Curse

Der Zeitgeist · May 23, 2010, 04:55 AM // 04:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by expugnare

Have you never heard of critscythe?

As I stated, I don't play sin to know. And don't feel like using 4 buffs (3 of them PvE only skills, 2 of them giving max damage if you have maxed titles) to do that damage. If Anet does overpower flops with other professions in PvE that's not a reason to overpower Eles, it would be better if they saw the mistakes on other classes and balance them.
There's a good way to play the ele, have fun AND do considerable damage. In a game you don't need a nuke head to blow up the whole map

Cuilan · May 23, 2010, 05:00 AM // 05:00

Elementalists can do constant damage in the hands of a good player along with speed clears and general monk replacing with Ether Renewal. You can even buff physicals decently well.

Elementalist shouldn't have too many skills giving armor penetration or any attribute changes that give such. Same with casting time.

I want hard mode hard, but having half your team suddenly spiked at a bad moment or as you go in...

Elementalists are not broken or unwanted.

Eluvatar · May 23, 2010, 05:04 AM // 05:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dark Paladin X

Well, elementalists ARE quite overpowered in PvE. Considering that I had a hard time with Borrguus Blisterbark, who was a complete pain in the ass (pariticularly in HM). But in general, ele bosses are something to really fear and this is why many players would prioritize on the ele boss.

But I do admit, there are a few underpowered elementalist skills that needs to be changed (Ether Prodigy, Mist Form, Second Wind, Stone Sheath to name a few)

ya ele bosses (and normal eles) in hm are super OP cause they are targeting foes (us) with skills that do aoe and kill us cause we all have low armor we use the same skill against them and it dose nothing because they have 80+ armor. the only time I'm realy able to pump out allot of dmg on my ele is when I use weaken armor ele lord and glyph of ele power to get 19 fire magic then I can hit for a bunch, I think an easy way to fix the dmg of eles would be to make ele lord boost attribs by 1..2..3 and maby make intensity last longer based on your E storage rank so only eles get the buff.

to OP, the RC of skills E manage and casting times are all fine for eles (other then cast time of air which is annoying) what needs to be addressed is the damage of eles not how often they spam skills.

Voodoo Rage · May 23, 2010, 05:45 AM // 05:45

I think the OP had a good idea for buffing Intensity. It really is a TERRIBLE Sunspear skill compared to what other classes get. It would be a way to buff an ele without affecting monsters OR PvP.

expugnare · May 23, 2010, 07:39 AM // 07:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Magragoc

inherent armor penetration.

Actually, they wouldn't get buffed from armor penetration, as I suggested buffing Intensity which is PvE only and thus unusable by monsters.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Der Zeitgeist

There's a good way to play the ele, have fun AND do considerable damage.

I agree, we can do fairly decent damage. The problem is in comparison to an assassin or necro or warrior its subpar, whats worse is we don't provide as much utility as necros or rits either. Its the same case with Dervishes. Sure they can do big damage, but warriors and sins do their job better, so Dervishes are unwanted.

Also, we have a basically worthless PvE skill in the form of Intensity which I think needs to be buffed to make Ele's a more comparable damage dealer.

So, the consensus I've gotten so far is this: lets up the damage and armor pen: cast speed and recharge can be covered pretty well with a 40/40 set, E management is fine.

Any more suggestions?

athariel · May 23, 2010, 09:08 AM // 09:08

HM ele bosses are so dangerous because H/H clumps and they have double damage on their AoE attacks. Same thing happens with hundred blades warriors, they can kick ass of your party too.

whenever I play ele I only call for discord and spam meteor shower, because no other build is viable at all. the problem is with scatter - manly spike doesn't scatter, spiteful spirit doesn't scatter, mesmer nukes don't scatter, every fire DoT AoE scatters and deals 2-3 damage per tick or something (EBSoH helps a bit with that but.. meh)

and ether renewal is crap, only use it has is for bonding in uw and that's it, one random strip and you're useless

now we even got hit we can't farm anymore because of sliver armor 'fix'

jonathan23 · May 23, 2010, 09:25 AM // 09:25

No buffs please, cause it would buff the enemies. I just had a skale ele boss wipe out the monk boss that is/was the blade bounty today/yesterday. It was in hm and if they buff the enemies, that monk boss and his group could be me

-Makai- · May 23, 2010, 09:51 AM // 09:51

I for one miss elemental damage in this game.

You know how Mesmers have Mantras, which increase resistance to specific elements? Why can't Eles have skills that lower enemy resistances? Think the Cold Mastery skill from Diablo 2. Anet could change the following sub-par skills into AoE hexes that serve this purpose:

Air: Tenai's Wind (seeing how it's a duplicate)
Water: Icy Prism or Swirling Aura (though the latter would go against naming conventions)
Earth: Magnetic Surge or Iron Mist (preferably Iron Mist)
Fire: Elemental Flame (single target, conditional Burning ain't that desirable in PvE)

Also, they could revamp Conjures a little and give them a small attribute boost to their respective element; obviously it would have to link to E-Storage some how. The trash skill, Magnetic Aura, could be turned into Earth's Conjure equivalent.

Alternatively, Anet could always just tone down AR-ignoring skills, but we know that's never going to happen.

Daft Shifty · May 23, 2010, 09:57 AM // 09:57

40 damage to 5 foes = 200dps. It's realistic.

Arato · May 23, 2010, 10:41 AM // 10:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Magragoc

And the OP wants them reduced further, which would just become ludicrous. He also refers to 5 and 8 second recharge times as "long cooldowns", which says a lot about how buffed he wants the Ele spells to be.

Enemies in HM are what, four levels higher than normal in eight-man areas? That's not a huge bump. Now throw in Cracked Armor, and whatever innate AP your Air spells are packing and the Ele situation isn't nearly as dire as people make it out to be. Are they the optimal profession? No, but they're not useless.

Reread the OP: He's suggesting that ALL Elementalist spells be dropped down to ten energy, and suggests two second recharges on spells like Rodgort's; Searing Flames doing unconditional damage in addition to the burning; Meteor Shower hitting instantly; and universal Armor Penetration for Ele spells. That would completely break the Elementalist. You can't deny it.

The game itself could use a tweak moreso than the Elementalist, but that's as unfeasible as the OP. This suggestion would do far more harm than good.

I agree with the basic premises of OP, in fact I made a post like this one but it's being reviewed by mods so that means it'll probably not be seen..

8s recharge, 10s, even 15s is fine for some big nukes but what Eles have to deal with is 30-60s recharge times. That's too long with the state of high end pve, too long of downtime between pulls. If assassin's promise doesn't work because the targetted mob gets healed through it, or flees, or your group doesn't focus fire it when you ping it, you're usually spent waiting 90s to be able to use meteor shower again, which is a cornerstone skill for our other aoe DoT's to be able to work.

I also find a 5s cast time on the skill to be ridiculous, things are often dead before you can get the cast off. Even if you get the cast off on a living enemy, they have 3s to move out of the way before the first knockdown.

That's basically an 8 second base cast time (just 3 of those seconds can't be interrupted, but they also can't be shortened by HCT or consets either). With a conset or mindbender or red rock candy, that's still 7 seconds. With a HCT proc that's still 5 seconds, before your spell has any effect. The 3 second window between the cast time finishing and the first hit gives ample opportunity for your spell to be completely wasted. I stack HCT mods and I still find them too unreliable to just simply cast the spell. To effectively use it, I have to use glyph of sacrifice and assassin's promise, just to make sure my bar will be recharged each pull. However glyph of sacrifice doesn't help my other spells which all have 2s cast times. The nerf to mindbender really hurt. That setup also doesn't allow me to be able to do cracked armor, so when my meteor showers are hitting mobs, it's hitting for about 63 damage per pulse, compared to the advertised 119 per pulse. My DWG Ritualist on the other hand, deals 130 some damage every 2.5s spamming DWG, in a larger area, and he can deal cracked armor with the same attribute as his main damage source. Ele can not (not as a nuker anyway, air magic is not a nuking line), Ele has to rely on secondary professions or other party members to support their damage dealing. Which do you think groups choose, a class that can independently (apart from being healed which everyone needs) do tons of damage, or a class that needs to have its hand held in order to do its job?

Before you say air magic. Realize that people don't take single target dps when they can just nuke down a whole group at once. If they need single target taken care of faster than the rest, pain inverter usually suffices.

I don't think we need everything to be reduced down to 10 energy and 5s or less casts, in fact I find our energy management to be one of the only acceptable aspects of the class (the other being earth magic as a tank substitute or tanking augmenting line), it's why Ether Renewal Bonding works, but I have no desire to play a bonder, if I wanted to play as a support and protection class, I'd play my monk, or ritualist as soul twisting (funny how my rit is almost never asked to do any kind of support role, always damage, whether SoS, SoGM, or DWG, I don't even HAVE a healing set of armor, I suppose I have a staff but it's not much, but I almost never get asked to do anything but damage.. on a class that was designed as a support class.. meanwhile on the class designed as a primary damage dealer, I'm being asked to do support roles, something seems wrong).

But 30s, not to mention 60s recharge times for your bread and butter nukes is just too much. I think maybe Meteor shower should be a 20s recharge, make the first knockdown happen at 1s after finishing casting rather than 3s, with a 3s cast time. That would be much more reasonable. Things like fireball and rodgort's invocation well, I'd like to see them down to 1s, at least fireball, maybe rodgort's left at 2s. Fire needs the most help but water isn't too far behind, controlling movement speed and miss chance is nice but most groups will opt for just more damage to kill them all faster instead and water has no punch.

I think as far as actual damage goes.. give fire and maybe water trees a way to do cracked armor on multiple targets in pve. Maybe if recharges on bigger aoes weren't 25s+ so you didn't need to be assassin secondary for AP, you could go Necro secondary, but as it is now, I can't really see myself switching to necro and having to wait 90s between casts, or relying on searing flames when there's enough content that can't burn that'll shut down a sf build. I had to switch to ranger to be able to really contribute to a group doing some zmissions with destroyers a few days ago.. that was.. painful waiting for recharges, but I've tried water builds on hard mode destroyers and that was miserable damage as well.

Or maybe adjust mob armor a bit in hard mode and end game. Our damage is fine until we hit those areas.

expugnare · May 23, 2010, 10:47 AM // 10:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sante_Kelm

I for one miss elemental damage in this game.

You know how Mesmers have Mantras, which increase resistance to specific elements? Why can't Eles have skills that lower enemy resistances? Think the Cold Mastery skill from Diablo 2. Anet could change the following sub-par skills into AoE hexes that serve this purpose:

Air: Tenai's Wind (seeing how it's a duplicate)
Water: Icy Prism or Swirling Aura (though the latter would go against naming conventions)
Earth: Magnetic Surge or Iron Mist (preferably Iron Mist)
Fire: Elemental Flame (single target, conditional Burning ain't that desirable in PvE)

Also, they could revamp Conjures a little and give them a small attribute boost to their respective element; obviously it would have to link to E-Storage some how. The trash skill, Magnetic Aura, could be turned into Earth's Conjure equivalent.

Alternatively, Anet could always just tone down AR-ignoring skills, but we know that's never going to happen.

This is a really good idea. I think I'm going to add it to original page.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daft Shifty

40 damage to 5 foes = 200dps. It's realistic.

too bad every second that foe isn't dead from the measly 40 damage you did to it is another second it is killing you

Weak aoe is completely worthless in the current Meta. Extremely strong AoE is not.

Winterclaw · May 23, 2010, 04:23 PM // 16:23

IMO the best thing for els would be turn 2-3 single target spells per line into attack skills that ignore armor.

tuna-fish_sushi · May 23, 2010, 04:38 PM // 16:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Der Zeitgeist

And this???
+200 dmg in one second from a sin??? Sorry but I don't play sin, can you perhaps enlighten me? I so badly want this build that does 200dmg in a sec.

Jagged Strike
Fox Fangs
Death Blossom
Asuran Scan
Critical Agility

Insert Elite of your choice:
1)Flashing Blades (Survivability + Damage)
2)Moebius Strike (More DPS Via Death blossom spam)

Insert Optionals of your choice:
1) Save yourselves (huge party damage mitigantion) (Add in FGJ for easy spammability)

2) Critical Eye (More Crits More energy)

3) Deaths Charge (Big heal) (recommend Flashing blades as elite so you don't get spiked)

(for even more)
+SoH from monk hero
+MoP from necro hero

Back on topic, Give eles some more armor ignoring skills. Won't make HM eles harder because most of their damage comes from armor dependant aoe skills.

Arato · May 23, 2010, 06:48 PM // 18:48

This isn't even an exaggeration but here's an example of how HM and high armor areas completely cripple us as damage dealers. Today I was doing Tihark orchard HM for the zmission, solo mission, and you get attacked by warrior and paragon mobs, so I figured, I need a little defense. I went with water magic and mist form, since these mobs would only be doing damage from normal attacks. I checked to make sure they were not particularly resistant or vulnerable to any elements, and went with vapor blade as my primary damage skill, 143 damage at rank 16 on the tooltip. Since I only needed to kill at most 2 at a time I didn't go with aoe's.

Luckily the vabbian guards get buffed in hard mode because otherwise I never would have killed the harpees, I was doing vapor blades for 39-43 damage. IE, my damage was about 1/4 of what it should be.

-Makai- · May 23, 2010, 07:15 PM // 19:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arato

I checked to make sure they were not particularly resistant or vulnerable to any elements, and went with vapor blade as my primary damage skill, 143 damage at rank 16 on the tooltip. Since I only needed to kill at most 2 at a time I didn't go with aoe's.

Personally, I find this to be one of GW's biggest issues: low ceilings on elemental vulnerability. Take a traditional RPG, such as Final Fantasy, for example; some enemies are extremely weak against particular elements. In Guild Wars, enemies are strong against certain elements, but have normal AR versus others. An ice imp should take way more than +10-20 from a fire attack. And a cursory Wiki glance on Destroyers will show that, contrary to popular belief, they are not weak against cold damage, but are strong against other elements in comparison.

Fooling around with resistances and vulnerabilities would take quite a bit of time from Anet, which is unlikely at this stage of the game.

Raising that ceiling higher and making armor-ignoring damage harder to spam would bring the Ele back into the limelight. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, it's probably not going to happen.

Arato · May 23, 2010, 07:40 PM // 19:40

Yeah unfortunately Anet seems satisfied that the status quo for hard mode and end game is that everything is backwards from what you learned leveling up and playing through normal mode in the earlier game.

Melee dps becomes tanks (assassins) (I was having trouble explaining to an assassin today that people don't take assassins for damage in end game areas but as tanks, he wasn't quite getting it)
Tanks become melee dps (100b whirlwind attack)
Support Classes become nukers (Mesmer, Necro, Ritualist, and Smiting Monk, all capable of dealing either armor ignoring damage or aoe armor penetrating damage)
Nukers become support classes (Elementalists primary role in end game/elite/hm is ether renewal bonders)
.. and true hybrids just have trouble finding a solid role period (Rangers, though they CAN find groups, but not everywhere, trying to get a ranger (playing as a ranger anyway) into a DoA speed clear is probably not going to happen)

I am however hopeful that GW2 will address the class's shortcomings though, like you said right now elemental vulnerabilities are really not emphasized, only resistances. I don't think they COULD better emphasize using vulnerabilities to your advantage however as you can't freely switch skills and attributes outside of towns. GW2 you will be able to do that however by switching attunements. Being able to switch attunements and weapons will allow for a very large skillset that you can switch back and forth between on the fly, to target vulnerabilities, making the class much more versatile and potentially a more reliable damage dealer.

Still it'd be nice if they'd address the outdatedness of the class in GW1.

Cuilan · May 24, 2010, 12:12 AM // 00:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arato

Melee dps becomes tanks (assassins) (I was having trouble explaining to an assassin today that people don't take assassins for damage in end game areas but as tanks, he wasn't quite getting it)
Tanks become melee dps (100b whirlwind attack)
Support Classes become nukers (Mesmer, Necro, Ritualist, and Smiting Monk, all capable of dealing either armor ignoring damage or aoe armor penetrating damage)
Nukers become support classes (Elementalists primary role in end game/elite/hm is ether renewal bonders)

Elementalists can still damage well, assassins are used in high end areas for physical groups, and warriors would be trash if they were only tanks.

The thing about elementalists is that they don't need a whole update. A skill or two can make a difference.

WarcryOfTruth · May 24, 2010, 01:09 AM // 01:09

I use Elementalists for damage, as far as I am concerned that's what their intended use was. I love dealing 80-130 damage to multiple foes at once (pending my buffs I deal around that much), and when I vanquish on my Paragon, one of my main damage dealers is a fire elementalist. So, as far as the way they were originally intended, at least in my opinion, the Elementalist is fine the way it is.

Myotheraccount · May 24, 2010, 01:34 AM // 01:34

No thanks. I don't want another class to go Mesmer's way. Eles are fine as they are now. They got strong AoE, can tank, farm and use awesome spike builds.

Eluvatar · May 24, 2010, 02:07 AM // 02:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Myotheraccount

No thanks. I don't want another class to go Mesmer's way. Eles are fine as they are now. They got strong AoE, can tank, farm and use awesome spike builds.

they dont realy have strong spikes in hm

they got there best tank skill nerfed

and the awsome spike your talking about only works with buh ebsoh the lightrbinger skill (+40% dmg in doa) and weaken armor, thats the only way you can spike with an ele and it takes a 25% dmg buff and a 40% dmg buff to do anything.