I’m taking a cue from the wvw discussion threads here -
Please post ONE thing – the ONE thing you think is the most “at fault” for the lack of ele build diversity. Don’t give me an essay on it; just post it. If it’s something no one’s thought of, you might need to explain it, but no one needs an explanation of “arcane trait line – attunement recharge.” This is intended to give devs a concise, non-confrontational summary of what the ele community thinks.
I’ll start:
—Reliance on water traits for condi-removal, especially with the melee range of d/d—
Heart of the problem? Most players don’t understand what “Jack of all trades” means.
Put another way, the Ele’s strength is that our weaknesses are not as weak as our opponent’s weaknesses. No matter who/what you are facing, you can perform their weakness better than they can.
Why do those that know the least know it the loudest?
The varying usefulness of utilities accounting for cds .(When was the last time you saw a glyph focused build or a build that used more than 1 conjure consistently).
Wouldn’t say that is the MOST at fault but it is definitely a factor.
The ele suffers from what feels like the class was used as a brainstorming session for every other class. It was the first class to be show cased so it has some of the early ideas (we even keep the idea of bundles getting special effects on occasional lowbie bundles like rocks). Some of our other abilities were just outsourced to other classes (e.g., signets). So we’re kind of this franken monster of different stages of development for the game. They need to eject the old stuff and replace it with things that match the later style for the class. Yeah, I cheated the question.
Our lack of build diversity comes from 1. lack of survivabilty within other trait lines and 2. lack of good traits in general. Personally I am excited for these changes.
Higher CD than is needed on several of our skills and on attunement recharge. Lowering the CD on many of our 4/5 weapon skills and on the more absurdly high CD utilities (Armour of Earth and Mistform for example, but even things like Glyph of Storms suffer from this) would go an incredibly long way to making us more viable.
Heart of the problem? Most players don’t understand what “Jack of all trades” means.
Put another way, the Ele’s strength is that our weaknesses are not as weak as our opponent’s weaknesses. No matter who/what you are facing, you can perform their weakness better than they can.
The problem with the Ele is that our strength (which you listed above) is irrelevant, because the current state of the game essentially forces you to focus on one thing, not to use an ‘all around build’. In a game where every class truly needed dps, condition damage, healing, and toughness, the Elementalist would shine. But right now the game is nowhere near that.
Survivability is terrible unless you trait fully for it. Costs to survive increasing further and overall survivability decreasing.
Useless traits at the adept level, and breaking even more lines for most builds. Moving most viable adept traits to master doesn’t improve variety, it just nerfs everything.
It’s entirely why we spec the way we have to and not the way we want to. Until this changes, nothing else really matters. They can dangle buffed Conjures, but we still need/want Cantrips. They can offer new Grandmaster traits and we’ll still end up speccing x/x/x/20/20 in most cases. We will always have to gear for Hitpoints which will force us into weird/expensive gear builds just to make up for a lack of what other classes get naturally.
Honestly the whole thing is pants on head kittened design. Look at the medium armor users. Thief has lowest HP (11k), most in combat mobility and escapes. Ranger has medium HP (15k), and relies a lot on regeneration for heals. Engineer has huge HP pool. Now look at the light armor users. Elementalist has lowest HP (11k), relies on a number of small heals/regen to tally up. Mesmer has medium HP (15k) and has a huge amount of in combat mobility and escapes. Necro has huge HP pool.
See how it’s criss-crossed there? The in combat mobility/escape class has that in combat mobility/escape mechanics because they have the lowest HP. Instead, for light armor, it’s the class with Medium HP pool who can ignore gearing for HP which also now lets them have high burst HP while still having good mitigation via Toughness.
The main problem I feel is with the lack of motivation for people to try. Recently, a few threads have gone up introducing dps builds rather than arcana support, and they slowly seem to be accepted as viable. But popular belief is working very much against ele variety.
If you can read this then it is proof that ArenaNet’s moderators just, kind and fair.
Main problem with the class is quite paradox, because it’s basically the thing which keeps ppl to play it even though the constant nerfing. It’s the class mechanic, attunement switching. On one hand, it’s a brilliant idea of a class mechanic and that made my decision to play this class, on the other hand, it’s so complex compared to other classes that it’s nearly impossible to balance, therefore we are dumped to the ground because of players skill (which was extremely visible in the beta and early release, skilled players was destroying everything, even though the class wasn’t “stronger”, it just offered much more possibilities to player)
I know it’s a long post, but I wanted to be accurate
The lack of base survivability in combination with the lack of good alternatives (like damage increase) forces us to mainly focus on improving our survivability, leading to the same builds. At the moment going for something other than speccing mainly into survivability just isn’t worth it in comparison.
Solution: Moving some of the extra survivability from traits and slot skill to the base survivability and better alternatives so ele’s can choose what to specialize in instead of being forced into one direction just to keep up.
A few accidents completely turned the class away from ‘versatility’ and towards spike dps or massive sustain (both are exceedingly cheesey).
The over the top numbers on a few ele weapon/trait heals, the insta cast dps abilities, the reliance on traits for cleansing and if you can’t get it you have to go insta-gib burst… that forced Anet to see the ele as an insta-gib or sustain class.
I mean, of course, instead of fixing those thingss o the class could have actually been a jack of all trades, they didn’t want to… they ‘let the meta play out’ and were too silly to actually realize that ‘working’ does not mean ‘working well’.
TL;DR
The class is never going to be as originally intended and at best you guys can keep it as a competitive spike dps and possibly get a viable team support setup back in (if you can stop them from shafting d/d again and again, or remind them that elementalists DO actually have a second offhand weapon)
> Double-layered cooldown system being VERY complicated to use effectively, players face a steep and frustrating learning curve
> Massively telegraphed and slow-animated weapon abilities, a lot of which require enemies to stand perfectly still or require expert positioning + timing
> All survivability tied to Arcana + Water + Cantrip builds, all other builds are prone to dying extremely easily with almost zero room for error
I’m special so I can post multiple flaws with the class :P
But seriously, this class has way too many things wrong with it.
“Jack of all trades” = “Sucks equally at everything”
Reading these ele forum pages is a real downer.
I could go play my ele to cheer up. lol. No that’s risking severe depression.
I’ll go play my Guardian. It works. It’s like being on holiday.
Low health, armor, and mobility. Those three do not go well together… Fgs is too long of a cooldown to be a reliable source for mobility. RTL nerf hit eles hard as well. At least back in the day the cd on RTL was low enough to allow us to compensate for the fail of all trades class. Ele with high defense is purely a punching bag, while warriors and guardians with 3k+ armor can still have a lot of kill potential.
If new patch goes through, the practically dead d/d roamers will be even worse off. By moving vigor up to 20 points in arcana, you still lock the ele to spec into that line. 30 in earth isn’t worth going for because it’s way too easy to hit an ele below 90% health.
Double-layered cooldown system being VERY complicated to use effectively, players face a steep and frustrating learning curve
This has always puzzled me. I’m a new ele, but what kept me from trying it for so long has been the attunement cooldowns. As an engi main, it just seems, well…unfair. Kit swapping with no cooldown vs attunement swapping with huge cooldowns. And long cooldown utilities to boot.
This is intended to give devs a concise, non-confrontational summary of what the ele community thinks. 