Guild Wars 2

I sat down and thought about each gw2 class so far and out of them all ele seems to be the most boring non standout class at the moment.
Let me explain. Yeah the concept of switching elements is cool and looks sexy at first.But after playing more classes you just realise that in the end is just another form of delivering what every class delivers at base line! at least currently.
Attunement swapping is something YOU do and its the way YOU percieve the game when playing on your ele. Your teammates dont care whether you switched from air to fire and did a combo to burst.All they care is that you did a cc and bursted which every class can do.Now count the amount of ccs,mobility and burst skills we have,add their cooldown on the equation and you see that 20 skills arent that impressive at all!
Now if you accept that the main mechanic is actually a gimmick that does little to alter the result of your actual actions,what are you left with?
(lets pretend that staff doesnt exist!it really doesnt exist in pvp at least )
The class cannot stealth or port like a thief. It cannot offer anywhere near the utility of shadowtrap or shadowrefugee and play the mind games a thief does.
It cannot offer party wide effects such as quickness,stability (earth trait is a joke with its range),burn or prot on hits etc
It doesnt have any important field apart from fire,while the most effective engi builds can have WATER ,SMOKE, light and poison at the same time!
It doesnt excell in mobility or cc and is very far away from having a condition build.
The only utilities that were ever non pure crap were selfish effects or pure damage boring skills.
Where are things like portal,spirits,elixir R , illusion of life, corrupt boon,stand your ground etc etc The list is huge. In comparison ele gets crappy signets,crappy glyphs with selfish effects aswell,semi decent selfish cantrips and pure damage arcanes with some minor utility added as blast finishers (wtf??)
Where are the game changing elites?
In the end its just a very straightforward class with mediocre versatily at best hindered by the inability to weaponswap and adjust its range.
Its also one of the most predictable classes in the game due to the nature of att swap cooldowns and base rotations to pull off your damage.An ele simple doesnt have options in the fight.He just goes to attunement does a few skills and leaves the attunement in the same pattern over and over again (exclude perhaps fresh air builds)
The skills although flashy are boring and basic and any kind of pure support it has always been based on the traits elem attunement,evasive arcana and the whole water line! and its now nerfed to not having any worthwile effect in pvp due to abudance of condi spam
There i got it out of me and feel lighter !! And wow it was longer than i though

I agree with most of these sentiments. I’m just glad I mained an ele, because I feel like it’s the hardest class to play due to it excelling at nothing, therefore you have to be good at everything. That’s why I mained it though, because it looked hard to play.

Every other class is WAY easier to play, largely because their skills aren’t half as effective. It’s also nice that every other class doesn’t get caught in a situation where they have to lock themselves out of using skills that aren’t on cooldown in order to remain efficient in combat.

Ele’s do have an excellent damage build for PvE in berserker lightning hammer. Staff is excellent in WvW as well. In PvP nothing stands out as meta worthy to me. However, having two good builds to play off of is better than none.

It’s weird because I find myself frustrated with Ele sometimes as well but I can’t seem to shelf it and reroll. I don’t even have any alts. For some reason I can’t bring myself to play any other class.

Shockwave.1230:

I agree with most of these sentiments. I’m just glad I mained an ele, because I feel like it’s the hardest class to play due to it excelling at nothing, therefore you have to be good at everything. That’s why I mained it though, because it looked hard to play.

Every other class is WAY easier to play, largely because their skills aren’t half as effective. It’s also nice that every other class doesn’t get caught in a situation where they have to lock themselves out of using skills that aren’t on cooldown in order to remain efficient in combat.

Ele’s do have an excellent damage build for PvE in berserker lightning hammer. Staff is excellent in WvW as well. In PvP nothing stands out as meta worthy to me. However, having two good builds to play off of is better than none.

Engi would like a word with you…

Machiavel.6042:

Engi would like a word with you…

I chose engie as my second, and while they have a lot of skills to use, they aren’t all underwhelming. In fact, most engie skills are very effective, and each kit is a viable weapon-set on its own. Engi has true versatility, and you don’t really know what any one is going to do until fighting for a bit. While the engie might take nearly as much work as the ele, it is way more effective for what it does.

i’d liketo adress the title and then the thread
thread first, yes.. there’s no outstanding reason why elem needed to be nerfed into the ground.. but it was, and also it’s a very needlessly clumsy profession in this game

as for the title, yuh huh elems are interesting
sadly, they are a classic spellcaster
it is a game character that will have variations throughout time
ArenaNet seems to have gotten bored with their version and simply like to —-- all over it
hypothetically, if gw3 came out and they had their way.. elem would be discontinued, if not put in as a laughing stock.. though, it’s well on its way in gw2

For me, it’s the combo fields that make it interesting and versatile. If you’re in Air, do you go Fire→Earth for burning/might, or Earth→Fire for vulnerabilty/might? Or do you rather give your team swiftness so they can dodge stuff more easily? Where do you place your fields? To maximize your effects or your team’s? What kind of elemental do you call with your glyph? What kind of finishers does your team have? Etc.

Avead.5760:

I sat down and thought about each gw2 class so far and out of them all ele seems to be the most boring non standout class at the moment.
Let me explain. Yeah the concept of switching elements is cool and looks sexy at first.But after playing more classes…Attunement swapping is something YOU do and its the way YOU percieve the game when playing on your ele. Your teammates dont care whether you switched from air to fire and did a combo to burst.All they care is that you did a cc and bursted…Now count the amount of ccs,mobility and burst skills we have,add their cooldown on the equation and you see that 20 skills arent that impressive at all!
Now if you accept that the main mechanic is actually a gimmick that does little to alter the result of your actual actions,what are you left with?
(lets pretend that staff doesnt exist!it really doesnt exist in pvp at least )…It cannot offer party wide effects such as quickness,stability (earth trait is a joke with its range),burn or prot on hits etc
It doesnt have any important field apart from fire,…It doesnt excell in mobility or cc and is very far away from having a condition build.
The only utilities that were ever non pure crap were selfish effects or pure damage boring skills…ele gets crappy signets,crappy glyphs with selfish effects aswell,semi decent selfish cantrips and pure damage arcanes with some minor utility added as blast finishers (wtf??)
Where are the game changing elites?
In the end its just a very straightforward class with mediocre versatily at best hindered by the inability to weaponswap and adjust its range…An ele simple doesnt have options in the fight.He just goes to attunement does a few skills and leaves the attunement in the same pattern over and over again (exclude perhaps fresh air builds)
The skills although flashy are boring and basic and any kind of pure support it has always been based on the traits elem attunement,evasive arcana and the whole water line! and its now nerfed to not having any worthwile effect in pvp due to abudance of condi spam
There i got it out of me and feel lighter !! And wow it was longer than i though

lmfao, I edited your post and left out everything other classes can do because I don’t care what they do lol. That concerns me none in the least and why should it? What is left is basically proof that you do not know how to play an ele. You have obviously done your book learning, but besides that, nothing of merit. Go solo some camps in Wvw or solo any but one champ in the game, hes impossible, in Pve, or provide artillery support for your favorite group in Wvw and then come back and talk to us, after you have learned to play the class.

^Thats the thing ..you dont know or care about what the other classes can do.You cant really have an opinion if you cant properly compare .
Not only that but you tell me to go solo camps in wvw and pve ?!? to learn to play the class?I have 1.5 k hours on the class and most of them have ben in pvp against people that know their classes in and out.There you HAVE to know what each class is capable of cause there arent noobs in low gear to farm ..
Dude..come on im pretty sure i know how to play ele and this post was not intended for the pve or wvw community at all.I dont give a kitten about those

As a matter of fact the only weapon i find interesting on ele is staff and that unfortunately only works in large encounters so only wvw..Thats why i excluded it from my post.Its actually a really good utlitity support weapon and not 1 dimensional at all..Too bad it doesnt work for where im interested in

You miss the point. Whether or not something is interesting, your post title, has nothing to do with anything else. If I see a girl, I may or may not find her interesting. I don’t care what other girls look like or what they do or do not do or what anyone else thinks. The relationship is between me and the girl. Between me and my elementalist in this case.

So, Mr. 1500 hours, if you find the class uninteresting , tell us why you have played and continue to play after so long. Let’s hear some truth here instead of what you brought into the forums in its place.

P.S. Spoiler for free. Btw, I solo supply camps with a staff lol. It is by far the easiest way for me.

Baladir.2736:

You miss the point. Whether or not something is interesting, your post title, has nothing to do with anything else. If I see a girl, I may or may not find her interesting. I don’t care what other girls look like or what they do or do not do or what anyone else thinks. The relationship is between me and the girl. Between me and my elementalist in this case.

So, Mr. 1500 hours, if you find the class uninteresting , tell us why you have played and continue to play after so long. Let’s hear some truth here instead of what you brought into the forums in its place.

Well to me something interesting is something that promotes intelligent gameplay that gives you a lot of ways to engage an objective.
I keep playing the class because im used to it by now. But how much complexity of the ele is actually true and not a gimmick that artificially makes basic things difficult for you?
I dont know..
I find the class mechanic and the 16 base att cooldown actually limiting eles options in fight promoting predictable rotations and little reaction.You are forced to rotate out of your attunement cause your dps drops dramatically ,you are locked of your skills the moment you need them which leads to spammy gameplay and your method of attacking or sustaining yourself is pretty basic with straightforward attacks or straight healing.Theres a reason everybody runs with 30 in arcana ..
And how many of eles utilities are actually worthwile?They are all boring to me compared to what other classes have in terms of affecting something more than yourself..in pvp of course!In pve even the crappy glyph of storms in earth could be usefull etc
edit:its not that hard to solo campl.. Go climb the soloq ladder beyond 200 or even 100 instead for a challenge:P

Basically they need to increase the benefit of staying in earth and water by a lot.Atm you need to go out of those attunements asap if you want to mantain good uptime of prot and regen.You also cant stay in fire for long cause autoattacks in both scepter and dagger suck so only air is an att you want to stay in.
If autoattacks werent that crappy maybe people would intelligently switch attunements to adapt and not to keep a decent amount of dps and boons.
Its contradicting ..you have to swap but you cant know if you will need the skills you leave a moment later.In the end you swap anyway and most of the times spamming those skills in an attempt to not waste anything before you regain access to taht attunement.

cheshirefox.7026:

i’ve logged 2500+ hours on the elem, mostly staff -_-
your analogy is completely moot.. if the elem performs significantly lesser than the other professions, and it does, then “appreciating it more or finding it interesting” isn’t going to correct the current state of it..

you missed the point of the opening post entirely

is elementalist interesting as in viable
was the elementalist so interesting as to be singled out from the other professions that it had to be nerfed into oblivion

Yay !interesting was more aimed as having a reason to bother with it.
But i do feel that the gameplay at core has issues that makes the class play a lot less strategically that it could thus making it less “interesting”
Maybe im burned out

yes, it has become straight forward. I remember when it used to be much more challenging. And, there was a time we thought combo fields would be much more necessary to an outcome, Cc much more useful. Not that knowing any class well isn’t useful. I don’t know how many pugs you have been in recently Some are pretty helpless. But, anything in the game is expendalbe and unneccessary. The loss of the trinity.

I still play d/d because I can’t find anything else I have enjoyed as much. This class may or may not be for you. Every class seems to have an achilles heal. For mesmers it is condition damage, necros it is stability and for certain builds in other classes its another thing. The only thing about an elementalist is power and condition damage builds are an achilles heal to us. We are on par with most classes in 1v1, but in wvw situations we are almost always focused down first and 2v1 has become almost impossible now because of our lack of mobilty. Healing isn’t the problem; it is our escape mechanics that help us live. That being said, we excel in small group fights and zergs (going staff), are average in 1v1, but 1 versus many is almost nonexistent.

every class on every forum has the same posts about how bad their class is. Go look. Every single one. I will continue to play the elementalist because I enjoy the class and I am above average at it. I think the reason no one likes this class is because all I ever see is staff ele’s roaming around. Please quit.

Avead.5760:

(lets pretend that staff doesnt exist!it really doesnt exist in pvp at least )
The class cannot stealth or port like a thief. It cannot offer anywhere near the utility of shadowtrap or shadowrefugee and play the mind games a thief does.
It cannot offer party wide effects such as quickness,stability

Duh? I mean, lets “pretend” a pistol and shortbow don’t exist. Then you take away a lot of a thief’s executions for combo fields as well. You can’t judge an entire class by “pretending” a weapon isn’t there. I get that you’re saying the staff is the only important weapon, which is true in group play. But I know people that play with s/d or even d/d like myself sometimes and it is still a very fun class.

It just depends on playstyle. Though, even with a d/d build, we almost have to have 30 in water and arcane still. Our trait lines are messed up.

@OP I see now where you were coming from. I popped into the Spvp forums and read this post

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/An-Elementalist-s-frustration/first#post2661968

and now also better understand your comment, “Go climb the soloq ladder beyond 200 or even 100 instead for a challenge:P”

Your post in that thread and the posts of other eles, and the consensus of the community on ele’s, in SPvp, TPvp are clear.

But, I don’t do that lol.