Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone.

Instead of throwing in a non constructive rant, I’ll try to make my point of vue rather clear on what I believe is the core problem of elementalist’s design and overall balance, tempest included. I have little faith in the devs actually reading my thread or having everyone agree with me, but that should not stop me expressing all this. And while pve ele is more rarely seen as having issues, mainly because of the nature of the fights and raw numbers making the class appealing at a competitive level, my thread is both dedicated to pvp and pve. I have too few knowledge on wvw so I’ll leave that aside.

Gw2 dev team clearly stated they wanted to avoid the so-called holy trinity, making every class supposedly able to take care of themselves in about all scale fights. As a result of this class’ identities are not made through their overall capabilities but rather through some gimmicks and differently looking effects. While I perfectly conceive the core differences between a mesmer and a elementalist, those differences do not make me feel like I’m really playing a totally different class. It leaves me with this impression that the devs took 10 core mechanics and for each class took 6 of them and gave them. Each class is different in that they mix their own combinaison of those 6 out of 10 total mechanics, but do kind of feel the same in a lot of ways.

Now, what is supposedly making elem unique? The 4 elements swap which have all their own theme. Core Elementalist is tied to this concept of temporarily giving up 3 out of the 4 themes to access to the bonuses of the forth element and having to quickly swap of attunement depending on the situation. Tempest, on the other hand, promotes the idea of being able to handle the situation whilst camping one element to become a master of this element and unleashe its true power through the overload.

Weapon swap is not exactly new. And having access to a spell after gathering a certain amount of ressources (here time) isn’t new either. In the end, the elementalist’s identity is more visual than anything

Concerning pvp’s status of the elementalist, the main issue with having no built-in hard mitigation is that either you are able to face tank the damage thrown at you with your healings and perma protection, and you’re on the op side, or you just can’t and you die within the x seconds of blocks of your opponents.

All classes have reliable hard mitigation tools, except maybe the necro who still have his shrouds to act as a shield, they can use while still battling. A fair amount of what’s making this the overall way to go is that it actually rewards good use of these defenses to mitigate more dmg than what protection can whilst punishing misuses of these defensive options. Time your blocks well and you’ll get an easier time killing your opponent. Misuse them and you’re a free kill. That’s part of why passively activated defense mechanics are the banes of the pvp community, it kills the “time it well to survive” requiered to make it interesting.

Finally, elements are either too tied to the traits or not enough, and while adating to the situation through attunement changes is promoted by the game itself since day 1, I have never felt any tankier while attuning to earth. Infact, I even feel like I’m losing survivability by not attuning to water instead. Because attuning to earth only gives you a slight toughness boost if you took earth trait. And here’s the thing, if I want to get tanky my only option is to trait earth. Attuning to earth has little to no effect on survivability, but the trait will get me way tankier even while attuned to fire. Do i feel really quick and precise by attuning to air? Hell no. I already have hours of swiftness stacked, and the common 25% speed buff requiers me to take air trait. It does not give me anything more than what everyone already has.

With all of that said, I’ll now list what elem should have to make it on par with its supposed identity.

- an actual effect tied to both changing an element and being attuned to an element.
- having to time both the burst / hard mitigation tool and the attunement swap
- traits that amplifies the core identity of its element.
- healthier mechanics that promote both teamplay and solo plays rather than solo plays benefiting to a whole group. And that’s coming from a guy that enjoyed playing healbot elem in pvp.

What I suggest :

For core elem :

- give a strong but quickly fading effect when swapping an element. For instance, attuning to fire could trigger an explosion around the elem dealing dmg and burning foes, air could give a low range teleport to a location and have thunder strike that location, water could release a torrent of water slightly pushing back foes and chilling them for 1-2 seconds, earth could offer a 75% damage reduction added multiplicatively to protection for 1.5 – 2 seconds. This way swapping of elements would reward good timings and increase elements’ identity.

- give bonuses and maluses depending on which element one is attuned to. Being attuned to fire should never offer as much defensive stats as earth. Actually it’s almost the case. Being attuned to fire should both increase power and reduce toughness or increase damage taken by a fair amount. Fire should be all about building a good burst while being weak to damage itself. Air should benefit of increased max speed (making swiftness go beyond 33%, maybe 50%) and precision while losing healing power and reducing any incoming heals. Water should have highly reduced power but a % increase on all incoming heals, earth should have increased toughness and reduced precision and movement speed. This way you reinforce the impact of being attuned to one particular element.

- traits should give bonuses that are more tied to the element itself. Traiting earth could upgrade the quick 75% damage reduction when atuning to earth to a 90% damage reduction, making it almost a 1,5 – 2 seconds block. Water trait could give a splashing heal, air trait would increase the range of the tp and increase the max speed even further (66% ?)… arcane tree as it is now could benefit of some rework on certain traits, but traits like evasive arcana are clearly what’s needed for the elem.

- remove the heals from water spells but add effect zones. If people wants heals they’ll have to burn some finishers in there. Have the players work as a team to get access to these team heals.

- add some quick moving low range spells to air. I want to feel like kitten Yoda when fighting in air element, fast, slipperish, precise. I want to feel like I’m some kind of thunderstorm quickly striking here and there. Staff air 2 is a boring spell. There’s so much room for excitement…

- earth should all be about becoming that annoying wall that can eat a punch and still prevent you from going any further. Make me slow but able to create mountains to ruin all your efforts to go from point A to point B without putting an effort to it.

- give fire burst. Air can carry the sustained dps, give access to burst through fire. Delayed burst would be amazing with the power bonus and toughness or incoming % damage malus as It would force the elem to work for a setup to throw that burst before swapping to anothet element. Firegrab is a good exemple of this. Having a 2 seconds delayed explosion from the center of the elem would also work in that direction.

For tempest

Promote attunement camping by giving higher bonuses for each seconds spent in the same element. Let’s say core elem earns 500 power by being attuned to fire, tempest would start with 0 bonus power but earn 50 power each seconds until it has a bonus of 800 – 1000. Air would get progressively more movespeed etc. This way, you’d be camping an element not only to get access to the overload but also to the bonuses you knew you’d need.

I wrote this thread on a laggy kindle, so mistakes are to be found. You can notify me these mistakes through my inbox if you want to.

Somehow.4769:

- remove the heals from water spells but add effect zones. If people wants heals they’ll have to burn some finishers in there. Have the players work as a team to get access to these team heals. Give clever ways to the elem to heal while fighting.

Fantastic, you want to add identity to elementalist yet you would absolutely kitten over the one build that can designate itself group healer in WvW by putting all the load on comboing rather than the massive AoE healing the elementalist can build himself in the water tree. When its 50 people, they arent going to “work as a team” as if its a 5 man tightknit party. AoE is king.

Thats PvE thinking for ya.

Dawdler.8521:

Somehow.4769:

- remove the heals from water spells but add effect zones. If people wants heals they’ll have to burn some finishers in there. Have the players work as a team to get access to these team heals. Give clever ways to the elem to heal while fighting.

Fantastic, you want to add identity to elementalist yet you would absolutely kitten over the one build that can designate itself group healer in WvW by putting all the load on comboing rather than the massive AoE healing the elementalist can build himself in the water tree. When its 50 people, they arent going to “work as a team” as if its a 5 man tightknit party. AoE is king.

Thats PvE thinking for ya.

Or it could be one person making a bad suggestion. I play PvE and honestly I don’t like most of his suggestions =/. Of course if you want to be the typical type of WvW player who hates PvE players for no reason other than that they are PvE players go right ahead.

Dawdler.8521:

Somehow.4769:

- remove the heals from water spells but add effect zones. If people wants heals they’ll have to burn some finishers in there. Have the players work as a team to get access to these team heals. Give clever ways to the elem to heal while fighting.

Fantastic, you want to add identity to elementalist yet you would absolutely kitten over the one build that can designate itself group healer in WvW by putting all the load on comboing rather than the massive AoE healing the elementalist can build himself in the water tree. When its 50 people, they arent going to “work as a team” as if its a 5 man tightknit party. AoE is king.

Thats PvE thinking for ya.

I feel like I haven’t made myself clear on that part. What I meant is that direct group healings are a problem in regards of balancing, a problem anet tried to get rid of by destroying elem’s supporting value in both pvp and pve. My suggestion might suck kitten , I admit that, but this is nothing more than a suggestion to an issue that has to be addressed and I am welcoming your own suggestions on my ideas. To be fair, of all my ideas removing diect heals from water is the one that I liked the less because the bonus malus of elements would already suffice in the context of these changes.

Elem should be able to do almost everything correctly, with the downside of not being able to do them at the same time. And there you open doors to balancing.

I also said that I don’t know much about wvw and therefore do not wish to interfere with elem’s balancing there.

Somehow.4769:

Dawdler.8521:

Somehow.4769:

- remove the heals from water spells but add effect zones. If people wants heals they’ll have to burn some finishers in there. Have the players work as a team to get access to these team heals. Give clever ways to the elem to heal while fighting.

Fantastic, you want to add identity to elementalist yet you would absolutely kitten over the one build that can designate itself group healer in WvW by putting all the load on comboing rather than the massive AoE healing the elementalist can build himself in the water tree. When its 50 people, they arent going to “work as a team” as if its a 5 man tightknit party. AoE is king.

Thats PvE thinking for ya.

I feel like I haven’t made myself clear on that part. What I meant is that direct group healings are a problem in regards of balancing, a problem anet tried to get rid of by destroying elem’s supporting value in both pvp and pve. My suggestion might suck kitten , I admit that, but this is nothing more than a suggestion to an issue that has to be addressed and I am welcoming your own suggestions on my ideas. To be fair, of all my ideas removing diect heals from water is the one that I liked the less because the bonus malus of elements would already suffice in the context of these changes.

Elem should be able to do almost everything correctly, with the downside of not being able to do them at the same time. And there you open doors to balancing.

I also said that I don’t know much about wvw and therefore do not wish to interfere with elem’s balancing there.

Having direct group heals is not a balance problem, as long as they need healing power to do any significant healing. The problem is that if you need healing power for your heals, damage-based ele defences suffer. This is one of the reasons why many players in this subforum recognise that damage-based elementalists need some form of hard mitigation as their main defence.

Anet did not really reduce the ele’s support value, they simply made changes in order to seperate support elements from damage elements. This is why you have changes such as the base healing nerf on WtPA, while increasing the scaling with healing power.

There are a number of classic combinations/counterbalances that ahave been around since day dot that help define a spell caster:

Strong range healer but weak dmg works
strong damage and mitigation but must be close range works
Strong damage at range with poor mitigation works
strong close range heal with weak damage and good mitigation works

What do we have?

Good heal at close range but no mitigation
Fair damage at close range with little mitigation
poor damage at range (slow avoidable attacks and cooldowns) and poor mitigation
Poor ranged heal with poor mitigation.

Get a grip Anet.

But… but… but… we … have… shatterstone!

Stack protection and heal through damage. This is the ele way. This is how it has always been. This is how it shall always be.

ArthurDent.9538:

Stack protection and heal through damage. This is the ele way. This is how it has always been. This is how it shall always be.

Actually I kind of loved that when it could work. Old pvp d/d cele was really fast paced and fun to play. But anet decided that being able to heal through damage was not normal and had to be destroyed. Multiple times now. And buffed many berz, marauder or condi builds, rendering prot + self healing dull and inefficent So I’m looking for alternatives.