Guild Wars 2

I’d like to post some changes to weapon skills that I’ve been thinking about for all ele weapons, as with as much reworking as Anet have been doing, (the last balance update was definitely a turn for the better) you can only change certain traits so much, as there are great traits we have mainly centered around Water and Arcane, and somewhat Earth, but not as much synergy is present with Fire and Air, and Earth could still use some improvement. I’m feeling like ele’s main problem isn’t with our trait setups as a whole, but it has to do with our core setups as we have the lowest base health while being a light armor class, yet we don’t have much anything apparent to show for it (Like Thieves rectify their low health with a vast number of evades, teleports, and stealths, and Guardians have naturally high toughness, potent heals, and good damage mitigation). We do (or did, your opinion) take advantage of high boon uptimes and constant HoTs (Heal over Time) and small burst heals to make up for this, as well as cover skills like the old Mist Form which let us heal while under a cloak of invincible water droplets, with cantrips being great for all your stun breaking needs, but a lot of our survivability mechanics centered around this were severely nerfed, leaving us with nothing much to compensate. As a D/D ele, our mobility was even nerfed as well as our damage for traiting heavily into water. Eles sorely need a defining CLASS mechanic to make up a justifiable reason for us to have such low base health and armor.

One way we could start off balancing eles’s core mechanics could be the reworking of some of our weapon skills and utilities, as a good number of skills that are deemed next to useless and utilities never see the light of day in any PvP or WvW environment setup. I’d like to start with weapon skills mainly. Some ideas for anet for weapon skills could be as follows:

Dagger: A lot of dagger skills are already in a good place, though some skills just need some minor tweaking to be fine.

- Fire #5: Fire Grab ~ All this needs is a rework or fix of the hit box mechanics and this could be a fine skill. It’s very often hard to hit anyone on the move and/or strafing around you to hit this reliably.

- Air #2: Lightning Touch ~ Same as above.

- Air #5: Ride the Lightning ~ Too many people have already voiced their opinion on this skill, and there’s no justifiable reason to keep this skill as it is. Revert the cooldown back to 15s, keep the current distance and get rid of the stupid double cooldown on miss mechanic.

- Earth #1: Impale ~ I understand that earth is meant to be mainly for conditions, but it at least needs to be somewhat viable for power builds as well. Powerwise it hits too soft to be a viable auto attack for if you’re stuck in earth attune, and the distance it reaches, for an earth spire, it’s too close range that I can barely hit anything that isn’t horridly close up. Raise the base damage of this skill and increase the range of this skill to 600 units, matching up with Vapor Blade. If you feel the need to, lower the bleed duration for each spire in ratio with the physical damage increase if you need to balance this.

- Earth #4: Earthquake ~ Could use a cooldown reduction, seeing as it’s a small AoE knockdown. 30s isn’t anything unreasonable. That way it can sync way better with…

- Earth #5: Churning Earth ~ This is already a pretty good skill itself, and the damage and bleeds it does definitely justifies the cooldown. The one annoying thing is if it’s interrupted at any point in mid-channel that the cooldown completely resets, in which you have nothing to show for leaving yourself completely open for 3 seconds. The same also holds true if you yourself move while channeling this skill. I have an interesting suggestion to improve this skill!

I saw something interesting on the Wiki that this skill used to be a Charge Skill (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Charge_skill) We could revert it back to this, as it was before, and do a certain amount of damage based on how long you hold the channel.

1/4 to 1s ~ 75% less damage done, 2 stacks of bleeds
1 1/4s to 2s ~ 50% less damage done, 4 stacks of bleeds
2 1/4s to 3s ~ 25% less damage done, 6 stacks of bleeds
3 1/4s ~ After the 1/4s Casts 1 second knockdown on last cripple pulse before the max charge eruption, dealing full damage and 8 stacks of bleeds, punishing people for staying in the AoE. (Knock down is completely optional by the way)

Scepter: I feel a lot of skills here solely depend on the opponent standing still, or are otherwise incapacitated. I feel we should remove some of the static regarding this glaring issue. Scepter also lacks sustained damage in 2/4 of its attunements.

- Fire #1: Flamestrike ~ Where to begin… The physical damage is VERY poor for this skill, the channel time is WAY long, and the burn isn’t very sustainable unless you’re running a condi build. Please give a physical damage specced ele a chance to do some sustained damage through this. Increase the base physical damage and reduce the channel time to 1/2 to 3/4 seconds.

- Fire #2: Dragon’s Tooth ~ Skill hits like a ton of bricks when it hits… if it hits. If the foe isn’t immobilized or stunned prior to casting this, they can easily walk out of the small AoE circle. Nothing needs to be changed damagewise, but let’s make this skill ground targetable, so that we can at least have more control over the skill for either holding choke points or blast finishing. Prehaps even inflict burning in the AoE under the dripping lava spire for 2 seconds while they stay under it.

- Water #2: Shatterstone ~ This has a really short cooldown, but a LONG wind up time. A 1s cast, with the shatterstone exploding 2s after cast. That’s 3 seconds. Stuff often moves out of range too often for this. I propose two possible fixes for this:

1) Reduce the shatterstone explosion time to 1 second.
2) Increase the cooldown to 5 seconds, add a blast finisher to it.

- Water #3: Water Trident ~ This heal/attack is kinda underwhelming compared to the Dagger Water #2 Cone of Cold skill. That and it has a twice the cooldown. Again, two possible fixes for this:

1) Reduce the cooldown to 15 seconds.
2) Add a 300 unit range knockback on impact. (This is similar to how it worked in Guild Wars 1)

- Earth #1: Stone Shards ~ Again, too little physical damage sustain with this auto attack. Increase base damage.

- Earth #3: Dust Devil ~ I can’t help but laugh every time as this is named after a vacuum… xD Anyways, the skill seems a bit underwhelming for the 15s CD. I’d suggest increasing the base damage done with this skill.

Focus: This weapon does make an excellent defensive weapon with 3/8 of its skills having great defensive utility, however the other 5 need quite a bit of work to make it more useful out of Air and Earth attunes. Focus should IMO focus mostly on control effects and defensive utility, as it currently does, but it needs to do a bit better on the control effects.

- Fire #4: Flamewall ~ Damage is weak, burn only lasts a second… the only useful thing this has going for it is that it’s a fairly long-lasting fire field… it should be more than this. It needs to punish people who even dares to cross the field. I have a few proposed fixes:

1) Increase the base damage of the skill.
2) Increase the burn duration for crossing the fire field, equal, if not more than the duration to Fire Dagger #4’s Ring of Fire skill.
3) Add a 1s Fear to anyone that enters the fire line. (This suggestion is more unusual yes, but we need some way to punish people for “crossing the line”, right?)

- Fire #5: Fire Shield ~ This skill has WAY too long of a cooldown for the underwhelming effects this does. Again, a few suggestions for this:

1) Halve the cooldown of this skill.
2) Increase the burn duration to 3 seconds per attacker.

- Water #4: Freezing Gust ~ For a single target chill, this has a really high cooldown… especially compared to Water Dagger #3’s Frozen Burst skill. Two suggestions to fix this skill:

1) Reduce the cooldown to 20s
2) Make the chill an AoE 240 unit radius chill around your target, targeting up to 5 foes.

-Water #5: Comet ~ This is actually a pretty good skill when used right, but can still use a bit of improvement.

1) Increase the radius of the comet to 240 units.
2) Make it an AoE comet, effecting up to 3 foes in the target’s area. Increase cooldown to 30s

- Air #5: Gale ~ A ranged single target knockdown REALLY doesn’t warrant having a 50s cooldown. Tone the cooldown to 30 seconds at the very most.

I’m not sure how much exposure these suggestions might get with the Anet staff, but the main point I’m getting across is, eles need a tweaking at the core of their class, and not just trait rebalances. Possibly then we can stop all the ele hate then.

Reserved for Utility Changes

Reserved for Utility Changes

The dagger changes have my support. I’ve learned a few tricks which help me hit a high percentage of my fire grabs, but I hope they make it a more reliable skill in general.

Bravo on churning earth. Making that skill unpredictable would be just phenomenal.