Guild Wars 2

Someone lately said something which I will paraphrase now:
Being allowed to do so much at once makes us less versatile, because we can do nothing on the proper level.

I made this thread to create a small discussion on the power of Elementalist.
“The Sorms obey me!” “I can move mountains!” “I summon the power of the oceans!”
Lol, no you don’t :P

The point is: unless you summon all this powers you will not kill a single enemy.
BUT because we can swap so freelry each Attunment is nerfed.

Am I the only guy around here who would prefer to change Attunments less frequently, but get visible benefits from each of them?

I am fiercy glass cannon -> I get hard situation -> I attune to earth and get instant defencive bonuses. Than to water and spray all the area with healing breezes. This all at the cost of not being able to get Fiercy again in just 10 seconds.

I’d like to change attunments less frequently, have Arcane Trait having a real meaning and gain a real power. Not a power to spam spells madly in the speed of Asian StarCraft player…

Once again I ask you, AN, to create some option for he players who do not fancy this playstyle. Obviously some pro-coxes can use it and play efficiently, but most players cannot. Can you make an option for Eles who do not fancy spamming attunments?

Dunno, for example make a skill for it or a Contra-Arcane Trait Line especially for eles
(Make 2 opposite Traits: Arcane Prficiency and Arcane Power. Le’t players chose just 1 at a time. Arcane Proficiency would shorten cooldowns and benefit from switching (like now) and Arcane Power would lenghten Attunments cooldowns, but shorten each skill cooldowns)

I almost think this is supposed to be possible right now (at least in arenanet’s mind). I think you are supposed to be able to buff your favorite attunement by going down that trait line OR choose arcane trait line and switch rapidly between them. The problem is that the elemental traits lines don’t really support it because they suck.

Traits like Internal Fire, Pyromancer’s Pussance, One with Air, Piercing Shards, etc… reward you for staying in one attunement. The problem is that no trait line can transform an attunement into a real full-fledged weapon set like what the other professions have access to.

That’s the point: Firstly, you can chose max 1 or 2 elements by traits and suck in others.

And nevertheless still none of your chosen 1 or 2 elements will behave as a viable weapon.

Related:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Elementalist-weapon-swap-1/first#post379738

Really, in my opinion, tweaking traits and abilities will never fix this problem. The elementalist abilities are balanced against the potential use with 15 other skills, using only five or ten will never be viable. And if they buff trait lines, it will only make the stance dance stronger, continuing to force this playstyle upon the playerbase as the only viable option.

But, Conncept…
More combinaions —> More swapping —> More nerfs on each single option to avoid overpower :|

It would be true StarCraft level of playing than…

There won’t be more combinations available, you essentially have to choose between attunement swapping or weapon swapping because of the CD system. You will not be able to do both. And in doing so, this will allow a player to essentially choose between speccing towards twenty skills among the four elements, ten skills with one attunement, or twenty skills between two- all being viable build options. What few current builds we have will be unaffected, and more builds will become available.

Elementalist, as a profession design, is inherently flawed. If individual elements were worth staying in for long periods (as the trait lines try to make it appear), then switching between them would be overpowered because of the synergy. If individual elements are not worth staying in for long periods and frequently switching between them is required (as it is now), then traits focusing on elements become largely useless because you can’t stay in that element for any length of time. A big problem right now is that elements don’t really have any meaning on their own; Fire is focused more on damage, but not enough so to make it viable to stay in it and DPS. Earth is more focused on defense, but not enough so to make it viable to stay in it to tank hits. Water is more focused on healing, but not enough so to make it viable to stay in it and focus on healing things. Air just sucks outright and is only ever used because certain key control/buff skills are in it.

A lot of this stems from how skills in general work in GW2. Everything is based on cooldowns. Most classes only ever have 10 skills available, so it’s expected that they’ll resort to spamming their autoattack, and their power reflects that. Elementalists have 20 skills available, and to balance the possibility of flipping attunements quickitteno blow through four sets worth of cooldowns in rapid succession, the autoattacks are sub-par and the cooldowns are balanced so that quickly chaining them is as powerful as other classes, rather than more powerful.

Which results, ultimately, in the problem we’ve all talked about for ages: in order to compete with other classes, Elementalists have to play harder. Because they can blow through 20 skills rapidly, they have to.

Edit: Seriously ANet, this word filter is preposterous. When placing the words ‘quickly’ and ‘to’ next to each other gets kitten-ized because the last three letters of the former plus the first letter of the latter, minus the space, forms a bad misspelling of a naughty word, you have problems. Fix your freaking forums. And then fix our freaking class.