Guild Wars 2

Are the elementalist’s long animation time from spells intentional? At the rate a lot of the spells actually go off … I feel like wanting to kill myself sometimes. I timed it manually with a stopwatch so it is not 100% accurate.

For example:
Staff – Earth skill 2 – Eruption
Cast time: 1 3/4s
Actual time: 4.8 – 4.9s
Suggested change: Make Eruption work like Lava Font of Staff Fire 2.

Nevermind there’s a cast time. There’s actually a very brief pause just after click. But that is probably latency issue. On top of that waiting for the rocks to actually rise up before the dmg kicks in.

I timed it … it takes around 4.8 to 4.9s. 5s??? Are you kidding me?

4.9s for a spell to hit. Even with Earth 5 Shockwave, it is 2s Immobilize. Yes cast it before Eruption. Then it goes on 30s CD. We have an earth spell here that has 6s CD, but takes almost 5s for it to be effective.

Eruption needs to work like Lava Font. Bad enough it is a targetted cast. On top of that a super long cast and animation time? We have to be smart about where to put our spell. But please don’t kitten us this bad to have it kitten spell. Please please please.

Other spells that has ridiculous long cast time. I might as well just target kittens to kill at this rate. Please tell me this is not intentional. I mean animation is nice and all … but why some really take forever?

Please give us some love and lower the cast time AND animation time.

Staff – Water 2 – Ice Spike
Cast time: 1s
Actual time to hit: 3.5s

Scepter – Fire 2 – Dragon Tooh
Cast time: 1s
Actual time: 3.3s

Scepter – Water 2 – Shatterstone
Cast time: 2s
Actual time: 2.8s

Besides the bugs, this is what is really holding back Eles. If we could actually land our damage reliably (of course ignoring immunity, and evasion) I think a lot of “UP damage” complaints would be mitigated. I feel like our numbers are good, but it’s landing kitten that’s the problem. Animations being so long makes this troublesome. Don’t even need your dodge key to evade some of our spells.

Yea it does seem strange that they designed things that way. I don’t know what the thinking was behind it, I’m sure every Ele would love if stuff went off faster.

I just made a Ele…and I think they are perfect. They represent what a caster should be. Making timed and effectively aimed hits creating massive damage. If the casting time where to be sped up. They would be overpowering the other classes. The point of giving the ele an opening is so that they dont instantly destroy everything. The game would get boring if there was no challenge. And if you just like overpowering with out even trying then I think you need to rethink your ideals and values. Its that kind of thinking that is destroying society.

I wouldn’t exactly call Ele’s damage “massive” xhenya lol. The issue with Ele’s is it’s a mixed bag and doesn’t quite make sense. Advertised as a traditional high damage dealer mage class, but it’s damage is not impressive enough to make up for the cast times, squishiness, and more complex skill system. So they end up being a more versatile class that many use in more of a supportive role and is best played switching attunements, but the trait lines are a bit wonky so some builds work and then some don’t, and you have wasted traits like the ones that promote being in one attunement.

I really enjoy my Ele don’t get me wrong, but that’s probably because I’m playing a more balanced Staff Support/DPS build with decent survivability and OK damage, so I’m really just going with one of the few builds that work (and only doing open world PvE and WvW with it, where Ele excels anyway, but not everyone enjoys that playstyle). The class seems to be suffering from an identity crisis. I think the Dev’s need to decide what it’s supposed to be and fix everything to make the class exactly that.

I think its intentional. Keep in mind when these spells were designed they came with a lot more damage. So making it hard to land your spikes made some sense. Then came the panicked Beta ele damage nerf, without them bothering to look at our cast times, cool downs and animations to compensate.

Xhenya, LOL!

You must be kidding me. You come in here with your brand new ele and say it is fine? 5s to cast a spell is not a challenge. It is a challenge enough to maintain 4 attunements with light armor and lowest hp. It is a challenge to place a static are spell on where mobs and players are constantly moving and dodging.

But please dont come in ele with your uneducated post saying about overpowering and bad for society. We dont destroy anything instantly. You have to refer to Thief and Warrior for that.

At least before you post, do read what the post is about. It is specifically referring to spells with long cast time and unaccounted animation times.

I have found this to be true with the scepter, it has a tediously long animation, making scepters currently not as good in WvW. When every class can mass attack / condition stack with super fast animations, we are stuck waiting for that slow animation to hit. Like the fire #1… it takes literally 4 – 5 seconds for the dmg to hit and burn to land. During that time, I have been hit (besides when I dodge) roughly 15 times.

I agree. Many elementalist skills seem to break the natural flow you get into while casting. A perfect example of this outside the examples in this thread is “Shatterstone”, i really dont get this skill at all or how the devs thought it would work well with the elementalist playstyle.

Every time you cast it brings on a severe amount of downtime for a class where every second matters, i often find myself in situations when fighting veteran mobs where i have used up every heavy nuke on all other elements and are getting low on health, so i switch to water and heal up, get some cc and ofcourse land a shatterstone or two after switching back to the more damaging elements. But shatterstone works in such a way now that it instantly breaks the flow of my attunement dance, i cast it and then i have to wait while my guy does nothing until i finally can get off all those heals, because naturally i want to start with shatterstone so i can finish my watery rampage with another one thanks to its short cooldown.

I just do not understand, PvP games like this need a good flow in the gameplay to feel responsive enough to utilize knowledge and skill to the maximum.

Eruption is totally broken anyway: If you start casting it and immediately dodge to interrupt the cast, you can then start casting another ability earlier than without this trick AND eruption somehow still goes off normally. Therefore i suggest removing the cast time itself entirely, leaving “only” the animation time, which is still looong enough…