Guild Wars 2

Fire is the selfish trait line. It offers very few traits that synergize with other lines and, despite being the only trait line to buff Conjures, doesn’t offer enough Conjure support to warrant using.

So here’s my rework.

Minor Traits

Boiling Blood (Adept)
When you burn a foe while attuned to Fire, you have an x% chance to inflict bleeding for y seconds.

Sunspot (Master) (Unchanged)
Deal damage around you when attuning to Fire.

Burning Rage (Grandmaster) (Unchanged)
Deal 5% more damage to burning foes.

Adept Majors

Removed the following traits – Burning Fire.

Added trait:

Flame On!

When you attune to fire, allies in range of you gain a Fire aura for 3 seconds.

Master Majors

Removed traits: One With Fire, Fire’s Embrace.

Conjurer (Improved)
Conjured weapons have 10 more charges and their skills recharge x% faster.

Persisting Flames (Moved)
Fire fields last 30% longer.
I’m of the opinion that this is too weak to be a grandmaster trait. If it’s a Grandmaster, it should include all combo fields.

Shining, Burning Fingers (New)
You and all allies deal 10% more damage to foes within melee range.

Grandmaster Majors

Pyromancer’s Puissance (Reworked)
Whenever you cast a spell on a burning foe, you gain Might for x seconds.

Conjure Responsibly
When you conjure a weapon, you gain Retaliation for x seconds and Stability for y seconds. This applies to the ally who picks up your other weapon as well. Conjured weapons have 20% lower cooldowns (not the same as Conjurer, which effects the cooldowns of the skills ON the conjured weapon).

My Thoughts

The reworked Pyromancer’s Puissance will allow long duration burns (such as Drake’s Breath) to stack burning on a foe long enough for the Ele player to swap attunements and wrack up might while waiting for the Fire Attunement cooldown to come back. This change will let it synergize better with other attunements.

Boiling Blood will make Fire more self-sufficient as a condition damage line – and well, Flame Barrier pretty much sucked.

The new Flame Barriers is a major trait that grants allies a Fire Shield when you swap to Fire Attunement. This provides some nice offensive team support that should synergize nicely with more mainstream Ele builds.

The new conjure traits are meant to improve their overall effectiveness and support capabilities through lower conjure cooldowns, lower conjure weapon skill cooldowns, and boons.

Shining, Burning Fingers is an interesting way to provide offensive support to allies and buff yourself in a D/x build (or any Ele build when a foe is chomping on your face).

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Boiling Blood (Adept)
When you burn a foe while attuned to Fire, you have an x% chance to inflict bleeding for y seconds.

How about a small chance to inflict bleeding with each tick of burning in any attunement?

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Removed traits: One With Fire, Fire’s Embrace.

Shining, Burning Fingers (New)
You and all allies deal 10% more damage to foes within melee range.

Fire’s Embrace is kinda fun, and would be pretty great if signets themselves were more useful. Also, Burning Fingers would mostly benefit the dagger, which is already generally the best weapon for both hands, so I’m not too keen on that idea.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Pyromancer’s Puissance (Reworked)
Whenever you cast a spell on a burning foe, you gain Might for x seconds.

Would be pretty great for builds with Signet of Fire, and signet-focused builds with Fire’s Embrace.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Conjure Responsibly
When you conjure a weapon, you gain Retaliation for x seconds and Stability for y seconds. This applies to the ally who picks up your other weapon as well. Conjured weapons have 20% lower cooldowns (not the same as Conjurer, which effects the cooldowns of the skills ON the conjured weapon).

I’m a much greater fan of changing conjures to act more like engi kits so that they’d always be accessible – that would really help to mitigate the lack of range versatility that elementalists suffer from. If that’s not an option, though, I guess this’d do.

I wouldn’t mind some buffs to Fire, though what I would really like is for Lava Tomb to be moved down to a 10s ICD (or have it removed altogether).

Vayra.3290:

I wouldn’t mind some buffs to Fire, though what I would really like is for Lava Tomb to be moved down to a 10s ICD (or have it removed altogether).

The latter might be better. Is it even used for anything other than rallying off of weakened mobs?

Chaosky.5276:

Vayra.3290:

I wouldn’t mind some buffs to Fire, though what I would really like is for Lava Tomb to be moved down to a 10s ICD (or have it removed altogether).

The latter might be better. Is it even used for anything other than rallying off of weakened mobs?

I wasn’t even aware people took it for that much. The only reason I didn’t take it out is for consistency. Every profession has useless downed traits like that.

Shining, Burning Fingers a reference to Gundam?=P

But +10% damage to all allies doing melee damage seems like a little too powerful in a team that goes melee. The other Fire traits would still not be attractive for me to want to go into Fire.

Chaosky.5276:

Vayra.3290:

I wouldn’t mind some buffs to Fire, though what I would really like is for Lava Tomb to be moved down to a 10s ICD (or have it removed altogether).

The latter might be better. Is it even used for anything other than rallying off of weakened mobs?

I use it in SPVP all the time with my GC build. It’s less useful now that Vapour Form doesn’t reset health, but still quite useful. My playstyle usually ends in me getting downed and rallying a lot, so something that ticks for 1000-1500 on players trying to stomp me is good, I’ve lost count of how many people have been downed trying to stomp me like that. It would be much better if it had no ICD.

Personally none of these changes would make me consider removing points from water or arcana. Now if that is an issue with water/arcane offering too much or fire still not offering enough I don’t know.

Lalnuir.4957:

Personally none of these changes would make me consider removing points from water or arcana. Now if that is an issue with water/arcane offering too much or fire still not offering enough I don’t know.

Yeah, I don’t think we’ll really be able to move out of Water and Arcana unless our base Attunement Recharge Rate is changed to about 10 seconds, and our survival becomes less dependent on healing.

I definitely agree that fire is currently the most lackluster trait line, and a lot of your suggestions are pretty good, especially regarding the selfishness of the line. However, building off of your proposed changes I would alter the following:

Sun Poisoning (Adept minor): Same as boiling blood, but adds poison instead of bleeding. Mostly because we have zero access to poison as a class which severely limits condition builds.

Flame On!: I actually like that over the current Fire aura on signet use, but I foresee this being OP in combination with other aura traits.

Conjurer: Maybe it could add an active effect after cast (similar to Ranger spirits)? But this is a topic for another day.

Shining, Burning Fingers: We already have a similar trait in the Earth line, and the buff to a whole team would just be too much.

Persisting Flames: Keep this as a grandmaster trait, change the duration increase to 20%, and have it affect all combo fields. I think this (or a similar change) would promote new staff builds.

Whether or not any of these changes would shift the current Ele meta is unlikely, but if some changes to our offensive lines (Air + Fire) were made I think it would entice a few people away from Water + Arcane, without actually nerfing anything.

To me the weak lines are air and earth. Fire does have its own share of crap traits, but it’s workable.

IMO the real issues with the class are:

• the crappiness of utilities other than cantrips (glyphs and conjures are really, really bad, signets cast too slowly, only cantrips break stun)
• the low mobility/defense of any weapon set that doesn’t have an offhand dagger.

The 20 water, 10 earth and 30~ arcane and dagger offhand are just too necessary for the class atm.
They’d have to fix that situation first before really going anywhere else.
(knowing anet they will just nerf kitten instead of fixing the class, ending with the currently too powerful spec just being mediocre instead of a more well rounded class in terms of speccing)

I’m honestly surprised these are the same people that made GW1.
An utterly terrible show by them when it comes to PvP.

@mjharrison
I don’t hate downed state, just the situation the Anet devs are in, from financing and their own silly mistakes they don’t seem to have what it takes to introduce anything to the MMO genre in a greatly functioning fashion.