Guild Wars 2

TBH, I love playing an ele. It’s fun, it’s dynamic, you alter your playstyle vs the type of enemy you face, etc, etc. I do believe however, there are several issues of significance that should be addressed to allow eles to stay on a level playing field with other professions. I apologize that I do not have suggestions for each of these, but I do know that people much smarter than I are certain to come up with some.

1. Elite skills – Greatsword is rarely ever used, for the reason that regular weapons put out more damage while allowing attunement swaps, and that the GS #2 is the only real reason to use it. Elementals are incredibly easy to kill (2-3 hits) while not really contributing much to a fight, even without line of sight issues. Tornados can be easily immobilized or stability stripped (making them useless), or killed without great effort.

2. Downed state – We are a free down. In an ideal world where the enemy was a long way off and killed you, this would be a great skill. However, the game is not designed that way. You capture and hold points, you fight over NPCs, all within melee range of your enemies. This doesn’t even include the fact that many professions are melee, and many ele builds require melee range for several important skills. Being a free stomp destroys the whole goal of having a downed state, which, I’m assuming, is not your intention. Please give us a functional #2.

3. Earth/Conditions – Condition builds typically rely on applying a large number of conditions and being able to take hits while the other person bleeds/burns to death. The issue with this for eles is two-fold. First, the traits in earth are far behind when you look at the other trait lines, especially XI and XII when you realize that the earth line provides condition damage. Second, the survivability of eles (light armor) is too low to be able to pull off a condition build, as they cannot keep themselves alive long enough to let the other person bleed out, even without considering the opponent’s condition removal skills. It seems like there is a design for an ele condition-type build (due to the traits), but it just isn’t working. :-/

4. Conjured weapons – I love the design of the individual weapons. They each have something they focus on and do well. The problem arises when you lock an ele into using ONLY that conjured weapon, locking them out of ALL other attunements. Then the weapon must stand alone and be good enough to throw away your other attunements for, and they simply are not worth doing that for. One suggestion would be to have the conjured weapon override the bar of the corresponding attunement for the duration of the conjure (or until dropped), while allowing the elementalist to still swap into his other attunements freely. As it stands, conjured weapons are not being used and PVP elementalists are down 4 utility skills from every other profession because of it.

5. Signets – The only one of real use is the signet of earth when trying to land a dragon’s tooth or lock someone in an AoE. The crit bonus on signet of fire is substantially weaker than choosing any other damage skill or survivability skill. It’s only real use would be in a condition build, but seeing as those don’t work for eles, it’s kind of a moot point. Signet of air’s passive buff is very minor, and active equally weak, especially in comparison with the thief skill that does the exact same thing, but better (25% speed, AoE blind). Signet of water’s passive condition removal seems useful, but, in addition to mostly cleansing non-existent conditions, it pales in comparison with other ele survivability skills. The active also leaves MUCH to be desired, especially for a 30s cooldown.

6. Damage/CDR traits – Unlike many other professions, our damage/CDR traits only provide damage/CDR for one specific attunement with no other bonuses. This actually discourages the profession mechanic of swapping attunements as you will lose substantial damage trying to do anything else. You essentially LOSE the traits completely when swapping to another attunement, which is frightening. Attunement dancing is now of lesser value the higher you are up a given trait line, further discouraging the use of the profession’s main mechanic, which I doubt is what you are intending.

7. Damage – I’m not going to say that eles do no damage, that’s just silly. What I will say, however, is that substantially more is required of an ele in order to do the same damage that a thief, warrior, or engineer does with much less effort. I have no problem having to attunement swap, chain abilities, and force dodge rolls to land my damage. My issue is that after doing all that, after the best playing I can do and hitting 6-10 button combinations, my damage is just on par (and often below) most other professions hitting just 2. My suggestion: reward players who can play very well with more damage that is above more simplistic playstyles. If you don’t, less and less will want to put forth the substantially higher effort required to achieve the same amount of damage as everyone else.

Thank you for reading, and I pray that this is read in the manner in which it was written, which is out of a respectful desire to see this profession attain the fully enjoyable PVPability that it deserves. If anyone has constructive things to add, such as suggestions or other PVP issues, please add them below.

Happy Gaming :-)

GREAT thread! Great list, I’m with you on so many levels!

Great post(s) OP. Though I love Ele to death I’m constantly reminded of a lot of disappointing things… which were reflected very accurately in your posts. Thank you!

I feel another issue to add is that the lack of weapon-swapping restricts Elementalists quite a lot in terms of range… especially in SPvP where you can’t even manually switch weapons after being ‘out-of-combat’ (though I’m sure this is an effort by ANet to prevent gear swapping or any possible exploits related to that).

I’d like our profession much more if we had weapon-swap that shared a cooldown with attunement switching, or was at least dependent on each mechanic (i.e, you can’t switch weapons if you’ve recently switched attunements) or something to that effect. It’s sort of depressing going D/D and feeling kind of useless when your teammates are flinging arrows and bullets at things beyond your reach because you can’t really.. hit anything without diving into the (most probably lethal) fray.

In addition I REALLY dislike Elementalist traits in general, and the fact that Arcane IX (Windborne Dagger) is IX in itself and only gives us 15% movespeed WHILE USING A DAGGER is an awful piece of garbage when thieves can take a dirt-cheap signet that grants them 25% off the bat and an AoE blind… compare Signet of Air. Seriously? What would be nice is if all of our trait lines had some form of synergy bonus with a specific element… it’d add a great amount of depth to choosing which attunement you want to spec in, as well as spicing up the amount of builds you could pursue. Somehow without being overpowered of course but it’d be nice.

Here’s a couple ideas on how to fix the loss of traits when switching attunements:

1. A trait or built in bonus to the time it takes for your main attunement to become available again. For example, if your main trait line is fire, you can switch to earth, air, or water and use the utility cooldowns there, and by that time fire will be back up again, rather than being locked out of fire for another 10 seconds or so. This will allow you to use your utility cooldowns more actively without locking out your higher damage (traited) abilities for longer.

This reduction could be applied in a number of ways: flat reduction in cooldown time, reduction in cooldown on ability usage while outside of that attunement, reduction in cooldown on crits, etc.

2. Add traits or add secondary effects to current traits that either spread specific trait bonuses to all attunements or give similar but reduced bonuses while in other attunements. This allows your main attunement to still put out the strongest of your bonuses but you don’t become too weak when making use of other attunements for their cooldowns. An example of this would be spec’ing deep into water would spread a heal or chill effect to abilities in every attunement.

This spread could be done in a lot of ways: flat adding bonuses to other attunement ability effects(chill or heal if water, etc), adding additional combo field effects to all combo fields (ex: water/ice field along with normal field effects), added finisher effects with or without field present, flat stat bonuses to other attunements instead of being limited to a single attunement (reduced or not), etc.

Slithan.4380:

1. Elite skills – Greatsword is rarely ever used, for the reason that regular weapons put out more damage while allowing attunement swaps, and that the GS #2 is the only real reason to use it. Elementals are incredibly easy to kill (2-3 hits) while not really contributing much to a fight, even without line of sight issues. Tornados can be easily immobilized or stability stripped (making them useless), or killed without great effort.

I feel as if elementalists are simply high skill cap and the balance talk going around at the moment is extremely premature. That being said I 100% agree that they could use a different elite skill.

The only elite I ever see used is the elemental and it just looks rather boring. Tornado looks fun but it displaces mobs in pve which isn’t something you want to do the majority of the time and in pvp like you said you can get immobilized or your stability removed.

I think I would rather have a signet that passively removes the global cool down on attunement swapping and its active refreshes all attunements and gives a short duration quickness. This allows for elementalists to more easily chain cross element skills together and the quickness would let us more reliably weave longer channeled skills into a stun or knock down.

Just my thoughts on that.

i have a lot of skills, but nothing makes me more mad than swappping stances 4 times in a fight and dying to someoen still above 60% life and looking at my damage log and he hit me over 20 times with his auto attack or heart seekor to kill me wit no other skills used.

I agree 500% with your points 1-5 although I think for the most part 6 and 7 are fine. The elite skills either need to be reworked or at the VERY LEAST the elementals need an option to activate their abilities. The downed state being the worst by far could very well be intentional through balance reasons, though.

Your thoughts on the elites and conjured weapons echo mine exactly.

I hate that I do not use the conjured because I love their skill sets, but they aren’t worth losing all of my skills and a utility slot.

I hate that I can often go entire matches without using my ELITE skill.

With that said, I feel that the elementalist is in a decent place balance wise due to our strong weapon skills, so they need to be buffed carefully. I also disagree on the damage comment. If you want to see damage, just go D/D fire/air and you can hit 10k fire grabs crits. I know I have wiped 3 bunched-up, full-life people within seconds with some massive damage crits in a tight AoE, but you get cut through like butter as well and in the end it wasn’t the playstyle I wanted to stick with.

Amazing thread, keep this up. I agree. The amount of effort I have to put into playing my elementalist is far more than my warrior, or thief… it’s a joke all i do is select 1-3 buttons and I win. On my elementalist however.. it is not the same. Not that I want everything to be that simple though.. I would prefer everyone being as difficult as the elementalist to master and put out dps if nothing else. Anyhow, just want things to be even.. I’m not enjoying my elementalist PvP wise.. it’s becoming mundane, when I run into a group of just 2 people I already know I’m about to lose 20k hp instantaneously unless I go maximum toughness build. You’re supposed to be able to play HOW YOU want to as I recall, that’s all this game as said for itself.. well that’s definitely not happening with the ELE.

Thanks for all the input guys, keep it up!

For those who disagree with my ‘Damage’ section, I want to clarify that I’m not saying that eles can’t do high damage, because they can. My issue is that the effort required to achieve the same high damage as other classes is substantially higher than those other classes. It’s extra effort for effort’s sake.

People keep bringing on this “effort”. Is pressing 4 keys instead of two really that much more effort? I think you should get into shape if you have to stop to catch your breath after playing an Elementalist. I’m pretty out of shape and fat and all that and even I only run out of breath after 20 keypresses, which is plenty for Eles.

Every characters downed state should be like elementalists imo ._.

Our elite skill is so elite I’d rather have another utility slot a lot of the time, thanks ANet.

I’m just going to respond to the op’s points in order:

1. Greatsword is worthless. It’s not merely enough damage for the amount of utility, burst, and survivability you lose while using it even for just 6-7 seconds, and the elementals are ok, but not worthy of being called an elite skill. Ice elemental is ok, but you can’t control when it heals.

Tornado just needs to do more damage. Around double, and it would be somewhat worth it.

Personally I would love it if you didn’t have to pick up elite skills. I’d love another slot to pick up another utility skill.
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2. Our downstate is fine so is the thieves downstate. The fact is if you are downed you should be limited to tossing stones, or healing, or just turling. Interrupts/CC should not be available to downstate regardless of class.

Aka nerf the other downstates.

3. Condition builds aren’t viable on ele, but you are wrong as to why. It’s simply because we have to switch attunements constantly so our earth has too much downtime. If we are allowed to freecast we are likely the strongest single target ranged as condi specced elementalists.

Our attunement cooldowns are too long is all.

4. Have you used the magnetic shield? It’s quite incredible. Thing is with conjured weapons you can’t use them for longer than 5-10 seconds. Sometimes even less time. Whenever I use the earthshield it’s to use the 3 for an interrupt on a heal with the daze that I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, or to use the 5 for a three second invulnerability while I hold a point. Once that’s used I just drop it. They just need a shorter cooldown. 25-30 seconds instead of 60.

5. Ok yeah you make a good point about the air signet, and the fire signet could be maybe 1-2% more crit. Other than that we aren’t a good signet profession. No big deal.

6. We can’t have 100% up time on our main damage source. The classes that can need to be toned down. All attunements do damage regardless.

7. I agree. The key is to buff our skill shot ability damage to make them actually count when they land.

Such as:

• Dragons tooth 35% with a cooldown increase to 10 from 6. Radius decreased to 130 down from 180.

• Phoenix direct hit damage increased by 80%, and blast damage decreased by 30%, and radius size decreased to 180 down from 240.

• Burning speed must now be completely manually targeted, but has had it’s damage increased on direct hit by 30%.

• Dragon’s Claw has had it’s spread increased by an extra 18°, but each claw will now hit for an additional 7% damage, and will apply a 1 second burn.

• Arcane blast, and arcane wave now share a cooldown, but are now lowered back to their original base cooldowns of 15/20 seconds down from 20/30 seconds.

Staff can’t have any damage increases. We have so much AoE, and incredible utility with staff.

TL;DR We’re fine for the most part, but we require a lot more effort, and skill than any other class.

100% agree with the OP… We really need a change or buff.

To the OP: Wow excellent post I agree with you. That is exactly how I feel regarding the conjure weapons, they are so situational that I truly feel like we have four utility skills less than all other classes

Truga.5897:

People keep bringing on this “effort”. Is pressing 4 keys instead of two really that much more effort? I think you should get into shape if you have to stop to catch your breath after playing an Elementalist. I’m pretty out of shape and fat and all that and even I only run out of breath after 20 keypresses, which is plenty for Eles.

You clearly got no clue how ele works to make such stupid statement. It’s not about how many buttons you have to press, it’s about the overall “weak” state of the class compare to others. I don’t have a problem playing a high skilled cap class, I actually enjoy it. The problem is this class is so weak right now that you always gotta put in twice the effort to make up for this disadvantage. If my class is to do massive damage and have low surviablility, I can accept that. But if other classes can do more damage than me and still have better surviability with much less effort, something is wrong.

Truga.5897:

People keep bringing on this “effort”. Is pressing 4 keys instead of two really that much more effort? I think you should get into shape if you have to stop to catch your breath after playing an Elementalist. I’m pretty out of shape and fat and all that and even I only run out of breath after 20 keypresses, which is plenty for Eles.

The effort is more that higher skill is required to do the same damage. It also follows that, as you are pressing more buttons, more time elapses and your rather limited survivability becomes an issue. Other classes are compensated for low survivability by high burst contained in relatively few (often spammable) skills, sometimes only 1 or 2. Ele burst is spread out, incredibly obvious, and difficult to setup while still doing the same damage as the easier playstyles. Making playing complex for high payoff = good. Making playing complex for no added payoff vs other classes = bad.