Guild Wars 2

Elementalist air magic has always been weak on a staff. I propose 2 changes to make this attunement more effective.

1. Skill 1, Chain Lightning, should be able to chain to more than 3 targets. This could be a trait skill, say at master level (20), you can slot a trait skill for Air that does something like, “Chain Lightning can strike up to 2 additional targets.” Ideally, I would like to see this happen without the need to use a trait though.

2. Skill 2, Lightning Surge, should be an area of effect attack. Make it targetable, like other AoE skills. The cooldown and damage are fine as they are, or maybe the cooldown should be 6 seconds, like Lava Font, but it should either have a large area, like Ice Spike (water skill 2), or a continuing effect, like Lava Font (fire skill 2). My preference is the larger area of effect, since I think if would make more sense to have what is bascically lightning strike bigger, rather than for a longer duration.

3. Skill 3, Gust, should affect all enemies around the caster and do damage on par with Chain Lightning. As it is now, the skill is fairly useless. It does no damage, has no sustained disabling, in that the enemy knocked down immediately gets back up and continues to attack, and it misses half the time if you are running while using it.

Also decrease the cooldown to 10 seconds, like Flame Burst. 30 seconds is far too long to make this skill at all useful.

Autoattack is fine as it is imo.
Lightning Surge is already an AoE although it has a pretty small radius but it could need a change in either blindness duration or cast time as it is rather useless in heated battles where blindness is most needed.
Gust is rather weak for its high cooldown and you’re right it doesn’t hit most of the time while moving. It should either have it cd reduced, given a longer duration or bigger AoE.

I suggested multiple times that they should be swapped.

Chain Lightning renamed to Lightning Bolt and just made single target.

And Lightning Surge renamed to Chain Lightning and bounce 5 times.

The Animation and Cast Time on Lightning Surge would make it so satisfying as a hard hitting chain lightning skill.

Regardless Staff Air needs a serious dmg boost, it’s so weak that if you get locked out of Fire on staff you do no dmg.

Gust just needs something to make it more reliable and maybe defensive, make it a cone, and PBAOE, or just buff the projectile width and make the LOS requirement more forgiving, anything really.

@Knote

I like these ideas, but if the 1 and 2 skills are switched like that, the blind effect needs to remain on skill 2. Chain lightning with a blind effect would be well worth the cast time, but an auto-attack with a blind effect would be kinda unfair.

If air does get a DPS increase, I don’t think it needs to be a lot.

Gust definitely needs a second look to make it more effective.