Guild Wars 2

Full celestial gear gives 378 barrier on dual attack. It’s not even worth it to trait for it.

I love having access to multiple skills with evade frames. Damage is very subpar though it’s probably because it’s meant to be hybrid for both power and condi. I still find it very lacking as people would still take a hybrid reaper anyday. Somewhat decent with carrion amulet in PvP but as usual, still weak against condis and chill. Maybe if Unraveling Hexes actually worked, it would be ok I guess. Survivability against power builds is really good with all the evade frames and barrier mechanic. For a “true melee” spec, it needs better gap closers. A little bump in range might be enough.

TL;DR – I had a blast but it can still be significantly improved in survivability against condis and in the damage department.

Sword needs, without a doubt, at least a flat 50% damage increase on weapon skills. The autoattack is a wet noodle and feels insanely slow and clunky . Sword also needs some faster animations that are a little more fluid (autoattack chains are 1/2 sec not 3/4 sec). Range on a class without weapon swap needs to be increased from 130 to 200 or so. Sword is inferior to dagger and scepter in every way as it stands now – less cleave, less damage, less range, more clunky.

Lightening hammer auto does more damage than playing the piano and lightening hammer auto is not particularly great.

The global ICD on attunment swap makes arcane mandatory and still locks you out of the much needed 3, 4, and 5 skills which hurts survivability more than the defensive weaver traits help it. The barriers weaver gives are a complete joke. Adding a weapon swap button that instead swapped the positions of the active attunements would help things. So if you are air/water (air 1,2 mixed 3, water 4,5) weapon swap would switch you to water/air (water 1,2, mixed 3, air 4, 5).

Prior to PoF, Elementalist did not have a true damage spec. Core ele has (other than staff) terrible damage. Tempest is a confused and not desired support spec. Elementalist has low health, low armor, and it sustains through healing power. Now a selfish damage orientated spec is being added that is melee ranged and incredibly complex. Weaver should have the potential to easily be the strongest single target damage in the game when played reasonably well. And it currently stands nowhere close.

Edit: All the crazy damage modifiers don’t help in melee. All they will accomplish is getting the weapon skills on staff nerfed.

Initial impressions:
Overall sentiment is that I liked the looks, I really liked the thought poured into this – and acknowledge that this one has the potential to be quite fun, but mechanically the spec has some significant problems.

Good stuff:

Skills look visually nice.
Liked the class concept.
Liked the possibility to play with the sword.

Negative:

- Just an intro, but I found it very curious that for a “DPS Spec” we start with Water and Earth trait lines and the Weaver traits that are all geared towards being tanky – instead of something like Fire and Air for damage.

- Damage is too low. We start with a viper amulet in PvP and we do so little damage with the sword it is absurd. Going full zerker and taking all +% damage traits in Air, Water and Weaver and we still do poor damage even with the “stronger dual attack skills”.

- Attunement cooldown is weird and makes things clunky. With Arcane traitline + the elite skill it feels somewhat passable (honestly the elite seems more like a crutch to try and make the class work a bit better).

- The extra vitality trait is negligible at best (it provides just a 1k health which is practically just an extra AA that you can withstand).

- The amount of barrier we can get from our skills is also far too low to make any difference. Elemental Refreshment is a terrible trait and I wish it was buffed.

Compare it with water second minor – for just attuning to water, you can get 1,3k heal without any healing power that affects you and allies near you. Elemental Refreshment gives you 378 barrier for using a dual attack ability… plain terrible and even goes against the skill “Unravel”. Terrible.

- Utility Skills are once again mediocre at best. I acknowledge the nice work done on the weapon skills (and it sure was a lot), but the utilities need some work.

Suggestions:

1. Buff Sword Damage – It is currently plain terrible you will do better by using dagger (more reach and better damage – sadly)

2. Elemental Attunment Recharge: Desperately needs change 4 seconds global is just too much to work. I would suggest to reduce it all to two seconds global attunement recharge – maybe even a bit less (1,5s). In addition, I would change that the elite skill ability to be that it removes the cooldown from attunement swapping (This would create seconds of complete madness for the ele for a cool burst / surprise)

3. Traits: Traits are weak in general, frankly. I liked the idea of some, but others feel a bit weird.

- Superior Elements: I don’t get the cooldown on this trait – really why? Remove it and buff the critical chance increase to 10%.

- Elemental Pursuit: I get the idea of helping to chase the enemy, but I think this would work best as a reactive trait (Gain superspeed if afflicted by movement impairing condis and remove the movement impairing condi – 10s cooldown seems fair for that). Naturally, with this Unravel hexes would be changed.

- Master’s Fortitute: Let’s be honest here – this trait exists because the base health of the ele is far too low for the sword to work properly. This ends up being a makeshift fix for an inherent class problem that could be solved by just raising the HP of the class (what many have requested for ages) and then giving a real trait.

That being said, if raising the base health is not feasible – make this trait the second tier minor and maybe keep it as it is or slightly buff the 5% to a 7%-10%.

- Elemental Refreshment: Would suggest this to swap places with Master’s Fortitude. In addition, raise the Barrier generated by this by a good amount – without any healing power it should be ~1k-1,5k to start to make a difference.

- Weaver’s Prowess: Think this is a good trait.

- Swift Revenge: Suggest to up the swiftness duration to a 8s base. Suggest to remove the +7% damage for a “Gain Retaliation when gaining superspeed. Retaliation you apply deals more damage”. (keeping it in theme – the damage buff goes to Unravel Hexes)

- Bolstered Elements: Cooldown of 70s is too high – think a 35s would be acceptable, the health trigger should also go a bit higher (maybe 60%-70%?). Rest I think is good.

- Elemental Polyphony: This is a nice one.

Grandmaster Traits: Grandmaster traits are a bit weird and I would suggest big changes.

- Elements of Rage: This I would suggest to be changed to a stance buffing trait. Something like “Stances gain 1 more ammo” (yes, including the elite). Stances now have a longer duration + something else.

- Unravel Hexes: I would suggest to keep this associated with super speed, but remove the condi removal portion.

First, I think this would be a good one for the +% when under the effects of swiftness or superspeed. Now as a Grandmaster it could go upwards to a solid 15%. (It should still have the superspeed, but now when you use a dual attack).

The condi removal portion should go due to the universal attunment cooldown reduction – which results in the possibility of the player to keep perma superspeed, which means condis would be worthless against an ele.

- Invigorating Stirkes: This could be the condi removal trait. It could be that “Dual Attacks healing you (small amount), remove condi (2) and grant vigor (5s). Dodge rolling grants barrier (base value higher to about 1k-1,5k without healing power).”

Now for the utilities.

- Aquatic Stance: This one feels weird – it is a straight compete with signet of restoration in signet of restoration’s own domain (heal on attack). Maybe with a buff to stance skills with the new grandmaster I mentioned above it could see more light, but right now I don’t see why I would change to this.

- Stone Resonance: It needs is a stun break property and better barrier generation.

- Primordial Stance: Don’t quite get the damage part – it is far too low to be worth it, haven’t tried with a condi spec, so I don’t know.

- Unravel: I don’t get this stance. You changed mesmer’s mantra traits because they were conflicting, but now we have an utility skill that completely eliminates the class mechanic, whilst leaving us with the bad univesal cooldown – why would I take this?

With a cooldown reduction of the attunment swap (much needed), I really don’t see why this utility should still exist and would suggest to replace it with something else.

- Twist of Fate: The superspeed should be a bit longer on this. With current duration it just lasts for the spin and nothing more. Seems weird. Another thing that would be interesting to this is a projectile hate (reflect missiles) – think it fits thematically and would make this one more interesting.

- Weave Self: Really think this should completely eliminate attunment swap recharge. Either Woven Fire or Woven Air should add to power damage playstyle.

Don’t like it. I wanted boosted phoenix, not some lame kitten skills.

Sword Weaver just seems like nothing special – D/D ele already does a good job at melee range with nice pbaoe damage, sword doesn’t add anything. Wish they made it a slightly longer range weapon instead.

The melee weapon also makes conjure weapons even more useless (except fds and ice bow).

I dislike that swiftness only in combat skills, and superspeed doesn’t last long enough for a weak melee class (using the trait with superspeed for condition removal is quite interesting though).

Weaver with the original weapons are totally fine however, bringing new options to scepter and staff. Lightning rod trait might be more used with the extra disables from dual attacks.

CD CD CD CD CD extremely annoying even with arcane on. Not liking this so far.

I think they should either make it so you pick four combinations to replace your four standard attunements or make it so that regardless of your attunement and offhand, you get earth focus for your offhand. Two rows of attunements, one for main hand and one for off hand, would work too.

Barrier seems like it needs its scaling adjusted too.

It’s a cool concept. They just need to tweak it before launch.

Another idea that could help with the attunment cooldowns is to have “affinity attunments”, for example – attuning to Fire makes the cooldowns you have be “Fire – 1s, Water 4s, Air 2s, Earth 3s”, representing the ease or difficulty to swap to another attunment given the affinity of the attunment you are with the next one.

Think this would also help for balance purposes to allow more control on the use of “on swap” skills, by making it not so easy to maximize it without having a longer CD on a defensive attunment (e.g., Air could have a 3s on Water and a 4s on Earth).

mainly tried sd fresh air

pros: the dmg is better as the new weaved skills hit far easier

cons:

- unravel hexes cd (that it doesnt work will prolly get fixed asap) but the cooldown kills it anyway
- esp on sd 90% of the skills arnt useable vs stealthed oponents
- global cooldown kills the fun
- global cooldown kills the possibility to get to our anyway subpar defensive skills
- ele is in dire dire need of defense outside of easy to corrupt protection

it felt as someone stated before: u do twice the amount of work to get max half of what anyone else get via one button.

holo got everything i wanted for weave.

now that two consecutive elite specs are essentially melee oriented (tempest was frontline support, overloads point blank AoE…. Weaver is definitely melee with the sword) …

MAY WE PLEASE HAVE A REAL BACKLINE DAMAGE SPEC NOW!!!???? or at least something that’s not focused on WvW / PvP…

in b4 but staff fire is a backline damage spec!
response: staff is a backline SUPPORT weapon with 70% of the skills being boons/ cc/ heals/ soft cc.

i redirect you toward the elite spec suggestion thread, using a couple of my own suggestions. there are MANY more:
~Archermage: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestions-Future-Elite-Specializations/page/7#post6171770
~Summoner: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestions-Future-Elite-Specializations/page/4#post5940673

You’re not forced to use a sword with weaver

Seriously I need more freedom on what elements I attune into….
Add a F5 mechanic that lets u single attune on demand.
Make it a switch between mainhand/offhand choice so that we can control each hand’s attunements independently.

A wild idea, what do you think about take the 4th and 5th skills first? (Reverse the dual attunement order)

Obviously, with minor tweaks to other things like barrier, traits…

I was super excited for this elite spec, but unfortunately less than 15 minutes into exploring it I gave up. The combo skills have some fun potential and the new trait lines really got me excited. But the global CD on elements and the way you have to shift to get elements from main to offhand really turned me off. Honestly, aside from a way to shift back to single element attunement, shifting main and off hand elements feels like they should have separate controls to allow Weavers to even have a chance to keep up not only in PVP and WvW, but just standard PvE.

Luindu.2418:

Imho:
1. Attunement CD is the worst
2. Barriers do nothing
3. Low damage

I somehow agree to this. instead of having all attunement on cool down.. at least the main attunement CD is removed. this will not overkill the profession. all we need is double activate the attunement for the offhand to become main attunement. double the work but good reflex helps. having CD on the main attunement is just making the profession a bit disabled.

Gonna add my two coppers:

1. Damage is way too low on sword, and being kited will result in a quick loss for you. I play d/d and it at least has a 600 range auto on water. I think sword needs this too on one of the attunements.

2. Barrier might as well not even exist. It’s useless in its current form. A single auto attack will rid it, even with extra stacks built up. Also, it decays waaaaaaaay too quickly. It’s in dire need of a numbers increase across the board.

3. I know a lot of people are complaining about the attunement cds, but honestly, I’m okay with it. I do think it serves as a good balance point if the above 2 are fixed.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Gonna add my two coppers:

1. Damage is way too low on sword, and being kited will result in a quick loss for you. I play d/d and it at least has a 600 range auto on water. I think sword needs this too on one of the attunements.

2. Barrier might as well not even exist. It’s useless in its current form. A single auto attack will rid it, even with extra stacks built up. Also, it decays waaaaaaaay too quickly. It’s in dire need of a numbers increase across the board.

3. I know a lot of people are complaining about the attunement cds, but honestly, I’m okay with it. I do think it serves as a good balance point if the above 2 are fixed.

Barrier should lessen the necessity to have to get to your 4/5 skills quickly, but in it’s current state it does not come even close to that.

Spec seems like a condition monster, not only burning but also bleeding

In sword dagger configuration, the build can do insane amounts of fire and bleed damage.

Sometimes i can reach 40 stacks of bleed with 15 stacks of burning, sometimes less stacks of bleeding with a little more of burning in a short time.

Primordial stance helps to do this, and with weave self the condition damage could be better

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Gonna add my two coppers:

1. Damage is way too low on sword, and being kited will result in a quick loss for you. I play d/d and it at least has a 600 range auto on water. I think sword needs this too on one of the attunements.

2. Barrier might as well not even exist. It’s useless in its current form. A single auto attack will rid it, even with extra stacks built up. Also, it decays waaaaaaaay too quickly. It’s in dire need of a numbers increase across the board.

3. I know a lot of people are complaining about the attunement cds, but honestly, I’m okay with it. I do think it serves as a good balance point if the above 2 are fixed.

1. I for one am not completely sure if sword needs a damage buff. It may just need a mobility buff, by making flame uprising and polaric leap have a higher range. Let’s not forget that too many damage buffs may end up making weaver pretty broken in raids.

2. Barrier does seem to be a pretty minimal survivability boost atm. It really feels lackluster.

3. The global cooldown is needed so you don’t swap between elements too quickly, but I don’t think that there is a justification for not being able to double tap the same attunement to access skills 4 and 5. Ele just depends on those skills too much for defense to not be able to access them immediately and as was established before, barrier is not enough to make up for this. Even if barrier was enough to make up for this loss, the damage-focused elementalists need to gain survivability from speccing into weaver, instead of keeping the same amount of survivability. So I would argue that we need both a good barrier and instant access to 4 and 5 if DPS ele is to be viable competitively in PvP modes.

Also, unravel is not a good solution. You sacrifice a utility slot for something that feels like it needs to be baseline and when you use this skill you cannot access dual attunements for 5 seconds. The 25 second recharge also feels like another hinderance in this case. I can see myself needing to access 4 and 5 skills multiple times within that time frame. However, I can see how double-tapping could be broken if combined with attunement swapping traits like sunspot and lightning strike. Please, just give us double-tapping and give those traits a cd to prevent abuse.

Imo the main issue is just not being able to access 4 and 5 fast enough. If this can be solved, I think the spec will mostly be fine with only numbers needing adjustments with balance patches. But the solution seems pretty simple to me, so I hope the devs realize this and make a quick fix before release.

Generally agree with what has been said about the clunkiness of sword, barrier being too low, and weaving cds.

I think sword either needs damage number increases, or more preferably, much faster skills (at least autos). Nearly all sword skills already have extremely low range so being in range should have impact.

Some of the dual attacks for sword are also quite mediocre…I wish there was more interesting effects, such as cc or gap closers so we can actually stick on our targets. Or at least the pure damage skills should hit harder than they currently do.

Something that hasn’t received as much attention is twist of fate. The skill is awkward to use because 1) it disables player control for the duration of the dodge, 2) the superspeed it gives lasts just over the dodge period, so you can’t really even make use of it. I feel like this skill should only have a very short spin at activation, as a stun-break animation, and after that give a 1 second period where the player can actually do something with evasion and superspeed. Otherwise, it currently feels like a worse mist form.

Hey!
I’d like to share my experience as a wvw ele player. I only tried sword/dagger, dagger/dagger and my beloved staff.

Weaver is useless in wvw.
I’m really sad to say that cause the mechanics you created is interesting and imply eles to relearn completly the class and that could have been good BUT:

- some skills lock us down, wich is the best way to get killed in wvw. For exemple, pile driver lock me down and that’s a skill that should work like lightning surge so I should be abble to move. Mud slide stops before leaping in d/d. And sword is worse! Earten wortex .. ok I can eventually understand this one but even so, rust frenzy > wtf, hundred blades with so less damage and more than double cooldown than warrior?
At least, if I have to take risks, I want a reward! Sword skill, as a mele weapon, you should never stops moving cause not moving is dying in this game mode (wvw).

- The mechanics of half my skills switch at a time doesn’t allow us to react! we have to predict since all our survival skills are on 3 and 4 skills. I mostly think about staff magnetic aura, the geyser, windborn speed and burdning retreat. So, at this states, it feels terrible if I’m in a awkward position as you can easily be. I always have to equip unravel and so that lowers down my dps while making me easier to kill. That’s sad but it’s the mechanic

- the general cooldown feels really damageable. I think I can get use to it as I did for tempest but if so … make 2nd skill cd lower and makes AA better :/ The classic skills CD doesn’t really work with such a mechanic. Maybe lower the attunment cd down to 2 or 3 sec?

- I do not have anything to help my party. That’s manly the reason it doesn’t have a place in wvw even if you managed to bested the gameplay and work around the cooldown. In wvw, everyclass need to be usefull to the group. Guardian are man stability and the core of the group and tankyness and some healing, War will come back thank to your work since now it has a purpose as a great debuffer, necro has always be great thanks to debuff and damage now it debuff even more and grants barrier, mesmer toolkit is unique and makes it uselful wathever build you run, druid heals re quite appreciable, tempest heals and mitigate damage thanks to his aura. What does weaver do? It’s a selfish class, that doesn’t do anything special to enemies and grant nothing to the group. That’s the main reason staff ele and now eles in general are disapearing from wvw. A long time ago, we were masters of the combo fields, now there’s so much ways to gives boons and heals that no one care’s about combo and even if … too many better classes can grant our more or less unique field we had (guard is stronger and gives fire field, lightning fields, WATER field and light field (that we can’t give))

- Damage: I thought it was the purpose of the class. But from what I tried, it’s the lower dps elite specialisation you made. Holosmith and necro are once again far better at damage that ele has ever be. The main problem is that you balance your game based on pve. Classic staff ele has dispear cause you nerfed our staff so much and gave other classes so much that now we feel useless to comanders. In opposition to mesmer, we have nothing unique and end up as ranger and inge have been for years: not bad in every aspect but great in none. There’s always a class that does better or as great but with more survivability.

My point is ele is fun to play but you makes it always harder and harder to be usefull in wvw. the weaver mechanics is really interesting and your work could have been so great and fun to play but it ends up 100% more ocmplicated to play that any other classes with no utility. It’s a class where you HAVE TO take risks (as thief) but with absolutly NO REWARDS.

In the end, I think the only spot that the weaver could fill in is dual pvp and counter periphery (focus party) that .. doesn’t exist anymore cause no one plays with ranged classes anymore. Maybe PoF will change the meta but I don’t think weaver can ever have a place in wvw. Weaver cahnges the gameplay but adds nothing to our kit, classic ele is the same but less melee (if you know what i mean)

and slightly a small note about why you didn’t open this spec beta to pve maps? we couldn’t play since they were so many pve players that wanted to try skills on mobs that we couldn’t correctly entered map and once on it no coms and peeps bashing mob close to spawn? Oo same with pvp, too many peeps that wanted to try the specs on golems that none was abble to try it properly :/

Played about 10 games on weaver, gotta say its absolutely trash for sPvP, Ele’s just do not have the defensive tools or the hp to fight people in melee range in any situation.

How ever it looks like a beast PvE spec. If you sPvP auramancer is still your goto, and if you WvW, fresh air is still the way to go there’s just not enough mitigation tools, condition clear to make weaver viable in pvp barriers are not enough.

Maybe if you spec toughness + healing power but then you have no damage, if your gonna run weaver that way you honestly should just run an auramancer.

Thats my 2 cents from what i have tested.

Forgotten Legend.9281:

now that two consecutive elite specs are essentially melee oriented (tempest was frontline support, overloads point blank AoE…. Weaver is definitely melee with the sword) …

MAY WE PLEASE HAVE A REAL BACKLINE DAMAGE SPEC NOW!!!???? or at least something that’s not focused on WvW / PvP…

in b4 but staff fire is a backline damage spec!
response: staff is a backline SUPPORT weapon with 70% of the skills being boons/ cc/ heals/ soft cc.

i redirect you toward the elite spec suggestion thread, using a couple of my own suggestions. there are MANY more:
~Archermage: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestions-Future-Elite-Specializations/page/7#post6171770
~Summoner: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestions-Future-Elite-Specializations/page/4#post5940673

Weaver is far from a PvP spec unfortunately.

Luindu.2418:

Imho:
1. Attunement CD is the worst
2. Barriers do nothing
3. Low damage

This is what I feel as well,

the mechanics are fun, but just another non-viable build for ele, I dunno why A-net keeps building really fun specs/builds and then making them non-viable and forcing us into boring specs/rotations (for competitive play).

I’ve been trying to work out a rotation and the entire thing is just slightly too clunky with the attunement cooldown. I think that the idea of having a single cooldown for all attunement swapping is okay, but it’s just ever so slightly too high. Right now its about 3.3 seconds with the arcane traitline, and it makes things very clunky. I think if it were 3 seconds when traited it would probably be something that we could work with.

Luindu.2418:

Imho:
1. Attunement CD is the worst
2. Barriers do nothing
3. Low damage

that’s all! Totally agree!
attuenement cd and low damage are main problems of weaver! it’s too risk and really low reward… I hope that anet buff that or weaver become unplayable! From a wvsw player

The most complicated Elite spec in the game

I’m very disappointed with Weaver. Lackluster sums it up, and the long global attunement cd doesn’t help.

When POF hits I will be sticking with Tempest. As it is, Weaver doesn’t feel viable in wvw, no matter what weapon set you are using.

So I encountered few bugs with weaver and how traits are working:
- while off hand attuning costs us full time with cd, some traits dont procs from it, like healing ripple (no heal), evasive arcane (only uses main hand attunement for dodge, instead of both effects)

electric discharge, earthen blast and sunspot works fine

No damage
No gap closer
No mobility
No sustain
No disengage
No support
No cleanse
No reactivity
No range
No projectile hate

High clunkiness
High squishiness
High efficiency against golems

My excitement about the spec vanished as fast as barrier.

MyPuppy.8970:

No damage
No gap closer
No mobility
No sustain
No disengage
No support
No cleanse
No reactivity
No range
No projectile hate

High clunkiness
High squishiness
High efficiency against golems

My excitement about the spec vanished as fast as barrier.

so much hyperbole in one post

Fought some very tanky weavers in wvw earlier today. They seemed to be able to constantly heal and pulse barrier even while being focused by 4 or 5 people. I’m trying to replicate it, but can’t figure it out. Might just involve properly timing Lava Skin and Stone Resonance, who knows.

Attunements
The attunement cool down being 4s is far too long. It takes about 10s for each attunement to recharge on base ele. Which means when paired with modest boon duration (50%) and elemental enchantment reducing this to 8.5s you can maintain defensive buffs like protection and regeneration the ele needs to survive in melee environments. However with weaver unless you keep revisiting an element (earth) every 2nd or 3rd swap you cannot maintain protection uptime and it breaks any kind of flow. Fresh air also doesn’t work very well with the current weaver as you get air back but everything else goes on cool down for switching.

I would propose reducing the attunement swap to 3s on weaver with arcane reducing it to 2.5s, this allows much higher uptime of these defensive boons. Possibly even folding weave selfs cool down reduction into baseline weaver, weave self is easily a great skill on its own without needing the 2s recharge. The other alternative is to increase the weavers access to other defences namely barrier.

Barrier
At the moment this is a very bad joke for sword. An 800 barrier will do sweet kittenainst melee classes and the damage mitigation it provides might as well not be there. For comparison a warrior can auto attack for 2,500 and do other hits for 5,000 and upto 10,000. An 800 barrier reduces that damage by 33% for the 2,500 but scales considerably worse to being not worth mentioning at higher levels while protection will always cut that damage by 33%. At the moment because of the attunement swap cool down protection is quite difficult to maintain in weaver without going into earth every 3rd attunement and that’s with 80% boon duration.

Simply put the damage mitigation on weaver is shameful for a spec that has a 170 range weapon as its showpiece.

Stances
In general the count recharge is far too high for the pitiful effect they all have and the duration on many is equally bad. You look at other classes with stances and they last much longer and have great effects like complete damage immunity while you can still attack for decent durations.

Aquatic stance, the healing is far too low and the recharge far too high outside the initial double use. It is categorically the worst heal in the game currently as the initial heal is incredibly low and the stance heal requires you to actively hit the enemy to get it while expiring after a certain time. It also scales hilariously badly with healing power. My recommendation is remove the heal allies aspect, weaver is a damage spec and many of the balance issues in previous ele iterations have been precisely because it gives too much team support for the power it had. Increase the base healing to 3500 and make the next 5 attacks heals only you for 800 and lasts upto 10s.

Stone resonance, the barrier gained from this is far too low to warrent a 50s count recharge. With menders amulet (1050 healing power) I got ~3,700 barrier and without healing power it was about 3,200 there’s no point in using healing power. additionally that will nullify 1-2 hits possibly while arcane shield has a 40s cool down, a stun break and deals damage and will block 3 hits regardless of damage. It doesn’t even compare. My recommendation is to double or even triple the amount of barrier given and/or reduce the count recharge. Possibly double the barrier given and make the count recharge 30s.

Unravel, you get to use this to fully attune twice and that’s it. It’s a very unremarkable stance with very little flavour that acts as training wheels for a weaver but still has all the downsides of global cool down on attunement swaps. The only good thing I can say is that the count recharge seems fair but otherwise I’d rather see this as a different skill. Weaver is about forgoing full attunement for the combo attunements, if I want to fully attune I would either go core ele as it’s already far superior or better yet I would have the global be 2.5-3s so wait it out. There needs to be some degree of forethought in the elite spec and giving a stance that goes around that feels like a discredit to the remarkable concept of weaver.

Primordial stance, I’ll be honest not really used it but looks decent on a condition build, would argue it needs to be distinguished from glyph of elemental power a bit more other than being a straight up weaver tailored clone.

Twist of fate, I honestly don’t know what to make of this. The superspeed is nice for getting away, the break stun is nice and the evade is nice. However the count recharge for what it is isn’t that good in my opinion. You compare it to other stunbreaks in the game and it’s not that great for the recharge. My only suggestion is reduce the recharge on the counts to 20-25s. This is meant to be a melee specc, getting locked down especially on the class with the lowest base health and armour is very punishing already.

Weave self, this is a good ability on it’s own but it seems it’s balanced for it’s flip over skill more than anything. I would personally decouple both of these and place the weave self portion (minus the recharge reduction which gets folded into weaver at a 50% rate) onto where unravel currently is with a 45s count recharge. I’d then have the elite be on a 60s cool down and be simply tailored victory. Whether this changes or not I feel the elite is good on weaver as is but unravel feels like it doesn’t belong while weave self feels like a great thing to switch it with.

Enigmoid.1264:

The global ICD on attunment swap makes arcane mandatory and still locks you out of the much needed 3, 4, and 5 skills which hurts survivability more than the defensive weaver traits help it. The barriers weaver gives are a complete joke. Adding a weapon swap button that instead swapped the positions of the active attunements would help things. So if you are air/water (air 1,2 mixed 3, water 4,5) weapon swap would switch you to water/air (water 1,2, mixed 3, air 4, 5).

This. Also:
- some attunement cd on Weaver’s Prowess
- Stance cd on Bolstered Elements
- some way to cleanse on non super-speed builds

Sword
The auto attacks are slow and clunky, why most are 3/4s casts with the associated aftercasts is beyond me but a simple QoL change is to reduce them to 1/2s casts which would improve the sword immensely.

Damage at least the direct damage feels on the low side right across the board on sword with dagger seemingly doing more damage as a main hand than sword while not suffering from it’s focused target nature. I can’t even recommend it as a condition weapon as the bleeds and burns on the auto attacks are stuffed onto the back end of the chain. I’d recommend increasing the damage scaling by 10% to begin with and see how it goes, the reduction in cast times will buff the damage and that part is what is needed. Also put conditions on the first parts of the auto chain or at least attack 2. Cripple on the fire, chill on 2nd auto of water would help this stay melee and get the final hits in.

Gap closers/openers on the number 2 skill. I like this idea and I think whoever came up with that idea was fantastic because it makes a complex class a little easier to get to grips with. The only improvements I’d like to see is 600 range on the fire uprising (fire) and polaric leap (air), 5s duration on riptide water field (water 2) as the field is hard to blast due to half it’s duration you’re in the evade frame.

Traits
Minors, I feel they’re all decent but elemental refreshment needs the barrier part increasing by 3 fold.

Adept majors, the weakness duration on superior elements could do with being increased to 4-5s but otherwise the rest feel alright and in keeping with core specialisations.

Master majors, weavers prowess seems a tad too strong, maybe reduce to 10% condition duration and 10% condition damage. Bolstered elements, I like the stability on stance portion but the game has too many automatically activated skills. I would much rather see this skill do something else consistently on stance activation, maybe 3s of protection on stance use however I feel it would make this a mandatory trait.

Grandmaster majors
Elements of Rage is a big damage boost but feels like it goes against the philosophy of weaver. I honestly don’t like that, it’s right up there with how berserkers power used to encourage not using adrenaline. I’d prefer it to be a shorter (3s) damage boost when attuning to an element.

Unravel Hexes the wording on it indicates it removes all conditions however in actuality it only removes movement impairing conditions. Superspeed isn’t something that stacks so to keep high uptime requires careful skill chaining and large trait investments. I would remove the gain superspeed on receiving chill, cripple or immobilise and instead make the trait remove damaging conditions as well when you gain superspeed.

Invigorating strikes is decent but needs the barrier component increasing by twice as much.

Duel Skills
On the whole from what I got to play with they all seem alright but I’d like the range on sword and dagger duel attacks to be a little more consistent. Some are 130, another is 170, one is even 180 and another is 600 on sword alone. I’d rather see them all 180 (240 on dagger) or 600 and not have to worry about if I’m 40-50 units too far away for them to hit. It’s just really inconsistent.

Otherwise there’s just too many duel skills to really get to grips with in this short time and I feel they’re generally ok or at least there are much bigger flaws with weaver at the moment that need addressing than a few number tweaking on duel skills.

Just going to add my thoughts to the thread, most has been said before, if not all, but hey, not like everyone else has read each and every post here to avoid repeating what has already been said

The Good:
Let me make one thing exceedingly clear: I love the concept. I really do. The Moment A-Net announced it and showed what it was supposed to be, I fell in love with the Idea of what it could be like.
Sadly, that’s about it. The Idea and the execution seem to be worlds apart.

The Bad:
Where to begin. Well, the new weapon is as good a place as any, so here goes:

The Animation for the Sword-Autoattack seems to have been done after some major mechanics where hashed out and people got lazy. It’s the same animation for all elements with a few different particles on top. Considering the vast mountain of already implemented animations for Sword-Attacks, you could have picked those apart and just sprinkled a few new particles on top.
The attacks themself look horrible, as if the person flourishing that sword around has no Idea what is going on and how to wield a sword in the first place. I understand that maybe you wanted to add some special flair to it, make it seem like the Weaver is, I don’t know, weaving the elements with the sword? While I appreciate the sentiment, if that’s where the animations come from at all – please reconsider. Again, you have a treasure treove of animations already in game. Just take some from Guardian, some from Ranger, maybe a bit from Rev and Mesmer, change the particles and you’re good.

On to other things: The GCD on Attunement-Swap is annoying as can be. It takes all the fun out of it. When I first heard about the Weaver, I imagined my Ele at the fronlines, stancedancing like mad, switching from one dual-attunement to the next. Sadly, that’s not what we got.
To change this, maybe remove the GCD and just stick the 3sec cd to the Element you just exited? Basically like base-ele with way shorter cds on attunements. I guess that would help the spec in a big way.

On to the stances.They are fine. Not good, not bad, just fine. I’d love to have some stability and condi-cleanse in there, but oh well, can’t have everything. Won’t be using any of them anytime soon, seeing as the old skills the ele has just seem to be better in any way, Primordial Stance excluded. That one may be worth looking at.

The Elite in itself is amazing, if only for the looks and nothing else. It needs to support Power-Damage in some way. Maybe you could remove the movement-speed on air and replace it with a ferocity-buff, similar to what fire does for condi-damage? That way it would make sense to take it on a power-build. As it stands now, I’d rather take my trusty fire elemental.

The Ugly:
Moving on to old weapons and weaver. I thought that maybe a Backline-Weaver could be a thing. But after trying it for myself I can’t get over how telegraphed these dual-attacks are, Piledriver excluded. Have you seen the Speed of Plasma Blast (which should NOT be traveling on the ground, imo) and Pyroclastic Blast? I could phone my enemy and tell him that those skills are on the way before he’d get hit by them, seeing as they move so slow. They may hit something in WvW, once two zergs meet. Maybe. But that’s about it. Even in PvE, if the enemy doesn’t have a hitbox as big as a world boss or even moves around somewhat – yeah, that can happen – these two are unlikely to hit. Increase the projectile-speed on these two, please.

If these telegraphed attacks weren’t bad enough, they lack the oomph behind them. And not just them. Nothing from the Weaver, no matter which weapon or Dual Attack – they don’t deal any real damage. I get higher numbers with just about any other class and considering that Ele -a class with the lowest armor, lowest base-health- is going into melee-combat (even more so than with daggers) and thus taking the by far biggest risk, it should be rewarded, not punished. Why give us Melee-Weapons if we’re clearly not supposed to use them?

good:

- the idea of mixing elements, it’s great!

bad:

- the implementation of this idea

More details:
- CD 4s on elements swap is a mistake. all people mentioned it above. It prevents the usage of other attunements, you can not maintain buffs from them anymore. You can not react (switch to water). It prevents the usage of all off hand weapons, you can not anymore use blast finishers or protection skills from focus or movement from dagger, nothing, even combo fields are expired due this delay. Why need to have CD 4s if all skills have own CD already?
Need to set this CD to 0. Just previous attunement can have 4s cd (to avoid returning back too fast). If I switching from full Fire to Earth, just fire can be on CD, other elements (Earth, Lightning, Water) should be accessible immediately.

- no single button to swap to full element. Not possible to react on a problem using off hand. As a result it is not fun to play at all, even more: it’s very annoying (all people mentioned it as well).
Has to be another row of buttons to switch to full element or just allow the double click on attunement to switch to full element.

- lack of condition removal. Does not work in PvP. Any condy class will kill this weaver very fast. Otherwise people will not use stances and must take condy removal skills, then what the point of stances? Can be fixed by adding regeneration to stances, then water will be used as condy removal.

- lack of protection (-40%). can be fixed by increasing of shielding mechanics by 2-3 times (at least!) or adding auras to stances. Then protection will be granted from earth.

- shielding mechanics, does not work, too small- useless as a result. has to be increased 2-3 times at least. too small scaling from healing power.

- not enough combo fields and blast finishers. or need drop stances. Ele without self-buffs? on Tempest I easily can have 25 might, but not on weaver.

- too slow skills on sword (execution time) 0.75-1s it’s too much for so small damage.
currently HoT tempest making MUCH higher damage.

- healing stance almost useless.

- CD on stances is too big, duration of stances is too short.

Enigmoid.1264:

Adding a weapon swap button that instead swapped the positions of the active attunements would help things. So if you are air/water (air 1,2 mixed 3, water 4,5) weapon swap would switch you to water/air (water 1,2, mixed 3, air 4, 5).

This. Absolutely this. Otherwise the 4 seconds of global CD just kill it. I’m an ele, half of what I do is an instinctual reaction to my surroundings. I’m not an ele to be locked into my elements, that’s not the playstyle of the class. I’d say it’s either the normal 1.5 s CD or a weapon swap.

Traits

The first 2 of the traitlines all seem fine to me.

The 3rd however is bad in every line. They are supposed to be defensive skills, but for being a melee class with lowest armor & health… they just don’t cut it. A whole set of traits for being “a little less squishy” is a waste.

“Mater’s Fortitude” – with zeker amulet and scholar runes I go from 11.645 to 14.035 HP. It’s almost 2.5k HP, that’s nice in theory… but it won’t make much of a difference with lowest armor class. It’s still squish. You would need to run full sinister or something to get the full bonus and even then I doubt it’s worth it.

“Bolstered Elements” + “Invigorating Strike” – as mentioned before, the barriers are simply too weak. Make them stronger pls (and last at least a little longer).

Sword

I like the sword skills. They fit the ele’s overall playstyle, they are fast, they make me feel like a bruiser ele. Yes! Good, they even look fantastic! Props to the dev team that designed this, it’s a job perfectly done.

The problem unfortunately is with the damage. I specifically mention this here. The sword damage is low. It’s not the weaver’s damage, I saw videos of people getting really good dps out of the weaver… with a staff. Pls, make this spec viable on sword. It’s suppsoed be melee, make us melee!

A lot of people mentioned it already: High risk, high return!

That’s what sword on an ele should be like as play-style.

Utilities

Hm. “Unravel”, “Primodiral Stance” and “Twist of Fate” (Jeff Hardy says hi) are decent skills. Their CDs feel a little bit long, maybe a few seconds less on each, but I get the idea beehind them. The stunbreak is nice and could work well with the swiftness/superspeed traits. Damage trait is ok and going back to the “base” ele of one element makes for nice combos.

“Stone Resonance” is sadly, as I mentioned under Traits already, a waste. A waste on a long CD. I recognize the idea behind the barriers, and I really like it, but the implementation is very clunky atm.

“Aquatic Stance” …doesn’t fit. It’s a heal skill for a spec that is supposed to be a squishy melee. If want a support heal I go Tempest and take “Wash the Pain Away”.

I don’t wanna support people on a weaver – I wanna save my own kitten kitten !

Overall

I love weaver. I love the idea of it. It’s kittening awesome! I wanted this since the specializations were accouned for HoT. Those skills make my mouth water looking at them.

Personally I however think adjustments need be made to the barriers the ele uses, some of the skills and especially the damage output on the sword.

You let us get close. Now actually give us to means to be beat the kitten out of the enemy while we’re there (and in mortal danger)!

Might get torn apart from saying this, but I feel like someone has to say something positive in this thread. I watched phantaram play weaver on twitch for a long time yesterday. It did take him a while to figure out weaver, and while he couldn’t make a power build that worked, he eventually found a condition build that worked really well. He was dominating with it for hours, even against some other top streamers/players he recognized. He did strong condi burst damage, survived and escaped out of a ton of tricky situations, had decent healing, etc. Looked like a very strong dueling build. The spec for sure needs a bit of work, probably some different power scaling and some bugs with traits worked out, but it isn’t the worst spec ever with no good qualities.

Very short and concise post here. Coming from an spvp perspective!

The sword has great survivability but very low damage. Currently the only way to do decent damage is with a sages amulet to take advantage of the extra condi damage the sword provides. Even then it feels decently negligible… until you equip primordial stance.

With primordial stance the damage becomes extremely immense. I would prefer it if the weapon itself had good damage on it and we didn’t rely on a utility to do damage. Decreasing cast times on the sword will help with this immensely and also perhaps an increase to the range of the leaps from 450 to 600 for fire and air leaps.

Double attuning to the same attunement never feels worth it. Perhaps double attuning should not incur the regular 4s (or 3.4s with arcane trait line) cooldown but instead a 2 or regular elementalist cooldown. Attuning to the same attunement twice is normaly only for the #3 ability which doesn’t feel worth locking yourself in that same attunement for another 4 to 3.4 seconds.

One of the key problems with the cooldown being slightly too long is that it really promotes or even forces a sort of “smash all the buttons” type of gameplay. As I said above, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of a cooldown like this, but it’s just long enough that after attuning you sortof have no choice but to hit all of your abilities while you wait before attuning again. It just promotes a sortof thoughtless playstyle.

Feedback:
Weaver is overly complicated for no real benefit.
I find it unplayable, just blasting fields with staff is a pain.

How is this supposed to be fun? “oh yeah I’m gonna need to evade with burning retreat in 5 seconds” Like who plays like that?
Why would you need a skill that completely undo the elite profession? Even Fresh Air, everything is so slow and confusing it makes my brain hurts.

I mean switch to water to have meteor shower available? Why?

It’s not ready.

Like others have said, good ideas are not always good in practice.

Perhaps if we could choose which offhand and mainland skills we want, for example switching to fire would always give us skill 4-5 while switching to air gives you skills 1-2.

A F5 mechanic to dual attune perhaps? Or a way that only the middle skill change depending on your previous attunement.

Is it just me or does staff plus weaver fell by far slower than the normal staff builds? It just seems like you are two times slower, probably because of the new cooldown on attunements. And the new skill seem not like a big plus either. The earth/fire combos skill is so extreme slow, not that we already had projectiles that are far to slow when you think about earth auto attack.

apharma.3741:

Attunements
The attunement cool down being 4s is far too long. It takes about 10s for each attunement to recharge on base ele. Which means when paired with modest boon duration (50%) and elemental enchantment reducing this to 8.5s you can maintain defensive buffs like protection and regeneration the ele needs to survive in melee environments. However with weaver unless you keep revisiting an element (earth) every 2nd or 3rd swap you cannot maintain protection uptime and it breaks any kind of flow. Fresh air also doesn’t work very well with the current weaver as you get air back but everything else goes on cool down for switching.

I would propose reducing the attunement swap to 3s on weaver with arcane reducing it to 2.5s, this allows much higher uptime of these defensive boons. Possibly even folding weave selfs cool down reduction into baseline weaver, weave self is easily a great skill on its own without needing the 2s recharge. The other alternative is to increase the weavers access to other defences namely barrier.

Barrier
At the moment this is a very bad joke for sword. An 800 barrier will do sweet kittenainst melee classes and the damage mitigation it provides might as well not be there. For comparison a warrior can auto attack for 2,500 and do other hits for 5,000 and upto 10,000. An 800 barrier reduces that damage by 33% for the 2,500 but scales considerably worse to being not worth mentioning at higher levels while protection will always cut that damage by 33%. At the moment because of the attunement swap cool down protection is quite difficult to maintain in weaver without going into earth every 3rd attunement and that’s with 80% boon duration.

Simply put the damage mitigation on weaver is shameful for a spec that has a 170 range weapon as its showpiece.

Stances
In general the count recharge is far too high for the pitiful effect they all have and the duration on many is equally bad. You look at other classes with stances and they last much longer and have great effects like complete damage immunity while you can still attack for decent durations.

Aquatic stance, the healing is far too low and the recharge far too high outside the initial double use. It is categorically the worst heal in the game currently as the initial heal is incredibly low and the stance heal requires you to actively hit the enemy to get it while expiring after a certain time. It also scales hilariously badly with healing power. My recommendation is remove the heal allies aspect, weaver is a damage spec and many of the balance issues in previous ele iterations have been precisely because it gives too much team support for the power it had. Increase the base healing to 3500 and make the next 5 attacks heals only you for 800 and lasts upto 10s.

Stone resonance, the barrier gained from this is far too low to warrent a 50s count recharge. With menders amulet (1050 healing power) I got ~3,700 barrier and without healing power it was about 3,200 there’s no point in using healing power. additionally that will nullify 1-2 hits possibly while arcane shield has a 40s cool down, a stun break and deals damage and will block 3 hits regardless of damage. It doesn’t even compare. My recommendation is to double or even triple the amount of barrier given and/or reduce the count recharge. Possibly double the barrier given and make the count recharge 30s.

Unravel, you get to use this to fully attune twice and that’s it. It’s a very unremarkable stance with very little flavour that acts as training wheels for a weaver but still has all the downsides of global cool down on attunement swaps. The only good thing I can say is that the count recharge seems fair but otherwise I’d rather see this as a different skill. Weaver is about forgoing full attunement for the combo attunements, if I want to fully attune I would either go core ele as it’s already far superior or better yet I would have the global be 2.5-3s so wait it out. There needs to be some degree of forethought in the elite spec and giving a stance that goes around that feels like a discredit to the remarkable concept of weaver.

Primordial stance, I’ll be honest not really used it but looks decent on a condition build, would argue it needs to be distinguished from glyph of elemental power a bit more other than being a straight up weaver tailored clone.

Twist of fate, I honestly don’t know what to make of this. The superspeed is nice for getting away, the break stun is nice and the evade is nice. However the count recharge for what it is isn’t that good in my opinion. You compare it to other stunbreaks in the game and it’s not that great for the recharge. My only suggestion is reduce the recharge on the counts to 20-25s. This is meant to be a melee specc, getting locked down especially on the class with the lowest base health and armour is very punishing already.

Weave self, this is a good ability on it’s own but it seems it’s balanced for it’s flip over skill more than anything. I would personally decouple both of these and place the weave self portion (minus the recharge reduction which gets folded into weaver at a 50% rate) onto where unravel currently is with a 45s count recharge. I’d then have the elite be on a 60s cool down and be simply tailored victory. Whether this changes or not I feel the elite is good on weaver as is but unravel feels like it doesn’t belong while weave self feels like a great thing to switch it with.

Thats actually not true.If you use earthen elemental barrier plus the earth elemental attack and double dodge you get up to 8k barrier.

What a disappointment all around. Low damage, low condi clear, low damage mitigation, long cd, long cast times, low gap closer. The dual skills is not worth it and neither it the sword.

My ele will definitely remain tempest.

Axl.8924:

apharma.3741:

Barrier
At the moment this is a very bad joke for sword. An 800 barrier will do sweet kittenainst melee classes and the damage mitigation it provides might as well not be there. For comparison a warrior can auto attack for 2,500 and do other hits for 5,000 and upto 10,000. An 800 barrier reduces that damage by 33% for the 2,500 but scales considerably worse to being not worth mentioning at higher levels while protection will always cut that damage by 33%. At the moment because of the attunement swap cool down protection is quite difficult to maintain in weaver without going into earth every 3rd attunement and that’s with 80% boon duration.

Simply put the damage mitigation on weaver is shameful for a spec that has a 170 range weapon as its showpiece.

Thats actually not true.If you use earthen elemental barrier plus the earth elemental attack and double dodge you get up to 8k barrier.

So you’re basically saying it’s currently fine if you burn all your dodges and 2 other skills (Do you mean stone resonance, the lava skin dual skill or what?) to get 8k temporary hit points that will disappear in 6s or so?

On whatever cool downs “earthen elemental barrier” is on and with an elite that is generally inferior to the frankly ludicrous heal of the ice elemental. That’s putting aside that you also need to dedicate a GM trait to barrier too.

I honestly don’t think the barriers on weaver are that good, maybe I don’t fully understand barrier as it’s new, if it reduced damage taken onto the barrier or scales with toughness, protection or whatever then maybe it’s better than it appears.

Sunshine.5014:

Axl.8924:

Thats actually not true.If you use earthen elemental barrier plus the earth elemental attack and double dodge you get up to 8k barrier.

Right, the mighty 8k barrier that disappears after 3 seconds, leaving you with no defensive option left since you blew everything trying to create that barrier.

Any thief will just eat a weaver alive in 2 seconds.

I mean I’d be willing to accept weaver as is if this was the power level of everything in PoF beta, but it isn’t. Deadeyes, soul beasts, holosmiths and spell breakers are destroying people in seconds. Don’t even get me started on the sheer corrupts and conditions flying out of scourge.

Xillllix.3485:

Sunshine.5014:

Axl.8924:

Thats actually not true.If you use earthen elemental barrier plus the earth elemental attack and double dodge you get up to 8k barrier.

Right, the mighty 8k barrier that disappears after 3 seconds, leaving you with no defensive option left since you blew everything trying to create that barrier.

Any thief will just eat a weaver alive in 2 seconds.

true,

while weaver will wait 5s CD to use [Obsidian Flesh] thief can kill him 2 times.

or necro will put to you 9 heavy conditions as once and you have no ways to remove them, because your water is not accesible 4s and even then will remove 1 condition…