Guild Wars 2

At a first glance fresh air look like a very bad trait so can someone explain me just how the fact of having my air atunement recharged on crit allow me to perform damage better? Totally clueless as to how ele could even benefit from it.

It synergises really well with eletric discharge, allowing you to rotate through all your burst and doing some extra damage by switching in and out of air attunement. It also ensures you’re not stuck in an undesired attunement after your burst. For instance, if you blow all your fire burst+ air+earth cc, you’ll only have water up, and with fresh air you can rotate in air again for more damage pressure. In pve, using fresh air is a good way to maintain a good rotation as well, as you can use some air damaging abilities/ damage modifier for conjures between your might stacking rotations and still have it for, say, your lightning hammer.

Fresh Air is most commonly used with S/D and S/F builds, in fact I don’t think I’ve heard of any other builds that use it besides scepter.

Arguably, without Fresh Air, scepter is fairly useless aside from a once in a lifetime opportunity to burst somebody from 100-0 (which will often miss).

The main and most reliable burst from the scepter comes from the air attunement. Ideally, you want that burst to be accessible to you as much as possible, which is why you take Fresh Air.

For example, you burst somebody down with Teleport ---- > Phoenix ----> Air attunement ----> Lightning strike. The person still lives. You now switch to earth and auto attack. One of the auto attacks crit allowing you to instantly go into air again and burst the target. Fresh Air allows you to get off consecutive bursts basically, and somewhat alleviates what we call "being stuck in attunements". And it allows you to do these bursts repeatedly with little recharge time.

It isn’t a very good trait for most other builds because other weapons don’t have the burst skills as the scepter has on such a low cooldown, and most other builds benefit from going for more survivability or some odd blinding ashes build.

In PVE the fresh air trait is used in D/F builds. You need it to be able to change to air and keep your dps up with lighting whip in between skill rotations. Without this trait D/F would never be viable, while right now it’s used a lot in high level content where you need the extra survivability/utility of your focus skills.
There is also a s/f or s/d LH build that uses the trait for extra dps with electric discharge while you attument swap during the lh chain.

Its uses in pvp have already been covered by the above poster.

FA keeps you fresh like Crest

…how can one look at that trait and think “wow, I cant think of how this could be useful at all”. It allows to you access one of, if not the best attunements you have when you crit which is like anytime. As a lifelong scepter player, this was the best and most intuitive trait anet ever made. At first glance, this trait will make you wet.