Guild Wars 2

Know what I wish was a viable build? One where you could use a different element for each situation. Maybe fire for burst, earth for DoT, water for healing, air for control…you know, kind of how ArenaNet likes to imagine the class now. That would be cool.

The only builds I ever see are bunker builds which just sit and tank usually in earth/water attunement & scepter/dagger or dagger/dagger builds which never stay in one attunement for more than 5 seconds.

There is no adjusting your attunement to meet the situation, it’s either roll through all your attunements very quickly or sit in the tankiest attunement. That’s a shame.

I think this is because the difference in power/utility between your skill #1 & your skill #5 is too great. This encourages us to use all the high cooldown skills and attunement swap to use more high cooldown skills. If they powered up our #1 & #2 skills, but powered down our #4~5 skills, I feel like there would be less pressure to constantly roll through attunements.

However, in order to correct the problem, an elementalist needs to have the ability to fight successfully using only one element. Thieves don’t have to switch from dagger/dagger to win in a fight if range permits. Warriors don’t have to drop that greatsword if their opponent tries to get in their face. Why should an elementalist be required to swap through all elements in order to compete when other classes don’t have to weapon swap in every fight?

Added bonus; they could further specialize the attunements. Make earth way heavier on bleeds but have essentially no control, burst, or healing. Make fire way heavier on the burst, but have essentially no DoT, healing, control. Have air have tons of control & essentially no damage or healing. And have water have tons of healing but no damage or control.

You know that would make you do near zero dps the moment u swapped out of fire? And with long attunment cd…
Anyway i personally like the playstyle of ele as it is. Just needs some adjusments.

Bond.4813:

You know that would make you do near zero dps the moment u swapped out of fire? And with long attunment cd…
Anyway i personally like the playstyle of ele as it is. Just needs some adjusments.

Because bleed builds can’t do damage. Necromancers clearly don’t ever kill anything.

Beside the point, fire/earth would be your method of doing any dps. The purpose of water/air isn’t dps, it’s control through immobilizes, knockdowns, blowouts, etc. or for water it would be heals/condition removal for survivability.

Fighting a glass cannon? Air attunement to keep it from bursting on you, fire attunement once you’ve created an opportunity to put it down.
Fighting a tank? Earth attunement to wear it down while water attunement keeps you healthy.
Capping a point? Air attunement to keep the other team away.
Holding a point? Water attunement to hold out until reinforcements arrive.

There is more to this than simple burst damage.

Because unless traited/equipped bleeds can be pretty much ignored. And same goes for direct dmg builds. Damage is there.. its just not worth using (as primary dmg) when you can use spells you traited for. For instance in my s/d build you will never see me intentionally stack bleeds when i have other dmg spells avaible.

Instead we use different skills from each attunement depending on situation.

But yeah, let´s look at speculation about the effects.

Squishy ele swaps to fire, get´s immediately facerolled as he doesn´t have any way of negating damage, ccing, opponent or generaly any survivability.
Same story with earth, except he now has a chance to deal damage post mortem if opponent doesn´t just use condition removal.
Swap to air and maybe you can keep yourself alive, but no damage means that it´s only matter of time.
Water same thing as air, except that you can be useful for your team while trying to survive.

So basicly we´d have everyone being bunkers, until they swap to earth/fire and be glass cannons with evenmore emphasis on glass than currently…sounds ok aguess.

You get enough trait points to max two elements. You don’t have to pick the two offensive elements (fire/earth) or the two defensive elements (air/water). You can mix to not be glass cannon or bunker.

I’m not saying make them all uber without traiting. I mean allow traits to let us have this kind of control over our build. Let traited attunements do what the attunement does best, and do it better than people who don’t trait into it.

Sure, my idea isn’t perfect. But at least I’m trying to come up with a way to introduce more viable builds….Elementalist should be one of the more versatile classes in the game.

Simplicity.7208:

You get enough trait points to max two elements. You don’t have to pick the two offensive elements (fire/earth) or the two defensive elements (air/water). You can mix to not be glass cannon or bunker.

I’m not saying make them all uber without traiting. I mean allow traits to let us have this kind of control.

If we increase the potetial of attunements, we would need to basicly limit attunement swaps to very long cooldown for obvious balance reasons.
Now then, with long cooldowns, what would happen when one switches to offense? Well he stays in offense untill game says it´s ok to move back. And as people love to state, ele without defense is dead in seconds.
Other way to work around balance would be to make anything not traited utterly inefficient. Problem with that is that it would still mean that people had to do bunker(air or water) first, then switch to offense and hope that nobody notices until he can switch back. Basicly it would limit eles to switching between 2 different attunements, offense and defense (main emphasis on defense as in most casesgoing offense withou way of keeping oneself alive is swift death sentence), as other 2 wold be rather useless without traits.

Strang.8170:

If we increase the potetial of attunements, we would need to basicly limit attunement swaps to very long cooldown for obvious balance reasons.
Now then, with long cooldowns, what would happen when one switches to offense? Well he stays in offense untill game says it´s ok to move back. And as people love to state, ele without defense is dead in seconds.
Other way to work around balance would be to make anything not traited utterly inefficient. Problem with that is that it would still mean that people had to do bunker(air or water) first, then switch to offense and hope that nobody notices until he can switch back. Basicly it would limit eles to switching between 2 different attunements, offense and defense (main emphasis on defense as in most casesgoing offense withou way of keeping oneself alive is swift death sentence), as other 2 wold be rather useless without traits.

Simple solution; triple attunement cooldown, but make the master or grandmaster minor trait for that attunement -66% attunement recharge for that attunement. This would effectively allow us to have two attunements that could be swapped to and from about as frequently as other classes get weapon swaps, with an added bonus of the other two, non-traited, ineffective elements for niche situations.

Simplicity.7208:

Simple solution; triple attunement cooldown, but make the master or grandmaster minor trait for that attunement -66% attunement recharge for that attunement. This would effectively allow us to have two attunements that could be swapped to and from about as frequently as other classes get weapon swaps, with an added bonus of the other two, non-traited, ineffective elements for niche situations.

Which would lead to situation that we´d have to be able to switch between our 2 chosen attunements pretty much at will to avoid instant death resulting from no defense wahtsoever when switching to offense or the 2 untraited attunements.

The thing about this whole idea is that it would reduce elementalist to swapping between defense and offense, without middleground. Sure there´s few different flavors of defense and offense, but pretty much the same still.
Bringing diversity by dumping down the mechanics is just not going to work in my humble opinion.

Strang.8170:

Which would lead to situation that we´d have to be able to switch between our 2 chosen attunements pretty much at will to avoid instant death resulting from no defense wahtsoever when switching to offense or the 2 untraited attunements.

The thing about this whole idea is that it would reduce elementalist to swapping between defense and offense, without middleground. Sure there´s few different flavors of defense and offense, but pretty much the same still.
Bringing diversity by dumping down the mechanics is just not going to work in my humble opinion.

There are ways to make it work. I feel like the best thing they could do to make the elementalist more balanced would be to improve the trait system and weapon skills. Right now, any build with 30 fire or 30 air is doing something really wrong. It’s a shame that two of our five trait lines can’t ever be utilized due to the resulting build being too kitten. I was just trying to think of a way to allow someone to compete with a fire/air build, a fire/water build, a fire/earth build, an air/water build, or an air/earth build.

Maybe I’m too optimistic. Warriors just spam hundred blades or hammer knockdowns. Thieves just abuse glass cannon burst or conditions. Necros just do conditions or minions…Maybe all we can expect is a bunker or a glass cannon from an ele.

In which case, make the glass cannon ele more cannon, less glass. Our burst skills right now are really sad in comparison to other classes.

Agreed, there’s every incentive to mash the attune keys and very little to stick with one for a while. I’m not saying I want it to be possible to faceroll fire all day and totally ignore the F1-F4 keys, but as is there’s basically no reason not to blow your cooldowns and move on to whichever set of four you need next. This is partly because of cooldowns, and partly because all the elements have plenty of utility by default.

One option is to move some of that utility away from the base skills and into low-hanging traits that grant utility to those skills. These would be picked up naturally while climbing your way towards mastering that element, or plucked from all elements to enable the current spastic Arcana builds to thrive. You could even buff individual skills a bit since there’s an opportunity cost on them now. I’m thinking this would mostly affect lower-cooldown skills in the middle of the bar, the ones used often enough to really define the weapon’s playstyle.

If you went for the big CDs instead you’d wind up with a bunch of long cooldowns that do nothing important without traits, and there would be too little incentive to swap to your non-favored elements. They’d be lacking those big, clutch spells you’re after when you really need healing/mobility/control right now. Hitting the little ones still leaves them as low-CD attacks of various shapes and sizes that you can use while waiting for your favored elements to cool down, which isn’t nearly as nasty a fate.

I also think Pyromancer’s Puissance is an interesting concept that could be expanded upon here. Similar high-hanging, snowball-y traits in each tree could offer incentives for focusing an element or two without getting out of hand in Arcana builds.

EDIT: I really like that idea for grandmaster minor traits. There’s an elegance about it. I don’t think I would have gone as far as triple CD, but something that grants increased uptime for your favored elements and increased freedom to dip in and out of others when the need arises.

My build is all about situational attunement.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcszM9molvMMolvMM0pVxaoaVcsV

With the focus its all about rotating defensive CDs with the usual dagger MH offensives.
I start in Air, either use 4 to mitigate ranged burst/Thief Elite or I open with a 5 CC and go do lightning whip and add weekness.

From there is the opponent about to burst me? Ok go Earth and pop 4/5
Are they chasing my ally? Earth + 3 to catch them
Do I need defence? Earth
Do I need to heal or Slow the enemy? Water for ranged chill/Daze/Heal/Cond Remove
Do I need to go straight into fire to damage and grant allies fury? Nps
Is the guy almost dead but too far away and I’m out of CC? Fire Wall + Arcane Proj

Then throughout the fight you might need to rotate through water to get rid of a condition or earth for extra projectile reflect or Air for another round of Knockdown.

So you must just be talking about cookie cutter builds?

Simplicity.7208:

There are ways to make it work. I feel like the best thing they could do to make the elementalist more balanced would be to improve the trait system and weapon skills. Right now, any build with 30 fire or 30 air is doing something really wrong. It’s a shame that two of our five trait lines can’t ever be utilized due to the resulting build being too kitten. I was just trying to think of a way to allow someone to compete with a fire/air build, a fire/water build, a fire/earth build, an air/water build, or an air/earth build.

Maybe I’m too optimistic. Warriors just spam hundred blades or hammer knockdowns. Thieves just abuse glass cannon burst or conditions. Necros just do conditions or minions…Maybe all we can expect is a bunker or a glass cannon from an ele.

In which case, make the glass cannon ele more cannon, less glass. Our burst skills right now are really sad in comparison to other classes.

I do agree that devs need to take a serious look at our traits and undeniably they need to tweak the balance a bit, as well as make whole experience more approachable by new players.
However i do not think that this means that the whole classes mechanics would need to be redesigned. Like i said presviously, i don´t think it would add variety, sure you could do different combinations but they´d be just different flavors of same.

Fire to burst in, Earth to get them down and start the bleed, Water to support the rest of my party. I don’t use air as much as I did in beta, dunno why.

I’m specced into Water, Arcane and Earth.

My guild have a habit of making the squishy ele pull aggro.

I agree to a certain degree.

I like the idea of each attunement being more geared towards a certain style, as it describes on our bar anyway. Fire being damage, burn, and AoE, Air being heavy direct damage + control, Water being support and healing, and Earth being DoT and defensive based. Right now, however, many attunements don’t feel like they live up to this standard.

I feel that they should make each attunement more specialized in it’s function, as described above. However, I don’t expect each attunement to only be that; that should just be that attunement’s primary focus. For example, you could go into Air for far more CC utility (Daze/Stun, Blind, Blowout, etc.), but you still have some in other attunements, just to a lesser degree (like Chill in Water, or Cripple in Earth).

I find that (for pvp anyway) the gear goes toward the elements. Gear is designed for all other professions to be for 2 weapons. Eles have 4 weapons. So if you take Cleric or Shaman amulet you are water earth main. Take Carrion, Rabid Earth main Fire now and then. Rampagers or Beserkers Fire Air. Knights or Soldiers Earth Fire/Air. Since their is no real way of buffing all our specs except Celestial we will be bias towards on or 2 specs.

I have gain protection on entering earth, that’s fantastic but when I’m using Shamans (scepter/dagger) I stay in earth, losing the protection bonus I could be getting by swapping to it every 10-12 seconds. With the same jewel, Air is just there for ride the lightning and the blind/blowback every now and then, the damage is so low there is no use staying in air. I switch to fire for dragons tooth, ring of fire might combo and straight back to earth. When my health goes down 20% straight into water for the 3 heals (evasive arcana) then back to earth.

The traits don’t help either, 20% more damage whilst in x attunement, 20% chance to set foes alite, only in fire etc.

Right now what is limiting the ele from getting having the attunements be stronger on their own is the fact that when you switch from fire to air, it doesnt matter if air was the right one to go to as you can just swap to earth in a sec. If the elementalist was given powerful solo attunements then we would have to have the global cd on swaps to be 15 sec instead of just on what you swapped out of.

EDIT: What i would like to see is if the above happens, or the global cd is even higher, that traiting into fire would decrease the fire attunements cd only, this with powerful traits would allow you to combo different attunement spells primarily with those you have traited.

ArenaNet could make it so attuning to an element grants a permanent boon as long as you’re in that element. Example; attuning to fire would grant might until you swapped out of it.

This way, we’re not encouraged to spam our attunement buttons to constantly maintain our boons because we can maintain the boons we need just by sitting in one element. Added bonus; it wouldn’t remove dancing through attunements as the trait that allows attunement bonuses to linger would still be there to allow us to grab tons of boons if we’re willing to dance.

I cede that perhaps earth would need to be looked at….permanent protection sounds fishy.

Simplicity.7208:

However, in order to correct the problem, an elementalist needs to have the ability to fight successfully using only one element. Thieves don’t have to switch from dagger/dagger to win in a fight if range permits. Warriors don’t have to drop that greatsword if their opponent tries to get in their face. Why should an elementalist be required to swap through all elements in order to compete when other classes don’t have to weapon swap in every fight?

Because attunement switching is our class mechanic, so the comparison to weapon switching is wrong. It´s more like Stealth/Stealing or Adrenaline/Burst for that matter….

STRanger.5120:

Simplicity.7208:

However, in order to correct the problem, an elementalist needs to have the ability to fight successfully using only one element. Thieves don’t have to switch from dagger/dagger to win in a fight if range permits. Warriors don’t have to drop that greatsword if their opponent tries to get in their face. Why should an elementalist be required to swap through all elements in order to compete when other classes don’t have to weapon swap in every fight?

Because attunement switching is our class mechanic, so the comparison to weapon switching is wrong. It´s more like Stealth/Stealing or Adrenaline/Burst for that matter….

apparantly attunement switching counts towards weapon swapping. i read it on this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Tanky-DPS-Elementalist-Videos-included

“You might ask yourself “But I don’t swap weapons as an elementalist!” Attunement switching is considered weapon swapping. The sigil has a 9second cooldown, and the elementalist benefits the MOST of this sigil of any class. Why? Your constantly changing attunements to maximize damage to maximize the CD recharge, whereas other classes change weapons based on situations.”

Reason why the OP suggestion will never work..
A guy fully stacked in pwer will never touch earth because of enormouse low condition dmg… He will probably never touch water attunement either because of 0 healing.
A guy fully stacked on condition dmg will never touch fire because even his weakest earth spell does more dmg due to the fact that earth has condition spells and fire all diect dmg spells. Etc.

By making each attunement into a different role.. It makes it impossible for the elementalist to gear/rune etc. For 1 or 2 specific roles… So by doing this you will force people to use only the attunements that fit their gear..

Thus making this totally not a good idea… At least as it is now people still tend to use all.

And if you dont use all atunements atm… You have no right.. Not even the slightest right to give even the smallest complaint about elementalist