Guild Wars 2

Many people loves swords, the idea of an elemental swordsmaster is pretty cool, and there’s some iconic examples from other gaming series with similar classes (think of Red Mage from final fantasy). I, personally, would love to wield a Bolt with my Elementalist. In fact, I absolutely love swords. And elementalists.

Because we know the current weaponry is going to be expanded for all professions in the future, here’s my wishlist for a possible mh sword for the elementalists:

So, what do Elementalists lack?

Dedicated condition-damage weapons. Elementalists already have plenty of party support, especially from Staff; Scepter already focuses on “single-targetting” bursting, daggers already fulfill the “melee mage” role, and focus is defensive.

How would this work?

Elementalists have plenty of access to burning, and decent access to bleeding. Taking inspiration from the warrior’s sword, our bladed weapon is going to bring in easier access to bleeding.

What makes it different from other condition damage builds?

Necromancers and engineers have access to poison, and can inflict a lot of aoe, ranged condition damage. Engineers can almost even “burst” with it. An elementalist with mh sword would have a more rigid range (600, inbetween dagger and scepter), rely only on two conditions to deal damage, but be able to cover the with several other, more defensive conditions (weakness, cripple, etc).

So let’s formulate a skillset at last!

Fire Attunement

1. Fire Trail

• Slash your sword into the air, sending a scorching trail your opponent and anyone inbetween you and them.
• 600 range, piercing, direct damage only;

2. Flame Wave, 6c

• Swing your sword, spreading a wave of flames to all foes around you;
• Mechanically similar to guardian’s staff auto-attack, 600 range, 3-4s of aoe burning;

3. Call of Fire, 15c

• Thrust your sword into the air, filling it with flames. You burn foes for 1 second for every third attack;
• 15 seconds.

Water Attunement

1. Healing Slice

• Attack at melee (130) range. Each strike spashes water around you, healing you and nearby allies at that range.

2. Spring Swing, 12c

• Swing your sword, spreading water waves that apply regen to you and all allies around you.
• 4-6s of regen, 600 range.

3. Ice Block, 15c

• Block the next incoming attack with a frozen blade. The ice is shattered by the impact, bleeding foes and making them vulnerable.
• 5 stacks of vulnerability for 6s, 5 stacks of bleeding for 6 second.

(Sequence) Icy Summoning

• Manifest the ice in your blade into a chilling beam against your foe.
• 2s chill.

Air Attunement

1. Lightning Slash (Chain Sequence)

• Two quick hits for low damage, at 600 range thanks to lightning’s aid, followed by a much slower hit that summons a random sequence of lightning bolts within the radius of the target.

2. Blade Storm, 10c

• Leap to your foe with the aid of lightning, striking them fast with a flurry of strikes.
• 8x (low) damage, melee range (130), leap finisher.

3. Call of Thunder, 15c

• Thrust your sword into the air, calling into it a lightning bolt. You inflict 3s weakness to struck foes every fifth attack;
• 15 seconds.

Earth Attunement

1. Magnetic Strike

• Wave your sword through the air with magnetic power, striking and bleeding your foe at range.
• 600 range, 2 hits, 1 stack of bleeding for 6s for each hit.

2. Rocking Blade, 6c

• Throw your sword into the foe like a rock-weighted spear, and bring it back with magnetic power.
• 600 range, slow but strong attack, 3 stacks of bleeding for 12 seconds, 100% projectile finisher.

3. Counter Quake, 15c

• Block the next incoming attack. If an attack is blocked, target foe and foes around you are knocked down by a groundshacking impact.
• Blast Finisher.

(Sequence) Ground’s Summoning

• Manifest your blade’s the shacking power around your ground, crippling nearby foes.
• Blast Finisher.

So, whats the playstyle?

This MH Sword elementalist has a few key details to note: It can spread several conditions to cover burning and bleeding, one of which is reliable; it has one source of bleeding outside earth (in water) and two sources of burning outside fire (fire’s #3 passive effect, earth’s projectile finisher on a fire field). Fire and air offer more aoe and/ or multi-hits to make use of their passive third skills, while earth focuses on applying bleeding through slower means. The two truly melee-range attacks are either supported by a leap (air) or are meant only as a defensive tool (water’s auto-attack). The counter skills allow for an interesting duelist/ riposting flavor.

Thanks for reading!

EDIT 1
Improved the skillset based on feedback. Call of Fire activation was changed to every third attack (instead of every fifth), and bleeding skills were improved.

I would add cast times, right now no one can tell how fast or slow these skills are.
This weapon could also use a way to transfer or remove conditions and maybe 1 or 2 combo field. I would replace the Call of _ skills with them since the every # attack seems kind of weak for how many attacks you actually need to land.

But swords seem like a cool idea, maybe even cooler if they get an animation on the weapon per attunement.

DiogoSilva.7089:

So, what do Elementalists lack?

Dedicated condition-damage weapons. Elementalists already have plenty of party support, especially from Staff; Scepter already focuses on “single-targetting” bursting, daggers already fulfill the “melee mage” role, and focus is defensive.

You seem to have forgotten that elementalists lack a proper ranged option for PvP. (The scepter is basically a melee weapon with ranged attacks, seeing as it’s only effective at close range due to Might stacking, Phoenix, and the offhand dagger skills.)

Yay! I love these kind of threads!

DiogoSilva.7089:

So, what do Elementalists lack?

Dedicated condition-damage weapons.

That’s arguable. Personally, I feel that every elementalist weapon should be capable of being an effective condition damage weapon but you have to choose what to focus on, direct or condition damage or attempt to utilize both…it seems it should be more of a choice of the Elementalist not the weapon since any Elementalist should be able to pick up and use any weapon properly…we’re not like other professions with weapon swaps, afterall.

Elementalists already have plenty of party support, especially from Staff;

Maybe…some things could be improved though.

Scepter already focuses on “single-targetting” bursting,

That’s debatable. But then scepter could be made better at that too.

daggers already fulfill the “melee mage” role, and focus is defensive.

Yup, although Focus feels like it’s more of a ‘ranged defensive’ weapon than a pure defensive one…but again that weapon could be made better.

But all in all, I sort of get your point…I just sort of disagree too. Elementalist could definitely use more weapon styles but perhaps something with a different type of theme…like you can make some kind of ‘all-in-one range’ type of weapon that has close range and long range skills but at the cost of a bit of versatility (like instead of having high CC in air/water, it just gets damage at longer range, instead of huge damage in fire it just gets standard damage with leaps and cleave melee, and earth could bridge the gap by being a hardened defense as you switch between melee and ranged with blocks and reflects…) for example.

Another random style I thought of was something like a blend of Ranger traps/Necro marks as a kind of off-hand weapon built for over-all pressuring and close range defense/harassment.

But a weapon aimed for condition damage? I think that’s a rather odd concept…

As for the layout itself, I think it’s pretty neat with the different kind of blocks. Very melee-esque defensive but I’d agree that the ‘condition on Nth attack’ is rather lame :/

Keep refining the idea though. I’ll keep reading.

3 things:

1) The bleed output with the skills as-written is worse than any other elementalist weapon. Consider dagger (an 8 second stack every second, with a 12 second stack every 6 seconds), scepter (three 6 second stacks every 2 seconds), staff (six 12-second stacks every 6 seconds with earth CD traited). Yours has an 8 second stack every second, and if the “Rocking Blade” skill is too slow, due to the low duration of the bleeds it outputs it may not accelerate bleed stack ramping at all. So yours ramps up slower than scepter or dagger, and isn’t as AoE as staff (and staff can reach bleed cap without sigil of earth, where this would require it, and hence a build with crits being necessary, locking in a stat slot)

2) This doesn’t solve the core issue of condition elementalists: Bleed stacking outside of earth attunement is negligible to the point that your damage output will be reduced by a huge amount when leaving earth attunement. Without Arcana, you lose 15 seconds worth of bleeds by leaving earth attunement; with Arcana maxed you lose 9 seconds of bleeds. Burning is not enough to cover that damage drop-off (burning benefits less in terms of % damage than bleeding from the condition damage stat, and in a dedicated build is only worth 5 bleed stacks; leaving earth will lose any condi build 9 or more). A single skill in water that inflicts a single bleed once per attunement rotation which also relies on being hit during a block animation also won’t cover it.

3) Because of 2) above, it doesn’t really matter if you can “cover” your bleeds with new conditions by switching attunements. You’ve already lost the majority of them by leaving earth (when it comes to covering conditions, the other weapons already can – MH dagger has immobilize and cripple, staff has weakness, cripple and immobilize, scepter has a blind… and then there’s utility skills, which help a lot for adding on extra conditions which signets or glyph of elemental power or glyph of storms can be really good for)

That’s really the deal breaker for ever having a condition elementalist build that actually uses attunement swapping – unlike direct damage builds, that maintain 80-100% of their DPS when attunement swapping due to having more than one viable attunement for damage, condition builds ultimately lose around 70% of their damage when they leave earth, because once you leave earth, all those bleeds come off. A working condi weapon for elementalists needs to have two attunements that can maintain a similar number of bleeds if the player’s ever going to leave earth attunement, so that after switching out to a utility attunement the player can quickly switch back to an attunement that functions with their build.

Due to the wholce “ice is sharp and pointy” thing, water’s the prime attunement to add bleeds to, flavor-wise. But having a decent damage output is counter to how the attunement is supposed to function outside of underwater combat. Obviously fire’s not going to bleed things – it’s more likely to cauterize the wound if you somehow made fire sharp. Air could step away from the lightning theme and be more about cutting winds and such.

DiogoSilva.7089:

1. Frozen Attack (Chain Sequence)

• Attack at melee (130) range. Each strike splashes water around you, healing you and nearby allies at that range.

My only response on the suggestions:
Frozen attack <—> Splashes water around you
Title and text aren’t compatible (you could use the title for the sequence instead.)

A Long Bow would be nice too focusing on single target skills since staff is the multitarget weapon.We allready have a melee option with D/D.

Thanks for the feedback!

When it comes to long-range damage and single-target direct damage, I feel like other weapons are already meant to do that, even if they’re not as effective as they could be. It would be wiser to tweak them instead of creating an entire new weapon.

I’ll explain some of my design decisions.

The “bleeding numbers” are arbitrary. They are what I felt was the best at the time I wrote the post, and did not directly compare them to other weapons. Initially, water’s #1, Frozen Attack, was meant to apply bleeding too, but I thought it made the skillset feel too samey, and the healing effect added more diversity to it. I forgot to update the name, so that’s why it isn’t compatible with the effect. :P

To improve the bleeding effects, I guess it’s safe to make Rocking Blade recharge twice as fast. 3 stacks isn’t as powerful as I thought. In addition or as an alternative to that, Magnetic Strike could probably strike twice for 6s of bleeding (=2 stacks), and Rocking Blade have its 3 stacks last for 12 seconds, allowing you to keep those between-attunements (and even use Rocking Blade twice before switching, if it has the 6s cooldown). That’s around 6 stacks of bleeding, that can last as much as 15s or more, with +condition duration and +bleeding duration. I wouldn’t make any more changes for now, in fear of making them a bit too strong.

Ice Block is conditional, which is already a disadvantage to applying bleeding. Besides, now that I look at it, the effect seems rather weak. But keeping the 1v1 duelist flavor/ mechanics, I’d only change the numbers, and Ice block could very well apply 5 stacks of bleeding for 6 seconds, mirroring the number of stacks for vulnerability.

Finally, the “Call” skills are very important in this set, because it allow you to spread burning outside of the fire attunement, and have an interesting synergy with the (few) aoe attacks, and with the multi-hit attacks. This synergy would lead to a satisfying playstyle. I used the guardian’s virtue mechanics, because I think they’re more interesting than a x% random effect, but if they lack oomph, I can very well tune up the numbers. Every third attack for Call of Fire? An air elementalist can easily apply 6 seconds of weakness with Call of Thunder, while still passively applying it in other attunements, and for this condition in particular, I think the skill is fine – I don’t want to see it used to mindlessly spam weakness, and I feel weakness is more strategical when it lasts longer but occurs less often.

Finally, the “Call of” skills are an offensive version of Scepter’s Rock Barrier. Initially, they were meant to have a sequence skill, like Hurl, but I didn’t want to overload the weapon with sequence skills, considering it already has two block sequences, so I decided to make them work more like the guardian’s first virtue, offering some synergy and “condition burst” to the remaining skills.

Also, one of the biggest flavors behind this concept, is that the blade is visually enhanced by the four elements. Call of Fire and Thunder make it burning and electrified for 15s. Ice Block and Counter Quake make it frozen or covered in rocks for their channeling duration.

It’s a great concept. Hope we get something like this soon. Adding combo fields to some of the attacks, as you’ve got the Earth finishers but a lack of combo fields. As it’s a one handed weapon however, it would synergise well with dagger (You’ve got the gap closers and Ring of Fire) and with focus (Flame wall and defensive spells/auras) but would need at least one more combo field.

Considering that the devs haven’t added combo fields to the scepter and to the mh dagger, I haven’t added one to this neither. The air leap and the earth finishers are there to interact with flamewall or ring of fire for fire aura/ burning/ might.

While I really like the idea of having a sword I’m not so convinced about making it condition related. First I would prefer a single target long range (vs the area damage staff) weapon to return to the more common “wizard”, a Wand maybe?

Only if it comes with an offhand sword as well. I want to either duel wield swords or wield a greatsword or longbow.

“Obviously fire’s not going to bleed things – it’s more likely to cauterize the wound if you somehow made fire sharp” Dingle

I really like the idea of the 1v1 duelist sword, and this ^ made me think of an idea for a fire spell that would deal extra damage based off of how much bleed was on an opponent (more stacks=more extra damage) but after the attack all bleed stacks on the enemy would be removed, or “cauterized”. I’m not sure where the attack would go, but if there was an off hand sword skill set, then make it a 5 skill with some good burst potential. Thoughts?

What? A single skill on the scepter is burst based, while the remainder are condition based.

You can burst pretty high with air’s scepter 1 and 2 combined with arcanes, traits and sigils; and dragon’s tooth, phoenix and hurl are also burst skills.

I personally think that the MH sword might be good with minor condi, but i really think eles are better at flat damage. Though i’m really hoping for OH sword, but i’m not much of o pvper so can’t really say it would be good

So, what do Elementalists lack?

Dedicated condition-damage weapons.

http://youtu.be/7fISdtOtREM

I don’t get this whole idea of sword for elemenists. It just doesn’t suit them, there is a reason why they have no melee weapons and have that mage image. Look at GW1 concept art and characters.

Would be nice if we could pop people into the air and do this to them with lightning with our swords https://youtu.be/Bg7j24XF_3c?t=2m50s

Mik.3401:

I don’t get this whole idea of sword for elemenists. It just doesn’t suit them, there is a reason why they have no melee weapons and have that mage image. Look at GW1 concept art and characters.

you must not have played gw1 very much because eles can use sword in gw1. also, i dont know why everyone is speculating on what the skills could be. they have already been datamined and posted on reddit.

nexidecimus.5973:

Mik.3401:

I don’t get this whole idea of sword for elemenists. It just doesn’t suit them, there is a reason why they have no melee weapons and have that mage image. Look at GW1 concept art and characters.

you must not have played gw1 very much because eles can use sword in gw1. also, i dont know why everyone is speculating on what the skills could be. they have already been datamined and posted on reddit.

This thread is a massive necro. No comments for a year until a couple of days ago.

Rhialto.8423:

This thread is a massive necro. No comments for a year until a couple of days ago.

It’ll be interesting to find out, though, if Anet has taken any idea from this thread or not.

I assume if an elementalist uses sword main hand, she/he will lose distance closing skills on main hand dagger like Burning Speed or Magnetic Grasp. I hope we get at least one aura with sword main hand… but that’s just being too greedy:)

Just give us quick 1 skill attacks to spam and my ele would be one happy camper. If you fear power creep make us hit only 2-3 targets instead of 5, but please don’t nerf casting speed.

I’m more interested in seeing the trait synergy to support a sword mainhand than the skills themselves. That goes for all other classes too.

Hoping we just end up with a build similar to med guard with great sustain that can blow people up in a split second. Fresh air s/f is fun and pretty decent, but too easily countered by anyone with half a brain that can dodge and make you waste your burst leaving you helpless afterwards. Rev gets a mistform-like skill that they can attack people with on their sword. Why would they not give that to ele instead? That’s our skill kitten it.

Looking at other sword wielders out there:
Thief – Mobility (infiltrator strike) and evasion (with dagger) or flurry attacks (with pistol). High dmg and control (cripples and immob, stun with pistol)
Ranger- Mobility (movement and evasions) and control (cripple)
Warrior – Mobility and control (leaps and cripples and immob), offhand parry/block, flurry strikes, bleeds and high dmg strikes
Mesmer – Mobility (teleports) and control (immob), flurry attacks, offhand party/block

This gives us an idea what the weapon skills might be.
It will most likely be a weapon with high dmg and low range (lower than dagger). It will give us more mobility (probably in air and fire) and maybe blocks/parry (probably in earth) might get some flurry attacks with evade frames (probably in water) along with some control (cripple/imob in earth, chill in water).

It will make a nice mobility high dmg combo (control and high burst) with dagger offhand and a nice defense (blocks, invuls, control) combo with focus…

I expect it to be a more “selfish” weapon, with not many (if any) blast finishers (probably leap ones though) and more frontal cone attacks (unlike the pbaoe from dagger) that only cleave up to 3 targets). Also, auto-attack chains instead of single skills, and maybe some other chain skills (block/parry – counterattack)

How I see the skill set, based on what other classes get with sword and what ele gets with its attunement:

Fire – Chain attacks focusing on direct dmg and burn application. One leap/dash mobility skill and a block/counterattack that can burn/blind the opponent or give might to you in case no attack is blocked
Air – Chain attack focusing on high dmg and weakness application. One leap/dash or teleport mobility skill. One evade skill with a hard CC and/or fury buff.
Earth – Chain focused on bleed dmg and soft control (cripple). Flurry attack with high bleed application, block/parry skill with high condi application on counterattack (torment or bleed) and defensive buff in case no attack is blocked (protection or thenew condi immunity buff)
Water – Chain focused on vulnerability application and evade frame (like ranger GS), flurry attack that stacks chill, evade/block skill that heals/cure conditions