Guild Wars 2

I have two documents for the trait changes, one is an overview and the other a functioning demo of the new trait trees (in the form of an excel doc), you can find both documents here.

• Each trees most influential (grandmaster) traits are separated in to three types: swapping, staying, and stacking.
  • Swap traits reward you with defense in the form of boons for swapping in to and/or out of an element and synergize well with the arcane tree, these exist to continue supporting the swap heavy playstyle.
  • Staying traits give you certain bonuses so long as you are in the element they pertain to, these serve three purposes:
    • To give swap heavy builds windows of power through controlled swapping
    • To give swap light builds a ‘second home’ outside of their primary attunement,
    • To create the option of an ‘attunement rocking’ playstyle, benefitting from swapping between two or more heavily invested elements.
  • Stacking traits, which reward you with continually increasing bonuses for staying in an attunement. These bonuses grow to a cap and can be very powerful, but are also lost when attuning to any other element. They are also made to have clear strengths which can be further improved upon, as well as clear weaknesses, which can be shored up through other trait choices.

Example: An elementalist knows he wants to build fire and air, and is unsure of the third trait path he wants. He can choose Ashes and Embers for disables and might while in fire, and then choose Fresh Air so that his critical hits in Fire will allow him to rock back and forth between the fire and air attunements. Having made this choice, he finishes it off with the Arcane line to further improve his boons and swapping advantages.
Given the same decision of fire and air, that elementalist may also choose to use Pyromancers Mastery, making fire his main attunement through the heavily stacking damage available from this trait. He then takes Airs grandmaster Unstoppable Force for chasing power and the spike damage to finish off opponents. Having a swap light build the arcane tree is less useful, so he chooses water to shore up his defensive weakness to conditions.

Each tree has also had an amount of its defensive power moved from its major traits to the minor traits. These minor traits take three forms similar to the major grandmaster traits,

• The Minor Adepts give a defensive boon upon swapping to the appropriate attunement, benefitting swap heavy playstyles.
• The Minor Master gives a defensive bonus while in a specific attunement, benefitting swap heavy or light playstyles.
• The Minor Grandmaster gives a defensive bonus in your current attunement, depending on the attunement you came from. These principally reward controlled attunement swapping, be it for swap-heavy or swap-light builds, in the form of specific answers to attack. These further push the idea of a gradient of builds from swap light to swap heavy, as well as facilitating the idea that there should be windows of offense and defense regardless of where your build falls on that gradient.

Example: We have a fire/water/earth condition elementalist. His investment in fire gives him retaliation when he attunes to fire, and deals damage to enemies who get near him while in fire. His investment in Earth gives him protection upon attuning to earth, and extra toughness while in earth. His investment in water gives him of regeneration when attuning to water, and further regenerating health while in water.

However, because the grandmaster traits work dependently, they can vary greatly depending on how this elementalist intends to swap and stay in attunements.

In the case above, let’s say he makes water his ‘home’ attunement by taking aquamancers mastery. He can now swap to earth from water for extra armor, then back to water for extra health. Or he can swap to fire from his home attunement of water for boons and condition clear, the swap to water to continue fire and waters shared condition clear theme.

Specific Notes on Traits

• Renewing Stamina – Because of the higher defensive baseline, renewing stamina has been brought in line the same way similar vigor-granting traits were months ago, and no longer gives 100% vigor uptime all on its lonesome. You can still get 100% vigor uptime, it just takes more than this single investment, the air tree, for example, has new sources of vigor.
• Elemental attunement has been made baseline, sort of. Each Minor Adept trait gives a defensive boon upon attunement. Note, defensive, meaning fire no longer gives might, but instead retaliation, defense through threat. There is a new arcane trait which grants might on attunement to preserve that functionality.
• Conjurer is now in the water tree, and probably makes absolutely no sense to you. It will make sense once you read the skill changes section, which contains heavy functionality changes for conjures.
• Any trait which was nothing but a stat conversion sticker (soothing winds, strength of stone) has been merged with some other kind of effect. Either a new one, or one found in another trait.
• Downed traits have been removed, not saying they are bad for every class, but they are for the elementalist, our key strategy for prolonging or rallying from the downed state is escape, not attack.
• Falling damage traits have also been removed, and those I will say are bad for every class. Put them in a food or wrench buff, or a mastery track, or anywhere else but in traits and gear.

The elementalist has two skillsets which trump all others because of their ability to be stacked and provide regularly available defense which either works with, or regardless of, attunement swapping; these two skillsets are Arcane skills and Cantrips. Now I don’t want to see these go away and my principle purpose here is to open the elementalist class up to more build diversity, and removing build paths is no way to do that. Nonetheless because of the inherent defense now available based on trait choice, the defensive power of both arcane skills and cantrips should be less reliable, in short, increased cooldowns, they will still be just as powerful (more powerful in some cases) but available less often.

In spite of all the above, the elementalist still retains a break between the class theme and its mechanics. If the elementalist builds with a strong theme towards one element, it can seem optimal to never use its class mechanic. And we have seen with such traits as Berserker’s Power that that is not okay, in the case of the elementalist more so than any other class, as its class mechanikittenerally makes up four fifths of its skill bar. This problem can be solved with a revamp to conjures.

• Conjures will now overwrite an attunement when cast, and remain until the conjure skill is activated again to drop it, or until the elementalist goes down. The conjure may not be dropped while you are attuned to the conjure, and when dropped (for any reason) will place the regained attunement on full CD. There is also now a trait for creating conjured environmental weapons as a support function found in the water tree.

Example: An Elementalist is built fire/earth/water, but is built to have earth as his ‘main’ attunement. He swaps in to water and fire for utility purposes such as healing, control, condition clearing and combo fields, but is largely at home in the earth attunement stacking his Geomancer’s Mastery and shrugging off damage and control. Having very little use for the air attunement, he slots Earth Shield on his utility bar, swaps to the Air attunement, and casts Earth Shield. Doing so replaces his Air Attunement with the Earth Shield as a second earth attunement, which will work with all traits, healing, elite, and utility skills as if it is the earth attunement.

Doing so will allow this elementalist to remain in earth attunement while still using the class mechanic and retaining the innate advantages of his chosen elemental path, but also exposes him to the weaknesses inherent to that path choice. For example, the defense from the minor grandmaster traits will not work swapping between the same element, meaning he will lose out on those defensive advantages if he only rocks between his two earth attunements, and swapping out of earth to regain those defensive buffs will cost him all stacks of his major grandmaster trait Geomancer’s Constance, making when and how you swap into and out of your ‘home’ element a very important build and play choice. Such rules would apply to any combination of base and conjured attunements.

There is a slew of other changes to conjures, some quality of life buffs, some so that they mesh better with the base attunement weapon skills, and some as just plain needed buffs and nerfs.

• Earth Shield skill five, Fortify now blocks projectiles and enemies from entering its AoE.
  • Earth is meant to be support through defense, and Fortify’s animation always appeared as if you could hide under its earth shield from damage, but you couldn’t, it did nothing for anyone but the elementalist, its functionality now matches its appearance and its theme.
• Ice Bow skill four, Ice Storms damage is decreased.
• Ice Bow skill two, Frost volleys damage is increased.
  • Just shifting power around to encourage use of more than one skill from the set, this would however be an overall loss in damage.
• Ice Bow skill five, can now be stunbroken, and the block of ice can be attacked and destroyed to prevent the stacking chill (similar to Entangles immobilize), and its base recharge has been increased to forty seconds.
  • Meant to retain the power of the skill, but give it some counterplay and a more reasonable uptime for such a strong control skill.
• Lightning hammer skill one, increased the windup for static swing to 1 second, and thunderclap to 1.5 seconds,
  • Honestly with evade, permacripple, permaweakness, and soon to be permachill auto attacks, I don’t think having a blast finisher on auto is anything to write home about, but it does need to be slowed down some to give it a little more vulnerability to control and enemies some more response time.
• Lightning hammer skill four, Lightning Storm, can now be cast at 900 range.
  • Just so it synergizes a little better with the ranged weapons.
• Conjure flame axe is gone, yeah sorry, I’m one of the few who liked it too, but…
• Fiery Greatsword is no longer an elite skill, but a utility skill, replacing Flame Axe.
  • Honestly it hasn’t been worthy of being an elite for a while, slightly lower the power scaling and it has nothing over a warrior with a greatsword. And under the new conjure system it would be both imbalanced and thematically nonsensical to have two fire conjures but one of each other element. I would imagine more elite conjures would be added with other elementally themed specializations, rather than as part of the base class.

Because of the newly customizable defense available as a baseline in traits, weapon skills need to be more specifically tuned in their own strengths and weaknesses, just as the traits have been. As you can also probably tell, some of the above changes to conjures were also made with this goal in mind. Also threw in some balance and quality of life changes to see if they stick.

• Focus Fire 4, flamewall, has its recharge reduced to 15 seconds.
• Focus Fire 5, fire shield, has its recharge reduced to 20 seconds.
• Dagger Air 4 skill, Ride the Lightning, now has a 25 second RC, unchanged by striking an opponent.
• Dagger Earth 2, Ring of Earth, now instant cast with a delay on effect.
• Dagger Water 1, Vapor Blade will now follow any angle of terrain or objects without being destroyed.
• Dagger Water 5, now heals for (ever so slightly) less
• Dagger Fire 3, Burning Speed, no longer evades, but instead grants retaliation per enemy hit.
• Staff Air 4 skill, Windborne speed no longer clears disabling conditions, but instead applies vigor in addition to its swiftness.
• Staff Earth 1, Stoning decreases the cooldown of eruption and shockwave on hit.
  • There should be no weapon in which the earth attunement cannot regularly apply bleeding stacks.
• Staff Fire 4, burning retreat no longer evades, but rolls back for further range.
• Scepter Earth 1 – Stone shards has a significantly lower precast, and an equally increased aftercast.
  • Damage and ability to stack bleed will remain the same, all this does is bring the damage to bear earlier for better PvE functionality.
• Scepter fire 2 – Dragon’s Tooth is now ground targeted
• Scepter Water 2 – Shatterstone is now instant cast with a delay on effect.
• Signet of Tectonomancy, the only change to utilities outside of conjures, cantrips, and arcane skills, it is a new elite to replace Fiery Greatsword… err… Flame Axe? You know what I mean. I themed it towards earth because that is the tree which contains the heaviest signet traits. However it would still be very useful with fires ‘threat generation’ condition/power builds, or useful in any other power and support builds for its active. Its passive is also a little on the weaker side, like most of the Ele signets, both to encourage use of the active and because of Signet Masteries ability to make the passive effects permanent.
  • Signet of Tectonimancy – Passive: Apply 8s bleeding to opponents who strike you, ICD of 2 seconds. Active: Knock down up to 5 enemies in a 600 radius, grant 3 stacks of 3s stability to nearby allies in that same radius.