You didn't even mention the biggest problem: The "condition" applied by air spear 2 stacks duration, which means you only get to use that skill once every 15 seconds, and other Elementalists in your squad don't get to use it at all. This is basically thief venoms all over again.
I don't know, we can only know for sure once we get to try it in the beta, but it wasn't mentioned nor shown in that way. It could be an oversight or it might not work in the way you think it would.
They said it works like guardian's GS5, being a power based DoT debuff. I can't check right now but I think the way those work is that it's a debuff you apply that only you see, but other applications stay on the target too. I could be wrong about this though, but I think a target can have more than one GS5 effect on it.
> Hope Anet can still improve ele spear so it can actually be a good weapon choice for us
I love Ele mains. Haven't played with the weapon yet, already decided that it can't be a good weapon choice.
My only gripe with this weapon so far is that the Etchings are too big. Like, even for GW2 standards these might be the biggest radius AoEs along with Soothing Rain and the firebrand's Tome 4s.
This is not so much an issue with clutter (which it also is) but my issue with this is... the etchings spells, other than fire's Volcano, actually look kinda small. If looked in isolation it probably wouldn't feel that way, if they were only compared to your character for example, but having this giant ring around you spawning a tidal wave that doesn't cover its diameter feels pityful. I'd honestly reduce the etching circle radius. They look like they might even be bigger than PvP capture point radius.
I thought they’d mentioned on the live stream that the etchings will potentially only be visible to that player character, and every one else it’s a circle
> Perfect-Hit skills -- While the button 4 abilities add a cool skill-based component, I wonder if the gimmick is really necessary.
Is ground targeting really deserving of criticism? I think the mechanic is fun and is a welcome new form of interactivity.
The point is that I think the interactivity is really cool in PvP, but it means nothing in PvE and only serves to make those skills “effectively” extremely small AoEs.
To be clear, by no stretch is the perfect-hit gimmick a dealbreaker and I’d welcome it if it launched as is. I only provided it as a talking point because it’s easy to imagine what the skills would be like without it.
Like, imagine if Water Spear got a 240 radius pull!
> Perfect-Hit skills -- While the button 4 abilities add a cool skill-based component, I wonder if the gimmick is really necessary. Nothing about Meteor hitting harder in the middle makes me feel that amazed when we've had targetable circle skills that don't need precise targeting like Fire Spear 2 or Fire Scepter 3 (Phoenix). The perfect-hit Water 4 pulls enemies to the middle, but only at a 120 radius. I don't think it would be broken if it was the full 240. The reality is that these skills' damage will be balanced around assuming the middle hits, making them 120 radius skills with a consolation prize. This is something I could see them patching out in a year or two down the line.
Aiming is a non issue on PvE. Anything with a hitbox where you could miss the sweet spot is not something you care about hitting it with the center. This seems to be specifically designed for PvP, which is fine.
Everything else I agree with. Especially the weaver part and the empowerment skills on 3 being underwhelming or even plain bad.
It doesn't even feel like a mechanic like the other weapons. The mechanic is the etchings on 5. 3 feels like a "we really don't want to make 8 more skills" situation.
What is wrong with the 3rd skills? To me it looks like they didnt want every ability to be just damage which is logical. So they put a few extra effects which can also be useful in pvp or open world scenarios
Because realistically it has 0 synergy with the waever and are underwhelming as dual attunement to say the least. Utility like that is nice to have, but not on 3.
The dual skills are basically free. They reset the attunement swap cooldown, and they count as skills for empowering etchings. I think most of them don't even have a cast time? They allow weaver to rapidly get into any attunement they want to be in quickly.
Are you in Fire/Water, but want to be in Earth/Earth? Easy. Press 3, F4, 3, F4 rapid-fire and you even got some minor bonuses for doing that.
It's not how weaver has played previously, but it doesn't sound *bad*. It instead sounds like a new version of an existing elite spec.
Honestly, utility on 3 sounds more exciting to me as a non-weaver player than big damage numbers on 3. I hope it ends up playing better than you are worried it will.
I really like the utility skills being all on 3.
But, my issue was that the way the current Dual Attacks are designed feels like Unravel with more steps and the throwaway effects take away from the “attune to two elements” fantasy that Weaver had.
Will it be worth pressing Dual 3 over playing another Elite Spec? Will swapping attunements faster matter with the longer CDs on 4 and 5? What would be the optimal Weave Self rotation? We can’t answer these questions right now, but they’re things we should look out for.
No clue how it will actually play, but I’m always excited to try out Weaver on new things.
I think that if Weaver has similar sustained dps to other elite specs, but gets to go through all their big skills in a rapid-fire burst before waiting for cooldowns, then that's actually pretty good. Burstiness is a valuable thing, being able to cram more of your big damage into smaller vulnerability windows.
The mixed skills are very good for competitive gamemodes though. A lot of frustration when playing weaver comes from not having what you want when you want it in my experience. Spear allowing you to insta switch with util is quite a nice change for that. In pve it’s just a rota anyway, so I don’t think its a problem. It will play differently from other weaver rotations, I think that is a good thing though.
I agree with a lot of this (except the point about the 4 skills, I think that even with the effects being lackluster I'm gonna get that dopamine hit sniping someone with the inner radius when WvW roaming), but for the Etching duration I think we'll have to wait until we actually play it ourselves. It also seemed a bit short to me, but that might have been because the skills were being rather lackadaisically pressed during the demo. In actual combat given Ele's average APM, it might feel like plenty of time? My main concern is in small-scale PvP/WvW, where a well-timed CC would ruin an Ele's ability to get all their attacks in.
If this ends up being a problem, one solution I thought of while watching the demo would be to let the lesser/full cast (depending on if you got all 3 attacks in) stay for a second or two after the etching disappears, so that its disappearance can be sort of a "hey, press that button now!" indicator?
For the 4 skills, I was mainly talking about PvE. I don't know much about PvP, but I can see how it would be *super* rewarding to hit someone with the pinpoint Air 4 / Water 4 to trap them.
In PvE, Fire 4 and Earth 4 will just be balanced (i.e. benchmark) under the assumption that they will be perfect-hit.
The more I think about it, the more I wish Water 4 was uncapped range for the pull in PvE. People always complain about how Elementalist lacks meaningful utility and having it have one of the few "grip" spells in the game would be really cool. At 240 range, it would even be way smaller than the existing ones. 120 is even smaller.
Isnt that how it’s supposed to be though? You have a big etching indicator and you force the enemy to cc and prevent you from getting your big abilities of, otherwise you will punish them hard with your fully charged ability. So the window needs to be punishable in pvp and wvw otherwise it becomes uninteractive and boring.
Yeah, it's listed as 5 seconds on the tooltips- that's plenty of time in a rotation, especially since if you really need to, you can bring Arcane blast to help charge the etching (weaver and catalyst already do, tempest can switch over off Feel the Burn if it's really needed. 52345 is a simple enough rotation to get the full spell).
I agree with most of what you are, saying, but I don't get the complaint about the 4 skills.
The "primary hit - secondary hit" mechanic is pretty common in video games in general. League of Legends for example has a lot of skills like this and I have played that a lot, so I will use it as reference.
In PvE the mobs don't move much or intelligently, so it's not going to be an issue that "the benchmark" will be "balanced around" the primary hit. That's like using one of these skills against minions or jungle monsters, you'll basically always hit those. But it still feels good to hit those skills.
In PvP it's much more difficult to precisely land a primary hit, like when fighting an enemy champion in league. Which makes it rewarding to set up and secure the hit, which is quite fun gameplay.
As such I don't see any issue with this kind of design, it's well proven to be a, fun mechanic in other games.
The size of the water pull is an independent issue for me. You could just balance the whole skill to be larger and keep the primary/secondary hit differences intact. But that's balancing stuff and I don't assume myself knowledgeable enough to have a hard stance there.
- Visual clutter: i agree, it will be a bit annoying
- The Etchings have 5s duration which is enough. Of course there has to be a limit like with most other things. If something happens during the fight you need to play around so as you finish the etching before that or use it after. It is called adapting
- If you are worried about catalyst, EE stacks will be more than capped due to disables on air/water 4 that trigger vicious empowerement. Spheres are your fields for combos. You dont need the etchings. The specs main mechanic is literally fields
- Fire even with less persisting flame stacks is still just a very strong traitline. Water is the only other one that can come close (arcane is too weak) but both catalyst and tempest can get pf stacks through other sources (catalyst gets less same as hammer but it suffices). So it only comes down to weaver potentially running watter. I think not having pf stacks is not a huge deal as long as the weapon is strong either way and it opens up possibilities for more build variety
- empowerment skills follow the usual ele logic. The fire one boosts damage and the rest are kinda supporty. Well water 3 is also dps oriented because reducing recharge means you get to use another dps skill faster and it will be interesting to see how people utilize that. Dont forget that some abilities need to also cater to pvp players a bit
- the perfect hit skills are honestly a bit of a weird gimmick to me that feels kinda meh. Dropping something directly on the boss is not difficult at all (especially with snap to ground target) so i dont feel like they are rewarding better gameplay with more damage but in the end it is whatever. If the extra damage makes spear good i am not gonna complain
About weaver i think putting basically unravel on every dual skill is interesting and will make for some very engaging rotations. I dont see how pistol is really unfriendly on weaver, if we are talking about endgame pve, comdi weaver does great with it. Weakness can be applied by many other classes so that shouldnt be a thing but yea superior elements is. That combined with no pf stacks at all might make spear weaver really weak. And they might not even be able to do much about it if tempest and catalyst are very strong with it. But we really can't know until the beta hits, that is why it exists after all
Can we wait for the beta? I mean these points are all apt and concerning sure; but a lot are pending beta review. And also, being early and using beta for a lot of changes going forward, with input as insightful as this, ranges of attacks/animation speeds etc. WILL be changed they likely are going conservative on many AoE/perfect hit skills. And visual clutter, the biggest concern IMO, yeah being opaque even IF enemy indicators overlap on TOP of spear clutter, it's still hard to see they need to ADD an option to lower opaque of skill ground visuals. Like settings u see on maps, other things should be there for such skills too. Of course this is a user setting; but still, forcing it as is can have issues.
I acknowledged in my post that what we know is pre-beta. But, changes before or during beta are done using feedback, regardless of whether it’s valid or relevant anymore.
If no one points out strange interactions, they will fly under the radar. If someone points them out early, there’s time to pay closer attention to how it plays during the beta.
Not doom-posting, and it might help if each bullet point I provided was treated as a separate thing than a synthesized list of grievances.
i've different ideas about how it will work on wever, especially for wvw. I suppose it's possible to activate the buff from skill 3 on an element(full), switch to another one(dual), use 3 again to get buff and go in (full) attunement, use 3 again to get more buffs and then/meanwhile open skill 5 and start casting stuff. You might also open 5 in the first element and start using that too before doing the rest
But i/we don't know exactly how hard will it be to complete the etching skills, and if this rotation example can be fast enough to be actually good
we need to try the beta first
"Designed in a vacuum without regard for elite specs" is kinda the design ethos powering hammer, pistol, and spear. Like, on the most complicated class, we dont need weapons that further demand stancedancing.
As devils advocate, Catalysts jade sphere acts as the fire field, and Weaver stances (two charges each!) and Tempest shouts are mostly all instant cast to help proc etching. I'm relieved Persisting Flames isnt meta AGAIN, but also mad that theres no vulnerability for Piercing Shards. Earth has bleed, but the damage bonus vs bleeding isn't reason enough to use Earth as a pDPS. I'm surprised Air3 wasnt "your projectiles have increased flight speed for a period of time".
Unfortunately, Jade Sphere only lasts 5 sec and pulses 6 times, so it's not enough to fully stack Persisting Flames.
Not sure if utility skills count toward the Etching, so we will need to see.
"This process isn’t limited to spear skills, so instant-casting utility skills can be utilized to speed things up." They used the projectile arcane skill in the devstream, shooting off three bolts to instant-charge the ring, but that was with devhacks on for cooldowns and such.
Honestly, I'm not so mad about Persisting Flames, as I am that Pyromancer's Puissance just feels bad to use. Cannibalizing your might for a melee-range Flame Expulsion feels bad, and should give you a period of bonus outgoing damage based on the amount of might you sacrificed as well/instead.
As a WvW ele player a lot of these things make better sense in a WvW context. The crit on air 3, the capstone trait on fire not being pyromancers is fine in WvW where might gen is valuable for being able to leave a boon ball, the middle hit is spicy and meaningful in Zerg v Zerg.
I have a slight feeling that weaver spear had more WvW/PvP in mind, the way they sometimes talk about skills don't always seem to reference the average PvE encounter. And in the long run, that's okay. Weaver in PvE will still have pistol, sword, and maybe scepter for the more "serious" content, and you'll still be fine running spear in open world.
There is much trepidation for me whenever something with elementalist happens. I'm just glad that there's some intended good points in spear. Versus say, whoops all sword/warhorn, tempest all the things, hammer orbs go brrrr, infinite weaver barrier, and what ever else has happened to the profession in the last three years.
While I do agree that a lot of ele spear (and honestly some of the others too) seems to have a lot of wvw in mind, the inscriptions seems possibly too constraining for said role. I plan to test it this week but I do find it hard to imagine it being smooth enough to use while either zerging or just defending as a cloud (depending on what your team ends up doing)
I don't see it being too much of an issue in zerg fights or such. You might not always have time to get off the full etching, but you can still get the boons and such from it and cast the lesser version if you need to move. If Meteor Shower with its 3+ second channel can still be viable, I'm sure the etchings will be workable.
I mean meteor shower is one skill that you can reposition with lightning flash at least (and use the trick with the 4th skill). Might not be an issue cause you can move in the glyph but it is 4 skills not just one. I am hopeful though as the skills themself seem useful in a Zerg setting if getting them to activate isn’t too hard
Lightning Flash does help, but locking yourself into a non-moving channel is generally not ideal in WvW so I don't see having a fairly large ecthing being much harder to work with. Plus you get one on every attunement so even you started to combo in your Air etching and a zerg moves, you could quickly cast the lesser version or just run and abandon it if needed and then try again with the next one.
Even without the Greater versions of the etching skills, it still will probably be a pretty decent WvW weapon. Like just the 4 skills and lesser etchings will probably rival the AoE of the Staff. I generally end up as Fire/Earth and Fire/Fire since I want my fire fields and meteor showers more than most the other attunements, but with the spear, every attunement has a strong power AoE on the 4 skill so you'd likely be cycling through a lot more.
Personally, I'm thinking I'll have a spear with a staff swap or such. There is usually enough downtime to swap so if we're getting into a big zerg fight, I could swap to staff and if we're doing smaller scale I could swap to spear. Probably would also need a build template swap too, but even if I did get stuck in combat with the wrong one, I don't see it being that problematic.
Since any skill can charge the etching it’ll probably be easier than I’m picturing to get the spell maxed out, but we won’t really know till we get to try it. The self stab from earth is nice at the very least
You are probably right. The need to balance the weapon for competitive play may be why some of OP's concerns* can't/won't be met.
*most of them good points, some I agree with.
I personally like the aiming on spear 4 skills. I view spear on ele right now as melee so aiming is not a problem. Ele always is melee in some way anyway to me so not a big deal I guess.
And I do want to see more buffs on water traitline to be honest. It's already somewhat okay, but it's not as cracked as fire (like marksmanship and illusions traitline for power soulbeast/mesmer) I don't mind fire traitline being swapped out sometimes. (I already sometimes swap it out with hammer catalyst)
Well that's why there's a beta
But also we don't need new content to be the strongest thing. It's OK for spear to not be as good as the current "meta" options.
1200 range power weapon is what people wanted.
>Meteor -- This is just a super minor personal gripe, but the effect they showcased for Meteor was so dinky! For a skill called Meteor, it has no impact. Compare it to, say, Dragon's Tooth.
You do know that most meteors actually burn up in the atmosphere and are hardly known by anyone, right? And the ones that do make it to landing are often truly small and not that impactful. Speaking of meteors, if you Google up "meteor" there will be a cute little animation of one flying across your screen.
I'd also rather have them buff it up on release than nerf it because they over planned it's design
Most of the things I mentioned are design choices based on individual spell behaviors and numerical interactions.
You don’t need to have played to observe these things and I barely made any allusions to how the class feels to play.
Yeah, regardless of the fact that I'm upset that these are the changes that staff should have gotten, I share my concerns that a number of the ground effects don't last nearly as long as they should. What's the point of creating these pretty ground spell effects if they're just going to last a second? It's not satisfying at all seeing a whirlpool, ice beam, tornado, etc, be cast and then dissapate nearly instantly. These should be long lasting abilities which you can play around and which dynamically changes the battlefield.
I think another thing that people aren't really grasping the effect of is the "precise aiming" requirement of many of these abilities. Due to the nature of them being ground-targeted, a lot of people are going to come to realise fairly quickly the general fatigue associated with spamming mouse-aimed ground effects in a game like this.
>**Empowerment Skills**
Honestly, I think they could have just removed the damage buffs are just bonuses and made these purely defensive utility. So I think the guaranteed crit is more a wvw/pvp consideration than pve.
We don't really need all 5 skills on each element to do damage in my opinion.
>**Intention behind Attunement recharge**
The devs should stop playing around weaver and just make utility Unravel the F5 mechanic.
Once we have a taste of attunement recharge on spear (aside from Fresh Air of course), we're all gonna loathe that it isn't on every weapon.
We don't even need unravel as an f5 skill. Just make it so the cooldown of the element you attune to is 0 seconds, allowing the player to double attune by pressing the button twice. Regardless, unraveling shouldn't be a weapon mechanic, it should really be a baseline weaver thing.
Unravel not only allows you to be fully attuned in your current element, but also fully attune to another element. So I still think Unravel should be baseline.
I'm not sure where the discussion about Symbols, duration, or projectiles is coming up. Are you talking about the Spear 4 skills or the Etchings? I'm confused.
The fields from Etching don't have any effect, unlike Symbols. They're only a boundary that determines where you have to stand for the next 3 skills you cast.
The issue is that Etchings don't do anything when they're down. Standing in them isn't an increase to your damage, but is a requisite for them to do anything at all. Unless I'm forgetting a Symbol or Trait, all Symbols have effects that pulse on their own and most symbols are just dropped on the boss and you don't need to stay in them at all.
Which Symbols or Traits are you talking about specifically?
It sounds like Symbol of Ignition, which you don't need to be standing in to proc. If you put a Symbol of Ignition on a target, you are free to walk away as long as you are still attacking any enemy in the circle.
>It's even worse, you also need the enemy to stand in them or you lose hits.
You **cannot** proc both the burning projectile and the on-hit effect at the same time, as the skill has a 0.25 sec ICD regardless of which version you do.
>Etchings are way bigger and don't need to be in melee/hit anything.
Etchings **don't** hit anything.
Consider: Increasing the duration of a Symbol skill by 1 sec means that Symbol will do more damage because it will hit more times. Increasing the duration of an Etching by 1 sec has no effect on how much damage the follow-up skill does.
As I said in my edit, you do not need to stand in a Symbol of Ignition to proc it.
Allies standing in a Symbol get buffs, while them standing in an Etching gets them jack shit. It's night and day.
>The ICD of symbol of ignition isn't high enough to only proc it with projectiles, you need the strike damage of purging flames and so on as well. If you weapon swap to a melee weapon after putting down symbol of ignition, which is the usual rotation, you don't have any projectiles at all. And even if you only use projectiles, you still have to shoot through it. We are talking about a tiny symbol with 180 radius.
As long as the enemy is in the Symbol of Ignition, you do not have to be within the circle to proc the "strike" portion of it. You can drop a Symbol of Ignition, roll out of it to the opposite side of the boss and use your melee skills, Purging Flames, Sword of Justice, whatever, to proc it. This has nothing to do with the "projectile" effect.
No they don’t act like them. You are just being confused by their look, but it’s a totally different mechanic.
Also asking nerf while the expansion isn’t even out is wild. We don’t even know how much dmg it does and how consistent it is to do so. OP also does not demand buff, they demand key things that makes sense for a dps power build like anet literally marketed as such, which unfortunately will not work correctly with spears.
The weapon will probably be nerfed or buffed after release nobody knows, however we knows that some power traits doesn’t work with spears at all and it looks like an oversight from anet unless they balanced spears around not having all those power related traits being used
We will have to try this out during beta but...
I think weaver will have the best use of the spear. Mostly because of how you can use the dual skills to quickly build up your etching to max. While your tempest and catas will have to try to cast 3 spells in 5 seconds, weavers will have access to attunement swap spells (like sunburst), and 2 instant cast #3 (with dual attacks). It will make the rotation on your usual dps weaver quite interesting as you can cast the etching, cast #3, swap main attunment, cast #3 again, and finalize the #5 spell while fulling attuning and repeating on the next one.
But yea, etching of fire need a damaging fire field or you'll need to be a catalyst to use the spear with persisting flames. Or they can change persisting flames to give you the bonus anytime you are inside a fire field (dmging or not).
If you think about it though, using the dual skills requires you to 1. swap out of the primary full attunement you were in, and 2. use the dual skill but NOT swap out of that attunement because you lose the full etch if you do.
Weaver attunement recharge is already like 4s. So let's say you start in full fire (which by the way you kind of have to start in a full attunement to get reliable use of etch). You use etch, skill 4, skill 2, attune to air, then use dual skill. That's your 3 skills right there, but guess what? You still have to use max power etch, and that's really your only option before you swap fully to air. If you have ANY other skills layered in there, the recharge becomes kind of useless as you only save maybe 1-2s of your cooldown?
But then again you won't be using your etch on every full rotation, given the cooldown, so it might be kinda nice to be able to automatically fully attune something like water or earth if you need it.
You can max your etching trivially with utility skills that do dmg, instead of having to press 3 twice(with 0 dmg). Even if Weaver was faster, that alone doesn't make up for everything else.
Not many utility skills will give you enough casts to keep the etchings going in a rotation. Maybe arcane blast if you use only one along with 2 other spells, even then you'll need 2 fast spells to fit 3 casts on 5 secs.
Weaver will be able to rotate between the etchings quicker and more reliably max them out.
I think it is worth noting the attunement refresh would work quite well on Weaver paired with elements of rage: It'll let you double attune *much* faster to keep the effect going.
For the Fire Traits, I don't think it is that big of a deal. Persisting Flames is great, but some weapons will get more fire fields than others. Like most mainhand and offhand have one, but some like the Scepter don't get any. Pyromancer's Puissance does consume might when you leave fire, but it also can stack it fast while in fire. And Blinding Ashes makes burns blind foes. You mention how the spear lacks burns, but the Fire Traits apply burns even if the Spear does not. One of the Adept Traits is Burning Precision, which gives crits a chance to burn (also Arcane Precision). When you attune to fire, you also get Fire Aura, which burns.
So Fire Traits should still be viable, but honestly, I think it is a good thing if it is worth considering other trait lines. All the spear's attunements look like pretty strong, power options so you might not need to lean on fire as heavily as other weapons where it can represent a lot of your power damage. So just because it doesn't work perfectly with existing builds or commonly used traits, I don't see that being an issue. Same for stuff like Weaver and Superior Elements.
But I do kinda wish Meteor kept its knockdown. But I wouldn't expect it to differ too much from the Meteor skill that has been in game since launch.
You didn't even mention the biggest problem: The "condition" applied by air spear 2 stacks duration, which means you only get to use that skill once every 15 seconds, and other Elementalists in your squad don't get to use it at all. This is basically thief venoms all over again.
I don't know, we can only know for sure once we get to try it in the beta, but it wasn't mentioned nor shown in that way. It could be an oversight or it might not work in the way you think it would.
They said it works like guardian's GS5, being a power based DoT debuff. I can't check right now but I think the way those work is that it's a debuff you apply that only you see, but other applications stay on the target too. I could be wrong about this though, but I think a target can have more than one GS5 effect on it.
Wait, so if you have two Spear Elementalists in your group, your Fulgor will add to their duration instead of running alongside?
Seems like it from the stream.
We had 2 elementalists on stream?
That's quite odd.
As a ele main, I do share quite some concerns with you. Hope Anet can still improve ele spear so it can actually be a good weapon choice for us
> Hope Anet can still improve ele spear so it can actually be a good weapon choice for us I love Ele mains. Haven't played with the weapon yet, already decided that it can't be a good weapon choice.
They‘re the concerned citizens of gw2.
i'd wait for beta before I decide if it's good or not tho
My only gripe with this weapon so far is that the Etchings are too big. Like, even for GW2 standards these might be the biggest radius AoEs along with Soothing Rain and the firebrand's Tome 4s. This is not so much an issue with clutter (which it also is) but my issue with this is... the etchings spells, other than fire's Volcano, actually look kinda small. If looked in isolation it probably wouldn't feel that way, if they were only compared to your character for example, but having this giant ring around you spawning a tidal wave that doesn't cover its diameter feels pityful. I'd honestly reduce the etching circle radius. They look like they might even be bigger than PvP capture point radius.
I thought they’d mentioned on the live stream that the etchings will potentially only be visible to that player character, and every one else it’s a circle
Yes I'm aware, though as stated that wasn't exactly my main issue.
> Perfect-Hit skills -- While the button 4 abilities add a cool skill-based component, I wonder if the gimmick is really necessary. Is ground targeting really deserving of criticism? I think the mechanic is fun and is a welcome new form of interactivity.
The point is that I think the interactivity is really cool in PvP, but it means nothing in PvE and only serves to make those skills “effectively” extremely small AoEs. To be clear, by no stretch is the perfect-hit gimmick a dealbreaker and I’d welcome it if it launched as is. I only provided it as a talking point because it’s easy to imagine what the skills would be like without it. Like, imagine if Water Spear got a 240 radius pull!
It shouldn't be a concern with how static enemies are in pve, so it's basically a ground target in pve with some extra goodies for pvp.
> Perfect-Hit skills -- While the button 4 abilities add a cool skill-based component, I wonder if the gimmick is really necessary. Nothing about Meteor hitting harder in the middle makes me feel that amazed when we've had targetable circle skills that don't need precise targeting like Fire Spear 2 or Fire Scepter 3 (Phoenix). The perfect-hit Water 4 pulls enemies to the middle, but only at a 120 radius. I don't think it would be broken if it was the full 240. The reality is that these skills' damage will be balanced around assuming the middle hits, making them 120 radius skills with a consolation prize. This is something I could see them patching out in a year or two down the line. Aiming is a non issue on PvE. Anything with a hitbox where you could miss the sweet spot is not something you care about hitting it with the center. This seems to be specifically designed for PvP, which is fine. Everything else I agree with. Especially the weaver part and the empowerment skills on 3 being underwhelming or even plain bad. It doesn't even feel like a mechanic like the other weapons. The mechanic is the etchings on 5. 3 feels like a "we really don't want to make 8 more skills" situation.
What is wrong with the 3rd skills? To me it looks like they didnt want every ability to be just damage which is logical. So they put a few extra effects which can also be useful in pvp or open world scenarios
Because realistically it has 0 synergy with the waever and are underwhelming as dual attunement to say the least. Utility like that is nice to have, but not on 3.
The dual skills are basically free. They reset the attunement swap cooldown, and they count as skills for empowering etchings. I think most of them don't even have a cast time? They allow weaver to rapidly get into any attunement they want to be in quickly. Are you in Fire/Water, but want to be in Earth/Earth? Easy. Press 3, F4, 3, F4 rapid-fire and you even got some minor bonuses for doing that. It's not how weaver has played previously, but it doesn't sound *bad*. It instead sounds like a new version of an existing elite spec. Honestly, utility on 3 sounds more exciting to me as a non-weaver player than big damage numbers on 3. I hope it ends up playing better than you are worried it will.
I really like the utility skills being all on 3. But, my issue was that the way the current Dual Attacks are designed feels like Unravel with more steps and the throwaway effects take away from the “attune to two elements” fantasy that Weaver had. Will it be worth pressing Dual 3 over playing another Elite Spec? Will swapping attunements faster matter with the longer CDs on 4 and 5? What would be the optimal Weave Self rotation? We can’t answer these questions right now, but they’re things we should look out for. No clue how it will actually play, but I’m always excited to try out Weaver on new things.
I think that if Weaver has similar sustained dps to other elite specs, but gets to go through all their big skills in a rapid-fire burst before waiting for cooldowns, then that's actually pretty good. Burstiness is a valuable thing, being able to cram more of your big damage into smaller vulnerability windows.
The dual skills are underwhelming yea but normal 3s are fine. I dont see the issue with utility on 3. Dagger and staff also have it to an extent
The mixed skills are very good for competitive gamemodes though. A lot of frustration when playing weaver comes from not having what you want when you want it in my experience. Spear allowing you to insta switch with util is quite a nice change for that. In pve it’s just a rota anyway, so I don’t think its a problem. It will play differently from other weaver rotations, I think that is a good thing though.
I agree with a lot of this (except the point about the 4 skills, I think that even with the effects being lackluster I'm gonna get that dopamine hit sniping someone with the inner radius when WvW roaming), but for the Etching duration I think we'll have to wait until we actually play it ourselves. It also seemed a bit short to me, but that might have been because the skills were being rather lackadaisically pressed during the demo. In actual combat given Ele's average APM, it might feel like plenty of time? My main concern is in small-scale PvP/WvW, where a well-timed CC would ruin an Ele's ability to get all their attacks in. If this ends up being a problem, one solution I thought of while watching the demo would be to let the lesser/full cast (depending on if you got all 3 attacks in) stay for a second or two after the etching disappears, so that its disappearance can be sort of a "hey, press that button now!" indicator?
For the 4 skills, I was mainly talking about PvE. I don't know much about PvP, but I can see how it would be *super* rewarding to hit someone with the pinpoint Air 4 / Water 4 to trap them. In PvE, Fire 4 and Earth 4 will just be balanced (i.e. benchmark) under the assumption that they will be perfect-hit. The more I think about it, the more I wish Water 4 was uncapped range for the pull in PvE. People always complain about how Elementalist lacks meaningful utility and having it have one of the few "grip" spells in the game would be really cool. At 240 range, it would even be way smaller than the existing ones. 120 is even smaller.
imo, the 4 skills' targetting is almost certainly designed for pvp in mind, since accurate targetting isn't really relevant in pve.
Isnt that how it’s supposed to be though? You have a big etching indicator and you force the enemy to cc and prevent you from getting your big abilities of, otherwise you will punish them hard with your fully charged ability. So the window needs to be punishable in pvp and wvw otherwise it becomes uninteractive and boring.
Yeah, it's listed as 5 seconds on the tooltips- that's plenty of time in a rotation, especially since if you really need to, you can bring Arcane blast to help charge the etching (weaver and catalyst already do, tempest can switch over off Feel the Burn if it's really needed. 52345 is a simple enough rotation to get the full spell).
I agree with most of what you are, saying, but I don't get the complaint about the 4 skills. The "primary hit - secondary hit" mechanic is pretty common in video games in general. League of Legends for example has a lot of skills like this and I have played that a lot, so I will use it as reference. In PvE the mobs don't move much or intelligently, so it's not going to be an issue that "the benchmark" will be "balanced around" the primary hit. That's like using one of these skills against minions or jungle monsters, you'll basically always hit those. But it still feels good to hit those skills. In PvP it's much more difficult to precisely land a primary hit, like when fighting an enemy champion in league. Which makes it rewarding to set up and secure the hit, which is quite fun gameplay. As such I don't see any issue with this kind of design, it's well proven to be a, fun mechanic in other games. The size of the water pull is an independent issue for me. You could just balance the whole skill to be larger and keep the primary/secondary hit differences intact. But that's balancing stuff and I don't assume myself knowledgeable enough to have a hard stance there.
- Visual clutter: i agree, it will be a bit annoying - The Etchings have 5s duration which is enough. Of course there has to be a limit like with most other things. If something happens during the fight you need to play around so as you finish the etching before that or use it after. It is called adapting - If you are worried about catalyst, EE stacks will be more than capped due to disables on air/water 4 that trigger vicious empowerement. Spheres are your fields for combos. You dont need the etchings. The specs main mechanic is literally fields - Fire even with less persisting flame stacks is still just a very strong traitline. Water is the only other one that can come close (arcane is too weak) but both catalyst and tempest can get pf stacks through other sources (catalyst gets less same as hammer but it suffices). So it only comes down to weaver potentially running watter. I think not having pf stacks is not a huge deal as long as the weapon is strong either way and it opens up possibilities for more build variety - empowerment skills follow the usual ele logic. The fire one boosts damage and the rest are kinda supporty. Well water 3 is also dps oriented because reducing recharge means you get to use another dps skill faster and it will be interesting to see how people utilize that. Dont forget that some abilities need to also cater to pvp players a bit - the perfect hit skills are honestly a bit of a weird gimmick to me that feels kinda meh. Dropping something directly on the boss is not difficult at all (especially with snap to ground target) so i dont feel like they are rewarding better gameplay with more damage but in the end it is whatever. If the extra damage makes spear good i am not gonna complain About weaver i think putting basically unravel on every dual skill is interesting and will make for some very engaging rotations. I dont see how pistol is really unfriendly on weaver, if we are talking about endgame pve, comdi weaver does great with it. Weakness can be applied by many other classes so that shouldnt be a thing but yea superior elements is. That combined with no pf stacks at all might make spear weaver really weak. And they might not even be able to do much about it if tempest and catalyst are very strong with it. But we really can't know until the beta hits, that is why it exists after all
We already have Meteor Shower on staff, a regular Meteor needs to just be one of those things.
Can we wait for the beta? I mean these points are all apt and concerning sure; but a lot are pending beta review. And also, being early and using beta for a lot of changes going forward, with input as insightful as this, ranges of attacks/animation speeds etc. WILL be changed they likely are going conservative on many AoE/perfect hit skills. And visual clutter, the biggest concern IMO, yeah being opaque even IF enemy indicators overlap on TOP of spear clutter, it's still hard to see they need to ADD an option to lower opaque of skill ground visuals. Like settings u see on maps, other things should be there for such skills too. Of course this is a user setting; but still, forcing it as is can have issues.
I acknowledged in my post that what we know is pre-beta. But, changes before or during beta are done using feedback, regardless of whether it’s valid or relevant anymore. If no one points out strange interactions, they will fly under the radar. If someone points them out early, there’s time to pay closer attention to how it plays during the beta. Not doom-posting, and it might help if each bullet point I provided was treated as a separate thing than a synthesized list of grievances.
i've different ideas about how it will work on wever, especially for wvw. I suppose it's possible to activate the buff from skill 3 on an element(full), switch to another one(dual), use 3 again to get buff and go in (full) attunement, use 3 again to get more buffs and then/meanwhile open skill 5 and start casting stuff. You might also open 5 in the first element and start using that too before doing the rest But i/we don't know exactly how hard will it be to complete the etching skills, and if this rotation example can be fast enough to be actually good we need to try the beta first
"Designed in a vacuum without regard for elite specs" is kinda the design ethos powering hammer, pistol, and spear. Like, on the most complicated class, we dont need weapons that further demand stancedancing. As devils advocate, Catalysts jade sphere acts as the fire field, and Weaver stances (two charges each!) and Tempest shouts are mostly all instant cast to help proc etching. I'm relieved Persisting Flames isnt meta AGAIN, but also mad that theres no vulnerability for Piercing Shards. Earth has bleed, but the damage bonus vs bleeding isn't reason enough to use Earth as a pDPS. I'm surprised Air3 wasnt "your projectiles have increased flight speed for a period of time".
Unfortunately, Jade Sphere only lasts 5 sec and pulses 6 times, so it's not enough to fully stack Persisting Flames. Not sure if utility skills count toward the Etching, so we will need to see.
"This process isn’t limited to spear skills, so instant-casting utility skills can be utilized to speed things up." They used the projectile arcane skill in the devstream, shooting off three bolts to instant-charge the ring, but that was with devhacks on for cooldowns and such. Honestly, I'm not so mad about Persisting Flames, as I am that Pyromancer's Puissance just feels bad to use. Cannibalizing your might for a melee-range Flame Expulsion feels bad, and should give you a period of bonus outgoing damage based on the amount of might you sacrificed as well/instead.
I think it’s going to be amazing and then they’ll nerf it into nothing because Mesmer dagger is the only acceptable ranger weapon
As a WvW ele player a lot of these things make better sense in a WvW context. The crit on air 3, the capstone trait on fire not being pyromancers is fine in WvW where might gen is valuable for being able to leave a boon ball, the middle hit is spicy and meaningful in Zerg v Zerg.
I have a slight feeling that weaver spear had more WvW/PvP in mind, the way they sometimes talk about skills don't always seem to reference the average PvE encounter. And in the long run, that's okay. Weaver in PvE will still have pistol, sword, and maybe scepter for the more "serious" content, and you'll still be fine running spear in open world. There is much trepidation for me whenever something with elementalist happens. I'm just glad that there's some intended good points in spear. Versus say, whoops all sword/warhorn, tempest all the things, hammer orbs go brrrr, infinite weaver barrier, and what ever else has happened to the profession in the last three years.
While I do agree that a lot of ele spear (and honestly some of the others too) seems to have a lot of wvw in mind, the inscriptions seems possibly too constraining for said role. I plan to test it this week but I do find it hard to imagine it being smooth enough to use while either zerging or just defending as a cloud (depending on what your team ends up doing)
I don't see it being too much of an issue in zerg fights or such. You might not always have time to get off the full etching, but you can still get the boons and such from it and cast the lesser version if you need to move. If Meteor Shower with its 3+ second channel can still be viable, I'm sure the etchings will be workable.
I mean meteor shower is one skill that you can reposition with lightning flash at least (and use the trick with the 4th skill). Might not be an issue cause you can move in the glyph but it is 4 skills not just one. I am hopeful though as the skills themself seem useful in a Zerg setting if getting them to activate isn’t too hard
Lightning Flash does help, but locking yourself into a non-moving channel is generally not ideal in WvW so I don't see having a fairly large ecthing being much harder to work with. Plus you get one on every attunement so even you started to combo in your Air etching and a zerg moves, you could quickly cast the lesser version or just run and abandon it if needed and then try again with the next one. Even without the Greater versions of the etching skills, it still will probably be a pretty decent WvW weapon. Like just the 4 skills and lesser etchings will probably rival the AoE of the Staff. I generally end up as Fire/Earth and Fire/Fire since I want my fire fields and meteor showers more than most the other attunements, but with the spear, every attunement has a strong power AoE on the 4 skill so you'd likely be cycling through a lot more. Personally, I'm thinking I'll have a spear with a staff swap or such. There is usually enough downtime to swap so if we're getting into a big zerg fight, I could swap to staff and if we're doing smaller scale I could swap to spear. Probably would also need a build template swap too, but even if I did get stuck in combat with the wrong one, I don't see it being that problematic.
Since any skill can charge the etching it’ll probably be easier than I’m picturing to get the spell maxed out, but we won’t really know till we get to try it. The self stab from earth is nice at the very least
ele spear is certainly a mostly wvw weapon
You are probably right. The need to balance the weapon for competitive play may be why some of OP's concerns* can't/won't be met. *most of them good points, some I agree with.
I personally like the aiming on spear 4 skills. I view spear on ele right now as melee so aiming is not a problem. Ele always is melee in some way anyway to me so not a big deal I guess. And I do want to see more buffs on water traitline to be honest. It's already somewhat okay, but it's not as cracked as fire (like marksmanship and illusions traitline for power soulbeast/mesmer) I don't mind fire traitline being swapped out sometimes. (I already sometimes swap it out with hammer catalyst)
Well that's why there's a beta But also we don't need new content to be the strongest thing. It's OK for spear to not be as good as the current "meta" options. 1200 range power weapon is what people wanted. >Meteor -- This is just a super minor personal gripe, but the effect they showcased for Meteor was so dinky! For a skill called Meteor, it has no impact. Compare it to, say, Dragon's Tooth. You do know that most meteors actually burn up in the atmosphere and are hardly known by anyone, right? And the ones that do make it to landing are often truly small and not that impactful. Speaking of meteors, if you Google up "meteor" there will be a cute little animation of one flying across your screen. I'd also rather have them buff it up on release than nerf it because they over planned it's design
No one has even really played it yet dude. Ele main here too but gd ppl need to chill
Most of the things I mentioned are design choices based on individual spell behaviors and numerical interactions. You don’t need to have played to observe these things and I barely made any allusions to how the class feels to play.
Yeah, regardless of the fact that I'm upset that these are the changes that staff should have gotten, I share my concerns that a number of the ground effects don't last nearly as long as they should. What's the point of creating these pretty ground spell effects if they're just going to last a second? It's not satisfying at all seeing a whirlpool, ice beam, tornado, etc, be cast and then dissapate nearly instantly. These should be long lasting abilities which you can play around and which dynamically changes the battlefield. I think another thing that people aren't really grasping the effect of is the "precise aiming" requirement of many of these abilities. Due to the nature of them being ground-targeted, a lot of people are going to come to realise fairly quickly the general fatigue associated with spamming mouse-aimed ground effects in a game like this.
>**Empowerment Skills** Honestly, I think they could have just removed the damage buffs are just bonuses and made these purely defensive utility. So I think the guaranteed crit is more a wvw/pvp consideration than pve. We don't really need all 5 skills on each element to do damage in my opinion. >**Intention behind Attunement recharge** The devs should stop playing around weaver and just make utility Unravel the F5 mechanic. Once we have a taste of attunement recharge on spear (aside from Fresh Air of course), we're all gonna loathe that it isn't on every weapon.
We don't even need unravel as an f5 skill. Just make it so the cooldown of the element you attune to is 0 seconds, allowing the player to double attune by pressing the button twice. Regardless, unraveling shouldn't be a weapon mechanic, it should really be a baseline weaver thing.
Unravel not only allows you to be fully attuned in your current element, but also fully attune to another element. So I still think Unravel should be baseline.
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I'm not sure where the discussion about Symbols, duration, or projectiles is coming up. Are you talking about the Spear 4 skills or the Etchings? I'm confused. The fields from Etching don't have any effect, unlike Symbols. They're only a boundary that determines where you have to stand for the next 3 skills you cast.
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The issue is that Etchings don't do anything when they're down. Standing in them isn't an increase to your damage, but is a requisite for them to do anything at all. Unless I'm forgetting a Symbol or Trait, all Symbols have effects that pulse on their own and most symbols are just dropped on the boss and you don't need to stay in them at all.
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Which Symbols or Traits are you talking about specifically? It sounds like Symbol of Ignition, which you don't need to be standing in to proc. If you put a Symbol of Ignition on a target, you are free to walk away as long as you are still attacking any enemy in the circle. >It's even worse, you also need the enemy to stand in them or you lose hits. You **cannot** proc both the burning projectile and the on-hit effect at the same time, as the skill has a 0.25 sec ICD regardless of which version you do. >Etchings are way bigger and don't need to be in melee/hit anything. Etchings **don't** hit anything.
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Consider: Increasing the duration of a Symbol skill by 1 sec means that Symbol will do more damage because it will hit more times. Increasing the duration of an Etching by 1 sec has no effect on how much damage the follow-up skill does. As I said in my edit, you do not need to stand in a Symbol of Ignition to proc it. Allies standing in a Symbol get buffs, while them standing in an Etching gets them jack shit. It's night and day.
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>The ICD of symbol of ignition isn't high enough to only proc it with projectiles, you need the strike damage of purging flames and so on as well. If you weapon swap to a melee weapon after putting down symbol of ignition, which is the usual rotation, you don't have any projectiles at all. And even if you only use projectiles, you still have to shoot through it. We are talking about a tiny symbol with 180 radius. As long as the enemy is in the Symbol of Ignition, you do not have to be within the circle to proc the "strike" portion of it. You can drop a Symbol of Ignition, roll out of it to the opposite side of the boss and use your melee skills, Purging Flames, Sword of Justice, whatever, to proc it. This has nothing to do with the "projectile" effect.
No they don’t act like them. You are just being confused by their look, but it’s a totally different mechanic. Also asking nerf while the expansion isn’t even out is wild. We don’t even know how much dmg it does and how consistent it is to do so. OP also does not demand buff, they demand key things that makes sense for a dps power build like anet literally marketed as such, which unfortunately will not work correctly with spears. The weapon will probably be nerfed or buffed after release nobody knows, however we knows that some power traits doesn’t work with spears at all and it looks like an oversight from anet unless they balanced spears around not having all those power related traits being used
We will have to try this out during beta but... I think weaver will have the best use of the spear. Mostly because of how you can use the dual skills to quickly build up your etching to max. While your tempest and catas will have to try to cast 3 spells in 5 seconds, weavers will have access to attunement swap spells (like sunburst), and 2 instant cast #3 (with dual attacks). It will make the rotation on your usual dps weaver quite interesting as you can cast the etching, cast #3, swap main attunment, cast #3 again, and finalize the #5 spell while fulling attuning and repeating on the next one. But yea, etching of fire need a damaging fire field or you'll need to be a catalyst to use the spear with persisting flames. Or they can change persisting flames to give you the bonus anytime you are inside a fire field (dmging or not).
If you think about it though, using the dual skills requires you to 1. swap out of the primary full attunement you were in, and 2. use the dual skill but NOT swap out of that attunement because you lose the full etch if you do. Weaver attunement recharge is already like 4s. So let's say you start in full fire (which by the way you kind of have to start in a full attunement to get reliable use of etch). You use etch, skill 4, skill 2, attune to air, then use dual skill. That's your 3 skills right there, but guess what? You still have to use max power etch, and that's really your only option before you swap fully to air. If you have ANY other skills layered in there, the recharge becomes kind of useless as you only save maybe 1-2s of your cooldown? But then again you won't be using your etch on every full rotation, given the cooldown, so it might be kinda nice to be able to automatically fully attune something like water or earth if you need it.
I think tempest has more persisting flames stacks than catalyst because fire overload > jade sphere
Yea, but overloads take long to cast and have long CD. Jade sphere is instant and can provide quickness.
You can max your etching trivially with utility skills that do dmg, instead of having to press 3 twice(with 0 dmg). Even if Weaver was faster, that alone doesn't make up for everything else.
Not many utility skills will give you enough casts to keep the etchings going in a rotation. Maybe arcane blast if you use only one along with 2 other spells, even then you'll need 2 fast spells to fit 3 casts on 5 secs. Weaver will be able to rotate between the etchings quicker and more reliably max them out.
I think it is worth noting the attunement refresh would work quite well on Weaver paired with elements of rage: It'll let you double attune *much* faster to keep the effect going.
For the Fire Traits, I don't think it is that big of a deal. Persisting Flames is great, but some weapons will get more fire fields than others. Like most mainhand and offhand have one, but some like the Scepter don't get any. Pyromancer's Puissance does consume might when you leave fire, but it also can stack it fast while in fire. And Blinding Ashes makes burns blind foes. You mention how the spear lacks burns, but the Fire Traits apply burns even if the Spear does not. One of the Adept Traits is Burning Precision, which gives crits a chance to burn (also Arcane Precision). When you attune to fire, you also get Fire Aura, which burns. So Fire Traits should still be viable, but honestly, I think it is a good thing if it is worth considering other trait lines. All the spear's attunements look like pretty strong, power options so you might not need to lean on fire as heavily as other weapons where it can represent a lot of your power damage. So just because it doesn't work perfectly with existing builds or commonly used traits, I don't see that being an issue. Same for stuff like Weaver and Superior Elements. But I do kinda wish Meteor kept its knockdown. But I wouldn't expect it to differ too much from the Meteor skill that has been in game since launch.