Guild Wars 2

I was going to comment in another thread, but there were so many that I decided to start my own discussion.

It seems to me more and more that Anet is pushing towards a staff support Ele. Especially in light of these new grandmaster traits. After all, the problems with Ele before is that they couldn’t ever be a balance between dps and bunker. It seems like they would either bunker and kill no one and nothing, or dps a crap ton and die by a sneeze. Now, Staff seems to be the solution. Whether that looks like camping in earth for a bit and applying bleeds and CC, or camping in fire and blinding everyone, or camping in water and healing everyone, or obviously a mix of these three.

Is anyone else thinking the same? Feel free to discuss below. (and to tell me how dumb I am for thinking this.)

i don’t see why people fee the need to ever “camp an attunement.” I’ll just refer to this post since he said it better anyway.

mcarswell.3768:

i don’t see why people fee the need to ever “camp an attunement.” I’ll just refer to this post since he said it better anyway.

I understand. Certainly camping for too long is never a good idea, but in light of these new traits I think more time might possibly be spent in a particular attunement over others. For example, if you’re trying to cast and a theif is after you. If you have the new earth grandmaster trait, life would be much easier. Granted, you can’t stay in earth forever, but it might be more beneficial to stay in it a bit longer than usual and even to cycle through the other elements quicker than usual in order to get back to earth. Does that make sense?

there’s no such thing as staying in an attunement.. playing around with attunements provides functions that players really shouldn’t avoid.. there’s also some incentive to maybe spend more time in a certain attunement than others, depending on your build.. the problem with elementalist is we have 3 and 1/2 really really bad traitlines.. new grandmasters is an opportunity to buff professions across the board.. fixing elementalist always takes a backseat to gimmick..

elementalist is a souvenir profession.. i don’t know of any reasonable human being who plays this game and hasn’t given up playing hop-scotch in the elementalist traits window. so, you really have to appreciate running a staff elementalist with mediocre capabilities stemming from poor stats and a combination of very weak traits or, convince yourself that cookie cutters and pigeonholes aren’t so bad

cheshirefox.7026:

there’s no such thing as staying in an attunement.. playing around with attunements provides functions that players really shouldn’t avoid.. there’s also some incentive to maybe spend more time in a certain attunement than others, depending on your build.. the problem with elementalist is we have 3 and 1/2 really really bad traitlines.. new grandmasters is an opportunity to buff professions across the board.. fixing elementalist always takes a backseat to gimmick..

elementalist is a souvenir profession.. i don’t know of any reasonable human being who plays this game and hasn’t given up playing hop-scotch in the elementalist traits window. so, you really have to appreciate running a staff elementalist with mediocre capabilities stemming from poor stats and a combination of very weak traits or, convince yourself that cookie cutters and pigeonholes aren’t so bad

Well. You seem to be pretty convinced that Ele’s completely and totally suck so I guess I won’t be able to change your mind much. I’ll just say that it’s my current opinion that a good Ele’ can friggin kick butt. I do believe they are slightly underpowered in the current meta, but not near as much as you seem to imply.

I am, so far, wholly disappointed with the new traits and how they will relate to staff. Besides making staff ele a pure healbot—I don’t see much viability for them in the future given these traits.

As it stands with what we know—I think the only viable staff ele build is going to be 0/0/30/30/10 with pure +healing. This just basically makes us a bunker.

But there are still unannounced details about the balance coming out, so who knows.

I really am amazed by all the doomsaying that comes up every time anything changes in an MMO. Especially with ANet’s style of making minor changes across many professions (with a few notable exceptions).

My point is this: there are so many factors to consider about how the live game will change that it is incredibly hard (read: kitten -near impossible) to wrap our heads around without actually playing it.

I look at it as an opportunity to figure out the strongest combinations of traits, gear, runes, and sigils all over again! This is one aspect of the Elementalist playstyle that I absolutely love — and now I get to do it again!

Then again maybe I’m just another glass-is-half-full kinda guy.

/shrug

i believe the only problem with the Staff ele at this point is mediocre/just plain bad 1 attacks. You could talk about speeding them up, or increasing targeting, but really, i think replacing a couple of them in way would be much better. They would fit the staff play-style much better if they were really AoE blasts(not finishers, I saw that somewhere else, and that would be OP).

Imagine F1 and W1 were self-cast-only AoEs, good damage, and faster casting (1/2-3/4 sec). Remember GW1 Flame Burst, Flame Djinn, Inferno, Frozen Burst, etc. Then think about combat with Staff Ele currently.

When things get really heavy anyway, a player does end up in close combat situations, especially near the close of combat. You obviously don’t finish stabbing someone from range 1200! This makes that high risk/high reward mechanic available in any Staff ele fight, for the fighter or the fightee.

Ele vs War/thief/guards/melee fighters as example: We all know zerk War/thief can smash a zerk ele to death quickly, literally in 1.5-2 seconds sometimes. This would not prevent them from doing this, but it would ensure they time their attacks to some degree (They still have higher health and toughness naturally) but let the ele fight back or potentially win an encounter(or at least land a hit during it). Fights with these characters will be melee/dodge/ reflex battles to the death, with eles ready for close but still trying to keep their distance really. = Fun for everyone
Ele vs. Ranged characters; ranger, bow thieves, bow war etc = battles of positioning and careful/patient timing of trap bursts, with Ele trying to close distance sometimes. = Fun for everyone.
Eles Vs. Necros/MMs: Glorious fun for all. High risk, High Reward.
Eles Vs. Mesmers – I can’t say actually. I seem to have a videogame weakness/blindspot for shadowclone attack. =( I kick butt in LoL all the time until Shaco shows up. =( I kill invisible thieves all the time, but can never figure out where the real player is =(. Someone else genius this part up.

Sooooooo self cast AoE F and W attacks FTW!