Guild Wars 2

In essence, if one is playing elementalist, the fire attunement will occupy a vast 70% majority of one’s time, but I am curious as to why arenanet has yet to comprehend the extremely poor consequences of such game design?

There exists 4 elements, and even if a player has tossed all their traits into a specific element, no single element should be our main focus for more than 40% of the time. Incidentally, it is even the 15th trait bonus that gives you an effect whenever you attune back into a trait you’ve spend more than 15 points on, and therefore if you’re not trying to abuse that by constantly switching elements then something is clearly off. While most players that are spending too much time in fire trait and not in any other trait are obviously and clearly playing elementalists wrongly, I cannot help but question whether or not arenanet is also not addressing the simple and obvious fact that the traits are simply not well balanced compared to each other.

Damage is a good thing, but utility can be just as useful given the right circumstances; this is why elementalists had the weapon swap taken away and instead reimbursed with the four elemental attunements. If all elementalist players were polled as to which element they spent the least amount of time in, while I certainly cannot back up my guess with hard facts, but I am guessing that the element you would get as your answer is water, roughly 5% of the time.

As a rough estimate, I would place the average amount of time that all elementalists spend in a specific element to be 5% water, 10% air, 15% earth, and 70% fire. Any of you may feel free to correct me, but do understand that my estimation is A: based on most “newer” elementalists to have a preference for almost permanently staying in fire, and B: that most elementalists have deemed the benefits of air redundant since its primary goals (damage and mobility) are defeated by the attunement of fire and the fact that speed buffs don’t stack, respectively.

Ideally, the goal is for the combined averages of all elementalists to be attuned to all elements equally, ergo, 25% of the time per element. Should I be questioned as to what this would mean for our less than ideal sample pool of online players, I would hazard a guess at either 15% water, 20% air, 40% fire, and 25% earth (given the propensity of a majority of players to want to contribute via damage dealing, and the game’s built in systems of being far more rewarding to players who dealt damage).

In order for this to be achieved, the benefits of other elements should be far more emboldened. It is pure foolishness to think that no elementalists wish to play support; and yet when I asked a friend who does so, he described it vaguely as a “punishing experience”, when all he wanted to do was apply conditions to enemies and buffs/heals to allies, instead of the traditional damage. Of the skills found in water, few are desirable, and of those, a vast majority have overbearing consequences of use (for instance, a personal favorite is Frozen Ground, but a 40 second cooldown for a spell that can be countered simply via cleansing of the condition, and no damage added on, is simply not tempting enough for use).

The other element would be air. While the damage portion leaves not much to be desired, it is simply not used for damage when held up to the scrutiny of any elementalist that has tasted the amount of damage that fire attunement can serve up. I humbly suggest that whilst an elementalist is attuned to the element of air, perhaps speed buffs could stack, as this would put a larger emphasis on the mobility provided by the air element.

As for earth, while I personally think that the characteristically slowness one would expect from an earth element to exist, in practice, becomes too easily predicted and thus nullified with ease by any competent player, or by an artificial intelligence that lacked the awareness of what it had accomplished. As a modest suggestion, I would wish for the element to become more practical, ergo, perhaps arenanet could consider the possibility that out of the 20 spells in an elementalist’s disposal, in every situation, at least one of those spells can easily be predicted and thus be treated by the elementalist’s peers with levity, and in certain extremities, vilification, making the entire experience a difficult endeavor.

I would like for educated discussion, with reasons and examples backing up any claims, and if change is to be advocated, I sincerely hope that the person would include a rough idea of how such change should be brought about.

giant walls of text are intimidating

CKMo.4097 is saying that synergy between elements is poor, there’s an unusual incentive to sit in 1 attunement a majority of the time due to poor design and attunements do not perform there supposed roles adequately such as earth being defensive focused or air being mobility focused

Nobody will read your post ….add :

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let me quote 2 parts:

While most players that are spending too much time in fire trait and not in any other trait are obviously and clearly playing elementalists wrongly

Damage is a good thing, but utility can be just as useful given the right circumstances

I mostly use a staff, even when soloing.
Usually i fight the monsters 1-on-1. There is no need to go the extra mile to prevent taking damage since you heal up very quickly after the fight. So you don’t need utility and the quickest and most convenient way to deal with the monster is to deal as much damage as possible. In other words: Stay in fire and don’t swap attunements.

If you don’t travel a lot and kill monsters in fast order (either because you want to stay in one place or because there are so many monsters that you will run into the next one in a few seconds anyway) switching to another attunement as a fight opener also only lowers your killing speed since you’ll have to wait to get back to fire.

This is the normal scenario, switching out of fire would only do you a disservice. You have 100% time in the same element, but imo the player is clearly playing the character correctly.

As soon as you get too many adds or fight a veteran things become different of course since you can’t simply outdamage them in fire and you need to start attunement dancing.

But i agree: it’s a design flaw, especially air. They state that air is the element for large single target damage. But take a look at the staff: There is no single-target-damage spell. Even worse: there are only 2 damage spells in total, even water has the same number. And of those 2 spells one has a long cooldown, long casting time and bad damage (number 2), and the other (the auto attack) only becomes viable if there are at least 2 targets nearby. But if they are too close to each other the fire auto attack is better again (as well as when there is only one enemy). And if there are more than 3 targets close to each other, fire is also better. On top of that it has a huge tendency to bring unrelated monsters into the fight.

So air is not a viable attunement to stay in. At the latest after you have used all your cooldowns, there is absolutely no point in staying in air. Even water is better for that because ice spice has a much shorter cooldown and decent damage. So air is simply useable as a pass through element to use the utility skills you need at the moment (knockback, swiftness or stun and combo field) and then you go on. This seems not to be what the element was supposed to do if you look at their description.

Naryoril.6507:

let me quote 2 parts:

While most players that are spending too much time in fire trait and not in any other trait are obviously and clearly playing elementalists wrongly

Damage is a good thing, but utility can be just as useful given the right circumstances

I mostly use a staff, even when soloing.
Usually i fight the monsters 1-on-1. There is no need to go the extra mile to prevent taking damage since you heal up very quickly after the fight. So you don’t need utility and the quickest and most convenient way to deal with the monster is to deal as much damage as possible. In other words: Stay in fire and don’t swap attunements.

If you don’t travel a lot and kill monsters in fast order (either because you want to stay in one place or because there are so many monsters that you will run into the next one in a few seconds anyway) switching to another attunement as a fight opener also only lowers your killing speed since you’ll have to wait to get back to fire.

This is the normal scenario, switching out of fire would only do you a disservice. You have 100% time in the same element, but imo the player is clearly playing the character correctly.

As soon as you get too many adds or fight a veteran things become different of course since you can’t simply outdamage them in fire and you need to start attunement dancing.

But i agree: it’s a design flaw, especially air. They state that air is the element for large single target damage. But take a look at the staff: There is no single-target-damage spell. Even worse: there are only 2 damage spells in total, even water has the same number. And of those 2 spells one has a long cooldown, long casting time and bad damage (number 2), and the other (the auto attack) only becomes viable if there are at least 2 targets nearby. But if they are too close to each other the fire auto attack is better again (as well as when there is only one enemy). And if there are more than 3 targets close to each other, fire is also better. On top of that it has a huge tendency to bring unrelated monsters into the fight.

So air is not a viable attunement to stay in. At the latest after you have used all your cooldowns, there is absolutely no point in staying in air. Even water is better for that because ice spice has a much shorter cooldown and decent damage. So air is simply useable as a pass through element to use the utility skills you need at the moment (knockback, swiftness or stun and combo field) and then you go on. This seems not to be what the element was supposed to do if you look at their description.

You are actually proving my point, my friend, about the fact that there is little to no incentive for switching elemental attunement.

that’s why i said “i agree” in the middle. Your statement of “While most players that are spending too much time in fire trait and not in any other trait are obviously and clearly playing elementalists wrongly” is probably just written in a way it could be understood incorrectly, since the way the game is now it’s usually the right descision to stay in fire (at least in PvE soloing).

Personally i’m fine with 2 elements simply being transitional utility elements. Using ANets description those would be water (for chilling and healing) and earth (for immobilize, crippling and damage mitigation) and they did that more or less (maybe earth could have some more damage mitigation and some less condition damage). Fire is fine as it is as an AoE damage element.

The problem is, as i said: Air. At least with the staff it’s some random utility without an actual theme to it (some light damage that jumps to 2 more targets, some medium damage AoE blind, a knockback, an AoE swiftness and an AoE stun when the enemy moves through), there is no real theme in there, especially not the one they claim there to be.

If you had 2 viable damage elements you could stay in one, use the utility from the 2 utility elements if necessary and then switch to the second damage element and stay there again for a while. If it were this way the 15 seconds cooldown to switch back to an element wouldn’t be as much of an issue anymore as it is now. People would use the utility elements much more often because they could just switch to another damage element after using them instead of doing significantly less damage until the element is ready again.

Imo S/D does this quite well, but with fire and earth instead of fire and air. I also think this is the reason why it’s so popular and imo the most effective for solo PvE.

With the build I use currently, I only switch between Fire and Earth. I use earth to defend me when I am in trouble and the rest of the time I am in Fire. I can do the most damage in fire, and the heal from water is so pathetic it seems to be useless. Air is not great, I switch to it some times to blind and knock down a enemy however I then go straight back to a element with damage.

If they want to promote swapping Attunements, they need to make the passive heal in water a lot better. They also need to make water a viable damage element.

Air needs to be tweaked also, I only use it for 2 skills. The damage from Air is so low I do not stay in it.

Earth I think needs some sort of massive passive defence, so tanking with a elementalist is possible.

All classes are meant to be able to do anything, currently elementalists can do very little and what they can do other classes can do it better. With ease.

If you are 70% in fire attunment then the problem is you not the class. You cant go about PvP assuming ‘’well fire is the most dmg’’ and then just roll with that and expect win.

seriously dude?

To clear up a possible misunderstanding: I was talking about PvE, not PvP

Naryoril.6507:

To clear up a possible misunderstanding: I was talking about PvE, not PvP

My bad, why’d you use ’’balance’’ ?

I’d still suggest more attunment swapping however.

That was way too much to attempt to read…

As a beginner it is a lot easier to just stay in fire because it is the main source of damage, and just using it alone is enough.

As you get to be a little higher in level and the monsters get harder, I started to notice I was lacking something, now I switch between all 4 attunements in battle often, it makes multiple monster fights easier, gives a higher curling in terms of how many you can take on, and makes fighting veteran monsters with a couple adds possible.

That being said, their should be more synergy between the attunements to reward playing the class correctly, I think more combos could be a possible answer.

Prowl.5097:

That being said, their should be more synergy between the attunements to reward playing the class correctly, I think more combos could be a possible answer.

More synergy between skills and traits would go a long way. Have the arcane talent lingering elements make the attunement specific traits apply for 5s after switching. Now you’ve just encouraged going into water, making things vulnerable then swapping to fire while keeping the 20% damage boost (for just one example). It really opens up a ton more options in our traits.

Prowl.5097:

As you get to be a little higher in level and the monsters get harder, I started to notice I was lacking something, now I switch between all 4 attunements in battle often, it makes multiple monster fights easier, gives a higher curling in terms of how many you can take on, and makes fighting veteran monsters with a couple adds possible.

As i wrote, it’s like you say if you fight multiple monsters oder veterans. But as long as you fight a single monster there isn’t much of a threat to die, there is no need for all the utility. Using the utility when fighting a single non-veteran monster just slows you down. Yes you end the fight with more HP, but the HP regenerate so quickly between fights that you don’t have to wait for it. So why switch to anything but fire when you can simply outdamage the monster? It just slows you down which is especially bad in Orr with it’s fast respawns.

I actually switch through all 4 elements a lot against anything that is at least veteran. I play with scepter and dagger offhand.

I tend to ride the lightning to a target, blind them, blow them back.
switch to earth, through some bleeds on the target, blind them again, knock down, switch to water to drop the ice blast for damage vulnerability, switch immediately to fire and drop circle of fire field, phoenix, arcane wave, and the fang spell in rapid succession for a lot of damage and 9 stacks of might use fire grab and switch back to air for another lightning blast and the channeled lightning tends to build up high damage and finish them off.

now if i fight any regular monster, i just kill them really fast with whatever element i happen to be in still. a lot of times THAT is still fire because the ring of fire/phoenix/arcane wave/fang kills any regular mob in 3 seconds.

tldr; but I definitely switch attunements a lot. On every weapon set. There are many incentives to switch, especially since staying in one attunement is locking away your core mechanic. I feel like if anything my element distribution is more like 25% fire, 25% water, 20% air, 30% earth.

I feel the reason I prefer Fire more is that it’s cooldowns are more balanced, especially on the Staff. Fire is the only one with it’s two main attacks being at 10~s cd, so they are up often. Every other element is full of massive cd abilities that don’t really reward you for being in that stance. None of our autoattacks are particularly impressive, so it only makes sense to switch back to the stance that actually lets you do things 70% of the time.

Simply rebalance the skills and cooldowns on other attunes to let them be fun and interesting to use, and you will see people not sit in fire all the time.

Edit: As an example, look at Water Attune. 2 is fine, the cd is low, damage is okay, it’s a skill you use a lot with great utility. I would say 5 is also of the right power. It’s a long cd, but aoe condition curing is great. 3 and 4 are the biggest problems. Geyser’s heal is very small, it’s main use is to spam a blast finisher in for a real heal. It also only provides utility in that minor healing. Yet it is on a 20s cd. Frozen Ground is the same way, a no damage, though it is aoe, Chill, on a 40s cd! There is a place for damageless utility to be sure, but the Rain Storm gets it right by feeling very powerful, while Frozen Ground and Geyser are less so. And as has been mentioned, Air with all weapons needs help. It certainly doesn’t have damage, like it says it should, with Air in staff having just as few damage spells as water does.

It seems that most people in general agree that air and water leave quite a bit to be desired.

Air and water aren’t meant to br dps, so in a short fight vs s regular mob there is little need to use either, water and air are for support either via positive team effects, of negative monster effects.

That being said, even vs normal monsters, I ride the lightning in, then blow us both back, then fire I hit 3 then 4, then I earth combo 4 then 5, which usually the monster is dead before I need 5. In any event, that chain of attacks kills anything faster than just using fire, can I kill the monster with just fire?? Sure, but its slower and not as fun

So, in summary, different attunements are for different purposes. It would be like asking for a heal in the fire spell line.

I used to think that some spells did too little for too long a cooldown.

Then I learned that not only do conditions stack, but they also get a huge boost from all the combos that are made with it. When teamed up with a longbow-wielding ranger for example, that very same Frozen Ground combined with Rapid Fire can create a chill effect that lasts for a minute or more. And you can repeat that every 40 seconds.

The thing with the staff is, it’s a combo weapon. It’s meant to be used for comboing not only with other players, but with yourself as well. If you play it that way, then you’ll realize the staff wielding elementalist isn’t that bad.

Not saying it’s great, just saying that it helped my game a lot.

Prowl.5097:

Air and water aren’t meant to br dps, so in a short fight vs s regular mob there is little need to use either, water and air are for support either via positive team effects, of negative monster effects.

That being said, even vs normal monsters, I ride the lightning in, then blow us both back, then fire I hit 3 then 4, then I earth combo 4 then 5, which usually the monster is dead before I need 5. In any event, that chain of attacks kills anything faster than just using fire, can I kill the monster with just fire?? Sure, but its slower and not as fun

So, in summary, different attunements are for different purposes. It would be like asking for a heal in the fire spell line.

First of all: According to their own description air is meant to deal high single target damage. See here:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/professions/elementalist/

And what you say might be true for S/D (and maybe D/D, i hardly used it), but not for a staff. No matter how you combo stuff together, simply staying in fire deals the highest damage, by far. The only option is opening the fight with Eruption and Shockwave and then switch to fire and stay there. But if you are at a place where there are a lot of mobs you can’t switch out of fire, open the next fight and switch back because fire will still be on cooldown.

I concur with Naryoril

I love fire so I spec’d fire. It works with my playstyle and have been using that almost exclusively since level 1. However, I’ve determined that I wasn’t performing as well in dungeons and then it dawned on me. What if I switched attunements while my abilities were on cooldown instead of waiting to use just fire abilities. Not only did I perform much better I also aided my team a LOT more because of all the fields I was laying down. Some of you might be saying “Duh!” but I only recently started looking at elementalist guides. Anyways, now I use a balance of all my attunements even when I’m solo’ing stuff.

elemental synergy is poor?
I guess we are playing different elementalists.

fight starts
3, roll backwards, 4
switch to earth
4, 5
switch to air
4, 5, 3
switch to fire
2 (or 1 if my sigil has proc’d) then 5

switching to water at any point if I need the healings

Elementalist is one of the few classes that can lay down, and their proc their own combo fields with ease (the combo I listed above uses 2 fields and procs them 3 times)

Also, do dungeons and tell me you arent having to switch to water several times a fight.

CKMo.4097:

You are actually proving my point, my friend, about the fact that there is little to no incentive for switching elemental attunement.

I would amend this statement to be “there is little to no incentive for staying in an elemental attunement.”

Now before anyone starts calling me a horrible elementalist player because obviously by what I just said I still don’t know how to press f1-f4 of haven’t figured out how to dodge yet, what I mean is that, besides fire attunement, there’s no benefit from remaining in a attunement, even after specialization.

I agree with the OP, trait investments do fairly little when they focus on an element (alacrity traits, mastery traits, etc). If in a magically perfect world, every attunement would be equally useful and used an equal amount of time by every player as a base, traits could slowly shift that, making it advantageous to spend more time in air and water by specing into those trait lines. But this simply isn’t the case, and the only attunement that’s good for anything besides cherrypicking cooldowns is fire.

Please, to people arguing against the OP, keep in mind that he’s not saying elementalists don’t switch attunements. He’s merely saying that the amount of time spent in them is disproportionate. I’m not saying don’t disagree with him, but keep in mind what the point is.

And to anyone mentioning air being meant for single target damage, speaking as a dagger player, it simply doesn’t exist. 2 skills that deal no damage, 1 that does less than the autoattack, another that deals roughly half that. What good is air daggers for anything but RtL and Updraft? Unless you’ve got Zephyr’s boon, basically nothing, and even then you’re not using Shocking Aura for the skill’s actual effect.

Loic.4367:

CKMo.4097:

You are actually proving my point, my friend, about the fact that there is little to no incentive for switching elemental attunement.

I would amend this statement to be “there is little to no incentive for staying in an elemental attunement.”

Now before anyone starts calling me a horrible elementalist player because obviously by what I just said I still don’t know how to press f1-f4 of haven’t figured out how to dodge yet, what I mean is that, besides fire attunement, there’s no benefit from remaining in a attunement, even after specialization.

I agree with the OP, trait investments do fairly little when they focus on an element (alacrity traits, mastery traits, etc). If in a magically perfect world, every attunement would be equally useful and used an equal amount of time by every player as a base, traits could slowly shift that, making it advantageous to spend more time in air and water by specing into those trait lines. But this simply isn’t the case, and the only attunement that’s good for anything besides cherrypicking cooldowns is fire.

Please, to people arguing against the OP, keep in mind that he’s not saying elementalists don’t switch attunements. He’s merely saying that the amount of time spent in them is disproportionate. I’m not saying don’t disagree with him, but keep in mind what the point is.

And to anyone mentioning air being meant for single target damage, speaking as a dagger player, it simply doesn’t exist. 2 skills that deal no damage, 1 that does less than the autoattack, another that deals roughly half that. What good is air daggers for anything but RtL and Updraft? Unless you’ve got Zephyr’s boon, basically nothing, and even then you’re not using Shocking Aura for the skill’s actual effect.

Fantastic reiteration of my words. I’m not being sarcastic.

One of my main points were that Air gives a lot of movespeed buffs…which is redundant. It’s like a waste of things. Unless during Air attunement movespeed buffs all stack on, I feel that it’s a redundant element to use even though it should give a lot of mobility.