Tarragon.4302

I dont even think this was made for PvE in the first place, if it was it should be fun to play and use when in reality its a complete and utter chore while managing to be boring, only PvE intended aspect is the boon fields. This 100% feels like the class is just left over skills slapped on to a weapon

It 100% should not exist in the first place. They made a support tank spec for ele when theres already tempest. It feels like everything was just all leftover skills and the orb mechanic kills any sense of fluidity by needing to instantly swap to a new attunement. Anet didn't listen to the first wave of feedback so I wouldnt hold my breath for any meaningful changes to come to the weapon. After all why listen to criticism when you can just listen to all the white knights killing the game

Hammer really needs to be reworked or something. It feels like hammer is just a bunch of left over skills thrown onto the weapon with no thoughtful interactions outside of air 2 and air 5, yet even then it feels so bad to play. The orb mechanic needs to be removed or moved to one attunement. Like you could keep it on earth or water and have the ranged skill on fire or air. It doesnt last long enough to warrant trying to use when your only source of damage is the air 2 and 5 combo and its a 3 second cast time. Instead you could make the melee option useful by building up some sort of stacks by using the orb which then can be used on air or fire, actually giving you an incentive to be in melee. right now using earth and water feel extremely bad since their dps is abysmal and clunky. Either commit to the melee portions being defensive or commit to them being offensive, not this awkward mix of the two that dont do anything. The ranged skills need to actually be ranged. 600 is not ranged. I just dont know why you would use hammer over dagger or scepter. Both flow much better and have better dps. Dagger even gets in the same ballpark of ranged skills that hammer has except its far more mobile with potent aoe's. The smallest range on dagger is 180 and thats for ring of earths initial aoe which hits twice, having the second hit be 240. Hammers shortest skills are 130, which belongs to the orb mechanic and melee auto attacks. Why would you have a skill thats a 130 range on attunements that are meant to be "ranged"? all it does is force you to stay in melee distance as the squishiest class in the game. Daggers longest ranged skill is 1200, hammer almost makes that with the disengage skill sending you back 600 units and usable at 600, but you still have to be in that 600 threshold. At the very least make them 900, even though they realistically should be 1200. Change fire 5 to ranged and not melee, it makes no sense at all that theres a melee skill for the attunement when everything else is ranged, aside from the kitten orb mechanic. You could instead have that be used for earth or water, oh wait, thats just earth 5, why is there the same exact skill on 2 attunements, its just so frustrating the more i break down this class. Air shouldn't have these slow moving skills, its lightning for god sake, its meant to be burst damage. Move air 4 to water or earth instead and change the skill to a lower cd line based damage skill in the same nature as coalescence of ruin or temporal rift. Please Anet, stop trying to make a melee class for ele, stop trying to make a tank class for ele, stop trying to make a catch all cele class for ele. We already have that in the form of the other specs and core profession. We need a ranged dps spec. We've needed one for a long time. Staff has been nerfed so many times to the point where you rely on an RNG mechanic with meteor shower to do any damage. I want to play this game, I want to support this game, but EoD so far has been extremely underwhelming and is going in such a bad direction after Heart of thorns and Path of fire were so well done.

Catalyst changes may as well be non existent. These wont do anything for the core design of the spec. I don't understand who at anet thinks these adjustments are meaningful. Don't ship catalyst in its current state.

Mez and rev elites are the only ones i liked. Everything else felt sub par but would be better with some minor tweaking. Except for ele elite. Ele elite needs a complete rework since it felt fundamentally clunky and not fun to play. No clue who thought ele needed another melee spec for the glass cannon mage

I really really do not like how this class feels to play. It feels so clunky and underwhelming. I think the best way to sum it up would be why would i play this when i can play tempest instead or why would i use hammer when i can use scepter or dagger instead. I really dont understand what the thought process was behind this class or who thought we needed something like this in the game when we have stuff that does what catalyst does but in a much more intuitive and smooth way. Personally I'd like to see the entire spec reworked but i know that wont happen. So instead i'd like to see changes to the overall fluidity of the class and changes to the ranged options. When you have so many buttons you need to press on ele to be effective you can not have casts times that are 3 seconds long and do baiscally nothing special to warrant the cast time. The aoe channel on air makes no sense to me, enemies can just walk out of it and you can do more damage by flipping attunements and casting other abilities. On top of this why are all the ranged options 600? it may as well not be ranged at that point. It needs to atleast be in a baseline with scepter but the abilities aren't good enough so they should be 1200 like staff so it can actually be this ranged melee hybrid, instead of this pseudo hybrid class. EoD specs so far as a whole have been very underwhelming and the commitment to being different is hurting the enjoyability of the classes.

I'd love to see staff reworked to a low mobility high dps class sorta like the black mage in ff14 instead of this class thats trying to always be a catch all role, which doesnt even work since cele was nerfed and the most optimal dps is to min max power and crit builds. I'd personally like to see meteor reworked to just one massive meteor instead of relying on rng, its always kinda felt bad to use for the cast time just for people to walk out of it and if they do get hit its barely the same damage as rev hammer 2 which is a 4 second cd instant cast. on top of meteor seeing most of the utility skills aside from the cc fields changed would be nice, i dont think we really need the healing on water given that tempest is with dagger warhorn is much better at healing. i've been playing this game long enough so I doubt though we'll see this happen for a long while since anet doesnt make changes quickly. Like the amount of time it took to address the issues in wvw is insane and we're only just now getting alliances which were promised i thought back when HoT was announced but maybe it was PoF

I think out of the three specs, virtuoso is the most fun and probably needs the least amount of tweaking. That being said heres my general feedback of the class from a PvE perspective and a WvW perspective. Overall the virtuoso feels like a good ranged damage dealer somewhat in the same vein as scourge and herald. Expect compared to those two the melee pressure of the class is quite awkward but understandable given that the class operates within this 1200 range threshold. However the abilities and traits intended for this melee style gameplay dont really make much sense to me. The second skill on the dagger requiring you to be pretty much point blank for its maximum effectiveness seems a bit silly since I never found myself wanting to be close to an enemy, which brings me to the point of the minor trait with the increased damage within 600 range seems redundant for a ranged spec, I feel like it would make more sense to have the damage increase be applied to enemies outside of 600 range. Another aspect of the virtuoso that i found somewhat odd was the blade stacking traits where taking the trait where you apply bleed whenever a blade ability crits and the trait where you generate ammo for your profession skills is far stronger then generating ammo every 3 seconds when you are under 3 ammo. I found I could either always have 5 ammo instantly taking the bleed traits or have 2-3 ammo over time taking the passive generator. It would make more sense for the passive generator not to have a minimum cap on the blade generation or to have it generate faster. My final thoughts about virtuoso are less about the actual profession but more about how it doesnt fit into the climate of WvW when the design seems like its trying to be an aoe dps boon rip spec to mitigate the fatigue from constantly having to play scourge. One of the biggest issues that hurt a fair amount of builds is how projectile reflects work, and unfortunately this mechanic completely shuts down any real chance the spec has of succeeding within the zerg metas that is WvW. Since virtuoso has nearly every major dps skill act as a projectile the dps output compared to scourge, revenant, dragonhunter, and weaver is effectively halved. Rather then have the skills not be projectiles, a better approach would be to change how projectile reflects work within the sphere of WvW. Giving them a finite amount projectiles they can reflect similar to the elementalists arcane barrier would allow more projectile centric builds to be viable.

i dont really understand why you guys would wait an entire month instead of just doing it like a week earlier. waiting a month is just going to make more people not play the game because they're stuck in boring and bad matchups. NA prime in t1 right now is just people losing 1 fight then sitting in their keep and just using siege. its so unbelievably boring to play

If damage is coming down, boon rip has to come up or we'll just be in a perma tank meta which is zero fun for anyone. it'll also make siege way stronger than it already is

This is a really good step forward with the meta and I appreciate the changes. However my main concern with reducing the amount of boon rip in the game is going to make killing zergs quite a challenge which was one of the main issues with HoT and the perma boon share unkillable pirate shipping. If you could, please consider giving boon rip to something like Ele on the lightning trait line. Currently ele, atleast for zergs, is a meteor shower bot and not much else. Giving boon rip somewhere in the kit would greatly change the play style. Similar to how how necro gets the change to scepter 3 through traits would be beneficial to ele. Having traits change something like lightning staff 3 to an aoe with boon rip would be nice. This is just a suggestion, one that probably isnt perfect, but something to consider none the less

am i missing something with the changes to eles fire traits? it seems a bit redundant to have two traits in the master set that are for condi damage when the new burning rage will be picked over power overwhelming almost always.