Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

here are a few ideas which I think might improve the elementalist gameplay a lot. While looking for combos to use on my elementalist I found this wiki page:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Table_of_elementalist_combo_skills

Here are some thoughts that came to my mind:

- Trident and utility combos look fine. There are a lot of different combos you can use to your advantage. => no need to improve here.

- Staff adds a lot of combo fields. => no need to improve here.

- Staff only has combo finishers in the earth attunement. => less finishers in earth, more in other attunements.

- Scepter has no combo fields. => add 1 or 2 different combo fields (not fire since we already have a lot of fire combo fields).

- Dagger and focus only have fire combo fields. => switch 1 to another combo field (I am not sure here since fire is most likely the most powerful due to the might stacking)

- Dagger, scepter and focus finishers are mainly earth or fire. => less earth and fire finishers, more air and water finishers.

Besides that I would also take a look at the traits. Most useful traits are either in arcana or water (that’s why x-x-x-30-30 is so popular). I feel like some of the stronger traits should be in fire, air or earth (there are already good ones but in total I still think arcana and water offer more). The community would have to think about new ways to play an elementalist effectively without just using the standard build.

Another topic which came to my mind are the conjured weapons. There are 2 reasons why most people are not using them (in my opinion):

- There is only 1 trait for conjured weapons which means there is no good way to improve them.

- Even if you could improve them there are still charges you have to worry about. This means you can only use the conjured weapons for a very limited time. => no reason to use traits for improvement since you can’t use them all the time anyway.

Here are the 2 obvious solutions for this problem:

- Add more traits which focus on conjured weapons. I feel like the basic +% damage, % recharge rate, etc. would be enough.

- Remove the charges. There is absolutely no reason to keep them. If the conjured weapons would be to powerful without charges just balance them. This would add a lot to the elementalist gameplay since you can switch from melee range (D/D) to longe range (frost bow) or from long range (staff) to melee range (lightning hammer) like any other profession. Even more defensive builds (earth shield) would be possible.

The last topic I want to talk about are the bugs. They need to be fixed. This would make some traits useful just due to the fact that they finally do what they are supposed to do. There are some major bugs like attacking environmental objects with several skills or the audio problems for asuras (this is a major bug, believe it or not) and minor bugs like wrong tooltips. The focus should be on the major bugs since they influence the general gameplay instead of minor things.

Besides that the elementalist and engineer have more bugs than any other profession (just by looking at the bug threads in the different profession forums) so they definitely deserve some more attention.

A list with elementalist bugs:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/NEW-Elementalist-bugs-and-glitches-thread/first

Thanks for reading so far.

If you have more ideas or want to improve this thread feel free to comment. Have a nice day.

The idea of summoned weapons not having charges is something I’ve considered in the past and agree with here. I don’t see them being so powerful that they need to be limited. If some combination comes up where it’s a problem, I’d be fine with numbers being adjusted accordingly.

Make Scepter earth #2 an aura.

Raise the damage of scepter water #1. The damage on this could seriously be doubled and it still wouldn’t be anything of interest.

Scepter air #2 and #3 should be combined into one attack. Add something new. We have 2 instant attacks, one damages and one blinds. Have 1 instant attack that just damages and blinds instead.

Reduce the universal attunement swap cooldown from 15 seconds. Then lower the reduction arcane gives accordingly. 30 in arcane could still leave you at 9 second cooldown in the end, but maybe having the base be 12 seconds instead of 15 would have people feeling a lot less pressured to go deep arcane.

Make the 10 point arcane trait Elemental Attunement (boons on attunement swap) a baseline ability everyone has.

Have a weakened form of the 15 point water trait healing ripple (50% of what we have now) be baseline to the class. When someone with 0 in water switches to water, they heal for 50% of what someone with healing ripple does now. The new healing ripple trait would double the heal, making it be as it is now. As with the arcane change, it makes it feel a bit less necessary to go into water, while certainly still being desirable to do so.

Damage across the board while underwater needs a pretty significant boost. It’s hard even finding a place to start, damage on the majority of abilities are lacking. If every ability we had underwater was doubled in damage tomorrow (exception of water #5), it probably wouldn’t be overpowered. That’s how bad it is right now.

While I’m salivating at the thought of it, I think it would be hard for Anet to justify adding more combo fields to d/d or s/d or more finishers to staff, simply because it would get rediculous how much you could stack. So another question of course would be, what would we be willing to give up? I’d be willing to give up, I don’t know, say some percentage of our potential damage output, or lower overall vitality? They’d probably have to take something away to give us something back.

My dream would either be a light field for retaliation stacks… which there was a number of light based skills for ele in GW1 like Ray of Judgement, a lot of which have been transferred to the guardian class…
or I would like a poison field for weakness… although I don’t know which attunement poison field would make sense it… certainly not fire, water or air… maybe earth??

Oh well, we’re just dreaming here

You have a max of 3 finishers in staff (if you count Evasive Arcana and Arcane Wave)… you have a max of 6 finishers in s/d and 4 finishers in d/d. Could you imagine if a s/d had 3 or 4 fields on top of that… so much utility… sounds great to me, but probably wont happen…

a guy can dream tho, right