Guild Wars 2

Elementalist Scepter main-hand is actually quite good. It’s only problem at the moment is its speed. It’s very slow. It’s too slow to be effective when faced with the damage output and utility that a dagger main-hand or even a staff can contribute to a battle. Therefore, I’m proposing some changes (keep in mind that most Elementalist skills have some after-cast delay so I have tailored the cast-time and damage suggestions to reflect that):

FIRE
Flamestrike

• Cast-time reduced from 1¼ to ¾ seconds.
• Damage reduced from 101 to 80.
• Burning duration reduced from 2 to 1½ seconds.

Dragon’s Tooth

• Dragon’s Tooth now uses ground-targeting.
• Upon fully casting Dragon’s Tooth, the tooth that manifests itself drops immediately.

WATER
Ice Shards

• Changed to a skill-chain: Ice Shard —> Ice Lance --> Glowing Ice

Ice Shard: Fire an ice shard at your foe.

• Cast-time: ½ seconds
• Damage: 100
• Range: 1,200
  —> Ice Lance: Launch a frozen lance at your foe that inflicts Bleeding.
• Cast-time: ½ seconds
• Damage: 100
• Bleeding (1 stack): 3 seconds
• Range: 1,200
  —> Glowing Ice: Fire a bolt of magical ice at your foe, granting yourself Vigor and inflicting Weakness.
• Cast-time: ¾ seconds
• Damage: 230
• Vigor: 1 second.
• Weakness: ¾ seconds.
• Range 1,200

Shatterstone

• Recharge increased from 2 to 5 seconds.
• Stacks of Vulnerability inflicted from the explosion increased from 4 to 5.
• On creation, Shatterstone’s AoE now creates a Frost Field. This Frost Field pulses once at creation and lasts 1 second. The pulse chills all enemies in its radius for ¾ seconds.
• This skill is now instant-cast (can be used simultaneously with other skills).

AIR
Arc Lightning

• Cast-time (channel) reduced from 3½ to 2¾ seconds.

EARTH
Stone Shards

• Cast-time reduced to ¾ seconds
• Damage reduced to 110.
• Bleeding remains at 3 stacks applied (1 per stone that successfully hits) but the respective durations of those Bleeding stacks is reduced from 6 seconds to 4½ seconds.

Rock Barrier

• Cast-time removed.
• Recharge increased from 15 to 20 seconds.

Hurl

• Is now a 5-part skill-chain.
• After activating Rock Barrier, the Elementalist has the opportunity to fire off each rock individually (up to 5 times—once for each rock).
• Each skill in the skill-chain that fires the floating rocks is called “Hurl.”
• Each “Hurl” has no cast-time (you can activate them without interrupting other skills).
• Each rock, if it hits, inflicts Weakness (1½ seconds), Cripple (1½ seconds) and does 120 base damage.

Dust Devil

• Cast-time increased to ½ second.
• Recharge increased from 15 to 20 seconds.
• Range reduced from 900 to 600.
• Now affects a 450 range knock-back on all nearby enemies in addition to inflicting blind (effectively a blind-inflicting version of the Mesmer Greatsword skill: Illusionary Wave).

“Dragon’s Tooth

Dragon’s Tooth now uses ground-targeting."

This. I really hate how the targetting works on that skill its too easily evadable. I do however think making it follow the target is abit too much

Bump because of a little update. I do think that it’s best if Dragon’s Tooth is simply just a ground-targeted skill. I’m almost certain that it was in the betas (or at least one of them). However, if the skill is deemed too overpowered with that feature, then it could be nerfed/changed appropriately after the fact. Regardless, I think that it needs ground-targeting and an instant drop.

The way it is now is effectively useless. It’s even worse than Hundred Blades—which is only good in PvE alone simply because most NPCs are brain dead and stand in it. Dragon’s Tooth as it is now is like Hundred Blades with a ridiculous wind-up.

Shatterstone also suffers from the same problem to an extent, but it at least doesn’t have the drop time interval. That skill is fine aside from a simple reduction in the interval between skill cast and effect.

Please God (and Devs), don’t make Dragons Tooth ground-targeted, simply reduce the animation time a little bit.

One of the reasons I adore Scepter as main-hand weapon is because of how few ground-targeted skills it has compared to staff. (yes, i know dagger MH has none). Please Devs, do not add another GT skill to this weapon set.

Besides, reducing the hovering animation time would correct what everyone hates about this skill in it being too easy to run/dodge away from. In effect, reducing the hovering animation time would not be adding adding yet another ground-targeted skill while still allowing the possibilty of people being able to avoid the attack if they react quickly enough.

Just making rock barrier on scepter earth an aura would make scepter so cool.

I wish Water Scepter 2 snared foes…outside of the healing in the set when combined with dagger, this seems to be one of the weakest. Healing on Elementalists is getting a nerf isn’t it? I really wish there was more incentive to specialize into an element. Too much homogenization, not enough specialization. No one can truly say they are a water mage or an earth mage and i think that’s kinda sad. I know the mechanics don’t work like that, but i think they missed out on a lot of distinct variety by pretty much forcing players to swap attunements like A.D.D. They could have basically created 4 classes in one like in GW1 if the combat mechanics were deeper.

lothefallen.7081:

I wish Water Scepter 2 snared foes…outside of the healing in the set when combined with dagger, this seems to be one of the weakest. Healing on Elementalists is getting a nerf isn’t it? I really wish there was more incentive to specialize into an element. Too much homogenization, not enough specialization. No one can truly say they are a water mage or an earth mage and i think that’s kinda sad. I know the mechanics don’t work like that, but i think they missed out on a lot of distinct variety by pretty much forcing players to swap attunements like A.D.D. They could have basically created 4 classes in one like in GW1 if the combat mechanics were deeper.

Water 2 sort of does snare foes in that it curtains off small areas at a time that players otherwise would venture into to sneak in close-range damage. I get what you mean, though. Water Scepter is probably the most lack-luster of the 4 elements. It would be nice if Water Trident left a water combo field for a moment after it splashed for the heal. That would at least be nice. They could adjust the healing accordingly to add in the feature. Or maybe they could make it a chain-skill that activated after you threw it. You could preemptively freeze the water field for a chill snare or something.

As for the homogenization of the elements for the class, the Elementalist of GW2 honestly plays no different than the Elementalist of GW1. In GW1, the whole point of running a particular element was because of specific skill chains and synergies that existed in that elemental attribute. You lined up certain skills of an element that all ran together and could be spammed or used effectively as a build. The GW2 Elementalist does this same exact thing, except that just opens up all of the elements to the player. The goal of the Elementalist in GW2 is to seek out combos and synergies in order to exploit them on the battlefield.

Being a GW1 player for several years, I can honestly say that I enjoy playing as an element-spitting Captain Planet more than I did sitting in one attunement in GW1, but now we’re getting into opinions so I’ll stop.

I am s/d wpvp’er and only use water to get to my dagger 5 really. Sure scepter 3 if I can, but it is so/so.

I spend 70% in air and rest split in fire or earth depending on what is going on. Fire can be ok if you can get a flank on a group and/or to get the might stacking.

With a power build and 20 in air, I find scepter air does really well

I LOVE doing earth 5, and porting into the group. That gets me so many kills.

Only change I agree with is Dragon’s tooth. It sucks when you’re not targeting someone and use the skill and have no control over where it goes. Most of the s/d skills can land by simply skill-shotting (save for lightning attunement burst) so I don’t see why dragon’s tooth should not have more control.

I don’t like Arc-lightning much either but my only issue with is the animation speed/duration. If they sped it up a bit it would be fine imo.

I kind of like where you’re going with shatterstone but I also feel the cast time should be removed or lessened by a lot. As it stands there’s no point using it since it disrupts combat flow and lessens your damage output.

Dragons tooth dropping quicker is plenty enough a buff for the skill. Ground target really isn’t needed, otherwise it just becomes a no-brainer like lava font.

Lightning autoattack really needs a do-over. It only does reasonable damage at the end of its channel, which means if you have to dodge during the animation you are losing out of a ‘huge’ chunk of dps. (being honest here, the lightning AA no matter what isnt exactly doing wowzers damage anyway, but still) I can run up to a mob on my melee professions and whack it twice with my autoattacks then dodge its counterattack and still have time to get back in range to finish part3 of my AA chain. I lose nothing. On my ele I do double digits worth of damage, dodge, and have to start again. I lose everything.
How would I fix it? A simple 3-hit attack like Water&Earth AA would do plenty to make the skill much more reliable. Rip from GW1 the Lightning Javelin or Shock Arrow skills for the visual imo.

Rock Barrier→Hurl needs some serious work done. Have you ever noticed how much damage the Hurl actually does? It is pathetic. Tooltips on these skills give you a glimpse into what anet originally had planned for this combo skill. Would be interesting to know what exactly was planned before this skill was left on the cutting room floor.

Dust Devil is great but a bit redundant since we already have an instant, no travel time blind from Lightning3. Would be nice if Dust Devil crippled targets along its (wider)path as well, if only to give it an identity. Besides, unless you run dagger offhand or 15points into earth traits, we cant get cripple anywhere else. Staff has cripple, dagger mainhand has cripple, scepter? nowhere.

Rest of your notes look good OP. Huge step in the right direction for putting reliability into ele attacks.

DieQuex.4096:

I kind of like where you’re going with shatterstone but I also feel the cast time should be removed or lessened by a lot. As it stands there’s no point using it since it disrupts combat flow and lessens your damage output.

Shatterstone currently has no cast-time. That’s its greatest strength. It’s only weakness is that it will never affect anyone with half of a brain (even including some aggroed NPCs) because of its delayed effect. It would maybe be nice to see it have an effect the moment it spawns on the field, but given it’s incredibly low recharge, I feel like it would need to be nerfed in that department. The only problem there is that Shatterstone shines because it can be spammed all of the time, so I think that that sort of change would defeat the skill entirely.

Siv.4351:

Rock Barrier->Hurl needs some serious work done.

Dust Devil is great but a bit redundant since we already have an instant, no travel time blind from Lightning3.

Staff has cripple, dagger mainhand has cripple, scepter? nowhere.

I know some people don’t like ground-targeting gimmicks, but it was the only way I could think to really make a game-changer out of Dust Devil. I updated my suggestion to Rock Barrier —> Hurl as well.

Swagg.9236:

DieQuex.4096:

I kind of like where you’re going with shatterstone but I also feel the cast time should be removed or lessened by a lot. As it stands there’s no point using it since it disrupts combat flow and lessens your damage output.

Shatterstone currently has no cast-time. That’s its greatest strength. It’s only weakness is that it will never affect anyone with half of a brain (even including some aggroed NPCs) because of its delayed effect. It would maybe be nice to see it have an effect the moment it spawns on the field, but given it’s incredibly low recharge, I feel like it would need to be nerfed in that department. The only problem there is that Shatterstone shines because it can be spammed all of the time, so I think that that sort of change would defeat the skill entirely.

Siv.4351:

Rock Barrier->Hurl needs some serious work done.

Dust Devil is great but a bit redundant since we already have an instant, no travel time blind from Lightning3.

Staff has cripple, dagger mainhand has cripple, scepter? nowhere.

I know some people don’t like ground-targeting gimmicks, but it was the only way I could think to really make a game-changer out of Dust Devil. I updated my suggestion to Rock Barrier —> Hurl as well.

Incorrect terminology, my bad. Referring toward how using Shatterstone locks you into an animation for a bit despite not having a cast time. I would have less of an issue with skill’s delay if it were possible to continue casting spells immediately after using it. As things are atm you get better damage output ignoring the skill entirely while using water auto attacks until your desired attunement is off cd.

Obviously wouldn’t solve the issue of actually hitting an opponent with the spell but I feel a change of that nature would at least make it less burdensome.

DieQuex.4096:

Incorrect terminology, my bad. Referring toward how using Shatterstone locks you into an animation for a bit despite not having a cast time. I would have less of an issue with skill’s delay if it were possible to continue casting spells immediately after using it. As things are atm you get better damage output ignoring the skill entirely while using water auto attacks until your desired attunement is off cd.

Obviously wouldn’t solve the issue of actually hitting an opponent with the spell but I feel a change of that nature would at least make it less burdensome.

Ah, I see. Well, I’d agree. I haven’t used scepter in so long that I guess I’ve forgotten some of its specific intricacies. Yeah, it should just be something you can use whenever without having to worry about it interrupting other skills.

Shameless bump. This thread is really old and I was wondering what people would think of it now.

I think you nerfed water 1 too much considering it’s already 3/4.

One thing that would be nice, would be to make one attunement 1200 range, I would nominate water since it already has low damage.

Swagg.9236:

Elementalist Scepter main-hand is actually quite good. It’s only problem at the moment is its speed. It’s very slow. It’s too slow to be effective when faced with the damage output and utility that Dagger Main-hand or Staff can contribute to a battle. Therefore, I’m proposing some changes (keep in mind that most Elementalist skills have some after-cast delay so I have tailored the cast-time suggestions to reflect that):

FIRE
Flamestrike

• Cast-time reduced to ¾ seconds.
• Damage reduced to 75.
• Burning duration reduced to 1½ seconds.

Dragon’s Tooth

• Dragon’s Tooth now uses ground-targeting.
• Upon fully casting Dragon’s Tooth, the tooth that manifests itself drops immediately.

WATER
Ice Shards

• Cast-time reduced to ½ seconds.
• Damage reduced to (3x) 120.

Shatterstone

• Recharge increased to 3 seconds.
• Interval between the Shatterstone manifesting itself and exploding is reduced from 2 seconds to 1½ seconds.
• Note: This skill conjures the Shatterstone area without a cast-time, that is to say that this skill activates immediately. It’s 2 second cast-time that displays on the tool-tip reflects the time it takes for the Shatterstone to explode and have an effect. This is a fine skill as it is, but I think that it would be best if the skill’s tool-tip were changed to reflect its actual functionality (remove the 2 second cast-time and update the tool-tip description).

AIR
Arc Lightning

• Changed to a skill-chain: Lightning Orb —> Lightning Javelin --> Arc Lightning

Lightning Orb: Fire a slow-moving orb of lightning at your foe that makes your foe Vulnerable.

• Cast-time: ½ seconds
• Damage: 75
• Vulnerable: 5 seconds (1 stack)
• Range: 900
  —> Lightning Javelin: Launch a lightning lance at your foe that inflicts Weakness if your foe was using a skill.
• Cast-time: ½ seconds
• Damage: 125
• Weakness: 2 seconds
• Range: 900
  —> Arc Lightning: Channel an arc of electricity at your foe.
• Cast-time: 1 second (hits 3 times)
• Damage: 90
• Duration: 1 second
• Range 900

EARTH
Stone Shards

• Cast-time reduced to ¾ seconds
• Damage reduced to 110.
• Bleeding remains at 3 stacks applied (1 per stone that successfully hits) but the respective durations of those Bleeding stacks is reduced from 6 seconds to 4½ seconds.

Rock Barrier

• Cast-time removed.
• Now grants Protection (3 seconds) instead of an increase in Toughness.
• Recharge increased to 20 seconds.

Hurl

• Is now a 5-part skill-chain.
• After activating Rock Barrier, the Elementalist has the opportunity to fire off each rock individually (up to 5 times—once for each rock).
• Each skill in the skill-chain that fires the floating rocks is called “Hurl.”
• Each “Hurl” has no cast-time (you can activate them without interrupting other skills).
• Each rock, if it hits, inflicts Weakness (1½ seconds), Cripple (1½ seconds) and does 120 base damage.
  • I was feeling ambitious.

Dust Devil

• Cast-time increased to 1 second.
• Recharge increased to 20 seconds.
• Dust Devil now uses ground-targeting.
• Damage (3x): 150
• Duration: 3 seconds
• Radius: 180
• Blind: 2 seconds
• Pulse: 1 second
• Combo Field: Smoke
  • Still ambitious.

Hey Swag, I am a fan of your suggestions on improving the Ele scepter mainhand as these proposed changes would make the weapon set feel a lot less clunky as well as add in more utility as the scepter has less than both the dagger and staff.

One idea I would like to propose would be an alternative to shatterstone:

Instead of reducing the charge up I wouldn’t mind the charge-up animation providing a 3 second chill to enemies that pass through it, punishing enemies for going through the area and potentially making it easier to catch them in the post-cast spell.

As for your proposed change to arc lightning I would keep arc lightning the same and move a similar chain to either earth or fire.

e.g. If moved to fire perhaps have a 3 attack chain that deals heavier damage for the first two spells and then a longer burn to finish off each chain.

Although the scepter is a great weapon for pve I would like to see a few changes to make it feel a lot more well rounded for pvp and these proposed changes would certainly help!

I want to say that DD is powerfull because of zero ground target ability. So Scepter should change the same way and those delayed abilities should get some love.

Dragon Tooth
Phoenix
Shatterstone
Water Trident
Dust Devil

And dont allow us to cast air 2-3 without target like Hurl. Because those skills are guaranteed to miss without a target.

hmm, some of those changes quite odd.

I’d say Dust Devil should a knockback, a mini tornado. It would push straight out same way as now, just on top of blind do a mini knockback. Scepter having no CC atm so … Also would help on wvw usefulness.

Shatter stone chills for 1 second or 3s with actual cooldown on the skill. Helping scepter focus in relative mobility, with a small disengage/kite tool and hitting dem fires.

Ground targetted Dragons Tooth would feel very powerful atm, but if it was ground targetted all the time it would feel normal. So I guess it could be justified.
It would prolly indirectly buff fire mastery, I could see heavy fire specs with Scepter happening, 20% less CDs + 10% dmg.

Fire: Flamestrike doesn’t do enough damage to do deserve a damage nerf.

Agree with Dragon’s Tooth.

Water: Again, not enough damage to deserve a nerf.

Shatterstone needs not lock your character from attacking after casting

Air: Arc Lightning is a fine skill, doesn’t need to change. However it needs to do more damage for the time spent casting it.

Blinding flash needs to do about 50-75% of the damage Lightning Strike does.

Earth: Bleed duration doesn’t need to be lowered

Rock Barrier is awesome as is. Hurl needs to do more damage or cause 5 stacks of bleeding

Mik.1324:

Hey Swag, I am a fan of your suggestions on improving the Ele scepter mainhand as these proposed changes would make the weapon set feel a lot less clunky as well as add in more utility as the scepter has less than both the dagger and staff.

One idea I would like to propose would be an alternative to shatterstone:

Instead of reducing the charge up I wouldn’t mind the charge-up animation providing a 3 second chill to enemies that pass through it, punishing enemies for going through the area and potentially making it easier to catch them in the post-cast spell.

As for your proposed change to arc lightning I would keep arc lightning the same and move a similar chain to either earth or fire.

Thanks for the kind words. I actually really liked your idea for Shatterstone. I updated my suggestion accordingly. As for the Lightning Arc suggestion, I actually changed it up a bit and moved the idea into Water in order to give that attunment a little more “oomph.” It was the only auto-attack that didn’t do anything besides damage. I mean, well, Lightning Arc does nothing but damage, but it’s also constantly hitting and also now has that “strikes enemies that pass through the beam” aspect to it, so I figured Water’s Ice Shards could use some more love.

Sabull.5670:

I’d say Dust Devil should a knockback, a mini tornado. It would push straight out same way as now, just on top of blind do a mini knockback. Scepter having no CC atm so … Also would help on wvw usefulness.

I thought that this was a great idea too. Blind is alright, but on a 15 second cool-down skill with low damage and no other redeeming attributes, it isn’t spectacular. A knock-back would make that skill so much more interesting and add some more surprise to the scepter play-style. I’ve updated my original post accordingly to match your suggestion.

Grok Krog.9581:

Fire: Flamestrike doesn’t do enough damage to do deserve a damage nerf.

Agree with Dragon’s Tooth.

Water: Again, not enough damage to deserve a nerf.

Shatterstone needs not lock your character from attacking after casting

Air: Arc Lightning is a fine skill, doesn’t need to change. However it needs to do more damage for the time spent casting it.

Blinding flash needs to do about 50-75% of the damage Lightning Strike does.

Earth: Bleed duration doesn’t need to be lowered

Rock Barrier is awesome as is. Hurl needs to do more damage or cause 5 stacks of bleeding

I think that the damage on most of the scepter skills is fine since it’s more of a Condition-oriented weapon than straight damage or CC. Also, I haven’t straight-up nerfed anything. All I have done with the suggestions in question is lowered everything together so as to keep roughly the same damage output, but just make the attacks come faster so the scepter Elementalist isn’t wasting so much time casting. Hurl is OK as it is since it’s a nice way to get quick damage in, but I felt that the scepter just needed more CC in general so I think that adding Weakness and Cripple to the skill would grant it more relevancy in combat. It would maybe even be fine if it just stayed as it was (all five are launched at once) and added something more like Weakness or Cripple.

Too many changes for a weapon that doesn’t need it. The two skills that need attention are Shatterstone and dragon’s tooth. Dragon’s Tooth needs the speed boost, but not ground target.

Nice change suggestions.

Dragon’s tooth – definitely need a change. Although full cast drop would be awesome I’d settle for shorter hang time.

Rock Barrier – I prefer the toughness. It adds a lot to survivability when wearing PCC gear.

Great post!

stale.9785:

Too many changes for a weapon that doesn’t need it. The two skills that need attention are Shatterstone and dragon’s tooth. Dragon’s Tooth needs the speed boost, but not ground target.

While it’s true that Shatterstone and Dragon’s Tooth do need somebody to sit down and have a talk with them about their performance, the scepter on the whole is very slow when it comes to seeing results when compared to main-hand dagger and even the staff at times. Furthermore, as already mentioned in the thread, Elementalist scepter main-hand has a dreadful lack of CC. The weapon in general is honestly pretty alright. It just needs a few things added and some cast-time reductions in order to really shine. While it looks like a lot, the changes I’ve proposed aren’t terribly drastic (except maybe for the water 1 and earth 3 skills).

After some use of the weapon and looking up the skills on the wiki it apparently has a dreadfully poor power coefficient on the auto attack skills.

Personally, I’d like to see reduced times on both scepter and staff skills. For example, Scepter auto-attack; I would much rather see that give, say, 1 second of burn, and have instead a cast time of, say, between 1/2 and 3/4 seconds. Or Dragon’s Tooth; make it ground-targeted, so that it’s less easily avoidable. That kind of stuff.

Swagg.9236:

FIRE
Flamestrike

• Cast-time reduced from 1¼ to ¾ seconds.
• Damage reduced from 101 to 80.
• Burning duration reduced from 2 to 1½ seconds.

About a 25% DPS boost overall, not bad since it does need a slight buff.

Dragon’s Tooth

• Dragon’s Tooth now uses ground-targeting.
• Upon fully casting Dragon’s Tooth, the tooth that manifests itself drops immediately./quote]

Seems fair enough considering it’s a full second cast time and mainhand scepter still has phoenix which takes some setup to use, so it’s wouldn’t be overkill on the AOE damage.

WATER
Ice Shards

• Changed to a skill-chain: Ice Shard —> Ice Lance --> Glowing Ice

Ice Shard: Fire an ice shard at your foe.

• Cast-time: ½ seconds
• Damage: 100
• Range: 1,200
  —> Ice Lance: Launch a frozen lance at your foe that inflicts Bleeding.
• Cast-time: ½ seconds
• Damage: 100
• Bleeding (1 stack): 3 seconds
• Range: 1,200
  —> Glowing Ice: Fire a bolt of magical ice at your foe, granting yourself Vigor and inflicting Weakness.
• Cast-time: ¾ seconds
• Damage: 230
• Vigor: 1 second.
• Weakness: ¾ seconds.
• Range 1,200

No. OP. You increased the range, damage, and gave it both vigor AND weakness? It needs help but this is overboard. Maybe just increase the dps slightly and give it the ability to maintain vulnerability on someone.

Shatterstone

• Recharge increased from 2 to 5 seconds.
• Stacks of Vulnerability inflicted from the explosion increased from 4 to 5.
• On creation, Shatterstone’s AoE now creates a Frost Field. This Frost Field pulses once at creation and lasts 1 second. The pulse chills all enemies in its radius for ¾ seconds.
• This skill is now instant-cast (can be used simultaneously with other skills).

I like where you are going with this but this is overkill. It could have the chill and the recharge, that would be a nice touch fitting with water, but the instant cast is too much. Damage would of course bump up a little to compensate for the added recharge as well.

AIR
Arc Lightning

• Cast-time (channel) reduced from 3½ to 2¾ seconds.

Arc Lighting is actually pretty decent in current form. It’s meant to work with crit effects and provide sustained damage. A slight increase in DPS from channel time or straight numbers buff with both be good changes. But not much.

EARTH
Stone Shards

• Cast-time reduced to ¾ seconds
• Damage reduced to 110.
• Bleeding remains at 3 stacks applied (1 per stone that successfully hits) but the respective durations of those Bleeding stacks is reduced from 6 seconds to 4½ seconds.

Stone shards are fine and do not need buffing. Learn to use them as a projectile finisher along with some other nifty tricks to maximize their possible damage. Maybe increase the projectile speed just to make it more usable.

Honestly you could make this instant in it’s current form and it would still just be an ok to good skill. No need for a recharge increase with it’s limited duration.

Hurl

• Is now a 5-part skill-chain.
• After activating Rock Barrier, the Elementalist has the opportunity to fire off each rock individually (up to 5 times—once for each rock).
• Each skill in the skill-chain that fires the floating rocks is called “Hurl.”
• Each “Hurl” has no cast-time (you can activate them without interrupting other skills).
• Each rock, if it hits, inflicts Weakness (1½ seconds), Cripple (1½ seconds) and does 120 base damage.

And now you jump the shark again trying to OP it. Instant cast rock barrier is all it needs.

Dust Devil

• Cast-time increased to ½ second.
• Recharge increased from 15 to 20 seconds.
• Range reduced from 900 to 600.
• Now affects a 450 range knock-back on all nearby enemies in addition to inflicting blind (effectively a blind-inflicting version of the Mesmer Greatsword skill: Illusionary Wave).

Stop trying to OP things lol. All this needs is a wider area affected. The slight change to rock barrier and speeding up the projectiles of stone shards would shore up what is already a strong attunement, this is just nice utility.

I’m not a big fan of reducing damage to accommodate faster cast times – maybe its just because I have grown accustomed to it. If I want to be faster I’ll use daggers. I use scepter for versatility, support and range. Wouldn’t mind Daggers Tooth to target ground so long as it’s initial target is the current target so I can just double tap – this should appease most players I think. In that sense Scepter needs a field however – perhaps shatterstone or lightning strike.

How bout just combining air 2 and 3 into air 2…then giving us an altogether new move?

I mean it’s two instant attacks. One damages and one blinds. Why not just have one ability that does both the damage and the blind.

Could have an air 3 aura, so scepter had an aura too.

Making Dragon’s Tooth ground-targeted isn’t going to solve the issue of it never hitting – frankly, I don’t see why it takes a full 3 seconds to drop when Burning Speed deals its damage in a mere 3/4s of a second. Is it because it does more damage? A fair point, but we already have a ranged weapon that is reliant on opponents not moving to deal its damage, we don’t need another one; lower the damage if that’s what it takes to get it to drop once the 1 second activation time is complete.
I don’t think the short cooldown would be an issue due to the extreme lack of sustained damage in the fire attunement, meaning that there’s no reason to stay in the attunement when the hard-hitting skills are on cooldown.

Regarding Phoenix, first I want to point out that it does not travel directly up or down, meaning that it will often miss if its target is at a different elevation. This is even more of a problem when it is traveling upward than downward, as it will completely disappear into the object it is supposed to climb.
Now, on even terrain, Phoenix is a great skill aside from one flaw:

IT’S REALLY SLOW.

It actually travels slightly slower than I do running while out of combat, and I don’t think I need to tell you that that makes it pretty terrible at range. I’d like to see it move at the speed of Water Trident.

It’d be nice if Shatterstone did more damage, chilled, and had a shorter delay – the recharge time would need to be increased due to the chill, of course.

I’d like it if Water Trident healed the user when cast and only healed others when it hit the ground, so that I might have a reason to cast it at an enemy rather than my feet. (This isn’t really an issue, though.)

I think Dust Devil should be replaced with another skill that is more damage-oriented – maybe just remove Hurl from Rock Barrier, increase its damage, and put it in Dust Devil’s place.

Finally, I’d like to see all the autoattacks scale better with power.

When you reduce damage for faster cast time you also have to consider the aftercast delays, so it may not be as much of a buff as intended.

Swagg.9236:

Dragon’s Tooth

• Dragon’s Tooth now uses ground-targeting.

I’m just posting to show some support for this. I actually like most of Scepter’s skills, but Dragons’s Tooth really could use to be ground-targeted. As it is now, the only time I really drop it is on top of a downed foe. Man, I love punishing a group for rushing forward to rez one guy.

I posted it in another thread as well but Dragon’s Tooth being ground targeted would absolutely be the right move, especially considering that right now it disobeys line of sight. Both the Necromancer and the Mesmer have had spells nerfed/fixed that behaved the same way. If they do the same to Dragon’s Tooth it will become even harder to hit than it already is..

If people think there would be too much ground targeted spells, why not have Phoenix follow your target instead of being ground targeted? I’m also hoping they will fix the spell so the animation of the returning Phoenix that procs the Vigor no longer interrupts a dodge. This can cause you to die, or to mess up an Evasive Arcana dodge effect.

Flamestrike does need a change, it’s a very dull spell in both animation and execution.. Maybe turning it into a chain would be good, something that has minor splash damage and applies an aoe burn.

Ice Shards could just do with a damage increase tbh. But if Shatterstone would chill people while it’s growing it would make sense to have a proper cast time and bar, it already locks you out of casting as it is, but then it would be easier to use. Perhaps increase the range to 240 and increase the vulnerability to 5 stacks.

Rock Barrier to be turned into an Aura and a significant increase in damage when you fire it with Hurl would be good enough too, then you’d have to choose between using it for the added armor or for damage. Or for both if you’re good enough at timing it with regard for the cooldown. Dust Devil would be the logical choice for the second control ability, maybe a knockback or knockdown is just what it needs.

Scepter is the only mainhand that has no CC, yet it’s the weapon that would have the most use for it, as some of the abilities can be hard to land, especially against a skilled opponent.

Anyway, great post! I love using a scepter on my Ele but always felt like it could use some tweaking, compared to the Dagger and Staff. Hopefully without making it overpowered

I’m against the idea of dumbing down Dragon’s Tooth. Instead, I suggest adding CC to underpowered skills to support it.

Shatterstone is the perfect candidate. Increase its cooldown to 6 or something, and have it add 1s of chill per second while it was building up, and you could get an interesting DT -> shatterstone or shatterstone -> DT combo. Alternatively, have it add any kind of CC upon its activation, like I stun once it blows up. This would be awesome with the grounded trait too.

Ice Shards can live with a damage boost. With air’s auto-attack being the best to generate critical-hit sigils and traits, and earth’s and fire’s auto being about condition damage, ice shards can simply be the damage/ critical auto-attack to go to for pure damage. Especially alongside my suggested change to shatterstone, which would make damage scepter eles switch between fire and water.

I agree that flamestrike is mechanically boring, but I’m not sure what to do about it. Maybe make it a channeling skill (that can be self-canceled easily) that adds 1s of burning the first second, and 2s more of burning in the next second. You know, something that gets stronger the longer it takes. For some reason, I dislike the casting animation for flamestrike too.

Rock Barrier is perfect as it is, and I would suggest that Hurl would be buffed with the addition of bleeding and not with a pure damage boost. Why? Because for elementalists who want to invest in condition damage can get more options for bleeding than spamming earth’s auto-attack until forever. However, I would make each stack of bleeding from Hurl last for a short duration. That would total to 5 stacks for, say, 5 seconds each. This would go hand-in-hand with the scepter’s bursty nature.

Finally, for Dust Devil, as mentioned, it is the second most natural candidate for an extra CC. Being a tornado, it can work perfectly with a knockback effect. Increase its casting time, take the damage out of it, maybe even make the animation slower, should the devs consider the aoe knockback too strong.

The first thing people usually suggest for buffing something, is to make the best skills even better. Dragon’s Tooth and Phoenix do not need buffs, they need support from other skills. They are perfect as they are. Do they have drawbacks? Yes, but that’s the fun of it. Buffing them would make them mindless to play (think: thief’s heartseeker) and maybe even force the devs to nerf them damage-wise, taking away the fun out of the scepter’s burst damage nature. Meanwhile, adding skills that support them makes the scepter’s playstyle more complex and compelling.

DiogoSilva.7089:

I’m against the idea of dumbing down Dragon’s Tooth. Instead, I suggest adding CC to underpowered skills to support it.

Shatterstone is the perfect candidate. Increase its cooldown to 6 or something, and have it add 1s of chill per second while it was building up, and you could get an interesting DT -> shatterstone or shatterstone -> DT combo. Alternatively, have it add any kind of CC upon its activation, like I stun once it blows up. This would be awesome with the grounded trait too.

Ice Shards can live with a damage boost. With air’s auto-attack being the best to generate critical-hit sigils and traits, and earth’s and fire’s auto being about condition damage, ice shards can simply be the damage/ critical auto-attack to go to for pure damage. Especially alongside my suggested change to shatterstone, which would make damage scepter eles switch between fire and water.

I agree that flamestrike is mechanically boring, but I’m not sure what to do about it. Maybe make it a channeling skill (that can be self-canceled easily) that adds 1s of burning the first second, and 2s more of burning in the next second. You know, something that gets stronger the longer it takes. For some reason, I dislike the casting animation for flamestrike too.

Rock Barrier is perfect as it is, and I would suggest that Hurl would be buffed with the addition of bleeding and not with a pure damage boost. Why? Because for elementalists who want to invest in condition damage can get more options for bleeding than spamming earth’s auto-attack until forever. However, I would make each stack of bleeding from Hurl last for a short duration. That would total to 5 stacks for, say, 5 seconds each. This would go hand-in-hand with the scepter’s bursty nature.

Finally, for Dust Devil, as mentioned, it is the second most natural candidate for an extra CC. Being a tornado, it can work perfectly with a knockback effect. Increase its casting time, take the damage out of it, maybe even make the animation slower, should the devs consider the aoe knockback too strong.

The first thing people usually suggest for buffing something, is to make the best skills even better. Dragon’s Tooth and Phoenix do not need buffs, they need support from other skills. They are perfect as they are. Do they have drawbacks? Yes, but that’s the fun of it. Buffing them would make them mindless to play (think: thief’s heartseeker) and maybe even force the devs to nerf them damage-wise, taking away the fun out of the scepter’s burst damage nature. Meanwhile, adding skills that support them makes the scepter’s playstyle more complex and compelling.

I have a few problems with these suggestions.

Firstly, putting CC in the water attunement would mean that I might not be able to use the swap for condition removal and healing when I really need to. Shatterstone would need to be changed so that it encases enemies in ice for 3 seconds or something, which would mean it’d be on about a 20 second cooldown, and even then I’d need to choose between using Dragon’s Tooth or Phoenix when at range.

Secondly, you’re suggesting even more condition damage (which eles are pretty poor at when it comes to PvP) on a weapon intended for burst damage – why? Also, I’m pretty sure condition specs can get more out of 250 extra toughness than 5 stacks of bleeding every 15 seconds.

Finally, what use would Dust Devil serve as a knockback? With your suggestions, I’ll still really only be effective at close range, so aside from knocking enemies of cliffs in WvW, I don’t see the purpose of a slow-moving AoE knockback.

I want reliable ranged damage, not the near-melee combat that the scepter currently promotes.

Chaosky.5276:

I want reliable ranged damage, not the near-melee combat that the scepter currently promotes.

There isn’t a single ability in the Scepter toolset that promotes any type of melee-play.

You seem to have problems with the skills that come from using an offhand Dagger, which is indeed a near-melee type weapon, by design.The Focus on the other hand is not melee orientated and neither is the Staff. If you don’t want a near-melee experience, I suggest you don’t equip a near-melee orientated weapon :P

Nalar.6523:

Chaosky.5276:

I want reliable ranged damage, not the near-melee combat that the scepter currently promotes.

There isn’t a single ability in the Scepter toolset that promotes any type of melee-play.

If you want to land your dragon’s tooth and phoenix for might stacks you need to be in melee range.

Having been playing with the scepter for a week or two, i have to say there are two abilities that stand out as just plain bad.

1. Fire 1 – extremely long cast time for pitiful direct damage and 1 second of burning?

Why not a flame thrower attack instead? That would be awesome.

2. Water 2 – the cast and animation on this are too long and the damage is pitiful.

Scepter could really use some snaring ability and this ability is really strikingly missing something.

My suggestion, Ice Mine you place a ward on the ground that when triggered does AoE chill and vulnerability.

There are other issues:

The auto attacks are too slow aside from Air 1 which is relatively low damage, I mean a pet crit me for 2600 today…

Earth 2 is a pain to activate, seems like you should automatically build up the rock charges somehow and then fire them off when you’re ready. Then it could be a decision, do I want to lose my toughness bonus? Do I want to fire off this ability without 5 rocks?

Earth 3 and Air 3 could probably use some love.

Nalar.6523:

Chaosky.5276:

I want reliable ranged damage, not the near-melee combat that the scepter currently promotes.

There isn’t a single ability in the Scepter toolset that promotes any type of melee-play.

You seem to have problems with the skills that come from using an offhand Dagger, which is indeed a near-melee type weapon, by design.The Focus on the other hand is not melee orientated and neither is the Staff. If you don’t want a near-melee experience, I suggest you don’t equip a near-melee orientated weapon :P

Phoenix, might stacking.

The autoattacks range from unremarkable to downright terrible.

Most other skills either aren’t intended for/effective at dealing damage.

That leaves Lightning Strike as the only good ranged attack, which means that the scepter’s only decent ranged damage is dealt via air #1 and #2, unless you want to go for a gimmicky condition build.

The focus doesn’t provide sufficient offense or CC to be worth taking, and the staff just doesn’t work for duels/roaming/etc.

Come to think of it, after guardians, I think elementalists are the most range-restricted class in the game.

Focus being underpowered is the problem with long-range elementalists, not the scepter. Although to be honest, we don’t have any long-range offhand that was meant to be dedicated for direct damage.

The idea of making shatterstone into an ice mine is probably better than mine’s. :P I like it, reminds me of our underwater skills.

The knockback on dust devil would work like a ranged, although slower and easier to avoid updraft. It would help scepter users to hit with their dragon’s tooth.

Well I’m agreeing that the Scepter could use work, the #1 attacks are not very strong, there’s no CC and some things are hard to land on skilled opponents, but all the skills itself are ranged.. Like I said before, if you equip a Dagger offhand you’ll gain spells that are melee orientated

I agree with all the updates you’ve made now.
Fixing Dragon’s tooth is a must.
Giving Dust Devil something useful like a knock back is great too.
Also I agree that water needs some love.

10/10

I agree with almost all of this. These changes are very well thought out and balanced, although it still would be nice to have more reliable range damage. I really like the change to water 2, and some way of having Dragon’s tooth be useful against anything that isn’t stationary (downed opponent arrow cart) would b great! Also the addition of some kind of cc would be very welcome.

You clearly put a lot of thought into making these suggestions and considering how the scepter could be improved without making absurd changes that are broken.

My biggest issue with scepter currently is that it has absolutely 0 crowd control. The AoEs are impossible to land without being either A) next to the person (phoenix) or B) and more effective with all the AoEs having them perma stunned or immobilized while the slow AoE explodes/drops.

To add to that, both the other ele mainhands have a massive amount of healing on water attunement. Water trident has an extremely small amount of healing and damage, its almost a useless spell. I would rather see it replaced with a dedicated healing spell.

Currently the scepter has the most potential burst, but it is the hardest to land by far. With no crowd control or healing, it has become a very niche weapon for circumstances when the mainhand dagger just won’t work.

We could really use reliable ranged damage that doesn’t require stationary enemies (the staff has that covered). Hopefully they will take your suggestions into consideration and at least rework this weapon. They seem to want to steer us away from the D/D cookie cutter build, but the staff isn’t built for 1v1s and the scepter is currently a mess for most combat.

Thor Rising.7850:

Water trident has an extremely small amount of healing and damage, its almost a useless spell. I would rather see it replaced with a dedicated healing spell.

Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but I’m pretty sure Water Trident is the best burst healing skill eles have. Its damage component may as well be nonexistent, though.

For Pete’s sake, don’t change dragon tooth. I know they’ll ruin it if they try. (ie. vs Siege.)

My biggest peeve is the switching of targets with channeled auto-casts in air and earth. You have to have air 2 or 3 up to switch targets most of the time, or it will take 3s+ to change target. I’ve stated this several times elsewhere.

The ramp-up in Air 1 is also tedium. Sure, it’s cool to hit something 8 times (or whatever) like a ranger, but the minim hit is so far away in damage from the final hit. I specifically have a zerkers set for Air 1 S/D, (and Staff), and would enjoy faster animations on both weapons, with less hits in S/D, but a scale up from lowest hit. I don’t want to lose big crits for any reason. It’s expensive to make a set that bursts hard. And you usually have to trade all of your survivability to do it. You are banking on rallying to keep your full uptime from mass-aoe crits.

I know full well that they scaled down the number of targets in beam tech with Air 1 with the last patch, as I can barely hit 2 things close together now.

katniss.6735:

For Pete’s sake, don’t change dragon tooth. I know they’ll ruin it if they try. (ie. vs Siege.)

My biggest peeve is the switching of targets with channeled auto-casts in air and earth. You have to have air 2 or 3 up to switch targets most of the time, or it will take 3s+ to change target. I’ve stated this several times elsewhere.

The ramp-up in Air 1 is also tedium. Sure, it’s cool to hit something 8 times (or whatever) like a ranger, but the minim hit is so far away in damage from the final hit. I specifically have a zerkers set for Air 1 S/D, (and Staff), and would enjoy faster animations on both weapons, with less hits in S/D, but a scale up from lowest hit. I don’t want to lose big crits for any reason. It’s expensive to make a set that bursts hard. And you usually have to trade all of your survivability to do it. You are banking on rallying to keep your full uptime from mass-aoe crits.

I know full well that they scaled down the number of targets in beam tech with Air 1 with the last patch, as I can barely hit 2 things close together now.

There is no ramp up on air 1. The final hit is the entire damage of the full channel. That’s how all channel skills work that do multiple hits.

Thor Rising.7850:

There is no ramp up on air 1. The final hit is the entire damage of the full channel. That’s how all channel skills work that do multiple hits.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Arc_Lightning

On the 4th hit it starts doing double damage, and about triple with the 7th-10th. It’s difficult to tell because of the way channeled damage is displayed, though.

“Dragon’s Tooth
Dragon’s Tooth now uses ground-targeting.
Upon fully casting Dragon’s Tooth, the tooth that manifests itself drops immediately.”

Why do people keep suggesting this? Dragon’s tooth is perfect as it is! It is only on an extremely short CD to allow for it to be used to create a lot of pressure and risk vs reward situations. It isn’t supposed to be this super bursty 1 hit ko move it is supposed to build pressure and make your enemies dance or else they taste the pain.

I’m mainly a s/tpvp player and mix in some wvw. Here are my experiences using exclusively scepter for the past couple of months (by attunement).

Fire: DT is almost never worth casting. The only time I cast it is if I’m locked in fire attunement and have already used my other useful skills (phoenix and rof/fire grab with a dagger; focus fire skills are worthless but the topic is scepter). The autoattack is the only skill in fire that I cast even less than DT. I like phoenix, but it flies too slow making it basically a melee-range attack.

Water: Shatterstone is in a similar place with DT. Even the water auto is a better use of my time than locking myself up casting shatterstone. Trident is good and the auto is my most frequently used auto outside of air.

Air: No complaints aside from the switching target while channeling issue mentioned.

Earth: No complaints here.

Overall, every skill in fire attunement + shatterstone need help.

i really like all the ideas here, but i think they would result in an overpowered scepter, but some of them or partial usage would be cool scepter really needs some love… especially few specific skills