Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer I do not believe that the Elementalist is severely underpowered at the moment, I just wish to highlight what I believe are the shortcomings/difficulties of this profession and provide suggestions for areas I think could be improved.

What is an Elementalist and how do I play one?

Most of this post will be PvP oriented but for anyone looking for an overview of the profession, here’s a few notes.

Serious Problems.

Downed state. We are currently the only free kill. Everyone knows this is an issue, and there are many ways to fix it.

Elite Skills. I’d honestly rather have another utility slot, and I don’t even like most of our utilities.

Weapon Skills

Anyone who’s so much as glanced at the Ele’s weapon skills has most likely noticed that theme for mainhand weapons is range and survival vs. damage for offhand weapons. I’ve played around with each weapon set and have found that it’s easy to become greedy and always want to swap/tweak one or two skills to better fit your build.
The fact of the matter is that we have 20 weapon skills and each set should bring plenty to fit just about any play style.
One issue: Focus Fire attunement #4. This is the only skill I consider useless, mainly due to it’s CD being too long and it not fitting in to the survival theme of focus.

Utility Skills

Herein lies what I consider to be the most overlooked issue with the Elementalist, and the main contributor to the feeling the PvP Eles are pigeonholed into a support/tank role. At first glance everything seems ok, but after playing around with different skills a noticeable trend arises: there is a vast difference in the utility that our utility skills bring.

We, like everyone else, have 5 different types of utility skills: Signet, Glyph, Cantrip, Arcane, and Conjure. Each type offers 4 different skills, for a total of 20 utility skills. I consider Glyphs and Conjures to be entirely useless, and Arcane skills to be viable but not as helpful as either Signets or Cantrips. Also, before traits Cantrips are easily the best skills (for PvP).
This issue stems from the low base survivability of the Elementalist, which requires us to pick up defensive abilities to avoid being blown out of the water. Thus, many players gravitate towards the most defensive utility skills, Cantrips. In addition, all four of our stun breaks exist as Cantrips, more or less requiring all but the most coordinated Eles to have at least 1 Cantrips.

Conjure skills in their current format do nothing more than take up space on our toolbar, for maybe 3-5 different skill casts every 60s. We already have 20 weapon skills, so unless those 5 new conjured skills are offer something overwhelming, I’ll just stick with Mist Form.

Glyphs, ah glyphs. Aside from Glyph of Renewal, which is a laughable skill after its recent change, most glyphs look like fun, powerful skills from their descriptions. Then you try using them. It’s not that they’re terrible skills, especially when traited, we just have better options. Glyph of Storms does mediocre damage that is easily surpassed by wielding a staff; I’d much rather use a crit-proc weapon sigil over Glyph of Elemental Power; and Glyph of Lesser Elementals only gives us a squishy boost to damage for a short while. I don’t think that Glyphs need a redesign, they just need to pack a bigger punch before I start using them.

When I first looked at Arcane skills I immediately began salivating over the potential of these as guaranteed crits to proc added affects in addition to their great burst damage. Well, that’s not the way the world works. I believe (could be wrong) that currently the most used arcane skill in Arcane Wave, just for it’s use as a blast finisher. These skills offer pathetic damage for their CDs, and crit-procs in GW2 just aren’t powerful enough to justify them for that reason. I personally wish that they just offered more damage.

I don’t have much to say about Signets and Cantrips, except that it’d be nice if we could get a stun breaker moved from Cleansing Fire to something else.

Traits

Overall, I think that our traits are in a good-but-not-great place. This again connects back to our poor base health/armor, “forcing” many Elementalist players into the Earth, Water, and Arcane trait lines. There are plenty of good traits in these lines, with excellent effects and synergy. However, these lines promote a similar playstyle and that leads to the pigeonholing into tank/support builds.

Additionally, the fire trait line kinda stinks and it promotes sitting in fire attunement, which blatantly contradicts many other Elementalist mechanics. If the Elementalist had better innate survivability, and a damage-based trait line that was up to snuff I think we’d see many more damage-based Eles around, and it might even lead to new and exciting builds.
As a psuedoside-note, I’d like to put in that I’d like to see many of Fire’s traits replaced with new (and useful….) Conjured Weapon based abilities.

Well, I could probably go on but I think I’ve said enough for now. Hopefully this post offered some new insight to help solve the Elementalist riddle.

If you’re curious about my background as an Ele, click here.

I have to agree with most of this.
The only real useful arcane trait I find for me personally is currently arcane power. This is because I’m a dagger/dagger elementalist and I can cast arcane power later in the churning earth cast doing massive AoE damage. This is the only real reason that I actually use churning earth.

However the people I’m in PvP against don’t seem to have learned to interrupt or dodge so churning earth is still semi useful. I find I actually get interrupted more in PvE by enemies than in PvP.

Much of the elementalist could be made extremely viable by changing some animation times and tweaks to utility skills, elite skills and traits.

But our downed and underwater combat is ridiculous

Burrfish.6408:

Glyphs, ah glyphs. Aside from Glyph of Renewal, which is a laughable skill after its recent change, most glyphs look like fun, powerful skills from their descriptions. Then you try using them. It’s not that they’re terrible skills, especially when traited, we just have better options. Glyph of Storms does mediocre damage that is easily surpassed by wielding a staff; I’d much rather use a crit-proc weapon sigil over Glyph of Elemental Power; and Glyph of Lesser Elementals only gives us a squishy boost to damage for a short while. I don’t think that Glyphs need a redesign, they just need to pack a bigger punch before I start using them.

I personally don’t use glyphs, only the healing glyph and elite. The utilities you got me at cantrips. My friend runs a support/tank build and he uses Glyph of Renewal (heal), Glyph of lesser ele, Glyph of storms and some sort of stun break as well as Glyph of greater ele (elite).
Glyph of Lesser ele and Greater ele are very good when summoned in ice/water. The ice pet adds not much damage, but it puts down a chill field and heals allies. If you summon both pets, one will drop a chill field then the other will after the first field has finished.
Glyph of storms we viewed as crap, but, in earth the storm will do damage and blind every second it is up, helping to get rid of a large amount of damage from the opposing team.

Burrfish.6408:

When I first looked at Arcane skills I immediately began salivating over the potential of these as guaranteed crits to proc added affects in addition to their great burst damage. Well, that’s not the way the world works. I believe (could be wrong) that currently the most used arcane skill in Arcane Wave, just for it’s use as a blast finisher. These skills offer pathetic damage for their CDs, and crit-procs in GW2 just aren’t powerful enough to justify them for that reason. I personally wish that they just offered more damage.

I use the arcane skills when using a glass cannon dps build. Usually I ride the lightning in, casting scepter 2, 3 and arcane wave, arcane blast at the same time, then arcane power and let the not 5 crits roll in. You need to do this on an unaware foe, or you will miss with 4 skills to his dodge lol, this has happened to me

Edit: I should mention that we both do pvp, his build is the same in both pve and pvp and I only run my ele in pvp.

Agreed with pretty much all of this.

And I agree with Toxification. Another problem we face are the obvious bugs, and animation times. Dragon’s Tooth would be an excellent skill… if people couldn’t walk (not dodge) away from it. Stuff like that holds us back.

The other problem? Bugs. Too many of them, and some traits are completely broken and don’t work at all. Silly.

@TGSlasher

I’m glad that you and your friend enjoy your builds, I’m all about playing with builds that have their own unique flavor. As far as your buddy’s glyph build goes, does he have a problem only using Lesser/Greater Elementals in water and Storms in earth? I’ve thought about using these skills for exactly those reasons, but I feel like I’m forced to be in a certain attunement before I use them… I wish they were more useful for builds that aren’t tank/support.

And in general, I didn’t touch on bugs because they are obvious flaws that need to be fixed, and in time I trust that they will.