Guild Wars 2

So, like many other Ele’s, I think that there is a serious problem with our four traits that reduce the cooldown of attunement specific skills. These are the traits like Geomancer’s Alacrity that reduces that cooldown of earth skills by 20%…there is one for each attunement.

The problem is that any decent Ele should not spend a very long time in one attunement once in combat. This has been discussed to death, and I think most good Ele’s will agree that it is true.

What this means is that the cooldowns of your individual attunement skills are basically subordinate to the cooldown of the attunement itself. So that if say, your ring of earth skill is reduced from 6 seconds to 4.8 seconds with your trait…it won’t mean much to you, because you will likely switch to another attunement before the cooldown is up, and thus have to wait the 9-15 seconds for earth to be available again to use ring of earth.

This, and this alone I feel renders these skill cooldown reduction traits near useless.

So here is my idea to fix this, and make Ele a more interesting class:

Make traits that reduce attunement skill cooldowns also reduce the recharge rate of the attunement itself.

I can think of a few reasons why this would be awesome:

1. It would allow Ele’s to reduce attunement cooldowns using something other than arcane.

2. It would allow Ele’s to “specialize” in one or two elements, while still maintaining the active “attunement dancing” playstyle. The only difference would be that if you specialize, your main attunement would be available more often, so your rotation might go from Air->Fire->Earth->Water to say Air->Fire->Earth->Air->Water.

3. It would make certain trait lines more appealing…I think that being able to SWITCH to something like fire more often to lay down more DPS would actually be something that Ele’s want.

Would this increased recharge rate stack with arcana making a possible attunement cooldown of 7.5 seconds? That could create problems with skills like elemental attunement which can give up to 8.25 seconds of protection.

If they didn’t stack then I wouldn’t even notice a difference as I still need 20 in arcana for renewing stamina, elemental attunement, arcane fury, and lingering elements(assuming it ever works the way one would assume it would, in its current form it’s worthless).

I also have a solution that could be implemented along with yours. Change the traits to “Weapon skills recharge 20% faster while attuned to air”, then make it an attunement bonus that works with lingering elements.

Sounds good on paper, but how do you balance it with other classes? You know how every trait line has a weapon or two tied to it for other classes…how do you make the ele equivalent more versatile without ultimately making it superior?

Cosmic Teapot.9162:

Would this increased recharge rate stack with arcana making a possible attunement cooldown of 7.5 seconds? That could create problems with skills like elemental attunement which can give up to 8.25 seconds of protection.

If they didn’t stack then I wouldn’t even notice a difference as I still need 20 in arcana for renewing stamina, elemental attunement, arcane fury, and lingering elements(assuming it ever works the way one would assume it would, in its current form it’s worthless).

I also have a solution that could be implemented along with yours. Change the traits to “Weapon skills recharge 20% faster while attuned to air”, then make it an attunement bonus that works with lingering elements.

Personally, I think that the arcana tree needs to be reworked a bit. The attunement recharge rate reduction is way too powerful, an elemental attunement is so necessary that I think it should just be a class feature.

I guess I was thinking that these changes would go along with a general rework of the arcana tree.

TWMagimay.9057:

Sounds good on paper, but how do you balance it with other classes? You know how every trait line has a weapon or two tied to it for other classes…how do you make the ele equivalent more versatile without ultimately making it superior?

Because other classes’ weapon traits do more than just reduce the cooldowns.

Warrior greatsword trait, reduced cooldowns and might on crit.

Engineer trait works for multiple weapons.

etc.

Currently we have the most worthless cooldown reduction traits.