Guild Wars 2

For thsoe wanting some insight on how the devs play eles, I noticed something interesting:

In the Ready Up Blog at 1:07:27 one of the devs mentions the following:

Elemental Contingency would go really well with the new earth trait because you cannot be crit, and you gain protection, so you’re actually pretty tanky.

Any ele worth their salt would know of course that Elemental Attunement would be a much better choice for this by miles. It costs 10 trait points less, its protection duration is twice as long and it triggers whenver you switch to earth to defend without forcing you to remain in earth. And that’s not even considering the aoe or the other reasons why EA is better to use.

So if you wonder why some ele decisions seem so out of tune with how the ele functions…this should give you some insight to the why.

I think they were just trying to show the synergy of the new GM traits. If Elemental Contingency work like EA (Boon ICD is per attunement) I’ll definitely give it a try.

Kyon.9735:

I think they were just trying to show the synergy of the new GM traits.

If they wanted to show the new trait’s synergy, then they should have shown their synergy to the current traits. In this case, anything EC does for Stone Heart, Elemental Attunement will do better. This just makes it look as if they balanced EC around supposed synergy with their other grandmaster trait.

If Elemental Contingency work like EA (Boon ICD is per attunement) I’ll definitely give it a try.

You’d still have to get hit 4 times for boons you can get more easily in other ways. Well, other than retaliation but that requires you to be hit even more for it to be useful. EA (and EA) just blow this out of the water, and then jump on it and smack it, and then insult EC’s choice of phone while they’re at it.

ThiBash.5634:

Kyon.9735:

I think they were just trying to show the synergy of the new GM traits.

If they wanted to show the new trait’s synergy, then they should have shown their synergy to the current traits. In this case, anything EC does for Stone Heart, Elemental Attunement will do better. This just makes it look as if they balanced EC around supposed synergy with their other grandmaster trait.

If Elemental Contingency work like EA (Boon ICD is per attunement) I’ll definitely give it a try.

You’d still have to get hit 4 times for boons you can get more easily in other ways. Well, other than retaliation but that requires you to be hit even more for it to be useful. EA (and EA) just blow this out of the water, and then jump on it and smack it, and then insult EC’s choice of phone while they’re at it.

IIRC they said it’d allow Bunker Elementalists to be “tankier” paired with Stone Heart. But I completely agree, the boons you get aside from Retaliation are somewhat lackluster and can already be obtained via other traits.

It seems that they only thought of EC as a pure bunker 0/0/x/x/30 build wherein you get Fury without putting points in Air for Zephyr’s Boon, and Vigor without traiting for Renewing Stamina since you probably won’t have enough precision to constantly do critical hits.

Elemental Contingency gives the Elementalist access to Retaliation. That’s huge. If the ICD for Elemental Contingency is per attunement, I could definitely see stacking Might for tons of Power and then getting hit while in Fire to do, well, really massive retal damage.

Neko.9021:

Elemental Contingency gives the Elementalist access to Retaliation. That’s huge.

No, it’s minor. Eles aren’t facetanks, they’re built to either cc the enemy or avoid being hit. If they take enough hits for retaliation to become useful, they’re gonna lose the fight.

Kyon.9735:

If Elemental Contingency work like EA (Boon ICD is per attunement) I’ll definitely give it a try.

And if it doesn’t, it’ll be crap.

ThiBash.5634:

Neko.9021:

Elemental Contingency gives the Elementalist access to Retaliation. That’s huge.

No, it’s minor. Eles aren’t facetanks, they’re built to either cc the enemy or avoid being hit. If they take enough hits for retaliation to become useful, they’re gonna lose the fight.

If you’ve ever fought a DPS Guardian, you’ll see just how strong Retal can be on a DPS build. DPS Guards are very squishy yet they get a lot of mileage of damage out of having Retal.

they don’t play elementalist
they play the  arrow keys + 1 professions
tanky elem, that’s funny

DiogoSilva.7089:

Kyon.9735:

If Elemental Contingency work like EA (Boon ICD is per attunement) I’ll definitely give it a try.

And if it doesn’t, it’ll be crap.

Well, you just confirmed it. It is crap

Neko.9021:

ThiBash.5634:

Neko.9021:

Elemental Contingency gives the Elementalist access to Retaliation. That’s huge.

No, it’s minor. Eles aren’t facetanks, they’re built to either cc the enemy or avoid being hit. If they take enough hits for retaliation to become useful, they’re gonna lose the fight.

If you’ve ever fought a DPS Guardian, you’ll see just how strong Retal can be on a DPS build. DPS Guards are very squishy yet they get a lot of mileage of damage out of having Retal.

lol dude don’t compare dps role between guardian and elementalist
dps guardian can survive longer than dps ele making Retaliation more viable, and i consider its a fail if you want to get hit if you are dpsing with an ele

Neko.9021:

If you’ve ever fought a DPS Guardian, you’ll see just how strong Retal can be on a DPS build. DPS Guards are very squishy yet they get a lot of mileage of damage out of having Retal.

Like Chris said, retaliation only works if you can afford to take a few hits. The ele can’t, and 3.5 seconds every 10 seconds is hardly 100% uptime. You’d be both lucky and unlucky if you could get 1 damage pulse out of every retaliation.

Thing is, from what they’ve stated, they DO want builds where you can be more reliant on a single attunement and swap less. I think they had that in mind with the new traits. And I would wager a lot of players want them to make such builds available. Unfortunately they seem to refuse to make the changes to the rest of the traits that are necessary for that to work!

Firstly, no build is ever going to be completely non-swap. But the problem if you build to rely on one or two attunements more than swapping you are locked out of them too long if you swap at all. We need either some manner of individual attunement recharge available in each tree. Look at how air went from the least used tree outside arcana to the most with one change.

Example: Fresh Air, but they could also just make it so points in a tree reduce its own attunement CD, this would be a much better decision in my opinion.

Second, non-arcana traits should reward you with appropriate offensive and especially defensive ability the further you go in to the lines, for the longer you stay in that lines attunement. And attunement swap bonuses should be earlier in the lines and most should linger for some period of time without staying in the actual attunement. These would be best placed in the minor traits.

Minor Adept: Provides an offensive and defensive bonus or affect upon attunement to that element.
Minor Master: Provides a defensive bonus or affect upon attuning to that element, as well as a bonus that scales up for the first 8 seconds you stay in that attunement.
Minor Grandmaster: Provides a defensive bonus which scales up a great amount the longer you stay in that attunement, up to 20ish seconds. None of these would tick outside of combat.

Example: The fire tree’s awful minor traits
Minor Adept: Heat Wave- Apply 2s of weakness and 4s of burning when you swap to the fire attunement.
Minor Master: Heat Exhaustion- Apply an additional 1s of weakness and 2s of burning upon attuning to fire. Gain 1/2/4 stacks of might at 1/4/8 seconds in fire attunement.
Minor Grandmaster: Inextinguishable- When an opponent removes burning they gain 1/2/3/4/5 seconds of weakness at 2/4/8/14/22 seconds in fire attunement.

ThiBash.5634:

Neko.9021:

Elemental Contingency gives the Elementalist access to Retaliation. That’s huge.

…Eles aren’t facetanks, …

well, some of us are, but we ride the short lightning

@OP
Devs playing elementalist? I highly doubt that. The devs play warrior, mesmer and necro but no ele. And even if they try to “play” it they make mistakes because they can’t understand the class they themselves have created. A dev once admitted in an interview that nobody at arenanet knows how to play the elementalist.

ElexOrieN.2130:

A dev once admitted in an interview that nobody at arenanet knows how to play the elementalist.

Source?

I’ve concluded that the only spec the devs use, after reviewing all previous patch notes and twitch feeds, that this can be the one true spec, and setup, for complete domination in the field: It doesn’t get any better than this.

I don’t see anyone come out with this kind of build in PvP nor WvW. Also, why take Fire’s Embrace [IX], when you use only one signet, especially healing signet ?
Anyway; best ele build ever ^^

Wow. You’re really bright if you’re thinking I just post that build as my own.