I know Anet has intentions of nerfing staff ele in raids, or at least there are rumors of it and rightly so. They currently just outshine everything else.
That being said I hope Anet understands that nerfing CD reduction traits for each attunement will have much bigger impact than it might seem on the first glance. I am mostly gonna talk about fresh air, as lowering CD reduction will affect only the DPS of staff ele. But that is not the case with fresh air tempest in raids.
Fresh air tempest rotation is currently quite good. Not only for its dps but also its flow. What do I mean by that? Example: Burning speed gets reduced from 15 to 10s with fire traits and Wildfire gets reduced from 30s to 20s. Completing a swap into air attunement takes just about 10s: You swap inside, wait 5 seconds for Air overload to charge and then keep casting it for additional 4 seconds. After that you swap to fire and use Burning speed and Wildfire. You swap back to air again. You have to now again wait roughly 10s to do your air rotation and swap back to fire.
Now we come to the problematic point: If Anet nerfed CD traits from 33% to 20%, Burning speed would be on a 12s CD instead of 10s and Wildfire big dps loss. When you swap to fire the 2nd time, your Burning speed is still on CD for another 2 seconds while Wildfire is still on a 14s CD. You have 2 options:
- You wait for Burning speed to come off CD. For that you have to wait 2 seconds in fire attunement. Since Air overload is almost half your DPS, wasting those 2 seconds in fire is horrible. Even with more damage modifiers (10%, 150 power). And you would have to wait 2 seconds every single time for CDs to be available, while your dagger fire damage skills are pretty bad, meaning additional dps loss.
- You swap to air again. This is an even bigger dps loss than the previous option. But didn’t you say Air overload is almost 50% of your dps? True, but if you swap back into air immediately, your fire skills come off CD while you are still in air doing your rotation. Meaning some of your hardest hitting skills spend a lot of the time on CD.
Seriously tho, don’t nerf fresh air ele. Even if the dps spreadsheet by qT seems like with good boons fresh air tempest would hit harder than thief, and while this is probably true, there is the simple fact that ele has a much higher risk higher reward play (plus Anet shouldn’t balance around one of the best guilds in the game, the raids are still quite accessible to lower skill players). If an ele has to dodge, while being in fire or casting Air overload, that’s a big dps loss (a little less dps if you dodge in fire than air, obviously). Thief on the other hand doesn’t lose much dps, since dodge deals damage.
Opinions ppl?
