Guild Wars 2

There’s a lot of whining over in the Ele forums about how UP we are. As a primary staff Ele I can understand the frustration. We attunement dance, dodge roll all day long, chill, immobilize, cripple our enemies, and lay down AoE after AoE to survive even a single lvl 80 trash mob. Sure when left to our own devices we are fairly devastating and we support our allies well.

Those of us who roll staff tend to realize that its not the best for soloing, which IMO is perfectly fine. We turn to our combo fields (of which we have 4: fire, ice, water, and lightning) and study them intensely in order to be of use to our groups and guildmates.

Still though, it seems a bit lackluster. So I propose this idea:

Make combo fields stack.

In a span of 4 seconds, in one attunement we can lay down 2 water fields and one ice field, but ourselves and our teammates can only proc combos off of one of them?

Why can’t I proc 2x Area Heal and 1x Area Frost Armor with an arcane wave? After all I did take the time to set up the fields. And before anyone starts with accusations of how OP this would be, in order to make any kind of meaningful use of stacking fields, you’d require a group that works like a well oiled machine to generate enough heals to even recover 50% of a level 80 HP bar, and that is what this games philosophy is supposed to reward, right? It’s not so much about your numbers vs theirs, but your skill and strategy and timing vs theirs.

All this does is expand the utility of any support build that makes strong use of combo fields, ele’s just happen to be arguably the best at it since we have 20 weapon skills as opposed to 10.

In addition to the above change, I highly recommend that some effects be buffed. Both Ice-Proj and Ice-Blast effects have pitiful durations. I’ve heard that Whirl finishers are altogether useless except in the case of condition removal. Area might, swiftness, and healing have great durations, but they’ll hardly turn the tables in a tough fight. In general projectile and whirl finishers are simply weak and really need a buffing.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a pipedream: a mesmer lays down time warp just as I law down frozen ground, and a ranger pops healing spring, the ranger opens with quick shot as I swap to air and put down my lightning field. I then swap to earth and fire my projectile finisher for the remainder of the time warp. When the fields go away, [insert dungeon boss here] has 25 stacks of confusion and vulnerability and a 25 second chill duration.

Or, working with another staff ele, we both lay down eruption and and use the delay to swap to fire and stack lava font in the same place and pop arcane wave giving 4 blast finishers on two fire fields: 8 procs of 3x group might for 20 seconds.

That is utility, rooted purely in teamwork, something I hope to see more rewarded as the game gets updated.