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)
(edited by Colt.9051)