Guild Wars 2

After this latest patch I started thinking about where Anet wanted our weapon combinations to be offensively/defensively. (Staff excluded in the following post)

When I look at our combinations it seems obvious that offensively it was meant to be:
D/D > S/D > D/F > , S/F

and Defensively:
S/F > D/F> , S/D > D/D

Obviously Focus is defensive, Dagger OH is offensive.
However there is a little bit of disparity when it comes to Scepter/Dagger for MH.

They are too close and need to be split a little to make one seem more offensive than the other and vice verse, as well as allowing Dragon’s tooth to stay how it is.

When looking at the attunment specific abilities:

Offense:
- Fire: Burning Speed + Fire Breath > Phoenix , unless a player is there to help DT land
- Water: Cone of Cold = a lot more damage than Water Trident
- Earth: Impale + Ring of earth seem more offensive than Scepters skills
- Air: Lightning Arc + Lightning Strike seem more offensive than Lightning Whip

This means Dagger wins 3/4 offensive attunements (Scepter taking Air)

Defense:
- Fire: Phoenix gives Vigor + Cond remove and can blast finish in water
- Water: Water Trident does almost no damage and is mainly healing
- Earth: Rock Barrier + Dust Devil = Defensive spells Dagger has pretty much none
- Air: Air #2 Weakness + Shocking Aura > Blind?

This would mean that Scepter wins 3/4 defensive attunements ( Dagger taking Air)
IMO the above is how it should be, however this needs to be defined more and tweaked.

If you test it yourself you’ll find a few things.
1. Lightning Whip DPS > Lightning Arc + Lightning Strike
2. Earth #1 in Scepter can stack bleed as fast as Impale + Ring of earth and brings their DPS basically equal.
3. Cone of cold does almost as much healing as Water Trident and way more damage.
4. Shatter stone in Scepter water is 100% useless in PVP

I propose the following:
1. Increase Lightning Arc again and allow the combination of Lightning Arc and Strike to be greater than Lightning Whip Spam.
2. Buff Ring of earth slightly in Dagger, in turn buff Dust Devil/ Rock Barrier to make them better defensively as Rock Barrier isn’t too good as active D.
3. Either Increase Water Tridents healing/Add Regen/ Add Con Remove to make it more defensive than Cone of Cold.
4. Fix Shatter stone so it can actually land in PVP…seriously do something with it.

By doing this you allow a few things:
- Fire Dagger > Fire Scepter Offensively (unless Dragon’s tooth lands)
- Fire Scepter > Fire Dagger Defensively
- Water Dagger to remain better offensively, while making Water Scepter better defensively
- Earth Dagger to be better offensively, while Earth Scepter adds proper defense.
- Air Scepter to be better at continual offense, while allowing Dagger to have a defensive attunement with Weakness + Shocking Aura.

The above will return choice and definition to an Elementalist’s weapon sets. So we can have a proper scale to choose from, whether we want the most defensive weapons or the most offensive or something in between.

“B-B-But what will Scepter do for damage?”
Simple Scepter will use Phoenix + Lightning Arc + Lightning Strike for it’s damage, unless you can land Dragon’s tooth with; a party member, Gale, Signet of Earth (which will bring your damage on par with MH Dagger in fire, but not overall as Dagger Earth and Water add more damage overall)

Scepter can have better defense than dagger but still do well offensively, while dagger can be better offensively while still having defense in Air.

You can then choose to couple either with Dagger OH for more damage or with a focus for more defense.

Do you guys think would this fix main hand weapons and allow them to focus on other issues?

Melee weapons NEED to do more damage than any range weapon, because they have lesser uptime. The whole problem of D/D eles is that their weapon do ridiculously low damage so there isn’t a single viable damage build (and bunkers get nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and…)

There is a lot of things wrong with the ‘balance’ of this patch. Necromancers are dominating sPvP, a Stun Breaker is on a bugged glyph, a glyph THAT MUST BE MAINTAINED, Fire, Air and Earth Magic traitlines are still useless.

ArenaNet really focused the GO GLASS CANNON RANGED for Fire and Air. As for earth GO CONDITION DAMAGE IT’S GOOD and screaming.
PLEEEEEASE PLAY SCEPTER AND STAFF MORE

They definitely succeeded of making ranged glass cannon more useful, with these 30 trait lines they are begging people to run ranged glass cannon.

As for Earth Magic, did I mention Necromancers are dominating sPvP? Condition damage for Elementalists lacks consistency, the biggest issue is your element is tied to a condition. Which is awful for both PvE and PvP, it greatly limits your damage output. You can’t efficiently switch elements for stacking conditions, not with a 10-15 second cooldown.

As for your suggestions:
-In my opinion, make Ring of Earth a 600 ranged point blank AoE and reduce it’s casting time by 1/4 of a second. the problem isn’t damage, it’s to slow and you’ll be lucky to hit something.
-Increase the projectile speed for Magnetic Grasp, it’s so slow.
-Lightning Touch really has no place, I almost never use it. They should really consider giving it a 2 or 3 stacks of vulnerability as well as weakness.
-Lightning Whip isn’t that big of an issue in terms of damage, it’s range is awful, where as Lightning Ark is great as it has AoE and high range. Lightning Ark does not need a buff.
-Shatterstone is indeed useless, what kind of PvP player stays still for 2 seconds?! Not to mention it’s damage is far from impressive, reduce it’s time to explode to 1 second and give it 5 or 6 stacks of vulnerability instead of 4.

I really see no use for Dragon’s tooth. Idea: make Dragon’s tooth “floating” on the head of the target until it land. If the target move, Dt will follow the target. Evade with the right timing to take no damage…

s/f is a very good build on paper, combo of range damage and control (also ranged btw). imo weak spot of this build is dragon’s tooth. it’s supposed to be major low cooldown damage (since there are no others), but to land it, you need to build entire game around this task (prepping with knockdown/daze). i just posted about this in another thread.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/scepter-in-spvp-how-do-you-do-it

Deneb.2697:

I really see no use for Dragon’s tooth. Idea: make Dragon’s tooth “floating” on the head of the target until it land. If the target move, Dt will follow the target. Evade with the right timing to take no damage…

I like this idea, atm its basically used to bait a dodge (with chill / cripple) or to deny area.

For the moment, try:
S/F, Air kd → DT → Earth Signet → Phoenix.

Aether McLoud.1975:

Melee weapons NEED to do more damage than any range weapon, because they have lesser uptime. The whole problem of D/D eles is that their weapon do ridiculously low damage so there isn’t a single viable damage build (and bunkers get nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and…)

Dude….just go play thief if you want mele dmg, d/d is not about burst dmg, won’t you get it already?

Deneb.2697:

I really see no use for Dragon’s tooth. Idea: make Dragon’s tooth “floating” on the head of the target until it land. If the target move, Dt will follow the target. Evade with the right timing to take no damage…

This is actually not a bad idea, I don’t want DT to be just another aoe targeted spell but it does need a change.