Guild Wars 2

Elemental Surge. I’m not sure people even know about its existence (it’s a Grandmaster Arcane trait). Suffice to say it’s probably not being used very much. It’s fairly weak all things considered; when you consider that you could instead take the amazing Evasive Arcana, its downright insultingly bad.

There’s another set of skills that I feel are lacking: glyphs. Anet seems to want us to get them to use them more, but they still feel clunky and limited in comparison to cantrips.

Perhaps there’s a duel solution.

Elemental Surge: Your glyph spells now cast all their effects, regardless of attunement.

With this change, Elemental Surge firstly becomes much more viable, taking a worthy place alongside Evasive Arcana as a true GM trait. Glyphs also become a far more interesting option; they’re still limited by long recharge times, but with this trait, when you cast them, you’re going to have an effect!

Glyph of Storms would now create 10 seconds of area denial; Burning, Chill, Vulnerability, Bleeding and Blindness!

Glyph of Elementals summons a virtual army to assist you. But how would this function with the new command utility on their skills? Simple: when you’re in Fire Attunement, you can command the Fire Elemental, Air Attunement, Air Elemental, and so on.

Glyph of Renewal could potentially turn the tides in a big event like Tequatal, WvW or holding a point in PvP. With a potential 6 revives on the one skill, this one could be devastating if used correctly.

Glyph of Elemental Power gives all your attunements an extra bit of conditional oomph. With all spells having a 25% chance to inflict Burning, Chilled, Weakness or Cripple (each with a 5 second internal cooldown of course) you’re virtually guaranteed to be keeping your opponents cleansing like mad.

Finally, Glyph of Elemental Harmony gains some serious boon potential with each cast granting 3 stacks of might, 10 seconds of regen and swiftness, and 3 seconds of protection. And let’s not forget that all of those get an extra 30% duration thanks to 30 points in Arcane.

Let me know what you folks think!

If you threw this in with the other two glyph traits you’d have an unstoppable permaboon ele. As funny as it’d be to see 8 minions floating around and the bundle of effects that’d come in glyph of storms, this is a ridiculously OP trait.

An interesting idea, but quite a bit over the top don’t you think?

How about ‘Glyphs now work with lingering attunements’

This would add a bit more depth, you could burn all your attunements to have a few seconds of superpowered glyphs, but then there’s at least the cost of being locked out of your attunements.

Further tweaking would probably include a limit of 2 or 3 attunement effects max.

Note that I said

Elemental Surge: Your glyph spells now cast all their effects, regardless of attunement.

Inscription would not be affected by this change. Casting a glyph in Fire Attunement would only give Might, not Might, Regen, Swiftness and Protection. There’s precedent for GM traits not interacting with lower tier traits too; just look at Stone Heart and Lingering Elements.

In short, if your objection to this change is that you could spam boons too easily, the change would be fairly minor from what you can currently do; the only additional boons being cast would be from Glyph of Elemental Harmony.

It would also be worth pointing out that running 5 Glyphs would reduce you to one stun break (Glyph of Elemental Power) and remove all your cantrips, with all the utility and survivability that comes from them. Your defensive abilities would be severely curtailed. Furthermore, grabbing Inscription in Air requires 4 points, and with 6 invested in Arcane, you can at most stick 4 in water, which leaves out Cleansing Water, so your Condition removal is going to suffer too (and you wouldn’t be slotting Ether Renewal either). And you lose Evasive Arcana too. That’s a lot to give up. In fact, I was honestly expecting people to say that the trait (and glyphs) would still be too weak, not too strong.

Bluefox.9580:

If you threw this in with the other two glyph traits you’d have an unstoppable permaboon ele. As funny as it’d be to see 8 minions floating around and the bundle of effects that’d come in glyph of storms, this is a ridiculously OP trait.

oooh my god, i want a freaking MM ele. NAO!!!!!!!!!!

hahahahahaha. awesome.

I very much approve of the suggestion to turn it into a Glyph trait - we all know that this skill type really lacks trait support, and Inscription isn’t even very useful apart from maybe as a Cleansing Water proc (that costs 10 trait points to get at).

Lingering Elements functionality would be cool, but I still see that being too powerful if it cast multiple skill effects at once.

How about one or two HP-barriers at which all Glyph skills recharged, with a 60s cooldown? Something like 40-50% health, so that it was possible to cast your GoEH heal before this recharge procced? Regaining access to things like the summons and Glyph of Renewal could be pretty useful and maybe worth the trait point investment.

EDIT: another idea would be to give Glyphs multiple "charges" with shorter cooldowns before their very long shared cooldown.

...oh! Or "Glyph skills now recharge independently in each attunement, but have had their recharges increased"? Most Glyphs have always felt like they were balanced around having access to 4 skills at all times, without taking into account that using one locks out the other four. This would turn them into basically some powerful bonus weaponskills - and the single-stunbreak issue of Glyph builds could be fixed by having GoEP on a 40-50s cooldown four times over. Obviously recharges couldn’t stay as they are (a Storm every 10s, and a Lesser Elemental every 15s?) but I don’t think they’d need bumped up much to be fair for the GM-trait investment required.