[Rylkan]

So, what does everyone think?

I can't wait to make a barrage build with Save Yourselves. 6 strokes of adrenaline in a very short amount of time hopefully.

[Neraphym]

I'm actually going to go through each skill and give my opinion.


Sunspears:

Whirlwind Attack - Its basically cyclone axe, but its a melee attack. Decent for building adrenaline, except it costs 6 itself.

Never Rampage Alone - The added speed and health regen is nice, but it is very expensive.

Seed of Life - This can be godly when cast on a bonder, but otherwise it doesn't look too strong.

Necrosis - Very powerful, cheap, fast, and spammable. Unfortunately, it requires the target to have a hex or condition.

Cry of Pain - Decent nuke, but it requires a mesmer hex on the target. It also interrupts the target.

Intensity - This can make your skills very damaging, especially combined with the Faction Skill. Unfortunately, the enchant doesnt last too long.

Critical Agility - This skill is amazing. It will probably make assassins useful now.

Vampirism - This is a fairly strong spirit, and is worth using if your a rit or any class with high sunspear rank.

"There's Nothing to Fear!" - This is my personal favorite. The damage reduction and health bonus is wonderful to have in hardmode, and you can keep this up most of the time provided you have the energy. (As an ele, I do!)

Eternal Aura - This is a wonderful skill for dervishes. It can give you a permanent Form and does decent damage. It also provides you with an enchant for a while.


Alliance Skills


"Save Yourselves!" - This can stop just about any attack in its place, but costs a lot of adrenaline and wont last long.

Triple Shot - Looks decent. Good for building adrenaline or stealing energy with zealous mods.

Selfless Spirit - Used with a glyph of renewal, this skill will allow you to heal allies constantly for free.

Signet of Corruption - Combined with a AoE hex, this can be great energy management.

Ether Nightmare - Takes away energy and causes nasty health degeneration, but takes too long to cast.

Elemental Lord - This is amazing for Elementalists. It'll make all your skills stronger and the enchant can be kept up indefinitely with strong enough faction.

Shadow Sanctuary- Same as feigned neutrality, only lasts a bit longer.

Summon Spirits - Teleports all your spirits to you. I guess its useful.

Spear of Fury - Great for building Adrenaline.

Aura of Holy Might - Another strong dervish skill. I might have to focus more on my dervish now...

[Rylkan]

Couple quick notes, conditions are a rangers best friend, so necrosis works great for us.

As well, Save Yourselves can be done pretty easily with Barrage. So a back liner can spam it pretty easily.

[Neraphym]

I can't wait until you get a build with that going. It'll make vanquishing so much easier for us.

[Goto]

I haven't tried any but the Sunspear Dervish one, yet. As Alpha said, obviously the prospect of permanently keeping up a Form is pretty cool, I can also think of a few other possible ideas but they'll have to wait until I've had some time to play around with it. Got the feeling it could synergize quite well with a build I was looking at recently, hehe.

[Rylkan]

I've so far only made a build change with Necrosis, and found a build for Vanquishing that allows me to afford "There's Nothing to Fear!" It's a bit high energy for most classes to just throw around without some reduction. But I can bring it down to ten, and with my burning build I have enough spare energy to throw around luckily.

[wibble]

They're on Fire + There's Nothing to Fear = 72% damage reduction

Hmm Alliance skills... I'll just forget about those...

[Rylkan]

Wibble....can I kiss you? I hope They're on Fire isn't Leadership, because I can cause burning with my build. If it isnt Leadership and isnt an elite, I can cause lots of damage reduction.

[Rylkan]

I checked. It's leadership.

But it does give me the incentive to make more builds using these skills

[wibble]

I think they'll add a damage reduction limit or something to nerf it next week... but if not, my Paragons moving from pvp

[Neraphym]

I've noticed that a lot of the nerfs are meant for PvP, but have the nasty effect of making life harder in PvE. Since these skills can't be used in PvE, I'm not expecting them to be nerfed at all. I would like them to extend the Elementalist Sunspear one, though.

[wibble]

Skill Updates

As a part of this playbalance test week, we’ve made the following skill changes:
[edit] Assassin

* Critical Agility: decreased duration to 4 seconds, the duration now increases by 1 second for each rank of Critical Strikes.

[edit] Elementalist

* Elemental Lord: decreased the bonus to Elemental attributes to 1.
* Intensity: decreased duration to 10 seconds, increased recharge time to 45 seconds.

[edit] Mesmer

* Cry of Pain: decreased recharge time to 15 seconds.
* Ether Nightmare: decreased recharge time to 15 seconds.

[edit] Paragon

* "There's Nothing to Fear!": decreased duration to 4 seconds, the duration now increases by 1 second for every 2 ranks of Leadership.

[edit] Ritualist

* Vampirism: increased duration to 30..150 seconds.

[edit] Faction Reward NPCs

* Characters must now be level 20 to learn Kurzick or Luxon skills.
* Using the "Raise Alliance reputation" option with the Kurzick/Luxon faction reward NPCs now gives 10,000 points toward the corresponding title track. The cost is still 5,000 faction points, and the reputation gained by the alliance is still 5,000.

[edit] Miscellaneous

* Moved the footmen away from the middle teleporters of the Jade Isle to prevent players from targeting them from below.
* Faction gain messages are no longer displayed in the Chat panel when you gain less than 25 faction points.
* Updated the Korean game ratings icons.

[edit] GuildWiki notes

* Critical Agility is currently bugged, and the bonus seconds provided by Critical Strikes do not apply when the skill reapplies itself.

Still good for the Leadership Paragons, but kind of destroyed my plan of Critical Agility / Go for the Eyes

[Neraphym]

They nerfed both the Ele skills. I completely underestimated someone at Anet's hatred towards my primary profession. So far every Elementalist I've talked to agrees: both skills aren't worth using anymore.

[Rylkan]

I expect a nerf on the dervy sunspear skill. It's far too powerful, permanently having an avatar to use. Then again, I wonder about how some classes use Vow of Silence to help run, so if you cast the skill early on, since it wont last long on a secondary, it might be a way to keep it up longer. ::shrugs:: I dont think it would be worth it particularly though.

[Goto]

Can't be bothered checking how long Vow lasts without Myst, but it wouldn't be very long. ~5 seconds or so? Eternal Aura could let you get two off in a row, but you can only do that once every 30 seconds. Without the Aura, you could keep Vow up half the time (ignoring casting time, not too important). With Aura, you're gaining an extra 5 seconds every 30 seconds, bringing your Vow of Silence ratio up to 2/3. That's probably not a very efficient use of a skill, particularly as you'll have to stop to reapply Eternal Aura while running. I think it'll probably still remain much better utilized by a primary Dervish.

Alpha, you have to give the Kurzicking about Ele nerfs a rest.
They get balanced quite a lot, but that's because they have a lot of power and potential, and Anet have a tendency towards making mistakes and causing them to be overpowered. The last major nerf to them a while ago was actually just them fixing up their mistakes from buffing a bunch of skills too much. I can understand it's disappointing when powerful combos get reduced in effectiveness or nerfed completely, but don't delude yourself into thinking it's some vendetta against Elementalists.

Also I didn't use either new Ele skill, but the Sunspear one especially looked way too powerful. I could tell at a glance they'd have to balance that one. I guess Elemental Lord (while not necessarily too excessive by itself) became too much when combo'd with other skills.