Guild Wars 2

One of the points you brushed on is currently what keeps elementalists out of tournament play. Attunement swapping cooldowns actually punish players that swap to an attunement and dont blow all their cooldowns. In pvp i currently float between air and fire, only swapping to water or earth if im in danger of going down or facing burst.

Massively lowering attunement cooldowns is very important to bringing elementalists back into viability for tpvp play. Our skills already have cooldowns and our auto attacks are weak (for the most part).

Anyone who has played pvp past rank 10 should be able to anticipate when an elementalist is going to burst, and from there it is a simple matter to pop invuln or similar skills. The scepter fire burst is very strong, but also very telegraphed. If attunement cooldowns are reduced, we can begin our bursts, and cancel partway through if the enemy goes invulnerable, uses stealth, or stun breaks and evades out of our aoes.

drkn.3429:

We’re taking damage from confusion on attunement swap. Not sure if it’s related to Elemental Attunement, or simply there. We also take damage from confusion upon dodging with EA; do all other professions (warrior, mesmer, thief, i’m looking at you) take confusion damage on traited dodge?

Confusion deals damage to dodge and weaponswap on every profession. Attunment swap is meant to act as weaponswap.

Give us the ability to stay alive to deal the damage we are meant to deal. Mesmers get stealth and clones, more hp, we get squat.

Mash Hog.5672:

Lets talk specifically about our Attunement Mechanic and how that hurts us instead of helps us.

I already talked a bit about attunements here.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/PvP-ELE-tism-Balancing-The-Elementalist/first#post3477748

But to further add to it, our weapon skills don’t synergize with our attunements either. If you look at other classes, their weapon skills have synergy with their class mechanics. Mesmers get to create clones which aid their F1-4 powers. Necros can gain additional life force. Warriors gain adrenaline faster with some weapon skills. Rangers buff their pets.

Then there’s the whole using F1-4. Other classes, you hit F1-4, you get an additional ability. Without needing to trait for it, mesmers get to blow up clones for added effect, engineers get an additional ability based on the utilities they equip, warriors get an additional powerful attack, rangers get pet abilities, necros get a whole new health bar and additional attacks, thieves get a range of abilities they steal with, guardians get extra buffs.

Our F1-4, no synergy with our weapon skills, and no additional effect other than being a weapon swap.

florence.1674:

Mash Hog.5672:

Lets talk specifically about our Attunement Mechanic and how that hurts us instead of helps us.

I already talked a bit about attunements here.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/PvP-ELE-tism-Balancing-The-Elementalist/first#post3477748

But to further add to it, our weapon skills don’t synergize with our attunements either. If you look at other classes, their weapon skills have synergy with their class mechanics. Mesmers get to create clones which aid their F1-4 powers. Necros can gain additional life force. Warriors gain adrenaline faster with some weapon skills. Rangers buff their pets.

Then there’s the whole using F1-4. Other classes, you hit F1-4, you get an additional ability. Without needing to trait for it, mesmers get to blow up clones for added effect, engineers get an additional ability based on the utilities they equip, warriors get an additional powerful attack, rangers get pet abilities, necros get a whole new health bar and additional attacks, thieves get a range of abilities they steal with, guardians get extra buffs.

Our F1-4, no synergy with our weapon skills, and no additional effect other than being a weapon swap.

In theory, attunements provide extra utility. We get 20 abilities instead of 10. In practice, the extra abilities are so weak they provide nothing valuable at all.

We end up having the same utility as any other class, except our damage is spread across a few extra abilities. (Which is actually an indirect nerf to PvP for us. Packing your damage into a couple of abilities is vastly superior to spreading it across four abilities.)

There just is no place for a “good at everything, master of nothing” profession in PvP. World of Warcraft tried it for years with Druids and Shamans, but those classes only found a place in PvP when they were allowed to be the best at something.

zilcho.7624:

florence.1674:

Mash Hog.5672:

Lets talk specifically about our Attunement Mechanic and how that hurts us instead of helps us.

I already talked a bit about attunements here.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/PvP-ELE-tism-Balancing-The-Elementalist/first#post3477748

But to further add to it, our weapon skills don’t synergize with our attunements either. If you look at other classes, their weapon skills have synergy with their class mechanics. Mesmers get to create clones which aid their F1-4 powers. Necros can gain additional life force. Warriors gain adrenaline faster with some weapon skills. Rangers buff their pets.

Then there’s the whole using F1-4. Other classes, you hit F1-4, you get an additional ability. Without needing to trait for it, mesmers get to blow up clones for added effect, engineers get an additional ability based on the utilities they equip, warriors get an additional powerful attack, rangers get pet abilities, necros get a whole new health bar and additional attacks, thieves get a range of abilities they steal with, guardians get extra buffs.

Our F1-4, no synergy with our weapon skills, and no additional effect other than being a weapon swap.

In theory, attunements provide extra utility. We get 20 abilities instead of 10. In practice, the extra abilities are so weak they provide nothing valuable at all.

We end up having the same utility as any other class, except our damage is spread across a few extra abilities. (Which is actually an indirect nerf to PvP for us. Packing your damage into a couple of abilities is vastly superior to spreading it across four abilities.)

There just is no place for a “good at everything, master of nothing” profession in PvP. World of Warcraft tried it for years with Druids and Shamans, but those classes only found a place in PvP when they were allowed to be the best at something.

@There wouldn’t actually be a problem if they balanced it correctly which they did not.
I am going to use D/D as an example.
They say we have 20 skills compared to their 10.
Lets look at more other classes weapon skill on offensive weapons(dagger/swords/ect.)
Specifically our number 5 skills.
On D/D we get four

1. Fire-Fire Grab(dps 45 sec cd)
2. Air-Updraft(knockback 40 sec cd)
3. Water-Cleansing Wave(heal 40 sec cd)
4. Earth-Churning Earth(dps 30 sec cd)
   As you can see our “BIG” skills get fairly lagre cd’s(justified) but the dps in both of our “BIG” skills is toned down due to the fact we get 4 skills to their 2(not to mention on offensive weapons most 5 skills are dps so in fact we get the same amount damaging skill they do)
   Not going into AA skills as they should be the same across the board whether we get 100 different one and they only get 2.
   The biggest problem with their balancing technique is they balanced them under the assumption that class would take one offensive weapon set and one defensive set when in fact most take either 2 offensive or 2 defensive depending on their play style.
   So when it come to either dps or defense the other class due better than us rather than the same.
   A-net assumed that people would play class without the trinity in mind and do an offensive and defensive set up in the same build rather than full dps or full bunker. As such they did not balance classes around this and balance change will come few and far in-between because they are trying to re-balance the whole game over again with both play styles in mind now which is a very difficult task to accomplish.
   I’m ending it here to not make it a big wall of text but hopefully you understand where A-net came from making the game to where it is now with trying to balance it.
   @Edit: First statement is a half-lie they did balance it correctly the way they thought it would be played instead of balancing it for both play styles to begin with.

Elementalist abilities are far too telegraphed and slow-casting. While it works out excellent for PvE (massive AoE damage, fields, etc), everything falls apart in PvP where it’s all about trying to hit mobile single targets that move randomly.

Something needs to be done with Staff, Scepter and off-hand Dagger abilities…at least half of them revolve around creating fields (or telegraphs) which an enemy can simply WALK AWAY from, they don’t even need to dodge it!

A few examples:
> Dragon’s Tooth – needs to be ground-targeted and have it’s landing-time cut by at least 30%. Seriously, how the hell are you supposed to land this on enemies when they have enough time to walk away from it even after getting hit by Updraft / Earthquake?
> Lava Font – needs an instant “first-tick”, currently even if you create it directly on a moving enemy (or ahead of them) it’s possible for them to take 0 damage from it.
> Shatterstone – cut exploding delay to 1 second.
> Churning Earth – this ability takes risk/reward to extreme levels. Crazy cooldown, crazy cast time, crazy risk, crazy damage. It needs to be made castable on the move and have it’s cast time lowered. To balance it I’m fine with getting the initial spike damage lowered.
> Earthquake – cast time lowered
> Fire Grab – cast time lowered
> Ride The Lightning – make the cooldown 20 seconds again (flat, regardless of whether it hits targets) for the love of god.

Mind you this won’t exactly fix the class. It still has sustainability issues, build diversity issues and godawful slot skills (besides Cantrips).

I am just going to wait for the Dev blog about the full list to see what is in store for elementalist. This listening to these things for profession changes aren’t to useful when its very limited information.