midline where every class could get a group. 'Balanced' was something that slowly crept up out of the gimmicks being run in Heroes ascent, while intending to be an altar holding build.

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

Non-hammer warriors are back to square one, except they are relatively much weaker than they were. Armor and non-warrior damage have both increased, maintaining a sort of equilibrium with each other, but pushing warriors down. Warrior counters are much stronger (Freezing Gust, Blinding Surge, etc etc). Monk energy is much more robust, further devaluing the autoattack. Warriors are still plenty good, and perhaps this is a testament that they were overpowered before, but most feel that was a very payable price for the dimension they added to the game beyond knocklocking someone every 10 seconds or so.

Yes, individual warrior counters are now stronger when analyzed in somewhat isolation like that, but this discussion had been about formats that frequently turn to forced confrontation with close to 40% team support allocation (forums merge Ensign's stuff, it's often read by PvE players as well). Mesmer skills don't support a defensive midline, so the typical Domination mesmer will just get physical spiked out repeatedly, which happened even with Aegis around. Necro defense would have been Foul Feast, Weakness, Insidious Parasite, and Faintheartedness; but people don't like Necros because they have the most potent mass enchant hate and spammable hexes. I'm not going to refer to Ritualists because they always became the 4th healer, and the Ritualist probably should be cemented as the third healer instead of the midline at this point.

Then there are elementalists, where the added DPS on Blinding Surge and Water snares is being cleaned up by the party healer anyway after being used on a target that no one else plans to attack. But even so, just how often should one mass snare melee versus the alternative of pinning an overextened monk out of position who is healing his warriors? How potent is it to use Blinding Flash/Surge to blanket melee in blind, when both of these skills compete with the ability to Mind Shock assist. A real defensive midline is going to look alot more like the nerfed Me/E + Rt/N; GoI steam snarebot with enchant removal and a free elite slot, and a healing rit with party support, caretakers, ancestors, and enchant removal. I don't like the Rit with healing skills, but I can see cause for combining the defensive ele into the same build slot again like old times (Wards/Blind/Snare). I haven't seen cause to believe a fire elementalist is a top 8v8 character, outside of altar caps or part of a build that splits, collapses, or pins people in AoE.

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

but a lot of people run around and blindly parrot "power creep" as the source of all problems, some of them being unaware of what the term actually means (right up there with "bar compression").

They heavily optimized the 2/3 character frontlines and midlines and the healer flagger when these were not originally the strongest strategy based on game design. Strongest strategy was originally to come with the most unexpected overload against what you believed the defense was going to look like, to make as many of their defensive skills useless as you could. Otherwise, you probably brute forced them with shutdown on every character. Most of the ranged pvp creep comes from the fact that this build requires a pretty brutal midline spike to make up for all the defensive spamming the midline used to do. High energy and 2 second single target projectiles don't cut it. I'm surprise to see that high energy and 2 second casts currently function for the buffs that enhance the spike. It's more likely the realization that monks will keep everyone alive if you keep the group together and lineback DPS in the modern game.