Guild Wars 2

Remove attunement cooldown to open up more tactic options. Thoughts? Some traits would have to get revamped along with cds on some skills. I think overall it would make Elementalist a much more interesting class to play.

Okay, here’s a repost of something I’ve replied to this with before:

Anyway, the ’our skills have long recharges’ argument is daft. Yes, stronger skills have long cooldowns, how surprising.

Consider just the #2 skills on Staff:
Fire: Lava Font.
Water: Ice Spike.
Air: Lightning Surge.
Earth: Eruption.

Think of the chain here: you can set up your lava fonts with ~60% uptime, with might-giving blasts going off every 7 seconds or so, and maintain 10 vulnerability on targets in that AoE.
Untraited.
And you have a bunch of CC and other utility in your remaining weapon skills, as well as the right half of your skill bar.

ICD on traits wouldn’t help with this. The only options to make zero-second attunement cooldown even remotely balanced are:
- making our short-cooldown skills very ineffectual
- increasing the recharges on every skill we have
Neither of these would be even slightly okay.

While I sometimes would like attunement recharge set at a constant, with arcana investment giving some other class-related bonus, there is no way to get zero-second attunement cooldown to function fairly.

How would you balance, say, those #2 Staff skills without a CD? Nukers casting Font every time it’s off cooldown while applying heavy vuln/damage/blast finishers? They’d all have to be nerfed to hell either with damage or their own longer cooldowns (which is the purpose served by our attunement cooldowns).

EDIT: my quote messed up some formatting, fixed that.

This thread is where I took that from, in case you want to look at the other points people made.

It would require complete redesign of the entire class.

cheese.4739:

It would require complete redesign of the entire class.

And that won’t happen.

Umm, that would break the game dawg.

Not needed.
Attunements as our “weapon swap mechanic” not affected by Chill would be a very nice buff to us, as we are the only class that suffers from slowed down weapon swaps due to a conditions (chill on Engi’s is so marginal, you can ignore it).
Btw, there is a thread about that somewhere on the forums, but I am too lazy to search for it now.

It’s not possible to remove cool down. Many eles uses Elemental Attunement and without cool down, eles can get perma boons.

Those are some interesting points cheese. I understand the elementalist would need on overhaul if this was to happen… It definitely doesn’t make sense to drop attunement cd with the current design of elementalist. But boy wouldn’t it be awesome to, for example, attune to earth, magnetic grasp, attune to fire, burning speed and then be able to go right back into earth? The tactics that would be available if there was no cooldowns or much shorter cooldowns would be awesome…

Grimreaper.5370:

But boy wouldn’t it be awesome to, for example, attune to earth, magnetic grasp, attune to fire, burning speed and then be able to go right back into earth?

With the way our traits are going right now, this would be even less of a good idea – the new Earth GM is “you can’t be critically hit while attuned to Earth”, so being able to switch back instantly would be completely overpowered.

cheese.4739:

Grimreaper.5370:

But boy wouldn’t it be awesome to, for example, attune to earth, magnetic grasp, attune to fire, burning speed and then be able to go right back into earth?

With the way our traits are going right now, this would be even less of a good idea – the new Earth GM is “you can’t be critically hit while attuned to Earth”, so being able to switch back instantly would be completely overpowered.

lol… If you are going to go that route I’m surprised you didn’t mention fresh air. obviously traits would have to be changed.

Once necros get infinite Life Force at the start of every fight, Warriors always have max Adrenaline, Thieves can Mug whenever, and Mesmers have all three clones out at once is when Eles can have zero attunement cooldown.

But I can sort of understand reducing the base CD to 10 seconds, though.

McFribble.2349:

Once necros get infinite Life Force at the start of every fight, Warriors always have max Adrenaline, Thieves can Mug whenever, and Mesmers have all three clones out at once is when Eles can have zero attunement cooldown.

But I can sort of understand reducing the base CD to 10 seconds, though.

You sir don’t take the time to read.

This sounds like giving thief skills with cooldown instead initiative, which we know – won’t happen (any soon at least)…