Guild Wars 2

I dont know about you guys, but I think something would be a lot smoother if certain traits werent locked in to the one attunement.

For instance, Piercing Shards really only brings up water damage to a good level compared to other attunements, but it makes more sense that these types of traits take effect to the elementalist in whole.

The ones like Internal fire and Air training are kind of annoying, we are already limited to one set of weapons and we HAVE to swap attunements, there’s no reason to stay in one attunement for 100% of the time and by not taking these types of traits we get shafted.

We are supposed to be masters of the elements, not good with this 1 kinda kitty with the rest.

I took a huge break a few months after the game was released and when I came back, the traits still stick out as kind of messy.

p.s What are elementalists supposed to do in pvp? I honestly havent found anything thats remotely fun. Do no damage, cant tank damage for kitten, its odd that i enjoy pve more than pvp, this doesnt happen.

from what i heard, piercing shards is useless if u arent using conjures, awesome if u do

if they would add all dmg modifiers for all attunements including piercing shards, that would be op.

The elementalist have by FAR FAR FAR the most numerous damage modifier of the game. Even if you don’t take into account all the damage modifier specific to 1 attunement you can get 93% damage modifier.

I don’t think it would be op, we have lower hp to balance it

Wanna hear a funny story? The title is Lingering Elements.
Don’t laugh yet, wait, it’s worth reading.

The story takes place a few month before the last “big” balance patch.

Since the release of the game the developers had been messing around with the Lingering Elements trait, nerfing it, breaking it, fixing it, rebreaking it … it simply never work as described, it never worked as the devs admitted it to work, it was just broken and close to useless. Yet, this trait is placed in what used to be a compulsory trait line. In that line is also located Arcane Precision, an other broken trait. Both are minor traits, so no way to pick something less broken and more useful instead.

For many months we reported these issues to the developers and nothing happened. They kept claiming to have “fixed” Lingering Elements, repeatedly, but this was not true. This is why the elementalist community decided that enough was enough. We started a thread in which we intensively called for Anet’s attention. The thread has been heavily moderated and we all got many infraction points in this struggle. But this was a just cause.

Many many times I made suggestions to improve this trait. I believe my most sensible suggestion was to make the mechanic of Lingering Elements natural to the class: all attunement bonuses would linger for a brief time after swapping out. When I mean all bonuses I really mean all, not just the adept minors like it is now. Then I suggested that the Lingering Elements trait could simply extend the lingering duration. So this would mean that all build would be able to use attunement specific bonuses like Piercing shards in other attunements, to some extent. I felt this would be a good suggestion because it would allow us to play with the elements. It would feel right for an ele.

Finally the devs cared for us a little bit. The 10/12 patch arrived. In the patch discussion thread we started an interesting conversation with Jon Peters about lingering elements. You can find the beginning of the discussion here. Needless to say I was not the only one utterly shocked by the way this conversation went. Let me give you a little abstract of what we learned from the devs in that occasion:
- They had never read any of our very numerous suggestion and discussion threads on the topic.
- They couldn’t even do basic maths: we have 70 trait points to allocate, which means we can not reach a 50% damage bonus from attunement specific damage modifiers. Never! At best we can do 40%, if the target has vulnerability.
- They said that the stacking of damage modifiers would be overpowered. However this is exactly what we do in PvE. Is the ele overpowered in PvE? Well that’s a good question, but the point is that the devs have no clue about what is going on in PvE.
- They failed to understand that stacking damage modifiers by swapping attunements comes at a huge cost: to stack three attuements’ modifiers you need to swap twice, the swapping cooldown is 1.65s, so that’s 3.3s wasted on just swapping, which allows you to use the stacked modifiers for 5 – 3.3 = 1.7 seconds at best !!! And this would work only every 13s (attunement cooldown). So we could do this famous “massive damage in a single attack” that manifesto promised us, at the expense of a bad spec, 2 attunement cooldown, with obvious telegraph (swapping) and long cooldown.

“Overpowered” they said.

Edit: they also admitted that our adept minor traits need work. Still waiting.
Edit2: for extra fun, look at the tooltip for lingering elements in-game
Oh and since I am delivering personal messages, I might as well add: Jon we told you that Ember’s might (+25% burn duration) would not be used. Maybe it is time you start listening to the people who actually play the class. With all due respect.

@Zelyhn, you could make a feature film out of that story. God kitten .

@everyone else so far:

I get what you are saying abut eles having lots of damage modifiers and that would be OP, but the thing about balancing is doesnt come in one big step, and it really seems that arena net arent even taking steps.

From the next patch our cantrips are going to be stronger, but they are already in our core pvp build that focuses around water anyway.

This game was supposed to have that “play what you want to play and it will work!” And obviously that was never going to be 100% true, but it shouldnt be how bad it is now

They could merge windborne dagger, Blasting Staff and Vigorous Sceptor into 1 trait and free up 2 spots for new traits. Which could break to Ele dependency on cantrips and open up build variety.

Julie Yann.5379:

They could merge windborne dagger, Blasting Staff and Vigorous Sceptor into 1 trait and free up 2 spots for new traits. Which could break to Ele dependency on cantrips and open up build variety.

Thats actually a really great idea. I mean, we are limited to one weapon set, whats really the harm?

Julie Yann.5379:

They could merge windborne dagger, Blasting Staff and Vigorous Sceptor into 1 trait and free up 2 spots for new traits. Which could break to Ele dependency on cantrips and open up build variety.

Too op!!!!!!

PSX.9250:

Julie Yann.5379:

They could merge windborne dagger, Blasting Staff and Vigorous Sceptor into 1 trait and free up 2 spots for new traits. Which could break to Ele dependency on cantrips and open up build variety.

Too op!!!!!!

What about it makes it OP? It’s the same thing we already have now except in 1 trait. So if you change weapons on the go like I do in WvW then you don’t have to change the trait to match it. You are only benefiting from one bonus at a time anyway.

Julie Yann.5379:

PSX.9250:

Julie Yann.5379:

They could merge windborne dagger, Blasting Staff and Vigorous Sceptor into 1 trait and free up 2 spots for new traits. Which could break to Ele dependency on cantrips and open up build variety.

Too op!!!!!!

What about it makes it OP? It’s the same thing we already have now except in 1 trait. So if you change weapons on the go like I do in WvW then you don’t have to change the trait to match it. You are only benefiting from one bonus at a time anyway.

Whoosh.