Guild Wars 2

Thought it would be good to get 1 thread with a collection of ideas from the elementalist community to make it easy for arenanet to see what we have in mind. I will start it off.

1) Skill changes to staff.
a) Fire
Lava Font – faster cast and a 2s snare effect. Currently with its small radius and distinct graphic, its easy to notice and avoid.
Meteor Shower – Allows movement while casting. Hold down button to channel spell, which will have the area follow your mouse so you can keep it on enemies at the risk of not being able to move

2) We need better synergy between attunements, they should interact more either like combo’s, or by some new and unique means.

3) All shielding spells need a duration increase, some level of damage mitigation, then an effect that goes with that attunement. Make melee ranged spec viable through properly using shielding spells.

That’s all for now, may have more to add later.

1) Reduced cooldowns between attunement swaps.

Reason: When we switch, the previous element is now on a 15 second cd. Other classes weapon swap timer is 10 seconds. “But you have 4 elements to choose from!” Indeed we do, but the way our class was designed has us twisting our attunements constantly, 15 seconds is far too long.

2) Faster animations on certain spells.

Spells: Dragon’s Tooth, Lava Font, Eruption, Shockwave, Ice Spike, Shatterstone, Churning Earth (at least a 1 second reduction in cast time). Just to name a few.

3)An obvious base hp increase.

Reason: we have the lowest, bar none, as well as some of the lowest damage output of any class, which makes our glass cannon build downright brittle.

4) Improved Elite Skills.

Reason: Our tornado skill is just not useful (a confusion debuff will downright kill us), our pets don’t last beyond a few hits, and the sword locks us out of our attunements.

5) Signet skill improvements.

Air: A Passive 10% non stacking speed increase? Our air tree is already full of non stacking speed buffs.

Fire: Needs a passive and active boost.

6) Glyphs.

Currently only 1 glyph is useful (storms) and I rarely find it useful outside of PvE, and even that is only during an invasion event.

Renewal is flat out broken, Elemental power is on too long a cd for a “chance” to inflict a condition, and lesser elementals suffer the same problems as the elite ones.

7) Its hard to ask for an across the board damage buff, but I’d love to see one. The amount of effort that goes into playing this class well leaves us still woefully underpowered by comparsion. The effort put in is not properly reflected by our results.

8) More synergistic traits.

I think we all know where the problems in our traits lie.

Increased Staff Area on default, remove/change the trait ability to do so.

Reason: As staff we are pigeon holed to 20 points arcana.

1. weapon swap, eg. staff to daggers with 3 second cool down (compromise)

2. more damage with air, water, earth

3. as Byona stated staff area should be larger and not take points.

Doing one of these things would make a difference.

I’m going to have to disagree with the above suggestion that the aoe’s should be larger untraited.

Traited, those aoe’s can almost cover entire points in spvp, it is a huge deal for a support ele to stand on the point, and literally drop all his aoe’s on top of himself, and it shouldn’t be untraited.

That’s why i stated doing 1 off the things, anything to make this class more competitive especially in PvP. I thought this post was for listing ideas, not for breaking down other peoples opinions. should we now examine and critic your suggestions?

improve firegrab’s ability to hit. look at thieves’ heartseeker.. or further increase its damage. look at thieves’ heartseeker again.

increase churning earth’s damage. make it a spell that everyone should be wary of and try to avoid. increase its cooldown a bit more too.

increase lightning touch damage to deal more significantly, still somewhat a useless skill.

Blasting Staff and Lingering Attunements should be base. Change Renewing Stamina to the 15-point minor.

Remove the “start-up” time on Lava Font.

Lower Attunement Swap Cooldown.

Increase Several Animation Speed’s (Not Eruption!)

Increase Splash Range on Staff’s Water #1. Currently don’t heal people when fighting mobs that have a slightly higher hitbox or something.

Change Unsteady Circle to a circular AoE similar to Ring of Fire.

Change Gust to be instant.

Do something with Lightning Surge. Maybe change it to a Light AoE Field and remove the damage? That would be great.

I think one of the biggest thing is just how the skill’s in a weapon tree play to what they are meant for.

An example, the popular D/D build. Made for up close confrontation of either damage or support. Problem is, to support that, their needs to be something in that skill line to make you survive better during this. Most of the shielding spells, while I think they are all fairly useless anyways, all lie in other weapon skill tree’s.

Look at staff, obviously a ranged support/damage line of skills. Problem is, at the risk of being squishy, it doesnt offer enough damage or ways to mitigate or outright prevent damage, and in a lot of cases, actually makes you more vilnerable (with channeling spells you cannot move during casting) and some spells outright useless in WvW or PvP (spells like lava font, meteor shower, which are the biggest damage spells, are extremely easy to dodge and render useless)

Then you have scepter / focus, which has spells like dragon tooth, and other delayed damage dealing spells, which are extremely easy for any player that is just paying attention to completely dodge.

I’m not as familiar with other classes abilities as I only have enough time to focus on my own class at the moment, but from what I have seen, they have very little, if any, of these issues with their skills being able to be negated so easily.

Also I believe our damage spells should have more effects, and some of our effect spells should deal more damage. Example: Unsteady ground should cause knockdown instead of cripple, making it a way to separate ourselves from a closing enemy. They can either wait for the spell to end, go around the spell, or try and go through it, get knocked down for 2 seconds, then pass through.

buff the base stats to be in line with every other class.
buff the dmg in dmg specs by a bit (should happen if you scale the stats currectly).

change all the traits so that they compliment each other so you will have the feeling that there is too many good things you would like but can’t have and they got a good synergy with each other. example the once i have tampered a lot with is the worriar and necro and there is SOOO many traits which compliments and majorly change playstyle and setup with just the change of few traits and the stats you gain with the traits compliment those types of builds very well, i find myself thinking “kitteni need all these as well”, this feeling does not exist on the ele there its more “hmm a or b, a give me only this one thing so does b which one do i want in this build” meaning there is absolutely no real synergy, taking one trait doesnt at any point exponentially make other traits stronger, there is no “tweaking builds” they are very straight easy forward and there is no real need to test a lot since the outcome of the test is almost always exact of what you thought since there is nothing that really compliment each other on the ele at this point.

remove all and any cd on attunement swapping.

tweak skills a bit in the diff ranges so that staff is truly a slow but very high dmg aoe CC and controll weapon, while the daggers are truly a close combat either high powered burst or dps weapon.
all the weapons as this point seems +- equelly bad and only the skill functionality would make you take one over the other since they don’t seem to specificly enhance or have synergi with whatever build your making, i do love the skills of most of them but the effects need some tweaking (as example of the worst skill meteor storm, AWESOME skill look and idea but it takes so long to fully cast it and the dmg is so terrible that any endgear char will smile and ignore it while he have ripped you to pieces before casting it, if you get it casted it does barely nothing for how long it takes to apply the dmg and how hard it is to do so compared to others example the worriar bow cluster fire or rangers arrow storm etc.)

a more clear role setup for this class allowing it to be the squicy but high powered version of a class:
meaning as healer/support build you add more heal/support in shorter time but you die much faster then others of your type, same in dps mainly burst /aoe (adds more then any other but dies faster as well). so it gets something that distincguese the class.

all skills need to be much faster in the end animation, you cast a skill and it takes a full second before the effects lands which is majorly out of place when its suppose to be fast pasted combat where your reaction is the key to victory, having to wait for the super slow skills to go off is not really good (for example the speed buff which removes snares of the staff, takes a full 1,5+ sec to switch attunement click key and wait till effects hit, by the time the effect actually hit the root would naturally be over anyway and the dmg done, this should be much closer to 0 sec so fast perfect reactions would clearly show good from bad players. and have a major impact instead of RNG)

this is just a fast of my mind set i think is obvious changes needed

Byona.8231:

Increased Staff Area on default, remove/change the trait ability to do so.

Reason: As staff we are pigeon holed to 20 points arcana.

Absolutely, from what i’ve seen other classes staves already comes with real radiuses.

Some of you people want buffs to some of our best spells. I disagree. We need buffs for our weakest spells. That being said, there’s maybe one or two exceptions I would make.

Staff
Meteor Shower – Increase the range of the splash damage and add cripple per hit.
Reasons: Staff has three control/ support-focused attunements with poor damage, and a fire attunement that does not add cc/ support nor has enough damage to compensate for it. This would make fire’s big 5th skill more reliable at killing, and simmultaneously add an extra CC effect.
Eruption – halved casting time.
Reasons: This skills takes some 3 seconds to blast, and is supposed to work this way so we can make some cross-attunement combos. For that reason, it’s already hard to pull it off perfectly, and so having a high casting time feels redudant and clunky.

MH Dagger
Lightning Whip – Have the player evade to the left/ right, like the Ranger’s sword.
Reasons: Air’s dagger was supposed to give us some sort of defense while still dealing damage, but it’s underwhelming at that. This change will improve its playstyle, while go in line with the mobility the weapon is supposed to be good at.
Lightning Touch – Add a conditional effect: If it hits from behind or from the side, like Ranger’s shortbow, add 10 stacks of vulnerability/ or the damage is increased considerably.
Reasons: To synergy with the above changes to Lightning Whip, and also because the mechanics behind this skill’s animation seem to be the same for Fire Grab, which also has a conditional effect. Would add consistency.
Shocking Aura – Increase stun duration to 2 seconds.
Reasons: Auras don’t prevent damage, don’t last long, and pve mobs don’t attack often enough. Worse, auras are some of the main defensive skills for D/D builds, and they’re clearly not offering enough. 2 second stun should give more room to breath, and some free and very needed spike opportunity.

OH Dagger:
Frost Aura – Increase chill duration to 3 seconds.
Reasons: Worse than Shocking Aura, and worse than Focus chilling skill, this adds no immediate defense at all, and I’m unsure how to improve it. Here’s an alternative solution: Adds 1s daze to foes who hit you in addition to 2s/ 3s chill.

Focus:
Magnetic Wave – Take condition removal out of this skill.
Reasons: Focus earth is overpowered, while focus fire sucks. We’ll need to nerf one to buff the other. Let’s add condition removal to one of the fire skills.
Flamewall – Crossing it gives 6-8 seconds of (non-stackable) burning.
Flamewall – Foes crossing it get 6-8 seconds of (non-stackable) burning, and allies crossing it lose conditions. Put it into the 5th slot.
Reasons: This will make flamewall work similarly to other wall skills, like the Mesmer’s focus skill, where you only need to cross it once to get the full effect.
Fire Shield – Make it also remove one condition per second.
Fire Shield – Reduce the recharge to half, have it give 2 seconds of burning at melee range.
Fire Shield – Remove the melee range, reduce the recharge to 30s. Whenever someone hits you, they’ll get burning for 6-8 seconds.
Reasons: This aura is bad and needs to be buffed somehow.

Scepter:
Phoenix – Remove condition removal and reduce the recharge to 16s.
Reasons: This skill is too busy. Put condition removal elsewhere, and give us more opportunities to burst and dodge instead.
Rethink the water attunement.
Reasons: Seriously, what’s the strategy behind this attunement? It feels like a bunch of random skills with completely different functions put together.
Water Trident – Add condition removal.
Reasons: Because of Phoenix’s suggestion above.
Lightning Strike – Add a conditional effect to make it less mindless.
Reasons: The current strategy behind LS is: spam it whenever you can. This should make it more tactical, like Blinding Flash.
Rock Barrier – Add passive condition removal every 10 seconds.
Reasons: Because of Phoenix’s suggestion above.
Hurl – Add bleeding per hit.
Reasons: Bleed stacking with Scepter is awfully boring. This will give some decision-making to it.

Base HP increased from 10,805 to 12,945 (to compare, mesmers have 15,082 and necros have 18,372 base HP)
The trait Internal Fire is now moved to Grandmaster, and provides 30% additional damage while attuned to fire rather than 10%

Staff Air auto attack now hits up to 5 targets instead of 3 because chain lightning is awesome.

Balanced?

Increase in damage output across the board – all weapons, all skills.

Make Air attunement a single target high damage version of itself – as advertised.

Change our traits to something that benefits all attunements.

I wouldn’t change the casting times, as I like the challenge of hitting people with flametooth and the likes, it requires some planning, some CC, while at the same time dodging their damage, the problem is, when it does hit… all the work you really put into it does not pay off.
Low damage is our biggest problem imo. EVEN when fully zerker and fully specced for glass cannon.
And most of the time, the elementalist can only focus on one thing at a time, applying CC’s, survival or doing damage – not all at the same time.

My warrior when specced for it, is a better ranged DPS class than my elementalist, and it can apply vunerability(brutal shot), bleeds (autoattack), cripple(Aimed shot) and knockback(Riflebutt) (all in 4 skills) WHILE doing damage, not, applying those without damage like the elementalist and THEN start doing damage, and having access to sustained pressure damage (volley) and burst damage (Killshot) as needed.
And most of these are low CD skills (the highest of which being 15 secs untraited) – which is funny when you think of the often 45sec CD’s on the ele which do the same thing, only without damage attached to it.

For example
Elementalist (Unsteady Ground 2.45 seconds cripple – 30 sec cooldown) No damage to speak of in PvP
Warrior (Aimed Shot 5.45 seconds cripple – 10 seconds cooldown) Often hits for 300 – 500 non crit. Depending on Might stacks

This is just an example, and not even the most glaring ones.

As far as elite, I find myself using the 10 point Sylvari Elite over the elementalist ones because frankly the invulnerability can be super valuable in WvW and PvE and the plants you drop are mob magnets in PvE (so another good survivability aspect). Haven’t used the greatsword much so I don’t have an opinion of it but the tornado is really meh (pet one is okay).

Buff to base toughness.

The other cloth classes have mechanics that prevent them from being focus fired.

Necro has its lich form which allows them to tank damage.

Mesmer has clones, shatters and stealth that can really screw up peoples targeting.

Elementalist has really no base mechanics to mitigate damage. A battle between two skilled people, everyone knows elementalist has very little outs other than outright killing the other person faster than they get killed.

I have to say that I agree with most of the previous posts. My damage while in PVE can be somewhat decent, but with no good CC or damage mitigation it’s not even worth the little damage we do. In WvW though, I feel almost like deadweight since my attacks can be avoided quite easily, and to top it off, every class can out-dps me by a large margin. Anyway, love these suggestions.

Trait re-work.

• Flame Barrier: – Chance reduced to 10%, triggers in any attunement.
• Internal Fire – Attacking in Fire increases your damage by 2% (stacks, max of 5 stacks) for 15 seconds.
• Spell Slinger – 1 more stack of might to a total of 4
• Burning Rage – Changed to ‘Each tick of Burning has a 75% chance to apply 2 seconds of vulnerability’
• Persisting flames Evaporation – Attacking a chilled enemy while in Fire has a 20% chance to grant you and nearby allies regeneration for 5 seconds. 30 sec ICD
• Zepher’s Speed – stacks with swiftness
• Grounded – Deal 10% more damage to Crippled foes.
• Stone Splinters – Deal 10% more damage while in melee range
• Strength of Stone – Take 10% less damage in Earth
• Salt Stone Erosion – Attacking an enemy in earth while you have swiftness has a 40% chance to remove a random boon. 15sec ICD
• Vital Striking – Deal 5% more damage If an enemy has regeneration, and 20% chance to steal it while attuned to water.
• Soothing Wave Extinguish – Attacking a burning enemy(must be your burn) while attuned to water inflicts 2 sec of weakness.
  Windborne Dagger – Cast times are reduced by 20% while wielding a dagger

This’ll increase power and defense a little, increase trait synergy and help make attunement swapping more meaningful

oh and fix the bugs.

Increase base health from 10k to 15k

Increased range on Daggers

Why do we have to perfectly align the player and victim models to land flame grab when other classes have similar skills that auto hit.

General improvements to the traits, many are weak compared to other classes.

All of the attunement specific traits need to be buffed, especially the 15-20% reduced cooldown ones.

An elementalist’s earth attunement is like a weapon for another class with longer cooldowns to make up for the fact that we have 4 “weapons”

20% shorter earth cooldown is much weaker than (for example, not picking on warriors) Sundering Mace: 20% shorter mace cooldown and 10% more mace damage to weakened foes

For example, this could be changed to 20% shorter earth cooldown, and earth attacks have a 20% chance to apply a 2s cripple

Aside from attunement specific traits, we need more utility or damage in our traits.

Made same thread day ago…. it disapeared on the other pages… Anyway re posting here what I wrote there:
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1. Staff-(Earth) Stoning: Weakens opponent, yet staff is long-range weapon. Other condition would be cool to replace it (small bleeding maybe?)
2. Saff-(Water)Water Blast: Healing radius is very small… It would be a good support skill provided it will be made bigger. It deals no damage after all ^^
3. Staff-(Water)Geyser: Allies often run away from it. Geyser should have combo skill spreading the heal (like Water Wortex shotting heal bolts away or Detonation so that geyser will explode healing nearby allies)
4. Staff-(Air) Gust: Pushing just 1 enemy makes this skill often not useful. Make it “can push up to 3 targets” maybe?

5. Daggers-(Overall): The jump-in and jump-out skills would work better if they had some combo skill to move other way. For example Updraft followed by Air leap and Burning Speed by Burning Retreat. It would add much so precious mobility to daggers.
6. Auras-(Overall): While Magnetic Aura works briliant others are weak. They would use protecting agains the damage as well. After all, WHEN you are hit already it doest make you a big difference, that enemy is chilled for 1 second, does it?

7. Fiery Greatsword (Skill): It takes you your attunments away, which makes it not pupular. It would use changing attunments with you (to also provide you support control and heal skills, not just attack)

anyone else got some good ones? Loving these comments so far!

fiery greatsword needs a significant buff. replacing all your 20 skills for just 5 and deal crappy damage and furthermore an elite skill, is just plain pathetic.

buff lightning flash range from 900 to 1500. no not even 1200. 900 range is way too short. you use lightning flash to escape at that pathetic 900 range only to end up with a thief or warrior or ranger behind you in a second with skills like steal, rush, blade trail or swoop. 900 is not even out of rifle or longbow range.

buff the range to 1500 and we’ll see a skill great for not just as an escape mechanism but also initiation.

alternative easy fix for anet, buff all elementalist skill damage by 1.5-2 times.