Guild Wars 2

Make Attunements Swap 10 seconds (from 15), eles fixed, thx.

attunement swapping is not the only issue and personally i dont see why as we are locked into either Melee or Range why we cant swap like every second. It doesnt effect our abilities – they all still have the cool down and we cant swap from range to melee or melee to range…

I agree with OP here…
I dont think Elementalist is broken at all. Since I play it as one of my main and favorite classes. But I do think shorter cooldown for Attunement Swap would be soo much cooler and epic!

Specially when I need to change to “Water” to freeze the enemy with Chill and to “Fire” and use lava around the enemy who is chilled for more damage/control effect. its fun to change attunments. So short is better.

Sorry but i have to disagree about the “ele is fine” argument completely. Damage is awful compared to other professions. Just plain awful. 1hb wars can do 17k on glass cannon, backstab thieves around the same depending on cds. To do my burst (which cant even remotely compete with that) i have to (i use daggers, scepter 2 is avoidable even with updraft): air 4-5, fire 3-4-2 (this passage is optional)-5. Notice 5 has a 45 sec cd. 45 secs for a spell that doesn’t do 8k but if we are lucky 5k.

And at any point my camera can be wrong, it’s very easy to miss. At any point a stunbreaker can end my burst which is a pretty long chain if compared to say 5, f1, 1. (and not one of this abilities has a cd). Air 1 almost misses half of the time even after the “fix”, so does fire 2, air 2, water 2. All 1 spells of every attunement except for scepter 1 air and maybe staff fire 1 have a damage that… if u remove them from game i dont think anybody would notice. We are speaking about hundreds vs 2k of other professions. I dont even consider viable to go condition: 2 decent spells (scepter 1 earth and dagger 5 earth) and 1 is pretty hard to land. Even supposing we land churning earth we are slower than a necro, a thief, a ranger, an engi for bleed stacking.

Adding to that the survivability if u go glass cannon is a laugh. Ele is extremely weak against controls: no automatic traits for say cloak yourself or have protection while stunned. A controlled ele is a dead ele. Even a 1 sec stun is deadly. Cause you know for some reasons we have low health and low armor adding to low damage. In exchange for what exactly? aoe i guess and some more healing options if compared to other professions. Just doesnt cut it for me.

What to do to solve this? First of all: Fire traits and to some degree air traits. Would be cool to have stats about people who picks fire traits: they are USELESS. And i mean USELESS. “Best” one is 10% damage in fire attunement. It’s a first tier trait: grandmaster traits are an insult. And that’s all said. Nobody builds around fire traits. Only exception may be the condi based aura build. In that case u go for fire embrace to have auras when u use signets. That forces u to have 30 pts in earth for written in stone. Not my pair of shoes so i didnt test that extensively. But the thing is we need fire traits designed for direct damage. Another line that needs rework but in a minor way is air. Mostly i’m speaking of the grandmaster traits. 20% damage on stun/kd is useless since we have so little control but if we add control and make it work with knockback MAYBE it’d be worth taking. Tempest defense is kind of good but it feels to me like it should be on second tier not 3rd and give space to something else.

Second thing: we need more control and/or traits for defending from control, specially for daggers. Maybe and i say maybe halving the cd on earthquake and updraft could do.

These are the 2 things i can think about while playing unhappily my mesmer. Before u ask: rank 30 here, played ele from the beginning, switching to other professions from the last patch while still trying to find something that works for ele unsuccessfully.

Sorry to say Elementalists needed some help. Weapon swapping like other classes would help, and armour that works at close quarters. I agree about the need for a shorter cool down for all abilities and attunements. Played spell casters in all sorts of games, the idea used in GW1 was good where you could have a secondary class, usually I chose priest so I could heal companions/allies, and myself of course.

If you guys played on my server… I could show you some strategies on elementalist that can give you ideas.

=)

Vissarion.6509:

Make Attunements Swap 10 seconds (from 15), eles fixed, thx.

erm, i dont get it. i regularly swap attunements every couple of seconds. even if you don’t add points to arcana, the cd is not 15 seconds.

the cooldown for attunement swaps without any points in arcana is about 15s yes u probably just dont notice it cuz u dnt switch attunements often as for ele doing bad damage are u smoking? we can bring on the pain just like any other class and dnt even compare us to no HB warrior come on man that crap is the easiest skill to dodge ever. we have so many ways to negate its hits and get out of it.. i admit some classes got it easy they can press 1 or 2 buttons and bam they hit over 10k but imo we are the most versatile class in this game right now. U actually need to practice with this class to get good not go stright into battle press a few buttons and WIN ….×.x

Facepunch.5710:

Vissarion.6509:

Make Attunements Swap 10 seconds (from 15), eles fixed, thx.

erm, i dont get it. i regularly swap attunements every couple of seconds. even if you don’t add points to arcana, the cd is not 15 seconds.

the cool down without it IS 15seconds, so you saying you swap “every couple of seconds” is either an over exaggeration or a lie.

I really do not want bring down your hope, but most likely you will see a father nerf on elementalist in next patch. I am not trying to be weird here, my point is that the higher expectation you have, the more disappointment you gets.

Look the ranger, they may have issue but generally, the class does a ok job in PVE (in compare of elementalist, not saying elementlalist is bad, but the work required to get the same efficiency of ranger or warrior are huge, way more than they need) . And one dev came out says he think that ranger had a lot of issues, and he “confirmed” that the class will be improved in next patch. And you all see what happened to that, they got nerfed. They expected the improvement since Oct. But all the way they get nerfed twice. In one of the patch, Anet nerfed shortbow #1 because of animation issue, instead of fix the animation, they decide to slow down the attack, which make no sense whats so ever. At the end, the dev came again, instead telling people what really happened, he just said, look we got only people working on staff, get lost we have no time to deal with you people.

Well, at least they showed up twice in ranger, did you see anyone showed up here? yes, there was one dev asking for suggest on improvement, but how did that go? I could not even find the post anymore. And if they really listen to people here, then that means all we asking for is nerf.

In a short version, stop make suggestions, you not going to get anything. Go play the game, or enjoy your life. No hope no lose.

Fiery Lily.8046:

Sorry but i have to disagree about the “ele is fine” argument completely. Damage is awful compared to other professions. Just plain awful. 1hb wars can do 17k on glass cannon, backstab thieves around the same depending on cds. To do my burst (which cant even remotely compete with that) i have to (i use daggers, scepter 2 is avoidable even with updraft): air 4-5, fire 3-4-2 (this passage is optional)-5. Notice 5 has a 45 sec cd. 45 secs for a spell that doesn’t do 8k but if we are lucky 5k.

You are actually doing it wrong. If you’re going to compare a full glass cannon Warrior, then you have to compare it to a full glass cannon Ele.

In the video below, you’ll see an Ele doing over 21k damage in under 2 seconds with only 3 abilities (Burning Speed, Ring of Fire, Flame Grab.)

Ele’s can do massive damage if they actually spec glass cannon, which they almost never do. The survivability is bad, but the damage is easily on par with other professions’ glass cannon builds, if that’s what you’re going for.

what i am trying to say, most of ele’s problems will be removed when the points in arcana stop being a must, we will have 20-30 more points to throw to other traits and be more viable

Facepunch.5710:

Vissarion.6509:

Make Attunements Swap 10 seconds (from 15), eles fixed, thx.

erm, i dont get it. i regularly swap attunements every couple of seconds. even if you don’t add points to arcana, the cd is not 15 seconds.

The cooldown to switch back to the same attunement is 15 seconds. I.e., if you leave Air, Air is on CD for 15 seconds. You can switch to the other attunements every couple seconds, but if you do, they’re all going to be on CD once you’ve cycled through all 4.

The upshot is that to be playing the class to its fullest potential, you really need to spec into Arcane to get your attunement CDs down to around 10 seconds, which pigeonholes pretty much every Ele build to put 15-30 points into Arcane.

Best suggest I’ve heard is to make the base CD 12 seconds, and cut the CD reduction from the Arcane line in half, so a full 30 points in Arcane still gets you to 9 seconds. This makes Arcane very useful, but not completely mandatory.

In my opinion 5 second cool down with 2.5sec cool down as a trait and make it so that the Arcane line makes Arcane abilities better

Survivability difference between armor types isn’t that big. Comparing 3 level 80 exotic sets:
Light – 920
Medium – 1064
Heavy – 1211

So, its 291 armor between Light and Heavy. With scepter and 10 points into earth, you can get 250 toughness from rock barrier and 170 from obsidian focus, 100 from the trait point investment and 80 from stone flesh.

Sure, it requires you to use a scepter, but 520 toughness while in air or 600 in earth is pretty great for 10 points.

Base HP at 80 is the lowest, tied with guardians and thieves, and guardians certainly don’t seem to have survivability issues.

If you are fragile, its because you chose to be.

still eithier or that cooldown on attunements needs to be lowered just a tad bit because if u choose to put 0 in arcana which is not really recommended u have that 15second cooldown on attunement swapping aswell as ur official skill cooldowns so ur pretty much forced to put atleast 15 points into arcana anyway its like u have no choice in the matter. ive tried it at 0 arcana and trust me that crap was not fun in anyway shape or form x.x

Fiery Lily.8046:

Damage is awful compared to other professions. Just plain awful. 1hb wars can do 17k on glass cannon, backstab thieves around the same depending on cds.
Guess you missed the Glass cannon topic about the Ele doing 23k burst dmg in 2 seconds

And at any point my camera can be wrong, it’s very easy to miss. At any point a stunbreaker can end my burst which is a pretty long chain if compared to say 5, f1, 1. (and not one of this abilities has a cd).

So basically u’re saying “I’m bad and can’t dodge so change Ele so I don’t have to dodge!” ?

Air 1 almost misses half of the time even after the “fix”
This I acctually do agree on, it does miss a bit to much

, so does fire 2, air 2, water 2.
Learn to aim..

All 1 spells of every attunement except for scepter 1 air and maybe staff fire 1 have a damage that… if u remove them from game i dont think anybody would notice

Dunno wut kind of Ele you play but my Fire 1 hit for 3×700-1100 and my air 1 hit for 900-1500 and that’s kinda good.

Adding to that the survivability if u go glass cannon is a laugh. Ele is extremely weak against controls: no automatic traits for say cloak yourself or have protection while stunned. A controlled ele is a dead ele.

Again, I’m not sure what Ele you play. But I have protection up a lot, I can escape away from enemy range in less than a second, I got loads of slows/stuns, I can cure up to 8 conditions every 15 sec and kitten I got damage.

Even a 1 sec stun is deadly.

Never been killed cuz’ of a 1 second stun. Vs a glass cannon theif, I might have died, but they are easily countered. You just got to pay attention, get hit by something you can’t see – theif: Use mist form = win.

Cause you know for some reasons we have low health and low armor adding to low damage. In exchange for what exactly? aoe i guess and some more healing options if compared to other professions. Just doesnt cut it for me.

I got 18k hp. Now that might not be the highest, but it’s decent. And I rarely die so no complaints

Second thing: we need more control and/or traits for defending from control, specially for daggers. Maybe and i say maybe halving the cd on earthquake and updraft could do.
LOL u cute ^^

So why all elementalists i see in teams play support staff? Do we really have any other options? I would really love to see stats about the ppl that does tourneys both free and paid. I would really like to see how many successful dps eles are out there (support eles are still viable imho). I know honestly i’m not one of them while i’m perfectly ok with mesmer. A matter of playstyle? I would even say i play ele better than mesmer but still the instrument feels much more powerful when i use the second one.

@Calle:
- I did miss that post, gonna give it a look if u link
- Dodge. Universal excuse for unbalance. L2 dodge. Sure, gimme infinite dodging and i will, unfortunately i have 2. I even have often vigor on but still there are moments when i cannot dodge.
- U r kind of right about fire 1 IF all 3 lines hit, which is not always the case. About air 1 we both agree “miss” counts as 0. I’ll give you that IF it hits the damage is ok, but since it doesnt…
- Thanks, good suggestion. Unfortunately since i often move around my enemy and so does he those spells do miss a lot.
- Yes, i can escape, assuming i’m not controlled: rtl is a very good spell, so is mist form. I do think ether renewal became interesting: though u r right to say UP TO 8 conditions since interrupts may happen. Yet escaping is not my thing: i may win or lose but escaping is not my thing. I do that occasionally when that 5 points could be necessary for the win but even so i dont like to do it.
That said with people that actually mark a target who is the first to go down in general in a group fight? Personally i target mesmers first (but mainly to keep attention on which is the real one) but i notice generally many teams go for the ele 1st (unless it’s bunker). And before you say it: also my leader goes for ele often, not just the other team cause i’m a baddie.
- I’m quite curious about your build: 18k life would mean knight or soldier amulet. Am i wrong? Please link me your spec, i’d like to test survivability and damage.
- Thanks for the cute, i would have appreciated a less sarcastic tone but meh.

mouse.1689:

Ele’s can do massive damage if they actually spec glass cannon, which they almost never do. The survivability is bad, but the damage is easily on par with other professions’ glass cannon builds, if that’s what you’re going for.

This is correct. I bolded the most important line. This happens I think mostly due to the sheeple mindset and ignorance of the class overall.

boozer.7815:

mouse.1689:

Ele’s can do massive damage if they actually spec glass cannon, which they almost never do. The survivability is bad, but the damage is easily on par with other professions’ glass cannon builds, if that’s what you’re going for.

This is correct. I bolded the most important line. This happens I think mostly due to the sheeple mindset and ignorance of the class overall.

I think that most people don’t do it because (in sPvP at least) glass cannon Ele’s are incredibly fragile. Sure, it’s fun as hell to blow people up, but the defensive builds have more going for them, imo:

• Survivability. The difference between a glass cannon spec and a more balanced spec is HUGE.

• The ability to fight multiple opponents without dying, which is good for distraction and point defense.

• 1v1. Speaking from personal experience, having played both specs a great deal, I can say that I am MUCH more confident going 1v1 against pretty much any class using a more defensive build. It takes longer to win, but it happens much more consistently.

• The ability to survive burst from other glass cannons. As a glass cannon, an Ele that gets opened on by a Thief will die about 9 times out of 10. With a more defensive build, those numbers are reversed.

• Group buffs. In tPvP, Powerful Auras is the strongest ability D/D Ele’s have.

Thieves and Mesmers can get away with playing glass cannon builds competitively because they have stealth and evasion mechanics that mitigate their fragility almost completely. A glass cannon Ele has… Mist Form.

Long story short, if you want to see huge numbers and make people explode, Ele can totally do it, but there are a whole lot of really valid reasons why the more defensive builds are more popular.

Fiery Lily.8046:

So why all elementalists i see in teams play support staff? Do we really have any other options? I would really love to see stats about the ppl that does tourneys both free and paid. I would really like to see how many successful dps eles are out there (support eles are still viable imho). I know honestly i’m not one of them while i’m perfectly ok with mesmer. A matter of playstyle? I would even say i play ele better than mesmer but still the instrument feels much more powerful when i use the second one.

@Calle:
- I did miss that post, gonna give it a look if u link
- Dodge. Universal excuse for unbalance. L2 dodge. Sure, gimme infinite dodging and i will, unfortunately i have 2. I even have often vigor on but still there are moments when i cannot dodge.
- U r kind of right about fire 1 IF all 3 lines hit, which is not always the case. About air 1 we both agree “miss” counts as 0. I’ll give you that IF it hits the damage is ok, but since it doesnt…
- Thanks, good suggestion. Unfortunately since i often move around my enemy and so does he those spells do miss a lot.
- Yes, i can escape, assuming i’m not controlled: rtl is a very good spell, so is mist form. I do think ether renewal became interesting: though u r right to say UP TO 8 conditions since interrupts may happen. Yet escaping is not my thing: i may win or lose but escaping is not my thing. I do that occasionally when that 5 points could be necessary for the win but even so i dont like to do it.
That said with people that actually mark a target who is the first to go down in general in a group fight? Personally i target mesmers first (but mainly to keep attention on which is the real one) but i notice generally many teams go for the ele 1st (unless it’s bunker). And before you say it: also my leader goes for ele often, not just the other team cause i’m a baddie.
- I’m quite curious about your build: 18k life would mean knight or soldier amulet. Am i wrong? Please link me your spec, i’d like to test survivability and damage.
- Thanks for the cute, i would have appreciated a less sarcastic tone but meh.

You seem to speak ONLY out of a sPvP/tPvP point of view, wich is just wrong. You can’t speak of the entire proff if you only play a small part of the game. I play sPvP, tPvP, PvE and WvW. I play mostly D/D Pewpew like boss Elementalist, sometimes switch to S/D or S/F for range stuff and I never ever use Staff cuz’ I hate it. I have the same build for everything I play 0/10/25/15/20 mixing it with the right runes and sigils and I got myself an awesome dps/surviving Elemntalist critting 6-8k with Firegrab and tanking like a boss.

Infinte dodge? Dude if you need that to make it in pvp you’re not a good Ele, sorry. You have this set of skills (4×5 weapon skills+3 utility+1 elite) and 2xdodges wich recharge at a rate of “??” (I dunno). It’s your job to learn how to use those in a combo. And the not run away part is just lol. Playing Ele I find running away one of the best things I can do. But I usually don’t run away as in run away and fight another day, no, I run away out of my enemies range, wait til’ I get my heal back up, then run back to the fight. Some people may find this noobish but soz, u people just suck. If this guy pops all his cd’s and makes a burst at me so I almost die and I run away (he fails to stop me), I heal up and come back when he got all his cd’s and I kill him, I see that as a win. If you don’t wanna run ‘away’ that’s ur problem, fine u die. But that doesn’t mean Elementalist doesn’t work just cuz’ u don’t want to play it the way it’s made.

And sure, here’s the stats I run with in Tournies:
2820 Attack (3070 when I got full Bloodlust runes)
20% crit (40 % when I got fury wich is pretty much all the time)
2605 armor
18945 health
1645 toughness

And I do awesome in tPvP.

Also everyone complaining about Elementalists not being able to make glass cannon builds like theives and that theives are super OP, let me ask you a question:
Have you guys acctually played theif? Or have you just been killed by em’, seen loads of QQ on forum ‘bout them and then started QQing yourself? And if you might have made one, have you acctually tried playing it, like really playing it as a proff or just running around backstabbing people like most of the noobies theives does? If you haven’t, I suggest you go make a theif and check it out for yourself, cuz’ I did. I got a theif as my alt now and while I still find the proff itself a huge LoL and an insult to GW2 it still change my entire perspective about that proff and I do acctually enjoy trollin’ all the theif haters.

But still Elementalist is in my <3

Eles are my favorite but I hate how they are treated.

Early on….

An Elementalist fires a Meteor Shower. Any place the meteor shower graphic hit inside the circle directly hit a player. Then players complained thinking that 20 – 40 players will get wiped out by a meteor shower. The solution?

Reduce a skill down to five targets! Now we have no control over what takes damage and a group of 20 can be stacked together and since the spell randomly targets and hits what is in the circle, guess what! All one needs to counter meteor shower is have as many targets inside the circle to split the damage up!

WOW! Way to go!

This is the first MMO I’ve played where its encouraged to have as many people in the area of effect to minimize damage spread by spreading it randomly among players.

Great!

40 – 50 players complain "How come an Elementalist can kill all 40 – 50 of us stacked together? and the result is….Keep zerging, we’ll reduce target count to five. Rather than asking "What are 40 – 50 players doing stacked together in the first place? and how come 40 – 50 players can’t kill an ele considering their base HP is 10K, they have lowest armor in the game. They can’t cloak and they have to stand still casting the spell….

What gives?

Oh, the same thing happens with healing builds!

I can attune to water and run 0/0/10/30/30 with full cleric and Dwayna runes. However I can’t control how many targets I can heal because it was reduced to five! So when I heal since no priority exists on the targets that are healed, I can be wasting heals on NPCs rather that using them on my own party.

It used to be that the spellcaster had the most devastating attack spell because of all the risk associated with using it. So now….let me get this straight!

In order to make an Elementalist a super damage dealing class…..I have to become a lightly armored, melee class. Carry around two daggers like a thief and try to burn everything right? I don’t mind the melee exposure, but as far as versatility goes I hate the fact that each update breaks or destroys something that I love about Elementalist.

Why is it that when players excessively complain about one class, the answer is always the nerf that class and power another? This was also true in the first guild wars. I felt classes were powered and nerfed to create flavor of the month.

When this game first started, I gave it praise for having the logical sense that if there was an Area of Effect, one of two things can happen. Either the attack occurs on the inside and if collision occurs, a hit occurs. Or, the entire area of effect gets hit once and everything inside takes damage.

@Calle

I like your Elementalist Build. Ele is my love and I try a lot of things. We do have a lot of high power things going for ourselves.

The only thing is that I bet you really thought out the build to the point that due to the restrictions and nerfing of abilities that now there are fewer and fewer builds that actually work. In fact thanks to the way targeting works at times, I feel I am playing with a RNG to hit targets when I am defending (like using meteor shower on top of a tower against 20 players below me)

I love how my damage is split up to the point it doesnt do much, but any mesmer while im standing can pull me off the cliff and unless I mist form on the bottom, Im pretty much dead.

So much for the entire idea that “Guild Wars 2 is about freedom of choice and diversity in its classes”

I love guild wars 2, but I have more freedom of choice in the other three games I play as a spellcaster where I can slot my skills into my quickbar to get to them and depending on what I slot and which weapon I use, I have to go either Melee, Medium or Long Range.

Yes, let’s cement in place one singular build, that’ll help.

:|

People need to
Stop relying on Armor/Traits.
Stop focusing on Damage all the kitten time.

This isnt a class with Tank/Healer and Damage Dealer classes.

This game focuses on Damage/Control/Support.
You got skills to deal “Damage”.
You got skills to help you stay in “Control”
You got skills to help you “Support” yourself.

All these help you be self-effeciant.
And in Party Play, Coordination of Control/Support while dealing “damage” is important.

If all you think about is “Damage” then ur a liability in the party, not an asset.
Team Play is important when it comes to coordination of “Control” and “Support”

Elementalist, just like the other 4 classes I have played, are all equally good and effective in Damage/Control/Support.

As long as you are on the Move+Dodge… You seriously shouldnt be taking damage.
Specially with excellent Support and Control utilities that helps you reduce or stop an enemy from hitting you when u got agro.

@ the OP:
I recomend you play Elementalist and see what u think. Its really fun if your into Magic using type classes. But be warned, You’ll need to do lots of Attunment changings to use skills you need. And you’ll need to be on the Move and Dodge a lot to evade tons of attks. If your up for it, you just might like it. =)

But i am playing ele since BWE1.

Vissarion.6509:

But i am playing ele since BWE1.

i am too.

Vissarion.6509:

But i am playing ele since BWE1.

Me too, and while you’re idea may help in a few small ways, it falls very very short of being a ‘fix’.