Guild Wars 2

I feel like most ele players go 30 in arcane. The reason for this is twofold: Evasive Arcana, and the 60% reduction in attunement swap cooldown. I feel like most of the recent patches by arenanet have been an attempt at making us try new things with our builds. For example, the change to bountiful power made players stop going 30 in water as much, and the addition of fresh air gave us something new to try. I think if the cooldowns on attunement swaps were set to 9 1/4 seconds by default and the -2% cooldown per point were changed to something else, or if they were set somewhere in between 9 1/4 and 15 and the -2% cooldown per point was changed to -1% cooldown per point, players would be much more inclined to try new things. Maybe they could make traiting into fire more viable or something.

Thoughts?

I kinda agree to that. If we would play another class with the effort and skill we play ele wed prob be overpowered. Im not saying ele is completely underwhelming but much classes have more natural advantages. And we have to just suck it up. A lower base attunement recharge would be a good change but won’t completely solve our problem im afraid.

An idea..

Imagine if they would increase the effect of Healing Ripple, Sun Spot etc. the less arcane (intelligence) you have, to make non-arcane builds have more appeal and so you wouldn’t be in need of often swapping into water every 9 secs for EA and/or Healing Ripple.

The less points invested in arcane (and more invested in the elements) the more powerful your minor master traits become. Basically Sun Spot, Electric Discharge, Earthen Blast and Healing Ripple would become stronger, perhaps with additional effects to the end of making new builds viable (especially in PvP, as there isn’t much of an issue in PvE).

An example (don’t take it too seriously. Just brainstorming here).

• 30 points in arcane (Approx. 9 secs attunement swap):
  Sunspot: X AoE damage.
  Electric Discharge: X single target damage.
  Earthen Blast: X AoE damage with 3 seconds cripple.
  Healing Ripple: X AoE healing.

• 0 points in arcane (15 secs attunement swap):
  Sunspot: X AoE damage, +X% added damage, + burning.
  Electric Discharge: X single target damage, +X% added damage.
  Earthen Blast: X AoE damage, + X bleeding, with 6 seconds cripple.
  Healing Ripple: X AoE healing, +X% added healing, + condition cleanse.

This is just a random idea, I can see making it more interesting for non-arcane builds. A problem would still be that there are mandatory traits in arcane, such as Blasting Staff for staff users (subjective oppinion) and you would probably argue Elemental Attunement, Renewing Stamina and EA.

I agree that attunement recharge rate is a grand problem for build diversity. I would love not being dependant on its traits and intelligence.

I am split on this issue, which has been thrown out there so many times over the past 6 or so months (that I have been playing). It has never received a response or a consideration from devs.

The problem
The problem with the ele attunement system is that it is supposed to provide versatility, but can’t actually do that b/c of the long cooldowns on swap. This is exacerbated by the fact that all of our skills are weaker (especially auto-attack)/ on a longer individual cooldown than other classes b/c we have access to more. This means that the only viable way to play ele is to spam skills from available attunements, rather than sit in the one that is best for the situation. In other words, if an ele is trying to do 1v1 damage, their design should make staying in air the best option for damaging the enemy. This is not the case. Instead, we have to do a rotation through attunements to output viable damage, usually saving only water b/c it is really the only one that provides specialized utility like it is meant to. This has made us very weak (on top of our other inherent weaknesses), b/c we can’t properly use our skills to respond to situations, instead giving up all versatility to piece together something that is closer to a whole. The boons that we could get by doing our spam-rotation is really what held it together.

Solutions

Longer recharge rate, buffed individual attunements
If they really want ele to ahve diversity, they need to buff individual attunements such that it is optimal to stay in the proper role/attunement for the proper time. This may actually be easier with a longer attunement recharge rate, or simply a decrease in the effectiveness of Intelligence. This would mean attunements that are more viable to sit in for a period, rather than spam-and-go like currently.

More fresh-air type traits
Fresh air is good, but air really isn’t good enough offensively to justify wanting to make it your primary attunement, only responding with another attunement then getting back to air so that you can get your utility back again. Fresh Air needs to reduce individual skill cooldowns (or aeromancer’s alacrity needs to do more than just give -20%) if it is meant to be a viable alternative to arcana. I believe it would be better to have a similar skill for earth/water that is:

“If you have 3 or more conditions on you, water attunement is recharged”
“If you take more than 20% of your total HP in one hit/over certain period of time, earth attunement is recharged”

This also only becomes meaningful with better minor traits that play into the proper theme (mainly in earth). I think this would also mean that these two attunements (defensive) can be used, but key skills can be saved for the proper time. If we had this, arcana wouldn’t be necessary b/c it wouldn’t be mandatory to make sure each attunement comes back ASAP for a certain utility we might need from there.

Lower base cooldown of attunements, traits to make individual attunements much better to specialize in
I am not sure this actually solves any of the issues with variabilty, but it does allow other builds to be viable as ele depends on rotations currently. It is also weaker at allowing specialization than fresh-air type approaches.

I think you are almost exactly right BlackBeard.
In my opinion the problem is more that we have very very weak attunement specific traits compared to the other classes (and also lingering elements is bugged). This is crucial.
With the way our attunements are designed it is ok to have 15s cooldowns and some ways to reduce it. But many traits are designed to work only in a specific attunement, which is ridiculous.

A solution that comes to my mind: lingering elements should be debugged to work with everything, and made natural to the class, for a shorter duration. So elements would linger for maybe 2-3 seconds as a class mechanic. The arcane 15 could then buff this duration.
Alacrity traits should work with lingering elements (“when this attunement is active your skills cooldowns are reduced by 20%”)

cheshirefox.7026:

i think ArenaNet wants elementalists disadvantaged in every possible category
Thoughts?

^Haha. I have to agree, devs really do not like Elementalists. Prefer you to play Guardian or Warrior.

I think they just need to improve the traits for earth, fire and air to make spending more time in each attunement as strong as quickly switching between them

And I think the class itself should have its base vitalitiy in-line w/ the base vit of engis and rangers so there is less need to trait in water or get vitality stat just to survive

While playing with random specs for the first time since… ever… because of the gauntlet, at many points I had 0 in arcane with the long 15s swaps. I then wondered why traits, specifically the ones that reduce cooldowns, don’t affect the attunement itself or alternatively, why points spent in the attunement’s line doesn’t reduce its cooldown, instead of arcane.

cheshirefox.7026:

i think ArenaNet wants elementalists disadvantaged in every possible category
Thoughts?

They pretty much straight up said that. Elementalists are the “druid” class, able to do everything, but not to the same extent as a class primarily focused on it. Because of that, they will always be at a disadvantage when comparing specifics.

I posted about this around two to three months back IIRC. The problem is not attunements themselves, but the skills. To be “masters of versatility” the Elementalist would need four attunements with clearly defined roles. Fire as AoE, Air as single target, Water as heal and CC, Earth as protection and condition.

But as it stands, each attunement on every weapon offers a hodgepodge of damage skills with certain “flavors” that makes you think ANet originally intended the Ele to be versatile, but due to time and budget constraints we got the current version.

To be clear, by having 4 attunements that in general all do some damage, with a design that encourages quick swapping and non-specialization, build variety will be lax and players will always be disappointed by the sub-par damage. This design absolutely encourages meta-gaming and min/maxing to eke out every last bit of damage to compare to classes that only have ten skills to work with, and trait lines that are complimentary to each other, rather than exclusionary as the Ele’s are now. This is compounded by the problem of the weapons also not having a clearly defined role, for example Staff Air is quite counter-intuitive to the other three, with much less AoE, again compounded by Staff Air being very CC oriented, despite supposedly being the high damage single target attunement.

If ANet wants to “fix” the Ele to truly be a nuker with a high risk/high reward style of gameplay, while keeping the lowest base armor and health, than the attunements need to be made useful for specific situations, rather than having to use all four on every mob. Fire should have five skills per weapon that are all high damage AoE attacks. Air should have three skills that are high damage single target attacks, with the remaining two being mobility oriented (Updraft as a combo of CC and Swiftness is a great template). Water should have only one damage skill, the AA (Water Blast is a great example of a good dual purpose skill) with the rest being heal and/or chill and other CCs. Earth should have two high damaging condition appliers (Dust Devil being a good template, but eliminate the direct damage and instead make it apply blind and bleed) with the rest being hard CC and protection. Making many of the skills sequence skills like Rock Barrier→Hurl would also greatly enhance versatility, such as giving Flamewall some sort of burst sequence similar to Temporal Curtain, or Frost Aura a sequence allowing you to manually detonate it chilling nearby enemies and giving Frost Armor to up to 5 nearby allies.

A design like that would give each attunement a more clearly defined role, allowing the Ele to switch to each attunement as needed, rather than being forced to utilize twice as many skills to still perform at a sub-par level to other classes. So the Ele would stay in Fire while blasting a Skale burrow, switch to Air when the den mother appears, switch to Earth once damage starts to mount for protection and blinds, switch to Water to heal and slow down the enemy, and if all else fails switch back to Air to escape.

By not putting damage on every skill, ANet would not have to worry about Ele damage ramping up over every other class via attunement dancing while still preserving this style of play with smart trait design that takes advantage of it. By giving each attunement a clearly defined role, you open up play to both the attunement dancers (primarily for boons and trait benefits, not direct skill damage), and the specialists who choose one or two elements.

I’ve posted this else where, but I’ll put it here to see what people think.

I’d like to see attunement cooldowns begin immediately upon switching to an attunement. This particular change effects dancing builds slightly, but has a much greater effect on builds that have a primary attunement focus by providing a way to switch back to that attunement faster.

When I’ve brought this up before there were some concerns about dance builds being affected by this. Why I said that this would only effect them slightly is because of the cooldowns for each ability within the attunement already act as a a limiter for rapidly dancing between attunements for more damage. The second concern, mostly directed at Healing Ripple, was the frequency of on attunement effects being applied. This change actually does not shorten the time in which these abilities may be proced aside from the amount of time spent sitting in that particular attunement currently. (This is to say that this would only decrease the amount of time Healing Ripple could be used by probably 1-2 seconds, or however much time spent in water attunement.)

Healix.5819:

They pretty much straight up said that. Elementalists are the “druid” class, able to do everything, but not to the same extent as a class primarily focused on it. Because of that, they will always be at a disadvantage when comparing specifics.

We can’t really do everything. We don’t have permanent pets, we don’t have stealth and we don’t have traps, I don’t even want to list the boons/conditions that we don’t have. If you’re talking about combat roles then I have some news for you: guardians can also bunker, dps and support, same for warriors and pretty much every class. If you mean that we’re forced to have support abilities because of water attunement then that’s not really unique either. For example you can equip a staff on a sword/focus zerk guardian and give him shouts for support. You can put a hammer on the normal zerk warrior and help your team with CC. Sure, it won’t be as good as a fully focused spec but since when is a full support else’s damage good? We get the same results as if we’d picked a weapon that we’re not specced for. The whole “jack of all trades” argument is completely invalid and it’s a poor excuse that the devs came up with for whatever reason.
And about attunements – make them 0s cooldown and put an icd on the “on swap” traits. I don’t see any real reason not to do it.

Wryog.5073:

I don’t even want to list the boons/conditions that we don’t have.

Boons (9 total):

1. Retaliation
2. Aegis

Conditions (12 Total):

1. Confusion
2. Fear
3. Poison
4. Torment

Yes, we don’t have a viable condition build, but whining about access to boons is just ridiculous.

cheshirefox.7026:

elementalist lacks synergy
synergy noun 1. the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.; synergism.

this is not only an issue with our attunements, but also our traits
one aspect of elementalist fails to compliment another and our traits are simply too bland or they hype ‘something’
elementalist then becomes a one trick pony in a marathon of race horses
then they decide to take our trick away

Exactly this.
Only very few traits have synergy, the others are just useless. That’s why I advocate a natural lingering element mechanic.

Zelyhn.8069:

cheshirefox.7026:

elementalist lacks synergy
synergy noun 1. the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.; synergism.

this is not only an issue with our attunements, but also our traits
one aspect of elementalist fails to compliment another and our traits are simply too bland or they hype ‘something’
elementalist then becomes a one trick pony in a marathon of race horses
then they decide to take our trick away

Exactly this.
Only very few traits have synergy, the others are just useless. That’s why I advocate a natural lingering element mechanic.

I also brought this up, the cantrips have great synergy, but the other skills seem to lack synergy. Signets traits are spread all over, almost all of the Arcane traits are Arcane + Signets but then there are ones that are just Arcane making a Arcane / Signet build an oddity.

I think people have done a good job of pointing out a lot of the issues. It’s really a combination of everything. There’s a lot of ways they could go to make the profession more effective. I’m actually fine with the twitchy play of the profession, but a few things really stand out to me as being the biggest issues.

Staff is bad for PvP – This is mostly due to it’s lack of damage that comes from ground targeted telegraphed skills that can easily be avoided.

Weak auto attacks – You aren’t dealing much damage and therefore HAVE to attunement dance to make up for the damage. This is so true that if you are auto-attacking, except for dagger air, you’re missing out on potential damage.

Big Hits have a large telegraph or a large cooldown – Dragon’s Tooth (too telegraphed), Phoenix (only useful at close range), Churning Earth (too defenseless), Eruption (too telegraphed), Lava Font (easily avoidable), Ice Spike (too weak, easily avoidable), Shatterstone (too weak, easily avoidable), Cone of Cold (DoT, interrupt or avoid), Dragon’s Breath (DoT, interrupt or avoid). All of these skills very easily be dodged, interrupted, blinded, blocked, or otherwise avoided. Churning earth is like a joke in WvW or PvP. The breath attacks and ground targeted attacks are DoT attackes which is bad for PvP, who is going to stand there and take a DoT attack? No one that is decent at PvP. They can dodge roll, teleport, walk away, interrupt the breath attacks, evade, and do all kinds of things.

Lowest Health and Armor – We’re the weakest profession by the numbers. This means we need to have compensation somewhere. Usually this would be in burst damage or defense. We do have some really good defense available, but there’s other professions that do it significantly better. We have some decent offense available but there’s other professions that do it significantly better.

Out of any of the there game mode, WvW, PvE, and PvP, I think our best build that stands out the most is the Lightning Hammer Berzerker build in PvE. I don’t see much else being used.

Checking the meta is a good way to see how people feel about a profession. Is a profession part of a lot of successful team compositions? If so it’s good enough to use, and hopefully not overpowered.

There’s just an overall problem. I say it’s with the skills. Because being able to access the already weak and avoidable skills more often is probably not going to solve our problems. From a PvP perspective, people have gotten better, and so the telegraphs that once worked are too easily avoidable. From a PvE perspective, people have have also gotten better and the most effective way to play is to be high dps, which the ele has at least 1 viable option I’ve seen.

This is neat and well rounded discussion gentlemen. I think we are being quite objective and constructive, I hope Anet can hear us.

I would just like to add that this overall problem you are talking about leads to a frustrating feeling of having to do a lot of effort just to do anything close to a decent output. I am totally in favor of the “high risk high reward” philosophy, but apart from in PvE I fail to see how we are rewarded for having to do so much.

People don’t go 30 arcana for swap reduction. Most of your time is spent in fire or air anyways.

People go 30 arcana for evasive arcana and the godly blast finishers and heal+cleanse. People go arcana for the prot on earth switch. People go on arcana for the only reliable source of fury once auras go on cooldown.

People also go to arcana for the only source of dodges (permavigor from crits).

Arcana and water are the traitlines that give the ele the amount of survivability they need for a team fight.

You’ll never see an ele without water or arcana because the other traitlines don’t provide that great offensive benefits and even the earth traitline, supposedly the defensive traitline, provides less survival benefits than water and arcana and only boosts to condition damage, but eles have terrible condi build potential because they can’t sustain multiple conditions well.

An ele without water or arcana goes down faster than a prom dress.

I even tried full fire, 20 air and 20 arcana in pve. Without the 20 in water the loss in survivability was huge. 12k base hp is suicide in most situations since you don’t have stealth to get the opening, guaranteed burst.

After thinking this over and posting in some other threads, I really think the best solution is to buff the autoattacks so that each attunement is optimal for its role. An example for D/D is below:

1. Switch lightning whip and Dragon’s Claw:
a. Fire is supposed to be AOE damage, all they need to do is modify the color and it is a fire whip doing decent aoe damage. JUST RIGHT
b . Air is supposed to be single-target damage, it could have an animation like a slimmer dragon’s claw that is colored purple/white for lightning. Call if something like “lightning blast”. Raise the damage a lot, decrease the cone angle/range a little bit, and have the skill slightly track with a target. Alteneratively, they could animate with just a quick lunge outward with a lightning strike at the end toward an enemy in about 400 range. It should be better to stay in lightning and AA for single-target damage than swap to fire over the long-haul.
2. Decrease the cast-time on impale to 0.5s. Add another bleed stack, decrease the bleed duration to 4s. You should be able to stack up a lot of bleeds here.
3. Add a chance to proc a short chill on your opponent with vapor blade (10%).

Now that each attunement is more viable in its role, you can truly have versatility. You don’t have to spam like crazy, but switch for the proper situation. The down-side is that switching out of one role, locks you out of it for a while.

On-swap reduction would not be needed, although this wouldn’t fix the reliance of eles on evasive arcana or water 15 as a minimum.

pmnt.4067:

Wryog.5073:

I don’t even want to list the boons/conditions that we don’t have.

Boons (9 total):

1. Retaliation
2. Aegis

Conditions (12 Total):

1. Confusion
2. Fear
3. Poison
4. Torment

Yes, we don’t have a viable condition build, but whining about access to boons is just ridiculous.

I wasn’t complaining. I was just pointing out that we can’t do everything since we lack those boons and conditions.
Can’t be a jack of all trades without having everything.

Zelyhn.8069:

This is neat and well rounded discussion gentlemen. I think we are being quite objective and constructive, I hope Anet can hear us.

I would just like to add that this overall problem you are talking about leads to a frustrating feeling of having to do a lot of effort just to do anything close to a decent output. I am totally in favor of the “high risk high reward” philosophy, but apart from in PvE I fail to see how we are rewarded for having to do so much.

Yea, I currently have a sore wrist from duelling last night. Go through all my skills, apply damage most efficiently, land a perfect crit dragons tooth … hardly and damage and it was regened within seconds. Finally beaten by a 7 second cd stun that stuns for 3-5 seconds not to mention the following brutal damage (from a soldiers rune warrior … what?).

TGSlasher.1458:

Yea, I currently have a sore wrist from duelling last night. Go through all my skills, apply damage most efficiently, land a perfect crit dragons tooth … hardly and damage and it was regened within seconds. Finally beaten by a 7 second cd stun that stuns for 3-5 seconds not to mention the following brutal damage (from a soldiers rune warrior … what?).

I do agree with you, but the warrior build you were trying to fight is unkill-able by an ele, unless you take sigil of doom and maintain high poison uptime. That issue is more that warriors were given WAY TOO MUCH healing right now, and the only counter to the signet is poison. A power ele has 0% chance to take it down, and a condition ele lacks access to poison. That warrior build is a hard-counter for us, but what isn’t a tough fight nowadays anyway?

Putting a little more dps on our auto-attack would actually allow us to deal constant pressure, such that they are not literally outhealing out attacks while we auto without even mitigating damage in any way.

BlackBeard.2873:

TGSlasher.1458:

Yea, I currently have a sore wrist from duelling last night. Go through all my skills, apply damage most efficiently, land a perfect crit dragons tooth … hardly and damage and it was regened within seconds. Finally beaten by a 7 second cd stun that stuns for 3-5 seconds not to mention the following brutal damage (from a soldiers rune warrior … what?).

I do agree with you, but the warrior build you were trying to fight is unkill-able by an ele, unless you take sigil of doom and maintain high poison uptime. That issue is more that warriors were given WAY TOO MUCH healing right now, and the only counter to the signet is poison. A power ele has 0% chance to take it down, and a condition ele lacks access to poison. That warrior build is a hard-counter for us, but what isn’t a tough fight nowadays anyway?

Putting a little more dps on our auto-attack would actually allow us to deal constant pressure, such that they are not literally outhealing out attacks while we auto without even mitigating damage in any way.

Funny story. I have been using Sigil of Doom for 3 months. Finally swapped it out for energy the other day lol.

I agree it would open up more options if Anet set our attunement swap to 9 sec like most classes.

However I do think it would be a bit overpowered with the range of abilities an elementalist has per fight. 20 abilities not including utilities. Wether they are good are not is another story.

I think Anet is approaching this differently, to allow players to focus on a certain element more often than the rest. I know this is posted somewhere else, but I think they will add more “fresh” traits to the other 3 attunements, similar to air.

This is a balance between a 15 sec attunement cooldown and trying to focus on one element or a 9 sec attunement cooldown and having to use all elements.

I myself would like to see more fresh traits cause it would provide the options for more builds focused on one element.

More importantly I’d like to add…..changing our base HP would be a much better improvement, so the water line isn’t such a requirement.