Guild Wars 2

Lightning rod, the new grandmaster air trait XIII is pretty underwhelming for a grandmaster. Why take Lightning rod when you could take a host of other talents that are much better such as fresh air, evasive arcana, etc. At its current power level it is probably on par with adept traits. Additionally eles do not have that many abilities that proc it, and the only time it is somewhat useful is with tornado elite and staff air 5.

I feel that this trait should be reworked into something that can compete with must take traits such as elemental attunement and evasive arcana. This is just an example idea I had:

Lightning rod: 50% chance when you critically strike an enemy: strike them with a lightning bolt that inflicts X damage and reduce your air attunement weapon skill cooldowns by 1 second. The damage cannot critically strike and has a ICD of 1 second per enemy. Additionally the air ability cooldown reduction has a ICD of 1 second.

Each enemy has its own separate cooldown kind of like how shocking aura works so you proc the lightning bolt on multiple enemies with one AOE attack. However the air ability cooldown can only occur once per second no matter how many enemies are struck. I think the damage boost and utility provided would be useful for all weapon sets in PvP, WvW, and PvE. Because one would need to spec 6 air this would be a major skill point investment to reduce the cooldowns of powerful abilities such as shocking aura, RTL, updraft, and static field.

TLDR: Lightning rod sucks and needs either a massive improvement or a rework

I feel like the long cooldowns on the interrupt skills hurts this trait. I wish they tied it to blinds instead, something like every time you cause blind you cause X (maybe weakness? or some small damage?) because that would have good synergy with a lot of the elementalist traits, utilities, and weapon skills.

How about no cd but drop its chase to go off on crit down to 30% so you can get benefits from aoe ICD makes the effect for aoe worthless and most of what ele runs off of is aoe ability. This is why the new Blinding Ashes 6 fire blind on burn is not that good because once you burn one target its on a cd of 5 sec so your aoe only going to bline one person.

That is what I am proposing, the damage portion trait sort of works like shocking aura’s ICD where each enemy would have his own cooldown so you use an aoe you could strike multiple enemies with lightning bolts at once. A small internal cooldown is needed so it cannot be exploited for massive damage with extremely fast ticking abilities such as FGS 4. Also, to limit the power of the second part of the trait, the air ability cooldown reduction has its own ICD of 1 second. So if you crit 10 enemies multiple times within 2 seconds then the trait will likely proc 2 times reducing air cooldowns by 2 seconds.

Piratoz.8627:

That is what I am proposing, the damage portion trait sort of works like shocking aura’s ICD where each enemy would have his own cooldown so you use an aoe you could strike multiple enemies with lightning bolts at once. A small internal cooldown is needed so it cannot be exploited for massive damage with extremely fast ticking abilities such as FGS 4. Also, to limit the power of the second part of the trait, the air ability cooldown reduction has its own ICD of 1 second. So if you crit 10 enemies multiple times within 2 seconds then the trait will likely proc 2 times reducing air cooldowns by 2 seconds.

Ya that works for me i am not sure if they can program it like that though it seems ICD on passive skills when hit works different then when you hit aura vs say Blinding Ashes. As is Lightning rod is not too bad there just better things to run over it.

lightning rod should be more like something that happens when y’r hit…

The main problem with have ZERO utility skills that can proc this, (and no please dont say earth shield lol), we need to change signet of water to have an interrupt instead of a terrible chill and give us some more ways to proc it. If they wanted more defence for ele’s though why not bring tempest defense down to a master level and nerf the % damage increase vs stunned opponents. I personally would love a trait that could counter hammer warriors.

Rocketmist.5436:

The main problem with have ZERO utility skills that can proc this, (and no please dont say earth shield lol), we need to change signet of water to have an interrupt instead of a terrible chill and give us some more ways to proc it. If they wanted more defence for ele’s though why not bring tempest defense down to a master level and nerf the % damage increase vs stunned opponents. I personally would love a trait that could counter hammer warriors.

Asura have a daze utility and i guess there is tornado it can trigger it not realty a utility though. The skill is good as is just fresh air and temp def are better and out of all the 4 atument trees air has some of the best chose water is good too but fire and earth fall behind.

What i think it should be changed into is every time you stun or daze or knock down / back some one then it should trigger not just off of interruption.

I think the main drawback is that you cannot combine it with Tempest Defense. Just moving it down to Master tier would make Lightning Rod much stronger

Yeah, id rather have a worse tempest defense, most eles I know aren’t warriors who will shield bash then evis you either, take away the 20% bonus damage to stunned opponents and just make the aura a master trait and i’d be happy.

If at least it would work together with updraft or something.
knockdowns etc

Could be reworked into

“When you critically hit your enemy you also daze your target for <insert time>”. This should get some serious cooldown ofcourse, something along the lines of 20 seconds. The only thing I still do not like about this is that you cannot control the daze for skillful play.

Lightning Rod should be a Master Trait at its current power level, to be honest. It’s better than Halting Strike on the Mesmer because of the Weakness, and the fact that the Ele isn’t supposed to be an interrupt-based class also keeps it from being an Adept trait. But no one will ever take this as a Grandmaster. If you’re not looking at Fresh Air, then even Tempest Defense is just way better.