Guild Wars 2

First of all, read this to help us provide the most valuable feedback we can get.

Obviously the main goal of this thread is to give feedback on how to improve the Scepter weapon in the most organized and concise manner possible so the developers have an easier time reading through your suggestions.

Please take into consideration the following bullet points before posting:

• Try to be as unbiased as possible. Make your ideas as fun as you imagination allows you, but within the realm of balance.

• Try to be as explicit as you can be. Provide examples and outcomes, your detailed reasoning should be there. How can this be countered? How does it interact with traits or other weapons? What about utility skills? Or even among different attunements?

• Be as simplistic as you can! Simple solutions are usually the best ones. Avoid suggesting huge mechanical changes as well as those that may require usage of considerable resources (ex. designing a whole new animation).

• Even though you certainly can follow and/or improve on others people’s feedback, don’t create a chain of quoted posts discussing someone else’s suggestions, edit your main post instead. Let’s keep this thread straight to the point and organized.

• And finally, last but not least, stay on topic and be constructive! My hand wont tremble when it comes to hitting that report botton if you don’t follow this one!

Some questions to help guide you through your feedback (they are there to guide you, you don’t have to answer the one by one):

Why do you think this weapon needs improvements?
What role (condi, hybrid weapon, CC oriented, etc.) do you think the Scepter weapon should be strong at?
What are the Scepter’s skills that you think are underperforming?
What outer and inner sinergies do you think the weapon should have and are missing?
How does the weapon feel in general? What about individual skills?

I’m going to post feedback of my own in a following post, but for now… let’s read yours people! Come on! =)

The auto attack on fire having a much faster attack speed (need to be at least half of what it currently is)

DPS on all air skills buffed across the board

Earth auto attack less awkward (technically I could overlook this if these other two changes happened)

When they make Dragons Tooth ground targeted i hope they at least give it another Animation, like summonung it above us and then throwing it.

Agree with all 3 of your suggestions. The changes to the Fire and Earth auto-attacks would ALSO help our condi builds out a lot.

-Slight damage buff OR flight time decrease for the Water auto-attack.

-Rework Shatterstone. Either dramatically reduce the wind-up time, or add features like pulsing Chill while winding up, and a Blast finisher at the end.

-Reduced channel time for Hurl (rocks fly out faster.)

-Flamestrike: Increased the damage by 33%.

-Dragon’s Tooth: Changed to a ground-targeted skill.

-Shatterstone: Increased the vulnerability from 4 stacks for 15 seconds to 5 stacks for 15 seconds. Increased damage by 10%.

My opinions:

-While I like the changes to Flamestrike, I feel instead of buffing the damage, they should have just reduced the cast time/aftercast.

-I like the Dragon’s Tooth change.

-Shatterstone’s problem was never its damage or vulnerability; it was that it’s just too easy to walk out of. It needed a cast time reduction, or a pulsing Chill while charging up, or something that kept enemies in it; its cool down could have then been adjusted accordingly.

-Why weren’t there any buffs to Ice Shards, Arc Lightning and especially Stone Shards? You can avoid Ice Shards and Stone Shards with just Swiftness, and Arc Lightning hits like a wet noodle considering its long cast time.

Not sure if these changes will help make Scepter meta again. Meh.

Beat you to it, mate. But yeah, the changes are worthless, and further proof that that devs just don’t given a kitten about Ele. Tempest + massive nerfs + no meaningful buffs to anything else = the great Ele purge of 2015.

It’s laughable they didn’t fix what was wrong with Flamestrike since they changed part of it… it wasn’t the damage, it was how absurdly long it takes to cast, needed its cast time reduced by half at minimum, that is the whole reason it is so bad and clunky. They change cast times all the time when they balance skills, this is quite an easy change for them to do.

just finished reading the patch notes

3 changes were made to scepter and i will talk about them in this thread

1. dragon’s tooth ground target:

this is by far the best change, one that i and many players have been asking for for years.

2. flamestrike damage increase by 33%

the damage of this skill was already very low because of the burning it applies, a 33% increase in damage won’t really make a difference. the problem with this skill is how slow it is. it is by far the slowest auto attack on scepter and the one i try to avoid using at all times. scepter skills need to be fast so rather than a 33% damage increase arenanet should have increased the speed by 33% but toned down the burning.

3. shatterstone 4 vulnerability stacks to 5 and 10% damage increase

tbh words kinda fail me.

the problem of this skill is neither the damage nor the vulnerability, but the fact that it is close to useless at all times. a simple 1-2s chill at the end of the skill would make this skill so much more desireable than a damage increase or 1 stack of vulnerability.

except for the change to dragon’s tooth which was a nobrainer i am really disappointed. those changes are nonsense and offend me as an elementalist player. i was expecting a 25-30% damage increase (in form of faster auto attacks, more damage on certain skills) overall, because that’s how much damage fresh air currently lacks compared to other dps builds.

Are you surprised? The devs do not understand the Ele class. The dev in charge of balancing Ele and designing Tempest isn’t even a Champion Magus.

you don’t have to be a champion magus to read the forums, there were many good suggestions out there for scepter. i have made multiple posts with proposed scepter changes, the only thing that got changed was the ground target on tooth.

Agree completely with your thoughts OP. Disappointed that they didn’t touch Ice Shards, Arc Lightning, and especially Stone Shards. I play S/F condi build and really was hoping for a Stone Shards or Hurl buff to help make condi builds more viable…nope.

@Glen… me too … Flamestrike and dragon tooth OK but not much help. At least something. Shatterstone doesnt help. I woul have increased the radius to 360.
The nerf of blinding ashes hits many non d/d builds and this is bad. The combination of blinding ashes and vigor nerf in arcane only means more forcing to water+cantrips. A pitty. I play without water and S/F. So i can´t regenerate like water ele and blinds are one of the defences … Gret to nerf a far from meta build eh..

And they did update Flamestrike (fire auto attack) except it was the wrong issue… I’m shocked they didn’t reduce the cast time, might as well not have even touched the skill if they weren’t going to do that.

Flamestrike is the most underperforming skill imo, at bare minimum needs the cast time halved and preferably reduced further to make it less clunky. Damage can remain the same as this fix will increase damage output.

Instead of delayed burst skill why not rework Shatterstone into pulsing AoE. Something like Smite on guardian scepter or Lava Font. Applying damage and vulnerability on every “pulse”. At least that way you could land some damage.. Also shorter delay on Dragon’s Tooth?

It would be nice to see it become a condi weapon as a opposed to a one shot burst gimmick that leverages the mechanics of a couple of skills to make up for all the bad ones.

I’ve been maining S/D Ele since right around release. I rolled an Ele because I had mained an Ele in GW1 and even though the GW2 Ele is radically different, I’ve come to really enjoy the versatility. With no weapon set is that versatility better expressed than with S/D, at least not how I like to play.

The problem with S/D, however, is now and has always been the autoattacks. S/D has a lot of burst, but then once that burst is over you’re just stuck there slapping your opponent with a wet paper towel regardless of which attunement you’re in.

Fire 1: Cast time is much too long. It’s as simple as that.

Water 1: Nothing but damage in a spec that’s not at all about damage, and the damage is quite unimpressive to boot. This needs to do something else. Personally, I like the idea of each projectile debuffing the opponent, and then allowing those debuffs to convert to a short Chill or a small AoE heal (centering on the foe) to the Ele’s allies at 8 stacks, but we could go with any of a number of other effects. It’s just gotta be something other than pew pew pew because no one wants to sit in Water just to deal damage. It also competes directly with the Air autoattack, in which case one or the other will always win.

Air 1: The damage is just ok, but considering the channel time it should really be better. The bigger issue is that even though the basic idea behind this autoattack is solid (ramping damage as the animation plays), the visible animation doesn’t change at all over the course of it and it’s very hard for the player to tell that the damage really goes up over the duration. This makes it unsatisfying to use and confusing to play against. If the damage started out very low with just a few strings of lightning and then slowly became more and more intense ending in a small AoE blast (say 180 units), then this would feel really good to use and it would telegraph to opponents that they should be trying to stun you mid-channel or force you to dodge near the end.

Earth 1: So the major problem with this skill is that it tricks you into thinking it’s a good option for Condition damage builds, but the Bleeds don’t last long enough to amount to significant condi burst and in any case they’ll never really be able to compete with the damage potential of Burning from Fire. Furthermore, this again forces the Earth autoattack to compete directly with the Fire autoattack — one or the other will always be the superior choice. Unlike just about every other profession’s condi build, it’s virtually impossible for the Ele to apply all its damaging conditions at one time. You have to choose between applying Bleeds or applying Burning — it’s extremely difficult to apply them both at once, and it’s impossible to apply significant stacks of both at once. I don’t know what could be done to prevent Earth and Fire from directly competing with one another but something’s gotta change to break their rivalry. The Scepter will never be able to compete with the Dagger if so many of its mechanics are at odds with one another.

Shatterstone is terrible even after these buffs, but buffing it even further won’t help if the Scepter’s sustained damage is still gutter-tier.

I get that the anet team can’t make any radical changes atm due to their attention being focused on HoT. That being said, I didn’t expect any game-changing/breaking updates this time around. To me, the winning point was the ground-targetting on DT. This was something we had at the start of the game, and it never really felt right to switch it to requiring a target.

Damage modifications? Meh. There’s more work to be done on scepter, but that goes beyond just numbers tweaking.

Edit: The ground targetting on DT also removed the cheesiest feature of being able to cast it without LoS. This was particularly annoying in WvW where a group of Ele’s could target your seige and still attack it behind walls.

This is one of the few times I do feel like the scepter nerfs were just thrown in there as a last minute attempt to soften the blow from icebow and fire nerfs and aren’t a very well thought rework of the weapon.

At least, dragon’s tooth is ground targetable. All things being equal, it’s a step in the right direction.

I might actually start to bother to switch to scepter now pre-fight for might before going back to staff.

-Flamestrike: Increased the damage by 33%.
Still sucks, which says a lot about the biased elementalist balance

-Dragon’s Tooth: Changed to a ground-targeted skill.
People still have 3 seconds to dodge out (or stunbreak/cleanse) while our knockdown/knockback are 2 seconds. Why is killshot having a shorter cast time and does more damage on a heavy class? No logic there.

-Shatterstone: Increased the vulnerability from 4 stacks for 15 seconds to 5 stacks for 15 seconds. Increased damage by 10%.
Still too slow to damage with all the ticks, damage is so low that people don’t mind staying into it.

Too many ele skills rely on having your opponent completely cced and out of stunbreaks. A lot of the cast times could be reduced.

Didn’t see what they’ve done to meteor but I’ll bet it’s another nerf.

Like most others I also had the feeling that scepter auto attacks are underwhelming. An idea I came up with would be to give them something like the combos other classes have ore to give them additional functionality.
Flamestrike for example reminded me of the skill searing flames from guild wars 1, as it has low physical damage but a long burning. For example if an opponent is already burning with 2 or 3 stacks then give it a new function. The target is hit with high physical damage instead including a small aeo around the target but it only gives a short stack of burning, for example 1s.
I must admit I still miss ideas for the other auto attacks. Also, I am not sure if it would interfere with potential condition builds.

My perspective is purely PvP-oriented.

While I normally don’t like the idea of buffing auto-attacks, I feel like the Scepter really needs it. It’s supposed to be our burst weapon. Other burst classes like Mesmer have decent auto-attacks to fall back on in between bursts; I think it’s fair for us to have that too if we are to play anything more than support/jack-of-all-trades builds. Auto-attack buffs can also help us with our weak condi builds, and, since you can’t really be BOTH burst AND condi, I think it’s fair to buff the autos.

Flamestrike: Needs its cast time and/or aftercast delay reduced. 1 attack per 1.54 seconds is very clunky.

Ice Shards: Projectile travel time needs to be reduced, OR its damage needs to be slightly buffed. Although, I feel like it could have its damage reduced, and instead have healing or Vulnerability instead.

Shatterstone: Either its wind-up time needs to be reduced, OR it needs to have an effect that makes it harder to just walk out of. Something like a pulsing Chill while winding up. A Chill would also help set up Dragon’s Tooth, etc. Cool down can be adjusted accordingly.

Water Trident: (Greedy change) I would love for this to knock down moving foes, like Water Trident in Guild Wars did. But otherwise it’s not really a bad skill; the regeneration that Anet added onto it not only buffed it, but also gave it better synergy with Cleansing Water.

Arc Lightning: 3.95 seconds for a full channel, and the damage is very mediocre, especially seeing as how Air is supposed to be the spike damage Attunement. Needs to have its cast time and aftercast delay reduced, and damage needs to be upped. Could also apply Vulnerability and/or Weakness when the channel is completed.

Stone Shards: 1 attack every 1.9 seconds is beyond clunky for an auto-attack with projectiles. Cast time and/or aftercast delay and/or flight time and/or flight arc needs to be reduced.

Rock Barrier: Cast time for the barrier itself should be 0.5 seconds.

Dust Devil Could use a very slight increase in speed, but not reaaaally needed.

My scepter changes (Based on these new changes, so count them too):
- Fire:

• AA: decrease casting time to 3/4 sec. Probably the worst aa in entire game. Mainly because so long casting time for so low damage.
• Dragon’s Tooth: Increase casting time to 1,25 sec. Aftercast time (before landing) reduced to 1/4 sec. Nobody is stupid enough to stand in its blast radius.
• Phoenix: Great skill. No changes needed.

- Water:

• AA: Decrease damage by 15%. When shards hit enemy, you are healed for a small amount. Make it feel more like WATER aa.
• Shatterstone: Radius increased to 200. Now has 3 pulses. 1st and 2nd pulse deals some damage and 2 stacks of vulnerability, last pulse (that shattering like now) deals more damage (about 30% more than now) and apply condition to enemies (weakness/3 stacks or vuln/bleeding <- one of these maybe?). Cd increased to 3 or 4 sec. This is now one of the worst skills ever. That delay is very noticeable and damage is very low. Only thing that Shatterstone is useful now is to stack vuln at non moving foes.
• Water Trident: Also removes 1 condition. Healing from regeneration increased a little. Pretty nice skill. However I still feel it needs something.

- Air:

• AA: Increase base damage. Decrease difference between damage in first and last stage. When fully chanelled, inflict weakness on your target for 2 sec. This skill just feels really clunky. Nobody will ever channel it fully when he can swap to fire for higher damage or to water/earth for some support. It’s casting time is just too long with a little reward. If you want long casting time, improve the reward.
• Lightning Strike: Great skill. No changes needed.
• Blinding Flash: Also hits up to 2 additional enemies around your target (radius 180). Even it can be pretty useful, it still needs a little improvement.

-Earth:

• AA: Decrease casting time to 3/4 sec. Same problem as fire aa.
• Rock Barrier: Changed animation so that those rocks are circling around you (Like in Armor of Earth). Sorry but I just don’t like how it looks like. But who knows, maybe someone does.
• Hurl: Each strike inflict cripple. I think that cripple is really needed here.
• Dust Devil: Increase radius a little.

Fire

I don’t want to see DT get sped up at all. The way it currently is now actually makes it possible to combine it with other skills and swap to another weapon before engaging in combat, making it really powerful for burst. I know this has nothing to do with PvP, but I’m just being honest. <3

But like, hear me out— so DT deals a lot of damage as it currently is. I think making it ground targeting was a step in the right direction honestly, and I don’t really see it as something in dire need of a change.

What does need a change, is the autoattack. It’s kittening awful, no 33% damage increase is going to save it.

Phoenix is superb, don’t touch it.

Water

Water skills are pretty bad all-around, all 3 need to be changed imo. This includes the autoattack, the shatterstone and the water trident.

Autoattack should deal more damage and heal more.

Shatterstone’s cast time should be reduced and I think it should maybe apply 1 second of chill when the damage inflicts.

Water trident should heal slightly more and have an increased radius.

Air

Air skills are decent I guess, but I wouldn’t be opposed to maybe decreasing the cooldown of #3 or possibly upping the damage coefficient of #2 ever so slightly.

Earth

Earth skills are rubbish. The damage of the autoattack needs to be increased and honestly, I think a cripple or something should be added to either the 2nd or 3rd skill.

Dragon’s Tooth used to be nice for taking out siege in WvW without LoS or while staying under cover.

FIRE:

-Flamestrike: increase attack rate to 1 attack per second.
Allows for maintaining about 3 stacks of burning if spammed, which translates to about 1k DPS on condi gear.

-Dragon’s Tooth: reduce casting time to 1/2 seconds. Now drops 1/2 seconds after finishing the cast.
Overall, much faster, while still allowing the enemy plenty of time and visual clues to react.

-Phoenix: no changes. It’s great.

WATER:

-Ice Shards: Increase both damage and velocity by 50%.
Currently, it deals about half the DPS of Lightning Whip, while the latter has only 300 less range, ‘instant’ verlocity, and a 3 targets cone AoE. Ice Shards should be brought up to par for some reasonable direct damage.

-Shatterstone: Now pulses three times: once on creation, and two more times every second. The first two pulses both deal half the damage and vuln stacks of the current skill (128 damage + 2 stacks of vuln for 15s). The third pulse deals 100% of the current damage (255 damage) and inflits 3s of Chill.
Overall, give this skill some minor AoE DoT presence and allow it to snare foes. For a mid-range weapon, the scepter has too little snares

-Water Trident: reduce recharge from 20s to 15s.
A good skill, but slightly undertuned. A small recharge reduction will make it more desirable.

AIR:

-Arc Lightning: channel time reduced by 1 second; now attacks only 7 times instead of 10 times. Hits 1-3 now deal Stage 2 damage (61 per hit), hits 4-6 now deal Stage 3 damage (92 per hit), and hit 7 deals the same damage as Lightning Strike (408).
In general, this AA is too weak because of the laughable Stage 1 damage, and because there is no real reward to completing the channel. Also, the channel was impractically long.

-Lightning Strike: no changes. It’s good for its niche.

-Blinding Flash: same.

EARTH:

-Stone Shards: increase attack rate to 1 attack every 1.5 seconds.
Allows for maintaining about 12 stacks of bleeding if spammed, which translates to about 1.2K DPS on condi gear.

-Rock Barrier: reduce casting time from 1s to 1/4 s. Reduce duration from 30s to 5s. Now boosts Toughness by 500 instead of 250.
The idea here was to make the defense boost less permanent but more impactful.

-Hurl: increase firing rate. Each hit causes Cripple for 1s.
This allows for more reliable bursting, and gives the scepter another much-needed snare.

-Dust Devil: cooldown reduced from 15s to 10s. Now also inflicts a 60 unit knockback.
Those changes retain the skill’s flavor, but increase its overall effectiveness in disrupting enemies’ assaults. The knockback is very small, granting virtually no area denial but good disruption.

Now that some posting guidance was given and some changes were made with today’s patch, I’m going to provide my own feedback on what I think needs some improvements still.

In spite of recent changes (today), I think the general consensus is that the Scepter weapon feels clunky as a whole. It also losses a lot of fluidity when not traiting into Fresh Air, and even then it still doesn’t feel as fluid as D/D .

Burst damage is its only notable trademark, by chaining instant and high cast skills into a highly damaging burst combo that can potentially one-shot your opponent. In doing that though, you disregard most of the utility these weapon skills may have.

To me, in general, the weapon’s main faults are:

It’s clunkyness (you’re going to read this one a lot).
Lack of sustained damage.
Lots of filler and low impact attacks:

• High castimes
• High pre and after-cast times
• Low utility on some of the skills
  It also tries to be a condition damage weapon, but it’s not there yet.

The following 4 skills are the main culprits of why, in my opinion, this weapon feels clunky and lacks sustained damage, so here are my proposed changes to solve that:

Shatterstone: Aftercast delay significantly reduced. It now pulses 1 second of chill every second. It’s now a blast finisher. It no longer applies vulnerability. Cooldown increased.
—Reasoning: Added effects and damage changes. Very little in terms of resources.
We are talking about what may be one of the most unusable skills in the entire game. It only served as a filler attack or for some circunstancial cleavage, we all agree it’s a bad skill. With chill, it now has it’s uses, and privides a reason for scepter users to cast this. I stole the chill idea from Phantaram by the way!
New blast finisher and lack of vulnerability better explained below.

Dragon’s Tooth: Time to hit the ground is significantly reduced. It’s no longer a blast finisher. Damage slightly reduced.
—Reasoning: With the shortened time to actually hit something the scepter all of a sudden gains some sustained and reliable damage, sorely needed for the weapon.
Dragon’s Tooth hits really hard, if it’s going to hit more often, it should hit for less.
I took away the blast finisher becouse it felt redundant with Phoenix and it was no longer going to be such a delay on a blast finisher, that’s why I gave it to Shatterstone instead, giving more utility to water as well.

Rock Barrier: Cast time reduced by half. Projectile velocity slightly increased. Each projectile now applies 1 stack of bleeding for x seconds, direct damage slightly decreased to compensate.
—Reasoning: The 1 second cast time feels incredibly clunky and you can’t actually combo the Hurl projectiles into a (fire)field reliably, the huge cast time just doesn’t feel right at all.
The projectile velocity suffers from the same issue as Stone Shards, slow and easily ‘strafable’.
The bleeding is there becouse having only Stone Shards apply bleeding didn’t feel enough and it was boring to only have to spam 1 to apply some decent bleeding.

Flame Strike (fire AA): Cast time significantly reduced. It now affects up to 3 targets.

alternative

Flame Strike: This is now the first attack of a new AA chain. Cast time significantly reduced. It applies 1 stack of burning for x seconds. It affects up to 3 targets.
new Flame AA2: Apply 1 stack of burning to up to 3 targets.
new Flame AA3: Direct damage to up to 3 targets. +50% damage against burning targets.
—Reasoning: Again, we all agree the extremely slow cast time makes as all avoid this AA at all costs, it feels slow and clunky(again) and therefore, not fun at all. Its damage is also incredibly poor unless heavy condition focused.
It’s single target, which also breaks from the AoE theme of the fire set, hence the change.
Regarding the new chain. Why not? Chain attacks instantly make a weapon more fluid and fun, also, the other caster classes have chain AAs on their scepters. It would also help that sustain damage.
Two new art panels would be needed for those AAs though. Animations could be reused from Necro/Guardian/Mesmer AAs.

My next suggestions are changes to skills that don’t need as many improvements as the 4 above but would also be very appreciated.

Ice Shards: Each shard new applies 1 stack of vulnerability for x seconds. Damage slightly increased.
—Reasoning: That’s why I took away vulnerability application from Shatterstone, to give this useless damaging skill some utility instead.

Stone Shards: Projectile speed slightly increased. Initial cast time reduced.
—Reasoning: Explained above.

Dust Devil: Travel time significantly reduced. It now pulses blind every second. It’s a persistent whirl finisher. It destroys projectiles in its path.
—Reasoning: Another one of those filler and low impact attacks. The common theme of Scepter nº 3 attacks are all high impact/usefull ones (Phoenix, Water Trident, Blinding Flash), it’s definetly a worse Blinding Flash.
It now has lots of sinergies on its own as well as being something you would now use to combo or to defend yourself, always following the theme of the Earth skills.
The only graphical change I would do is increasing the size of the DD to make it look more appropiate.

Lightning Strike: It now applies x seconds of weakness at a certain close range threshold. It does additional damage at a certain ranged threshold.
—Reasoning: Even though it’s still a filler attack, it’s strong and instant. But I feel it’s missing something.

Khenzy.9348:

Dragon’s Tooth: Time to hit the ground is significantly reduced. It’s no longer a blast finisher. Damage slightly reduced.
—Reasoning: With the shortened time to actually hit something the scepter all of a sudden gains some sustained and reliable damage, sorely needed for the weapon.
Dragon’s Tooth hits really hard, if it’s going to hit more often, it should hit for less.
I took away the blast finisher becouse it felt redundant with Phoenix and it was no longer going to be such a delay on a blast finisher, that’s why I gave it to Shatterstone instead, giving more utility to water as well.

Noooooooooo, don’t take away it’s blast finisher, better might stacking is a big bonus of the scepter and removing it would take remove some theme from scepter.

Xillllix.3485:

Didn’t see what they’ve done to meteor but I’ll bet it’s another nerf.

They said that the meteors will be more spread on the whole area. Before, they tended to land more in the middle.

Kulvar.1239:

Xillllix.3485:

Didn’t see what they’ve done to meteor but I’ll bet it’s another nerf.

They said that the meteors will be more spread on the whole area. Before, they tended to land more in the middle.

I guess its more a fix for the linecast exploit:

Tomiyou.3790:

Khenzy.9348:

Dragon’s Tooth: Time to hit the ground is significantly reduced. It’s no longer a blast finisher. Damage slightly reduced.
—Reasoning: With the shortened time to actually hit something the scepter all of a sudden gains some sustained and reliable damage, sorely needed for the weapon.
Dragon’s Tooth hits really hard, if it’s going to hit more often, it should hit for less.
I took away the blast finisher becouse it felt redundant with Phoenix and it was no longer going to be such a delay on a blast finisher, that’s why I gave it to Shatterstone instead, giving more utility to water as well.

Noooooooooo, don’t take away it’s blast finisher, better might stacking is a big bonus of the scepter and removing it would take remove some theme from scepter.

Keep reading. I gave it to Shatterstone instead. If Dragon’s Tooth is going to hit much more reliably with those changes, let it be just pure sheer damage, like Drake’s Breath. Shatterstone needs all the help it can get, and it always screamed Blast Finisher! to me anyways.

The buff to the scepter was laughable, and feels like a slap in the face following the heavy nerf hammer that the devs threw at D/D ele. I was so excited to get some good scepter game play in.

I think there have been a lot of great suggestions in this thread already however I just want to add that I feel the #1 problem with Scepter is the god-awful auto-attacks. They are too clunky and slow, not dealing the damage expected. Here are some quick suggestions for AA:

Fire: Right now, this auto-attack is just awful. No damage increase will help it, it needs a reducing in casting time.

Water: This skill does not feel like a water skill. One of the following needs to occur: Increase Damage/Allow it to Heal/Inflict Vulnerability

Air: I think the channeling time could be lowered slightly, but overall this is the best currently auto-attack on the scepter and requires the least amount of retooling.

Earth: The attack is too slow and the damage dealt by bleeding is bad. Increase the velocity of the projectiles would be a great place to start with this one. I also feel that bleeding on Elemenalist needs a look at.

I would also like some dev to clarify on the purpose of the scepter… is it our burst weapon? Is it our condition weapon? I know that the elemenatlist is suppose to be able to do ‘everything’ but I think that if we can identify what they want to use the Scepter for they can then re-work the clunky skills around it to better fit that playstyle without giving up the whole “can do everything” aspect. Because right now… it just (to me anyway) comes across as a jumbled mess of different ideas.

As others have already pointed out the scepter currently has:

- a few “one-hit-wonders” like dragonstooth or phoenix, that make up most of scepters damage. This gives the scepter an incredible burst if all of these skills are used in a rapid succession. There is not much to follow the initial burst though.
- low to medium sustained DPS
- lots of fillers and low impact spells
- bad autoattacks

Currently the scepter mainly needs to have its autoattack damage increased to make it worthwile using it in compination with tempest – throwing toothpicks at your enemy for 2-3 seconds while waiting for an overload to become available makes casting an overload even more of a gamble.

I liked the following ideas:

Flamestrike: Reduce cast time to 1 second in total, so one cast per second.

Shatterstone: It has a high cast time, it is highly telegraphed and you can avoid it without even dodging – I would really like to see it as the “ice spike” of scepter: Increase the damage even further, increase the radius and/or add a chill effect.

Arc lightning: I know that this skill can be used in combination with skill 2 and skill 3 but the damage is still low. Suggestion: Remove Stage 1 damage and start with Stage 2.

blinding flash: Even though it is instant cast, devoting a skill to do nothing else but inflict a single blind is not really that impactful. This should get a minor damage added to it – not much, but something. Alternative: Add weakness.

rock barrier: In my opinion this should get more defense, like 10% projectile block or something like that. Or (as suggested) give it much more defense at a much shorter duration – so you need to recast it on every rotation but it would feel much more worthwile and impactful.

dust devil: With the small impact line, it is very unlikely to hit more than one target or even the current target if the target is moving. The fact that this applies blind is also somewhat of an overlap with blinding flash. As others have pointed out, this should become a high impact spell, like other scepter 3 spells. So I would mainly add damage (yes I am not very creative, but what scepter lacks most is damage).

Alright, I’ll post some suggestions for Scepter changes. Reading some of the suggestions here, I like some of the thoughts and brainstorming going on. I see suggestions from a PvE perspective and a PvP perspective and lots of them are pretty good but I’m going to take a different approach.

My perspective for ideas is from a “Fun Exciting” perspective, not particularly aimed to make its PvP or PvE use more viable, just a “We need more cool and interesting toys” perspective.

Scepter
Not sure what concept the Scepter itself has. Staff flavor is it has many placable effects and field while dagger aims at player based AoE and Focus is namely strong defensive utility. Scepter, I’d like to have the concept of “Combo melding or Field utility” where it does more when fields are present or does more for with combos and fields. Although Scepter/x doesn’t have many fields, still giving it more utility when fields are present gives it some team play.

Fire Attunement
Flamestrike: This skill really should be castable faster. It’s just too slow but a fun flavor change I’d like to see in this is if it just did more: Same effects but if cast on a foe standing in a Fire or Light field, it strikes twice and hits 2 targets within 260 range of that target.
Dragon’s Tooth: Changing it to a placable AoE is all the change it needs.
Phoenix: Needs no change except maybe make the phoenix vfx larger.

Water Attunement
Ice Shards: Increasing the damage slightly + give this a 75% projectile finisher.
Shatterstone: Not sure what the concept goal was behind this skill. It’s very very bland and even buffing the skill’s damage will keep the skill pretty bland. So what about a kind of “Charging placeable” that let you aim the reticle circle and as you move it around, it drops up to 3-5 shatterstones and when you release the skill, they all explode at once. Think of it like painting a trail of shatterstones that you can then choose to explode at your control.
Water Trident: Just add a little extra effect when used in a Water or Dark field. Like extend the duration of the field by a couple seconds or makes a whirl finisher at the targeted area within that field.

Air Attunement
Arc Lightning: Add If used on a target within a Lightning or Chaos field, the attack will branch off from the initial target to 2 additional targets within 260 range which then branches from those 2 additional targets to 1 additional target. Each branch can target any other target, so long as they are within range. You’d be able to do some serious damage to 3 targets within a lightning/chaos field as it’d branch off from the 1st target to the 2 others then branch off from those 2 back to the 1st or other target.
Lightning Strike: No change.
Blinding Flash: If striking a foe within a water, lightning or light field, the target will also be hit with Lightning Strike damage and apply 5seconds of Weakness.

Earth Attunement
Stone Shards: I think this skill should just copy the same animation as Ice Shards instead of Arc Lightning as well as its animation speed. Copy its new 75% projectile finisher effect
Rock Barrier: No change.
Dust Devil: Whirl finisher added.

I would like to see all autos display like Air 1, a channel that activates immediately.
A trait to increase range on at least the autos would be handy, or access to quickness in cast times, not just movement.
Condi durations are way too short. When condi damage is so powerful these days, how do we become a condi ele?

The other buffs, what were they ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQD022fvhUs&feature=youtu.be&t=1035

A few damage buffs to useless skills. These changes are not gonna cut it, except for Dragon’s Tooth, and this skill’s change was because we could hack damage on top of WvW siege by LoS’ing.

So much for nothing.

something that i wrote in a different thread a while ago, a little bit updated because of the recent changes: (does not only include scepter stuff)

Scepter

scepter, fire, auto attack – cast time decreased to 0.5s and less burning duration

scepter, water, auto attack – if you hit the same target 3 times, apply 1 second of chill

scepter, water 2, shatterstone – needs to become a pulsing chill field. increase cooldown to 8 seconds.

scepter, earth, auto attack – cast time decrease to 0.5s and less bleed duration

scepter, air, auto attack – instead of hitting all targets that walk through the arc this skill now connects to 2 nearby foes next to the target.

scepter, air 2, lightning strike – damage is now delayed by 0,75s (skill still instant), a little black cloud appears over the target to indicate the lightning strike. damage increased by 30%.

Dagger

dagger, earth 5, churning earth – reduce casting time to 1.5s or let us release the skill early for a portion of the damage.

Focus

focus, fire 4, flamewall – increase size or burn targets that shoot projectiles through it.
focus, water 4, freezing gust – needs a wider casting cone

Heals

heal, glyph of elemental harmony – increase healing by ~2k

Utilities

cantrip, mist form – cooldown reduced to 60s
arcane, arcane shield – cooldown reduced to 60s

Elite

elite, tornado – no more transformation. instead it summons a ground target tornado for 10 seconds based on your attunement that deals damage, knocks enemies around and is a combo field based on the attunement you are in while casting. it applies conditions to enemies and boons to allies.
fire -> fire field and burn. might for allies
water -> water field and chill. regen for allies
earth -> blind field and bleeding. protection for allies
air -> lightning field and weakness. swiftness for allies.

some more suggestions would be good, scepter (and other stuff) needs as nuch love as possible. keeping this on the frontpage would certainly help.

My scepter suggestions:

Fire auto: Don´t increase damage, decrease castign time so the burn part gets pushed.
Air auto: Add a condition on the last hit of the channel chain (e-g. 2s confusion)
Earth auto: increase flight speed a bit and give the last hit poison instead of bleed. Or make it 8s bleed duration.
Dust Devil: instant cast
Rock barrier: 1/2 casting time.

Shatterstone: Increase radius.

Scepter needs an aura.

Main-hand Dagger has Air, Focus has Fire , Off-Hand Dagger has Water, Scepter should have Earth.

Yes, I know that Staff has Earth, but Staff also has built in combos that produce water auras. There is no reason that two weapons can’t have the same aura as long as whatever you are holding in both hands can at least produce two of them.

Personally I would like to see Scepter Earth 3 become Magnetic Aura and Focus Earth 4 become Dust Storm .

Aww don’t touch magnetic wave. Best skill S/F ele has :-/.
The aura on earth3 would be great. Light aura would be nice but won’t fit eart so good.

Wolfric.9380:

Aww don’t touch magnetic wave. Best skill S/F ele has :-/.
The aura on earth3 would be great. Light aura would be nice but won’t fit eart so good.

Magnetic Aura and Magnetic Wave would be insane :p

Great on earth 3 woudl be:

Glitterdust. Ele is surrounded by a cloud of sparkling glitter :-)

Casttime: Instant
Recharge: 20s

Apply 6s of light aura.

Dang. Great synergy with earth and aura builds. + Light aura would be new to ele.

Next time when i hear about Scepter changes i would like to see something like this:

Fire #1 – reduced casttime, might buff for 3s

Water #1 – increased damage
Water #2 – increased damage, initial-damage on cast, vulnerability, second pulse of damage, increased cooldown
Water #3 – add knock down

Air #1 – reduced casttime
Air #3 – aoe blind, fury buff

Earth #3 – fast whirl finisher

I would be happy to see a new patch log about Scepter.
Would be like this to me :

Fire #1- Flamestrike
Cast time reduced to 0.75s
After cast time reduced to 0.2s
Less clunky

Water #1 – Ice Shards
20% chance to be a projectile finisher
The third shard apply 3s vulnerability x1
They litterally are projectiles.

Water #2 – Shatterstone
New animation : Ice spikes spurting out of the ground and exploding after 2s
On spurting, apply 2s torment x2.
On exploding, inflict damages.
Do not apply vulnerability anymore
Scepter is supposed to be the condi weapon, but water have no damaging condition.

Water #3 – Water Trident
Leave a water field (180 radius, 3s)
Clean one condition after 3s (when water field evaporate)
It would make people less reliant on staves for water fields and condi cleanse. The short radius and cleanse delay still make staves better.

Air #2 – Lightning Strike
Apply 2s Confusion x1
Scepter is supposed to be the condi weapon, but air have no damaging condition.