Guild Wars 2

Ele, in PvP, is now worse than ever. In this season, thiefs and eles are usually asked to reroll for something more useful, and who can blame those people who ask for it ? Ele IS out of this PvP season. Just ask yourself, how many eles have you seen in sPvP or WvW Roaming?its almost been a month, people who said “go experiment and you’ll find a meta build” are long gone. In this state, it is sure that the ele’s will get buffed sooner or later.

There will be buffs, thats for sure. Since ele still performs good enough with staff at raids, and no one in their right mind would bring a staff to PvP(unless wvw zerg), we can assume that staff will be untouched.

Offhand dagger is pretty outdated, with cooldowns that are 30-40 seconds. Water 4 skill and earth 5 may change, with long cooldown reduces on the rest of the skills.

Scepter is sort of fine at the moment, we might expect another shatterstone or flamestrike buff. Oneshotting people with those never gets old.

Focus is perfectly fine in my opinion, but we might get a tiny cooldown reduction on some skills.

For PvE, we might get a small warhorn buff. D/W has inferior damage compared to Staff and its melee so its more risky to use D/W, so it would make sense.

Traitwise, i can’t come up with an idea. But they might add fresh air kind of trait to all elements. Something like “blind/immobilize a target to reduce earth cooldown to zero, chill/condiclear to water, burn to fire” sort of traits. If offhand dagger gets buffed however, we all know which traits would be buffed.

Share YOUR ideas, suggestions or predictions!

Kurt Wulfgang.2436:

Ele, in PvP, is now worse than ever. In this season, thiefs and eles are usually asked to reroll for something more useful, and who can blame those people who ask for it ? Ele IS out of this PvP season. Just ask yourself, how many eles have you seen in sPvP or WvW Roaming?its almost been a month, people who said “go experiment and you’ll find a meta build” are long gone. In this state, it is sure that the ele’s will get buffed sooner or later.

There will be buffs, thats for sure. Since ele still performs good enough with staff at raids, and no one in their right mind would bring a staff to PvP(unless wvw zerg), we can assume that staff will be untouched.

Offhand dagger is pretty outdated, with cooldowns that are 30-40 seconds. Water 4 skill and earth 5 may change, with long cooldown reduces on the rest of the skills.

Scepter is sort of fine at the moment, we might expect another shatterstone or flamestrike buff. Oneshotting people with those never gets old.

Focus is perfectly fine in my opinion, but we might get a tiny cooldown reduction on some skills.

For PvE, we might get a small warhorn buff. D/W has inferior damage compared to Staff and its melee so its more risky to use D/W, so it would make sense.

Traitwise, i can’t come up with an idea. But they might add fresh air kind of trait to all elements. Something like “blind/immobilize a target to reduce earth cooldown to zero, chill/condiclear to water, burn to fire” sort of traits. If offhand dagger gets buffed however, we all know which traits would be buffed.

Share YOUR ideas, suggestions or predictions!

Ice bow buffed by 50%! At least we would have 1 more skill to use. Probably wont happen.

Arcane Shield:
Block attacks for 3 seconds. While this skill is active, Detonate Arcane Shield becomes available.
Channeled ability
25 seconds recharge

Detonate Arcane Shield:
Make your arcane shield explode, dealing critical damage to nearby enemies. Using this skill adds 10 seconds to the recharge of Arcane Shield.
Damage modifier: 1.0 (currently 1.5)
Number of targets: 5
Radius: 360

It’s time..

Alternatively, instead of the detonate skill, take away the damage entirely and add a trait to the arcane line:
Reduce the current recharge of your attunements by 0.25s on each succesful block.
I actually rather like that idea, and it fits with the overall concept of arcanes. They could turn Final Shielding into this, passive defensive procs are bad anyway.

Also, scepter deserves a proper rework. One-shot gimmicks (Phoenix) and instant burst damage (air swap, lightning strike) is never going to be balanceable in the long term.
As someone who thinks staff is a really well designed weapon, I’d also really like to see some buffs to it’s single target potential (instant lava font ticks, shorter cast times and delays on other #2 skills).
And yea, dagger cds are archaic. I hate this new development with super spammable skills, but if they insist on going that route, they need to make sure everyone is on par. Almost everything on ele is way too 2013 to compete.

Ele also needs a niche defensive mechanic that isn’t based on face tanking the enemy. The above buff to arcane shield would be a start. Maybe better accessibility to blinks and movement skills. Anything to give better potential for kiting and damage mitigation.

Also, since we’re doing pictures:

I predict more nerfs…sorry for being cynical and all

Mr Godlike.6098:

I predict more nerfs…sorry for being cynical and all

+1, Ele is still being used in PvE. It’s still top tier, and it will be nerfed.

The balance team doesn’t play PvP.

The PvP team will try to add an amulet to help Ele, but it turns out another class will make use of that amulet better, and we’re gonna be bad for another season. Usually it takes a year for them to fix a class.

I think we will have to wait for a change of balance team lead dev.
It’s inevitable at this point, the class balance is so terrible and unfair, whatever they are doing it’s not working. It’s clearly a failure when you see 5-6 DH per match in pvp and do not see a single elementalist in over 10 matches.

Look at what happened to WvW, they changed the team, and then we had polls and a more responsive lead dev that seems to listen and engage with the community. We do have to wait and see if they deliver.

Hopefully the same thing will happen with the balance team and it will be replaced by a team that is more aware of the urgent issues with build variety and class balance.

Xillllix.3485:

Kurt Wulfgang.2436:

Ele, in PvP, is now worse than ever. In this season, thiefs and eles are usually asked to reroll for something more useful, and who can blame those people who ask for it ? Ele IS out of this PvP season. Just ask yourself, how many eles have you seen in sPvP or WvW Roaming?its almost been a month, people who said “go experiment and you’ll find a meta build” are long gone. In this state, it is sure that the ele’s will get buffed sooner or later.

There will be buffs, thats for sure. Since ele still performs good enough with staff at raids, and no one in their right mind would bring a staff to PvP(unless wvw zerg), we can assume that staff will be untouched.

Offhand dagger is pretty outdated, with cooldowns that are 30-40 seconds. Water 4 skill and earth 5 may change, with long cooldown reduces on the rest of the skills.

Scepter is sort of fine at the moment, we might expect another shatterstone or flamestrike buff. Oneshotting people with those never gets old.

Focus is perfectly fine in my opinion, but we might get a tiny cooldown reduction on some skills.

For PvE, we might get a small warhorn buff. D/W has inferior damage compared to Staff and its melee so its more risky to use D/W, so it would make sense.

Traitwise, i can’t come up with an idea. But they might add fresh air kind of trait to all elements. Something like “blind/immobilize a target to reduce earth cooldown to zero, chill/condiclear to water, burn to fire” sort of traits. If offhand dagger gets buffed however, we all know which traits would be buffed.

Share YOUR ideas, suggestions or predictions!

Ice bow buffed by 50%! At least we would have 1 more skill to use. Probably wont happen.

Lol, if you are still running glass staff ele in wvw, thats on you. Been outta the meta for months now.

As for the original topic of this thread, I think you forget that some classes go months being out of the meta without receiving buffs. Ele mains might not be used to that since ele hasn’t been out of the meta for ages. In general, Anet has kind of screwed over ele though. They have expressed that they intended for ele to be a more damage focused class so as a result have nerfed the parts they didn’t want out of ele without realizing that it is just never going to contend with Rev, Warrior, DH, and scrapper (current dps classes) in terms of damage.

So in short, maybe ele will receive some slight buffs in the future, but we know its going to focus on the damage side of ele. So will these buffs place ele back in the meta, and my opinion is no. It would take buffs to ele and nerfs to the four classes above before ele can be really talked about.

vana.5467:

Arcane Shield:
Block attacks for 3 seconds. While this skill is active, Detonate Arcane Shield becomes available.
Channeled ability
25 seconds recharge

Detonate Arcane Shield:
Make your arcane shield explode, dealing critical damage to nearby enemies. Using this skill adds 10 seconds to the recharge of Arcane Shield.
Damage modifier: 1.0 (currently 1.5)
Number of targets: 5
Radius: 360

Alternatively, instead of the detonate skill, take away the damage entirely and add a trait to the arcane line:
_Reduce the current recharge of your attunements by 0.25s on each succesful block

Love both version.

They are almost just how they were before the celestial buff, but they are better off in the instance they have tempest than stand alone ele, but they are a joke now in higher ranked PvP.

I predict that they’ll nerf it again.

Based on past performance, this is how the next 3-4 patches will go:

Next patch: more nerfs. ANet’s development of skills always lags far behind where it needs to be. After nerfing something out of viability, they usually still have a few more nerfs that must have been in development, and show them to be completely out of touch.

2 patches from now: meaningless buffs to “underutilized skills.” This is along the lines of a 10% damage increase to shatterstone, more useless stuff added to flamestrike, other things of that nature. Ele will stay in the trash bin.

3 patches from now: same as patch 2, except 1-2 of the changes might be “pretty good.” This won’t be enough to fix something that is useless, but it will add onto the power of the class after…

4 patches from now: ANet devs get frustrated that nothing has worked, and so just reintroduce celestial amulet, buff earth/water/tempest lines to give more healing/cleanse, and act like they magically fixed what ailed the class. The minor buffs prior will just add extra “icing” and now everyone will play ele b/c it will be OP.

OR

They release another specialization, stop caring about tempest and core even more, and still ele is useless b/c ANet has 0 clue how to develop for the class. The next specialization will probably be another Arcane 2.0 (3.0?), be really slow-hitting, have no hard mitigation, but be strong against immobile enemies with large hitboxes. This will invariably lead to more core ele nerfs…

BlackBeard.2873:

Based on past performance, this is how the next 3-4 patches will go:

Next patch: more nerfs. ANet’s development of skills always lags far behind where it needs to be. After nerfing something out of viability, they usually still have a few more nerfs that must have been in development, and show them to be completely out of touch.

2 patches from now: meaningless buffs to “underutilized skills.” This is along the lines of a 10% damage increase to shatterstone, more useless stuff added to flamestrike, other things of that nature. Ele will stay in the trash bin.

3 patches from now: same as patch 2, except 1-2 of the changes might be “pretty good.” This won’t be enough to fix something that is useless, but it will add onto the power of the class after…

4 patches from now: ANet devs get frustrated that nothing has worked, and so just reintroduce celestial amulet, buff earth/water/tempest lines to give more healing/cleanse, and act like they magically fixed what ailed the class. The minor buffs prior will just add extra “icing” and now everyone will play ele b/c it will be OP.

OR

They release another specialization, stop caring about tempest and core even more, and still ele is useless b/c ANet has 0 clue how to develop for the class. The next specialization will probably be another Arcane 2.0 (3.0?), be really slow-hitting, have no hard mitigation, but be strong against immobile enemies with large hitboxes. This will invariably lead to more core ele nerfs…

100% Spot on..glad to see I’m not the only one who can predict the outcome, even more, point 4 has 200% accuracy