Guild Wars 2

So to start I’d like everyone to know I’m looking at this primarily from an spvp perspective. I don’t have as much experience in other parts of the game.

The current design of elementalist seems to be directed towards celestial amulet always being optimal. Staff ele and DD ele in spvp currently run celestial. The optimal spec for scepter though is currently a pretty glassy berserkers amulet fresh air build, and it’s not very good to be honest (I’ve played it to top 25 Eu solo queue and now top 25 on NA solo queue, and in quite a few team queues, but it’s even weaker in team queues, very fun spec just too squishy). You can attempt a celestial sort of build similar to dd or staff but its just not very good on scepter because it doesn’t do enough damage.

So with that said, do you think all elementalist weapon sets should follow this design of really taking advantages of all stats (aka celestial amulet) or scepter perhaps be made to primarily be a power damage weapon? The problem with making it primarily a power weapon is you are automatically placing it in the glass cannon weapon category. Celestial amulet is the only amulet currently available that allows the elementalist to both be the amount of tanky an elementalist needs to be and still do decent damage(if the weapon set has good condi damage). Any other amulet makes you squishy with the available needed damage or makes you tanky enough without the needed damage.

I’ve said all of this to bring us to here. So lets say the design goal will be to follow the ways of the celestial. Let’s come up with interesting ways to give the scepter more condition damage.

Here’s one of my suggestions:

Air Master Trait: Hot Lightning – Scepter Air attacks apply burning (2 second duration, 3 second icd)- One problem with this is that it would compete with the 10% air damage trait which is very good especially for fresh air. Perhaps combine them and make it increase air damage by 5% + the burning.

This trait would allow a fresh air specced elementalist to take the celestial amulet and still do decent damage and gain the defensive perks that come with the celestial amulet that elementalists desperately need. No doubt it would be a great trait to also take without going fresh air. For the first year or so of the game many other elementalists and I ran a 0/4/0/4/6 build with a valkyries amulet and this trait may very well bring back that trait spread for the scepter elementalist just now with a celestial amulet and might stacking instead of a valkryies amulet.

Edit: Another suggestion would be to make Earth #1 not so clunky. Make it cast faster!

If you have any thoughts or suggestions of your own please post!

All scepter air attacks will trigger this or just the auto attack? The trait seems good, whenever talking about conditions keep in mind in wvw its not too hard to get to 100% condition duration, so now your talking about a master tier trait with potentially 133% uptime on burning, with burning being the hardest hitting condition in the game at like 900 damage/second in condition builds. All that being said I think the air def needs some master traits that can synergize with something since it really has none at the moment. I doubt the devs would put a trait that burns anywhere but the fire traitline, so maybe a different condition. The problem is the conditions that air could seem to do as we know are weakness and blindness and neither of those do damage. I also doubt they will give ele’s an access to something like confusion or torment.

They could just reduce the cast time for Fire1 on Scepter so that it flows more smoothly with the other scepter weapon skills.

Rocketmist.5436:

All scepter air attacks will trigger this or just the auto attack? The trait seems good, whenever talking about conditions keep in mind in wvw its not too hard to get to 100% condition duration, so now your talking about a master tier trait with potentially 133% uptime on burning, with burning being the hardest hitting condition in the game at like 900 damage/second in condition builds. All that being said I think the air def needs some master traits that can synergize with something since it really has none at the moment. I doubt the devs would put a trait that burns anywhere but the fire traitline, so maybe a different condition. The problem is the conditions that air could seem to do as we know are weakness and blindness and neither of those do damage. I also doubt they will give ele’s an access to something like confusion or torment.

People can also build defensively against condi in WvW. WvW just isn’t balanced. Condi ele would be the least of most peoples problems.

@Resjudicator – I don’t think that would be enough. To give scepter as much condi as daggers.

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Vee Wee wants to play condi Ele so bad! Vee Wee thinks Earth Scepter 1 needs to not be so goshdarn slow! Vee Wee also thinks Shatterstone needs to not be completely useless! Lower the cast time! Make it apply bleed! It’s a jagged icicle that explodes into icy shrapnel! How does it not cause bleeding! Vee Wee also thinks shooting out Rock Barrier could cause poison! That way you can choose to either beef up your defense or lower the enemy’s sustain!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

I am not sure its necessarily a good thing that all ele specs have to maximize a celestial approach – I think it is O.K. if there are other play-styles that are viable as well.

That being said, I DO think that scepter needs more sustained damage, as even taking fresh-air isn’t enough sustained damage (and fresh air is supposed to add sustained damage). The way daggers handle this is high burning uptime on drake’s breath.

Before making other changes, I would like to see the following skills and traits fixed:
SCEPTER SKILLS
Fire 1: This needs a much faster attack rate. Perhaps make it function like earth 1 on scepter and shoot out a quick volley of fire-balls that each apply short burns. This would make the attack more reliable, as well as synergize better with fresh air.

Fire 2: Reduce the CAST TIME, but keep the same delay. This thing takes FOREVER to cast, has an even longer delay, and requires a minor miracle to hit.

Water 1: These need to home in your target MUCH better, and not spread out like a bunch of drunken sperm every time you fire off.

Water 2: This needs to actually exist and do something. Reduce the cast time significatly, have it apply vunlerability in stages with the blast at the end. Or just speed up the entire animation. As it is, casting this essentially makes you useless for 2s. At the very least, make it a blast finisher. Currently, this is only useful for spraying aoe on the ground when you are SURE you killed a thief and shadow-refuge so that they can’t full-res.

Earth 1: Either make this faster, or increase the projectile finisher percentage so you can get higher burning uptime by casting through your fire-field. I personally very much like this approach, if you make the condition application require higher skill-level via use of fields/finishers. Alternatively, increase the bleeding uptime.

TRAITS
Sunspot: This needs to do WAY more damage, or have an additional effect added to it.

Zephyr’s Speed: This needs to actually do something, especially b/c every ele gets switftness on attuning to air, and 10% is not noticeable. Make it 5% that stacks with swiftness, or increase precision by a flat value, or even reduce the duration of incoming weakness while attuned to air.

FIRE TRAITLINE: Add anything that isn’t complete garbage at the adept tier.

Finally, in thinking about how to make earth better, fire projectile finishers could do more than 1s of burns.

Blackbeard I love your post a lot. I am also personally on board with keeping scepter mostly a power based weapon fresh air and just fixing all the clunky parts about it. Just giving anet some options in case the direction they want to take ele is to make celestial the primary elementalist amulet for all weapon sets.

The current fresh air spec is a ton of fun just not quite good enough. Along with the fixes to scepter a few things could change about focus since that is the only weapon someone should take as fresh air berserker.

All the other berserker roamers have very high mobility (thief, mesmer, etc. even guardian will have lots of mobility next patch) and scepter focus has absolutely zero. The second you start to get trained by a melee (thief, dd ele, warrior, dps guard) you just have to stand and fight.

Focus #5 fire could be changed to some kind of mobility. Would be really awesome to sort of melt your self into molten lava then move along the ground and erupt at targeted location. Or perhaps if it sort of worked like phase retreat on staff for mesmers so we could use it in specific spots to take advantage of the Z axis.

As for how to get mobility:

I would suggest they make FGS a mobility weapon and reduce the CD to 90s, as a means of having better mobility. This is doable now as the skill is useless in PvE again, and there is no risk in hurting the game by doing so.

Alternatively, they could make “One with air,” the air adept trait, give a longer duration haste (2-3s), even if they have to add an ICD. As it is, even fresh-air specs, which would utilize it best, don’t take this trait b/c it doesn’t really do much at all.

Finally, I am all for making fire on focus-5 do something (other than an instant 200 hp heal with SoR), but I am not sure that mobility is the right change. The problem with Fire-5 is that its effect require you to get hit, on a spec that can’t really afford it. The only thing Fire Aura has going for it, is that it kinda looks like arcane shield, which does scare off smart enemies.

I think it is a good thing when specs have to make sacrifices for mobility. Mesmer mobility is only good when the abuse phase-retreat and the Z-axis. Guardian mobility requires a team to give them target (and no escapability). Thieves get free mobility, but they are thieves and most rules don’t apply to them.

FGS on 90 second cooldown would be a great start. You’re full of good ideas!

• I think Fire 1 should count as a channelling skill so that it can take advantage of obsidian focus and mitigates lack of defense when you don’t use celestial amulet.

Besides choosing celestial amulet, you can get condi dmg with high toughness and low hp or high hp with low toughness. Making Fire 1 count as a channeling skill will allow you to use carrion amulet and still get decent amounts of toughness, that way celestial isn’t the only amulet that is survivable for condi

• Piercing Shards can be changed so that you apply bleed when you apply vuln, this would work with Shard of Ice and Shatterstone that way you can maintain bleeds outside of earth attunement

• And like everyone else said Shatterstone needs to be casted faster since there is already a delay to the explosion

• They can also rework Freezing Gust so its like Burning Speed but applying chill instead of burning. its really weak right now since its only single target chill and not a very long one. It will give focus some mobility but not to the degree that other weapons have and it would also be another high power dmg skill for a berserker build. Its also another evade that will help ele’s without celestial or soldier amulets survive

• If that isn’t enough they could add swiftness on Fire Shield or make it clear movement conditions

IMO the scepter only needs his water weapon skills and auto attacks modified. Since beta, the scepter has been the weapon of choice for burst, it would be weird if it ever becomes better at conditions than dagger main hand skills.

i want water scepter 2 to be reworked into a totally new aura :>

ArrDee.2573:

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Vee Wee wants to play condi Ele so bad! Vee Wee thinks Earth Scepter 1 needs to not be so goshdarn slow! Vee Wee also thinks Shatterstone needs to not be completely useless! Lower the cast time! Make it apply bleed! It’s a jagged icicle that explodes into icy shrapnel! How does it not cause bleeding! Vee Wee also thinks shooting out Rock Barrier could cause poison! That way you can choose to either beef up your defense or lower the enemy’s sustain!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

lol your posts are so fun to read, that is all XD

The Scepter Earth 1 ability is more or less worthless. As a blank skill on the set, it actually does need a buff.