Guild Wars 2

Just an idle thought, but what if instead of Fiery Greatsword, the elite instead summoned an elemental weapon based on your attunement?

Air would give Lightning Hammer, Fire would be Flame Axe, Water Frost Bow, and Earth Magnetic Shield.

Would this give us a more versatile Elite that could compete with Elemental?

Would it perhaps even be too strong, given the immense versatility it would provide? There’d certainly be a good chance it could become the new ‘de facto’ elite over Summon Elemental.

• If they implemented something like that they would have to create 4 new utility skills to keep the number of skills the same across all the professions.

• Fiery Greatsword would dissapear because you already have Flame Axe for the fire attunement.

• It sounds very flexible and strong. You are giving up only one elite slot instead of your utility slots. So you will basically give up your Summon Elemental or Tornado for 4 conjured weapons with all those abilities and have the ability to put anything else you want in your utility slots.

• Engineers will hate us for having an elite granting us 4 “kits”.

Would make far more sense.
Especially seeing as it would turn into an elite skill that doesnt ACTIVELY HAMPER you.

kubertz, I don’t think there’d necessarily be a need to remove the existing utility skills. They’d still have an advantage in the form of much lower cooldown compared to the elite, and, should tornado/elemental ever become more impressive, there might still be people who would prefer to use them and have a conjure in their utilities.

Fiery Greatsword disappearing wouldn’t be a terrible loss. I’ve seen it used once in about the last 300 PvP matches. It may see more use in PvE, but I doubt it.

On the flexibility front, I don’t disagree. It could perhaps have a limited number of charges compared to normal (10 maybe), with the trait buff only providing 5 more, rather than the normal amount. As far as the ‘but then people will use it instead of utility conjures’ argument goes, I don’t think that’s something that happens even with our existing sub-par elites. We have more necessary utility skills than conjures, and until that changes, the weapons don’t even come close to competing with the exception of a few gimmick builds where they are of arguable effectiveness.

Engy’s can suck it :P If Tornado was better we could complain about how they have an elite that gives them that

I use conjures a fair amount.
sometimes i would like to see the conjures on the elite because currently the conjures have to be more powerful than the utility they replace.

they do a pretty good job.

conjures get the bonus’s of whatever attunement you are in.

reminder…
10% while in fire is +10% to the conjures damage while in fire.
all of those bonuses work.

Crunchy Gremlin.5798:

they do a pretty good job.

If you have any links or some hints in what situations you prefer to use which conjures that would make me very happy.

It is hard for me to identify situatios n when to use shield, GS or hammer as a D/D ele. I can see the usage for the bow, but I’m not sure about the rest.

Crunchy Gremlin.5798:

I use conjures a fair amount.
sometimes i would like to see the conjures on the elite because currently the conjures have to be more powerful than the utility they replace.

they do a pretty good job.

conjures get the bonus’s of whatever attunement you are in.

reminder…
10% while in fire is +10% to the conjures damage while in fire.
all of those bonuses work.

Do you use them in PvP or just PvE?

I have found no way to use them in PvP simply because I’m D/D and to survive I absolutely need to have all my defensive and healing abilities on tap 100% of the time.

I think the best fix to a conjure weapon is to allow us to weapon swap without dropping them. This way you can use your greater Fiery sword and switch back to your standard weapons for the support, then back to Fiery again.

@Albane

Yep, I agree. I might use the conjures if you could weapon swap with them.

Creslin.1758:

Crunchy Gremlin.5798:

I use conjures a fair amount.
sometimes i would like to see the conjures on the elite because currently the conjures have to be more powerful than the utility they replace.

they do a pretty good job.

conjures get the bonus’s of whatever attunement you are in.

reminder…
10% while in fire is +10% to the conjures damage while in fire.
all of those bonuses work.

Do you use them in PvP or just PvE?

I have found no way to use them in PvP simply because I’m D/D and to survive I absolutely need to have all my defensive and healing abilities on tap 100% of the time.

I use them in both.
Primarily i used them in PvP. keep in mind that I am forcing myself to use them to understand them

I use lava axe mostly.

i use a standard d/d opening move sequence.
mist form/lava axe/earth armor for utility.
open with air->fire->earth->water->lave axe.
lava axe is like a second fire attunment that i can use and get bonuses from any other attunment. It also has a 900 range. so instead of taking arcane blast or wave or whatever i take the axe.

with the axe i do a ring of fire and a leap for a fire aura. +20 crit +4% damage with water 25.
the axe goes away pretty fast so it fits in well with my rotation. I rarely have to ditch it as each auto attack on a crit is ~1400 damage.

Fiery great sword though has a two fold problem
1 FGS has a skill curve higher than learning to press a few buttons.
2. its on 3 minute timer so if i blow it then its waiting a long time to be useful again thus making it more difficult to learn to use.

Those are pretty big issues as an ele dies so fast that making some mistakes is costly and further steepens the learning curve. I think that the FGS is not used like the hammer or the axe. that it needs a different spec. im guessing something more fire attuned. but again i think its recycle is too long.

I would like to have all the conjures as an elite option with a 60 second CD but that would be a fairly powerful effect.

OK all that said… I am only rank 17 and die a lot anyway…

Here is a basic build i have been using with axe. the axe here should be used from water.
http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc/elementalist#3|3|2771|628|3984|1848|1027|0|0|0|0|25|1887|1889|0|0|0|0|0|30|2261|2260|2259|15|2250|0|0|0|0|0|28016|28047|49966|49966|49966|49966|49966|25790|48792|0|0|0|0|
I generally use the shaman jewel but the build utility does not have it or show its bonus…

1 hing to note about fiery great sword is that the autoattack appears to be able to fire behind me.

another note is that conjures can be summoned and used from mistform.

That. Fire Axe is very underrated. I use it too as my range skill with D/D.

Conjures need to lose the cd and add “gain charges when not in use”.

I’d rather see Conjure Fiery Greatsword be a utility skill while keeping the high cooldown and have the elementalist get an active combat elite similar to Signet of Rage, Rampage as One, Entangle, Basilisk Venom, Mass Invisibility, or Time Warp. The Elementalist is one of a couple of professions that doesn’t have an Elite that can be used to actively supplement the play of your build without compromising it.

Skill changes, and transforms has an overall negative impact on the flow of a build. The best elite Elementalists have is Glyph of Elements, which just summons a passive that you can’t even command.

i would agree that the common usage of the ele does not fit well with the use of the elites in general. I also think that the elemental is generally the best elite except that its broken in respect to air trait 8.
Mainly its the best because i dont have to think about how to use it. the fiery great sword i believe is just like the ele.

its hard to learn to use.

fiery great sword is also fairly exciting used with runes of lyssa for 5 secs of all buffs.

When I have a mesmer in a dungeon party, I like when the ele conjures the fiery greatsword for them, certainly ups the DPS a bit and also helps in hitting those elusive burrows and some of the other annoying little things you cant hit unless you summon a meteor shower down on them.

The obvious fix for conjures being terrible (because they lock your other attunement skills out) is simply for them to replace the skills of only 1 element, so that you can continue to switch attunements ie:

• fire axe, fiery GS replaces only fire attunement skills
• frost bow replaces only the water attunement skills
  etc…

One thing that might help in my opinion, is for players to not lose their weapons’ stats when using a conjure. That in itself is quite a large loss, and is tough for the conjures to compensate.

“It’s hard to learn to use” should never be an excuse as to why an ability i s considered bad. That’s a problem with the player, not the class. Complexity is generally a skill barrier thing and what we should be focussing on is final results disregarding player skill, because skilled players WILL learn how to use this skill if it’s really worth using.

Currently it doesn’t have enough in the way of positives to really warrant using. I personally prefer it over glyph of elementals, but it needs to do a lot more damage given how long the recharge is and how few charges it has. It doesn’t really offer much utility either. Randomly striking meteor showers? Meh. Inconsistant DPS is not very attractive.

Another problem I see is that the conjures need to be worth 20 skills. If those skills are locked until I drop them, they better be kitten worth it.

Take for example lightning hammer 1. It is 3 in 1.
AoE attack
blast finisher every 1.5sec
and AoE blind every 1.5sec

All conjure skills need to be like that.

how about fire axe only replaces the 1st 3 skills?

so you keep your offhand skills

I hate when someone not from party just takes it and run away giggling. :/

here is a mists video of how i like to use the lava axe… im just not that good at the ele in general…

http://youtu.be/_SER5Nl__1g

those videos are useful… i see that if i use the burning retreat move away and out of the fire ring i can use the ring as an obstacle to keep people at ax range in prepation for another burning speed/RTL.

I did some stuff with the FGS too and i think the real power of that device is running away as it can shoot at stuff behind me with the autoattack.

on the subject of fiery greatsword, if you get someone trapped in a corner and use fiery whirl in there face… well lets just say im still a little hard from doing that