Guild Wars 2

1) Base HP raised to mesmer’s 15k. This will make the 20+ points in water truly optional.

2) Reduce cd of Arcane Shield and Erath Armor to 30-35 seconds. Do the same same probably for Mist Form.

The glyph and signet utilities need better defensive options. The Earth Signet in addition to rooting could grant protection for a short time. The Air Signet could cause weakness in addition to blind.

The glyphs just plain need help because most of them are just bad, especially the summoned elementals and elemental storm.

A lot of the ele utilities like the glyph utilities could use a halving in cd, as could signets.

Eles by virtue of their squishiness need much more constant access to stun breakers and blocks if they are to compete.

3) Allow healing in Mist Form again. It’s pretty absurd that a warrior stance allows them to be immune while still attacking and being able to heal, but the squishier low HP class suddenly is banned from it.

4) Spread condi removal outside cantrips. Both the glyphs, signets, arcane utilities, and conjures should each have a stun break, and a condi removal option.

5) Make base Attunement cd 10 seconds, and change the arcana line to simply buff the effectiveness of lingering attunements. Make lingering attunements baseline.

6) Reduce the cd of Fire Grab, retool arcane utilities so that ele burst capability is not tied to them. Make it so Fire Grab always crits on targets with burning.

Arcane utilities should function like any other utilities, changing up playstyle not just being a substitute for the innate lack of burst on ele weaponskills for a squishier class.

7) Cap boon duration. Part of what made the ele OP before was the sheer boon stacking. You can raise ele base survival and damage output because by capping boons people no longer need to cheese out arcana and boon stack runes to actually function.

8) A warrior should never be healing passively for far more squishier classes need to activate abilities for. Hell, Signet of Restoration requires constant skill usage to still be only a fraction of effectiveness, and Ranger’s Troll Unguent, a delayed heal with a cast time and downtime, still heals for less.

9) Buff elementalist autoattacks, especially for scepter. The only remotely viable high sustain build with some tankiness that can go in the frontlines in WvW is a dagger/dagger cantrip variant. This really kills spec diversity when your only weapon that can do sustained damage is a dagger/dagger build unless you have the luxury of sitting behind a zerg spamming fire staff (note, fire staff’s sustained damage drops to crap once anybody, especially mele, pressures you).

I think that with these few changes elementalists would actually consider the other traitlines.

A lot of people have been trying to change up traitlines, but I feel they miss the point of why the other traitlines are not taken.

And the simple answer is that without 20+ trait points in water the ele just dies. Miserably.

People also are forced into arcana because the ele does no sustained damage when he’s not attunement swapping because ele autoattacks are really bad in general for most attunements. Moreover, several key survival skills for the ele without arcana have longer cd’s and overexpose the ele, or his offensive/cc skills are locked out when needed.

Really, just play with 12 sec cd attunement cooldowns. It’s really bad and it feels like forever because if I switched out of fire and air, and I’m stuck with water and earth, their offensive capabilities are so terrible that my pressure just dropped to 0 for well over 10 seconds, which is plenty of time for opponents to recover and reset on you.

Something in particular needs to be done for the attacks on water and earth attunements so the ele can maintain pressure. For water in particular the autoattacks just need to be increased by a lot, especially staff and scepter. For earth either more condi application or the base damage needs to be increased.

Zenith.7301:

1) Base HP raised to mesmer’s 15k. This will make the 20+ points in water truly optional.

And what about Thieves? Surely you cannot suggest that one class in the game have less HP than everyone else?

3) Allow healing in Mist Form again. It’s pretty absurd that a warrior stance allows them to be immune while still attacking and being able to heal, but the squishier low HP class suddenly is banned from it.

The difference is that Mist Form gives you the actual invulnerable state, whereas Berserker Stance or Endure Pain only make you immune to Condition or Physical damage, respectively. And no, comparing Mist Form to the combination of two utilities and demanding that it be equal to that isn’t fair.

5) Make base Attunement cd 10 seconds, and change the arcana line to simply buff the effectiveness of lingering attunements. Make lingering attunements baseline.

I believe this was talked about when they lowered it already. Don’t hold your breath.

7) Cap boon duration. Part of what made the ele OP before was the sheer boon stacking. You can raise ele base survival and damage output because by capping boons people no longer need to cheese out arcana and boon stack runes to actually function.

Boon Duration already caps at 100%. And with the new rune changes, you won’t be able to run three sets of 2 runes for +45% boon duration.

8) A warrior should never be healing passively for far more squishier classes need to activate abilities for. Hell, Signet of Restoration requires constant skill usage to still be only a fraction of effectiveness, and Ranger’s Troll Unguent, a delayed heal with a cast time and downtime, still heals for less.

Has nothing to do with eles. Not to mention that before Healing Signet got buffed, Warriors were far too squishy.

Yeah, buffing everything will surely make build diversity, just like devs did with warrior. Everything works as long as you have a healing signet and 20-30 points in defense. But this is called power creep and it has nothing in common with balance.

Dagins.5163:

Yeah, buffing everything will surely make build diversity, just like devs did with warrior. Everything works as long as you have a healing signet and 20-30 points in defense. But this is called power creep and it has nothing in common with balance.

So long as 10k base health exists and there are classes who can take out over 60% of your health in one hit, ele will NEVER skip 20 points in water.

So long as classes can sustain hits that easily take 1/4 to 1/3 of your health pool, and you don’t have stealth/blind spam or 8k more base HP and supremely more healing alongside short cd CC (hi warrior skills), eles will never make it back into the meta with any builds that isn’t valkyrie/PVT.

Whine all you want about power creep, but their nerfing of warrior healing signet by 8% and leaving Cleansing Ire untouched clearly shows that there’s a higher chance of bringing classes up to speed than knocking others down.

And let’s be honest, not even at the beginning of the game was ever an ele build not containing 20 water ever viable. Ele berk builds were never consistently taken, and all the OP builds were either valk abusing boon stacking for high fury uptime (which was nerfed), or PVT/Celestial cantrip dagge/dagger in WvW.

But by all means complain about what hard time other classes have and that with enough nerfing eles might start investing in a traitline that isn’t water and arcane just so that they don’t get 2 shot and the only skills allowing them from not being 2 shot are on 75+ sec cd’s. Even at 50 sec cd an ele will never be viable in a teamfight as a squishy class you get trained to the ground, particularly by thieves and warriors, far more often than every 50 secs all the while necros and engineers are also peppering you with condi bombs.

Mist Form does not block condi dmg btw, so it is exactly like Endure Pain.

Olba.5376:

Zenith.7301:

1) Base HP raised to mesmer’s 15k. This will make the 20+ points in water truly optional.

And what about Thieves? Surely you cannot suggest that one class in the game have less HP than everyone else?

3) Allow healing in Mist Form again. It’s pretty absurd that a warrior stance allows them to be immune while still attacking and being able to heal, but the squishier low HP class suddenly is banned from it.

The difference is that Mist Form gives you the actual invulnerable state, whereas Berserker Stance or Endure Pain only make you immune to Condition or Physical damage, respectively. And no, comparing Mist Form to the combination of two utilities and demanding that it be equal to that isn’t fair.

5) Make base Attunement cd 10 seconds, and change the arcana line to simply buff the effectiveness of lingering attunements. Make lingering attunements baseline.

I believe this was talked about when they lowered it already. Don’t hold your breath.

7) Cap boon duration. Part of what made the ele OP before was the sheer boon stacking. You can raise ele base survival and damage output because by capping boons people no longer need to cheese out arcana and boon stack runes to actually function.

Boon Duration already caps at 100%. And with the new rune changes, you won’t be able to run three sets of 2 runes for +45% boon duration.

8) A warrior should never be healing passively for far more squishier classes need to activate abilities for. Hell, Signet of Restoration requires constant skill usage to still be only a fraction of effectiveness, and Ranger’s Troll Unguent, a delayed heal with a cast time and downtime, still heals for less.

Has nothing to do with eles. Not to mention that before Healing Signet got buffed, Warriors were far too squishy.

Guardian has lowest HP as well.

Also, Mist Form does not stop Condition Damage. So why block healing in it?

I would argue that just 15k base health is would be enough of a buff and open up enough options.
The rest of the suggestions would be too risky, even though I’m fully aware just how badly Ele’s need all of those because of how flawed the class feels at it’s core.

Cantrips are currently the only option for any Ele that is interested in that whole “staying alive” business so cuttng their cooldowns would make them even more of a braindead-obvious option.

Yes, attunement cooldowns feel more like a hindrance than a help after I played an Engineer with their instant-access kits. Abilities like Churning Earth, Dragon’s Tooth, Firegrab and many other abilities seem to be designed around being impossible to hit anything with. Scepter autoattacks are absolutely godawful, etc etc. It’s just lame.

But baby steps are needed first, and the most important thing that needs to happen is that 15k health. Everything comes later.

Olba.5376:

Zenith.7301:

1) Base HP raised to mesmer’s 15k. This will make the 20+ points in water truly optional.

And what about Thieves? Surely you cannot suggest that one class in the game have less HP than everyone else?

Guardians have the same HP as Thieves/Eles, yet they have held their position extremely well in all aspects of the game (PvP especially). It boils down to built-in survival tools and armor.
Meanwhile Thieves have stealth, mobility, CC, evades, guaranteed stomps and/or some combination of those strengths in their “cheesy” builds. They can afford to run berzerker builds while keeping a solid amount of survivability thanks to…you guessed it! Stealth, CC, evades, mobility or some combination of those.
Overall Thief rewards skillful play FAR FAR FAR more than Ele.