Guild Wars 2

Please make suggestions on skill buffs/reworks to fix our class Try to keep things on topic (skills and traits). Keep your ideas specific, don’t give a vague suggestion (ex. buff stoning) Instead say how it should be buffed (ex. Increase stoning damage by 35%)

Disclaimer: A lot of these buffs are from a pve standpoint and thus OP in pvp. Ideally skills should be split for pve and pvp. I could be going too far on a lot of these skills or maybe I’m not using them right. So feel free to call OP, but please give a reason.

Fireball: increase explosion radius to 240 (slightly reduced damage to compensate?) let blasting staff affect it.

Burning retreat: increase the damage for going through it to equal flame wall

Water blast: increase damage by 100% or let it target allies for healing

Geyser: increase duration to 3s or increase base healing to 1000

Chain lightning- Frankly, I think this should be replaced. Increase damage to equal fireball, no extra effects. Keep activation time. (effectively 33% stronger than current fireball, but single target)

Lightning surge: decrease cast time to 1sec

Gust: double projectile speed

Stoning: increase damage to ~250 (35% buff). List the real weakness duration (3sec)

Eruption: lower cast time to 1s or decrease bomb timer by 1s

Unsteady ground: Increase cripple time to 5s

Flamestrike: Increase damage to 150 and decrease cast time to 1s

Dragon’s tooth: this one is hard to mess with. I need some ideas on this one. Current idea: decrease direct damage by 25% and decrease hit delay by 33% slightly increase recharge time to offset buff.

Phoenix: decrease recharge to 15s or apply 1s burn

Ice Shards: Increase damage by 50%

Shatterstone: increase damage by 20% or decrease damage delay by 20%.

Arc lightning: remove stages, keep stage 2 damage. Make it each hit apply 1 stack of vulnerability for 2sec.

Rockbarrier--> Hurl- This is really weak, although I’ve read that might just be a bug. Assuming it isn’t: add 1 stack of bleed for 5s per hit

Burning speed: make it explode on impact like ride the lightning

Fire grab: reduce recharge to 40s, decrease cast time to 1/2sec

Cone of cold: increase base healing by 20%

Frost aura: decrease chill duration to 1sec. Chills foes within 120 radius (remove requirement of being hit)

Ride the lightning: this skill’s intended effect is actually ok, but it’s still in desperate need of glitch and pathing fixes

Magnetic grasp: same as above

Fire shield: See frost aura. Burns instead.

Gale: reduce recharge to 40sec

Glyph of elemental harmony: increase protection duration to 5sec. Applies 3 stacks of might instead of 1 (reduce might duration by 5~10 sec)

Mist form: cure and grants immunity to immobilized and crippled

Glyph of renewal (and other res signets): reduce cast time to 1sec 2-3sec

Glyph of storms fire: add 1sec burn with each pulse
Air: add 5sec vulnerability with each hit

Tornado: draw foes IN, not out, similar to whirlpool.

Grasping Earth (downed skill): Replace with a 2 sec knockdown. Applies 3 sec bleed and does 195 damage (equal to down skill 1)

Traits:
One with fire: increase flame barrier’s chance to burn to 50%. (set amount, not with time in fire attunement)

Zephyrs Speed: make this stack with other speed boosts. (add a hard cap of 33%) needs rework since we have perma swiftness anyway.

Arcane lightning: buff to 5% more critical damage

Inscription: increase protection duration to 5sec. applies 3 stacks of might instead of one. (reduce might duration by 5~10sec)

Arcane fury: increase fury duration to 3-4 sec

Arcane precision: make this % chance on each skill (instead of critical hits). Conditions should also depend on attunement, rather than skill. That way linger elements will give a chance for multiple conditions. (ex. I switch from fire to earth and use a skill before my 5sec of fire attunement expires, that skill rolls for burning, then rolls for bleeding)

New Trait: 5% of power is converted into vitality. I chose power because bunkers wouldn’t really be able to profit from it.

Fireball is fine. Does not need it’s radius change.

Burning Retreat is a utility skill. It’s a free dodge that doesn’t use endurance and should be used appropriately so.

Geyser is fine. If you want a bigger radius, throw 20 points into arcane for large AoE’s

Burning speed is fine as it is going through opponents. It’s a great skill in sPvP as getting behind players offers time to do damage. Learn the distance and use accordingly if you want it to “hit” on contact.

RTL is fine? I lol’d at that.

I’m not going to go on and on and explain everything wrong with what you posted. It this case, it is a matter of L2P. There are plenty of threads throughout the Ele forum and plenty of posts that will help you understand how to play the class.

Unsteady ground: needs to work like Temporal Curtain, where passing through it applies a good duration cripple instead of requiring the enemy to stand in it forever to do anything.

Shatterstone: go back to the good old days of 1/4 or 1/2 second cast, anet pls

Frost aura: I like this idea. That or make it inflict chill no matter what range the enemy is attacking from.

Ride the lightning: agreed

Fire shield: See Frost Aura.

Glyph of renewal (and other res signets): reduce cast time by 1 sec maybe, definitely not all the way down to 1 sec.

Tornado: Yes!

Grasping Earth: YES!

hakurface.2619:

Fireball is fine. Does not need it’s radius change.

Burning Retreat is a utility skill. It’s a free dodge that doesn’t use endurance and should be used appropriately so.

Geyser is fine. If you want a bigger radius, throw 20 points into arcane for large AoE’s

Burning speed is fine as it is going through opponents. It’s a great skill in sPvP as getting behind players offers time to do damage. Learn the distance and use accordingly if you want it to “hit” on contact.

RTL is fine? I lol’d at that.

I’m not going to go on and on and explain everything wrong with what you posted. It this case, it is a matter of L2P. There are plenty of threads throughout the Ele forum and plenty of posts that will help you understand how to play the class.

I wanted the radius on fireball changed because the game site says fire is meant to be aoe damage while lightning is single target, and 120 isn’t going to hit another enemy unless they’re standing right next to each other. I wanted geyser buffed because it feels like its only good for combo fields atm, the skill itself can’t do much (even with the staff trait). You made a good point about burning speed in pvp, so I’ll strike that.
I don’t see what’s wrong with ride the lightning outside of the bugs though, can you explain that?
As far as l2p goes, I feel like I play the class fairly well. I’m lvl 80 and can do most dungeons without too much difficult, so I can play the class just fine. I posted this because I sincerely think that we’re outshined when compared to other classes in pve.

Should I add a little reason under each suggestion?
edit: as for renewal, its cast time is about the time as a revive atm, so I felt like it needed a big buff, but yeah, I did go to far.

It’s also a ranged/mobile revive, plus some nice extra effects. The cast time is painful but anything less than 2 seconds would just be obscene.

Remove cast time from geyser but keepit the way it is, much more useful that way.
Lightning surge should be instant, imho.

Cone of cold: increase base healing by 20%

Healing is fine and synergizes well with D/D Bunker builds. Grab some Monk runes or +Healing. It serves it’s purposes as a general heal and decent damage.

Zephyrs Speed: make this stack with other speed boosts. (hard cap of 33%)

No point in buffing it, we have “infinite” swiftness. Eruption>Static Field>Arcane Blast>Windborne>Updraft

Fire has plenty of AoE. Hell, every Staff skill on Fire has an AoE effect. The description of Lightning is correct. If you run S/D that is.

New Trait: 5% of power is converted into vitality.

Really? No point, bunker builds have plenty of survivability and if you’re running a GC build, it’s not really gonna matter that you have more life since you won’t have damage mitigation.

Glyph of storms fire: add 1sec burn with each pulse
Air: add 5sec vulnerability with each hit

Eh, no matter what they do with this skill, it basically has no utility outside of dungeons. I throw it on to use with MS for the extra DPS or Earth for perma blind for the duration of it.

Frost aura: decrease chill duration to 1sec. Chills foes within 120 radius (remove requirement of being hit)

If you remove the requirement of being hit you severely take away the utility of the skill in s/tPvP. It offers great escapability as you activate and as players attack you, they become slowed, offering you the chance to escape. The more they attack, the more distance is put between. Great against ranged.

Phoenix: decrease recharge to 15s or apply 1s burn

Is fine as it is. S/D stacks might like a boss. Add the fact that it grants fire, has initial damage+aoe and grants vigor and it’s clearly fine.

RTL’s pathing/tracking is absolutely horrid atm. Saying it’s fine is anything but the truth. MG falls into the same category. It’s clunky and unreliable atm and basically acts like a 3 second self stun when it doesn’t work.

Mist form: cure and grants immunity to immobilized and crippled for the duration

Can’t have it all bud. Depending on traits, it can grant regen+vigor or damage and chill enemies. Mist Form+Cleansing Flame will suffice for almost every situation. Even if you’re Immobilized, a well timed Mist Form will get you through most PvE situations. PvP is slightly different but works on the same premise.

Arcane fury: increase fury duration to 5 sec

3 seconds is good enough.

Geyser: increase duration to 3s, or increase healing to 1000

Still serves it’s purpose. Decent heal with a great field. Personally I use it on downed allies if I happen to be in Water to help with the pick up.

Burning retreat: increase the damage for going through it to equal flame wall

Again, it’s a dodge utility skill. You can’t expect it to dish out damage as it’s not meant to. It’s meant as a dodge and should be used appropriately so. Hell, Updraft has the same effect and it has a KD and grants Swiftness.

Everything else has more or less been stated already. General consensus is that Dragon’s Tooth speed needs to be increased. Everyone agrees that Eruption needs a buff to cast time. With cast time and activation, I believe it’s around 4s before the skill actually casts.

Hakurface, thank you for the detailed response. I chose 5% power to vitality because I felt it wouldn’t help bunkers while still allowing well rounded builds to profit from it.
I went a too far with mist form. Added note on arcane fury.

Any suggestions on how to improve Zephyr’s speed? It’s useless atm tbh. I mostly just want a compiled thread of suggestions
P.S. GoEP-Although air was bad, an aoe recurring burn is fairly powerful.
P.P.S. RTL I assumed it getting stuck is a glitch. Which is why I said its in desperate need of glitch fix.

We can have perma swiftness as an excuse for letting speedbuff traits go un-noticed is like saying that we don´t need to fix our lighter because we have a flamethrower.
We can choose to go with stacking swiftness actively, or we should be able to stack speed through traits if we choose so.

Also, it would be nice to see that skills could be used in multiple ways, for example that we could use burning retreat offensively if we want. Though the burning and damage tick it does gets a bit damage done, i´d wouldn´t consider it too far fetched to improve that a bit…either direct or burning that is.

Why waste a Trait when it can be done by weapon skills alone? If you read his post, his views are from a PvE standpoint. The movement speed is basically there for traveling. Zephyr’s speed should be removed and replaced with a minor trait that is actually useful for both PvE and PvP. As of right now, passive movement speed buffs do not stack. The highest passive is used. Now if you decide to use an air build and you use One With Air, Zephyr’s is now useless. If windborne dagger worked, you would have the same issue. I’m pretty sure the reason why they don’t stack is because it starts to get ridiculous how much ground an Ele would be ale to cover. 50% movement speed from traits. Throw in Burning Speed, RTL and swiftness and it’s ridiculous. I think the best option is to replace Zephyr’s Speed entirely.

You can use Burning Retreat offensively, don’t expect it to do a good amount of damage because again, it wasn’t designed for it. Whenever I do AC sometimes I’ll drop a BR on a burrow for the damage but it has much better utility in being used as an emergency dodge.

hakurface.2619:

Why waste a Trait when it can be done by weapon skills alone? If you read his post, his views are from a PvE standpoint. The movement speed is basically there for traveling. Zephyr’s speed should be removed and replaced with a minor trait that is actually useful for both PvE and PvP. As of right now, passive movement speed buffs do not stack. The highest passive is used. Now if you decide to use an air build and you use One With Air, Zephyr’s is now useless. If windborne dagger worked, you would have the same issue. I’m pretty sure the reason why they don’t stack is because it starts to get ridiculous how much ground an Ele would be ale to cover. 50% movement speed from traits. Throw in Burning Speed, RTL and swiftness and it’s ridiculous. I think the best option is to replace Zephyr’s Speed entirely.

You can use Burning Retreat offensively, don’t expect it to do a good amount of damage because again, it wasn’t designed for it. Whenever I do AC sometimes I’ll drop a BR on a burrow for the damage but it has much better utility in being used as an emergency dodge.

There seems to be a 33% speed cap anyhow, stacking would only work till that point.
Also what you said is exactly the reason why they should be looked into. if they worked well, people could actualy use them to satisfy their need for speed, and use weapon skills other ways. You know, give us more ways to play the game. We can do it through weapon skills, yes, but why shouldn´t we be able to sacrifice some traits instead and use weapon skills differently?

<edit> I know i can use it offensively, i do it all the time, but i don´t see it impossible to increase the damage a bit to encourage that kind of use. And ofcourse it has better utility as dodge, it´s name is burning retreat, but again it wouldn´t be going overboard to encourage using it other ways too.

Fire grab: reduce recharge to 40s, decrease cast time to 1/2sec

The cast time decrease on this is frankly not a good idea. It could even end up being a nerf because it would be harder to swap attunements in the middle of the cast time for the extra 20% crit chance from fury.

You should never want to sacrifice a trait. Traits are the core of any build. If a boost to speed can be done by our weapons alone and be kept up as long as it’s needed, why waste a Minor Trait like that? Just looked it up and the cap for MS is 33% as you stated. Perma swiftness fulfills the need. No reason to have a minor trait for 10% MS. When you can have 33% whenever you need it. But like I said, I don’t think they foresaw the perma swiftness but it’s here.

hakurface.2619:

You should never want to sacrifice a trait. Traits are the core of any build. If a boost to speed can be done by our weapons alone and be kept up as long as it’s needed, why waste a Minor Trait like that? Just looked it up and the cap for MS is 33% as you stated. Perma swiftness fulfills the need. No reason to have a minor trait for 10% MS. When you can have 33% whenever you need it. But like I said, I don’t think they foresaw the perma swiftness but it’s here.

uhm….yes you should want to sacrifice traits…

If there´s enough good and viable options, you would want to sacrifice some trait over other to make it better for your playstyle.
And if you don´t want to sacrifice a trait for another one, it just means that there´s pretty much set in stone way for picking traits, which is rather boring idea.

For example see many of the gw1 builds. There was usualy some key skills, and after that many variations, depending on player and intended use. Rest of the skills you could play around and sacrifice some skills for others. That was good.
If you have definite set of traits you must use, like if i wantto go offensive D/D i have to pick these, that´s bad.

I´m not saying you should want to take them in their current state, but they should be looked into, and made viable options to take instead of other traits.

You do realize this is a Minor trait? It’s basically not needed and should be replaced with a more useful one. Bottom line.

hakurface.2619:

You do realize this is a Minor trait? It’s basically not needed and should be replaced with a more useful one. Bottom line.

Basicly it could be made to be useful, bottom line.

I have 3 major problems with the class right now, I’m primarily a staff user, but:

• Ride the Lightning (Air-Dagger-4): It needs to get fixed, asap. S/D is not a reliable build for me right now because it’ll get you killed 50% of the time. A lot of great suggestions have been given already (tweaks like letting you detonate it yourself by doubletapping is a good one).

• Lightning Surge (Air-Staff-3): I can’t say it enough, this skill is essentially useless in pvp, and it’s nothing more than a noob trap, by the time you’re finished casting it you’ll get hit enough times to make the blind effect meaningless, and the damage is mediocre for the time it takes to cast. Either decrease the cast time GREATLY or remove the cast time completely, blinds in this game aren’t strong enough to justify such penalty.

• We don’t have elite skills.

I can put up with temporal air trait bugs that are highly situational, or having miserable damage unless we combo skills perfectly, but these mentioned above are priority for me.

can ele get some downed skills? i don’t even play ele main but it’s kinda messed up how useless they are while downed. make their 2 move stun and give it a cd or lower cd on mist form.