Overall, I like the Elementalist class. I like the idea of attunement swapping and changing roles on the fly. I like the high learning curve and unparalleled skill ceiling.
What works?
Elementalist weapon skills feel solid (for the most part) and work well together. The vast majority of their weapon skills just mesh. They feel well-designed from an ability standpoint.
Specific traits like Bolt to the Heart and Elemental Attunement are just beautiful.
Cantrips feel good – and are good. They often feel necessary.
What is lacking?
Traits
In contrast to the beautiful synergy between attunements, traits are essentially at war with each-other and with the elementalist class as a whole. The Ele is meant to be swap-happy. A dedicated Ele is a dead Ele.
Why then do the majority of traits encourage the Elementalist to be played incorrectly? Bonus damage for one element. Cooldown reduction for one element. Bonus bleed duration (which is mostly exclusive to earth, other than sigils). The list goes on. The traits that improve over duration the longer you are attuned to x element are by far the biggest offenders.
Fire in general is a very selfish element trait-wise. Unless you are running a conjure build or making use of Spell Slinger or Burning Precision, it offers nothing to the other elements.
I would recommend shifting +damage % and +cooldown reduction traits to the weapon-based traits in the Arcane line. An example would be – you move 15% faster and have 10-20% cooldown reduction while wielding a dagger.
Trait compression is always a wonderful thing to have.
And speaking of Conjures
They need work.
Their trait support is almost exclusively (if not exclusively) in Fire Magic – the most unsynergetic trait line. In addition, what little trait support they have consists of things that feel like they should be baseline.
They do not benefit from sigils. This needs to be fixed – sigil support could be huge on something like the FGS.
They lock you into a single skill bar, contradicting your role. An earlier thread had suggested that they act as a secondary weapon set while in use. This is brilliant.
Elites are ….. ehhhhhhh….
There is a reason why the glyph is used so frequently. The FGS needs work, just like other conjures, and the Tornado feels suicidal at best, largely because of its limitations to your skill bar and short range, coupled with a high cooldown- it’s situational, unlike the glyph, which is versatile, easy to use, and relatively strong.
If it looks like a channel, smells like a channel, feels like a channel, and tastes like a channel, it’s a kitte- I mean a channel
Elementalist have a large number of channeling spells. Unfortunately, not all of these even benefit from associated traits. Things like Meteor Shower and the auto-attack of the FGS need to benefit from the channel-based traits.
Elementalist killed me, HARD NERF Elementalist MORE…