Guild Wars 2

After looking up the beta nerfs everything suddenly makes sense. Eles were OP with insane damage. The problem was mostly “fixed” by lowering damage on skills and increasing cds.

Heres the problem. Elementalists dont have any spammable moderate damage skills like the other classes and on-top of that, everything hits like wet noodle with a long cd. Good elementalist players can do nicely while good players of other classes are god-like.(And bad players from other classes can do nicely aswell.)

You have pretty much 2 choices whitout completely changing the class imo. Increase the damage of number 1 and some other abilities with putting longer durations on effects/stuns with the other skills. Or, you need to significantly decrease the cooldowns and buff damage to the current “cooldown skills”.

Elementals are a joke now. Fix them.

Yes well, imho cooldowns are not TOO bad if u increase the dps

otherwise decrease cooldowns, the cooldowns atm are a total joke for the utility of the skill

Agreed, please work on Elementals.

Theres also the problem with attunaments having too long cds and traits being quite meh, aside from arcana. Those are abit harder to balance, so im willing to go for a compromise in order to have this class more viable/less clunky as soon as possible.

Sometimes I record sessions then go back and time fights… On average it takes close to 3x longer for my elementalist to take-down a single enemy than my warrior, guardian, ranger, etc…

What’s worse, is these other classes do perfectly fine with AoE, mocking the one thing elementalists seem to be built for, since the weapons they use have a HUGE damage arc to the enemies in front of them and it only takes a little bit of kiting to group all your enemies up… And this is regardless of the fact of their AoE melee attacks.

Beyond rebalancing the cool-downs and DPS, I think one thing that would be helpful is a bit-better AoE splash on the auto-attacks. Lightening is ok. But after than… Single point damage and it’s really weak… 300hp dps when a ranger of the same level will do 800hp dps to the same enemy with a great sword… And get a 100-Blades warrior… 3500K HP dps in just a few seconds to everything in front of him…

All while my elementalist goes ‘300 plink’ ‘300 plink’ ‘300 plink’ in earth or 500 plink 500 plink 500 plink in fire all to a single target…

It seriously frustrating…

Yeah, we all know Anet screwed up this class after the nerf of BWE2. Great thing is that they did the same thing to the el in GW1 and they didn’t get around to fixing them until 5 years later so we are in for a hell of a wait.

Played on Guardian 1-80, finished all ps / events / hearts / dungeons. Loved the way my character played though out. Elementalist does feel eh, much weaker. It’s not just the light armor being an issue. I know how to kite, but IMO for a light armor, ranged caster the DPS should be much higher.

The end result for players is that an Ele is a much more expensive profession to play. I find myself doing two signifigant money sinks. 1.) armor repair cost are higher 2.) instead of buying a new armor set every 10 levels (worked nicely on my Guardian) I’m doing it every 5 on ele.

The end result, this is a break-even profession to level. Don’t expect to have any extra coin to craft, etc without grind.

I hope they won’t wait five years to fix them.. sighs

My first character was a guardian whom I have leveled till 80. I got bored of her and then leveled an Ele.

While a Guardian is effective at facerolling content and groups, I assure you that the ele is no slouch either… the problem – more movement and more buttons. While I can simply Hulk Smash stuff with my Hammer/GS with my guardian, I have to stance dance/ combo field stuff with my ele.

Does it take longer on Ele? Maybe only SLIGHTLY. Do I die more? no way. Was it tougher to get used to? definitely yes.

Maybe you should post your spec / skills you are using so we can see what the problem is.

Danielle Mesmorie.7864:

My first character was a guardian whom I have leveled till 80. I got bored of her and then leveled an Ele.

While a Guardian is effective at facerolling content and groups, I assure you that the ele is no slouch either… the problem – more movement and more buttons. While I can simply Hulk Smash stuff with my Hammer/GS with my guardian, I have to stance dance/ combo field stuff with my ele.

Does it take longer on Ele? Maybe only SLIGHTLY. Do I die more? no way. Was it tougher to get used to? definitely yes.

Maybe you should post your spec / skills you are using so we can see what the problem is.

Doing Dagger/Dagger or Staff if I’m playing in a group. I’d say post level 20 I’ve gotten the hang of it. The real problem is easy enough to identify. The most powerful Ele skills are AoE. If I’m in an area where there are a lot of mobs the AoE creates aggros the mob and I end up getting taken out quickly. If you’re an ele and you do end up mobbed you have light armor so you need an exit strategy. Swiftness boons from Air attunement aren’t going to save you.

To qualify when I say I die more. In a three hour session in the open world doing events with my Guardian past level 30 I would rarely go down. Perhaps once per three-four hour gaming session, even about half that time I would recover from down state. It was a very rare occurrence. On ele I’m going down perhaps 3-4 times per session. I’m not dieing all the time, it’s just mildly annoying how much more often I go down. On ele I do manage to recover from down state slightly more often. If I’m on my way out I usually manage to pop something heavy.

The problem only occurs in zones where I don’t have at least one other to help me work the mobs. To be fair the game was designed to be a MMORPG so I don’t think it’s all intended to be soloable. Aren’t heavy armored professions always the go-to choice for people who want to play mostly alone?

PvE balance doesn’t belong here because Ele’s are probably the most capable in PvE, if you’re having trouble in PvE then it’s a LTP issue, which I don’t say often.

In general quite a few of the skills are bugged anyways so we need to wait for fixes before we get buffs or C/D reductions, some skills do need their damage up’d and/or C/D reduced, theres a million and one threads about Ele’s and how kitten they are, stop with the threads please. >-<

People seem to be forgetting that we have the highest utility of any profession in the game right now (bar engi who are around about the same if running with lots of kits) so if the damage were buffed we’d suddenly be the profession with comparable sustained and burst damage to every other profession with utility that far outstrips theirs i.e. a broken profession, in my opinion at least.

High utility does NOT justify horrible damage.

And Curring, you can say it’s a L2P issue, but the fact of the matter is that in places like Orr you have to constantly be moving in order to just survive; much less kill anything. You have horrible damage and horrible health/armor to go with it. If you get hit with a yank, you’re pretty screwed. Especially with almost everything in Orr having either Pull, Paralyze, Cripple, or Life Leach.

By the way, I play an elementalist and can survive 95% of the time while killing things. But it takes 5x the skill of any other class for 1/5th of the results.

@ Shadow Dragon Ad

I don’t think our damage should be as high as it is with a few other professions, but the problem with us having 20 skills with a lot of utility (and some high casting times), is that we spend a lot of time setting up skills.

Our damage input is currently fine, or close to it, I think, for our defensive builds, as we can survive extremely well while still manage to slowly kill our opponents.

But for glass cannon builds, elementalists just don’t work with their current damage output. Considering that elementalists take more time to set up their bursts, any other glass cannon will be able to kill us before we kill them. And what about having a lot of utility? That utility comes at the cost of our damage, and most of it is especially lacking for low-vitality/ low-toughness builds. Several of the auras and armor of earth require us to get hit, our anti-projectile skills are conditional by their very nature, most of our defensive support skills interrupt our own bursts or require us to get hit.

It’s exactly because Elementalists have and rely so much on utility through so many skills, that their glass cannon builds currently do not work. Because elementalists need time. They need time to react, set up, improvize. And while our defensive builds full of regeneration among other boons and full of condition removal give us time to defend ourselves while (slowly) killing our opponents, our glass cannon builds are, much like the entire thief profession, a kill-or-be-killed time bomb. Our glass cannon builds do not give us time to use twice the skills of other professions, because we have less natural defense and because several of our defensive skills are not worthwhile without the proper investment on specific attributes, or better yet, they are worthwhile to delay our death, giving us extra seconds to make sure we kill our opponents. But we can’t kill our opponents that fast, because our damage is poor for the sake of our utility.

Elementalists do need more damage, but not for all their builds (specifically, not for their current meta builds, which are fine as they are). Or better yet, elementalists with glass cannon builds need more efficient means to make sure they kill their opponents before they are killed. This can even mean more defense for our power builds, if that indirectly fixes our power.

And the solution to all this is possibly in fixing our terrible fire/ air traits, considering that increasing our spike potential with those traits comes at the sacrifice of our other traits. I really think the traits are the main issues, because with 30 water and 30 arcane, I can make a lot of weapon combos work, and I can even invest on power through amulets (valkyrie’s my favourite for this combo), deal good damage, and still have high defense. But I can not, in any way, make above mediocre builds with 30 fire/ 30 air traits, unless I have an entire party devoted at protecting me like a princess.

High utility does NOT justify horrible damage.

my experience (in sPvP at least) is that we do not have ‘horrible’ damage. I think that we need some skills to have more damage but suggesting a damage buff across the board would be silly o.o

Considering that elementalists take more time to set up their bursts, any other glass cannon will be able to kill us before we kill them.

If we include fire grab in a burst it takes around 3 seconds for you to do a burst as d/d and about 4 (with Dragon’s tooth delay included) for s/d. In a usual burst spec this would be pushing the limits of unacceptable but often you’ll only be trying to land your full burst whilst someone is updrafted.

The main problem with glass ele builds is that for both s/d and d/d you have to be relatively close to the middle of the fight to get your burst off for the duration which means you get hit be all the erroneous AoE flying around.

I will agree though that staff glass right now just isn’t up to par when compared to d/d and s/d, especially with how strong staff support is.

And the solution to all this is possibly in fixing our terrible fire/ air traits

I definitely agree that the fire traits are awful however a lot of the air traits are really nice (especially in a d/d build), one thing they should fix about air traits is the grandmaster trait that increases damage to stunned foes doesn’t work on updraft because it’s considered a push (like a guardian’s banish) rather than a stun (like warriors earth shaker)

I figured out how to get optimal damage out of my Elementalist, but it cost a good amount of money.

Be in charge of the siege weapons. I am pretty sure this is what we are meant to do. Bunker build and siege weapons.

Albane.8367:

I figured out how to get optimal damage out of my Elementalist, but it cost a good amount of money.

Be in charge of the siege weapons. I am pretty sure this is what we are meant to do. Bunker build and siege weapons.

OR just ninja somebody else’s seige weapon, that’s what I do. Admittedly, it does save me a lot of money.

Yeah, I can definitely see air’s “Grounded” trait to be the damage boost a glass cannon ele would need, if it worked with updraft. The effect is called launch, btw, while Push is something like Gust from Staff. The trait should definitely affect launched foes, and if that was the case, it would affect Tornado and Lightning Hammer too.

I do think they should get some form of defense from their fire/ air traits, but a different kind of defense than what is offered by water. Something that would help Elementalists spike for 1-2 seconds extra. I think Tempest Defense (the one that gives Shocking Aura) is pretty cool for that, it stops a spiker and makes it easier for you to spike them, but I feel it’s not worth being tier 3 (maybe tier 2?) or having that high of a recharge.