Guild Wars 2

Balancing (or rather nerfing) ele is a hot topic and deservedly so, DD ele is truly overpowered in some game modes/roles. However what I’d like to point out is when it eventually gets nerfed Eles will need something else, and SF Fresh Air could be one of those things, it’s probably the most fun build to play, and has great potential.

To make it really viable though, the weaponset needs to be adjusted in my opinion. I’m not calling for flat damage increase, but there are some absolutely useless skills that really need improvement (looking at you Shatterstone), and others that are just a way worse version of dagger skills (Flamewall and basically all the autoattacks).

So Anet please when you do a balance pass on Eles, take the time to look at the other weapons and not just nerf dagger.

In my experience Anet doesn’t really care about the non meta things, their idea is to kill meta to bring up non-meta things. The only time in the recent memory that they actually did something for build diversity is with the June 23 changes. I don’t think it will happen, maybe in 2 or 3 years.

Well, buffing Scepter would certainly be buffing non-meta builds, since FA scepter builds aren’t really meta anymore.

I would also love for the Scepter to be our go-to condi option…I think just making much-needed QoL improvements to the auto-attacks would help in this regard. I think Scepter is already very fun to play with whacky condition setups; Rabid works okay and even Settler’s isn’t atrocious since you have Water Trident to help heal. It would be great to have builds like these become more viable.

Focus on the other hand I think is in a very good place, besides Fire Shield. That skill needs to be buffed, but the other skills are solid for the most part, with Air and Earth in particular being outstanding.

Well i am a S/F fan and i play a rare condi option and use rabid.
Fire shield should have lower CD and i don´t use water much but focus is great annyway.
The build has problems with most necros and i find the condi mesmers hard, but going condi with scepter goes a bit around the weak autoatacks. Especially earth. What i will try next is to use more sinister/rampager pieces for more hybrid damage.

A few tweaks an scepter will be fine. I write only number changes to make it easy.

Flame strike: 1s channel. – 20% direct damage.
Dragon tooth: lower casting time to 1/4
Stone shards: increas bleeding duration to 8s. Make them fly a bit faster.
Shatterstone: Increase area to 300
Arc lighning: Apply 2s confusion on the last hit.

Scepter is what needs to be buffed, focus is a very strong defensive/utility option. D/F is a viable build in PvE, though overshadowed a bit by Staff, if you already have 1 or 2 other staff eles on your team, it’s worth a try.

I agree that focus is in a good place atm, but the fire skills for it still kinda suck, not just Fire Aura but in my opinion Flamewall is objectively worse than the dagger counterpart too (longer cd, less burnstacks, no upfront damage).

Tomiyou.3790:

In my experience Anet doesn’t really care about the non meta things, their idea is to kill meta to bring up non-meta things. The only time in the recent memory that they actually did something for build diversity is with the June 23 changes. I don’t think it will happen, maybe in 2 or 3 years.

Sad but true. Unfortunately during that big revamp of many skills and weapons anet somehow forgot ele was thing, so all they really did was give us changes that were forced by burning mechanics change.

Scepter needs buff and QoL. Focus is strong but still needs buff, fire skills are borderline useless, gale could use few sec lower cd. As is no one will ever eat gale combo due to every stun breaker got lower cd than gale. Also fights rarely last long enough for it to cool down -.-