Guild Wars 2

Water Blast

Problem
No matter how strong the heal, the fact that the ele essentially deals no damage makes it impractical for use. Healing has little to no use in PvE, and the radius is too small for it to heal anyone in PvP.

Solution
Lower the heal, increase the damage up to the level of stoning.
-or-
Make the heal center around the ele rather than the target.

Pros
-The skill will have more varied use, making it an actual alternative to fireball or other attacks.

Cons
-Some folk may actually like the healing, despite the fact that it essentially cuts your party’s dps by 20%.

Hey I’m glad someone point this out. The whole water attuntment skills aren’t as well design as the rest of the elements. (Not enough chill, no good aoe crowd control, low damage beside Ice Spike and healing isn’t ideal in this game)

My suggestion: Add 1 sec chill to the current Water Blast.

Water Blast is probably the least useful staff 1 skill. Stoning is a lot better, it has 2 extra functions beside damage. I was thinking Anet should at least add a 1 sec chill to Water Blast. This can help your front line warrior/guardian or whoever in the frontline to chill their target while having some minor almost ignorable heal.

Solution:

Attune to fire/Earth/air.

a cool idea would be to make it a channel skill like the scepter lightning auto attack but with “splash” damage/healing (watery pun very much intended)

so it would constantly aoe heal and damage while channelled,
obviously the damage would be lower than fireball,
but the synergy with traits that work with channelled skills could make the skill quite attractive

it would also let the ele tag enemies in pve while still being able to focus on healing.

1 sec chill on autoattack would be mad OP.

Increase the healing power scalling and radius, even cut the damage.

Add damage to skill #2.

Solution:
Attune to fire/Earth/air.

This pretty much right on. The OPS request seems irrational to me. Similarly if you gave engineers elixir gun tranquilizing dart more damage, you would suggest it is OP.

Expecting support kits or support attunement/weapons is just unreasonable over reaching

coglin.1867:

Solution:
Attune to fire/Earth/air.

This pretty much right on. The OPS request seems irrational to me. Similarly if you gave engineers elixir gun tranquilizing dart more damage, you would suggest it is OP.

Expecting support kits or support attunement/weapons is just unreasonable over reaching

Except kits dont give you a 10s cd when you leave them, so no it wouldnt be similar at all. Not to mention that tranq dart has a pretty solid bleed attached to it even though its on a kit thats meant for support.

And agreed that its damage should be the same as stoning since theyre both basically support abilities

IMO it should just have a wider default radius (i.e. 180-240). That would allow blasting staff to boost it to a 240-300 radius, meaning the healing ability would be that much more useful in larger scale combat (i.e. WvW zerging).

The main reason it’s not useful in PvE is because it doesn’t do anything useful. Even with the proposed changes, there’s still no point in using it because you might as well just be doing DPS. The heals from it can actually be quite potent, but there’s no point in healing people when you could be killing the enemies and clearing the PvE content faster.

It’s a similar principle in sPvP. You generally won’t be sitting there shooting water blast on an enemy your ally is fighting because it’s generally better to try and kill/CC the person rather than giving spots of healing to your buddy. I guess you could use it to bunker a node, but I don’t really play staff ele in that context.

I could see it being somewhat useful in a WvW context, especially since sitting in water attunement can allow you to provide a persistent source of regeneration to your allies. But it will only ever affect 5 people, the combat may be very mobile, and you’ll have to be switching your attunements quite frequently.

If there was more of a place for healing in general, I think this would be much more useful.

I remember testing out water blast early on in the game after having rolled a elementalist.

I pretty much picked a target type in the starting area, and fought it using fire and water staff. And surprise surprise, i came out of it hurting more when using water than when using fire. This even tho i was clearly face to face with the mob, and being affected by the AOE of water blast.

Why does this ability not heal in the path of the jet and instead heals on a small blast radius? If you “Spray a jet of water at foes” it’s going to hit people who are in the path. Same as if I were to take a water hose and spray it at someone. If you’re near the path I’m spraying in you’re going to get wet too.

ArchieD.6972:

Why does this ability not heal in the path of the jet and instead heals on a small blast radius? If you “Spray a jet of water at foes” it’s going to hit people who are in the path. Same as if I were to take a water hose and spray it at someone. If you’re near the path I’m spraying in you’re going to get wet too.

Obviously it’s magical phasing water, gosh.
The reason it does damage is because it actually phases into the enemy. The healing blast you see is actually their sweet, sweet tears, which heal because they taste so good. Sadly, they are really pretty subpar tears when you get down to it, so the heal is mediocre.

The skill isn’t clear enough, though. It should really read, “phase a blast of water inside the body of your opponent, while nearby allies drink their sandwich-grade tears.”