Guild Wars 2

Well other than being meta anyways.

Just a FYI, this is someone who hasn’t played a whole ton of ELE, but let me describe you my take on it, and perhaps you can give me some insight.

When I first saw ele, I saw all the abilities and thought that all those abilities would translate nice into real time tactics. For exampole “this enemy is using this ability and him doing that , that means i should use my number 5 skill, switch to lightning and do this” Things like thast simply dont seem prevelant, for all the attune variety, there seems to be little counter play and strategy mixed in.

What I do see is ROTATIONS. And yes you can mess up rotations but its the same thing over and over again. There are some exceptions it seems but those exceptions are not that important it seems.

So do you see where I am coming from . I admit I dont have that much experience on ele, but for all its abilities you have to use, it seems to be boring and yet keeps you busy at the same time. Am I wrong?

All games have skill rotations, anyone worth their salt uses them… ele is no different to any other class in gw on that front so i don’t get what you’re trying to say.

Well, when I started playing the game I went from one class to another until I tried ele. That was a long time ago, but ever since then I mostly played this one class. Since I pvped a lot I was always trying different classes, but in the end came back to ele.

For me it was exactly the number of possibilities that was entertaining. When I played other classes, I usually got bored quickly, but bear in mind that this comes down to a build. I played a bit of d/d ele back in the day and it wasn’t bad, but due to heavily depending on rotations it just wasn’t that much fun. But when playing fresh air, you could do anything you wanted. Sure, you needed to keep going back to air, but that was in time when this had 5 sec cd, so there was plenty of time for messing around. It was truly the only build I really enjoyed on ele. Sometimes I played d/d when my team begged me to, but thankfuly that wasn’t too often. However, it was a way stronger build than fresh air since FA was never really viable in pvp, let alone the competitive scene.

Well, then they butchered it and it made me kinda sad. I played that build for years and it was gone. Don’t get me wrong, I still tried to play it (and zerker not marauder), but quickly came down to realization it’s just not gonna work, especially after hot release.

So we got tempest and frankly that’s the most boring thing I ever played. Phantaram said when you play tempest, you press a button and it’s like the game plays for you. It’s true. You hold one button and wait for it to do the work. It’s rather based on decisions than rotations, but due to the attunement camping and long cast times it’s just not fun at all for me. I mean, even d/d was fun compared to this.

So in my opinion, ele has the potential to be a lot of fun to play, but due to balance and the elite spec it’s been going rather a boring direction and that’s why I stopped playing the game. I still go on forums, especially around big patches, cause I hope that they will make fresh air viable some day.

But after all, everyone is different and like different things. Ele was popular cause d/d ele was a fairly easy build to start with and on top of that it was also very strong. In pve it’s still one of the highest dps and that’s why people pick it. So tldr, people played it a lot because it was meta. You can also see way less eles now, since it’s not really that strong anymore and we’ll probably see even less after the patch hits.

For me it’s the combination of proactive and reactive plays.

There’s a constant tug-of-war between rotation and situation. As a beginner, you’re using skills randomly as you see the need, then you learn to do the leet rotations, and finally you end up appreciating reactive skill use again.

Personally I’m not a fan of the engi playstyle. If all your skills are available at all times, that’s a loss of depth rather than a gain in my humble opinion.

In short, you can get pretty far with rotational knowledge alone, but weaving the steps of the attunement dance according to the situation is the true joy of playing ele.

I do try to pick the correct skill for the situation whenever possible, but due to attunement cooldowns, this is often not possible. I don’t really use rotations (though maybe I should?) in pvp. That’s more of a pve thing. and by pve I mean dps race. In pve stuff that puts pressure on your ability to stay alive, you can’t just use rotations there either

Anyway, what you’re looking for you can find in engineer. Kits don’t have cooldowns.

Because it has lots of group support while setting up big combo fields with chill, cleanses, and burning.

Gokil.2543:

For me it’s the combination of proactive and reactive plays.

There’s a constant tug-of-war between rotation and situation. As a beginner, you’re using skills randomly as you see the need, then you learn to do the leet rotations, and finally you end up appreciating reactive skill use again.

Personally I’m not a fan of the engi playstyle. If all your skills are available at all times, that’s a loss of depth rather than a gain in my humble opinion.

In short, you can get pretty far with rotational knowledge alone, but weaving the steps of the attunement dance according to the situation is the true joy of playing ele.

I was going to comment but this guy already covered everything I wanted to say, especially the bolded part.

+1 To Gokil.

Laraley wrote: It’s rather based on decisions than rotations

This is the reason i love tempest. I am a tactical player not fast klicking and rotating always the same. For some its boring but i can beat down oponents by only 2-3 swaps a fight …. Its all about positioning and watching what your oponent does.

reikken.4961:

I do try to pick the correct skill for the situation whenever possible, but due to attunement cooldowns, this is often not possible. I don’t really use rotations (though maybe I should?) in pvp. That’s more of a pve thing. and by pve I mean dps race. In pve stuff that puts pressure on your ability to stay alive, you can’t just use rotations there either

Anyway, what you’re looking for you can find in engineer. Kits don’t have cooldowns.

Well, d/d ele was all about rotations, because you had to stack might to get some damage going. Tempest is different because it forces you to camp attunements and overload. Despite the fact tempest is not about rotations that much, your decision making is rather limited due to higher cooldowns on attunements and camping. While it seems you have more freedom, it’s often not like that.

PvE is obviously all about rotations to maximize your damage.

Cobrakon, I think a lot of veteran ele players would love for the class to be as complex as you describe, freely swpping to any attunement depending on what your opponent is doing to you, but unfortunately the class would take a lot of rework to function like that and remained balance, tempest pushed the ele into an even more dull state since you’re forced to camp an attunement for much longer than you sometimes may want to, and I think thats why this class is now dead to me. I just cant competitively play ele the way I want to with out hindering my potential skill build which bugs me.

I hope for some good buffs on 26 compensating cele loss. Scepter, WH, a bit focus, fire traits, elite, conjures .. so much still not cared about.

I’d love anet forever if they reworked overloads to allow you to instantly re enter an attunement for the current cooldown penalty in order to try and pull off some sweet combos.

dodge on overload is it XD.

>for all the attune variety, there seems to be little counter play and strategy mixed in.

That’s why GW2 PvP never took off.

I feel they just try to do this. Classes that counter each other more and more offensive direction. I hope ele gets some good things to compete, otherwise with cele removed it might get hard.

Its fun to be able to jump arone with fire and lighting (earth kind of but no ice dash yet sadly) being able to take hits by healing and out put dmg at the same time. Its not that fun to fight ppl when you do no dmg to them and lose out right due to an error but at the same time its not fun to fight ppl when you comply kill them with out them getting any thing off on you. Ele is that class that you can always win but you will have to “fight” for it there just not “i win button” like some other classes have.

For me i like a bawl type fight not a one hit fight.

the rotation is only the skeleton to the elementalists Playstyle, if u played strictly to it, u would inevitably die as its build for might stacking and not survival, SPVP is alittle too Unpredictable to realistically use it as a Playstyle rather then a guideline as u will always have to use resources else where for survival or in the moment split second decisions. you have a lot more to pay attention to and to know when u can use the rotations to begin that Damage ramp.

I find the Elementalist fun to play cause each level has its own learning curve and I feel like I constantly get better at it, also magic themed proffessions have always appealed to me realistically.

Watson.6492:

>for all the attune variety, there seems to be little counter play and strategy mixed in.

That’s why GW2 PvP never took off.

GW2 PvP did take off, just not as fast as Arena Net hoped…

the issue isn’kittens “counterplay” the issue is its a MMORPG, todays PvP is in MoBAs.. and the games Meta is bull, nobody wants to see bunker Metas etc etc so for various tournaments nobody bothers to watch it yet during zerker metas in tournaments the numbers rise.

its hard to realistically pull off what Arena net are trying to and we’ll wait and see if it sees any more lift from where it is now as we carry on… end of the day no games made it big after only 3 years… some of the games we compare GW2s ESL potiental at are 10+ Years old which isn’t a fair evaluation at all.

I love the staff, it was a little bit boring pre-HoT but now with overloads I feel like each element is useful and has a distinctive role. Mainly PvE.

I’ve always played ele/mage in every rpg I ever played. I like to burn stuff.

Cobrakon.3108:

I’ve Never UnderStood Why Ele is Popular.

Flashy stuff of course! Boom Boom Meteor Shower.
As long as angernet keeps it’s visuals I’ll play the thing.
If you have human female as your elementalist(which you should), look at her face when casting this, after that look at famous Colinface, after that look at your own face and all questions of “why” will instantly fade away. Now go and blast things.