Guild Wars 2

Despite inherently having the lowest base HP and toughness, I think Elementalists are really close to being into the meta and are somewhat close to being balanced and highly viable. Of course in the right hands.

I’m already starting to see more elementalists roaming in WvW and some of them have pretty strong dueling specs and can handle themselves when they are outnumbered as well. I guess people have learned to adapt to the situation and learned that they really aren’t as bad as people claim to be.

I think Armor of Earth being reduced to 75 second cooldown is a pretty significant change. With Cantrip recharge trait that is about 60 second cooldown, which means around 9 seconds of Stability and 9 seconds of protection (with boon duration that eles have ofc). That end the change they are going to make to that one skill that makes them evade when they use it. I think people underestimate that.

And that is only a preview of the changes to come and they had already stated the main goal is to buff the sustainability of eles. Which probably means they have more buffs in that department coming their way. Of course one should reserve their judgments to when the patch actually happens. But I have confidence that elementalists will at least be a viable and competitive spot in tournament play (although they may not be necessary). And they will be even stronger in PvE and WvW. Which I am not opposed to and would actually like to see since they got hit with a huge nerf bat early in the game.

Eles will always suck until they overhaul the profession mechanic/Arcana and give them more innate survivability.

Im not exactly sure what is the point of this thread, but I will bite;

I still believe this is not enough. The fact that we are still TO dependent on cantrips makes eles slaves of water/arcane. Their healing has been hit too much. I would like to see skills getting their CD reduced, animations reduced, healing being stronger and I mean being REALLY strong because thats our defense, because unlike other classes we lack constant blinds and teleports, aegis, clones, huge hp bar, double huge hp bar, stealth, etc…

D/D is getting multiple buffs here but sadly I seriously hate D/D, especially in SPvP. Any ranged build can basically troll you by sitting out of reach and taking pot-shots and there is nothing you can do about it.
You’re not a thief so you can’t just stealth/leap to them, you’re not a mesmer so you can’t send waves of clones + stealth or range them back…you’re just an Ele with 40sec Lightning Flash (yay for cantrips) and 40 sec RTL.

I feel after the Ele changes we’re going to see people bottlenecked into Water+Arcana + Cantrip builds even more, but I guess as far as ANet is concerned it’s progress.

If you take Resto Signet you sacrifice condi cleanse, so any Resto Signet build that DOESN’T dip at least 20-30 points into Water is going to get eaten alive by condis. Ether Renewal is just far too necessary given how fast Ele health goes up and down, constantly teetering on the edge of death.

Wintel.4873:

D/D is getting multiple buffs here but sadly I seriously hate D/D, especially in SPvP. Any ranged build can basically troll you by sitting out of reach and taking pot-shots and there is nothing you can do about it.
You’re not a thief so you can’t just stealth/leap to them, you’re not a mesmer so you can’t send waves of clones + stealth or range them back…you’re just an Ele with 40sec Lightning Flash (yay for cantrips) and 40 sec RTL.

I feel after the Ele changes we’re going to see people bottlenecked into Water+Arcana + Cantrip builds even more, but I guess as far as ANet is concerned it’s progress.

If you take Resto Signet you sacrifice condi cleanse, so any Resto Signet build that DOESN’T dip at least 20-30 points into Water is going to get eaten alive by condis. Ether Renewal is just far too necessary given how fast Ele health goes up and down, constantly teetering on the edge of death.

Between lightning flash (32 sec cd on a cantrip build), RTL (20 sec cd when you hit someone, which should be the goal when fighting a ranged enemy), magnetic leap, and even burning speed, d/d ele has enough gap closers to make things work IMO. The only scenario I can think of when you wouldn’t be utilizing these tools would be if you were trying to bunker a point, but the fact is that d/d ele simply doesn’t fit a bunker role anymore. That’s fine though, because they’re able to make up for it in other ways, and the upcoming patch will help make them more viable.

Black Box.9312:

Wintel.4873:

D/D is getting multiple buffs here but sadly I seriously hate D/D, especially in SPvP. Any ranged build can basically troll you by sitting out of reach and taking pot-shots and there is nothing you can do about it.
You’re not a thief so you can’t just stealth/leap to them, you’re not a mesmer so you can’t send waves of clones + stealth or range them back…you’re just an Ele with 40sec Lightning Flash (yay for cantrips) and 40 sec RTL.

I feel after the Ele changes we’re going to see people bottlenecked into Water+Arcana + Cantrip builds even more, but I guess as far as ANet is concerned it’s progress.

If you take Resto Signet you sacrifice condi cleanse, so any Resto Signet build that DOESN’T dip at least 20-30 points into Water is going to get eaten alive by condis. Ether Renewal is just far too necessary given how fast Ele health goes up and down, constantly teetering on the edge of death.

Between lightning flash (32 sec cd on a cantrip build), RTL (20 sec cd when you hit someone, which should be the goal when fighting a ranged enemy), magnetic leap, and even burning speed, d/d ele has enough gap closers to make things work IMO. The only scenario I can think of when you wouldn’t be utilizing these tools would be if you were trying to bunker a point, but the fact is that d/d ele simply doesn’t fit a bunker role anymore. That’s fine though, because they’re able to make up for it in other ways, and the upcoming patch will help make them more viable.

The problem still exists with these unreliable gap closers. RTL is a 50/50 situation even if you’re sure to hit your target because of how broken it is with bugs. Magnetic grasp/leap will be totally useless unless you can hit magnetic grasp. This leaves you with just Burning Speed and Lightning Flash as your real reliable gap closers.

I’ve been playing D/D and staff most of my ele’s game time in all aspects of the game. I only recently picked up Scepter last week and I’m surprised how it makes D/D looks like pure crap in sPVP. I can even say that Scepter can give better survivability than main hand dagger ever did because of the access to blinds.

TL;DR Yes I agree with you the buff is needed especially to Burning Speed. Now if we can only get some access to more blinds or evades with Main Hand Dagger..

RTL is guaranteed to go on a 40 second cooldown against anyone with half a brain.

Cool so next patch roaming ele will get a new evade that tbh is cool but not gamechanging, and a new blast.

but will
Lose 15-25% damage due to ferocity nerf. (25% mostly if you consider most DD celestial or valk/cavalier + fury builds…).
Lose their boon uptime from mixed runes….

While other professions will get a second sigil on 2H weapons.

To tell the truth overall nerfs that for some coincidences happens to hit mostly eles will be way more impacting then buffs.

While i don t seem to be optimistic…i was quite often right in the last years predictions about the game..

D/D without RTL is not working…

killahmayne.9518:

Despite inherently having the lowest base HP and toughness, I think Elementalists are really close to being into the meta and are somewhat close to being balanced and highly viable. Of course in the right hands.

I’m already starting to see more elementalists roaming in WvW and some of them have pretty strong dueling specs and can handle themselves when they are outnumbered as well. I guess people have learned to adapt to the situation and learned that they really aren’t as bad as people claim to be.

I think Armor of Earth being reduced to 75 second cooldown is a pretty significant change. With Cantrip recharge trait that is about 60 second cooldown, which means around 9 seconds of Stability and 9 seconds of protection (with boon duration that eles have ofc). That end the change they are going to make to that one skill that makes them evade when they use it. I think people underestimate that.

And that is only a preview of the changes to come and they had already stated the main goal is to buff the sustainability of eles. Which probably means they have more buffs in that department coming their way. Of course one should reserve their judgments to when the patch actually happens. But I have confidence that elementalists will at least be a viable and competitive spot in tournament play (although they may not be necessary). And they will be even stronger in PvE and WvW. Which I am not opposed to and would actually like to see since they got hit with a huge nerf bat early in the game.

Eles have the lowest HP pool in the game.
Eles have the worst deffensive mechanics in the game.

A 15 seconds reduction on an insanely long CD utility doesn’t affect the gameplay at all.
Dagger/dagger is in a really bad state, so the buff to fire#3 won’t make it meta-worthy. Just an average-bad build.

Every experienced ele player knows that the changes are not good enough. Ele will be unplayable for the next 8 months (4 months till balance patch)

To be perfectly honest I don’t really care about cooldown reduction on Armor of Earth and whatnot as long as RtL stays on 40s cooldown. The butchering of that skill was the dumbest thing they ever did (and the list of dumb stuff they pulled is quite impressive to say the least), and the fact it’s still not reverted to 20s or even 15s after the range got ‘fixed’ is baffling really. Tweaking stuff like Armor of Earth doesn’t even remotely make up for them pretty much invalidating Ele as a roaming class, which was the sole reason a lot of people rolled an Elementalist in the first place.

At least you have a gap closer and vigor. Unlike my necro. So you dont have it as bad as you think.

I am a big fan of earth staff, but there are some changes I would like to see to it. Mainly lower the detonation CD on Staff #2 so it can be better timed as a blast finisher and up the dmg a little on staff 1.

@necro gap closers: Dark Path. It combines Burning Speed’s cooldown with RtL’s range and Magnetic Grasp’s reliability.

I play both, guess I have double good karma coming to me in my next life.

Stand The Wall.6987:

At least you have a gap closer and vigor. Unlike my necro. So you dont have it as bad as you think.

If only Necros had 8k more base health and a second health bar.

Dark path is the slowest projectile in the game so it misses most of the time.

If only eles had more burst damage and 10 more skills.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Dark path is the slowest projectile in the game so it misses most of the time.

If only eles had more burst damage and 10 more skills.

The cost for having 10 more skills is every cooldown is doubled, damage is nerfed, and all base survivability is removed. You still want them?

Necros have a really hard life, it takes only one warrior to stunlock them, while it only takes one warrior to kill an ele in seconds.

Near 100% of the people who played an elementalist think that the RTL nerf was a gigantic error by anet and they they can’t be all wrong of course.

It created huge problems in gameplay, image for example:

You use RTL in combat, it glitches against some invisible wall or strange terrain angle, goes on 40 sec cooldown (or something like that), attune to other attunements and continue your battle, eventually go back to air out cast your blind and lightning bolt, realize all your attunement are on recharge, your about to die, still 15 sec left on RTL.

Happens to me every day and I use the staff mostly. If I was a d/d player I would feel much worse about it. That broke the survival of the d/d ele (That’s actually the moment when I stopped playing d/d as much as staff).

Mist form healing nerf broke the survival of the berserker staff ele. But the staff eles tried to fix this with the new Guard Defense boons.

Both happened in the same nerf patch. There is not enough kittens in the world to represent what I think about these decisions. For some reason Anet have been stubborn on the idea that RTL must not be fun to use like it used to be, that you must use travellers runes instead and that it can no longer equivalent to staff swiftness, even if daggers actually requires you to go close combat with foes that have twice your HP. Therefore they placed the ele into the gigantic problematic of having to use 2 sets of runes, one for daggers and one for daggers/scepter.

The armor of earth buff is the only thing that makes sense in the next balance patch… (Waiting 90 seconds when a warrior is stunning you every 5 seconds was a long time to run around fences in circles… )