Guild Wars 2

I’ve dropped down from warrior to play Elementalist, which I’ve spend one month on (2 weeks in PvE to learn rotations like the back of my hands). And I have to say, even when getting shread apart, the D/D zerker ele is the funnest playstyle I’ve played in any MMO, if there is any plans on buffing ele, please avoid giving them the same fate as the ranger, the warrior or the necromancer.

This class is the definition of active play, combination of skills simply to have the effect of a single one, attunement dancing, combo bursting, LoS survival and timed burst! This feels like a thief without stealth but its so kitten fun to play!

Please don’t make this a spammy class or a passive healing class, just fix it the proper way, increase its base toughness and vitality just a bit, slowly, t’ill its enough to play in TPvP, because as an Elementalist, I can’t leave that berserker amulet.

Other professions need to be harder to play.

The question is, will that ever happen, especially when taking into account core profession mechanics behind those classes?

I remember saying an year ago that the elementalist is one fo the most well-designed classes in this game, and that all others should have 4 sets of 5 skills too for fair balancing and a balanced effort/ reward ratio.

Ultimately, Anet’s choice to make each profession’s mechanics as distinct as possible from each other will always make some professions require a lot less effort than others, I think. When one profession has attunement swapping and the other has something so drastically different as the the initiative system, the effort/ reward ratio will never, ever, be the same for both players. The game design just doesn’t allows it.

The same can be said for base health values. When the HP gap is so high between two professions, no matter how you much you adjust damage rating in this game, either one will be too slow to kill, or the other will be too fast to kill. There’s no inbetween scenario here, unless the profession with the lower base health is entirely build around defensive skills (guardian), or has strong stat-neutral defensive mechanics to support it (stealth, clones, evades, etc).

An elementalist doesn’t have much of that, and many of their defenses rely on defensive stats (auras, healing spells), making them incredibly lop-sided towards defensive stats to be able to survive. Which would justify a higher base health.

^ I don’t feel like elementalist is as terrible as some might say, simply because most players seem to only be good enough to pull off necros and warriors because they are easy to be effective, but when it comes to high skilled play, I feel like elementalist STILL gets the low end, and that’s the problem, they play like thief without stealth and they have a FORTY SECOND CD ride the lightning to get away, forty seconds in not just bad, its cruel. We melt when we get fired at, and can’t do much about it.

If swirling wind (#4 on focus air) would stop the enemy necro’s staff abilities, they could actually be useful for team fights.

Any ele build requires high APM because of core mechanics. But if you think about it, most if not all classes have very engaging builds too that don’t rely too much on passive play, AI, or condi-spam. It’s just that these less engaging builds are the most rewarding and least punishing that’s why people prefer playing them than other builds.

Take for example necro. You can build zerker Dagger Warhorn/ Axe Dagger or any other power weapon combination other than staff and S/D. It’s harder and more fun to play IMO than the standard condispam necro but we see less of it because going condispam on a necro is waaaay more efficient at the current state of the game.

^ I agree after, especially ranger that seems to be able to build quite well into Power or Traps, even if those builds have decent potential, spirit ranger will dominate because of how brainless and rewarding it is.

Zerker ele would be in a good place if they toned down survivability on other classes

As for bruiser ele, that needs some love starting with a revert to the arcane trait lines.

zerker fresh air ele can one shot everything exept a warrior… just sayin