Guild Wars 2

It seems like the general consensus is that eles are in a pretty weak state compared to other classes at the moment in PvP. However, it wasn’t that long ago that eles dominated as bunkers.

If you were dev for a day, how would you balance this class to make it competitive without being overpowered?

EDIT I totally forgot about the new balance forums. Devs, feel free to move this topic, but if you do, can you add something about how this is about sPvP in the title?

You can’t !

Because its not only the profession, you also have to think about every weaponset / combination there is.

If you only buff traits / utils certain combination will become OP while others still will be kitten !

They melt too easy to condition and burst. I’d fix that 1st

Its a class that i see as a roamer with a lot of spike dmg. A class like that should be better at kiting / being mobile than it is now. Right now classes with more sustain can stay on top of them or roam just as good as they can.

I would bring them up to par or close to thieves mobility wise. I would drastically lower the CD of lighting flash as a first step.

It’s a profession that was originally designed to survive around active defenses.

However, unlike thieves or mesmers, elementalist’s active defenses are heavily driven by defensive stats, or mostly only available through defensive traits. Usually a combination of both. This means that without healing power, toughness and vitality, elementalist’s active defenses are too weak to sustain a glass cannon – but with those stats, those defenses could scale really high and make them excellent bunkers (in the past). Not only that, but the elementalist’s best traits and best utilities were mostly defensive, and some of their best trait combinations also so.

So it was a mix of poor design (a profession designed around active defenses that depend too much on defensive stats to be good compared to the other 7 professions), of massive defense stacking (where elementalists stacked as many defensive effects/ stats as possible and acchieved some overpowered combos), and Anet nerfing all of their defensive options one by one without fixing the core problem of the class, that lead to the current situation.

Well perhaps, after a litte thinking time, how about they revert every nerf ele got.
Would really like to see how that will do.

give them a decent health pool.

condense some traits together (Fire tree for example, there are some great traits that noone can take because of other mandatory traits.)

or a HUGE buff would be allowing ele to switch weapons so you could use staff for group fights/support and then switch to daggers for smaller fights,
currently staff eles are pretty dam aweful when you have even 1 player attacking you.
(its too heavily reliant on stupidity of your enemy to stand in aoe)

well staff ele is quite decent tbh – i mean think a little bit, if they have to stand in your ae to take dmg how about laying it under your feed ?

I see the most problems with D/D – its inferior in infights , 1v1 its okayish, but this game is not about 1v1… and if you go in as D/D you most likely are dead 5-10 sec after that.

“Range”-Ele is kinda okay.

eles are not weak, it is just some other classes/spells need to be toned down imo
if there was less condis and CCs (especially in aoe form) flying around, i think eles would be in better spot

eles, mes and thieves have about same role, the only reason why mes and thieves somehow doing better is because their defensive mechanics are based around avoiding dmg while eles is around healing/mitigating it… it doesn’t work so well in current meta though

this is my personal opnion though, i might be wrong

Small wonder why the class with twice as many weapon skills as all the other classes was once overpowered only to be made underpowered.

i say nerf the healing and buff up the standard survivability. press the elementalist more into the gray area instead of (overkill + squishy) and (supertanks + dumb damage)

I’d put them on a balacing scale, and on the other side I’d put something equally heavy.

Balancing 101

Besides fresh-air, eles are pretty balanced nowadays. The problem are some other classes.

Ele damage is fine. The problem is terrible low health and armor and huge cooldowns on defensive skills.

All a thief and mesmer needs to do is reset the fight over and over. The ele waste 60+ second cooldowns surviving the first burst. Burst ele cannot maintain vs this. A bunker ele can survive a bit but wont kill anything but a glass cannon class that is terrible.

To fix this Anet thinks adding a blast finisher to dagger water and evade to fire skill is gonna save them. Which is horrible just like Diamond skin is a joke trait.

To Fix Ele:
1) Increase health and armor to that of mesmer or necro
2) allow out of combat weapon swap ( one can dream)
3) Fix focus fire and water skills ( fire aura is stupidly designed)(maybe make is cleanse conditions for the duration then explode with damage or absorb damage and anyone that hits you for the 3third time it explodes said damage.)
4) Revert old nerfs
5) Our auto attacks are about half damage compared to everyone else, adjust this please.
5) Staff Auto attacks cannot hit moving targets. A jump or side step makes them miss. Any other ranged auto attack class pretty much auto follows targets. Increase our projectile speed and cast time.
6) Staff Air Gust Skill is terrible and misses way to much.
7) Nerf Lyssa Runes
8)To many classes have insta teleport to enemy skills. You cannot kite someone as a mage if they can teleport to you every 5 seconds. Which means you are dead.
9) read Elementalist forums to find better solutions. Or other profession boards as it seems anet only made them for us.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Besides fresh-air, eles are pretty balanced nowadays. The problem are some other classes.

Theres no sense of balance in a vacuum ..
So how is ele balanced?Compare to what? compared to ele ,the ele is balanced ????
Lol just jk.. :P i know you wanted to say reduce the power of the other classes !
Though many think bad ele players want the class buffed while good ones want what you said .
I personally wouldnt care a bit of what happens since the result for the ele player will be the same!More relative power! Although i can see how the first option is worse considering build diversity..But when did this game had build diversity anyway?

Power creep is only bad (and i mean it ONLY) cause it makes all previous options irrelevant..Point is ,this game never had options. Its always 1-2 builds and the rest are suboptimal with usually a huge gap between those in power terms. And it has been like that from the very beggining..Maybe they power creeped this kitten in closed beta or something :P

every good ele has experienced the inviable use of eles in 5v5 team play

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Besides fresh-air, eles are pretty balanced nowadays. The problem are some other classes.

nerf eles plss

Glass Fresh Air ele – Can kill things like bunker guards/warriors and actually does well 1v1 against quite a few things. Thieves completely hard counter you, and a soldiers warrior can 100 – 0 you if he hits a pin down and you happen to not have a 75 second cooldown utility.

Mid-Range ele (Valkyries 0/20/0/20/30) – feels like you are just performing below average all the time. You can’t kill a guardian or warrior whatsoever. They could really care less if you are attacking them or not. Thieves can still whittle you down and kill you 1v1. If you are low on cooldowns you still die just as fast as glass ele to necro/thieves.

Healing Bunker Ele – This still has the weakness of getting killed by thieves with sleight of hand, just like any elementalist. But with all players spread across all 3 nodes a healing ele can properly keep themselves and 1 teammate healed during a 2v2 and slowly whittle them down. It’s only working because of the bunker meta so damage is low so the elementalist doesn’t just get bursted despite being bunker. Same weakness as valks, once you are low on cooldowns a thief can just train you and you are dead.

If things remain even remotely as close to as tanky as they are, they need to increase elementalist damage outside of Freshi Air. They could do this a number of ways but the easiest is to actually make our auto attacks good outside of air, and improve all of the auto attacks on staff. From there lower the cooldown on all of our stun breakers by a bit. After these things are changed I think they just need to decrease the power of thieves and see where elementalists are at at this point.

The ultimate solution is to nerf like 5 layers of broken things and just bring it back to before the necro burning patch. Everything was so close to balanced back then and just tweaking things would have been swell. Instead warriors and necros got like 1/4th of their whole class buffed to insane amounts, and it’s continued since then.

lvis.3824:

You can’t !

Because its not only the profession, you also have to think about every weaponset / combination there is.

If you only buff traits / utils certain combination will become OP while others still will be kitten !

that will always be a problem. natural logic, cause all works additive non conditional.
a+b+c = op or a+b+c = ok but a=weak
or
ok+ok+ok = op / weak+weak+weak=ok…. see? thats the problem the current game has and always will have. some traits are to weak for them self and as soon as they got buffed they will outshine in combination with other traits. good example hambow.

and no its not a solution to always move traits up the tier.. all what happens is that either just need to spend more to get as example 2 mastertraits, but it doesnt hurt u, cause the grandmaster traits suck.. or like some other classes have the problem, that some adepttraits simply suck after all that nerfs and moving up.

some guy had a good suggestion, that traits should change the way how skills work. as stupid example: pin down now applies torment

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Besides fresh-air, eles are pretty balanced nowadays. The problem are some other classes.

I think so too. Fresh air (really, just the electric discharge being instant rather than a projectile), diamond skin, and tornado/meteor shower combo are all bad design for eles. Everything else about the profession is pretty well designed (relative to the other professions anyway), but certainly could use adjustment in places.

Edit: Agree with Phantaram about necro patch…

Phantaram.4816:

If things remain even remotely as close to as tanky as they are, they need to increase elementalist damage outside of Freshi Air. They could do this a number of ways but the easiest is to actually make our auto attacks good outside of air, and improve all of the auto attacks on staff.

This is probably the worst scenario that could happen. This would generate even more power-creep and is overall not a good solution. As you said, the pre-dhuumfire-balance was probably the best we had. If you keep buffing classes the balance will go further away from that state.

-Support staff ele only needs cleansing water off 5s icd and one/some/all of the water traits they put in master tier back to adept… Before dec 10 you could sustain okay with blast finishers etc just needed a tiny bit of help with things like necros which the cleansing water icd would presumably help with. Much more and it becomes OP imo.

-Remove/change diamond skin, I assume they nerfed eles in dec to make way for this trait(way to kick eles at their lowest point). I worry this becomes viable with heal sig fix which is a bad thing.

-DD will be fine if they do the changes they talked about in preview+ RLT reduced cd , went from driving a Ferrari to a 10 speed when they nerfed this.

-Fresh air zerker is more less fine imo, I think it was better when you could get a cleanse in water (that dec update tho) … i see it as a spec like 30 30 signet thief or zerker lich form necro ….deadly if left unchecked but put a warrior or thief on it all game to shut it down working as intended I guess (the problem is not much else is viable atm) zerker staff is fine where it is for this reason too.

-s/d valk needs the most love and like said above it needs it in dps…. if you don’t take every single +damage trait/rune you find scepter dps is abysmal….although burst is crazy high with the traits. Maybe reduce some of the + damage traits and increase the damage on some of the abilities like the autos ,water 2 ,earth 3 etc. Then maybe you could have a balanced ele build where you take traits that have utility to them not just + % damage when X.

In short undue a few nerfs ,water trait line,rlt … find someway to increase dps on scepter without burst becoming too strong.

Most of the ele seems sound but.
Arcane wave is a pain, fresh air in general
Glyphs and traits surrounding glyphs are shakey.
Diamond skin is dumb.
Focus fire attunement is balls.
Conjures are inconsistent in value and often used for 1-2 skills and thrown away.

Reduce all cooldowns 30sec and above on offhands.

I wouldn’t touch them, they’ll be fine if the other classes get toned down.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Phantaram.4816:

If things remain even remotely as close to as tanky as they are, they need to increase elementalist damage outside of Freshi Air. They could do this a number of ways but the easiest is to actually make our auto attacks good outside of air, and improve all of the auto attacks on staff.

This is probably the worst scenario that could happen. This would generate even more power-creep and is overall not a good solution. As you said, the pre-dhuumfire-balance was probably the best we had. If you keep buffing classes the balance will go further away from that state.

Yeah, I agree bringing things down to the ele level is the ultimate solution like I said. However we have to look at it from the perspective of the devs. For them bringing ele up to the level of everything else is much easier and probably the path they are on. So I’ll try to influence making that path as good as possible since the other path we all want is such a longshot.

All ele needs now is cleansing water’s ICD removed.

I’d accept also having RTL’s cooldown reduced.

Class=fine at that point.

Stop tweaking it past that.

Mbelch.9028:

All ele needs now is cleansing water’s ICD removed.

I’d accept also having RTL’s cooldown reduced.

Class=fine at that point.

Stop tweaking it past that.

Only bunker healing ele specs use cleansing water and that is the only ele spec already working. No full damage spec spec goes 30 water and very few mid range (valks amulet) builds go 30 water. I think when most people are complaining about ele balance it is to do with elementalist specs that are meant to do damage.

Anyways, there is a reason it has an ICD. With Runes of Dwayna + the new 10 point trait that gives regen when crit, you’d be practically immune to conditions.

Oh wait there is already traits that make you immune to conditions in this game, bring on no icd cleansing water! (joking, and seriously showing how dumb the immune to condition traits are)

Acandis.3250:

I wouldn’t touch them, they’ll be fine if the other classes get toned down.

Acandis.3250:

Acandis.3250:

I wouldn’t touch them, they’ll be fine if the other classes get toned down.

Mr. Acandis we all agree. Clearly it’s not what is going to happen though unfortunately. So the least we can do is influence the direction the devs are going to take ele.

Edit: for those wondering Heal sig is still not going to be good. It’s bad in PvE and it’s only getting buffed in pvp to the pve level so… it’s still bad. If you don’t know why it used to be extremely strong I’ll provide a short explanation.

Evasive Arcana used to = 2-3 Heal sig procs, now its 0
+ hurl used to = 5 heal sig procs, now it’s 1

I do not think their current path is any good even if it is easier.
It just gives the players less freedom. Invulnerability on burning speed just counters direct damage for a short time frame. This means for a short time a certain aspect is hard-countered. Same goes for Diamond Skin on Elementalists or Berserker Stance on Warrior.
I find that bad design.

Acandis.3250:

Phantaram.4816:

Acandis.3250:

Acandis.3250:

I wouldn’t touch them, they’ll be fine if the other classes get toned down.

Mr. Acandis we all agree. Clearly it’s not what is going to happen though unfortunately. So the least we can do is influence the direction the devs are going to take ele.

Edit: for those wondering Heal sig is still not going to be good. It’s bad in PvE and it’s only getting buffed in pvp to the pve level so… it’s still bad. If you don’t know why it used to be extremely strong I’ll provide a short explanation.

Evasive Arcana used to = 2-3 Heal sig procs, now its 0
+ hurl used to = 5 heal sig procs, now it’s 1

You’re deluded if you think the devs are going to be influenced in any way, by anything we say here that isn’t referencing some proposed change they have already shown us.

They don’t give a kitten anymore. They have their own list of “ideal” world, and they’re looking to get the game to that state. Nothing we say or do will change that.

I only come to the forums to at least try to make a difference. Sometimes there is a funny post I see while I’m here and I’ll post in it. I don’t post or browse in the forums just for the heck of it though. If my suggestions fall on def ears whatever. It turns out to be the same result as wasting my time posting on the forums for no reason.

I see a lot of people thinking ele should be a s/X roamer, but I really want them to help make Staff a stronger option to replace guardian as a mid bunker with.

Let’s look at the context first. I’m gonna list the nerfs/changes that brought ele down:

Evasive Arcana nerfed:

• radius reduced to 180
• effectiveness with healing attribute reduced by 50%
• no longer break knockback (yes, that’s the little known fact people didn’t know. EA was OP because of this). <—- Ele didn’t need much stability because of this. After it is fixed, Ele shows their true weakness to crowd controls.

Healing nerfed:

• Signet of Restoration nerfed 18%. This is planed to be reverted… in a few months.
• Cleaning Water now has an internal cooldown of 5 seconds. This makes Ele critically vulnerable against conditions meta. <—- this took away the main way Ele can deal with conditions.
• Healing Ripple nerfed 50%. The number of targets reduced from infinite to 5. <—- this, together with EA heal nerfed, are why Ele is no longer the immortal bunker.

Ride the Lightning nerfed:

• increased recharge from 15 to 40 seconds if blocked/evaded. <—- A lot of people complain about this, but I don’t think it’s as significant as the survivability nerfed mentioned above.
• reduced range from 1550 to 1200

Magnetic Wave nerfed:

• from unblockable to blockable
• [minor] has two casts now, but the immobilized duration is the same, which means ele loses out on time.

Cantrips nerfed:

• Cleansing Fire: no longer stun break <—- this is big, after the nerf, Ele struggles to play in the meta because Ele doesn’t have a lot of stability. Ele depends on stun break to deal with stuns/fears/knock)
• Lightning Flash: no longer a stun break, add a little bit damage <—- same above, ANet removed the stunbreaks without giving Ele anymore stability to compensate for it.
• Mist Form: now still get damage from conditions.

Auras nerfed:

• Shocking aura boons duration was halved. It was bugged before and granted double boons duration. <—- this is a bug fix, but it reduced bunker Ele damage significantly because the fury duration is reduced.

Bountiful Power nerfed:

• damage increase per boon reduced from 2% to 1%. Which means on a d/d Ele, damage is reduced on average 6%. <—- another big damage nerf

Mist/Vapor form nerfed:

• no longer contest point
• no longer be able to cast any spell <—- how I hate this. I haven’t used mist form again since. It’s a self stun for 3 seconds now.

Fresh Air nerfed:

• recharge increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds
• Sunspot, Electric Discharge, and Earthen Blast no longer trigger when changing attunements while out of combat. This means you must use another skill to get you into combat before you can use them.

Arcane Wave nerfed:

• [minor] number of target reduced from 6 to 5

Swirling Winds nerfed:

• [minor] no longer destroy unblockable missiles.
  =========

I’m sure I missed other things too. Just have a quick look at the nerfs, and you can see exactly why Ele struggles so much in the current meta:

The current meta is about:

• crowd controls (stun/fear/engi knockback): Ele cantrips got nerfed badly, and without more stability, it’s obvious they can’t handle the meta.
• conditions: Without using the healing skill, Ele can only remove 1 condition per 3 seconds now. If we look at the rate of how fast a Necro/Engi can apply conditions to us, we can see that it’s too slow. Their attempt to add Diamond Skin is… misguided.
• bunkers (warrior/guardians/MM necro/spirit rangers/engi): with its damage got nerfed (except the fresh air build), d/d Ele can hardly kill any competent bunkers anymore. Especially when its auto attack can’t even kill an AFK healing signet warrior in 5 minutes.

Beside that the old enemy: thief, is still pretty strong. With all the healing nerf, Ele can hardly survive a thief burst anymore, since after the burst, the Ele can’t heal back up unless spec’ed full cleric.
=======

If you are one of the people who thinks “Nothing has changed, why did Ele become so bad?” I urged you to read the list of nerfs again. It’s really significant. The buffs ANet gave to glyphs, conjures, etc… are not enough to help Ele coming back.

ronpierce.2760:

I’d put them on a balacing scale, and on the other side I’d put something equally heavy.

Balancing 101

Aye, you just failed balancing 101. When you use a balance scale you can’t just use 2 bodies of equal mass, the moments around the fulcrum are what needs to be equalized.

They need mobility. Revert ride the lightning nerf and ele will once again be a force to be reckoned with!!

piffdaddy.8014:

They need mobility. Revert ride the lightning nerf and ele will once again be a force to be reckoned with!!

I seriously can’t believe people who think this alone will fix Ele.

I mean, really?

Key issues in my opinion:

The Arcana traitline is a bloody mess: there are pretty much only 3 traits there that any WvW/PvP elementalist pick. Those traits are Renewing Stamina, Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana. Either those traits are blantatly overpowered, or the other traits are underpowered. I don’t know which solution is the best to this, but I’d say that this issue should be fixed asap.

Earth Magic lacks a worthwile grandmaster: diamond skin is bad, both in a design and effectiveness standpoint. Just scrap that skill and give Elementalists some real damage-mitigation grandmaster and some grandmaster capable to make Condition Elementalists somewhat viable.

Fire Magic is lacking: why would someone go with fire magic while Air Magic provides better damage and better utility? The main issue in my opinion are 5 and 15 minor traits, which are completely worthless. Other than that, there are some interesting traits there, but most of them are meh. Perhaps, give Fire Magic some blindness capability in order to make it halfway between pure burst and a defensive traitline?

Glyphs are bad: nuff said

Condition Removal outside of Water is mediocre: let’s face that. If you don’t run Ether Renewal + Rock Solid or 30 water, the condition removal is just bad to the point that a single Incendiary Powder proc can bring away almost half of your HP bar. This issue is because of the lowest HP pool in the game which isn’t compensated by the insane evasion uptime of Thieves, nor the incredible condition removal, sustain and blocking of Guardians. Perhaps only pure glass cannons elementalists don’t bring that much of condition removal, I think because they die in a second anyway.

The main problem with balancing eles is that with the smallest tweeks they go from unkillable tanks (d/d a year ago) to completely worthless.

I feel like many of their offencive traits are underpowered while their supportive traits are more about self sustain than actual team support.

I would try to fix it by first adjusting the traits to be better, like how every line has 20% reduction and 10% damage while attuned, those 2 should be mixed with other effects. Then the defencive traits should be reduced and applied more to the party than just the ele. Once the traits get a solid revamp to be in line with the other profs then the numbers on skills can be tweaked a bit.

It is pretty crazy though how much cc all of their options actually have. That’s the main problem with attunements I guess. Maybe scrapping those entirely and add way more weapon sets so that the ele can be more specialized.

Ele is definitely the hardest to balance :/

They don’t need fixing, they are fine. Just get better imo.

Chilli.2976:

They don’t need fixing, they are fine. Just get better imo.

Play a D/x ele in sPvP / tPvP and then tell us again the ele is fine …

You can only play with a full zerker staff , or fresh-air S/x .
But in both cases you arekitten**** hardcountered by a thief on your skill-level.

Also mesmer or Wars can just train you 24/7 and you wont get your job done.

D/x is so useless.
DPS-wise it would be okay, but you will just be focus and die in 2 secs , other professions can just nuke you and go immune while doing so ( warrior ) or stay out of the deadly AEs .

Playing D/x as closepoint def , is meh too, rangers / warrs or even mesmers can do much better.
You cannot kill anything as D/x bunker spec, whereas ranger / war or mesmer can.

So basicly you are reliant on your team helping you, and all you can give back is medicore condi-removal ( if you trait for it ofc . ) – don’t come with protection via aurashare, its freaking bad !

So, I’ll admit from the start that I’ve never played an ele in PvP.

However, I’ve heard a lot of people mention thieves as a hard counter to eles…and as someone who’s primarily played thief, I believe that.

It sounds like, because of this, that the best way to buff eles without breaking them is to buff specifically tools that allow them to compete against their hard counters.

Anet is balancing like this:
Warrior is weak? Okay we buff it!
Now Necro is weak? Okay buff it!
…
Now we have reached Ele… As other said ele was good as it was before. But if you buff everything else, then they become week.
Ele still can deal awesome dmg.
The litte survivability follows stright from the Anet way of balancing.
Ele has lowest hp and lowest armor.
Guess what happens if you buff the dmg of all other clases? Ele becomes a farm victim…

Thats what happend!
How to fix it? Nerf the others… If you add tons of survivability to the ele you are only creating a warrior 2.0

Phantaram.4816:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Phantaram.4816:

If things remain even remotely as close to as tanky as they are, they need to increase elementalist damage outside of Freshi Air. They could do this a number of ways but the easiest is to actually make our auto attacks good outside of air, and improve all of the auto attacks on staff.

This is probably the worst scenario that could happen. This would generate even more power-creep and is overall not a good solution. As you said, the pre-dhuumfire-balance was probably the best we had. If you keep buffing classes the balance will go further away from that state.

Yeah, I agree bringing things down to the ele level is the ultimate solution like I said. However we have to look at it from the perspective of the devs. For them bringing ele up to the level of everything else is much easier and probably the path they are on. So I’ll try to influence making that path as good as possible since the other path we all want is such a longshot.

True . . .

Sunshine.5014:

Let’s look at the context first. I’m gonna list the nerfs/changes that brought ele down:

Evasive Arcana nerfed:

• radius reduced to 180
• effectiveness with healing attribute reduced by 50%
• no longer break knockback (yes, that’s the little known fact people didn’t know. EA was OP because of this). <—- Ele didn’t need much stability because of this. After it is fixed, Ele shows their true weakness to crowd controls.

Healing nerfed:

• Signet of Restoration nerfed 18%. This is planed to be reverted… in a few months.
• Cleaning Water now has an internal cooldown of 3 seconds. This makes Ele critically vulnerable against conditions meta. <—- this took away the main way Ele can deal with conditions.
• Healing Ripple nerfed 50%. The number of targets reduced from infinite to 5. <—- this, together with EA heal nerfed, are why Ele is no longer the immortal bunker.

Ride the Lightning nerfed:

• increased recharge from 15 to 40 seconds if blocked/evaded. <—- A lot of people complain about this, but I don’t think it’s as significant as the survivability nerfed mentioned above.
• reduced range from 1550 to 1200

Magnetic Wave nerfed:

• from unblockable to blockable
• [minor] has two casts now, but the immobilized duration is the same, which means ele loses out on time.

Cantrips nerfed:

• Cleansing Fire: no longer stun break <—- this is big, after the nerf, Ele struggles to play in the meta because Ele doesn’t have a lot of stability. Ele depends on stun break to deal with stuns/fears/knock)
• Lightning Flash: no longer a stun break, add a little bit damage <—- same above, ANet removed the stunbreaks without giving Ele anymore stability to compensate for it.
• Mist Form: now still get damage from conditions.

Auras nerfed:

• Shocking aura boons duration was halved. It was bugged before and granted double boons duration. <—- this is a bug fix, but it reduced bunker Ele damage significantly because the fury duration is reduced.

Bountiful Power nerfed:

• damage increase per boon reduced from 2% to 1%. Which means on a d/d Ele, damage is reduced on average 6%. <—- another big damage nerf

Mist/Vapor form nerfed:

• no longer contest point
• no longer be able to cast any spell <—- how I hate this. I haven’t used mist form again since. It’s a self stun for 3 seconds now.

Fresh Air nerfed:

• recharge increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds
• Sunspot, Electric Discharge, and Earthen Blast no longer trigger when changing attunements while out of combat. This means you must use another skill to get you into combat before you can use them.

Arcane Wave nerfed:

• [minor] number of target reduced from 6 to 5

Swirling Winds nerfed:

• [minor] no longer destroy unblockable missiles.
  =========

I’m sure I missed other things too. Just have a quick look at the nerfs, and you can see exactly why Ele struggles so much in the current meta:

The current meta is about:

• crowd controls (stun/fear/engi knockback): Ele cantrips got nerfed badly, and without more stability, it’s obvious they can’t handle the meta.
• conditions: Without using the healing skill, Ele can only remove 1 condition per 3 seconds now. If we look at the rate of how fast a Necro/Engi can apply conditions to us, we can see that it’s too slow. Their attempt to add Diamond Skin is… misguided.
• bunkers (warrior/guardians/MM necro/spirit rangers/engi): with its damage got nerfed (except the fresh air build), d/d Ele can hardly kill any competent bunkers anymore. Especially when its auto attack can’t even kill an AFK healing signet warrior in 5 minutes.

Beside that the old enemy: thief, is still pretty strong. With all the healing nerf, Ele can hardly survive a thief burst anymore, since after the burst, the Ele can’t heal back up unless spec’ed full cleric.
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If you are one of the people who thinks “Nothing has changed, why did Ele become so bad?” I urged you to read the list of nerfs again. It’s really significant. The buffs ANet gave to glyphs, conjures, etc… are not enough to help Ele coming back.

You forgot 2 major nerfs:

Elemental attunement from adept to master tier.
Cleansing wave from adept to master tier

Five major problems:
- Chill: this condition does not work efficiently where Elementalist is has predisposition for this condition. Chill MUST be reworked. Instead of slowing movement it would work as the inverse of Quickness, by reducing the action speed by 50% (—> this is a conclusion after testing a lot of chill based-build on Ele and Necro).

- Conjured weapon: conjuring weapon is not natural in the action, it is a pre-emptive action. So they are ineffective during combat or not as effective as they should be. Either conjuring should add a secondary AoE effect on landing + Combo Finisher “Blast” at the location the weapon is conjured (e.g Fire: Burn+KB, Lightning: Thunder+Stun, Earth: Bleed+Root, Water: Poison+Chill) OR you allow conjured weapon to be swapped (with the condition to have only one weapon backed up at the time). Beyond that, Frost bow skills must be 1200, not 900; water arrow need to go much much faster (as fast as Ranger’s longbow n#1 skill). Without this change, Ele have 4 unusable skills in sPvP.

- Glyph of Renewal is clearly a design mistake (total useless utility: 5). Why? There is no secondary effect between the 165s of CD. Hence, this skill should be either a Signet or something extraordinary should happen when you revive someone.

- Now Focus Fire does not work at all. While it is a defensive weapon, it should deal significant damage by defending. So Flame wall have to be replaced by something like Warriors’ Combusting shot. Basically, large area of damage that eat you slowly by applying you burning should the opponent want to fight the Ele while is he “defending himself actively”. Fire Shield should be changed by the addition of weakness (5s) whenever a enemy strikes, on a lower cooldown (25 instead of 40s).

- Dragon Tooth, Shatter Stone, Ice Spike and Eruption must be either incremental, i.e you take immediate damage but damage scale the more you stay inside the area of effect, OR these skills would be coupled with an activation skill. What I mean is, I trigger Dragon Tooth, a second icon appears (name it “Bite”), the Dragon tooth is immediatly applied. There could be penalty like for instance the CD of dragon tooth would be increased by 20% if the skill is immediately activated, or the damage would be based on the number of second dragon tooth take to execute.

IMHO based on the aforementioned changes, Ele would be in much much better position.

Peace

i think anet cant balance ele correctly anymore.. the history of ele and warrior has shown the fundamentl issue with the current engine.

the problem of this engine are the traits and how they interact. u can sum up the traits that they either are +-dmg, -recharge, +boon or condi, -condi/duration, +stat or activate a skill. all traits are stacking the effects. no trait changes fundamental how some skills work.

that leads to a state that either some traits/skills alone are bad and needs to maxed out to be effectiv (traps as example) or that traits/skills alone are actual pretty good but stacked with others provide to much on the table.

the balance then usually regarding traits leads to a move of that trait or by reducing the effectivity of that trait. that leads either to the slowly state that more and more adepttraits are useless and more and more master or grandmastertraits competing against each other or that the single trait alone isnt good anymore without the old additional traits.

that balancing effort hurts build diversity alot. and on the same time birth always new abnormal overperforming builds, when anet was buffing traits or skills to a normal level viewed in a isolated state.

with this in mind and anet improves the survibility of eles, we sure can see a new bunkerbuild that overperforms. the intention isnt wrong to higher the survibility on esp dmg eles, but the engine isnt made for that.

im pretty sure on ranger u can see the future. that nearly all builds need 30 points in a traitline with a lot competing mastertraits and a lot of useless adepttraits.

the engine needs a exklusive order function on traits, where other traits arent usable in certain combination of traits or amuletts or stats or the efficiency is reduced if used in combination. the engine needs to support all mathematic and logic operations between traits, skills and stats to provide optimal balancing and build diversity.
without that we will be sometime in rangerland and have a couple of stable builds with a lot of useless traits and skills.

until the engine got changed im pretty sure we will always have after every balancingpatch bad traits, bad skills and overperforming combinations figured out by some players. the current warrior builds are a good example.. anet was buffing some skills and traits in a isolated view, what isnt exaclty wrong if u doesnt use them all together. i think that will happen again.

after all i cant understand the buffs they did to warrior. either they dont understand theyre own engine or they had that builds in mind and was thinking that is not op.

I think I’d keep them the same and just make them medium health pool characters.

i posted this some time ago and that would be a good start

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dec-10th-Balance-Preview-Updated-Nov-6th/page/4#post3133942

air II only works during air attunment
earth I only works during earth attunment

i suggest changing this to attunment independet.

So this posts just a little bit old but I’d like to mention a sort of hidden nerf.

Evasive Arcana used to proc Healing Signet 2-3 times (3 times in earth twice in the other attunements) for whatever reason. It also proced confusion. Evasive Arcana no longer procs either of them. Hurl on Scepter also proced healing signet and confusion 5 times now only once.

This was the cause of every single ele using it for a long while. You could just make sure you did a dodge every time you swapped attunements and it was about 500-750 healing every time. You had to be super careful with confusion back then but yeah you get the idea.

Really if you think about it, if people would have utilized all of the healing ele really had at its disposal at release even zerker eles would have been extremely hard to kill lol.