Guild Wars 2

Hello,

This thread will be addressing some changes that could be made to the Elementalist, mainly focusing on weapon skills.

We all know that the Scepter Dagger set is very strong and has been abused for a long time especially in the form of bunker with out of this world sustain. The hit to Evasive arcana was a step towards less healing but did not hit the main skill Water Trident.

Water Trident should be nerfed healing wise, a 20 second cooldown heal (traited 16 seconds) is what makes the scepter the go to weapon for any bunker, together with the blinds and Rock Barrier.

Following I will address some changes that can be made to scepter but especially the focus offhand to make it more viable.

- Water Trident (Scepter): nerf the healing.
- Shatterstone (Scepter): make it do something outside of a two second cast time, bring down the cast-time or make the cast time worth it.
- Ride the lightning (Dagger offhand):personally 20 seconds is decent but 25 seconds would make it more a skill to think when to use. A higher cooldown then 25 could be possible.
- Flamewall (Focus): Reduce the cast time 1/2 or 1/3 of a second would make it more useful, 1 second cast to create a fire field that applies one stack of burning and does a small amount of damage compared the the same slot skill on dagger offhand: Ring of fire that does instant damage of about 900 in tooltip compared to 200 for Flamewall. Ring of fire also applies 5 seconds of burning every time someone enters / leaves the ring. Ring of fire has 15 seconds cooldown compared to Flamewalls 20 seconds.
Would suggest you make some other change to this skill as well, increase the dmg or increase the burning applied for each tick.
- Gale (Focus): 50 seconds of cooldown, it is great that it is ranged but compared to Updraft (40 secodns cooldown) to aoe knockback/down apply 10 seconds of swiftness and make you evade attacks. At least bring down the cooldown of Gale to balance the tradeoff, possibly add some damage to.
-Freezing Gust (Focus): A 25 second range 3 second chill, this is what you get instead of frost aura: 10% damage reduction for 7 seconds + apply 2 seconds of chill every one second when stricken. Make it instant cast time and increase the damage of it since focus overall lacks damage abilities.

And please erase the cast time of conjure weapons, maybe with a small increase in cooldown. I would love to make builds around them or just incorporate the skill combinations. The same could be said about Glyphs, if for example Glyph of Elemental power had no cast time I can make it work in numerous builds.
Right now Cantrips and Arcane spells just dominate the other utilities.

Alot more can be talked about when it comes to Elementalist but I stop here for now.

So, basically, you’re asking for a nerf on the already overnerfed ele. Even better, on a weapon set that, if you ask me, is not much played.

The most played set is a staff, go everywhere on PvE and you see staffs. Staffs everywhere, after that comes the dagger-dagger set.

Before you nerf the scepter, try buffing it so that’s it’s actually useful outside of face-tanking damage.

Also, a 25 second cooldown on RtL? That couldn’t possibly backfire and hit specs other than s/d bunkers.

Trolls, trolls everywhere

his supposed changes are actually very decent – people are just way too clueless about this game, also it’s about spvp, not about pve. they need to split pve and spvp skillwise, because what might be broken in spvp is still fine or in some ways not as useful as in pve and the other way round.

The problem with Elementalist is this. In PvE or huge zergs our AoE (especially Staff) is fine. In anything smaller, such as sPvP it’s just pathetic. Too many of our skills have huge telegraphs that make them exceedingly simple to dodge or just walk out of. Until that issue is fixed we’ll see most of our “go to” builds as overly tanky bunker builds that predominately use X/Dagger and crow about our insane “mobility” and healing abilities.

Odd that our incredible mobility comes from 1 ability on 1 off-hand weapon, yet it supposedly defines the entire profession. Strange that our supreme healing comes from a build entirely devoted to the purpose, which sacrifices almost all damage output.

And as for the telegraphs, ask yourself this. How many people have taken Lightning Flash just so you could occasionally hit someone with Churning Earth once in a while?

Yeah, me too.

Elementalist healing might need a nerf, but I personally don’t think so. One Corrupt Boon or Null Field and we drop like a rock. What we need is a BUFF to the stuff we all wanted to be doing in the first place…. DAMAGE!

At the moment the class is too reliant on “Do loads of damage to those too stupid or laggy to move” skills.

Nerf Big Red Circles.

OP should work for ANet’s balancing team. He sure knows what he’s talking about, and he’s already following ANet’s Elementalist balancing methodology.

I’ll help with some ideas of my own:

- Ring of Fire: Increase the cooldown to 20 seconds, make it burn, and make it hit allies as well. This would greatly enhance our profession synergy with Guardians and Necromancers, who can benefit from having a condition / being burned.

- Drake’s Breath: Increase the damage, cooldown to 10 seconds, and make it spread randomly in a cone of about 180º in front of us. This way it’d be more AoEish, and we all love random hits everywhere.

- Frozen Burst: This skill is abused terribly in PvP. I think the cooldown on this should be increased to 20 or 25 seconds, so it’s more of a “oh snap!” skill since it’s so awesome.

- Cleansing Wave: Increase the cooldown to 1 minute. Elementalits have way too much condition removals already and instant heals, and this only makes us overpowered.

- Shocking Aura: Another skill that needs the cooldown increased to 30 or 40 seconds. It’s a nightmare for melees. Only thieves can deal with this since they kill an Elementalist in one hit, but for every other melee and ranger pets, this is overpowered.

- Lightning Strike: Cooldown needs to be increased to 10~15 seconds. Instant, ranged and deal too much damage, so the cooldown must be long to make up for it.

- Dragon’s Tooth: Make it fall faster, but increase the cooldown to 25 or 30 seconds. It’s a huge spiky damage, one of the biggest in the game, and at 6 sec cooldown it’s just so spammy and insane…

- Meteor Shower: While we all love RNG, this is too much. You can down someone if you get lucky and buggy, and all meteors fall in the same place. So I propose make something like, if a player’s been hit by a meteor once, he can’t be damaged again for 3~5 seconds. So it gives them time to realize they’re inside a Meteor Shower and can walk their way out without getting insta-downed by some bad luck.

I think with this, no more nerfs to the Elementalists would be required, and we could play happily every patch without fearing nerfs.

Ah, wait, there’s one more… cut down Elementalist’s armor by half. Currently it’s also way over the top those PVT guys who can take a FULL backstab from a Thief and still live.
Preposterous!