Guild Wars 2

I would like to see ele get some kind of niche. Thieves have insane burst stealth lots of evades and initiative. Mesmer has clones and stealth. Necro has a large health pool plus a second health pool and so on for the other classes. Ele are lowest health lowest armor class and don’t have a niche to make up for it. As several have stated other classes do everything and ele can do better. Want to do burst thief>ele Conditions necro>ele sustain guard/war/engi>ele etc..

So Ideas for possible niches.
1)Add water fields to all ele weps and add some sort of heal to all water attunment wep skills sets like dagger off hand has. So they ele can be the best healer.
2)Massive reduce on cooldowns accross the board so they can be masters of burst like the thief.
3)Add lots of torment chill criplle and wall type skills to the wep sets so they become the masters of anti mobility
4)Add lots of combo fields to every wep set so they become the masters of combo fields.
5)Add lots of mobilty with decent cooldowns so they can become as good or better than thief mobility since they are a low hp low armor class.

We provide boons to allies if needed we can burst If needed we can be tanky if needed. Find a balance between all that in your build and you got a good all rounder

There lies the problem. If you want to provide boons to allies your way better off playing a guardian. If you want to burst your way way better off playing a thief. If you want to make a build that is all around subpar then you play your ele or ranger. Atleast the ranger has its niche pet mechanic even though its awful.

The niche mechanic of an ele is being dead 90% of the time .

If they want to increase Ele’s survivability without bumping up the base HP, they either need to boost Ele’s healing where it wouldn’t require them to invest most stat points in healing or give them more access to evades and blinds from weapon skills.

Change our fire fields to create smoke fields after the fire expires. This could even be a fire trait to replace any one of the painfully awful traits in the line.

By your examples, I’m assuming you mean a defensive mechanic.
They actually have many defensive skills, but it’s true that they don’t have a defensive mechanic that is unique to them.
What they do have is versatility, though. And I like that.

Axelwarrior.9084:

By your examples, I’m assuming you mean a defensive mechanic.
They actually have many defensive skills, but it’s true that they don’t have a defensive mechanic that is unique to them.
What they do have is versatility, though. And I like that.

It doesn’t have to be a defensive mechanic but it wouldn’t hurt either. As far as versatility goes I don’t see it. They are versatile at doing everything worse than another classs can. Right now ele is like necro where they basically have to stand and fight against whoever engages with them. Unlike the necro though they only have 1 very small health pool.

Ele’s niche is the developers couldn’t kill them pre rtl nerf.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

There lies the problem. If you want to provide boons to allies your way better off playing a guardian.

Why? Can guardians provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait?

Chuck Zitto.2367:

I would like to see ele get some kind of niche.

The ele’s niche is the fact that they can change their role on the fly, and always have something of everything. They have good damage, heals, a little burst and partywide boons. Their other niche are staff combo fields, which are long lasting and of various types.

The ele’s niche is that they don’t have a niche. And while most claim it doesn’t work because you don’t specialize, the opposite is true for me. Because you don’t specialize, you can always do something. But that’s just not something that fits the playstyle of the majority of the players. So I fear the ele will end up somewhat like the engineer or WoW druid. Forced to choose before the battle what role they’re gonna perform instead of during the battle.

As you can tell, I’m pretty pleased with the ele right now but I realize that it’s not well suited for everyone so I fear they’ll end up being changed.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Axelwarrior.9084:

By your examples, I’m assuming you mean a defensive mechanic.
They actually have many defensive skills, but it’s true that they don’t have a defensive mechanic that is unique to them.
What they do have is versatility, though. And I like that.

It doesn’t have to be a defensive mechanic but it wouldn’t hurt either. As far as versatility goes I don’t see it. They are versatile at doing everything worse than another classs can. Right now ele is like necro where they basically have to stand and fight against whoever engages with them. Unlike the necro though they only have 1 very small health pool.

As far as I know, Elementalists have the highest DPS potential among other classes, can stack might exceptionally well, have FGS (that’s basically a different category on its own, lol) but can also sacrifice damage to bring lots of healing and survivability, being seen commonly on D/D builds.
They can be very mobile with D/D, or stand far off in the distance and nuke everything with Staff, or get Scepter and put out bigger burst than your average thief.

Isn’t their niche the fact they technically have “4” weapon set skills without changing weapons as opposed to every other class only have 2? IMO, only 3 of them are useful anyways but 3 is still better than 2.

They have extreme AoE burst damage which is going to be far more useful in both PvE and WvW, not so much sPvP but 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. In fact, I don’t know of any other class capable of even touching the ele’s burst AoE potential. Necros aren’t even close. Even the tankiest of tanky necros drop quickly during an ele’s AoE burst.

As ThiBash says: we can do everything with one build.

Can a guard do both dps and have reasonable survivability at the same time? If yes... can they also have good mobility? If (somehow) yes to that too - do they also provide team support?

Ele weapons can do a greater variety of things than other classes - hell, our Glyphs are specifically designed around adding more utility, with different effects per attunement, even if they do need some work to become properly useful (smoke and ice fields on glyph of storms would be delicious, though the smoke may only be able to exist for a short part of the spell’s duration to avoid massive stealth stacking).

We can’t do any one thing quite as well as others, apart from (particularly AoE) damage - but an Ele that specs for full S/D burst or full zerker Staff is faaaar squishier than anyone else running their profession’s burst builds.

We have lots of weapon skills doood!

Our Niche: Average at everything, good at nothing.

While we can do many things, the problem is we don’t excel at anything. If you want support you take someone that excels at it, not something that is decent/good at it while being worse than the one that excels at it simply because they are cent at others as well.

We “specialize” in something and we become WEAKER than most other classes that do the same thing. The fact that we are pretty much forced into certain trait lines and getting Toughness and/or Vitality JUST so we are not one shot says it all.

ThiBash.5634:

Why? Can guardians provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait?

Neither can ele.
Just because every build propably should have it, doesn´t mean it´s free.

The trait alone needs 20 points investment, and the uptime from only that is 49.2% for regen, protection and swiftness, 123.1% for might meaning 1.23 stacks of might on average.
Maximum you can get (without the completely unviable stats like givers armor) is 86.7% which requires 30 trait points, all rune slots and food to pull off.
Any additional duration on any of those boons(except might) teamwide requires atleast either weapon choice or another 40 trait points and 2 major traits to be used

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Our Niche: Average at everything, best at nothing.

Fixed that for you.

cheese.4739:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Our Niche: Average at everything, best at nothing.

Fixed that for you.

I had a feeling that specifically you would have something to say on that. If you ignore traits then we are good at nothing. So really unless we go full cele on everything and 15 points into each tree we arent really specializing in anything and we are still then just average at everything.

The problem comes when we TRY to specialize at something. We always have a disadvantage that the other classes don’t have. That being our defensive options are SHOCKINGLY weak – Sure we have AoE, Arcane Shield and Mist Form but then take into account the cool downs and such and the effectiveness other classes similar kind of skills and it shows alot.

Then we get into the fact That we NEED points in Water and Arcana. We have no choice. The choice comes in how many points we point in, some think 10 is fine, others 20 and others still think 30 is a must.

The problem is that we can’t really try anything new Earth, Water and Arcana are just to important. Sure you get those that go the Fresh Air scepter build but they have the problem that if someone blocks, immunes, dodges there burst they are pretty much going to down.

It would be nice if we were given a bit more defense in terms of Health/armor and lower cool downs so that we could try other things. Fire trait line for example, seems interesting but i can’t spare any points currently in my build Earth is needed for toughness, Water needed for the healing and Arcana for the attunement cool down reduction and other things like Evasive Arcana.

our niche is pretty much: Meteor Storm and then going Tornado.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

cheese.4739:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Our Niche: Average at everything, best at nothing.

Fixed that for you.

I had a feeling that specifically you would have something to say on that. If you ignore traits then we are good at nothing. So really unless we go full cele on everything and 15 points into each tree we arent really specializing in anything and we are still then just average at everything.

The problem comes when we TRY to specialize at something. We always have a disadvantage that the other classes don’t have. That being our defensive options are SHOCKINGLY weak – Sure we have AoE, Arcane Shield and Mist Form but then take into account the cool downs and such and the effectiveness other classes similar kind of skills and it shows alot.

Then we get into the fact That we NEED points in Water and Arcana. We have no choice. The choice comes in how many points we point in, some think 10 is fine, others 20 and others still think 30 is a must.

The problem is that we can’t really try anything new Earth, Water and Arcana are just to important. Sure you get those that go the Fresh Air scepter build but they have the problem that if someone blocks, immunes, dodges there burst they are pretty much going to down.

It would be nice if we were given a bit more defense in terms of Health/armor and lower cool downs so that we could try other things. Fire trait line for example, seems interesting but i can’t spare any points currently in my build Earth is needed for toughness, Water needed for the healing and Arcana for the attunement cool down reduction and other things like Evasive Arcana.

our niche is pretty much: Meteor Storm and then going Tornado.

We aren’t “good at nothing” without traiting or specialising – we have great versatility built into our weapons, and can do a reasonable job at many roles. We just aren’t the best at any one thing based on our weapon skills*.

Were you around when D/D Ele had high mobility, strong heals and a bunch of other powerful defensive skills while still being able to dish out damage? I’m pretty sure it was the first big meta build, and was nerfed to hell several times while the balance team tried to work out what made it so good. Eles have spent most of the last year gradually recovering from these nerfs, but they happened in the first place because Eles were the best at several things, or at least very very good.

Our massive utility from the multiple weaponsets means that we can’t be overbuffed in one area, since anyone playing at all well would vastly outshine another class trying to do the same thing. You need to actually use all your skills, and in conjunction with each other, rather than just write off half of them as useless and then QQ about how you suck.

Yes, we still aren’t in the best place, and yes, our traits are messy, generally encouraging us to spec into only one or two elements but requiring that we’re locked out of those elements for large chunks of playtime – but the problems that you’re experiencing seem to be mostly a combination of:
1) you need to practice and improve. Many of your problems sound like you need to learn how/when to dodge or use defensive skills, and to run the hell away from those bloody WvW thieves – or to better use your defences and actually spec for any damage at all so you can ever kill anything. The longer the fight goes on when you’re doing 0 damage, the more time in which you can slip up or your foe can do their burst. The offensive trait lines are rather more powerful than they used to be, and our attunement cooldowns were improved greatly in Dec10 patch, so the general consensus is no longer “you need 20 water 20 arcana to do anything”.
2) you need to stop thinking about “what’s weak and needs buffed” and instead think “what’s useful to me, and how best can I use it?”. You make far too many threads with complaints about other classes (or your own) or OP suggestions, when you could instead be theorycrafting and saying “hi guys, what do you think of this build?”. People can’t give you tips or suggestions, or even make use of your ideas, if you only contribute meaningless noise then plug your ears when your nonsense is called out.

*note: this isn’t actually true. Compared to other untraited weapon sets, Staff has superior AoE damage and control, S/D has great might stacking, and so on.

Yeah i was around when D/D was insane, personally i dont think it would be as strong now even if they reversed some of the nerf’s due to other classes being buffed so heavily. So think some of them could easily be reverted without actually breaking the class or anything.

Of course we don’t need to be hugely buffed, we just need a few tweaks here and there just to get us up to a point where we dont have to pick Toughness/Vit gear if we don’t want to be one shot. Or don’t have to go Earth, Water or Arcana due to some pretty mandatory traits and lower cool downs on attunement swapping.

Fire for example, i rarely see that used. Maybe 10 points or something but nothing really big into it. Part of that is due to the many crappy traits it has which is fine but what if the traits in it were good….Where would you take points from? Water at the loss of much needed health and healing? out of Arcana at the loss of longer attunement cool downs?

The fact i take a Racial elite 90% of the time as the others are simply lackluster for my build is kind of disappointing. Sure the odd Tornado at thr right time but that may be once or twice a day – if that.

I have made plenty of “what do you think of this build” threads, The last about my Condition build that i am currently using. Its okay. Could it be better with tweaks to the class? Sure, would it ever be as strong as some of the other condition builds? Not a chance. Is it fun? Yes. That’s all that counts to me. Just getting killed by a class that either spend 90% of the fight in stealth or by a class that spams CC with a hammer knowing that we have VERY little access to Stability.

Strang.8170:

ThiBash.5634:

Why? Can guardians provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait?

Neither can ele.
Just because every build propably should have it, doesn´t mean it´s free.

The trait alone needs 20 points investment, and the uptime from only that is 49.2% for regen, protection and swiftness, 123.1% for might meaning 1.23 stacks of might on average.
Maximum you can get (without the completely unviable stats like givers armor) is 86.7% which requires 30 trait points, all rune slots and food to pull off.
Any additional duration on any of those boons(except might) teamwide requires atleast either weapon choice or another 40 trait points and 2 major traits to be used

The might boon lasts 15 seconds and can be applied every 10 seconds, so that’s 100% uptime.

Now, if you use staff, you get Windborne Speed and Healing Rain to make the regeneration and swiftness last permanently too (even without extra boon duration).

That leaves protection, but in a boon duration build you can get as much as 8 seconds of protection every 10 seconds.

So the bottom line is: eles can provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

The fact i take a Racial elite 90% of the time as the others are simply lackluster for my build is kind of disappointing.

You could make great use of elemental summon even in D/D.

knowing that we have VERY little access to Stability.

We have Armor of Earth, a trait for another Armor of Earth, and a trait that gives us stability everytime we swap to earth attunement. That’s hardly ‘very little acces’.

ThiBash.5634:

So the bottom line is: eles can provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait.

1 trait, 30 points locked, weapon choice locked, runes locked, food locked.
Without boonduration it´s about 80% uptime on regen/swiftness, it´s till just 1.24 stacks of might despite it sounding cool that there´s one permanent stack.

I´m not denying that eles can be good boonbots, but it´s far more investment than just one trait.

ThiBash.5634:

knowing that we have VERY little access to Stability.

We have Armor of Earth, a trait for another Armor of Earth, and a trait that gives us stability everytime we swap to earth attunement. That’s hardly ‘very little acces’.

It´s bit of an odd kind of stability being small bursts of it (very hard to work with sometimes), but hardly matters since eles are one of the classes that need the stability least.
One of the better uses i´ve found for this is lengthening stabilities teammates provide.

Strang.8170:

It´s bit of an odd kind of stability being small bursts of it (very hard to work with sometimes), but hardly matters since eles are one of the classes that need the stability least.
One of the better uses i´ve found for this is lengthening stabilities teammates provide.

Its best uses are stomping (including helping allies to stomp) or channeling MS or ER - though the stability popping through regular attunement rotation is pretty nice when it negates an engi’s insta-CC.

The niche mechanic of an elementalist is the fact that they have four times as much abilities and as such are extremely versatile. It’s the inherent trait of elementalists. It’s also the reason why camping one attunement seldomly works.

So I played GW1 a lot, and one of the roles I liked playing with my Ele was the burning/condition builds. Burning was truly significant in the first one. You could only drain someone at max 10 ticks/sec, and burning could account for 7 of them right off the bat. All the other conditions the Eles have are great, don’t get me wrong, but really you only get burning for damage(i’m not even going to talk about bleed, seriously.).

Many people have mentioned that burning can be easily removed, or can’t be applied enough. I disagree. I think it is perfectly able to be applied for long periods on a target, or sprayed in short periods over groups easily, which is appropriate. Some people think the Ele should get something like poison or torment, I also disagree there. They should continue to be the masters of the four elements solely. So I think the following is frankly the ideal solution for opening up many condition builds for elementalists.

Replace the ‘Persisting Flames’ train in fire (11) with ’Wizard’s Fire’

Wizards Fire: Burning damage is doubled.

Boom. Over. Done. Elementalists can now focus on burning as their primary attack, because elemental wizards should be able to burn people to cinders if that’s their thing. Burning, which is stacked in time, could still be easily removed, and people would remove large stacks because not removing them would be bad otherwise. Condition removal would be more important in matches. Elementalists in this trait line would have to use 30 points in fire and GM trait to achieve this(and of course would still be Ultra-Squishy as usual), so balanced easily.

Also, they could probably achieve this with like 5 lines of code, so it could be implemented like yesterday.

If you want to be a condition elementalist, +1 this post and ask for Wizard’s Fire!

Strang.8170:

1 trait, 30 points locked, weapon choice locked, runes locked, food locked.
Without boonduration it´s about 80% uptime on regen/swiftness

If you re-read my post you can see that with just a staff and Elemental Attunement, you get perma swiftness and regeneration. The usefulness of the might stack is debatable and yes, you only have 50% protection uptime with said build.

If you make a full build, adding boon duration and the fire field’s fury, things just get better.

ThiBash.5634:

Strang.8170:

1 trait, 30 points locked, weapon choice locked, runes locked, food locked.
Without boonduration it´s about 80% uptime on regen/swiftness

If you re-read my post you can see that with just a staff and Elemental Attunement, you get perma swiftness and regeneration. The usefulness of the might stack is debatable and yes, you only have 50% protection uptime with said build.

If you make a full build, adding boon duration and the fire field’s fury, things just get better.

With staff and ea it´s still just 80% regen about 90% swiftness. Ofcourse like i said it´s a powerful build with rest of it there too, but it´s hardly just 1 trait that makes the build, you need to sacrifice a lot more for the effects.
Just the fact that everyone bascily can do it because the points/traits/gear needed are optimal anyway doesn´t mean it´s a free choice, there´s a lot of commitments needed to get the build, which will become obvious if we ever get build choices that compete with the ones mentioned.

Strang.8170:

With staff and ea it´s still just 80% regen about 90% swiftness.

My original premise was near-permanent, but yes you’re right. Permanent boons with just the 1 trait is impossible. I was wrong.

However, it does mean that a ranger using a warhorn/healing spring every minute or so can push it over 100%. There’ll likely be at least someone in your group filling up the small gaps, so if it’s group play you want, 1 trait is theoretically enough.

My point though was simply to show that even a non-support orientated ele can add a lot of benefit to the group. And we do seem to agree there.

Vash Past.4385:

Replace the ‘Persisting Flames’ train in fire (11) with ’Wizard’s Fire’

Wizards Fire: Burning damage is doubled.

Boom. Over. Done. Elementalists can now focus on burning as their primary attack, because elemental wizards should be able to burn people to cinders if that’s their thing. Burning, which is stacked in time, could still be easily removed, and people would remove large stacks because not removing them would be bad otherwise. Condition removal would be more important in matches. Elementalists in this trait line would have to use 30 points in fire and GM trait to achieve this(and of course would still be Ultra-Squishy as usual), so balanced easily.

Also, they could probably achieve this with like 5 lines of code, so it could be implemented like yesterday.

If you want to be a condition elementalist, +1 this post and ask for Wizard’s Fire!

This sounds insteresting… but in the Power and Condi Duration fire line I can see it being hella powerful in Power-based burst with perma-burning to supplement damage.
Burning traits wouldn’t thematically fit anywhere else, however.

The only way I can really see such a trait working is if it’s conditional. Double burning damage if suffering from no other conditions (so it’s easy to cleanse and you can’t soft-CC them)? Double burning damage while within a range of <600?> of your target? Double burning damage on the third Sunday of each month?

I would simply be broken. I deal like 850Tick Burning as it is. Imagine that Burning Doubled and i have near Perma access to it as well. No chance this idea would ever get into the game. It would have to be like while the Ele is under 50% health or something so you risk dying for the higher Burning Damage or something

Oh, bonus condi damage while under <health threshold> is a pretty good one, aye - if you heal up, you lose a chunk of dps. Hm.

well they have traits that make you immune to Conditions from either being below 25% or being above 90% – why not a trait that increases Condition damage by say 25-50% -100% would simply be too much while being under 50% Health.

They could even make it the lower our health is the bigger the increase is

For those who think this would be broken, consider:
A couple posters mentioned burning being up to 850ish/tick, which is in the higher ends of what you can get. For even someone with as little as 15k health, this is still over 17 seconds before they die from burning, without applying any heals or condi removal. Talk about a someone with high vitality and 30k health, now they can sit n laugh at you for 30 seconds before finally popping one cond removal and a heal. And as an Ele, when you spec for that high condition damage, especially in PvP, you’re not getting much damage from your actual attacks, them’s small potatoes.

Sure, this 850/tick would be dangerous if you were applying poison/torment etc on top of it, but you only have access to bleeds as an ele, and good luck applying all this burning and all these bleed stacks before someone hits you twice and your down (because again, you know, lowest life pool n all).
If anyone here really thinks this is wrong, I would love to attempt to prove via Duel. I take my staff ele(notoriously known not be strong for 1v1s) and you go full Ele condition build(carrion/settler/rabid) and any weapon set you prefer, and we see how the battle goes. With my glass cannon build, I will have little life or toughness, and you will not be able to burn me to death before I spike you out(you will also likely not be able to apply enough bleeds). I won’t even take any cantrips or extra condi removal from trait lines/utilities, it won’t make a difference.
If conditions/burning were really that useful, why is Berserker build massively prevalent in meta? Because condition builds don’t apply any real pressure, which is what they are supposed to do. Enemy should know when they get hit with lots of condit. damage that it’s time to end battle quick or retreat, but instead, they ignore the petty damage and continue doing whatever they were doing. Again, burning was massively more relevant in GW1…

Vash Past.4385:

you will not be able to burn me to death before I spike you out

That right there is where your argument comes apart. Conditions aren’t meant to be bursts: they’re meant for longlasting damage over time. They’re made for atrition builds, to hinder, weaken and pressure the opponent while you outheal them.

The only condition that’s somewhat suitable for bursting is confusion.

The problem is, at least in SPvP, you help your team a whole lot more by playing a class that can effectively fulfill a defined role well than by playing ele, which can fulfill a variety of roles but not optimally. Roamer? Thief. Bunker? Guardian. Teamfight? Necro/Spirit Ranger. Hilariously, the Warrior does the jack-of-all-trades role better than the Ele. Even Engi has at least one role that it excels at (decapping.) Plus the higher skill floor of the ele makes it a chore to achieve mediocre results with the profession.

I suspect that the devs want to give Ele a role that it can perform better than other classes in the feature patch. I’ m gonna guess it’s some sort of group condi removal/support type role. I’m also gonna be pessimistic and say that it isn’t going to help Ele one bit (gut feeling, no real evidence to back any of this up.)

Ya i would like to see force get things like a water and chill field and a lighting field. Dagger main and off seem ok though the off could use one more field. The scepter is lacking a lot its a pure dmg tool and that it maybe some type of after effect fields would be fun.

Over all i think ele is missing one major thing an earth filed type out of all the elements earth has been comply left out of the fields.

If you’re so calleous about throwing fields on weapons, then you underestimate the usefulness of fields. Most skills will need nerfing if you’re gonna start adding fields to them.