Guild Wars 2

My I first of all commend your team on reducing the attunement cooldowns. I am really looking forward to the changes on December 10th.

I am a dedicated dagger/dagger elementalist and I have been running a very unusual condition build for several months: 30,0,30,10,0 with cantrips and carrion amulet. I am consistently successful at holding points and surprising thieves and warriors with my skill and setup. Therefore, nobody more than me is excited at the prospect of the upcoming faster attunement swapping thanks to you guys. Having said that, there are some notable failings even with this setup in respect to utilities and survivability.

1) Is there any plans to look at utility cooldowns? In particular, “Armor of Earth” (90s cooldown), Cleansing Fire (40s) and Lightning Flash (40s). Of course, traits can shorten cooldowns by 20%, but what I recommend is to reduce by 20% by default and remove/replace the trait with something else.

2) Alternative to the above, how about increasing the base HP, perhaps to match a mesmer’s base HP?

Either of the above will introduce yet further viable permutations for dagger/dagger elementalist as well as for other disciplines.

3) Finally, the current Ride-The-Lightning (RTL) ability is flawed and is considered a buff to certain classes. If a thief goes invisible at exactly the same time RTL is invoked, the elementalist is immediately penalised in that the cooldown is instantly doubled. What plans, if any do you have for this problem?

Many thanks for reading this and I look forward to your response.

Kind regards
Candar
[Earth/Fire Elementalist]

i suggest reiterate all previous balancedecisions. natural i would expect that to be part of every balancepatch. but its seems not and j. davis has told me, anet needs a hand to tell them what to do.

The current situation the ele is in right now is the summation of all the back to back nerfs to the fotm d/d elementalists which was quite effective in sustain and mobility tied with the buffs to all other classes. It’s basically powercreep for the other classes and a reverse mode powercreep to the elementalist.

But they are now trying to mix things up with the redesigning of crap traits. Maybe they realized they were too harsh on the ele nerfs. However, they are still too scared of making eles OP hence these buffs shall not be given without the corresponding nerfs. Let’s all hope for the best for the ele class in the upcoming Dec.10 balance patch. However I wouldn’t hope too much on reverting the previous nerfs nor the lowering of skill cooldowns. Devs are just too convinced that the ele is bound to be OP if they don’t put a tight leash on it.

Gotta say, wouldn’t like your changes… Think they wouldn’t be good.

(And to any (future) posts that complain about Eles not getting love from ANet, that attitude is shared across all Profession-forums. Logically means that either ANet is terrible, or that there is in fact some balance)

I’ve suggested in the elementalist forums a change to air’s #5 minor trait, to make it work like ranger’s vigor trait, by offering a passive +25% endurance regeneration, instead of the current (and crappy) +10% speed movement.

This would be flavourful with air magic (which involves not only speed and bursting, but also timing), and it would help elementalist’s builds to gravitate a little bit more towards the offensive traitlines and a little bit less toward the defensive traitlines, something that is not viable at the moment. It wouldn’t be as strong as a defensive option as what the defensive traits have to offer, which is ideal, but it would be enough to give to unviable non-water/ arcana builds some extra breathing room to survive. And in addition to this, it’s a pretty elegant solution, that is easy to understand, and works well with Lingering Elements.

And if you think this would be too strong anyways, remember: it would only work while attuned to air. if anything, there’s a risk for it not being strong enough without lingering elements. The ranger version, even after the nerf, should work full time, afterall.

Besides, d/d builds naturally gravitate towards 10 points in air minimum, because of the aura trait, so this would help giving them what they need. Maybe even – who knows – open up space in arcana for them to use Windborne Dagger instead of the much precious Renewing Stamina.