Guild Wars 2

Note: These changes are preference, Comment ideas and recommendations.
Be sure to +1 if you agree with most of these!
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Traits:
Fire:
Burning Precision: Now inflicts burning x2 instead of x1.
Conjurer: The additional charges are now baseline to conjures, stats granted by conjures are 50% stronger.
Burning Fire: This once again grants might on cantrip use.
One with Fire: All auras now grant 2 stacks of might.
Presisting Flames: Now affects Fire Overload.
Pyromancer’s Puissance: Now removed.
New Trait:
Pyromancer’s Solution: Burning a foe removes a condition; 3 second cooldown; 1 condition removed.
Blinding Ashes: The Internal Cooldown is now unique to each target struck.
Water:
Aquatic Benevolence: The Outgoing effectiveness is now reduced to 10%, and Soothing Power is merged with it, now making Soothing Mists 35% stronger.
Soothing Power: Removed
New Trait Ideas/Votable Choices:
Eruptive Mists: When Soothing Mist’s duration ends, it heals for a large amount of health. Amount: 15 * Current Soothing Mists amount.
Toxin Immunity: When you or allies around you gain your Soothing Mists, it grants immunity to Poison.
Air:
Inscription: Might applied from Fire is now 3 stacks with the same duration and boons apply to allies in a radius. Targets: 5; Radius: 360.
Tempest Defense: Removed.
New Trait:
Eletrocuting Disturbance: Foes that strike you with a critical hit, are dazed for 1 second. Daze Attack Delay: 3 seconds; 15 second cooldown; Range: 1200.
Lightning Rod: Now has the effects of Tempest Defense.
Earth:
Earth’s Embrace: Now also procs when you are CC’d.
Rock Solid: Now makes Earth a stun breaker when attuned to instead of giving stability.
Arcane:
Arcane Resurrection: Revive Speed is now 20% and allies are revived with 5% more Health.
Elemental Surge: Is now Removed.
New Trait Ideas/Votable Choices:
Arcanist Expertise: Using an Arcane skill reduces the cast time of the next skill used. (Can not be triggered by instant cast spells.) 50% reduced cast time. Cooldown of Arcane skills is reduced by 20%
Arcane Lightning: Increases Ferocity when using an Arcane skill, Gain ferocity based on Concentration. 250 Ferocity, 13% Concentration is converted to Ferocity. Cooldown of Arcane skills is reduced by 20%
Tempest:
Tempestuous Aria: Reduces cooldown of shouts by 20%.
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Utilities:
Glyphes:
Glyph of Elemental Harmony: Boons now apply to allies. Radius: 320
Glyph of Elemental Power: Effect now applies to allies. Radius: 320
Glyph of Storms: Now gives combo fields based on attunement: Fire = Fire; Water = Ice; Air = Lighting; Earth = Smoke. Cool down is now 50.
Arcane:
Arcane Brilliance: Now is ground targeted with the range of 450.
Arcane Power: Applies to allies in a radius. Radius: 320
Arcane Shield: Now blinds when it’s been hit 3 times. Blind Duration: 3 seconds.
Cantrips:
Ether Renewal: Cast time has been reduced to 2 seconds.
Signets:
Signet of Water: No longer applies chill nor damages. Place a large Water Field for allies to use Combo Finishers in. Radius: 600; 5 second duration; Signet Cool down: 30 seconds.
Conjures:
Conjures no longer have a cast time to pick up. Auto Attacks no longer count as a charge.
Shouts:
“Eye of the Storm!”: Now clears Chill, Immobilize and Cripple.
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Weapons:
Dagger Offhand:
Frost Aura: Cool down is reduced to 25.
Cleansing Wave: Cool down is reduced to 30 and healing is increased by 15%.
Updraft: Cool down is reduced to 30.
Earthquake: Cool down is now reduced to 35.
Focus:
Obsidian Flesh: Cool down is now reduced to 45.
Warhorn:
Sand Squall: The Boon Duration increase is scaled by Concentration (Boon Duration).
Staff:
Burning Retreat: Aftercast is halved.
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While I can tell you put a lot of time into this I am not sure this is the correct way to take Ele in. Many of these changes again put the class outside the realm of what is possible on other classes or would be very much not needed. I understand that this sub is mostly made of PvP players from my observations but I do think some of these are ultimately useless for PvE specifically raids.

It would take forever to go over everything I disagree with but some ones off the top of my head – No don’t change the revive speed. Arcane needs to be an alternative to fire or air for a dancing attunements build. Second tier of major traits there are two that are absolutely useless in elemental contingency and Final Shielding. I would say Bake in Contingency into elemental attunement and actually move bountiful power into elemental contingency’s place. Replace bountiful power with maybe something along the lines of Increased boon duration on yourself (so you choose between dodging/pure damage/and longer boons). Final shielding cooldown 30 seconds, same with arcane shield but you can trait arcane shield. This imo is much better than long cooldown.

As for the arcane utilities and heal…
Brilliance just needs 1k more hp on the heal base.
Power – cooldown needs to be essentially 15 sec at most.
Wave – 25 sec cooldown base
Reasoning for all of these are that arcane skills are generally not that very good…they need their own niche and where shouts are utility + medium/low cooldowns. Then arcane needs to be low cooldown+damage. (and nothing else). This will help all builds of ele but imo will be most effective on melee eles with Scepter/Dager mainhand mostly because giving up fire’s longer lasting fields on staff is terrible.

Cantrips need to be pure utility not damage. Conjures…well there isn’t fixing conjures unless you make them OP but tbh I think that they would need to rework most of them except Icebow. And Glyphs are mostly fine besides power and renewal where imo power just needs to be on crit with a lower internal cooldown and have lower downtime. Renewal needs to be a long cast revive skill that pulls the target to you and starts ressing them. It needs to be generally worse than search and rescue because again, ele is NOT about team utility and shouldn’t be. They should be more selfish but be great in damage and dancing between attunements.

In general – we learned from Tempest that giving a class that already does so much a lot of team utility breaks the class. So therefore we need to give them things to use for themselves and of course damage to the class. I have a lot more suggestions using fine tuning on lots of cooldowns for weapon skills (I could go on FOREVER on how bad offhand Dagger is. Wh is damage+utility, Focus is utility, dagger is supposed to be damage yet does worse damage and less utility than Wh).

In general:
Fire = Big damage
Air = Consistent damage
Water = Pure healing and Cantrips
Earth = Mitigation of damage
Glyphs = fine
Arcane = Needs to be low cooldown high damage (works best with arcane traitline for attunement dancing on close range builds)
Shouts = Fine
Signets = Make water better but stick with condi clear, Signet of healing needs to do 250 heal per spell in PvE only (PvP I can see why it is a problem)
Cantrips – Need to be more utility than damage

General changes: Lots of weapon skills need reworks or cooldown changes. Staff needs huge reworks to not be so OP on big targets but should never have been nerfed with across the board cooldown nerfs and instead should have been damage nerfs to lava font and reworks to how “random” Meteor shower is and due to its randomness and higher percent chance of hitting big targets needs to be accounted for. In general they took a hammer to ele when they need to adjust skills with a scalpel (same with engineer imo)

@OP
Too many passives and overpowered might stacking across the board.

A couple of ideas to make non bunker Eles work. I have a lot more but I don’t want to make a long wall of text.
Goal – Increase active defense

Final Shielding – Increase threshold to 40%.

Reasoning: Glass eles have low base HP. Chances are they’d get burst even before the 25% threshold procs.

Rock Solid – Activating a signet grants you 1 charge of Arcane Shield. Heal yourself for a small amount when the charge is consumed (around 1k hp).

Elemental Attunement – Make it baseline. Nerf the effects so that it only affects the user unless Arcane trait line is taken.

Elemental Surge – Add effect: Remove 2 conditions when an arcane skill hits your target.

Conjures – Reduce CD to 30s. You won’t and should not camp in conjures in the first place.

Earth Shield – Breaks stun.

Arcane Shield – Reduce base CD to 45 secs. Heal yourself when all 3 block charges are consumed (same healing as rune of defender).

Reasoning: The current effects of consuming 3 charges are not reasonable enough for enemies to stop hitting you.

Signet of Water – Active: Convert all conditions into boons. Passive: Breaks stun. CD increased to 40s, remove cast time. Passive: 33% chance to Chill your target on hit. ICD 8s.

Signet of Air – Active: Teleport to your foe (900 range). If you hit your target, stun them for 1s. Breaks Stun. CD 25s.

Reasoning: Much needed mobility and additional burst setup.

Lightning Flash – Reduce Base CD to 30s. Reduce damage.

Kyon.9735:

@OP
Too many passives and overpowered might stacking across the board.

A couple of ideas to make non bunker Eles work. I have a lot more but I don’t want to make a long wall of text.
Goal – Increase active defense

Final Shielding – Increase threshold to 40%.

Reasoning: Glass eles have low base HP. Chances are they’d get burst even before the 25% threshold procs.

Rock Solid – Activating a signet grants you 1 charge of Arcane Shield. Heal yourself for a small amount when the charge is consumed (around 1k hp).

Elemental Attunement – Make it baseline. Nerf the effects so that it only affects the user unless Arcane trait line is taken.

Elemental Surge – Add effect: Remove 2 conditions when an arcane skill hits your target.

Conjures – Reduce CD to 30s. You won’t and should not camp in conjures in the first place.

Earth Shield – Breaks stun.

Arcane Shield – Reduce base CD to 45 secs. Heal yourself when all 3 block charges are consumed (same healing as rune of defender).

Reasoning: The current effects of consuming 3 charges are not reasonable enough for enemies to stop hitting you.

Signet of Water – Active: Convert all conditions into boons. Passive: Breaks stun. CD increased to 40s, remove cast time. Passive: 33% chance to Chill your target on hit. ICD 8s.

Signet of Air – Active: Teleport to your foe (900 range). If you hit your target, stun them for 1s. Breaks Stun. CD 25s.

Reasoning: Much needed mobility and additional burst setup.

Lightning Flash – Reduce Base CD to 30s. Reduce damage.

In general a lot of these changes work however the ones I feel don’t are…
Final Shielding – Cooldown would still be way too long to be any use in any active mitigation while I do agree the threshold needs to be higher. Round it off to 50%.

Rock solid – Change not needed as one stack of stab is already amazing in an aoe. Also way too much extra healing simply for attuning to earth (Why earth?) that makes no thematic sense and honestly if you changed anything on earth

Serrated stone – extra damage you do to bleeding foes to be 10% (to reduce reliance on other damage traits and being inable to take earth due to less output.)

Elemental attunement – fine where it is on the arcane tree as it actively promotes attunement dancing which is what arcane is made for. The real problem is how arcane contingency is pretty useless at 1 time every 10 seconds you get a boon if you get hit (bad gameplay) and it is pretty much one of the only ones that may be worth it in that tier. One of the ways to fix it is as I stated above. Another is to swap final shielding into the first trait tier and bake renewing stamina into elemental contingency (replacing the “Get hit” effect on all of them with; Do a crit/10 sec. Granting a boon and Vigor on crit.). There are plenty of ways to fix it. You can even move boon damage to the tier if you really needed something. I suggest against nerfing the damage mainly because fire and air are so dominant for damage. Reasoning is that Arcane is supposed to be what you take if you want to get lots of boons for yourself and focus on dancing attunements to get good damage. You give up the cooldown trait for one entire line which is huge.

Elemental surge is fine – No changes needed besides cooldown changes on arcane skills to keep higher uptime on it (and of course make it not compete with bountiful power).
Conjure changes are fine – 30 sec is great and not too low. 60 seconds for FGS due to it being an elite, but buff the damage it does.
Arcane Shield – lower the cooldown to 30 sec and remove the healing. We do not need more healing as that will not only be generally unhealthy for the class in PvP (fine in PvE) but imo blocking 3 hits would be amazing at 30-25 sec cooldown. As I said I’m more for arcane skills to be low cooldown fairly high damage or in the case of shielding – more utility to not instadie.

Water signet change – Good but instead of all condis (Too good for a utility slot) you can just make it convert 3 ish. We should not be making it as strong as an elite and you shouldn’t need that much condi cleanse outside of wvw with regeneration curing a condi.
Air signet change is fine, would be very useful in all modes.

Lightning Flash – fine, but honestly I’d totally give up the damage just for the range that mesmer has on blink.

Additional thoughts I didn’t think of before –
Cleansing fire trait does not belong anywhere in fire and should be in water for cantrip focus or removed alltogether and the condi clear from the trait being baked into the water traitline somewhere.

Arcane Fury needs to do damage and apply fury (damage is on an internal cooldown of 5 seconds, fury is every time. Even if the damage is 50 it would still be good.). Reasoning: A big reason why fire is so dominant is bc it does damage on attunement swap and it does good damage. By giving incentives/reasons to use earth or Arcane as damage specs you open up build diversity with what exactly works well and what is viable. As it stands in PvE you take Fire, air, Tempest end of story. If earth and arcane were on par with fire at least you would see either of those two being taken in melee ele builds. Staff would still take fire and that would be fine. Water should remain as a pure healing/cantrip spec and honestly Piercing shards should probably be reworked. Extra vuln time is not worth it and neither is 20% damage only in water (possibly the worst attunement for damage, you swap to it to drop your water heals and swap out ASAP). Soothing power should be baseline or replace piercing shards.

Speaking of –
Latent stamina in tempest needs to be moved into healing ripple in water bc it has no business being in tempest.
Temp Aria into the first tier and add 20% shout cdr.

Imbued melodies in tempest needs to give the boon duration regardless of weapon.

AS A NOTE: I say all of this without any real premise of what entirely new traits will take the place of ones that are pretty “useless”. Active def is important and I feel ele should have some but in all honesty I would like to see these reworks first

Both of you have some interesting ideas. And I’ll put my two cents in as well. Here is my ‘ideal changes’ list I made some time ago…

WEAPON SKILLS:
Scepter
- Flamestrike: the secondary strike is now aoe, affects max 3 enemies (radius 180)
-Dragon’s Tooth: aftercast reduced by 1/2 sec
- Shatterstone: radius increased to 240
- Water Trident: also removes 1 condition
- Stone Shards: precast reduced by 1/2 sec -> casting time reduced by 1/2 sec
- Dust Devil: Base damage increased by 100%
Focus
- Flamewall: now applies 2 stacks of burning instead of 1
- Freezing Gust: Base damage increased by 100% and now it’s aoe, affects max 3 enemies (radius 180)
Dagger MH
- Ring of Earth: When used, a buff appears that properly shows the projectile block
Dagger OH
- Fire Grab: Damage vs non-burning foes increased by 10%. Damage vs burning foes increased by 15%.
- Frost Aura: CD reduced to 25 sec
- Cleansing Wave: CD reduced to 35 sec
- Ride the Lightning: CD is now 20 sec base, you don’t need to hit a target anymore
- Churning Earth: This skill now has its previous animation
Staff
- Lightning Surge: Casting time reduced by 1/2 sec
- Windborne speed: This skill now grants 2 seconds of superspeed + 10 seconds of swiftness
Warhorn
- Heat Sync: You now gain 2 additional stacks of might if you spread boons to an ally
- Wildfire: The firefield appears faster.
- Tidal Surge: Cd reduced to 30 sec
- Water Globe: Cd reduced to 30 sec, the water field travels slower

UTILITY SKILLS:
- Signet of Restoration: Casting time reduced to 1/2 sec
- Arcane Power: Cd reduced to 25 sec
- Arcane Shield: Cd reduced to 50 sec, duration decreased to 4 sec, now blocks all attacks during that time instead of just 3, after 4 sec it explodes if you block an attack, this change also applies to Final Shielding
- Armor of Earth: Cd reduced to 50 sec
- Mist Form: Cd reduced to 50 sec
Earth Shield
- Stone Sheath: Now blocks all attacks during its duration and applies bleeding to foes that hit you during channeling, but only in range to 600.
- Magnetic Surge: Base damage increased by 200%
- Magnetic Shield: Casting time reduced to 1 sec
Flame Axe
- Lava Axe: Now explodes when hitting a foe, damaging nearby foes (max 3) too, might duration is increased to 10 seconds
- Explosive Lava Axe: Damage increased by 15%
- Burning Retreat (Flame Axe): This skill is now changed to Blazing Axe. Throw a blazing axe that bounces between foes and allies, granting might to allies and damaging and burning foes. Creates a fire field between you and the 1st target struck.
- Ring of Fire (Flame Axe): This skill is now identical to dagger’s Ring of Fire skill.
Lightning Hammer
- Lightning Leap: Damage increased by 100%
- Wind Blast: Now applies 3 stacks of vulnerability
- Lightning Storm (Lightning Hammer): This skill is now ground targeted (900 range) and is now identical to Lightning Storm (Glyph of Storms), but cd reamins the same and does not apply vulnerability
Ice Bow
- Frost Volley: Damage increased by 30%, casting speed of this skill is increased -> casting time reduced to 1 1/2 sec
- Frost Fan: Damage increased by 50%

- Signet of Water: Now heals you by a small amount if condition is removed. Active skill is now aoe (3 targets max)
- “Feel the Burn!”: Damage increased by 20%, burning duration increased to 5 seconds
- “Flash-Freeze!”: Cd reduced to 25 sec.
- Tornado/Whirpool: When this transformation is active, base Toughness is quadrupled and base Vitality tripled (similar to Plague)
Fiery Greatsword
- Fiery Eruption: Radius increased to 240
- Firestorm (Fiery Greatsword): This skill is now identical to Firestorm (Glyph of Storms), except the cd

TRAITS:
- Conjurer: Instead of gaining fire aura when picking up a conjured weapon, players gain 2 stacks of might and additional boon based on the conjured weapon (Lava Axe:
3 stacks of might / Ice Bow: regeneration / Lightning Hammer: fury / Earth Shield: stability / Fiery Greatsword: 5 stacks of might)
- One with Fire: This trait now additionaly grants fire aura when you cast a signet
- Serrated Stones: Damage done to bleeding foes is increased to 10%
- Rock Solid: Duration of stability is increased to 3 sec
- Diamond Skin (if this wouldn’t be op): Now automatically removes conditions while above health threshold. You don’t need to be struck to remove them.
- Stop, Drop, and Roll: Cd reduced to 4 sec
- Soothing Power: Now additionally allies under the effect of Soothing Mist have reduced incoming condition duration by 10% (or 15% maybe?)
- Arcane Fury: Duration of fury is increased to 3 sec
- Elemental Attunement: The non-aoe version of this is now baseline. This trait now makes it aoe and increases duration of these applied boons by 20%.
- Latent Stamina: This trait has been reworked: Now when you dodge while you are under the effect of vigor, you gain some endurance back and the duration of that vigor
on you is increased (+2 sec maybe?)
- Tempestuous Aria: This trait now also reduces recharge of shouts (20% or 15% I guess?)
- Lucid Singularity: You are now healed by X amount when an enemy tries to put a movement-impeding condition on you while you are overloading.

Glyphs changes I suggested here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Glyphs-rework/first#post6267069 (btw, those skills above with changes linking to some glyphs are used with the current vesion of glyphs) + the changes to Glyph of Storms may be better from Kyon in post above me, so I would like to maybe replace that…

Avador.8934:

Both of you have some interesting ideas. And I’ll put my two cents in as well. Here is my ‘ideal changes’ list I made some time ago…

WEAPON SKILLS:
Scepter
- Flamestrike: the secondary strike is now aoe, affects max 3 enemies (radius 180)
-Dragon’s Tooth: aftercast reduced by 1/2 sec
- Shatterstone: radius increased to 240
- Water Trident: also removes 1 condition
- Stone Shards: precast reduced by 1/2 sec -> casting time reduced by 1/2 sec
- Dust Devil: Base damage increased by 100%
Focus
- Flamewall: now applies 2 stacks of burning instead of 1
- Freezing Gust: Base damage increased by 100% and now it’s aoe, affects max 3 enemies (radius 180)
Dagger MH
- Ring of Earth: When used, a buff appears that properly shows the projectile block
Dagger OH
- Fire Grab: Damage vs non-burning foes increased by 10%. Damage vs burning foes increased by 15%.
- Frost Aura: CD reduced to 25 sec
- Cleansing Wave: CD reduced to 35 sec
- Ride the Lightning: CD is now 20 sec base, you don’t need to hit a target anymore
- Churning Earth: This skill now has its previous animation
Staff
- Lightning Surge: Casting time reduced by 1/2 sec
- Windborne speed: This skill now grants 2 seconds of superspeed + 10 seconds of swiftness
Warhorn
- Heat Sync: You now gain 2 additional stacks of might if you spread boons to an ally
- Wildfire: The firefield appears faster.
- Tidal Surge: Cd reduced to 30 sec
- Water Globe: Cd reduced to 30 sec, the water field travels slower

UTILITY SKILLS:
- Signet of Restoration: Casting time reduced to 1/2 sec
- Arcane Power: Cd reduced to 25 sec
- Arcane Shield: Cd reduced to 50 sec, duration decreased to 4 sec, now blocks all attacks during that time instead of just 3, after 4 sec it explodes if you block an attack, this change also applies to Final Shielding
- Armor of Earth: Cd reduced to 50 sec
- Mist Form: Cd reduced to 50 sec
Earth Shield
- Stone Sheath: Now blocks all attacks during its duration and applies bleeding to foes that hit you during channeling, but only in range to 600.
- Magnetic Surge: Base damage increased by 200%
- Magnetic Shield: Casting time reduced to 1 sec
Flame Axe
- Lava Axe: Now explodes when hitting a foe, damaging nearby foes (max 3) too, might duration is increased to 10 seconds
- Explosive Lava Axe: Damage increased by 15%
- Burning Retreat (Flame Axe): This skill is now changed to Blazing Axe. Throw a blazing axe that bounces between foes and allies, granting might to allies and damaging and burning foes. Creates a fire field between you and the 1st target struck.
- Ring of Fire (Flame Axe): This skill is now identical to dagger’s Ring of Fire skill.
Lightning Hammer
- Lightning Leap: Damage increased by 100%
- Wind Blast: Now applies 3 stacks of vulnerability
- Lightning Storm (Lightning Hammer): This skill is now ground targeted (900 range) and is now identical to Lightning Storm (Glyph of Storms), but cd reamins the same and does not apply vulnerability
Ice Bow
- Frost Volley: Damage increased by 30%, casting speed of this skill is increased -> casting time reduced to 1 1/2 sec
- Frost Fan: Damage increased by 50%

- Signet of Water: Now heals you by a small amount if condition is removed. Active skill is now aoe (3 targets max)
- “Feel the Burn!”: Damage increased by 20%, burning duration increased to 5 seconds
- “Flash-Freeze!”: Cd reduced to 25 sec.
- Tornado/Whirpool: When this transformation is active, base Toughness is quadrupled and base Vitality tripled (similar to Plague)
Fiery Greatsword
- Fiery Eruption: Radius increased to 240
- Firestorm (Fiery Greatsword): This skill is now identical to Firestorm (Glyph of Storms), except the cd

TRAITS:
- Conjurer: Instead of gaining fire aura when picking up a conjured weapon, players gain 2 stacks of might and additional boon based on the conjured weapon (Lava Axe:
3 stacks of might / Ice Bow: regeneration / Lightning Hammer: fury / Earth Shield: stability / Fiery Greatsword: 5 stacks of might)
- One with Fire: This trait now additionaly grants fire aura when you cast a signet
- Serrated Stones: Damage done to bleeding foes is increased to 10%
- Rock Solid: Duration of stability is increased to 3 sec
- Diamond Skin (if this wouldn’t be op): Now automatically removes conditions while above health threshold. You don’t need to be struck to remove them.
- Stop, Drop, and Roll: Cd reduced to 4 sec
- Soothing Power: Now additionally allies under the effect of Soothing Mist have reduced incoming condition duration by 10% (or 15% maybe?)
- Arcane Fury: Duration of fury is increased to 3 sec
- Elemental Attunement: The non-aoe version of this is now baseline. This trait now makes it aoe and increases duration of these applied boons by 20%.
- Latent Stamina: This trait has been reworked: Now when you dodge while you are under the effect of vigor, you gain some endurance back and the duration of that vigor
on you is increased (+2 sec maybe?)
- Tempestuous Aria: This trait now also reduces recharge of shouts (20% or 15% I guess?)
- Lucid Singularity: You are now healed by X amount when an enemy tries to put a movement-impeding condition on you while you are overloading.

Glyphs changes I suggested here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Glyphs-rework/first#post6267069 (btw, those skills above with changes linking to some glyphs are used with the current vesion of glyphs) + the changes to Glyph of Storms may be better from Kyon in post above me, so I would like to maybe replace that…

This post will be dealing with specifically just the weapon skills. I will not speak on scepter bc honestly I don’t really like scepter and I don’t play scepter so I don’t feel qualified to make change suggestions. ALL NUMBERS ARE FULL ZERKER GEAR. We can have a discussion on the contribution of healing power later and base numbers. For now I feel like there is a lot to work on especially in offhand dagger.

Focus

-This weapon is balanced for the most part, that said cooldown adjustments to make the traited cooldowns match the old traited cooldowns. This didn’t need a nerf and every skill on the weapon needs to have the old cooldown back if traited. This weapon is pure defense and should not be given damage.
Warhorn

-Again change cooldowns to be the same as when we had 33%, this didn’t need to be nerfed.
Mainhand Dagger

Burning speed(fire 3) – 10sec cooldown
Frozen Burst(water 3) – 10 sec cooldown
Shocking Aura (Air 3) – 20 sec cooldown
Ring of Earth (Earth 2) – 5 Sec cooldown (Buff to show when it blocks projectiles)
Magnetic Grasp (Earth 3) – 10 sec cooldown.

Offhand Dagger
-This one is a fun one…and honestly needs a whole ton of work. This is SUPPOSED to be the damage weapon but wh beats it in every case. Wh is supposed to be utility+damage.

Fire (This needs a lot of work as especially in PvE, Wh 5 is better all on its own. In order to come close to matching it you need a few buffs. I’m sure these might be too strong for PvP)
-Ring of Fire – Reworked. 10sec cooldown: Now pulses 1 stack of burning every second for 2.5 seconds duration each for 8 seconds baseline to any enemies in the area 3 targets if too strong 5 targets if just right.
Reasoning: I want to minimize how much effect the trait persisting flames and the cdr for fire traitline factors into this rotation. The best way to do that is to give it a low cooldown baseline so that it’ll be up usually before you even finish coming back to the rotated skill even without the trait. The trait will help but it doesn’t overshadow other traitlines in terms of damage all that much/too much.
-Flame Grab – 25 sec cooldown, 0.5 sec cast time.

Water
-Frost Aura – 30 sec cooldown
-Cleansing wave – Cooldown Reduced to 35 seconds. Heals for what it heals now in an AoE+removes a condi. Added – 8 Sec of regeneration and a 1200 self heal only. Why? Take a look at tidal surge, it is on this cooldown, with twice as much healing as cleansing wave and CC. And it does all of these in an AoE. Cleansing wave regen and second heal is ultimately selfish to make up for the fact that you really can’t blast finisher wh 5 with dagger 3 on d/d due to the lack of water fields.

Air Needs a bunch of work due to the repeated nerfs to ride the lightning and how much better warhorn is. Again this is from a PvE perspective and I think I’d be totally fine if it was split numbers wise for PvP. Again they can do it, look at lava font.
Ride the lightning – Added 5 stacks of 10 sec of vulnerability. Cooldown Reduced to 25 sec, reduced to half on hit. (Effective 10 sec traited and with a hit). Base damage increased to anywhere between 887 – 1242.5 (2.5-3 times higher preferably on the lower side if data says average lightning orb hits 8 times, but if it is 14 as the wiki says then 1200 range).
-WAIT ISN’T THAT OP?! Actually no, if you really look at the numbers lightning orb hits 14 times on average and does about 410(540 with might) damage per hit while inflicting vuln. That is 5800(7560) damage without crits on just a 20 sec cooldown. Ultimately it should be having high scaling with power and at 887-1242.5 at 2.5-3 times stronger at a 10 second cooldown it just barely matches and comes up to the same ish amount as lightning orb on warhorn. Unfortunately ride the lightning simply is on a too long cooldown to be useful and should we really be complaining when ancestral grace is the same thing except better and ground targeted and heals? Mobility is less of an issue and if it was we can keep a 30 sec cooldown and halved on hit with slightly higher damage.
Updraft – 25 sec cooldown, does roughly the same amount of breakbar as wh 4. Not much to explain here. 40 seconds even if you add in the trait is too long for a breakbar skill with no damage.

Earth
Earthquake – Cast time reduced to 0.5 seconds. Cooldown reduced to 25 seconds.
Churning Earth – Pulses 1 stack of stab every second for 2 seconds. Blinds enemies in the area on activation (1 time application). Cooldown is fine

Not much to explain here. Churning earth needs stab to be any good. Blind is also needed because nobody is going to let you channel for 2 seconds, not even PvE mobs. Ideally earth should be a lower dps blast finisher machine where fire is dps, air is consistent dps, and water is the “oh no I need healing” attunement.

A lot of these offhand dagger changes are focused on burst and should be very interesting as opposed to a lot smaller hits for wh with more utility.

EDIT: STAFF
This one is tricky, you can’t buff it too much and you can’t make it useless. One thing for sure I’d do though is test something then continue to reevaluate it over time.
Generalized changes
All cooldowns lowered to make traiting for them match the old cooldown. 25 sec for meteor shower, 5 seconds for Lava font, Static field is 30 sec, etc.

Now for meaty changes
Fire
-Lava font damage decreased, I would say don’t absolutely make it terrible but it needs to either do less damage if it is the bulk of ele damage or…
Meteor Shower 1) Meteors now do not fall randomly within the AoE, they fall at specific spots which are the same every cast, apply this to every AoE skill in the game and most of the bolts should be hitting around the center of the cast. REEVALUATE DAMAGE AFTER THIS CHANGE.
2) Less meteors cast at the beginning of the skill, move them to the end so you have to go through the full cast animation. (Reevaluate damage)
3) If damage is too high on big targets lower damage, if not meteor is fine. (still would like to see it being "Competitive* on large targets being within 1-5k optimal dps difference, preferably higher.)

Reasoning: The whole reason staff is so hard to balance is because of the random nature of the meteor shower and subsequently Icebow 4 and any glyph of storms activation. The impacts hit randomly and can result in much much more damage. By eliminating this randomness we can actually balance it more properly without taking into consideration the RNG of simply hitting a target more times than normal. If a big target is standing still and gets hit 5 times then it will be hit 5 times if you cast it on the same spot. This allows them to balance enemies by their size (certain thresholds will be hit more or less by meteor) and by their mobility which they are already doing. Staff was too good and unfortunately for PvP players trying to use staff I don’t think we should consider PvP staff at all as the game mode pretty much is not useful for the weapon (does not mesh well).

FUNNY SEMI SERIOUS SUGGESTION
Keep Construct
-Removed “stunned” status when in the burn phase. (Stacking tempest defense with bolt to the heart is crazy. Not sure why they even made it be stunned in the first place. It is already a big target which is great for Ele.)

I have no idea why you quoted my post when you are not commenting it at all :P
Btw some of your ideas for OH dagger are pretty good.

@Senario
The main problem of non bunker builds are self sustain and defense. Eles doesn’t have access to stealth, does not have decent mobility, nor do they have access to low cd blocks. Those are needed to compensate having the lowest base HP and Armor.

In the first place, damage was included as an effect of breaking arcane shield to discourage enemies from attacking through it. However, the damage itself is not enough so I figured that adding a heal on break effect would achieve its true goal – stop attacking carelessly or suffer the consenquences.

I am basing it on experience as I have been playing S/X in duels and solo roaming with rune of defender. When people realized I was using the rune, most decent players stopped mindlessly attacking and actually learned to wait it out a bit.

The next problem is active defense. Since eles can’t stealth and has bad mobility ouyside of FGS, they will have no choice but to bulk up in defensive stats which is a no go for DPS eles. Hence, I added blocks on different traits which would require active play.

BTW I made a mistake, One with Fire will give an Ele 1 charge of arcane shield upon signet use, not Rock Solid.

TL;DR – All my suggestions are centered around non bunker builds and I tried minimizing buffingbunker builds in the process.

Kyon.9735:

@Senario
The main problem of non bunker builds are self sustain and defense. Eles doesn’t have access to stealth, does not have decent mobility, nor do they have access to low cd blocks. Those are needed to compensate having the lowest base HP and Armor.

In the first place, damage was included as an effect of breaking arcane shield to discourage enemies from attacking through it. However, the damage itself is not enough so I figured that adding a heal on break effect would achieve its true goal – stop attacking carelessly or suffer the consenquences.

I am basing it on experience as I have been playing S/X in duels and solo roaming with rune of defender. When people realized I was using the rune, most decent players stopped mindlessly attacking and actually learned to wait it out a bit.

The next problem is active defense. Since eles can’t stealth and has bad mobility ouyside of FGS, they will have no choice but to bulk up in defensive stats which is a no go for DPS eles. Hence, I added blocks on different traits which would require active play.

BTW I made a mistake, One with Fire will give an Ele 1 charge of arcane shield upon signet use, not Rock Solid.

TL;DR – All my suggestions are centered around non bunker builds and I tried minimizing buffingbunker builds in the process.

Giving DPS eles more defenses that are independant of stats is necessary. However, I don’t think that Anet is capable of adding enough active defences without making them part of a new elite spec. Anet simply doesn’t make nearly enough changes in their balance patches.

Avador.8934:

I have no idea why you quoted my post when you are not commenting it at all :P
Btw some of your ideas for OH dagger are pretty good.

I was tired and forgot to respond, :P If my suggestion differs from yours I most likely disagree with the proposed changes :P.
Except for
Soothing Power: Now additionally allies under the effect of Soothing Mist have reduced incoming condition duration by 10% (or 15% maybe?)
Serrated Stones
Latent Stamina

I do think Arcane fury needs to do some damage on attunement swap (5 sec cooldown) that way it opens up the door for pretty much every attunement to be used in fresh air builds. Even if it did 1 damage.

@Kyon: Problem here is that it is a utility, not a heal skill. I think I would be hard pressed to find any utility that actually heals (not apply regeneration) on use baseline. Shadow Refuge is the only one with significant amounts imo and honestly ele doesn’t need shadow refuge. You would be better off giving Arcane shield a 25-30 sec cooldown, maybe more damage, and a blind (AoE) on activation, interestingly enough you can make it require less enemy hits and decrease the cooldown even further to make it more effective if you need it to be. I am highly wary against increasing sustain as active mitigation through blinds I think would be a lot more effective and definitely balanced for PvE and in PvP would make up for the fact you have less active mitigation but if you really really wanted more sustain….
Signet of Restoration – heals for 252 each time you cast a spell (passive). Assuming on average you’re rotating and doing 1 cast every 0.75 seconds the heal passive now heals for a competitive amount with glyph of elemental harmony. Adjust numbers as necessary to be competitive with glyph of elemental harmony untraited as traiting for any heal would be difficult. Things do more damage now and old healing values really don’t hold a candle to anything in any mode. If you wanted self sustain you would go with the highest self sustain and nothing else (glyph of harmony). If you wanted team sustain you would go for wash the pain away! Changes to arcane Brilliance (0.5 sec cast time, 1k more base healing, maybe damage scaling) would do wonders for PvP as well. Ether renewal needs less changes but +200 more base healing would be a useful change due to the long cast time. I do not think all of these are balanced but I do believe the Arcane and signet heal changes are much needed to actually give any sense of usefulness to either of those two heals.

I would say to be wary about Roaming builds as they are completely different than talking about PvE (My focus, raids) and PvP (something I feel less qualified on but feel should be accounted for on some skills). Rune of the Defender is not in PvP and thus shouldn’t be accounted for. It is fine in WvW because you’ll be taking a lot more damage than that and in all honesty balancing for WvW is tough because it always changes and they haven’t shown that they will split balance for PvE and WvW. They have shown to do that in PvP. One way to fix WvW balance for ele though besides fixing the cooldown blunder…remove the 10 person limit on their CCs. Done. They only needed either the stab change to be removed only 1 per second ish or reduce target number on CCs.

Some improvements to aid my personal build and make it cooler:

Scepter/

Dragon’s Tooth – No cast time! (or at least a very very short cast time) I never minded the slow drop of the tooth that much (it recharges so quickly, if you really want to try and land it, you can try again) but I do mind if I have to dodge and end up interrupting the cast. The tooth will appear for a moment, do nothing and disappear. Would be so much more fluid and you won’t really lose anything if it misses (if the cast time is nearly ignorable).

Shatterstone – changed into a charge skill. If you charge the skill (up to 3 seconds), the radius of the skill improves (up to 380 radius) and if charged to max, the skill will also apply 3sec of chill, 2.5sec of daze and auto-crit.

Arc Lightning – each hit has a 10% chance of granting fury for 2sec. Nothing major. If we were going for something more interesting though, give each hit a 10% chance of granting 1sec of quickness.

Stone Shards – speed the cast time up by half. OR for gp, make all its projectiles 100% finishers.

/Dagger

Frost Aura – swapped with Frost Shield > Absorb Frost. Frost Shield is an instant cast skill 35sec cooldown and with it, will block up to 2 attacks for up to 8sec. Upon blocking an attack, the Ele will apply a frost aura to themselves and nearby allies. Absorb Frost is a chain skill that will absorb all remaining Frost Shield blocks, in exchange it cleanses chill from yourself and nearby allies and heals for a certain amount for each stack of chill you cleanse. This also applies a Frost aura to yourself only.

Ride the Lightning – lower the cooldown on this skill to at least 30sec. 25sec would be optimal.

Churning Earth – Would like added functionality to reposition so the skill isn’t as reliant on lightning flash. Give it some sort of earth-meld teleport or magnetic slide that will allow the Ele currently casting Churning Earth to teleport 600 range in a direction. For gp, make this skill auto-crit immobilized targets.

Arcane Power – Either give this skill 3-5sec of all crits on a 35sec cooldown or remain 5 auto-crits but on a 25sec cooldown.

Traits:
Conjurer - If conjures don’t receive an overhaul, I’d like to see: Conjure cooldown -20%, Conjure weapon skill cooldown -20%.

Inscription - Needs changed. I think changing the trait line would help the most, and I also really like the idea of changing the effect to “Increases the duration of glyphs by 20%, Reduces cooldown of glyphs by 20%.” (Storms to 12s, GoEP to 36s, Elementals to 72s). Elemental Harmony could use +100% duration to mimic existing Inscription, otherwise perhaps tweaks to its boon durations.

Chill - A trait that works with Chill. A few ideas:
-Burn on Chill
-More damage to Chilled enemies
-Increased crit chance vs Chilled enemies
-Gain Regen or Vigor when applying Chill
-Applying Chill cures a condition
-Your next Chill freezes instead.

Arcane Resurrection - Yes please, this trait is so bad. Apply the aura at the start of revive, Cast Swirling winds at the start, or increase revive speed to 20%.

Arcane Precision - While I think it’s okay as is, I would be curious to see how it functioned with a longer icd (9ish seconds) and a proportionately stronger effect to encourage attunement swapping to take advantage of it in multiple attunements (the icd is separate for each, right?).

Weapon Skills
Dagger Main – No complaints.
Scepter – Bleeds on Shatterstone (lol, yes I’m serious!), faster Air1? Maybe bleeds on Earth3.
Staff – Mostly good. Bleed on Unsteady ground? Faster Air2?
Dagger Off – Frost aura at 25s, RTL 25s.
Focus – No complaints.
Warhorn – Water4 knockback could be faster. I like the Warhorn a lot but the CC skills feel clunky.

Glass ele will never be viable. DH, Rev, Warr, Scrapper all have the same DPS as a glass ele, but can survive about 1000 times longer.
Ele needs a real change, as for the tempest line needs better GM traits bcos heals from auras is the mandatory in ALL game modes, the other traits can not compete in any way, I am surprised anet haven’t reviewed this situation.
Without heal spam amulets, which is all it’s been reduced to, ele is trash. The construction of tempest and the way it interacts with other classes has no chance for DPS.
It will never be the same as D/D cele or S/F dps.

I think some of these ideas are good, but Tempest is the real problem here. It’s pure defense based. Fire I do agree needs massive buffing, and air could use a little too. Offhand Dagger and Mainhand Scepter are extremely inferior compared to D/F, and staff is lacking too without the celestial amulet.

Next Patch:
Removing of Mender’s amulet and Magi’s. – Last Amulet that ele will ever do more than 1000 dps with.
Adding ‘new improved’ amulets that have plenty of power and precision, maybe some expertise, mixed with healing or something silly.
Nerf eles healing some more
Buff Flamestrike and Shatterstone, leave the rest untouched
Nerf Elemental Bastion, Leave the other GM untouched – “balance”
Nerf earth focus 4& 5
Nerf Lightning Whip
Buff Chuning Earth
Buff Ring of Fire
Buff staff in some irrelevant way
Nerf Fire attunement somemore, because PvE, but we will never ever use it in PvP.

Ideas for improvement?
Bring back cele amulet, bring back cleric. The only class that was strong with these amulets, was ELE. Now look at Ele’s state.
Spend a good few hours (in the past you only have spent 5 minutes on it per patch) reviewing tempest traitline. Add more utility, DPS and viability other than heal spam. D/D ele 2015 had plenty of support, it DID NOT need the tempest line for full defensive support.
Buff Glyphs
Buff Conjurable weapons to compete with Engineer’s kits’ utility.
Improve all the elites
Buff dagger offhand.
Buff ALL the scepter autos.
Add more cleanse to Warhorn, and reduce warhorn cast times.
Make overloads less easy to interrupt, it’s impossible to complete any overload besides earth, as even with traited Stability, a DH trap and a bow 3, or a rev staff 5, or a mace warrior and you’re a goner, overloads are garbage if they don’t finish. Even in PvE they get interrupted too easily.
Improve Fire traitline and Arcana traitline, FOR PVP ONLY if you have to….. they are literal garbage at the moment
Arcane shield – I saw the idea somewhere of blocking all atks for 3s, yes this is a genius idea for improvement, this is a step to compete with DH, otherwise reduce its terrible cd from 75s…
Cantrips need more utility, Mistform and Armor of Earth are only good for stomps, Cleansing Fires can not cleanse enough conditions to survive against any condi HoT spec
Signets were strong pre-hot, but power creep outdated them. Need improvement.
Signet traits need improvement, nothing compared to Necromancer’s signet traits.

There is no build diversity in ele, and it’s not even in the meta now for PvP, you can make a healy build with vitality but you will be too glassy.
Back in 2014 and 2015 pre-June, there were plenty of viable builds; D/D, Staff, S/F. Balancing has only gone downhill.