Guild Wars 2

There was a time when we were told that elementalist was to be the ‘king of versatility’, however for various reasons we know this to be a large pile of male bovine excrement. The attunement mechanic was given to us in place of the standard weapon swap on other classes to facilitate versatility (if ten skills are good, twenty must be better!), but ironically, it is this mechanic that shackles us the most.

Without traits, attunements are a drawback to something that has no benefit. The sole effect of attunments in this state is to lock you out of skills, leading to situations like staff users losing the ability to do any meaningful damage for a whole 13 seconds if leaving fire.

With traits added, there’s finally some benefit to activating attunements. Traits attach powerful effects like boons, healing, cleanses and damage to the attunements themselves, but this leaves us with two major problems. Firstly, you have to take specific traits for attunements to be beneficial at all, and secondly, you need to be activating each attunement as often as possible to get the most out of these benefits. It is this second problem that I wish to address.

Currently the cooldown on an attunement starts only when you leave that attunement. Combined with attunement bonuses being triggered when activating an attunement, this punishes elementalists for staying in an attunement for any longer than the barest minimum. To give an example, the standard source of sustain for most elementalists is water attunement, which gives an immediate heal, up to two conditions cleared depending on what traits are taken and further healing over time through regeneration and soothing mist. Because these effects are gained when activating water attunement and the cooldown on water attunement does not start until you leave it, this paradoxically means that every second you spend in water attunement is a second during which you are not benefitting from water attunement.

What I would change, therefore, is to make attunement cooldowns start immediately when activated. The global cooldown would remain unchanged and you would not be able to activate an attunement that is already active, but you would now be able to use an attunement for as long or as short as you like without being punished for it. A staff user would only lose out on damage for the time it takes to use whichever defensive skills are required. Any elementalist could make use of the water weapon skills without limiting their access to the water attunement bonuses. In general, elementalists would be able to use the right skill at the right time, rather than whatever happens to be available at a given time.

I quite like this idea, though I’d see base attunement cooldowns increasing again if it were to happen - since staying in one attunement wouldn’t necessarily be a punishment, it makes sense to require folks to invest in arcana if they wish to dance more often.