Guild Wars 2

It’s pretty clear to mostly everyone whose touched the class that while Elementalists are not broken, we have to have good gear and good skill management to even hold a candle to the effectiveness of the other professions. For whatever reason, Anet saw it fit to make Elementalist a masochist only prof, and that on its face is fine. What bugs me is not really getting a noticeable advantage over the other profs who can phone it in when I’m managing four skillbars.

So why not just go all in and give us another four skillbars to manage? We won’t be able to burst like a thief, tank like a guardian, support like a mesmer or cond/tank like a necro, but we can competently fill the role of any of these prof’s without making them redundant or being over-powered ourselves. We’d be the games go-to jack of all trades prof that is more and more effective based on player awareness and ability while not displacing any other class.

No. That is just plain silly.

I’m not sure why we don’t have this ability in the first place. Our d/d s/d is outperformed by a thief, guardian or warrior and our ranged is outperformed by a mes or a necro, so why can these profs weapon swap to fill a different role on the fly while we would have to break combat and manually switch weapons? Just because we have access to more skills doesn’t mean we outshine the other profs in doing anything.

I believe Elementalist (which is my main, focusing on Staff mostly) is fine. We have the tools we need within our four attunement. However, I’d like to see weapons swap implemented, just to make it easier then opening the bags and swapping manually. Just make it so we can’t swap in combat.

The reason they don’t outshine are the numbers. By numbers, I mean range, damage, animation speed, etc. The ABILITIES and their purposes are great so if we were given another weapon set…. we’d have too much CC or swiftness(maybe another random buff) or AoE or something.
We’d turn into a utility class that would make engineers cry “why can’t we get another weapon too” every time they make a comparison to us

Elementalists don’t need drastic changes, but they clearly need something.

1. Bug fixes.
This will help some key skills/ traits that are widely used.

2. Stronger traits.
This should put the elementalists more on par with other professions late-game.

3. More meaningful auto-attacks.
This should make elementalists less stressful to play against normal enemies. Why must we treat every single wolf as the most decisive battle of our lives, while other professions can get off by simply auto-attacking and using a few other skills every once and then?

Weapon swapping for an elementalist would be a mess to play with, a mess to play against, and a mess to balance for, in my opinion.

I would like an out of combat (and, by extension, out of sPvP) weapon switch. You get the same effect by having your weapons in your inventory and switching them that way…

But I don’t really see it as something hugely important, and I don’t think combat weapon switching is a good idea for the class.

What they need to do instead of an in combat weapon swap (we sorely need an out of combat one) is make 1 of our Attunments the opposite range of the rest. I’ll try and explain with an example.

If you select Dagger/Dagger you are basically locked into melee range when in combat, as such why not make Fire/Air the melee range attunments (exactly as they are now), make water a midway (as it’s about slows and heals) and make earth a ranged setup. No skills woudl really need to be changed for water/earth and this is how.

Water – increase Cone of Colds range to match vapor blade or make CoC have a slow effect so we get back to the 600 range. Everything else ramains the same.

Earth – Impale gets changed to a 900 range attack and stays exactly as it is now in animation/damage etc.
Ring of Earth – it keeps the same type of attack (the circle earth spikes) but becomes a placeable AOE up to 900 range.
Magnetic Grasb – it does the opposite and pushes you away from the target (the immobilise stays the same).
Earthquake – it becomes an AOE attack like Ring of Eath and can be placed at 900 range.
Churning Earth – same as Earthquake and Ring of Earth, a channeled AOE that can be placed at 900 range.

There we go, exactly the same attacks as D/D but now 1 of the attunments is made for range, 1 for midway slowing and 2 for melee (and the ranged can be used at melee aswell).

Somehow I don’t think that this will happen anytime soon. The idea is great, but then they would have to change all the other weapons, however few they may be.
Scepter would have to have water and earth like at 1200 range and staffs would have to have their range be either 1500, or melee range.
With the daggers it makes sense but for the others ( namely the staff ) it causes quite a bit of confusion as no class exceeds far beyond 1200 range and I can’t see the staff being melee.

I would say no … if u want to use more spell’s from the weapon just simple put some on arcana, so the CD of the Attunement be lower …

lets say that u could swap weapons … well staff+focus would give u 11 seconds of reflect projectiles and other stuff with the “Swirling Winds” that it will destroy projectiles for 6 seconds and from Focus and “Magnetic Aura” that would reflect projectiles for 5 seconds from staff …

Lets say u are going against a Ranger that only have the longbow and the shotbow … well it would put u imune to is atack’s for 11 seconds …

Saying this, i would just say no, to the Weapon swap for the Elementalist

Imo, weapon swapping should only be allowed out of combat for Ele. In combat, you’re lock with the weapon you currently use. It’s quite frustrating to always switch to staff to buff speed on my group before switching back to scepter/dagger, or having to keep switching from dagger/focus to staff when I’m going to defend a keep.

for wvw its kinda needed, for ground fighting i tend to use dagger/dagger then change to staff for a siege and its very annoying to have to run way back and wait for aggro to go away

my suggestion would be to allow ele to weapon swap but put a long cool down on it, say 2 min, that way you cant constantly swap

I think my head would explode are 25 abilities not enough for a 1v1? do you need 45. Better traits would be nice, our earth traits are far inferior to other classes, my ranger has a free stun break every 90 seconds 10 points into defence trait, and 20 points in you can also grab become invisible when immobilised or stunned on something like a 45 second cd.

Honestly I just want to weapon swap so that I don’t have to carry the weapons in the inventory and hit H out of combat to change.

Just let me use the slots as inventory savers! I won’t swap during combat I promise!

Yes have us weapon swap but keep the CDs though. So we have even more choice of spells and different auto attacks.

I personally think they need to rethink the attunement swap mechanic period. I don’t have a solution only ideas so don’t flame me please. These are just thoughts I’m putting our there. Maybe we need to pick and choose our five weapon abilities much like we would utility skills. We browse through the available atunement for that ability # and we only have five skills per weapon. And we could have weapon swap then. Maybe we could be limited to choosing 2 elements to focus on instead of 4. With the first one we could choose our five skills and then have 4 elemental skills in our F1-F4 skills similar to the engineer. When I play my ele I feel like I need to switch between elements spamming every CD with little to no regard for what they do because they are such weak skills.

It would be so OP to have weapon switch also. The amount of boons/CC’s you could gain from doing that would be insane. I would be up for having the weapons sets there in inventory that you can easily switch between with 1 click out of combat rather than searching through your bags and making sure it doesn’t equip the wrong weapon in offhand.

At what levels do people seem to be having problems with their ele in pve by the way ive mostly just pvp’d on mine so far but im starting to level it in pve?

Well at least buff the conjure weapons and have it not consume all our attunements.

I’d personally remove the CD, time limit and use limit of elemental weapons, make fiery GS into an arcane GS (keeping the use and time limit), and replace the elemental weapon skills with a glyph of elemental weapon and make it switch form depending on attunement.

bam, all of our range switching woes solved, medium for fire, melee for air, long for water and defensive/tanking for earth, it would allow attunements to act as he weapon kits everyone seems to think they are

While I’m not entirely convinced we need weapon swap, we do definitely need some sort of way to have range while in d/d or other close range set-ups. I too often find myself run into a dynamic event chain which has champions appear at some point, and suddenly I can’t do anything. If I try to attack I am dead constantly as I can’t take many hits, and in these events there is so much going on I can’t see the champion to see when the attack is coming so can’t roll out the way. But as I usually run around d/d I find I’m stuck in close range or not taking part in the event. Or running away until it says I’m no longer in combat so I can go to inventory and swap to staff and run back just in time to watch the champion die and the event is over…

No. Weapon switching would make the class disgustingly over powered. The amount of defensive cool downs I would have to play with would be unreal, with all the control and area of effect damage, I don’t think so.

Like someone pointed out earlier, we need a trait and auto attack fix to help our damage output for how squishy we can be at times. Or I think a small cool down reduce on element switching would be great, then the arcane trait tree would become real interesting.

I actually feel this would help quite alot; however, to balance the additional weapon set only allow us access to 2 elements at anyone time, due to having to impliment a out of comabt attunement system this might be more a long term goal. This would also help with trait synergy as we wouldn’t be trying to use/trait 4 different elements.

This would also allow us to focus our character thematically, I for one have no real interest ustilizing anything other then pyromancery, we do choose an elemental attunement at the character creation screen after all.

Finally it would decrease the amount of stance dancing, I have no really issue with waltzing between atunements, but for the most part it seems i’m only using 1 or 2 abilities from the other attunments before switching out. Too many abilities aren’t being used as they’re really nothing more then reskins of abilities in other attunments.

We need weapon swap same as engineers i think but only out of combat
our weapon swap are the 4 elements but we do need weapon swap ill say it again out of combat…

I use Scepter+dagger and staff for better support abilities and i swap em based on what i need but here comes the problem i need to open my inventory or character window and to swap weapons manualy Not a big deal but the other problem is that when my weapons are into inventory theres chance to salvage them by mistake

From a D/D PoV eles need a incombat weapon switch badly but on a high CD,
maybe 2mins or something so we are not switching weapons for extra moves
but rather based on the situation we are in.

To many times i have been locked into melee range when i had to be at
ranged either for pve/WvW. Its a pain having to run away and
wait for ooc to switch.
As for dungeons well i learnt a long time ago dont go D/D unless i know whats going to happen.

Or as some people have suggested Giving dagger a longer range attunement
could work but the offhand dagger shouldnt be changed at all , would totally
make S/D to strong.

I’ve been imagining how I’d have design elementalist with the GW2 current one as a base concept.

I think that I have an elegant solution to fixing conjure weapons and elementalists loss of range versatility due to not having weapon swap. As well as preventing the idea of a swap weapon on elementalist from getting out of hand.

Conjure Elemental [Weapon(s)] (one conjure spell per weapon combo)
————————————-
Replace your Weapon Skills of your current element with [weapon combo] weapon skills of the same element
.
This lasts until you hit swap weapon which destroys the conjured weapon, you can change elements and return to the conjure weapon element without losing the changed skills.

CD: 120, starts after you destroy the conjured weapon