Guild Wars 2

I started another similar thread on this, but it had bugs in it aswell and i hadn’t reserved the 1st few posts – as such this thread is for suggestions only and not bugs.

You can find the bug thread here

Please post any suggestions (try to be a bit realistic in them please) and i will add them to the list on a daily basis. Also if the suggestion hasn’t been posted already in the suggestion section please post about it in that section and then put the link in your post so i can add it here aswell – this is so the mods/devs still have single thread links available for ease of use.

To the mods, please don’t lock this thread, it’s simply a place to keep track of all the elementalist suggestions in 1 place (and it also gives you single links to each suggestion in the suggestion section – soon) so people can have 1 place to post them and keep track of them.

If the thread could be stickied it would be a big help so it doesn’t get lost (and it will also stop multiple threads on the same things).

Conjured weapon improvements.
1: Please make it so Conjured weapons can only be picked up by the person who put it down & their party members. As someone who plays an Elementalist and loves using the conjured weapons, there is nothing more annoying that spawning a Lightning hammer (or bow/sheild/axe/greatsword) running out of charges/time and then going to grab the spare and seeing it taken by some random passerby.

2: Allow Conjured weapons to remember auto attacks, i know some like that they don’t, but some would like that they do – so making them remember pleases everyone.

3: Make it so if using a Conjured weapon if you are downed when you get back up (within the weapons time limit) that you still actully have the weapon, it’s really annoying to use the fiery greatsword (for example), get downed within 10 seconds or so and then have to wait a full 3 minutes to use it again due to this. Also, make it remember you had the weapon on quest pickups aswell – the frog trap quest for example, when picking up frogs/traps it looses the conjured weapon after you use them.

4: Increase the base charges from 15 to 25 and make the trait that increase the charges increase it to 35 and add an extra 15 to 30 seconds. Or to work with the countdown etc make it so we have a base 25 charges and 60 seconds and the trait for conjured weapons adds a 25% damage increase to conjured weapons instead.

If part 3 and 4 got put in then part 1 wouldn’t be needed.

A possible change to all Conjured weapons.
Possibly convert all 4 conjured weapons into 1 skill called “conjure elemental weapon”, what this could is make it so we get each current conjured weapon based on the attunement we are in – so if i’m in fire i get the fire axes, if im in water i get the frost bow, air = hammer and so on. Doing this would allow 3 extra utility skills to be made for the proffesion and would keep the same range of damage we get now from conjured weapons.
-
Give the elemental an out of combat weapon swap, make it just like the other classes sweapon swap (same button on taskbar, same extra slots in hero menu), but just make it greyed/faded out when we are in combat.
-
Our elementals (lesser/elite) should/could scale with our stats (even if only a fraction of them).
-
We could perhaps do with more base health and our healing skills could do with a slight increase in base healing.
-
Meteor Shower improvements.

The skills Meteor Shower seems to have a cast and then channel time, please make the channel bar reflect this by having the channel bar increase in it’s size at the point of the channel part (some other skills do this).

Make it so the shower has a greater chance to hit targets in the AOE, sometimes you can actully hit nothing at all despite spending 6 seconds casting it.

Perhaps make it so a bigger Meteor comes down in the very center of the AOE within the 1st 3 seconds of casting that hits harder than all the smaller ones that come after, this gives the player a chance to actully control the aim of at least one Meteor (it could even have a shockwave that slows all within the AOE).
-
Reduce Dragon’s tooth landing time, 3s to land it’s just too much!
-
Fire Grab, does ridicolously low dmg compared to its CD, at 2k Power I can barely hit for 2k dmg on a light armour profession! So I need to go completely glass cannon spec to be able to hit heavy armour professions for 3k dmg…c’mon — either lower considerably the CD ( 30s CD max ) or increased the dmg ( 4k base dmg at 1.8k Power).
-
Lightning Flash , the range should be increased to 1200, the CD reduction was great but it’s still bad for a quick get away skill, the range is just too short.
-
Signet of Air, it should give 25% speed increase just like the thief signet.
-
Make our pets (glyph of elemental/lesser elemental) attack faster, we have to cast them and then only have them for 60 seconds – a good bit of the time at the start is actully waiting for them to attack.
-
A change to Elite skill Fiery Greatsword.

It doesn’t make sence that this elite skill is fiery only, this is because every attunment has a version of a cunjured weapon. So why not have an “elemental greatsword” instead of just a 1 element weapon. All attacks on it would be the same as they are now – but each attunment gets a style of damage/buff/debuff added to the attacks.

Fire would conjure – fiery greatsword with burning effect attacks.
Water would conjure – icey greatsword with chilling effect attacks.
Air would cunjure – lighting greatsword with a speedbuff.
Earth would conjure – Earthen greatsword with a bonus to toughness.
-
Evasive Arcana
Evasive Arcana doesn’t seem to work under water and i am unsure if this is a bug or intended. If it is intended i propose that water based versions of the attacks are added (as it’s a tier 3 trait).

Reserved for future suggestions/ideas.

Reserved for future suggestions/ideas.

Reserved for future suggestions/ideas.

The skill Mist Form says on it’s tooltip that breaks stun.

Since the skill turn the character into a “vaporous mist”, I think it would make sense to it also break from Immobilize condition (which is part of stun).

Elemental weapons

A great idea but currently they are not very useful, I have tried them all and the only one I found myself using was lightning hammer, and that was for the significant aoe dmg. Other utility skills just seem like a much smarter choice. Several improvements could be made, but when pondering about these I came up with a great idea.
Since we are elementalists instead of weapon swapping we get 4 attunements that take place of our F-key abilities. But what do we get for replacement of our F-key skills? Nothing.
I suggest that in place of the weapon swap button/icon, we get a summon elemental weapon button/icon. give it a 1 min CD, and you will summon the elemental weapon type of which ever attunement you are in when you cast it. There, now we have an actual weapon swap, and we can replace the elemental weapon utilities with actual useful utilities!
I think you would still need to make a few changes to the elemental weapon skills, make them a little more appealing, you can keep the charges on them and just make it summon a weapon in your hand and one at your feet for other members to pick up.
Basically add functionality to the class with out making it over powered.

I have several other suggestions but I have stuff to do so they will have to wait for future posts.

MajorMelchett.6042:

Conjured weapon improvements.

Give the elemental an out of combat weapon swap, make it just like the other classes sweapon swap (same button on taskbar, same extra slots in hero menu), but just make it greyed/faded out when we are in combat.

-

Yes! This is also a great idea, would be soooo useful for WvW, it kind of goes against my elemental weapon idea though >_<

Dagger/Dagger
Earth
Churning Earth- I don’t even know what to say,
1) Cut the cast time down by a whole second
2) The ability should apply weakness to targets in the AoE, not cripple and have a weak magnetic affect
3) Give stability to the elementalist for the duration of the cast, due to how incredibly squishy you are and that you cannot dodge.

That might actually make the skill decent.
Air
Lightning Whip- I swear that there is something flat out broken with the skill, 40% of the time that the animation shows it hitting the target it flat out misses and it can’t be used to hit things like stationary turrets.
Lightning Touch- The skill really should be doing quite a bit more damage in my opinion, considering air pretty much puts out less damage than water does with D/D. And the targeting on the skill seems pretty weak as well.

Ride The Lightning’s Targeting is messed up and half the time I end up just sitting in front of the enemy waiting to do something. The skill should also count as a blast finisher.

Fire
Only real problem with fire is that sometimes I find Burning Speed doesn’t explode, which is a significant portion of the skills damage.

Water
Maybe a tad bit of a damage boost? No real complaints though.

Toxification.8421:

Dagger/Dagger
Earth
Churning Earth- I don’t even know what to say,
1) Cut the cast time down by a whole second
2) The ability should apply weakness to targets in the AoE, not cripple and have a weak magnetic affect
3) Give stability to the elementalist for the duration of the cast, due to how incredibly squishy you are and that you cannot dodge.

That might actually make the skill decent.

Took the words right out of my mouth.. its VERY obvious to me that no devs tested this skill in pvp before finalizing it. Any skill that makes you stand next to your opponent for that long with out getting interrupted or flat out killed by dmg should be an insta kill. I NEVER use this skill in pvp because it is a deathwish, either make it worth the cast time or COMPLETELY redo this skill.

There have been times in spvp where I was naive and thought “no ones focused on me right now maybe I can pull it off” and I had to mist form right before I finished the cast with 10% health and I started the cast at 100%. This is with the soldier amulet BTW.

Many guilds rely on dropping conjured weapons to help boost AoE damage and DPS for everyone in the area for WvW. This is usually done before battles. If you make it so it’s party-restricted, you are DESTROYING a tactic used by many large guilds in WvW completely. I’d like to see a different solution instead

Xethos.3179:

Many guilds rely on dropping conjured weapons to help boost AoE damage and DPS for everyone in the area for WvW. This is usually done before battles. If you make it so it’s party-restricted, you are DESTROYING a tactic used by many large guilds in WvW completely. I’d like to see a different solution instead

I think if they just made it so it stayed on you when you get downed (and in other situations – like in water, quest pickup etc) and increased its base charges to 25 (15 is just not enough – make the trait increase it to 35 or increase damage to them) there would be no issue with how it is now regarding the dropped spare.

A lot of my complaint is due to how easy it is to loose/use up the conjured weapon and needing the spare and finding it gone.

Added an idea for the elite skill “elemental greatsword” to replace fiery greatsword and a recently proposed “conjure elemental weapon” to replace all 4 standard conjured weapons.

MajorMelchett.6042:

Signet of Air, it should give 25% speed increase just like the thief signet, nobody use this signet in sPvP and the 2s activation make the blind useless.

2s activation time? Isn’t this instant cast?

1.Our traits need to be reworked (Someone has started a thread with suggestions on this) so that you benefit from them regardless of your element attunement. As they are you receive benefits only while you are attuned to a specific element. In a class where you have to be swapping elements all the time this is not very helpful. Basically your traits help you only 25% of the time…..yes even Grandmaster traits only help you 25% of the time.

2. I have posted this already somewhere else but in case someone from Anet comes over here I’ll post it again:

OneBloke.7264:

The focus should have a healing skill on water attunement but most importantly the fire focus skills are utterly useless:

Flame Wall: Damage almost non existent and it causes burning for one second, yes for one second to a target which is probably burning already from Flame Strike or Dragon’s Tooth.

Fire Shield: Perhaps the most useless skill in the entire game as I said on another thread. Puts up a shield which lasts for 3 seconds during this time if someone attacks you they will get burning for 1 second. Yes you read properly, as if burning from Flame Strike, Dragon’s Tooth and Flame Wall was not enough Fire Shield gives you the chance to burn your enemy for whole full second holy cow!

So yeah the focus has some nice defensive abilities but its fire skills are worthless, I really wish they implement a decent offensive skill for the focus on fire attunement. Isn’t attack what the fire attunement is supposed to be about? I’m sure more people would begin to use it if they made this change.

It would also be nice if they added one defensive skill for the dagger under earth, this would also make the dagger more appealing. As it is now the focus is all about defensive and nothing and the dagger all about offensive but no defensive skills.
These change would make both weapons more balanced and start to add actual versatility to the elementalist

Seleucus Nicator.1682:

2s activation time? Isn’t this instant cast?

It is indeed, changed the post.

suggested changes for D/D(from a pvp standpoint):

Fire: (very happy with this attunement currently)
Fire Grab – I would like to see this instant cast or atleast reduce the cast time, it is difficult in pvp to keep my enemy in front of me while casting this, and often misses.

Water:
Frozen Burst – instead of chill make this an immobilize, or if that seems OP then make it a 1 sec immobilize and then the chill.
Frost Aura – add bonus armor or defense to this skill.
Cleansing Wave – increase radius to 600, I can rarely heal others with this skill as it is.

Air: (not enough damage currently)
Lightning Whip – either increase damage or increase attack rate, this skill also seems to miss alot even when your opponent is right in front of you.
Lightning Touch – Either make instant cast or increase damage
Ride the Lightning – Please fix this skill!!
Updraft – reduce CD slightly, reduce blowout, increase radius slightly, add some damage, take swiftness away in exchange

Earth: (I only use this attunement for the protection buff and KD currently)
Magnetic Grasp – very buggy currently, instead of pulling you to target, you should pull target to you, and keep the 2 sec immobilize.
Earthquake – reduce the CD
Churning Earth – significantly reduce cast time, or significantly increase damage, its just not worth the cast time currently in pvp.

I have other ideas for earth but don’t have the time right now

Okay, so I’m mostly focused with dagger/dagger with my elementalist, so here’s my take…

Fire
A lot of people have been saying fire is pretty much golden, and I agree. But like people have been saying, Fire Grab’s cooldown feels a bit high for it’s damage and range, but it’s still very functional and doesn’t take away much.

Air
Very clearly the weakest of the dagger attunements. Not because all the skills are weak, but the kit lacks cohesion and the most effective skills by far are on the offhand.

“By harnessing wind and lightning, elementalists can target specific foes with focused, high-damage attacks.” Unfortunately not. In air attunement, every skill except Lightning Whip can potentially affect more than one target and typically does little to no damage. Ride the Lightning does less damage than a cast of Lightning Whip. Lightning Touch does less than one lash.

Lightning Whip itself does reasonable damage. It’s single target, inflicts no conditions, and for some strange reason has a strange conical hit zone despite being single target. It either needs to hit multiple targets or do more damage and hit reliably.

Lightning Touch. Insignificant damage and a condition that might not pay off at all. I would just as soon throw it out and add a different, better skill, but if it has to stay it’d be much better with more damage and a longer weakness duration.

Shocking Aura. It can interrupt channeled melee skills. It’d feel a lot better and make more sense if it did damage, I think.

One thing that I think is needed for the elementalist, and I believe air attunement daggers is a good place for it: more lightning fields. There are currently two skills that produces one, or more accurately, a single skill twice. Daggers only have two fields in fire, and two finishers in earth. If there were more fields and more finishers to choose from, I think we’d see less of the linear comboing shenanigans we see now, and more variety and malleability with dagger elementalists.

And while Ride the Lightning obviously is a good skill (if a little wonky against moving targets), I’d be very satisfied to see it as a blast finisher. It would give Ride the Lightning value during combat, and make it not just a tool for initiation/chasing.

Water
Water, like fire, is also in a fairly good spot. I think what really hurts it is the longer cooldowns and the fact that Frozen Burst is a better applicator for Chill than Frost Armor. And does damage. And has a significantly shorter cooldown.

Earth
Earth has a similar problem to air: it’s most useful for it’s offhand and, unfortunately, the offhand skills have very long cooldowns. There’s little incentive to stay in this attunement with daggers. Impale does decent damage but can’t sustain damage as well as fire, even when used with periodic Ring of Earth casts. Speaking of, I’m extremely surprised Ring of Earth only applies a single stack of bleed. And by surprised I mean sad that.

I like Magnetic Grasp. It’s a darn shame I never use it. It takes a very long time for a gap closer, and I don’t see why it couldn’t just be a “requires target” skill and immediately start the dash when cast.

Earthquake suffers for being so awesome. It’s damaging area knockdown. Reasonably, it should have a long cooldown. Unfortunately, there’s little that can be done to change it that wouldn’t either diminish the skill or place it wildly out of the existing power curve.

Churning Earth, however, has obvious shortcomings. The long cast time combined with an agonizing thirty second cooldown make it very ineffective. Consider Eruption, which can’t be interrupted, allows you to do other things while it’s cooking, does greater bleed damage at it’s full duration, and takes roughly as long to finish. At five times the cooldown, Churning Earth just doesn’t measure up.

It’s apparent that ArenaNet likes skills that do damage over time, even if it’s an enormous amount of damage, but wants to discourage large upfront amounts of damage with either delays or long cooldowns, but it’s obvious which kind shines brighter.

Auras in general, to be more effective, need either longer duration, effects on activation, or built-in damage reduction.

And now two last things regarding traits.

Arcane Precision feels too infrequent. I might get one activation every few minutes. Three seconds of weakness, lucky me! A higher proc chance would be welcome.

Evasive Arcana obviously fights itself. Dodging away from my opponent puts me completely out of range. Other evasive skills like Mark of Evasion or Deceptive Evasion activate at the initial location, and Evasive Arcane needs to do the same.

i use mostly staff so i will add some of my ideas to your thread

• remove auto attacks?

- I find the auto attacks very boring and sometimes weak, i’d prefer to see maybe a medium damage spell with a short CD ( this will also help with us lacking burst dps that other classes have right now ) that can be used with our combo fields or maybe apply various debuffs that increase damage of our other abilitites or to combo with over spells eg.

Fireball – deals X damage, ( can apply burning if shot through a fire field ) debuff – the next water spell to hit this target will cause it to take X damage and cause vulnerability 4 stacks.

Waterblast – deals X damage and heals all nearby allies AROUND THE CASTER ( can apply regen or vulnerability if shot through a water or lightning fields ) debuff – the next lightning spell to hit the target will become stunned for 1 sec? ( to OP? maybe just a daze? )

etc etc. – but the idea is to give even more synergy between attunments and also options! – the ele will have to decide to going to water to get those vuln stacks! or going straight to earth in order to gain a root or magnectic shield

• Skills

Shockwave – let us cast this in any direction we want!!! not just at our target ( make it similar to the warriors great sword spin that we get an an arrow pointing the direction it will go )

Gust – Same as above i want more control of my knockback not them just being able to strafe out of it

meteor shower – Needs fixing to be more consistent with damage not random hits

eruption – I dont think there is a slower animated spell in the history of mmo’s i have played, and its damage its really just not worth it at all, make it a shorter animation also so I can combo it with lava font without having to put down eruption first

• Traits

there is already so many posts on this so i want go into great detail, but some small ideas:

Fire – increase the damage of all AoE abilities

water – increase the radius of all AoE abilities ( this can be combo’d with arcana to make them quite big and very effective! )

Air – when an opponent is criticaly hit with an AoE attack it will cause a debuff depending on the attunment ( lava font – burning )

earth – an additional field will be cast below the elementalists feet when useing AoE ground targeted spells ( lava font can be put on the ground and another under your feet! )

i focused really hard on just AoE abilitites sorry but i didnt want to spend all day writing out ideas :/ maybe people can expand of what i have or just balance them ( i didnt spell check dont hate )

Make Glyph of Renewal an elite spell so we actually get a useful spell in our elite slot.

It already has the same CD that the elite ones.

Hi all,
I would like to add few thought as well. Just one note before I start: I did not read every posts in this topic, so something might be already here. I am not copying things, it just mean that we think alike.

General changes:
Elementalist should have passive ability that will add a percentage of corresponding to elemental magic trait while in specific attunement. While in Fire, there should be bonus of to Power and Expertise; while in Watter bonus to Vitality and Compassion and so on. It should also be affected by Lingering Element trait. This would allow for very specialized build around one or two elements and help with adapting to the situation as well.

Elementals (both elite and utility):
While elemental is out, the corresponding skill slot should be equipped with “detonate” skill (think of Necromancer’s minions or Engineer’s detonate turret). When this skill is used, elemental gets destroyed, small aoe damage and/or a condition should be applied. The conditions should be: Fire = burning, Air = blind, Watter=chill, Earth=bleed. This would help us with extra damage/control as well give us, to small degree, control over skill’s cool down – now we have to wait for elemental to die naturally (if he is not killed in combat) and then actual cooldown starts.

Conjures:
There has been a lot of comments around conjures and I have to agree with the most people, conjures are not much worth having in skill bar at this point. Therefore I suggest some mechanic changes for conjures. Remove “charges” mechanic, add “toggle” mechanic and divide conjures to active and passive effect:

Toggle mechanic would indicate which conjure weapon would be in swap position (see below). Ementalist would firstly “toggle” conjure weapon skill to indicate which weapon he/she want in swap position by using it – with obvious limitation of one toggled conjure weapon at time. If the Elementalist wants to switch to another conjure weapon from skill bar he/she simply uses the new conjure weapon making it “toggle” and the previous conjure weapon goes to full cooldown (60 seconds or 180 seconds for Firely Greatsword) – this should be available even if the active effect is on cooldown.

Once the skill is set into “toggle” mode, it will provide:

Passive effect would grant Elementalist option to swap to conjure weapon. The passive effect would be indefinite (and not lost upon skill activation) and the swap mechanic would work the same way as in other professions. The swap should have the same cooldown as element attunments including reduction via Arcana trait; the possibility to swap element while holding cunjured weapons should be kept as it is now.

Active effect would work the same way as it does now including cooldown and lifespawn (60 second), but minus the charges. Also, all weapons should have the same Fire axe and greatsword – effect at conjured location. Fire axe and greatsword already have this, lighting hammer = aoe blind, frost bow= aoe chill, earth shield=aoe cripple/bleed.

I believe that this would preserve original intention for these skills and add new variability since the Elementalist could now make build around specific weapon, conjure weapon/weapon combination or around swapping weapons all together.

With charges removed, the trait Conjurer needs to be updated with “Weapon-swapping recharges x seconds faster” – the same aas Warrior trait Fast Hands.

Also, I suggest tiny changes to certain conjured weapons:

Firely Greatsword:
Change 1st skill Flame Wave to Flame Blast – combo sequence with increasing damage. First use = shoot fireball at enemy, second use = shoot bigger fireball at enemy, third use = shoot exploding fireball at enemy + burning aoe.

Frost Bow:
Make all skills 1200 range. Change 1st skill Watter Arrow to Frost Arrow, removing healing effect and buffing damage little bit – possibly adding a chance to chill enemy for 1s but that might be an overkill.