Guild Wars 2

My girlfriend has recently lost interest in the Ele because it keeps getting power to its “battlemage” build but nothing to the “ranged magic caster” playstyle.
She feels that the class is currently somewhat weak with staff and a lot more efficient with D/D.
I somewhat agree as in my experience I’ve never once died to a staff Ele but melee Eles are actually quite challenging, even after you learn all their tricks.

So how do other Eles feel about this?
Would you enjoy the class more if it was better off ranged (say, getting more snares and damage to staff) but somewhat worse in melee?
Or maybe Ele should stay like this, and a new future class should fit the ranged magic caster archetype?
She also thinks Ele should be king of AoE (which is currently a hot subject), what’s your take on this?
We believe that if Staff needs to be weak 1vs1 it needs to at least make up for it with AoE.

Please post your opinion and elaborate if you wish.

It has already been stated prior to release, that ranged dmg will be always inferior to mele dmg in terms of overall efficiency, said so it’s still possible to pull out quite big numbers from distance , but normally you’ll pay a huge price in survivability if maining an ele..

Basically if you use zerker staff ele , you’ll bring very huge numbers to the battefield, but you’ll have to watch carefully your position otherwise you’ll get one-shotted..just your typical glass cannon mage archetype.

Almost the same if you go s/d zerker , even though you’ll have definetely more survivabilitycompared to staff, you can still be easily one-shotted by basically anything.

I’m fine the way the ele is now, I enjoy the fast paced combat of d/d ( of course I never play bunker) and when I feel like, I use s/d zerker for some huge numbers ( 4k lightning strike and 3k arc-lightning).

The staff simply need better snare skills, the only decent one is frozen ground with its instant activation, while unsteady ground is a failure of design( 1s cripple for each second..basically you won’t snare your target at all as he will keep coming to you as nothing has ever happened) and gust/shockwave with an useless ground targeting

And finally dragon’s tooth/phoenix which need to see their activatio delay shortened, while shatterstone must allow the user to keep attacking rather than stopping you from using water auto-attacks for 2s

Staff Eles suffer in SPvP because most of their power attacks are ground targeted and extremely easy to avoid. I mean if you had to sit in AOE of a Berserker staff Ele you’re going to literally be roasted. The damage is there, the ability to reliably land it is not. Even using tools like our snare fields it’s still all a very risky proposition.

Defensively the issue is that a lot of the cool downs are on ridiculously long timers compared to other classes. For example a Guardian has a skill that adds X seconds of stability/protection and Elementalist has the same but is on nearly twice the cool down. There are a lot of instances like that where the Eles utility cool downs are just kittenedly long despite being identical to other classes which makes going full on DPS spec all that much harder because you don’t have the utility to back it up.

The few instances where you can do it is in WvW where you usually have a crowd of people taking up the target pool letting you use utility Cantrip skills for a bit of survival while still going full on DPS to wreck faces.

Personally I’ll never play the Ele as a melee. After making many classes to 80 the melee Elementalist still pales in comparison to just a flat out Warrior. I naturally don’t expect people to agree with that statement, but in my experience it simply is.