Guild Wars 2

Looking at traits and skills, I always find myself annoyed at just how much redundancy there is, particularly in the air line. In a game in which speed boosts don’t stack and only the highest one is taken, we have:

Zephyr’s Speed (Air)- 10% movespeed while in air

One With Air (Air)- move faster the longer you stay in air attunement (up to 25%)

Inscription (Air)- gain a boon associated with your current attunement when you cast a glyph (swiftness for Air)

Zephyr’s Boon (Air)- Auras grant fury and swiftness.

Elemental Attunement (Arcana)- grant yourself and allies a boon on attunement swap (air grants swiftness).

Windborne Dagger (Arcana)- gain 15% movespeed while wielding a mainhand, 10% for offhand. Stacks to 25% with both. Only works in combat.

Signet of Air (Signet utility) – gain 25% movement speed passively. Activate to lose the speed (unless traited) and blind the target foe and nearby foes.

Windborne Speed (Staff) – Place swiftness on and cure chilled, crippled, and immobilized on yourself and nearby allies.

Updraft (OH Dagger) – Roll back, blow adjacent foes forward, and gain swiftness.

Blast finisher (lightning field) – AoE swiftness.

Glyph of Elemental Harmony (healing skill) – Heals you and grants a boon based on your current attunement (swiftness for Air).

I mean, seriously, who designed this? Why do we have so many sources of movement speed that cancel each other out. There will almost always be wasted traits, utilities, or skills in a given Elementalist build because of this. It’s so easy to maintain permanent (or nearly permanent) Swiftness as an Elementalist that skills and traits like Windborne Dagger, Zephyr’s Speed, One with Air, and Signet of Air are shafted into redundant wasted slots reserved mainly for lazy players or builds.

Could Elementalist traits and skills be looked at? We have so many wasted sources of movement increasing abilities that could be better designed as short duration Fury buffs or various other effects. Air can do a lot more than make us run faster, after all.

The swiftness redundancies aren’t too bad since, as you said, they allow high to constant upkeep when used together, thus actually giving you a reason to use them in conjunction. That being said, aoe swiftness on blast is still a weak finish.

I completely agree on how worthless the +movement speed traits are though. On top of not stacking, they’re also very pathetic without swiftness as well. Ai/lightning is supposed to precise and hard hitting, so the critical side of things could certainly use some more attention.

Blast in Lightning Field should give Fury IMHO.

I’d imagine the design concept was a sound one.

We have low health, low armor, and lots of ranged attacks. We’ll need to move fast to kite stuff around and avoid damage.

Unfortunately, with all the gap closers available to every profession, Swiftness isn’t all that great for avoiding damage or kiting except for PvE.

Yes. A 900 range charge on a 10 seconds cooldown is way better than perma-swiftness.

Aether McLoud.1975:

Yes. A 900 range charge on a 10 seconds cooldown is way better than perma-swiftness.

It’s debatable.

Perma-Swiftness is amazing, until you get charged and burst into paste.

The dagger stuff and signet stuff is fine, swiftness stacks duration, so it is a nice synergy…

One with Air and Zephyr’s Speed are rubbish tho.

There is some swiftness available in just about any build. If we didn’t have the “redundancy” as you refer to this as, we would have few options available to us that we would be forced to take for what is a very neccessary ability in PvP.

One solution would be to give all lower tier speed boons a secondary trait that it will boost the duration of higher speed boons overlapping them.

So zephyr’s speed, when superceded by a 33% swiftness boon, will boost the duration of that swiftness by 10% instead of giving a wasted 10% speed. Most boons are 10-30 seconds so it shouldn’t be gamebreaking.

I never understood why we aren’t allowed to have anything faster than swiftness (nothing stacks!) but engineers can have 200% runspeed for a short time with their superspeed boost.

Aether McLoud.1975:

I never understood why we aren’t allowed to have anything faster than swiftness (nothing stacks!) but engineers can have 200% runspeed for a short time with their superspeed boost.

They can’t. Either the tooltip is wrong or the skill is bugged, it’s only slightly faster than swiftness. It also mitigates the fact that they only have one weapon based gap closer, a 700 range leap on a 20 second cooldown (which has such a long animation it only ends up adding about 200ish units over plain swiftness).

Comparing single class skills as if they exist in some sort of vacuum is problematic. It’s what lead the developers to make such a drastic change to RtL, for example.

Aether McLoud.1975:

I never understood why we aren’t allowed to have anything faster than swiftness (nothing stacks!) but engineers can have 200% runspeed for a short time with their superspeed boost.

thats just poor wording on the skill tooltip. it is only very slightly faster than swiftness. (140% instead of 133%)

Maskaganda.2043:

Aether McLoud.1975:

I never understood why we aren’t allowed to have anything faster than swiftness (nothing stacks!) but engineers can have 200% runspeed for a short time with their superspeed boost.

thats just poor wording on the skill tooltip. it is only very slightly faster than swiftness. (140% instead of 133%)

Still faster than swiftness :P
AND they now have a much better RTL…

Aether McLoud.1975:

Maskaganda.2043:

Aether McLoud.1975:

I never understood why we aren’t allowed to have anything faster than swiftness (nothing stacks!) but engineers can have 200% runspeed for a short time with their superspeed boost.

thats just poor wording on the skill tooltip. it is only very slightly faster than swiftness. (140% instead of 133%)

Still faster than swiftness :P
AND they now have a much better RTL…

Which requires it’s own utility slot, the equivalent of giving up an entire attunement worth of skills for one (or 2 utility slots for the max range once every 35-45 sec with slick shoes). I’ve been using it on my engineer recently, but it definitely comes with it’s drawbacks. Apples and oranges again.

Thrashbarg.9820:

Aether McLoud.1975:

Maskaganda.2043:

Aether McLoud.1975:

I never understood why we aren’t allowed to have anything faster than swiftness (nothing stacks!) but engineers can have 200% runspeed for a short time with their superspeed boost.

thats just poor wording on the skill tooltip. it is only very slightly faster than swiftness. (140% instead of 133%)

Still faster than swiftness :P
AND they now have a much better RTL…

Which requires it’s own utility slot, the equivalent of giving up an entire attunement worth of skills for one (or 2 utility slots for the max range once every 35-45 sec with slick shoes). I’ve been using it on my engineer recently, but it definitely comes with it’s drawbacks. Apples and oranges again.

Not really because engineers get 2 utilities out of every utility slot (or 6 if it’s a kit).