Guild Wars 2

I know this has been said before (and it applies to several professions) but exactly 33% of the minor traits of the elementalist really need to change as they are awfull in their current state. I have listed suggestions for changes. What do you think?

Flame Barrier: 1 in kittens will grant the attacker a whopping 1 second burning. Sadly, taking kittens usually means death and even so, the minor burning will accomplish nothing.

Suggestion for change: a simple power increase (or perhaps condition duration increase) is better when attuned to fire.

Zephyr’s Speed: a non-mobile elementalist usually means a dead elementalist. Not having 25-33% speed increase is a death sentence waiting to happen. A 10% increase does nothing in itself and is useless in practice because it is overwritten by the necessity of speed buffs.

Suggestion for change: If you really want it to relate to speed, let it apply swiftness for a few seconds on attunement swapping. Or even better, and since swiftness is easily applied otherwise, let it do something else, such as an 5-10% increase in crit change (or crit damage) while in Air.

Weak Spot: While better than the two minors above, it is still close to being useless. In a window of opportunity you may be able to achieve a whopping stack of 5-6 in combination with arcane utilities. Compare that to the typical 10% damage increase of several other professions (though somewhat offset by the fact that it is a debuff that also applies to other teammates). It could perhaps be useful as a cover condition but then again, why you want to go so high in a damage tree (and we all know that conditionalists are non-optimal).

Suggestion for change: Let it apply the debuff on all hits in air (no proc chance) or at least increase the duration to 8-10 seconds.

Lingering Elements: There are two major issues with this one: (i)to be fully effective you need to spec into all trait lines, (ii) half of the minors are useless, cf. above.

Suggestion for change: I don’t know but it will help changing the other bad minors.

Arcane precision: This has got to be the worst of them all, in particular when considering that it is placed so high in the tree. While the conditions it applies are fine in theory, the proc rate is insanely low. Even with a 100% crit chance only 1 of 10 hits will proc the trait. Try for a moment and compare to other profession proc traits, typical being either 33% or 66% for bleed procs.

Suggestion for change: increase the proc rate to at least 33% (though I would probably still hate the trait).

Make som noise!

Eles got shafted in Traits together with Skill Cooldowns, Cast Times, Sustain, HP Pool and Armor because they have so many visually appealing skill animations. That’s the cost of being too flashy.