Guild Wars 2

PREFACE
What I’m proposing is going to sound fairly over-the-top to many of you. Please read it with an open-mind.

For those of us who have played the Elementalist for a very long time deeply love the class and are distraught by the many changes made to it since beta weekend 01. Something drastic needs to be done, something fundamental needs to change to dig this class out of the hole it has fallen into.

PURPOSE

• Promote build diversity.
• Remove reliance on Arcana.
• Remove lackluster traits.
• Normalize class mechanics and give back some form of power to the class.

PROPOSAL

• Normalise attunement swapping to 9 seconds and base global attunement cooldown to 1 second.
• Remove Evasive Arcana, Elemental Attunement and Lingering Elements.
  Replace with a new class mechanic called Elemental Mastery which provides the same boons on attunement change and procs the same effects on dodge. (Internal cooldown of 10 seconds. Boon duration halved.)
• Arcana trait line still provides increased boon duration.
• Intelligence attribute is replaced with Celestial Favor: +3 to all stats excluding critical damage or Studied Mastery: -1% to all utility cooldowns.

FURTHER SUGGESTIONS

• Merge Blasting Staff, Windborne Dagger(movement bonus applies OOC) and Vigorous Scepter.

RATIONALE

• Attunements are the fundamental mechanic of our class. Too long have we tried to balance around attunement switching, cooldowns associated with them, and the benefits or downfalls associated with switching.
• We’ve seen internal cooldowns implemented as a measure to balance emergent builds. Fundamentally we’ve had the power of each skill in each attunement reduced as a handicap due to the number of skills available.
• Furthermore our skills are handicapped a second time by long cooldowns. We’re paying a very steep price for our flexibility.
• There needs to be some reciprocity for our extremely low base health pool and armor, combined with the various balances made to healing co-efficients.
• At this stage we do not have the damage potential related to our defensive shortcomings.

SHORTCOMINGS
I don’t have any concrete ideas to replace the merged traits or the -20% cooldown traits that would need to be changed if you decided to trait deeply into Arcana.

Perhaps you guys can offer a few suggestions?

IN CLOSING
I doubt this topic will be taken seriously but I sincerely hope that either a Community Manager or a member of the development team will at least take a look and give it some consideration.

I understand how difficult and complex our class is to balance but perhaps it is time to address the underlying issues making this task so troublesome.

Thank you for taking the time to read this proposal, please keep discussions civil and on topic. I don’t mind being offended and called silly names but love this class and want to see some positive changes made.

If your purpose is to derail this topic, ask yourself first “is what I’m planning on saying going to be detrimental to our (the elementalist) community?” and refrain from posting if that is the case.

Wanted to add this post to further the discussion.

Nike.2631:

On the topic of making people branch out in their Elementalist builds, with less absolute reliance on Arcane, I have two suggestions~

General: It would be nice to see more synergy between the elemental trait lines. Give me obvious, tangible reasons to build 30 Fire & 30 Earth or 30 Air and 30 Earth. Make elemental “pairing” sing. There’s only 6 possible pairs among the 4 elements, go through and deliberately make sure each pair offers something (probably by way of their 25 point minor trait) that has specific utility and application if you have 25+ points in another of the 4 elements. Give us an incentive to break away from the tyranny of Arcane rather than increasing the opportunity cost of Arcane in the hopes that we’ll maybe give up on the cornerstone choices in that line.

Specific: Dump all-aspect recharge% from Arcane entirely. Rather than neutering it down from 60% to 30% for a whole line’s worth of investment, keep the current recharge times and ADD “+50% recharge% for that element only” to each of the 15 point minor traits for each elemental line in addition to their current effects. Do you want fast recharge for Fire attunement? THEN SPEND POINTS INTO FIRE! Splashing 10 is not a commitment. Splashing 15? Cool, you get fast recharge for that Attunement. 15 points is also a low enough number that you could see a “fast-swapping master” built on 15/15/15/15/0 with 10 points left over to mix it up.

But what to replace the class specific boost of arcane with? Make it a stat buff that varies with your attunement! Make it “double down” on the attributes already associated with that element as seen in their trait lines. A fully fire-traited elementalist in Fire Attunement with 30 points in Arcane should get a huge bump to Power and Condition Duration (the Fire line bonus). When he shifts attunement to Earth, that Power and Condition Duration bonus morphs into a Toughness and Condition Damage bonus (The Earth trait-line attributes). Make points into Arcane something that reinforces the flavor and playstyle of your other choices, rather than diluting them.

Less “I want to be a hydromancer, and arcane lets me get away with occasionally swapping through other attunements…”

More “I want to by a hydromancer and arcane lets me stack even more vitality and healing power while in water Attunment, making me a BETTER hydromancer!” With it built-in that being a 15+ point hydromancer means you can get back to that attunement quickly after rotating out to answer some specific need.

And another, every thread needs some DiogoSilva…

DiogoSilva.7089:

Another idea to take the dependence out of elementalist’s elemental attunement, is to further buff their minor adept traits to be comparable.

Make earth #5 add 180 toughness (same as signet of earth) instead of the stated 120, or give a party radius effect like the water trait. Or both.
Make air #5 add 15% speed instead of 10%, but I have my doubts about this one. 25% speed would feel better, but could it be too strong for a 5-points trait? What about a party-radius effect instead?
No ideas about fire #5, but maybe something like “% chance to inflict 1s burning on hit/ 5s cooldown”, kinda like a modified burning precision.
To be honest, even water’s #5 could get a slight buff, even though it’s the best of them all.
And of course, bug fix lingering elements to work with air and earth.

Even so, those are only very tame buffs. Think this way, Anet: what would be better, investing 5 points in each traitline to get each of those small tiny effects, or invest 20 points in arcana for elemental attunement and fury on swap and an adept tier of choice?

EDIT:
Another solution, and a very bold one, is to remove the elemental attunement and lingering elements completely from the game, and have each minor adept trait add EA’s effects, with slight modifications.

Fire’s #5 trait: 3 stacks of might for 12s. 240 radius.
Air’s #5 trait: 6s of swiftness. 240 radius.
Earth’s #5 trait: 3s of protection. 240 radius.
Water’s #5 trait: 6s of Regen. 240 radius.
Lingering Elements: increases the duration of those buffs by 33%.
Elemental Attunement: increases the radius of those buffs to 600. Adept tier, or grandmaster minor, or master minor swapped with lingering.

1. Make Conjured Weapons function like Engineers Kits.
2. Stop focusing on Bleeds (Earth) and Burning (Fire) … Elementalist is not a Condition class, its never going to be a Condition class, nor do elementalists want to be. That is what Necro/Mesmer are for.
3. Elementalists need a toughness/armor bypass mechanic.

Forgotten Legend.9281:

ELEMENTALIST

1) why not combine elemental attunement and lingerig elements? this would be the new arcana 15.

2) move Conjurer to Arcana to fill the hole left by elemental attunement, because there is only ONE trait for conjures, and it doesn’t make sense in fire line, as there are 5 conjures spread over all 4 elements. (and no Arcane Conjure)

3) i don’t really understand having defensive traits in the fire line, especially fire 5. i’d much rather fire 5 be changed to give power per level while attuned to fire, or +300 range while attuned to fire. leaving defensive selectable traits is fine, allowing for choices of course.

4) the elemental 15 traits basically turn attunement swap buttons into spells. and then there are master traits that add extra effects to the attunement swaps. i’d much rather see those 15s rolled into a single arcana master trait, because in my opinion, that would be much more useful than evasive arcana. combining all the 15s and all 4 of the master traits that buff the F1-F4 keys could be a grandmaster trait. and would really then feel like a grandmaster of attunement swapping.

5) after freeing up the 15s, the 25s would be moved into the 15 slots, because frankly, the 25s are copies of other classes ADEPT traits. (+10% damage while endurance is full, +10% damage while target has x condition) and then new elemental 25s would be made. that would be useful no matter what attunement you’re in. for example, all projectiles pierce targets.

6) i don’t understand the grandmaster arcana traits at all. evasive arcana is a copy of a master trait for every other class. and in my opinion, is not worthy of grandmaster status. the other one only affects 5 utility skills, which means a grandmaster trait is wasted on at most, 3 skills on a skill bar, more likely 2 or 1. i’ll never trait 30 arcana as long as we have such weak grandmaster traits.

Stepping in to say that evasive arcana is absolutely worth being a grandmaster trait. I don’t see how anyone could say otherwise.

Perhaps offer a trait(would probably have to be a grandmaster trait) that offers boosts related to that attunement everytime you swap to that attunement and stacks higher like weapon stacks each time you re-enter that attunement. The bonus is only active while you are in the attunement but you can have stacks on each attunement simultaneously. This would synergize well with the arcane trait that makes attunement bonuses linger. Upon reaching say 10 stacks the bonuses would stop and stay at 10 until downed.

Example:
For each swap into water you gain +x healing power and vitality. For each swap into earth you gain +x toughness and +x% condition damage. Etc.