Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone. My name is Munchkin, and my main is an Elementalist. I have been playing Ele since beta and I love the class, but it needs help. I see that even more clearly after playing Warrior extensively. I propose to you this list of six changes that would help the Elementalist greatly and be very simple to implement. I will post a TLDR at the end, because even though it is a short list of only six changes, I try to explain exactly why the changes are needed and how they would be implemented. Let’s get started.

1. Long animation abilities.
There are some Ele abilities that would be good but have animations that are WAY too long. I would recommend cutting the animation time in half at least. If damage needs to be adjusted to account for the faster animations, so be it. The abilities are Dragon’s Tooth (Scepter), Shatterstone (Scepter), Ice Spike (Staff), Eruption (Staff), Churning Earth (OH Dagger), and Comet (Focus).

2. Attunement Swapping.
The cooldown on attunements when swapping to another is WAY too severe, and lowers the amount of viable trait builds that the Elementalist has. Here is what I mean. Say you were in Fire attunement. You swap to Air. That puts your Fire attunement on a 15 second cooldown, regardless of whether or not you are in combat. On classes with a weapon swap, there is no cooldown when out of combat, and in combat the cooldown is 10 seconds.

But wait, isn’t there a way to lower the cooldown? Why yes, there is. Putting points into the Arcane tree does two things, as do all trees. It increases boon duration, as well as lowering that nasty 15 second cooldown. How much, you ask? Well if you put a whopping 30 points into the Arcane tree, you will lower that cooldown to 10 seconds, the same as a weapon swap. This is a problem. Just to “break even” you need to put 30 points into a tree that you may not necessarily even want to put points into. Lowering the cooldown is THAT important. This is why Elementalists have so few viable builds. I don’t like the Arcane tree at all, but I won’t even consider a build that doesn’t put at least 20 points into it.

The necessity for every build to invest heavily into the Arcane tree is extremely limiting. My suggestion for this would be to make it a base 10 seconds just like weapon swaps. This would open up many more builds.

3. 20% woes.
Hey non-Elementalists. Does your class have traits to lower cooldowns with certain weapons by 20%? It does? Do one or more of those traits have some other bonus to go along with that 20% cooldown reduction? They do? Let’s look at some warrior traits, shall we? All of these traits lower the cooldown of their respective weapons by 20%. I am just going to list the extra effects.

Great Sword and Spear: Might on crit (Hundred Blades a group of mobs and see what happens)
Rifle: Shots pierce multiple mobs (insane)
Mace: +10% damage to weakened foe
Shield: +90 toughness
Hammer: +25% damage to disabled foe
Warhorn: Converts a condition to a boon

Remember folks, those effects are on TOP of the 20% cooldown reduction of their respective weapons. The Elementalist’s cooldown reduction traits aren’t aimed at weapons though. Aside from Arcane, they are aimed at attunements. Understandable, right? Let’s take a look at the bonuses of those traits, shall we?

Fire:
Air:
Earth:
Water:
Arcane:

Not a typo. There are no bonuses. Gotcha. Joke’s on you, and totally not on me, the Elementalist. I would also like to add that since you are switching between 4 attunements, and not 2 weapon sets, you are getting even less for each of the already lackluster cooldown reduction traits, half as much, in fact. And it’s not even possible to trait all your attunements like another class would be able trait both weapon sets. To get all 20% reduction traits for Elementalist you would need 90 trait points.

4. Dagger Issues.
Daggers have good burst. The problem is the cooldowns of key abilities are too long. This makes you useless in between kills, or if you aggro more mobs between combos. This would be the best spec for leveling and killing mobs efficiently, except the cooldowns make it inefficient. I will explain how.

Your combo for killing something with daggers is as follows: Start in Air. Ride the Lightning to the mob and Updraft to knock it down. Switch to Fire. Burning speed to the mob (Updraft moves you back, Burning speed moves you forward the right distance), use Ring of Fire, Arcane Wave for the damage and might, Arcane Blast for more damage and possibly catch the projectile on fire from your Ring of Fire depending on mob/ring orientation, and finish it up with a Fire grab, which will do more damage if your enemy is on fire, which it will be from the Burning Speed.

That is a lot of things happening all at once, and that whole combo is executed in just a few seconds. If you have the right traits, gear, and execute it properly you will likely kill the mob. Try not to think of how a Warrior will just have to press “2” for Hundred Blades and do just as much, if not more damage. You need to stay strong. The problem with this rotation is that Hundred Blades has an 8 second cooldown (6.5 seconds with trait) and the dagger/dagger rotation has these cooldowns:

Ride the Lightning: 15s (12s traited)
Updraft: 40s (32s)
Burning Speed: 15s (12s)
Ring of Fire: 15s (12s)
Arcane Wave: 30s (24s)
Arcane Blast: 20s (16s)
Fire Grab: 45s (36s)

So, as you can see, the cooldowns are pretty severe for killing mobs. If you had a killstreak buff up, you would not be able to do this combo to kill a mob every 30 seconds because of the cooldowns of Updraft and Fire Grab. The Arcane abilities actually used to be on lower cooldowns but were nerfed in beta for whatever reason. It doesn’t make sense because the burst of this build is not limited by the cooldowns of the Arcane abilities nearly as much as the cooldowns of Updraft and Fire Grab.

I would also like to talk about the Fire 2 skill, because I believe changing it could provide an opportunity to not only replace it with a better skill, but provide another combo utilizing Earthquake, your other knockdown. First of all, why is Updraft used over Earthquake?

It is because:
A. To start the combo, a knockdown is needed. Ride the Lightning helps you get close to knock down with Updraft and start it. Ride the Lightning and Updraft are both in Air Attunement.
B. Updraft has you do a little backflip away from your target when you execute it. This puts you at the perfect distance to follow up with Blazing Speed and the rest of the combo.

Dagger/Dagger is about burst, not conditions. More about that later. Here is my proposal for a change to Drake’s Breath.

Dragon Punch
Punch the ground beneath you (or the target) for medium PBAOE damage and propel yourself backwards a short distance. (setting you up for Blazing Speed)

Ok let me explain why this would be good. Say you have already done the combo I listed earlier which uses Updraft. You want to kill something else but updraft is on cooldown. Normally using Earthquake would be less than optimal because it doesn’t set you up for Blazing Speed like Updraft does, But with Dragon Punch propelling you backwards after Earthquake, you would be able to follow up with Blazing speed. Here is the Updraft combo listed above:

“Your combo for killing something with daggers is as follows: Start in Air. Ride the Lightning to the mob and Updraft to knock it down. Switch to Fire. Burning speed to the mob (Updraft moves you back, Burning speed moves you forward the right distance), use Ring of Fire, Arcane Wave for the damage and might, Arcane Blast for more damage and possibly catch the projectile on fire from your Ring of Fire depending on mob/ring orientation, and finish it up with a Fire grab, which will do more damage if your enemy is on fire, which it will be from the Burning Speed.”

And here is the alternate combo using Earthquake in place of Updraft:

“Your (alternate) combo for killing something with daggers is as follows: Start in Air. Ride the Lightning to the mob. Switch to Earth and knock down with Earthquake. Switch to Fire. Dragon Punch back and Burning speed to the mob (Dragon Punch moves you back, Burning speed moves you forward the right distance), use Ring of Fire, Arcane Wave for the damage and might, Arcane Blast for more damage and possibly catch the projectile on fire from your Ring of Fire depending on mob/ring orientation, and finish it up with a Fire grab, which will do more damage if your enemy is on fire, which it will be from the Burning Speed.”

Dragon Punch would allow for a lot more versatility and cooldown independence without lowering the cooldown times of our knockdowns, which could lead to potential balance issues. If Dragon Punch were implemented, the only things needing to be tweaked would be the cooldown of Fire Grab, which is your finisher and an extremely important part of both combos, and the cooldown of Arcane Wave brought down to 20 seconds from 30.

So to fix Dagger/Dagger three things are needed:
A. Dragon Punch
B. Lower Fire Grab cooldown to 20 second base
C. Lower Arcane Wave cooldown to 20 second base

5. Staff Issues.

I love using Staff on Ele. I leveled from 1-60 using only Staff because I wanted to program it’s cooldowns into my brain for WvW. At 60 I couldn’t take it anymore, and had to explore other weapon setups and builds to find a more efficient way to level. So let’s talk Staff attunements for a moment.

Air: Air is perfect. Every ability is extremely useful. It’s a great mix of support and control, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Water: Water is nearly perfect. The only thing I would change is the number 2 skill, Ice Spike. It is one of the slow animation skills I mentioned in the first section. Other than that, I wouldn’t change a thing. A ton of support with a little control too.

Earth: Earth has Eruption, which is another one of the slow animating skills. God is this thing slow. Plus it’s almost completely bleed damage. This would be great on a Scepter, but not a Staff. Staff isn’t about conditions. I will talk more about why in the next section. I would change eruption to do regular damage, plus a knock back. It is an Eruption, after all.

Magnetic Aura is great, as is Shockwave. The fact that Shockwave has bleed damage doesn’t bother me because it is more about the immobilize than anything else.

Unsteady Ground I am not a fan of. In PvE the mobs get through it too quickly, and in PvP it’s very easy to just roll past. In fact, it seems almost fun for people to roll past it like a limbo contest or something. I would make it a circle instead of a line, and adjust the cripple if necessary. I would also make it tick for a decent amount of damage, like Lava Font, but more about that after we get through these attunements.

Fire: Lava Font I would absolutely change, but I’ll get to that. Flame burst is a crappy burn. I would replace it completely. More on that next. Burning Retreat is burn damage, but it doesn’t bother me because it’s a gap opener, plus it has invincibility frames like a dodge. Good ability. That brings us to Meteor Shower. This ability is awesome in WvW, and terrible in pretty much every other aspect of play. I would just leave it.

Ok so what you need to realize about staff is that the heals are great, the CC is great, but the damage is terrible. This makes killing mobs a huge hassle. The problem is that Staff just doesn’t have any good reliable damaging abilities. Your best bet is Lava Font. This is your highest damaging ability. The problem is, you need to get the mob to stay on the Lava Font and take all the ticking damage. This is tricky to do because of the mechanics of Lava Font.

Lava Font normally has a 6 second cooldown, but can be lowered by 20% when traited to 4.8 seconds. It has a duration of 4 seconds. With 30 points into fire, you can get a trait that increases the duration of fire fields by 30%. So that bumps The duration up to 5.2 seconds. (keep in mind that you won’t be able to trait this until level 60) So that means with the 4.8 second cooldown along with the 5.2 second duration you will be able to have a Lava Font up all the time, right? Wrong! There is a “startup” to Lava Font. It is hard to explain, but it puts a gap of 1-2 seconds where there is no lava Font down. Well, so much for that.

This “startup” to Lava Font messes with killing efficiency in a big way. And here’s why. You need to immobilize your target to get the most out of Lava Font. You have two possible ways to immobilize. One is Shockwave in Earth Attunement. This is a 2 second immobilize, and if you have 30 points into Fire, it gets bumped up to 2.6 seconds. I bet you can already see the problem. With lava Font’s “startup” time, you would be lucky to get one second’s worth of Lava Font damage. Well, how about our other option? That would be the utility skill Signet of Earth. This immobilize lasts 3 seconds, and with 30 points in Fire it would last 3.9 seconds. This one is a little better, but you would still only get about half a Lava Font. If you combine both immobilizes, you can get off a full Lava Font. However, both of these are 30 second cooldowns each, and with two separate traits can be lowered to 24 seconds apiece. To get both these traits would require 20 points in Earth. So 30 points in Fire and 20 points in Earth to land a single Lava Font. Sounds legit.

This is why I propose a change to the Lava Font skill. My change is extremely simple, but would help Staff Ele in a BIG way. And here it is. Lava Bomb. This would look like Lava Font and be placed like Lava Font, but it would be, in essence, a proximity mine. Instead of dancing around a mob to get them to walk on Lava Font (after you’ve given up on your immobilizes) for a tick or two of damage, you would kite the mob to the mine and it would detonate. Not ticking for damage, but exploding and doing it’s damage all at once. I’m sure the damage would have to be retuned, but you understand what I’m getting at. It would still do good damage like Lava Font can potentially do. It would still be able to AOE multiple mobs/players. And it would still be a deterrent and a tool for “zone control” in WvW and structured.

Now I said I would talk more about Unsteady Ground. Essentially I would change it to be a circle instead of a line, be a 240 radius, which is the same size as Frozen Ground, and have it cripple for 1 second instead of 2, since it has much more surface area. I would make it tick for damage like the old Lava Font, but not as much since it has the cripple element. It’s Damage would be somewhere between the current Unsteady Ground and Lava Font. That would make this ability much more useful, as well somewhat fill the role of Lava Font “ticking” for damage. Also, having cripple being applied would help keep the target in the field.

The last ability I will talk about is the Fire 3 skill, Flame Burst. This is a single target long range crappy burn. As a Staff Ele, what was really missing from the toolkit was a long range single target damaging skill. It’s sad, but aside from auto-attacks there are none whatsoever. Staff needs one badly, so that’s what I would put in place of Flame Burst. I would make it an attack very similar to Fire auto-attack (Fireball). It would be single target, explode in a small AOE on impact, have a 5-8 second cooldown, and be about 3 times as powerful as Fireball. You could even use the same animation as Fireball, just sized up a bit. I wouldn’t even care.

So to fix Staff three things are needed:
A. Lava Font changed to Lava Bomb
B. Flame Burst changed to Fireball 2.0
C. Unsteady Ground changed from line to circle with better ticking damage

A and B are absolutely imperative. C would be great but is not nearly as important as A and B.

6. Abilities that don’t fit weapon theme.

Each weapon set has a theme. This theme, or focus, is based on the abilities in that weapon set’s toolkit. Here is what the focus of these weapons are:

Staff: Long Range. Support, AOE, and CC

Scepter: Mid-Range. Condition damage

Dagger MH: Melee Range. Burst damage

Dagger OH: Extra melee burst, knockdowns, and travel

Focus: Pure defense

This is what the weapons focus on. However, many abilities in the weapon’s toolkits do not fit the theme. You have probably heard Elementalists say things like “well yeah we have more abilities because of the 4 attunements, but half of our abilities are garbage”. This is what they mean. Here is a list of abilities for each weapon that do not fit the theme and an explanation why.

Staff:
Flame Burst – Condition damage
Eruption – Condition damage

Burning Retreat and Shockwave are also condition damage as mentioned earlier, but as condition damage is not their purpose, they should be left as they are. I talked earlier about Flame Burst and Eruption in the Staff section, and don’t forget that Eruption is one of the slow animating abilities.

Scepter:
Scepter is different, because the only attunements that have condition damage are Fire and Earth. That being said, Phoenix is the only ability that doesn’t fit the theme. However, it should be noted that Scepter builds tend to focus on both power and condition damage. This is because Dragon’s Tooth does good chunks of both regular and condition damage. Also, Scepter condition builds tend to use Dagger offhand. This means Fire Grab for high non-condition damage, Ring of Fire for both regular and condition, Earthquake for regular damage, and Churning Earth (if it weren’t so incredibly slow) for high regular damage and high condition damage. So, as you can see, Scepter condition is a mixture of regular damage and condition damage, and needs both power and condition damage. Carrion gear is good for this. All that being said, it would be nice if Phoenix had a burn to it, but it is still a very useful ability with high damage when aimed correctly.

Dagger MH:
Drake’s Breath – Regular and condition damage
Burning Speed – Regular and condition damage
Ring of Earth – Regular and condition damage

It would benefit Dagger greatly if the condition damage were shifted over to regular damage. Dagger needs to focus more on power, precision, and crit multiplier to get a good burst.

Dagger OH:
Dagger OH is going to be used by both Scepter and Dagger builds, so it needs both regular and condition damage. It has both types of damage, has two knockdowns, and has the almighty Ride the Lightning. It manages to fit both themes very well while still having great utility, and in my opinion is probably the best designed weapon the Elementalist has access to. (for now)

Focus:
Focus is all about defense. Comet does fit the theme, as it has a daze bult in, but is one of the abilities with a slow animation as was mentioned in the first section. The only abilities that don’t fit the theme are the Fire abilities, which are decidedly lackluster:

Flame Wall – Make it so you can’t walk through it and we’re in business
Fire Shield – The lowest damage burn I have ever seen, plus the enemy gets to be right next to me, hitting me? That doesn’t sound very defensive. Or legit.

This is the end of my list of 6 changes that would help the Elementalist greatly. Thank you for reading. I just wanted to touch on a couple things outside of the list before I finish up and post the TLDR.

A. Risk vs. Reward.

Elementalist has the lowest armor and lowest HP of all the classes. My Warrior has the highest armor and highest HP of all the classes. My Warrior will outdamage my Elementalist without even putting any points into traits. No matter what build I use with my Ele, weapons/traits/gear/utilities, doesn’t matter. If I trait and gear my Elementalist to be as tanky as possible, with 30 points into Water and 30 into Earth, I will still die much quicker than the Warrior, again without any points in traits. All glass and no cannon. If I’m going to be so fragile, and if my class takes so much more skill and micromanagement than other classes to play, there needs to be some kind of reward for that. Currently there is not. If anything, there is just punishment for picking the wrong class. I would be better off playing literally ANY other class. Good thing I got my Warrior.

B. Don’t Nerf Warrior.

In my list you heard me say things about Warrior traits, Hundred Blades, the Warrior’s killing speed, and I mention them in the Risk vs. Reward section above. That being said, I DO NOT want Warrior to be nerfed. This game feels like it was designed and balanced around Warrior. Leveling as one was an absolute joy and just felt right. You felt like a hero, and the PvE speed seemed very similar to other MMORPGS. I firmly believe that other classes need to be brought UP to this standard instead of the Warrior being brought DOWN. While leveling both characters, I came across maybe 5-6 Arenanet employees. Every one of them was playing Warrior. It’s just plain fun, and other classes need to be just as fun.

TLDR:

1. Some Ele abilities have animations that are WAY too long.

2. Attunement swapping is too punishing. The Arcane tree limits builds.

3. Traits that lower cooldowns by 20% have other bonuses on other classes. Ele does not.

4. Dagger/Dagger is crippled by long cooldowns.

5. Staff is cumbersome due to Lava Font mechanics and a lack of a good single target attack.

6. Some weapon abilities don’t fit the focus of the weapon and are either dead or subpar.

A. Highest Armor/Highest HP should not outdamage Lowest Armor/Lowest HP.

B. Don’t nerf Warrior. Use it as a standard to bring the other classes up to.

Thank you again for reading. I would love to hear from any fellow Elementalists on these issues, even if you do not agree with me. I won’t give up on the Elementalist, and neither should you.

There is nothing wrong with attunment, its likely you who poorly manage this. If you switch between 2 attu. then you will get locked out yes, if you wildly swap instead of utilizing each attu. then you will get locked.

This is purely a player issue.

Ele arn’t perfect by any means, they require above average skill to ‘’have a good time’’ in pvp where as a warrior could fare decent with a monkey behind the keyboard.

Theres a thread about two good specs in Elementalist section, I suggest you try them and commit some time. If you are not able to have sucess with that, then you’d probably be better of rerolling – and there is no shame in that.

Otiz.3259:

There is nothing wrong with attunment, its likely you who poorly manage this. If you switch between 2 attu. then you will get locked out yes, if you wildly swap instead of utilizing each attu. then you will get locked.

This is purely a player issue.

Ele arn’t perfect by any means, they require above average skill to ‘’have a good time’’ in pvp where as a warrior could fare decent with a monkey behind the keyboard.

Theres a thread about two good specs in Elementalist section, I suggest you try them and commit some time. If you are not able to have sucess with that, then you’d probably be better of rerolling – and there is no shame in that.

This is the problem this forums sees a lot, and I keep saying it. People assuming other people are bad because they don’t find it that bad. Yet, same people haven’t even begun to analyse or try other classes, but when they do, they’re gobsmacked. Stop and think- Maybe, just maybe, there is a possibility the person is great at their class, but still has concerns? :|

@OP

Great post, keep it coming.

Otiz, I should not have to reroll to enjoy the class. The elementalist very clearly has some serious issues. I got this game to play elementalist, and I agree with everything Munchkin posted above, with one exception: Your comments about Staff Air; These absolutely need fixed.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/professions/elementalist/

Read what it says about Air attunement. It does not say “Support” or “CC.” It says Focused, High Damage abilities. Which none of the weapon sets for Elementalist offer. Firstly, the damage of chain lightning needs to be stronger or the spell needs to cast faster and instantly travel to its target. Like a bolt of lightning does. When it storms outside, do you see a slow moving burst of lightning fall out of the sky and splat harmlessly on the ground? No, you see a bolt. Instant transmission, at around 224,000 miles per hour. Big flash, lots of noise. Also, Gust needs to be a Blowout, not just a knockback. Knockbacks are pretty useless, at least in this case; a Blowout would be more effective as you could knock someone down then plant Lava Font underneath them.

Also, a custom combo where Eruption placed in Lava Font would cause an actual, high-damage volcanic eruption would be sweet as hell. I thought that was the point of the combo field system, when they advertised it, not silly boons and conditions. =\

Razarei.2809:

Otiz.3259:

There is nothing wrong with attunment, its likely you who poorly manage this. If you switch between 2 attu. then you will get locked out yes, if you wildly swap instead of utilizing each attu. then you will get locked.

This is purely a player issue.

Ele arn’t perfect by any means, they require above average skill to ‘’have a good time’’ in pvp where as a warrior could fare decent with a monkey behind the keyboard.

Theres a thread about two good specs in Elementalist section, I suggest you try them and commit some time. If you are not able to have sucess with that, then you’d probably be better of rerolling – and there is no shame in that.

This is the problem this forums sees a lot, and I keep saying it. People assuming other people are bad because they don’t find it that bad. Yet, same people haven’t even begun to analyse or try other classes, but when they do, they’re gobsmacked. Stop and think- Maybe, just maybe, there is a possibility the person is great at their class, but still has concerns? :|

@OP

Great post, keep it coming.

Or maybe they are just bad.
I was very critical on Ele from the get go, cause I spend a lot of time trying different stuff and didn’t have a lot of sucess. After changing to the spec Kryto suggested I feel I can compete with (almost) everyone and contribute a great deal.

The main issue with Ele is that they can be somewhat complicate to play, so the average Joe will shy away from this class creating balance issues if you will.

Westley.4716:

Otiz, I should not have to reroll to enjoy the class. The elementalist very clearly has some serious issues. I got this game to play elementalist, and I agree with everything Munchkin posted above, with one exception: Your comments about Staff Air; These absolutely need fixed.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/professions/elementalist/

Read what it says about Air attunement. It does not say “Support” or “CC.” It says Focused, High Damage abilities. Which none of the weapon sets for Elementalist offer. Firstly, the damage of chain lightning needs to be stronger or the spell needs to cast faster and instantly travel to its target. Like a bolt of lightning does. When it storms outside, do you see a slow moving burst of lightning fall out of the sky and splat harmlessly on the ground? No, you see a bolt. Instant transmission, at around 224,000 miles per hour. Big flash, lots of noise. Also, Gust needs to be a Blowout, not just a knockback. Knockbacks are pretty useless, at least in this case; a Blowout would be more effective as you could knock someone down then plant Lava Font underneath them.

Also, a custom combo where Eruption placed in Lava Font would cause an actual, high-damage volcanic eruption would be sweet as hell. I thought that was the point of the combo field system, when they advertised it, not silly boons and conditions. =\

I agree you shouldn’t I’m just letting you know that playing an Elementalist will require A LOT more skill than average burst Warrior if you will.

Sure the class has issues, but many are painting a very distortet image of the Elementalist – and if we end up getting buffed you will see that those who manage to fare well or great as it is now, will likely Overpowered (just to simplyfy)

I really suggest you try Krytos specs, it will really make you competitive in every way, sure there are classes you can’t 1v1 but that is to be expected.

Razarei.2809:

Otiz.3259:

Razarei.2809:

Otiz.3259:

There is nothing wrong with attunment, its likely you who poorly manage this. If you switch between 2 attu. then you will get locked out yes, if you wildly swap instead of utilizing each attu. then you will get locked.

This is purely a player issue.

Ele arn’t perfect by any means, they require above average skill to ‘’have a good time’’ in pvp where as a warrior could fare decent with a monkey behind the keyboard.

Theres a thread about two good specs in Elementalist section, I suggest you try them and commit some time. If you are not able to have sucess with that, then you’d probably be better of rerolling – and there is no shame in that.

This is the problem this forums sees a lot, and I keep saying it. People assuming other people are bad because they don’t find it that bad. Yet, same people haven’t even begun to analyse or try other classes, but when they do, they’re gobsmacked. Stop and think- Maybe, just maybe, there is a possibility the person is great at their class, but still has concerns? :|

@OP

Great post, keep it coming.

Or maybe they are just bad.
I was very critical on Ele from the get go, cause I spend a lot of time trying different stuff and didn’t have a lot of sucess. After changing to the spec Kryto suggested I feel I can compete with (almost) everyone and contribute a great deal.

The main issue with Ele is that they can be somewhat complicate to play, so the average Joe will shy away from this class creating balance issues if you will.

Add me ingame, and give me an available time through PM.

Okay, I’ll be avilable most of the day tomorrow.

@Otiz: None of the OP’s suggestions point to the fact that he’s a noob or average player. In fact it shows he understands the class quite well. You however are using someone elses build and claiming success. It isn’t about Average Joe and Sideshow Bob, this is about players who have dedicated themselves to the class from as far back as BWE1 stating what they feel could be done to improve the class without boosting pure numbers.

@OP: thank you for taking the time to put your thoughts together so nicely. One thing I’d consider amending is Dragon Punch > Dragon Lunge turning into a PBAOE knockdown + blast finisher instead leaving Earth available for further CC and finishers.

Otiz, I don’t poorly manage attunement, I don’t get locked out, and I don’t wildly swap. I burned Staff cooldowns into my brain permanently. I don’t have an issue managing them, but an issue with the limiting cooldown length, and the way having to invest points into Arcane limits the amount of builds we have available to us. I don’t need to look up builds, because I have tried all of them in search of not sucking.

I would respect your opinion more if you had waited for me to actually post my entire article instead of trolling me halfway through without reading.

Thank you Razarei. I rolled my Warrior purely as a comparative experiment. it was definitely illuminating.

EDIT: @ Westley. I definitely agree with you on Air attunement. That’s the way it SHOULD be. However, since I find each of the Air Staff abilities so insanely useful, I could not justify changing them. After all, Staff is for support. But I could definitely handle Lightning Surge (the blind) doing a bit more damage, as well as our auto-attacks traveling a bit faster. The Fire one is very slow as well.

EDIT: @Marz. I actually considered making Dragon Punch a knockback. Whether it pushes you back or them back does not matter, as long as it puts you at that sweet spot for Blazing Speed. I don’t think ANet would go for another knockdown or knockback though, which is why I tried to make the ability have as little impact as possible CC-wise. I also wanted to utilize the under-used Earthquake (in the PvE burst combo at least). All of my changes are basically quality of life improvements to make leveling smoother and have as little impact on PvP as possible. After all that writing, I think the one change that would have the biggest impact would be a faster animation on Dragon’s Tooth. But if they adjust the damage accordingly, it will not be a problem.

Munchkin.4137:

Otiz, I don’t poorly manage attunement, I don’t get locked out, and I don’t wildly swap. I burned Staff cooldowns into my brain permanently. I don’t have an issue managing them, but an issue with the limiting cooldown length, and the way having to invest points into Arcane limits the amount of builds we have available to us. I don’t need to look up builds, because I have tried all of them in search of not sucking.

I would respect your opinion more if you had waited for me to actually post my entire article instead of trolling me halfway through without reading.

Thank you Razarei. I rolled my Warrior purely as a comparative experiment. it was definitely illuminating.

Staff is crap

Edited: Sorry if I don’t take you very seriously when you claim to know the secret of how an Elementalist should be.

@Otiz: We should take you seriously with blanket statements like that?

Please enlighten us with what you feel is overpowered and/or underpowered about the class or stay out of threads like these if you have nothing meaningful to contribute.

I don’t agree with the “Staff is for Support” mindset at all. Staff is for AoE, but that does not define it as support. Yes it has good support potential, but the character spec should determine if its support/damage/tank, not the weapon. That “weapon-determines-function” mindset is what Guild Wars 2 had hoped to avoid, and tried to amend by adding the condition damage you mentioned throughout your post; it’s meant so that with proper speccing and accessories/runes/sigils, one may capitalize on one damage type (direct or condition) and leave the other as purely supplementary.

In regards to a change to Staff Air, get rid of the 4 skill, the one that grants swiftness. Swiftness can be easily obtained via a Lightning field (5) and a blast finisher (Earth 2, Arcane Wave, Evasive Arcana-any attunement) Yes the Immobilize cure is useful, but that could be worked into a water spell, where it belongs, or a utility, like Mist Form (which already cures immobilize anyhow) or Armor of Earth. Replace it with some form of damaging lightning spell, a powerful bolt from the heavens, instant damage, small radius AoE. Sounds deliciously perfect, if you ask me.

Edit: Better yet, work that into a trait – Attuning to Air cures crippled, chilled, and immobilize.

Edit 2: Also, another limiting factor of Staff is that the Blasting Staff trait requires at least 20 points in Arcane; another tree I would not normally spec into for a staff build were it not for that ONE trait. Could be moved; I’d be happy if it were moved to the 10-point slot. Wasting 20 points in Arcane is costly for that one trait, and the 3-4 seconds off my Attunement recharge doesn’t help me much anyhow.

Otiz, I’ll feed your fat troll mouth one more time before I go to bed. For someone who likes WvW, Staff is definitely not crap. For someone who likes to run dungeons, Staff is definitely not crap. And if it’s sPvP you’re concerned about, I would direct you to this video of Super Squad vs. Team Paradigm. The PoV is of a Staff Ele. They win by the way. So I’m gonna go ahead and say definitely not crap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUjW6m7_qvY
And before you say the video is too old, here is his build. You can still trait the same way. There have been no significant changes since then, except perhaps the increased cooldowns on Arcane Blast and Wave, which he does not use.
http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.1.7.0.0.0.27.0.0.0.2.9.11.17.24.1.6.8.0.0.0.18.0.0.33.0.0.48.46.0.64.65.68.0.10.10.20.30

Good job Munchkin on researching, compiling, and presenting this data. Hopefully Anet takes this into consideration.

I wish Staff could be played that well in offensive playstyle instead of support only. =(

Personally, I think the 15 second cooldown is fine. We have four things to swap to rather than two, and we swap for different reasons to many other classes.

I question why the staff is pure damage and the sceptre is condition damage. That appears to be an arbitrary decision you have made yourself. To be precise:
Staff: 2 Burn, 2 Bleed
Sceptre: 2 Burn, 1 Bleed
Admittedly, the Sceptre has only three spells per attunement, but we should also consider:
Staff: 5 attack spells (not including auto-attacks)
Sceptre: 3 attack spells (again, cooldowns only)
In both cases, almost every attack spell has a condition attached to it. Clearly Fire causing Burn and Earth causing Bleed was intended as a class mechanic, not a weapon-specific one.

I agree 100% that certain spells take way too long to animate. I agree 100% that the traits are poorly designed, but check out the other classes and you will soon see that it is not much better anywhere else. Besides, many other classes also only get 20% cooldown bonus with nothing else, and need multiple if they want to get them for all weapons they use, and likely do not have enough trait points for it.

I would also suggest that the auto-attacks need a buff. We have a lot of cooldowns to use, but most of them are utility spells and situational. As such, we need useful auto-attacks as much as any other class. Especially Sceptre/Air, where the other two spells are clearly designed to be used while channelling the auto-attack.

I also felt kind of let down at Air Magic’s relative weakness. Personally, I love the S/D skillbar for Air, and the Staff bar’s not bad either. Maybe if the whirlwind type skills (slot 4 for both Staff and Focus) counted as whirl finishers I’d find the utility more interesting, but for now I tend to use Air attune just as a fight opener with the 4-5 dagger combo.

I haven’t played any other class for very long but I don’t find I have too much trouble on my elementalist. The squishiness really shines through when I accidentally aggro too many mobs at once, but I’ve managed to hit 80 and have 90% map completion without ever running into a serious wall. I’ve struggled sometimes, but I generally attribute it to sloppy playstyle rather than Ele being particularly underpowered.

I guess I generally agree with the OP’s points, but I’m not sure if this works from a solid balance perspective because I can’t really compare to other classes.

The way I understand it, the class’s underwhelming performance really shines (or fails to shine, rather) in sPVP. I did come across a build I enjoy quite a bit, as its very effective and can 1v1 most classes fairly easily. It uses D/D, and is an odd amalgamation of traits that I initally thought to be a fool’s errand, but actually manages to deliver fairly consistently.

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.1.1.0.13.0.0.0.0.0.3.9.11.10.24.2.2.2.0.0.0.21.24.0.0.0.0.48.50.0.65.69.0.0.25.0.25.20

This is the build I use now, and the daggers I use twin Sigils of Superior Air for the extra lightning damage. Coupled with the Runes of the Air, you end up with a LOT of incidental damage procced by critting or getting hit, and the heavy water spec gives you some extra padding in your Vitality as well as some decent regen and heals by switching to water attunement. The cantrips all grant you regen and vigor, and using Lightning Flash to chase someone when they move outside of Churning Earth works very well. You also have a lot of mobility with RTL to get out of fights if the kittehs (HAH! Beat you to it, filter) get ugly. Try using Magnetic Grasp to jump into a fight instead of using RTL; although they both work interchangeably, RTL does move you farther and doesn’t require a target, making it equally useful for a quick getaway. Just some helpful advice.

That being said, I still find Elementalist underwhelming at best. This build works, but still requires far more precision and timing to execute than the average H. E. Artseeker musters when they spam their favorite key. It is, however, very gratifying to get kills with, especially knowing how underpowered it is.

One last time: Do not make the mistake I did and underestimate Burning Speed (Fire skill, either 2 or 3) when it crits, it crits very hard and sets you up for a painful Flame Grab follow up.

All skills in Staff need its damage increased by atleast 50%, and as OP says, the animation timers needs a serious reduce.
Even using eveyrhintg you have, changing attunements to use all skills in you have available, you have to do it with 4 times the effort of any other class, and still do less damage.

Even Meteor Shower needs some changing, most of the time you dont hit anything becouse of the meteors having to hit your target.

When rangers barrage hits about the same damage as meteor shower, their ST long range shot hits for twice the damage and with basicly no cd and rapid fire hits for same damage as your fireball but 5 times as fast, its kinda borked. All that at longer range then any other ele skill.

Metoer Shower has such an insane long activation animation its almost impossible to use at siege defending, you get gunned down by rangers before you even manage to cast the skill.

Munchkin, you are wrong in 1 point- Staff condition damage is the only thing that saves this weapon :P Both Flame Burst and Eruption are the skills without which I would be dead twice as often in PvE.

About the “Badly located” things I would point other skills:
-Staff: Gust = Pushes away only 1 enemy, which often makes it no worth taking (it pushes 1 enemy away from others while staff is also all about AoE.)
-Staff: Stoning. What it changes to me that I weakened my opponent if I am supposed to stay on long distance? Weakness would be better in daggers.

And I kinda agree about Fire Shield. In fact about all shields- all besides the Magnetic one are useless :<

Afer all I myself consider Ele lacking in condition applying. For example blinding and chilling. It would very much increase their survivability

I have 5 evenly leveled characters and with even gear (25 crafted sets). Those are Warrior, Elementalist, Engineer, Guardian and Mesmer.

Comparing those 5 I can say that:
Warrior is easy and fun
Guardian is easy but boring for soloing (high damage weapon is GS and it has boring 4-2-3 combo)
Engineer is fun and versatile, but tougher to play
Mesmer and Elementalist are an exercise in frustration:
Mesmer – because if there are unplanned adds you’re boned
Elementalist takes forever to kill anything and cannot take a hit at all.

And a disclaimer to L2P crowd: I know what tools to use per class and when, I switch attunements, utilities and weapons based on situation to what benefits most. Yes, I dodge properly too.

I just don’t want to have to fight a regular mob like it is an epic survival battle. There are Champions and bosses for that.

Seraskus.6810:

Munchkin, you are wrong in 1 point- Staff condition damage is the only thing that saves this weapon :P Both Flame Burst and Eruption are the skills without which I would be dead twice as often in PvE.

About the “Badly located” things I would point other skills:
-Staff: Gust = Pushes away only 1 enemy, which often makes it no worth taking (it pushes 1 enemy away from others while staff is also all about AoE.)
-Staff: Stoning. What it changes to me that I weakened my opponent if I am supposed to stay on long distance? Weakness would be better in daggers.

And I kinda agree about Fire Shield. In fact about all shields- all besides the Magnetic one are useless :<

Afer all I myself consider Ele lacking in condition applying. For example blinding and chilling. It would very much increase their survivability

Frost Shield is the greatest armor aside from Magnetic and Chaos. Try dropping your Earth 2 skill (Eruption) and then your Water 4 skill and standing near the Eruption when in combat.

Also, casting any earth projectiles (#1 and #5) through your Water 4 skill will cause Chilled to the target. The only way we can cast Blindness though is via Sigil of Air and Air 2 (Lightning Surge) also note Lightning Surge has much longer range than it advertises.

A good tactic for PVE is to cast the Ice field at your feet, so you’re standing on the opposite side of it from the mobs you’re engaging. Toss a few Earth autoattacks through it to apply Chilled and Weakness to make their ranged attacks miss more, then switch attunements to whatever you like. Any mobs moving into the Ice field who weren’t already chilled from the projectiles will become chilled, thus buying you more time before you need to move. Also, Unstable Ground is alot more useful in PVE than PVP.

Great info thanks!

Earth: Earth has Eruption, which is another one of the slow animating skills. God is this thing slow.

Which is actually kind of why it’s fantastic. You might not have noticed, but it’s actually a blast finisher. Its slow animation makes it perfect for starting out in that attunement or just hopping to earth for its animation time and then switching to any of the other three attunements to lay down whatever elemental field you want to use the blast finisher on.

As you mention staff does provide some very good support and using eruption in this way you can add either 3 stacks of AoE might (or 4 if you have points in arcane), AoE healing, AoE Frost Armor or AoE swiftness as the situation calls for it. This is also why removing any type of fire field from staff’s flame attunement isn’t the best way to go about things.

Also flame burst is a pretty long duration AoE burn. I’m not sure what’s supposed to be bad about that.

Amazing post. I play elementalist as my main and necro, warrior, ranger, guardian as my alts, and I see the problem very clearly (spvp/tourny POV). I run dagger/dagger usually 1600 toughness 20k life 2100 power, mist form, armor of earth, elemental elite, 30 points in water for condition removal, and I still feel weaker than any other class I play on. Trying to run a condition build on an ele? Forget about it. I might switch to dagger/focus and get beserkers amulet and see how that works out.

I think, even without committing 20 points to Arcane, you pretty much need to put in at least 10 points and trait for the boons on attunement. I do feel like whenever I try to fiddle with traits in PvP, I always feel like I’m getting cramped trait wise, a feeling I don’t have on my Engineer, Warrior, Mesmer or Guardian PvP alts. I’m not sure if that just means Elementalists are less focused (and have more flex), or if I’m just doing it wrong, but a lot of the things listed here (especially cast times) really play into my problems (even though I do enjoy the class.)

/Agree with most of the above

The main problems with elementalist are at the end-game, PVE. The class does generally fine and the issues it has usually don’t bother the players, as long as they’re below level 70. Above it however, the class starts to lose ground against the others at an insane rate. I try to make categories to make it easier to comprehend. Also please note that I do not think the game is unplayable with elementalist, but I do think it takes a lot more effort and an experienced player to achieve the same effectiveness that many other professions have by default, regardless of build and player skill.

Survivability
The elementalist is the only light armored class with around 10,8k base hp. Generally you are very very squishy, and do not have more means of survival than the other classes. Staying at light armor wearers and scholars for comparison:
Necromancers are usually surrounded with pets, and even without them they usually have a bit more toughness and closely the double amount of HP than you do.
Mesmers have around 15k base HP, many defensive skills, distortion, disables and illusions at their disposal.
Guardians have as low HP as us elementalists as far as I know, however they have a lot more healing, aegis, many options for ‘protection’ and wear heavy armor.

Opposed to the above, as an ele you’re quite soft. Arcane Shield and Armor of Earth (and the Traits granting them) could temporarily help you and grant you a relatively nice amount of survivability… as long as they last, but both are easy to counter. You can run and dodge around too, but everyone else can do that just like you, so I’m not counting it in.
You can also have pets, but unlike Necro and Ranger, you can’t have your pet out for an unlimited time. Even Mesmers are better at this, even though their illusions die with their targets, they can always re-summon them and have them around. With elementalist, if your elemental dies, you are the tank for a long CD.

In conventional PVE situations you can manage, you can survive with just moving and dodging around… but when it comes to End-Game, you get to Orr. Risens are thrown at you by legions and they generally move a lot faster than you. Because of this you can only avoid their attacks for a very limited amount of time. Of course you can sacrifice your damage, and start running around like a crazy kid, only stopping every-now-and-then for a quick attack, but hey… other classes aren’t forced to do that.

In instances your squishiness is the worst curse ever. No matter how much necro minions, earth elementals, guardians and warriors are you surrounded with, the AI is mean, evil. All the mobs will just run after the squishiest team member: you. Even if you didn’t do as much as looking at them, they will generally chase you.
Furthermore, you die horribly from any AoE, DoT and stuff like that which others just survive without problems, simply because they have 1.5 times of your HP at the least.

If nothing else, at least our base HP should be imroved to the average 15k.

Damage
There are three main problems with the damage of an elementalist, which are the following:
Unlike most other professions, many of your skills require your target to stand completely still to do any decent harm. (e.g. Fire Scepter against risen is a joke) This works well at first, but not on Orr with the speedy Risen all over the place. Same applies to instances, except if you have a Necro face-tanking everything with it’s pet armada.

I’ve played ele in BWE1 and It was a lot more useful back then. Now, if you want to do some damage, you’re forced to use Fire. Water doesn’t do any noticeable dps, Air is generally too weak as well… Only Earth has a chance to match the dps of fire, as long as you’re talking about single-target dps… But when you need AoE (and you usually need it), Fire is the plain winner again. I do understand that the attunements other than Fire have certain utility abilities, boons and conditions, or healing on them, but using them just does not worth it. Every decent elementalist I have seen this far during playing the game always used Fire, and only ever switched to the other attunements for a very short time, bursting everything on cooldown then switching back to fire as soon as possible. The damage on the other attuenements was nerfed ways too much.

Compared to some other professions, the base damage of elementalist skills is low. Engineer and Warrior packs a lot heavyer punch, Ranger does not but attacks a lot faster than you, and the list goes on… I’ve even seen Guardians out-dps me!?
ArenaNet, you made elementalist the squishiest of them all, which leads to it being a glass cannon. But currently it is only glass, without the cannon. I’ve literally seen a Warrior alone kill mobs faster than me and a fellow elementalist together ever could.
I’m not saying it’s useless, I can kill stuff, but would you mind explaining me why a guy wearing heavy armor, having twice the amount of base HP and using a class as complex as a wooden stick is allowed to kill a mob by using 2 skills at maximum? (and then he had bad luck in crit rolls).
You could say that if I combo my skills this way, or place that AoE before using something, etc. I could do the same amount of damage, but then I spent a good 5 seconds preparing for it, while other guy killed the sorry mob in 2secs without any clever tricks. Why can’t I, who plays the glass cannon?

Back to the low base damage, just a quick example: As you know, when you link a skill on to chat, the tooltip of the skill will show you the damage you would do with it if you had it, using your Power as the base.
Because of my build I usually have a minimum of 6-7 stacks of Might boons applied to me, with it I have over 2,4k Power and I also have +48% critical damage multiplier. With all this, the base damage of Fireball, Lava Font, Lightning Surge or any other high-damaging staff skill is still below or around 1000. Fireball does 2-2,5K criticals.
Having these stat’s I’ve asked a warrior to link Hundred Blades for me and I couldn’t believe my eyes… It had over 4,4k base damage (non-critical) with my stats, and even it’s final blow damage was higher than anything my Fire could do…

People usually say that: “ok it’s high damaging, but you aren’t supposed to stand before it”. Well hello, this is no excuse, Lava Font, Dragon’s Tooth and other, similarily “high-damaging” skills of the elementalist affecting a releatively small area can as easily be avoided as Hundred Blades… Even easier, because you see well ahead where the AoE will be, however these elementalist skills do the quarter of the damage the warrior has.

How on earth is this balanced?

Traits
Elementalist does not benefit as much from Traits as other classes do because our traits are not generally stronger, however they do have a lot more constraints. Every one of our passive traits (except Arcane) and many of our active Traits only ever have an effect if we are attuned to, or are attuning to a certain elements. Other classes aren’t so limited, they can put points in whatever trait line they want, and they are not forced to use a certain weapon or skill-set to benefit from those Traits.

The Traits of elementalist should be completely reworked to give us the same amount of flexibility. Passive Traits should give effects which we always benefit from, and we should also have some traits affecting our elementals.

Weapon Choices
While leveling you can use any weapon you like and you’ll be fine – if you ask me I used Scepter / Dagger becaused it had ways more damage than any other weapon, but closing to lvl80 areas, Instances and WvW you are more and more forced to use a Staff.

Because of the squishiness of elementalist you really really need the 1200 range for any world event and instance coming your way. For solo fighting the other weapons would still be viable options, however roaming around Orr and other high level areas, the ‘hearts’ are gone. Instead, you have a crazy amount of events literally jumping at you, which require you to have a long range or die. The problem is, that we do not have weapon switching, and because of this you either have to run away out of combat to be able to switch from your bags (silly), or – being prepared for everything – stick to the staff.
In instances it’s not even a question, there are so many boss fights requiring you to have a long range that it’s not worth going there with anything but a staff.

I do know that we can switch attunements instead of weapons, the problem is that every attunement of a given weapon is essentially the same. Fire has more damage, Earth may bleed, Water may heal, etc. But, using a dagger they’re all melee skills, using a staff they’re all slow firing, long range skills, and the list goes on.
It’s a serious problem for the elementalist that the concept of their skills is determined by their weapon instead of their attunement.

If I want to fight with a dagger – because god why on earth shouldn’t I? – then I should have at least one attunement which has range, instead of being all of them melee. As elementalists can’t switch weapons in combat, they can very easily get into situations when they just cannot attack, even if they have 20 skills at their disposal instead of the usual 10. We have more, but a lot less differing skills.

A good example is my first time in Ascalonian Catacombs: I went with daggers, and when we reached the room with flame spitting traps all around the walls, I literally couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t attack them because all of my skills were melee and/or not projectile based, and was also stuck in combat, not having an option to switch for a ranged weapon. There go my four attunements, all being the same useless as the other.
This is what forces elementalists to stick to staves, that it is the only weapon which never fails you. The problem is, that with it we have the least possible weapon and skill options, however the statistics suggest the opposite.

General
Many people suggest condition damage gear, but I have to disagree here. It is good for leveling, I actually used it, but for the Staff it fails. Staff has a lot less means for condition damage than the other weapons… to be more specific the only condition it can efectively apply is burning. The problem with buring is however, that every second class can burn it’s target. Burning stacks in duration, not in intensity. In every non-solo fight, the burning we apply is useless because if at least 2-3 people hit something it will just keep burning for eternity and you will not have your own X stacks of burning on the target the way bleeding works. Instead your burns will always get overwritten by the other people and the target will just burn once. (for a long time that’s for sure, but most of that damage is not specifically yours)
If any of you bothered to read this far, I’ve chosen my end-game gear to be mostly “Valkyrie”, because ele needs Power, but also needs the Vitality to counter it’s squishiness. I’ve tried earth-based tank builds, pure dps builds, Berserker, Rampager and even Knight gear, and all that stuff, but none of them really worked well. I either did no damage, or died in an instant. Valkyrie and Arcane seems to be the best choice, even if for many reasons it also is bad. The negative you have to counter on it the most is the lack of precision.

I don’t know if I’m right about it, but I think that elementalist is as bad as it is mainly because it was only balanced for sPVP. However the majority of players do not, or only ocassionally play sPVP, so the class shouldn’t get balanced based only on that.
It might be balanced in sPVP, but it sure as hell is not in PVE. The most underpowered class at the moment, even worse as the commonly flamed Mesmer because that is at least fun to play, whereas the elementalist has all it’s options and strengths nerfed to oblivion.

Sorry for the long post ,had to let off the steam, I’m very mad at ele as it currently is…

Munchkin,

You are a genius! I love your ideas and I believe the changes you requested for Staff will make it a much more “FUN” weapon set, and I find as well the higher level I get the further I need to be from mobs, I leveled a lot with D/D but mobs are hitting around 2k, and I only have 10k hp. I strongly believe the class needs some changes as it does feel inferior to other classes.

@Ortiz- I dont believe in having ONE build to be viable should be an option, you can be my guest and play that one cookie build to your hearts content.

I still standby my opinion that what elementalist really needs is direct, non condition damage that SCALES, and is somewhere other than the fiery greatsword autoattack. The scaling is key; if an ability is direct damage, and scales well with power, then the power/precision/critdamage trifecta can multiplicitively interact, making glass cannons usefully powerful. (See heartseeker thief for a ridiculous example, or a ranged AD in LoL more generally) Condition damage scales linearly in damage, so condition damage is strictly lower in a glass cannon build as a consequence.

Look at our skills, and you will realize that water generally has low damage but good heals and control and earth has tons of bleeds and movement controls. Both of these are the basis of the only viable builds currently.

Fire has an identity crisis, where a ton of its potential direct damage is shunted to burning, which conflicts with any multilayer situation, since burns don’t stack. It at least still fits the bill for aoe generally, like it is supposed to.

Air, our “high damage” atunement, and the only one with no condition damage (or healing) is flatly the lowest damage we have outside water.
Lightning whip is melee, single target, and deals less than 2/3 the damage of dragon’s claw. (impale does slightly less, but then gets over DOUBLE the total damage accounting for the bleed!)
Chain lightning deals 2/3 the damage of fireball, even through it can hit the exact same number of targets
Scepter is even sadder, with ICE SHARD dealing literally double the damage of arc lightning, even ignoring the fact that arc lightning has a duration of 3 seconds! What about lightning strike? Even including it in the dps numbers puts ice shards ahead!

We can’t ignore the rest of the skills though, but right…… air gets the least number of damaging skills! 2 on staff, 2 on scepter/focus, and 3 on dagger/dagger. Fire gets 5, 4, and 5, water 2, 4, 3, and earth 4, 4, and 5. That’s right, air atunement depends on autoatacks the most, and it gets the weakest ones barring those with other effects like healing or cripple.

So THERE is our problem, our HIGH DIRECT DAMAGE atunement deals the worst damage out of the four……

Only read the OP. Agree with most of the things you brought up for sure, even if I still feel the elementalist is viable/strong if played correctly, just not enough so for how much harder it is to play well.

About the D/D chain you mention however, I’d suggest you try playing around some more with combofields even as D/D as that will make you use some more skills, stack might extremely high (I can get ~16stacks or so quite easily, 9 of which are AOE) and thus gives you a more fluid gameplay. RTL > Updraft > Burning Speed > Arcane Wave > Ring of Fire > Magnetic Grasp (Gives Fire Aura) > Earthquake (rather long CD but when available) > Churning Earth is one example.

Munchkin.4137:

As a Staff Ele, what was really missing from the toolkit was a long range single target damaging skill. It’s sad, but aside from auto-attacks there are none whatsoever. Staff needs one badly, so that’s what I would put in place of Flame Burst. I would make it an attack very similar to Fire auto-attack (Fireball). It would be single target, explode in a small AOE on impact, have a 5-8 second cooldown, and be about 3 times as powerful as Fireball.

This. I find it amusing that squish caster with staff at 1200 range (compared to 1500 from eng/ranger/war) has to settle for mere auto-attack for single target damage

3 times seems a lot of damage, I would change it to 1500 range for double

I thought I was the only one who thought this was extremely strange, lack of single target dps at long range.

I understand rangers getting 1500 with long bow due to it’s inherit nature of not doing max damage <1000 range but eng and war? not elem? wtf Anet

I would love to see all of these changes implemented and I agree 100%.

Good job Munchkin!

Your posts is right on the spot. My Warrior alt is leveling nicely and I am actually having fun! To see a heavy armored, highest HP char mow through mobs it is actually disgusting when I think of my Elementalist @ weakest HP with lame damage. Warrior’s weapons and moves actually does both really good single and AE dmg!

Us Eles? No weapon swap. Want to AE after using scepter/focus? zzz, Dragon’s Tooth takes forever to hit.

Now I love my Elementalist … perhaps only in WvW, PvE dungeons and events farming. Beyond that, I hate soloing at the L80 zones because it is too much work to kill a regular mob.

See i dont find any issue with the staff, which i have played from 1-80 with when you team the staffs combo fields with arcane skills that gives you so many options for combos with burst. That along with the amount of control you get with the slows and stuns gives you so many options. I wouldnt change a thing about the staff

I agree with what you said in general, but I disagree on some of the skills. Namely for staff.
For staff, In general, I would alter the blasting staff trait to also include a bump in range to 1500. It’s odd that we as the supposed long ranged damager does not have the longest range. Also I would bump damage to warrior levels. In my opinion, the squishiest class should have the same damage as the melee on the tankiest class, considering Arena Net’s opinion on melee should have better damage than range because as it is a higher risk. There should be a natural continuum for damage with health and support with armor

For specific skills, Fire is pretty good mechanics wise, it just needs that boost. I do love your lava mine idea though. Meteor does need alot of help though. It should work alot more like other large aoe skills, Having a huge area being damaged/healed/ what have you, not a huge area where something might happen. I would keep the animation, maybe speeding up a little more to be in line with this, but have the entire area being damaged every second. Or keep it the way it is, but increase the aoe of each meteor and add knockdown.

For air, 3 should be a wave that otherwise works in the same manner. Air 4 should be brought down to 20 seconds, to be in line with the warrior warhorn skill that does basically the same thing with the same duration of swiftness. Air 5 should act on targets within the ring, not just as they cross it. Air 2 either needs to scrap the cast time, or increase its damage by ungodly amounts.

Water is actually in a really good place in my opinion.

Earth: 1 should bleed or cripple(1-2 bleeds, 3rd attack cripples) instead of weakness. Eruption is fine, though I like the knockback idea. The big thing though is that I would make it instant after cast time, not having it just bubble for a few seconds. Earth 4 needs to cripple longer and maybe also be a earth combo field (even though those don’t quite exist) and maybe add a bleed.

Munchkin.4137

1. Long animation abilities.
There are some Ele abilities that would be good but have animations that are WAY too long. I would recommend cutting the animation time in half at least. If damage needs to be adjusted to account for the faster animations, so be it. The abilities are Dragon’s Tooth (Scepter), Shatterstone (Scepter), Ice Spike (Staff), Eruption (Staff), Churning Earth (OH Dagger), and Comet (Focus).

From a PVE perspective only:

This is a huge issue, and severely impacts damage potential. It’s extremely punishing for so many key abilities to be so dependent on an enemy staying in one place for a long period of time, and renders a number of them either useless or just bad enough to ignore far too often. I honestly think this one issue you point out being fixed would erase a lot of the complaints people have about the class.

Eruption is one of my favorite abilities we have, but takes so long to get off that it’s nearly impossible to actually -use- once combat has started (it works as an opener since it doesn’t draw aggro until it fires). It has a cast time, and a 4-second fire for a damage over time effect… that’s a ridiculous amount of time to build up to the potential damage output of the ability. The only fights where it’d be extremely useful would be on stationary boss fights, but then you run into stacking bleed issues with other classes and its use becomes questionable.

It’s probably the harshest of the bunch, but it makes the same point about all of them. Even monsters in PVE don’t stand still long enough for these abilities to be effective on a regular basis.

The entire staff line has a lot of that problem, though. Fire is hampered by a slow firing auto-attack that doesn’t hit extremely hard. Lava Font requires something to stand on it for its full duration to be really useful. The #3 ability becomes useless entirely if you manage burn from something else, but it’s almost mandatory to keep that up in the first place to do any real damage. Earth is very similar to Fire, only with different (and still very good) defensive skills; slow auto attack for low damage, and Eruption. Air is useless against a single target damage-wise, but good for control.

The abilities either need to be faster to make up for the lower damage, or need to hit much harder to make up for being difficult to land. As it is now, they’re both slow and don’t hit all that hard. Our survivability is, I think, something people who chose elementalist expected; they just need the damage to make that fragility worthwhile.

Churning Earth is the only one I would disagree with, because while it is slow to fire it’s also the only ability that actually has a massive impact when you get the spell off. It’s hard to cast it but it tends to end fights with a successful cast, which is how an ability like that should be.

Also, another point:

Ride the Lightning:
Updraft:
Burning Speed:
Ring of Fire:
Arcane Wave:
Arcane Blast:
Fire Grab:

This combo, which is considered our only direct damage combo (in fact I have seen it independently arise in a few communities), is actually proof that eles want (or even need!) more direct damage that scales off power/precision/critdamage.

If you notice, every skill there except ring of fire is a high cooldown, but also HIGH SCALING direct damage ability. Ring of fire is really only there for the might and to get burning to increase the SCALING of fire grab.

Every other class has reliable, low cooldown combos that are direct damage. Eles, instead, get a 30+second combo that uses two atunements and TWO UTILITY SLOTS, because we have no other direct damage that scales at all.

I love my ele, and am still low-level enough that I’m unable to see these issues. But Munchkin/OP —- awesome posts. I really think you and others have some great ideas and would definitely like seeing the class have more power to bring it in line with the competition.

Why should warriors do so much more damage at little risk? Seems really backward, they should be the ones with long fights, not the glass not-cannons eles are.

Please, ArenaNet, consider some positive changes for eles, and don’t make sPvP the focus of balance, those folks will never be pleased and you’ll burn cash to just get more complaints.

I’m kinda counter on your opinion on the staff. The only attunement that actually feels right on staff to me is Fire. But granted I’d like to see every attunement viable as a ‘home’ attunement. Fire is the only one with semi low cds that allow for interesting gameplay. The other staff abilities suffer from horrendous cds. It’d be nice if 2 and 3 were in the 10-15s cd range or under of course, and 4-5 were the big ticket items of the attunement, Meteor Swarm and Healing Rain fit that great.

But again I feel a big issue is that for Ele our weapons are only 1/4 of a weapon, since we have attunements. Our weapon skills in an attunement should be changed to be able to just sit in one attune, rather than /needing/ everything to play, making using all your spells an option rather than the only route.

Very nice post OP. Yes attunments are a huge issue imo they should be no cool down what so ever since they are that important. I am still using a staff. I have just started to switch between earth and fire earth for bleed and cripple then finish off in fire. Obviously it doesn’t work with ambushes. Currently i have 30 points in fire and 30 into air but I’m having second thoughts about it. I wanted to try a fire earth build and maybe ten in arcane or ten in air because of bolt to the heart or movement speed which i need for running away. Above all else we really need a dmg buff. I see these undead ravagers and they cast bolts for 1k dmg and that’s how we should be. Granted they are cheap with a fast cast speed. The risen eagles and the shadow imps are worse by far.

Don’t chance Eruption on Staff bro, please.

I love it’s current timing and it’s great for combo finishers.

Pls bro

:[

Unsteady Ground definitely needs improving, the cripple lasts way too short amount of time to be useful. Frozen Ground is 10 times more useful: being a combo field, bigger area causing chill to last longer, -66% skill recharge and more effective slow. Having 4 attunements doesn’t justify having no weapon swapping, or that attunement swapping has longer cooldown than other classes weapon swapping, when there are skills that are just useless…

And why is scepter’s air auto-attack weaker than water’s, even on stage 3? Because they have Staff’s lightning Surge separated into two different skills, AND making Blinding Flash single-target only (Staff causes AoE blind) and Lightning Strike deal 100 less damage? What… Again, waste of a weapon skill slot. No, Dust Devil doesn’t make up for the waste of a weapon skill slot.
Scepter’s Air skill 1 is ridiculous (also, bugged) when compared to Earth, which works as a combo finisher, bleeds and deals more base damage.
And as has been mentioned many times, Dragon’s Tooth is way too easy to dodge… Er, I mean, too easy to walk away from.

I agree with a lot of the OP’s points but one thing I disagree on is Eruption; its a great skill. Deals plenty of damage and can be used as a timed blast finisher. Flame burst on the other hand is yet again one of those useless skills that do not justify having no weapon swap or long attunement swap cd. It’s only good for the burn if you have traited to deal 5% more damage to burning foes, but even then… Deals 1/3 of the damage of Eruption and has half the radius, while doesn’t work as a combo finisher.

Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread yet is the use of Lightning Flash with Churning Earth. So I’ll explain; you can start casting Churning Earth, then use Lightning Flash to teleport, without interrupting the cast. This might negate the long casting time on it, since you can start casting it from afar.