Guild Wars 2

I would like to make a serious topic about the state of the ele and put together all the concerns we have about the profession maybe also to have an answer from anet. I tried reading this forum but i probably missed something from fellow eles so please post here to tell me about your concerns in a constructive way and i’ll try to keep original post updated for ease of reading for developers. Also possible solutions to the concerns are welcome.

As for me, i’m mainly a s/tpvp player so if i say something wrong feel free to correct me. Please do so in a nice way since i admit i’m no expert about pve.

1) While eles seem to have a place in WvW (even if maybe a little pigeon holed to staff) they feel sub par in pve environment (cause the only viable spec is lightning hammer which makes me say: why not take directly a war?) and totally unviable in s/tpvp. While we are ok with the low armor, low health we are not so ok with the low damage. Quite honestly as for pure dps output many professions can do better. But that’s not the main problem in fact.

2) Most of the eles in fact feel like we miss something to make us decent glass cannons. Basically other glass are not so glass. Wars are beefy and have excellent control, necros are king of control (oh, u have stability? nice, i corrupt boon u!), thieves have stealth and evade, mesmer have clones, invisibility and access to better utility (portal/time warp/moa). This is for glass cannon, if u go for a mixed approach then u have spirit rangers that are better at support while doing good (rightfully so not fantastic) damage and evading and are becoming a must have for every team.

3) I didnt mention guardians cause they have a different role in the current tpvp meta which is THE bunker. No other profession seem to rival that. And what makes me really really sad i did not mention engis not for the reason they are not good but for the reason they stole our place as jack of all trades but having a more reliable damage output and survivability. Basically why take an ele when u can have an engi in your team?

4) Eles are too depending on their mechanic and this makes the arcana tree quite compulsory therefore making 30 pts there a must have. Also Evasive Arcana is almost unskippable. Which other grandmaster trait is so good? Now before u nerf evasive arcana it would be nice to give us some serious fire traits for example cause right now, at least in a s/tpvp nobody in his right state of mind would pick even 1 of them.

5) Many people feel like the problems of the ele right now is not it’s underpowered but that other professions are overpowered. Many feel (me included) recent buffs to some professions were way exaggerated (necro in particular) therefore pushing out ele

6) Some nerfs were uncalled for. A 20 sec ride the lightning could not ever rival the mobility of a war or a thief.

7) All in all we suffer from identity crisis as mentioned in point 3: what’s our place?

8) Some weapons sets lack synergy among skills and arcana tree just alleviates the problem.

Issues with eles run even deeper with that. I’m talking awkwardly designed weapons that don’t take each other into account, and even elements in the same set that aren’t designed around flowing well together. Without traits, even a staff ele would be subpar, leaving d/d and s/d as the only sets that start to flow within each other. This kind of situation is pretty unacceptable. You cannot rely on specific traits to make your set viable; it must have some relatively effective output by itself. This is rampant throughout the game actually. It seems like once the trait system was put into place, weapons started being balanced around them being active, instead of as standalone entities with traits adding a little flavor along with stat boosts.

However, if Arcana was reworked to give some other bonus aside from attunement recharge, and the recharge was set to 9-10 seconds, this would free up a huge amount of working room for rebalancing the profession as a whole.

I would like to see more support for “Specialised Elementalists”

Basically make all lesser then they are now. The more you spec into a tree the greater your powers with that tree become. Specing arcane would make all skills lower then they are now but much better then without.

Speccing fire would make fire stronger then now and make it cool down a lot quicker (not stacking)

etc . etc . etc.

@Leuca: seems to me that your opinion there shows more of an issue with the game rather than the ele itself. Or I misunderstand what u r saying? Or u mean it’s particularly bad with ele? In the second case can u make a comparison with another profession to make it clearer? Cause it seems to me, but we may simply disagree, that traits for specific weapon sets are quite rare in ele trees while quite common in other profession. Again maybe i completely misunderstand what u r saying.

@TGSlasher: u mean u would like fire tree to empower fire spells, water empowering water spells and so on? Cause there are specific traits for that (more damage for a single element, cd reduction for elements). The problem is the class is designed around its mechanic and this traits dont work particularly well (with the possible exception of air training+fresh air).

Fiery Lily.8046:

@Leuca: seems to me that your opinion there shows more of an issue with the game rather than the ele itself. Or I misunderstand what u r saying? Or u mean it’s particularly bad with ele? In the second case can u make a comparison with another profession to make it clearer? Cause it seems to me, but we may simply disagree, that traits for specific weapon sets are quite rare in ele trees while quite common in other profession. Again maybe i completely misunderstand what u r saying.

I was speaking more of the lack of synergy within certain weapon sets (staff/focus are the main offenders) and the necessity of having certain traits for some weapons to even be effective. Both problems are startlingly obvious on the ele, though I did say they exist throughout the rest of the professions to one degree or another. The fact that Arcana spec is pretty much required for most builds because of badly designed attunement cooldowns compounds this problem, because traits you could bring to potentially alleviate the problems some of our sets are essentially closed off.