Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: post tagged as spvp because thats pretty much all I play.

As an spvper I am of the opinion that some weapons are lacking in a few areas or just in general and I’d like to propose what weapon skills need to be changed and some suggestions for what could be done.

First I’d like to state that I’ve always had this opinion that dagger main hand has this nice flow between all the attunements, always feeling useful in every attunement. Staff and scepter don’t have this and often it feels like you are doing practically nothing. Many of these changes seek to alleviate this.

I’ll start with scepter because its my favorite weapon:
At the moment scepter lacks good consistent damage outside of air attunement. For this reason, it’s a great weapon to take if you are playing fresh air because then you can just avoid using the other attunements except for the cooldowns and just stick with air. Also for that reason, it’s a really bad weapon if you don’t take fresh air.

(I’ll only list abilities I feel should be improved)
Fire Attunement:

Fire #1 – Flamestrike – Needs improved somehow, it casts too slow for what it is. Easiest fix: reduce cast time.
Awesome but hard fix: change the ability to something else! Scepter doesn’t have to be a condition damage weapon.

Fire #2 – Dragons tooth – A really cool ability but in it’s situational uses it needs to be casted faster. Perhaps the delay on the tooth landing could remain the same but being stuck casting this ability for so long is a real bummer. Some people have suggested making it ground targeted but I don’t care either way.

Water Attunement: This attunement is a nightmare.

Water #1 – Ice Shards – This skill may as well read 300 range because if a target is moving and farther you are not going to hit hardly at all. If you hit all hits though its actually pretty decent damage. I avoid using this skill if at all possible. Revamp or clean this skill up immensely.

Water #2 – Shatterstone – I probably use this skill for an actual purpose 1 out of 3 games and those are in dire situations where I have no other options. Mostly on a downed opponent.

Earth Attunement:
Earth #1 – Stone Shard – an obnoxiously long cast time and wind up and the ability just feels clunky. Does decent damage though. I think this ability just needs cleaned up a bit but it’s mostly fine.

Earth #3 – Dust Devil – I’ve come to really like this ability and with it’s situational use I see it as a way to really separate yourself from other eles by using it at the right times. However it just feels slightly lacking and often like a filler while I wait for other attunements to come up. Increase it’s speed and add some more power damage to it and call it a day! Or whatever other improvements you like.

Focus: Only one ability really concerns me here.

Fire Attunement:

Fire #5 – Fire Shield – compared to most solid abilities on most ele weapons this ability just falls short. Situationally its pretty great, like when a mesmer has a bunch of clones hitting you and you stack 15 might in seconds. These situations are slim and thin, and focus these days is being ran by almost all glassy builds in which you can’t just stand and take some hits to take advantage of the aura. The Flame Aura part should definitely stay so both offhands (dagger and focus) still retain synergy with aura traits. On top of gaining the aura something should happen though. What happens could be so many things but I’d personally enjoy some mobility. Just pop some mobility on there that doesn’t closely resemble any of the other elementalist mobility skills and it’d be great!

Continued…

Staff: In general I feel this weapon lacks damage unless you are just throwing your abilities into a big zerg, in which case you can’t miss!

Fire Attunement:

Fire #1 – Fireball – Staff has this problem where all of the auto attacks (except for air) list 1200 range but they can’t be hit reliably without being sub ~800 range. This is one of them. Otherwise, good ability.

Fire #2 – Lava Front – This abilities hard to get anything out of except on crowd controlled opponenets. I remember way back in the betas this did damage as soon as it hit the ground allowing for often 2 hits on even moving targets. I don’t think this would be too crazy right now but if it is then perhaps just decrease the amount of delay it currently has before it does the first tic.

Water Attunement:

Water #1 – Water Blast – This abilities functionality should be completely changed and here is why. Any good elementalist knows that you get in water attunement, do all your healing, and get out as fast as possible. You do this because Healing Ripple and Evasive Arcana occur every time you switch to water, and the faster you get out of water the faster you can do Healing Ripple and Evasive Arcana again the next time water comes up. By spamming Water Blast to heal allies or yourself you are actually doing less healing by delaying the next Healing Ripple and Evasive Arcana and spending your time spamming Water Blast instead of using useful abilities in other attunements. Besides that, it also suffers the same problems as Fire #1 but has even slower speed.

Air Attunement:

Air #2 – Lightning Surge – Doesn’t do much more damage than spamming #1 (and in a lot of cases less damage), has a really long cast time, and your only reward is a blind that will 100% be on some random skill because of the cast time. Needs to be more rewarding to hit.

Air #3 – Gust – Can’t hit moving targets past something like 400 range. The key though is to just un-target and skill shot it. I think that’s fine for skilled players but I’m very sure many people are frustrated by this ability.

Earth Attunement:

Earth #1 – Stoning – Same problem as Fire #1 but multiplied. Weakness is really strong though. Make the damage just a little bit higher and increase the projectile speed by a lot.

In WvW, where staff is already strong and optimal in large groups, I don’t feel these changes will make much of an impact. However, they would improve the staffs capabilities in small scale fights quite a bit.

If you have any suggestions of your own for improving certain elementalist weapon skills post your thoughts and thank you for reading.

I’ve often felt Lightning Surge should be redone and made into something like a watered down Kill Shot. Air is suppose to be the elementalist’s single target damage element, but right now it’s pretty underwhelming.

It already has the long cast time and a very obvious animation. It’s the only skill where the elementalist aims their staff like a rifle. There’s really no reason for it to hit the target if they are paying attention. Maybe something like 5K damage on a full zerker elementalist would suffice.

Other than that accelerating the projectile speed of our auto attacks would be extremely useful. It’s a 1,200 range weapon and should be reliable at that range.

I personally get where you’re coming from phanta, but I’m almost certain they made the auto attacks on ele pretty poor on purpose – similar to engie and their main weaponset. However I completely agree that some of them might see a bit of tuning. Shatterstone is pretty horrible. There really isn’t a reason why lighting surge should have a cast time of 1 and a half seconds.

I don’t think Lighting surge needs to be a watered down killshot. Staff lighting has a lot of control-focused abilities, and it really should stay that way. Staff is generally considered a support-focused weapon anyway – for many classes as well.

Agree with most of it – especially lava font. This could even make it possible for staff-players to win 1v1 against decent players.

Auto attacks for both engineer and ele are weak intentionally. They have stated this. They say it is because we have the availability to swap kits/attunements, to have much more access to stronger attacks much more often then the other professions. As this is true. It is reasonable the A A have the limitations they do. Neither profession is intended to camp in one attunement/kit.

dancingmonkey.4902:

They say it is because we have the availability to swap kits/attunements, to have much more access to stronger attacks much more often then the other professions.

First, this isn’t true. Eles often have huge cooldowns on strong spells compared to other classes – therefore I’d say the overall frequency of strong attacks (that actually hit a target) is much lower on ele than on other classes (just think of warriors F-abilities).

Second, both cooldowns and weak AAs are said to be a compensation for the availability of more spells – which is our “class mechanic”. So the beneficial effect of our class mechanic is kinda negated.
Lower the CDs, merge some spells and you could delete two attunements on ele and I think it would still be as effective as it is now – even without F-spells like other classes have – especially because many of our traits would then work on 50% of our spells not only on 25%.

Third, having more spells isn’t necessarily a benefit, especially on ele where many spells practically do the same just with different visual effects and/or conditions (for example #2 staff-spells, where lava font is obviously the most effective and it would be best to only use #2 in fire – however, once you switch out of fire it gets replaced by weaker spells which are therefore useless [except earth because it’s a blast finisher]). It’s similir with dagger or scepter #2s. I hope you got my point here.
Ele has it’s potential distributed on 40 spells making each spell weaker compared to other classes which have it on only 20 and they also get additional F-abilities which the ele is lacking.

But well, I guess they knew that it would be hard to balance a game where a class has twice the amount of spells and at the same time half the HP of other classes…

I hope they don’t change the water #1. It helps keep people alive when attacking gates in wvw. Besides, as you are getting in and out of water so fast, changing this skill won’t be worth it as you won’t be auto attacking anyway.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Auto attacks for both engineer and ele are weak intentionally. They have stated this. They say it is because we have the availability to swap kits/attunements, to have much more access to stronger attacks much more often then the other professions. As this is true. It is reasonable the A A have the limitations they do. Neither profession is intended to camp in one attunement/kit.

More access to stronger attacks is unfortunately not true, at least for ele. And engineer has a strong rifle auto attack but the pistol one is pretty bad. but, engineer has what the dagger weapon set has going for it. A nice feel for constantly using strong abilities. Staff and scepter do not have this feel. You often are just throwing out abilities that literally do almost nothing.

Phanta, I agree with most of these, similar to the thread you posted on the ele forum. A few notes on individual skills that I have a different take on though:

Scepter in general: Needs more sustained damage by a lot, perhaps less instant-cast burst potential (although maybe that reduction should come from arcanes). The autos are all insanely bad outside of air, as you have addressed.

Dust Devil: I wouldn’t necessarily give this more power-damage, as I am o.k. with earth being mostly defensive focused. I DO think a short cripple added to this skill would be excellent however.

Fire Shield: Needs treatment similar to the frost aura skill (i.e. only change the weapon skill version), but perhaps they want to keep an offensive theme. Perhaps let it do damage at the end of the duration (similar to guardian focus skill), or also cripple people who hit you. I am not sure this is the right spot for mobility, as focus is a choice to give-up mobility for defense in the fight.

Gust: I have actually cast gust point-blank on a stationary target and had it go wide left before. Increase the speed and/or width of this skill

Stoning: I disagree here, it is a 100% projectile finisher and has on-demand weakness. I wouldn’t change this one.

Eruption: This should be able to detonate early for lesser effect, but only blast at full duration. Apparently it worked like this at some-point?

Fiery Greatsword: This should be a 90s CD now that it is ONLY for mobility. Especially if they never patch the damage of the #4 ability to actually do more than pre-patch (the actual hit does less damage than it did pre-patch, not the 2.4x damage it was supposed to do).

dancingmonkey.4902:

Auto attacks for both engineer and ele are weak intentionally. They have stated this. They say it is because we have the availability to swap kits/attunements, to have much more access to stronger attacks much more often then the other professions.

This is also the reason engies are given Incendiary Powder, one of the strongest traits in the game, and arguably better than having a good AA. Ele has no similar option. One of the reasons d/d works as a weapon-set is because of lightning whip, one of the best auto-attacks in the game.

Mesmer: what’s the AA damage ?
why people want every class to be equal in any aspect?
And why anet should make every weapon set with everything ?

musu.9205:

Mesmer: what’s the AA damage ?
why people want every class to be equal in any aspect?
And why anet should make every weapon set with everything ?

Wrong thread?

This is just a request to make other weapon sets besides d/d more viable. Phantaram isn’t asking these weapon sets to be able to do everything, but all of the skills mentioned are sub-par atm, and not really viable. Phanta is asking for buffs so that there are more builds to fulfill specific roles.

Sure, staff shouldn’t be GREAT at 1v1’s, but it needs to be decent because eles can’t swap weapons.

BlackBeard.2873:

musu.9205:

Mesmer: what’s the AA damage ?
why people want every class to be equal in any aspect?
And why anet should make every weapon set with everything ?

Wrong thread?

This is just a request to make other weapon sets besides d/d more viable. Phantaram isn’t asking these weapon sets to be able to do everything, but all of the skills mentioned are sub-par atm, and not really viable. Phanta is asking for buffs so that there are more builds to fulfill specific roles.

Sure, staff shouldn’t be GREAT at 1v1’s, but it needs to be decent because eles can’t swap weapons.

Well i was half joking . Sorry about that .

I agree with Water #1 – Ice Shards Water #2 – Shatterstone Earth #3 – Dust Devil
I think fire scepter is fine but we could make those skills more reliable but less damage or longer CD (we don’t need RF 2.0 yet).

Water #1 – Water Blast : for this one anet could make it work like engi’s bomb so it will acctual heal yourself .
Earth #1 – Stoning : it could be AA chain first hit do low damage with weakness second hit do higher damage on foes with weakness condition.

Personally i just don’t think suggests like reducing cast time and more damage on AA are going to be good ideas in gw2.

Staff AAs are kitten slow indeed. So slow that you can’t even take advantage of the 2s fury from arcana 1. Above 800 range you dont even need to actively dodge them. Fire and air are still useful against turrets though. Chain lightning ricochets are harder to avoid when you target something else. Otherwise, i think staff is globally fine, just make the projectiles faster would be enough. Almost 2s travel time (roughly estimated) for 1200 range compared to mesmer GS auto attack, it’s pretty meh. Well, maybe staff necro and mesmer are worse, and should be revamped too.

As it’s easier to position yourself better at long range to avoid attacks (using terrain, obstructions…) halving travel time would be nice, that would make staff aa somewhat useful at close range too, when staff users are the most vulnerable.