Guild Wars 2

Particularly the autoattack damage, for both of these, is just dreadful. Trident could use a damage buff as well, given its cooldown. Shatterstone also does too little damage.

Fire Grab needs a substantial reduction in cooldown, given the cooldowns on Hundred Blades and Mindwrack/Blurred Frenzy and thief burst frequency, and elementalist needs more burst spell or higher damage dealing spells in its arsenal.

Many people playing dagger/dagger may feel fine, but I ask you to play a warrior or mesmer or grenadier engineer or thief and say with a straight face that ele damage is fine. Dagger/dagger is closest to being good, and staff at least has support, but the scepter for the elementalist needs work. Reduce the delay on Dragon Tooth and Shatterstone’s detonations down to 1 second. Hurl Rock from Rock Barrier should do more damage given the nice toughness boost you’re giving up when throwing it.

Arcane Wave is a 30 sec cd yet it hits for a fraction of what my Mesmer’s Blurred Frenzy does, and it’s a utility skill!

Scepter Air seems pretty decent to me, considering its got Lightning Strike (or whatever the 2 skill is called) as supplemental damage that doesn’t interrupt your autoattack. The damage on the autoattack could stand to increase a bit faster so that it doesn’t take quite so long (and lock you out of dodging) to get up to respectable damage output and if it ramped of faster maybe it would do higher damage in later stages as a resault (say if they added 1 more damage stage and decreased the time to jump stages), but otherwise it doesn’t seem too bad.

Water on the other hand… yah, definately agree. Scepter Water is extremely lackluster. Autoattack is pathetic (though all water auto-attacks are, this one is especially bad), ice shatter takes an age to go off and doesn’t do much damage to compensate, and trident is just a joke, everything about trident is bad (damage, healing, cooldown). Autoattack should either do more damage or inflict some kind of debuff. Shatter should apply Chill to enemies within its AoE on activation to make it harder for enemies to escape the actual damage blast and just in general give more utility to the skill, and possibly be an Ice field during that time as well. Trident, if it remains in its current form, needs a boost to everything. More damage, higher healing, less cooldown. Possibly gain a cleanse, though that might be a bit much in combination with offhand Dagger. I’d be more in favor of a total redux of Water Trident though, it feels off in general and I remember reading that it was completely different during part of the Beta, so maybe thats why it doesn’t quite feel right now.

Fire Grab cooldown reduction would be nice, since its pure damage and not even THAT amazing.

Arcane Wave is fine. Its a Blast finisher, its a full AoE (Blurred Frenzy only hits an arc I believe), a guaranteed crit, and there are some traits that boost it / give it added abilities as well. And being a Utility gives you more freedom when using it.

Electro.4173:

Scepter Air seems pretty decent to me, considering its got Lightning Strike (or whatever the 2 skill is called) as supplemental damage that doesn’t interrupt your autoattack. The damage on the autoattack could stand to increase a bit faster so that it doesn’t take quite so long (and lock you out of dodging) to get up to respectable damage output and if it ramped of faster maybe it would do higher damage in later stages as a resault (say if they added 1 more damage stage and decreased the time to jump stages), but otherwise it doesn’t seem too bad.

Scepter Air autoattack could stand to channel slightly faster, but do be aware that that and lightning strike seem pretty much intended to be combined with Arcane missle.

My only real complaint is that to make air effective you pretty much have to build your skills around it and spec into. Fire and Earth are pretty much effective no matter what.

Scepter Water however is completely pointless. Both Dagger and Staff water are respectable but Scepter water is simply bad.

A few things to keep in mind.

Scepter air has its uses. For one thing, damage is balanced using Lightning Strike. For another, it’s a channeled skill. That means that it will continue to hit a thief if they go into stealth. It can be incredibly annoying to fight against. So yes, it’s a long channel and you can’t dodge without dropping your DPS, but it’s a strong counter against stealth. If you time it right, you can be hitting the thief for almost the entire time they’re in stealth, making stealth far less powerful.

Water is weak, yes. However, it does have a very high hit volume. This means that things with a chance to proc off of hits or crits will proc really often with scepter water attack. Also, remember that water is supposed to be fairly weak in damage. Scepter Water #1 could use a little bit of a buff, but I don’t think it’s that far off.

If water is supposed to be weak in damage, then why is there a trait increasing its damage by 20% against vulnerable foes? If water remains a weak offhealing attunement you only use when cleansing wave and trident are up, that’s bad design.

If I spec for water traits increasing my water offensive spells, I expect to get reasonably returns for my investment.

And, sorry, but the air scepter channel does in its entire channel what my mesmer’s sword autoattack does in less than a second repeatedly. The channel is terrible, and I really suggest people play other classes to realize the damage gap the ele has to overcome.

I shouldn’t need to pick specific sigils in order for water not to suck — fire certainly is not that dependent on gear, and it performs more or less in every setup. Marginalizing the other attunements by making their uses very situational is what got conjured weapons in the state they are in at the moment — situational means rarely used. That’s not something I enjoy.

Has anybody ever died to Air autoattack? It just tickles. They should renamed it Violet Wand.

I play a dps ice mage, using scepter and focus. Personally I have no trouble keeping up with the dps of any other class/build but I do agree that Shatterstone needs a rework. In addition to the cast time (charge time aside) it has an involuntary daze-like state you are stuck in for another good second.
I love scepter water, but it needs more offence. The basic attack is amazing, but beyond that you have no burst (unless you use arcane spells.) Make Shatterstone better/worth casting, or make either focus or offhand dagger have better water offence.

At the very least Shatterstone needs to be returned to its beta effectiveness, where it was basically instant cast (meaning you could get an attack in before it detonated) and began recharging as soon as it was cast rather than after it explodes (which let you recast it immediately upon explosion).
It was almost sort of useful like that, but completely worthless in its current state.

Yeah Lightning strike is what kills people when i am in air. The total damage for Arc lightning is fine it just needs to channel fast. The air attunement description said heavy damage and control, right now scepter air does not feel that way.

Also blinding flash is the only blind we have that does no damage why is that? Signet of air does AE blind and damage, Lightning Surge AE blind and damage, Dust devil AE blind and damage and even our underwater blind Steam does a AE blind and damage. Just a little bit of damage to it would help.

Zaviel.1245:

I love scepter water, but it needs more offence. The basic attack is amazing, but beyond that you have no burst (unless you use arcane spells.) Make Shatterstone better/worth casting, or make either focus or offhand dagger have better water offence.

Well the description of water attunement is superior support and healing. So its damage should not be as high as someone in Air/Fire/Earth. The aura and the amount of healing you gain with water OH dagger is fine. The only change I would want with water focus is making freezing gust an AE.

Ulion.5476:

Yeah Lightning strike is what kills people when i am in air. The total damage for Arc lightning is fine it just needs to channel fast. The air attunement description said heavy damage and control, right now scepter air does not feel that way.

Also blinding flash is the only blind we have that does no damage why is that? Signet of air does AE blind and damage, Lightning Surge AE blind and damage, Dust devil AE blind and damage and even our underwater blind Steam does a AE blind and damage. Just a little bit of damage to it would help.

Zaviel.1245:

I love scepter water, but it needs more offence. The basic attack is amazing, but beyond that you have no burst (unless you use arcane spells.) Make Shatterstone better/worth casting, or make either focus or offhand dagger have better water offence.

Well the description of water attunement is superior support and healing. So its damage should not be as high as someone in Air/Fire/Earth. The aura and the amount of healing you gain with water OH dagger is fine. The only change I would want with water focus is making freezing gust an AE.

Wanting to viably dps in water atunement isn’t as bad as you make it seam. I simply like ice, water, and the dps role. You are essentually saying “just live without, and do something else” is silly, i bet every DD elementalist pops into water for all of 2 seconds for the heal to sustain their “dps” spec.
I don’t care if water dps will ever be top fire, I just want the option to be viable doing it. I’d make up for the lacking dps with the group regen.

Scepter air could maybe use a little love but it’s usable at least.

Scepter water is truly awful. #1 should do more damage, #2 should do more damage, #3 should heal more. Just flat out numbers buff across the board needed.

Minion of Vey.4398:

Scepter air could maybe use a little love but it’s usable at least.

Scepter water is truly awful. #1 should do more damage, #2 should do more damage, #3 should heal more. Just flat out numbers buff across the board needed.

Agree 100%

Personally I think scepter water 1 should be a projectile finisher, 2 should cause chill to keep people in its area, and 3 needs to heal more.

Scepter air is fine although 3 could also apply a one second daze

water scepter 2 is just not worth casting,
the casting time, delay for the spell to trigger for damage/condition is not viable.

suggestions :
make it an instant cast (similar to air2), instant will compensate the 2-3 seconds for it to explode, the aoe and damage isnt that remarkable anyway. cooldown is a bit weird considering the spell takes longer to cast and trigger compared to its cooldown.

scepter needs an auto attack that will be viable casting on a close/mid range battle. the damage from air 1 is not noticeable until after channeling it at 2.5 second mark and channeling / long cast time spells while dancing around with classes with more noticeable auto attacks than you.

channeling puts you on risk already. a moving target until he gets to 2.5 second channel mark to get to noticeable damage.

recommendations :
cut down the channel time or make the dps constant/dps tick faster from air 1
or
reward for completing channeling air 1, automatically reset the cooldown of air 2 for a successful air 1 channel
or
slight/decent increase on water’s auto attack.

just my two cents

Air 1 (Arc Lightning) is fine. It’s meant to be chained with Air 2 (Lightning Strike) and Arcane Missle. It works well as an extremely mobile and evasive single target spike build with good DPS. as well.

Both Air 2 (Lightning Strike) and Air 3 (Blinding Flash) are also able to be used at any time. Like while using Ride the Lightning, while rezzing, while casting utility skills, while otherwise stunned, etc.

In fact I usually open on someone with RTL>>Lightning Strike>>>Blinding Strike, Updraft, Arcane Missle. By which time Lightning Strike is up again and Blinding Flash is not far behind.

So, what if you can do it while doing a weak autoattack? Those aren’t hurting anyone that either. OOOoooh, I got hit by scepter 2, better bring out my immunities!

Just because a utility exists doesn’t mean it justifies the weak autoattack. Let’s grab a warrior with 23k HP on dps magic find gear and compare his damage to your little properly geared 14k hp glass cannon. You won’t even do half the damage he can sustain, let alone the burst.

Thieves and mesmers will spank you in DPS as well. Your crappy 8-9k once a blue moon Fire Grabs and 3-4k Lightning Strikes don’t touch 12k+ shatters let alone the obscene Backstab and Hundred Blades.

Zenith.7301:

So, what if you can do it while doing a weak autoattack? Those aren’t hurting anyone that either. OOOoooh, I got hit by scepter 2, better bring out my immunities!

Just because a utility exists doesn’t mean it justifies the weak autoattack. Let’s grab a warrior with 23k HP on dps magic find gear and compare his damage to your little properly geared 14k hp glass cannon. You won’t even do half the damage he can sustain, let alone the burst.

Thieves and mesmers will spank you in DPS as well. Your crappy 8-9k once a blue moon Fire Grabs and 3-4k Lightning Strikes don’t touch 12k+ shatters let alone the obscene Backstab and Hundred Blades.

Everything matters. Because one attack can be combined with another. Similarly many thief abilities are individually not a problem damage wise but combined they can inst-gib someone.

Hundred Blades is easily counterable and avoidable. Both Mesmers and Thieves are almost sure to get nerfed. But honestly even of those two the shatters requires be glass cannon and blow their clones which have to run to you and then explode.

I did a few tests. We not only do good burst on a fiarly short cooldown (10kish in a couple seconds against heavy armor golem) but built properly our damage only gets stronger as the fight goes on.

Because if there is one thing Air scepter does really really well it’s take advantage of on crit effects. Passive vulnerability causing from the air line, burning from the fire line, bleeding from the earth sigils. It gets ugly.

Mobs don’t dodge 100B, and thief heartseeker by itself hits hard. Compare thief dagger autoattack or shortbow autoattack with other classes, and the damage gap is noticeable, as is the warrior.

And it’s bullcrap that shatter builds need to be glass cannon. I own a mesmer. He’s power/vit/toughness, no berserker and with points in inspiration. Each shatter I do does more damage on average than a fire grab, and it’s 1/4 the cooldown of Fire Grab.

Keep testing on PvP golems, but I’ll invite you to a dungeon and then we’ll see if you can even hold a candle to one of the warriors or thieves, let alone a good grenadier engineer.

While we’re on the topic of crappy auto attacks:
I included thief dagger for a reference point, but I forgot to bring a steady shortbow.
Damage vs Heavy Golem in HotM

Cast time – Ability – damage x hits per cast time.

Elementalist – No equipment – Steady Dagger – No traits
1/2 – Drake’s Claw – 16 x3
1/2 – Lightning Whip – 29 x2 hits
1/2 – Vapor Blade – 14 1% vulnerability
3/4 – Impale – 21 8 second bleed

Elementalist – No equipment – Steady Scepter – No traits
1 1/4 – flame strike – 13 2 seconds of burning
3 1/4 – Arc Lightning 4 x3 8 x3 12 x4
3/4 – Ice Shards – 8 x3
1 1/2 – Stone shards – 6 x3 3x 6 second bleed

Elementalist – No equipment – Steady Staff – No traits
1 Fireball 40 120 radius AoE
3/4 Chain lightning 32 bounces 3 times
3/4 Water Blast 14
3/4 Stoning 24 3 seconds of weakness

Thief – No equipment – Steady Dagger – no traits
1/4 – Double strike 12 x2
1/4 – Wild strike 36 gain 10 endurance
1/4 – Lotus strike 36 2 seconds of poison

The math (3 seconds used because everything except scepter fire/air fits into it neatly)
Thief dagger auto attack damage over 3 seconds
312 damage 8 seconds of poison

Elementalist auto attack damage over 3 seconds
288 drake’s claw
348 lightning whip
84 vapor blade
84 Impale 4 stacks of bleeding (8 seconds)

31.2 Flame Strike 4.8 seconds of burning
77.5 Arc Lightning
96 Ice shards
36 Stone Shards 6 stacks of bleeding (6 seconds)

120 Fireball
128 Chain lightning (256 if it bounces back to hit the target 2x)
56 Water Blast
96 Stoning

*disclaimer – it’s late and any errors are George W. Bush’s fault.

Zenith.7301:

Mobs don’t dodge 100B, and thief heartseeker by itself hits hard. Compare thief dagger autoattack or shortbow autoattack with other classes, and the damage gap is noticeable, as is the warrior.

And it’s bullcrap that shatter builds need to be glass cannon. I own a mesmer. He’s power/vit/toughness, no berserker and with points in inspiration. Each shatter I do does more damage on average than a fire grab, and it’s 1/4 the cooldown of Fire Grab.

Keep testing on PvP golems, but I’ll invite you to a dungeon and then we’ll see if you can even hold a candle to one of the warriors or thieves, let alone a good grenadier engineer.

Against mobs too stupid to dodge scepter is not going to be king. Persistent AOE will be because you can make them stay inside it. Still, that’s cherry picking “best for PVE” vs being viable isn’t it? There will always be a best and this game bears more than one play style.

Grenades are likely a little too good. Virtue of one of the traits increasing their damage 50% and the need to be viable even without that likely.

Ralathar.7236:

Zenith.7301:

Mobs don’t dodge 100B, and thief heartseeker by itself hits hard. Compare thief dagger autoattack or shortbow autoattack with other classes, and the damage gap is noticeable, as is the warrior.

And it’s bullcrap that shatter builds need to be glass cannon. I own a mesmer. He’s power/vit/toughness, no berserker and with points in inspiration. Each shatter I do does more damage on average than a fire grab, and it’s 1/4 the cooldown of Fire Grab.

Keep testing on PvP golems, but I’ll invite you to a dungeon and then we’ll see if you can even hold a candle to one of the warriors or thieves, let alone a good grenadier engineer.

Against mobs too stupid to dodge scepter is not going to be king. Persistent AOE will be because you can make them stay inside it. Still, that’s cherry picking “best for PVE” vs being viable isn’t it? There will always be a best and this game bears more than one play style.

Grenades are likely a little too good. Virtue of one of the traits increasing their damage 50% and the need to be viable even without that likely.

So where will it be best, then? You may be satisfied with being good at tagging in brainless zerg DE’s, but for actually competitive and complex content, some of us would prefer warriors and thieves not blow everyone else out of the water.

Especially when one of those classes has about 8-9k more HP than you while dealing more damage.

It’s just like when they say that classes would have flexibility, yet when it comes to defensive capability, nothing gets close to a Guardian. The gaps are too big. Yeah, different classes have differences, but some classes are flat out better than others at many tasks, and what happens is that you make certain classes niche classes as a result whereas classes like the warrior and thief can never go wrong — killing quickly and efficiently is extremely important in high difficulty dungeons unless you are stacking guardians. And two classes leave the others in the dust.

A warrior can do the best damage in the game, but he can also go shield and mace Shake It Off aoe heal/condition removal tank build and approach Guardian tankiness with banners to give the group perma boons.

Some classes are just far better polished than others. How many people use those worthless conjures? How many use Glyph of Storms or any elite outside the elemental? How many elementalists are using the focus outside WvW?

Zenith.7301:

Some classes are just far better polished than others. How many people use those worthless conjures? How many use Glyph of Storms or any elite outside the elemental? How many elementalists are using the focus outside WvW?

I use conjures.

Frost Bow is great to give to team against graveling mounds. I’ll admit that I don’t have a ton of use for it generally as its auto attack is useless.

Lightning hammer is awesome for AoE blind crowd control and damage. I’ve had one attack chain do up to 10k damage. I also use glyph of storms for earth aoe blind. The other attunements are not worth using the spell in; I’ll give you that.

Lava Axe is a great addition for a D/D auramancer, providing both greater range and another fire aura for a prot/swift/fury proc.

FGS is superb for both damage and perma-snare against a mob of melee targets. Just untarget for #4 and run through the mob for more dmg fun.

Pets always get me in trouble. At least I’m in control of my weapons.

Earth Shield…meh. I want to use it, but just….can’t….

I also have been using the focus in dungeons. Fire and water need serious love but air / earth are nice.

Despite all of these comments, I do agree that we could use a lot more polish. Too many traits are blah or broken, focus and scepter need some love. Staff animation and projectile speeds need help.

See, Scepter must be taken as a whole, not cherry picking each attunement. Currently Air scepter is capable of good single target damage while also repeatedly blinding a single foes. If you combine the strengths of Air with your other elements you can do pretty good. Dragons Tooth/Phoenix/Dust Devil does a good chunk of AOE damage while blinding multiple foes. Rock Barrier helps give you more survivability. Air continues the single target damage flow and single target blind.

The problems isn’t that Scepter isn’t good. The problem is that when you are facing mobs which other people are holding aggro for you can AOE all day with much lowered risk. Mobility doesn’t come into play as much and AOE’s are balanced in damage by the ability to avoid or miss the projectile storms/delays. Mobs are easy to game in that regard.

I think EVERYONE agrees water scepter could use help though. All 3 skills are unimpressive, there is no reason to use water scepter at all outside of using water trident to help maintain health levels.

Thieves and Warriors will almost always outperform in some situations I’m afraid. They have the limitations of range and their AOE is far far FAR less damaging than ours in general. So their damage is stronger and focused in a shorter period of time to compensate. But if we did all that better than them to, why play a Warrior or Thief? Be reasonable.

Thief aoe is not bad. What. It spams blast finishers and does significant bouncing damage on a spammable, re-targetable attack. Warrior greatsword is more than enough cleave AoE. What range limitations? I’m fractal lv21 and I just stand there and melee alongside the warrior.

scepter fire could use some help as well.

Scepter would get a lot of help if the 2 sec delay from Dragon’s Tooth and Shatterstone were reduced to 1 instead. All autoattacks on scepter are pretty terrible with the exception of maybe stone shards. But scepter fire autoattack is just pretty bad as well.

And man is the projectile for Phoenix slow, and curiously it has a weird range setup compared to Dragon’s Tooth.

There’s also little incentive to use Hurl — the toughness gain is rather substantial, and sacrificing stone barrier for such negligible damage is a nonstarter.

By the way, our warrior’s Aimed Shot alone without much power stacks hits for 11k. Try getting that number on anything but Fire Grab. And Fire Grab is 4x more the cooldown of Aimed Shot and melee range.

The problem is PvP. Fire Grab is instant, Hundred blades is 3.5 second channel, Kill shot is 1.75 second channel.

People cry about a ranged attack that can be reflected for massive damage, blocked or dodged.

Imagine the kittenstorm if Fire grab hit as hard as hundred blades, but instantly and guaranteed crit thanks to arcane power. That being said I don’t see why they can’t buff things PvE only and make it hit that hard in PvE while doing the same damage it does now in PvP.

Of course it is instant — have you seen its range? You need to stand still, as does your target, for it to hit (it misses all the kitten time if you are moving or your target is).

It can also be blocked like any attack, and has 4x the cooldown. If they are not going to increase the damage, they should at the very least look at the cooldown. And the fact is that a single warrior attack is doing the damage of multiple elementalist “spike” spells combined (and said spike spells have larger cooldowns).

Fire Grab also has a telltale windup animation where your character literally pulls his arms back and then does a push. It gives ample time for dodging.

I would agree on the point about dt and Phoenix since no one is going to get hit by it. Scepter dmg is still lackluster. Ele can’t go full dmg since it lacks the survivability both thief and warrior have.