Guild Wars 2

Randomness is a double-edged sword in most games. In some cases it can result in a frustrating experience, causing a player to feel as though they lost due to the game rather than due to their own play or the play by their opponents. On the other hand, randomness can also add a great deal of excitement; StarCraft would have been a lesser game if not for the uphill miss chance forcing strategic positioning, Magic: The Gathering would be lackluster without the occasional absurd starting hand or miraculous top deck, and Dungeons & Dragons would fall flat without the potential for the dice to shake up encounters in unforeseen ways. In these ways randomness is good, as it forces players to account for many possibilities and to position themselves so that they can take advantage of openings without being overly vulnerable to unexpected pitfalls.

Players in Guild Wars are well positioned to be able to benefit from some elements of randomness. The fact that positioning and timing matter more than in many other MMOs gives players significant ability to manage the downsides of randomness and capitalize on the upsides. The Elementalist in particular is a prime candidate for taking advantage of randomness, as it has access to more total skills than any other class. And within the Elementalist’s kit the Fire Attunement is a logical and flavorful place for randomness to be a significant part of the playstyle.

Fire is unpredictable. One doesn’t know whether it will be readily contained or if it will flare up and burn any who stand too close. That flavor is currently literally applied in Flame Barrier and in One With Fire, both of which literally burn enemies who are standing nearby. However, neither trait is interesting, as the effect is both weak enough to not be worth playing around and uninteractive enough that there aren’t really any ways to play that could take advantage of it. Your weapons and your opponents weapons will dictate whether you are within melee range or not, those traits simply won’t factor in to how you play at all. Burning Precision the other RNG fire trait, and it similarly fails to change how either you or your opponent plays. I doubt that anyone has ever won a fight and thought that burning procs off of the trait changed the outcome.

So, my proposal, which is admittedly both difficult to implement and to balance, is this: make the Fire Attunement actually unpredictable. I’m talking significant changes. Makes Pyromancer’s Alacrity a Grandmaster trait and change it’s effect to “When you burn an opponent you have a 15% chance to refresh the cooldown on a Fire skill.” This gives incentive to stay in Fire Attunement by providing a way around our long cooldowns, and notably it actually rewards an Elementalist for favoring an attunement. As it stands now only Fresh Air breaks the generalist mold, and the Ele isn’t going to be able to have more build variety until it has more playstyle variety open to it. Instead of having a flat cooldown on Burning Fire, give it a chance to proc on any new condition applied, or redesign it so that you have a chance on condition application / when you apply burning / per condition tick to convert some number of conditions to fury. A 10% chance to remove 2 conditions and add 5 seconds of fury per removed condition would be really in flavor, and would reward good play by your opponent by letting them weigh the benefit of new conditions they might add versus the conditions already applied. It also would be a hopefully more viable alternative to Water traits for condition removal. Obviously these aren’t balanced as written, they would definitely need to be modified, but the intent I hope is clear: traits that are unpredictable in ways that impact how the game is played.

In all fairness, there are some builds that allow for you to stay on fire most of the time. From personal experience, 30/10/10/10/10 on Staff works well in this regard, with the latest patch. Fresh air doesn’t seem to be the only kid in town anymore.

There’s also players accustomed to the way it used to be, claiming that an Elementalist “must” switch elements all the time in order to be “troo”. Both playstyles are correct for many players.

Finally I find it OK for defensive abilities to be mostly Earth or Water.

I do agree people should feel that each element is a strong option to base his/her build on, and that constant element switching should be a playstyle choice, rather than the default for lack of better options. The hard part is balancing each so that elemental switching is still attractive/ viable for many players while not making any single attunement “OP”, or without any disadvantages.

I do not mean any offense, though, so feel free to disagree.

In some PvE situations yes, staying in fire with Staff can be effective. But that is largely limited to fights where the enemy isn’t going to move much, which limits its use, and Staff is very ineffective in WvW roaming or in small skirmishes. It’s only once you hit critical mass of blast finishers in a zerg that staff becomes truly good in WvW (at which point it’s bonkers good).

Defensive abilities should be mostly in Earth and Water, I agree. However, the extent to which Water monopolizes the good ones right now is very bad for build diversity for the Elementalist, and ANet has a stated goal to increase build diversity. Burning Fire was changed specifically for that purpose, and so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that they want to retain at least some defensive abilities in every attunement (think Tempest Defense in Air)

I think I may have overshot the attention span of the forum, whoops.

I mean you didn’t overshoot my attention span, I’m just the case that disagrees. I don’t like any of my traits to be random, but unfortunately one is. (soothing wave). I personally like my play to be dynamic and action packed. This is why I refuse to use skills like armor of earth, ether renewal and traits like you are describing.

I think each attunement would do well to have a grandmaster like fresh air, I just don’t think it’s valuable to have a random skill chosen. On dagger, it could be my 6K fire grab, or my semi useless if spammed fire circle.

I wouldn’t pick it, but I understand some who would. Staff for example. Perhaps if it were “whenever you burn an opponent”, recharge fire attunement, I’d take it. As I draw burning from many sources.

Secondly; gotta love magic the gathering.

I would like cooldown refresh on burn, but a problem is that almost no Elementalist will have almost no access to burning outside of fire attunement, and the utility access they would have has a long cooldown. I also think there is value in having different attunement incentives to function differently.

False. Fire shield, Cleansing fire, Fire signet, glyphs, ect.

Edit — also the burn on crit if you’re going 30 deep into fire.

Fire Shield can only be set up while you are in fire attunement first, and the rest are all utility skills as I said already. Burn on crit is true, though that’s only an Adept trait, not a Grandmaster. That would be a good synergy though.

The specific mechanic you have suggested here has very little counter-play that can be accomplished by someone playing against the trait. Additionaly the only real way for the traits power to be controlled by the elementalist is almost strictly limited to weapon choice. This is because the actual effects of refreshing a skill to be used will vary dramatically depending on what skill is refreshed. If you would be lucky enough to refresh fire grab three times in a row then your damage will spike dramatically. Conversely if you refresh flame wall or fire shield three times in a row you will gain very little from the trait.

This will lead to what is probably the worst situation with RNG that you have mentioned above. RNG in this manner will likely lead to situation that are frustrating or exciting for the elementalist with the trait. From the point of view of someone playing against this trait, it will either be a non-factor or frustrating.

Traits that are very feast or famine tend not to be what you want to aim at.

@dukevonart
Those are good points, and I don’t mean to distract from the overall message with either specific proposal. I had merely wanted to demonstrate the potential power level of RNG mechanics compared to what is there now, and I’m certain that there are other ideas that are better than what I can come up with, but I do still believe that actually relevant RNG mechanics should have a place. Keep in mind that these would all have to be traited for, so any Elementalist that doesn’t want to deal with them wouldn’t have to.

RNG as a mechanic can indeed be very powerful. I am less concerned with the elementalist’s view of as there are both positive points and negative points depending on how the RNG rolls. What concerns me more is the interaction with the opponent’s perspective as it will at best be a neutral point and at worst a negative point. If you keep this in mind then my goal has been accomplished.

A greater focus on a specific attunement or two is something that I’ve played around with and my general conclusion still stands that there are two main points. The first point is that there is a division of types of skills that an elementalist has access to in each attunement that makes a focus build difficult. The second is that elementalist skills are almost all, in some combination, less powerful, have higher cooldowns, and have more limited effects. The combination of these two points makes it very difficult to play a focused elementalist , though there are some exceptions.

Melancholia.8123:

Fire Shield can only be set up while you are in fire attunement first, and the rest are all utility skills as I said already. Burn on crit is true, though that’s only an Adept trait, not a Grandmaster. That would be a good synergy though.

I meant going 30 into fire, why not take that trait (especially if the change I proposed were true).

And you would be setting it up by attuning to fire, dropping fire circle or burning speed, moving to earth, stack a little might and grab the aura, then go back to fire with earth protection? Sounds devastating to me!