Guild Wars 2

I keep coming back to the thought that our lack of viable build variety stems directly from our lack of weapons and weapon swap. Save engineer, all classes can mix and match their weapons in SO many more ways that we can, resulting in many more varied and unique builds, many of which even the developers haven’t thought of… not to mention being able to mix range and melee effectively. When it comes to us though, we are pigeonholed into only FIVE possible weaponsets: d/d, d/f, s/d, s/f, and staff. When I’m playing ele, I feel like I’m forever limited to the narrow combos that the developers thought up when they made the class, while other classes are always discovering cool new ways to combine all their skills effectively.

The worst thing about this is it is much much harder for us to adapt to new metas than the other classes… since really, what can we change? It is looking more and more like once D/D becomes countered by a new meta (which Anet seems happy to hasten the arrival of), there will be almost nothing left for us. At this point I feel that we are in desperate need of not one but SEVERAL new types of one handed weapons in order to provide us more potential weapon combinations. Personally I would prefer at least one of them being a one-handed long-range weapon (magic pistol?) so that we can emulate the ability of other classes to carry both long-ranged and melee weapons.

Honestly though I think weapon swap is also something that should be looked into… maybe if there was a requirement that one of the weapons had to be staff? That would at least solve our range/melee conundrum, and honestly, if weapon swapping cooldown was tied to attunement cooldown I don’t see how it would be overpowered.

Traitlines of course exacerbate the problem with our complete and total reliance on the arcane traitline… but that’s for another post.

The inability to switch from a ranged playstyle to a melee playstyle is what bothers me more than anything about this class.

I mean, we’re supposedly the kings of versatility, but you could certainly fool me.

but..but..but… we have conjures????

Theway I’d prefer doing this (weapon swap) is to let us select certain attunements to go with certain weapon sets, for example, when I’m in Fire Attunement I use Staff, when I’m in Air I use D/D etc, it won’t make Elementalists use 40 skills (which is ridiculous), they will still have the same 20 skills, only some variety in RANGE.
Obviously 2 weapon set tops like all professions.
The other solution is to give us a conjure with 1200 range (much needed) and then fix the conjures to be useful and not total garbage.

@OP I’ve been saying Ele needs weapons swap since day 1

@DeWolfe if traited ad hoc, conjured weapons can pull out some wonder but I believe they should be a viable option independently from trait lines