Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, Sensotix here and I am bringing you a video showing you what I think about the State of the Elementalist!

Link to the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86qjjTGJYFM

Feel free to join the discussion and tell me your opinion in the comment section here or on Youtube
Also make sure to leave a like and subscribe to my Channel to join Sensotix’ Army

Link to the channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialSensotix

Discussion:

• Don’t insult anybody
• Stay objective and try to also offer nice feedback to the devs
• Tell me which Elementalist playstyle you like most (Off/Balanced/Deff)
• Tell me what you would change about the Elementalist
• Tell me what other class you think should be nerfed in order to make Ele viable

(Edit):
Please make sure to list your thoughts like i listed the discussion rules so that the devs can have a better overview

Thanks! We aren’t too far from being viable, but need a little help with sustain and damage to actually be able to compete.

The following things destroy eles:
-Stuns
-Immobilize
-General condis
-Burst if we don’t respond fast enough

I personally feel that the following things are holding us back:
- Instant burst is too strong. Tone down the arcanes and either make them very-short CD finishers, or automatically give them the capabilities of elemental surge and put a new trait in there.
- Sustained damage capability is pretty bad outside of lightning whip. More AA damage is a great start
-Easier access to sustain (healing/cleanse), which is supposed to be our primary means of sustainability. The nerfs to ele healing could be rolled back a bit, maybe 25% less effective in pvp as opposed to 50%.
-Make attunement CD shorter and half the effectiveness of intelligence (so arcane isn’t nearly mandatory)
-Shorter CD on utilities of make them able to support team-mates (cleansing fire could be aoe cleanse, given its CD and lack of stun-break).
-RtL needs to be reverted back somewhat. We no longer sustain very much, and X/D can’t get away from almost anybody to boot. If they are stuck on a dual CD, it should be unblockable, although that is still sad. Maybe 15/30 would be reasonable.
-A stun-break back on a skill that is useful. Currently on arcane shield is worth taking.
-Staff: air 3 needs to be fixed to hit something, literally anything, just about ever. Right now, it only hits stationary targets.

Other classes holding us back:
-Warrior with healing signet: even d/d sustained damage barely out-damages their regular regen. This skill pretty-much hard-counters ele unless they play magic-thief (S/D). It is good that the stun-sigil is getting fixed, but pin down is still killer. 6 bleed stacks + a 3s immob is crazy on a skill that has a poor tell and is very hard to dodge most of the time. I would also decrease the radius of their fire-field.
-S/D thief destroys any reasonable ranged S/X or Staff build as it destroys the concept of positioning. There is no such thing as “positioning” in my mind when they have an instant port at will. The port needs a shorter range and to obey LOS/distance b/c it currently seems further than 600 range.
-Necros have always been a near hard-counter to eles. Reduction of their spam will help, which is good for the game anyway.
-Engie bomb spam should be reduced, not increased like it is being. Idk what they are thinking there.

i totally agree with everything you said
i wish anet could have a look at this thread

@ Blackbeard

-I believe that the burst should be left as it is on eles, the scepter air burst is the only thing on ele which doesn’t require military positioning, alignments of all planets and a blessing from the god of luck…all the same time.
All other professions have most of their skills ( 80%+) on auto-locking/auto aiming , with shorter CD , I don’t see why it’s a problem for eles to have something similar.
Mesmers and thieves don’t need complicated ground targeting and near fingers dislocation combos to deal any dmg….why my ele must be forced into this piano session?
- About healing, there are no huge problems for me, it’s still better than having trolls running around with cleric amulet, we want to keep FOTM players away from this profession and not calling them back, give the healing back to eles and most of these regen warrior trolls will jump wagon..once again ..no ty

- I agree with the rest

Professions holding us back
- A d/d ele is not supposed to outshine a warrior in mele range, you can avoid to be killed while using a d/d set, it should not be an easy fight..but definitely a ranged set must remain the best option for eles when facing high regen warriors ( I use s/f burst to deal with them )
-S/D thieves, yeah I agree , their teleporting should be reduced by decreasing the time allowed to use shadow step by 7-8s
-Engy bomb require the ele to go s/f or s/d..not reason for you to keep playing d/d

Things that I would change:
- And the single most important one of all increase our base health. Make it at least that of a Mesmer. With us having no combat escape, light armor, and the lowest health, it gives us an instant disadvantage to everyone.

- For our class suppost to be swapping attunement all the time the base cd of 15 per attunement is just crazy. It need to be reduce by something like 50%, doing this would also help to not force us to put 20+ into arcane.

- CD on skills, the ones that are 45+ need to be reduced, (looking at earths cd’s ;_;) I would say 5-10 secs. A 75 sec cd on mist form, when it doesn’t protect for condition dmg (which is the current meta, so everyone is running it) it just plan crazy.

- Your skills really need to have better target hitting. Staff air 3 never hits, Fire grab and Updraft missed 70% of the time, then there lightning flash that for some reason half the time doesn’t teleport you even though you can see the lighting strike where you where aiming.

- Cast time/travel time one some skills need to be reduced, ie all of staff 1. enough said.

- A slight dmg increase would be nice, but I would wait to see after the rest of this list was addressed.

- Not putting anything about nerfing another class, as I believe fixing yours is more important then nerfing someone else.

On a side not please anet stop with the conjure weapon thing, I know every few ele’e that use or WANT to use them.

Let me say that I don’t think the elementalist, or any, balancing should be done based on profession X can do Y for Z so much better than us! What I mean to say is, if your idea of balancing one class is to nerf another then it’s already pretty full of fail.

With that in mind, I’d like to say that any minor changes to Ele at this point (which are the only changes Anet is interested in making) is pointless. It may increase viability, sure, but it won’t mean that the elementalist is a well-designed profession.

In short, the Ele basically needs a total redesign. Well, maybe not total, but basically the only thing we need to keep is the concept Anet wants to design the class around because right now, they don’t have one and the Ele’s mechanics actively contradict each other.

Traits need to be reworked to benefit every attunement.

Cooldowns need to be revisited. I don’t care if we have twice as many weapon skills as everyone else, having multiple 40+ second cooldowns is stupid. And then you have skills like fire shield…

Attunement swapping cooldowns need to be adjusted. Frankly, I’d rather there be a base 9 second attunement swap with perhaps a minor trait somewhere that reduces it to 5 seconds. This goes hand in hand with the cooldown restructuring I mentioned above because right now, we rely on combinations of long cooldown skills to be useful within specific attunements. Once those skills are on cooldown, Ele’s are out of options. I think perhaps Anet has fooled themselves into thinking it works out so fluidly when it’s just nerf on top of nerf.

Then there’s the other matter of our pathetic auto attacks, low HP without any active or damage mitigation skills that don’t have close to or over a minute cooldown, and so forth.

The way certain skills work. Skills that miss a ridiculous amount of time or are stupid easy to dodge. Skills that have a really long cast time for not much pay off (Air Staff 2, looking at you), things of that nature.

With all of the above, new weapon options.

I know it’s in the far future, probably over a year away, but they need to be discussed. The Ele needs better, more focused options. The weapons now are currently too ‘generalist’ so what we need are more focused weapons—weapons that when you look at, you know they’re a condition weapon or a power weapon or long-ranged weapon.

On a side note, Anet is so enamored with conjure weapons because they’re easier to balance, being only 5 skills instead of 8-20. Other classes can also use them, which I imagine is their key draw to their balancing since it’s pretty obvious that Anet is unable or unwilling to touch the Elementalist besides petty nerfs and UI/tooltip adjusting.

OP if you can make extremely clear we are talking about sPvP because people have the tendency to assume PvE is relevant to mokitten of the ele’s problems.

Now, I would like to see the following:

Reduce attunement recharge: the current sykittenem seemkitteno be punising us for our class mechanics and that is not right. Arenanet wanted ukitteno have the right tools at the right time, how can we achieve that if we are locked out of tools for 15 secs.

If they want to buff of support on water cool, but they shouldn’t forget that they are 3 other attunementkittenhey should return to the original premise of making fire AoE damage and air high single target damage. And earth into a defensive based attunement and not simply a defensive attunement in trait points.

Reevaluate the CD, after cakitten. Jon talk about reducing the cd right before release and I think they completely forgot about the elementalikitten.

Either improve our hp or give us defensive skillkittenhat actually jukittenify our low hp. Right now our defensive skills are on an extremely high CD, yet the thief has a lot of built in defensive mechanics from kittenealth to evades on their skills. Currently, Auras don’t punish enough for attacking the ele, it should give the player a reason to avoid hitting aura ele, right now it doesn’t. Personally, adding confusing to auras will make sense.

I think the ele also need a weapon that complimentkittenhe scepter. Right now the current choices contradictkittenhe scepter or are jukitten bad. /D forces you to be in melee range to use the skills it offers very little at range and focus jukitten sucks.

conjures suck. Either make it a kit or don’t bother. Using conjusres in PvP takes away all the benefit of having 20 skills and replacekittenhem with bad low damage skillkittenhey should reward using them inkittenead of punishing the summoner.

Devs, may Kormir open your eyes.

cheshirefox.7026:

Lina.9640:

Let me say that I don’t think the elementalist, or any, balancing should be done based on profession X can do Y for Z so much better than us! What I mean to say is, if your idea of balancing one class is to nerf another then it’s already pretty full of fail.

i’d argue it’s fail to play chess against an apposing team whos pieces all consist of knights and queens

That’s doesn’t seem fair at all, who thought something like that was a brilliant idea?

would think towards revamping them and their class ability mostly becouse i think the currrent setup of them is too blend and doesnt add a good flavor or feel to them:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Attunement-and-Traits-Revamp-idea/first#post2825766
something like that

i think the devs should have a look at this thread here since i can see some very nice ideas!

Keep boon duration in arcana, change the base attunement rate to 12 seconds have a minor or major trait that reduces it even further(see sleight of hand for theives) . Some other benefit by going into the arcana tree. My friend suggested that -% damage reduction the more you go into the tree with a max of 10%

I’m a big proponent of modifying each tree to include an individual cooldown reduction OR a fresh air type trait.

I’m also a proponent for changing previous nerfs like bountiful power back. Also RTL should be normalized. There are so few conditional skills in the game. Of all the classes to have them ele probably shouldn’t.

We need higher base stats across the board. Not just health, but others too.

We need ether renewal changed so that it has a gradual cooldown based on when it was interrupted. I often get one pulse off, am interrupted and am stuck without any heals minus water for 15 seconds. It should be 3 second cooldown if interrupted at 1 pulse, so on and so forth.

I think our attunement cooldowns should be lowered.

Lastly our utilities are on far too long of recharges for the benefits they give us. I am not even delving into it past armor of earth and arcane shield. Two very useful skills made useless by minute+ cooldowns. That’s unacceptable. We need normal utilities like every class. Look at how short thief cooldowns are and how much survivability they provide. A similar skill to these is shadow refuge. Which awards far more on a far shorter cooldown.

However, OP, all of this is typed in vein as Devs so infrequently look at our forums. We have had countless threads like this. Even a Dev Q&A where they could respond yes or no, and we got nothing. It’s tiring. I hate to say it but I’m discouraged.

The changes I wrote above would be useful for spvp and WvW. I’m a WvW player though just for reference. The biggest necessity is allowing classes to choose their accessories, amor pieces and jewels in spvp. That would help elementalist a ton. And it would allow for greater build diversity and competition. They used to have those options in spvp, then removed them on release. They should be put back. It’s why I no longer touch spvp with a 10-foot-pole

What about adding a cooldown reduction similar to Arcana to each individual element that doesn’t stack with Arcana itself?

So if you had 20pts in Air, you’d get 20% cooldown reduction on Air Attunement, 30pts in Earth and 10pts in Arcana, get -30% on Earth and -10% on the rest, etc.

It’s not the answer to all, but it’s a relatively simple change and unlikely to introduce any new gamebreaking exploits.

ANet check out this thread !

I think ele is for the most part a fairly well balanced and fun to play class. If you’re good you can win, if you’re bad you’ll get stomped. That’s how it should be. The real problem are other classes.
What I would change in general:
- tone down spammable skills and autohits (took that idea from another thread)
- tone down heal-efficiency of 6-spells and increase the heals on weapon-skills or utilities (would make “support-builds” not only viable but also important for a team to have – more intelligent team-play, less spamming)
- by reducing the overall dmg and overall heal we could slow down the very fast pace of the game a bit and make it less “spammy”
- make most “big hitters” and CCs on weapon-skills high risk – high reward. Meaning that they should have a high CD and be difficult to land (like many of eles’ spells)

Ele-specific changes:
- In order to create build-variety I’d like to see
+ attunement-CD reduced by about 3-4 seconds (or as an alternative create traits like fresh air in each attunement or implement a system described by ThiBash)
+ blasting staff moved to the 10P-tier
+ some good defensive traits in fire and air
+ less traits that only focus on one attunement. This works well for other classes since traits that boost one weapon can be active 100% of the time, whilst traits boosting an attunement are only active about 25% of the time, which makes them fairly useless. Such a change would also make PvE-Rotations more appealing and would boost eles’ damage while we’re supporting the group with our support-spells in low-dmg attunements. Maybe traits should focus more on what weapon you’re using or which conditions are on your enemy (like +5% dmg on burning foes which I think is a well balanced trait or +20% dmg on vulnerable foes – something like that).
- Conjures should work like engis’ kits, otherweise they’ll never be viable in PvP
- revert RTL-changes (at least make it 30s standard or fix the issue with blocked/dodged/etc. attacks)
- increase base health
- maybe lower AoE-damage of certain skills, while increasing single-target-damage
- adjust some cooldowns of certain utilities (armor of earth)

Conjures should work like engis kits is an awesome idea!

Comparing to other classes can be a good thing, because some things are just plain ridiculous when you look at them. Things such as the difference between the standard Stability-granting skills for Eles and, say… Guardians. Eles have Armour of Earth while Guardians have Stand Your Ground . So let’s take a look at these two, shall we? AoE gives 6 secs of Stability and 6 secs of Protection to the user, and also acts as a stunbreak, pretty useful. It’s got a 90 sec cooldown, but a stunbreak and Stability has to be worth it, right?

Let’s see what the Guardian one looks like, it’s only 5 secs of Stability, and 5 secs of Retaliation instead of Protection, alright, so not gonna mitigate damage, instead sending it back. Oh, but this is a Shout, so it affects up to 4 other people in range as well. It also acts as a stunbreak too, so this is REALLY powerful. Surely it’s got a really high cooldown to go along with this, right? It’s got a 30 sec cooldown, 1/3 of what an Ele’s Stability skill is.

Well, maybe the Guardian one is just a bit too strong, let’s see what other Stability skills are for other professions. Warrior has Balanced Stance which gives Stability and Swiftness to the user for 8 secs. Pretty good, he can avoid knockdown and could potentially use it to flee, so how long does it take to recharge? 40 secs, that’s a little under half the Ele’s AoE CD.

Mesmers and Necros are our fellow casters, surely they have similar Stability skills as us, right? Ah, nope, Mesmer’s Mantra of Concentration is a Mantra, so it does require charging, but they can fire it off twice and give themselves 2 secs of Stability and stunbreak each time. How long is the recharge? 25 secs. Necros have Well of Power which is a really nice Well if enemies are spamming conditions on you, it also stunbreaks as well as pulsing 1 sec of Stability each second while inside it. This is great, surely you can’t use a skill like THIS very often? Nope, 50 sec CD, little OVER half the CD of AoE on the little Ele.

So there’s 4 classes who just have a better Stability skill than the Ele, and every single one of them has better ways to take the damage if they DO end up getting stunned anyway. If an Ele gets stunned, they’re basically dead unless they pop a stunbreak, and even then with an Ele being so fragile, they’re going to get smacked hard again. And since this is on a utility skill, they don’t even have any justification on the grounds of “but you get 20 weapon skills!”. It’s pretty ridiculous, frankly, as well as pretty kitten sad.

That mantra is really terrible, but mesmer has other good stun breaks such as blink and decoy. The cool down on aoe is indeed over the top. It is also absurd that lighting flash does not break stun.

True, I was mainly looking at skills that are stunbreak + Stability. I’d far prefer to just use Blink to get the hell away from my enemy than use the Mantra.

well its really hard to compare the stunbreaks from different classes tho

True, harder to compare, but it also brings around the fact that others with shorter stun break cd, also have ranged/melee weapon swap, stealth, invis`, pets, clones & some even have insane heals (some instant) compared to the ele, so these things are yet another set of reasons why the cd on ele stun breaks is insane.

yes i think they should give ele a viable disengage which breaks stuns but nerf the damage an ele does overall so there can be balanced eles again…same goes with necros imo since they do waaay to much dmg but the main issue is still that they cant really disengage

Tonight, my first log in for around a week (really can`t be kitten d any more) & duelling in EB jp both enemy servers.

It got to one warrior that could virtually perma stun, over & over.
Armour of earth on its cd is next to kitten all use because they can just stun again 7-15 seconds later.
Switched CF for arcane shield but again, even two stun breaks don`t help against immobs so I`m losing out either way.

Combine that with the insane damage warriors can output because they`re not forced into using 30+ points just to survive a cold…. ;p
Also higher hp (by a hell of a lot), armour etc.

I did vaguely glance at the conjures, but they`re useless (& still we be post patch) because of the crappy mechanic of placing one down for strangers to loot before you can even use your own ;p
Ah, combined also with stunned/immob`d, you`re not going to even be able to use them & lose more important utils just for gimmicks.

As luck would have it, the game just kept crashing after an hour+ of duels.
Guess the pc heard about me uninstalling gw2 soon lol

Attunement Recharge:
Well other classes have 10 sec of CD when changing weapons ingame.
Basically Attunements are the counterpart on Elementalists, yet watch what they are.
They have a 16 sec Standard-Time.
In order to get the 10s every other class has you need to go 30 Arcane (which I currently do, cause i like the extra cleansing water from evasive arcana etc)
Right now we HAVE to invest 30 points in one traitline just to match the other classes.

So I would suggest, either reduce base-recharge-rate to 13s or maybe even 12s and keep the current 1s per 5 in arcance rate so you can get to 6s or 7s with full arcane.
Or maybe giving fresh air a 7s CD and let it apply on all attunements not only air.

OR let Arcane do what it says, -2% per point, resulting in -60% CD
=> 0.4*16s=6.4s which is obviously unequal 10s.

Stunbreaks:
What I’d like to see buffed again is Mist Form:
My Suggestions:
-Reduce Base CD by 15s, from 75s to 60s
-give immunity to conditions as well / or nerf overall conditions builds
-make it Rootbreak as well (at least in PvE), there are almost no mobs anymore that only stun, most of them root

OR: give us back slots 6-10 during Mist Form

Mobility:
Give back some mobility, I’m not asking for our old RTL to come back, but it needs to be buffed a little again.
I mean afaik you doubled the CD from 20s to 40s, and reduced the range by half, thats quatering the Mobility of that Spell.

In terms of mobility Elementalist is not really bad, but considering him to be the squishiest class (unless you completely bunker) he could at least have the possibility to flee when he has full life.
Well its a flaw in my eyes as well that this PvP system basically relies that kitten mobility as it does as well but thats not the topic here.
_______________________________________________________________
Just to some things recently happened to me in PvP:
1) A warrior caught me after capturing a point when I had full life, as Arcana Waterbunker i usually dont stand a chance against most warriors when it comes to 1on1 so I decided to make a run for it.
So the Warrior was on my back, I was in earth attunement (D/D), so i knocked him down, went to air attunement used RTL, used lightning flash, attuned to water doing frost field for the slow.
guess what the very moment I made the frost field the Warrior already caught up to me (and I ran all the time, i didnt stop to cast the skills), smashed me down and stomped me, dont ask me how he caught up but he did.

2.) On the PvP map with the Orb
I want to fast capture the point on our side of the map, so I used the shortcut through the bases Sidedoor using everything granting me swiftness shortly before the door opened, using RTL and using lightning flash the best way i could in that moment in order to make me faster.
So I start taking the Point and at 80% an enemy Warrior already was with me on the Point and guess what … right he stomped me, so basically going almost across the entire map hes not even 10s slower than an elementalist having only half the way pulling out every last inch of mobility his class has to offer?
There is something terribly wrong, but there it maybe just the map design.

3) I take a point, a Condition Necro comes and a VERY BAD one.
So we fight I use attuning to water for removing conditions Dagger 5 skill same as well as well as evasive arcana for cleansing wave, the Necro didnt even bother using dodge roll or even leaving my “strong attacks”, so i downed him (yes I downed a necro, once in a lifetime….) applying some dmg to him in his downed state, but then due to the conditions I was downed as well (couldnt remove em anymore) , finishing him in my downed state rallying again.
But that was ALMOST a DRAW, with the difference that I used a lot of the Elementalists capabilites while the Necro used almost nothing.

Problem there is almost every Condition Damage Build is stomping an Elementalist right now in PvP if your not 30/30/0/0/10 or something with full zerker and can outdamage their conditions, but if you do that you get stomped by every burst build,
having at least 20 in Arcane being mandatory doesnt make that better.

Just reverse all the nerfs that have happened to ele since beta. Given all the buffs other classes have gotten, we’ll STILL be underpowered if that happened. But atleast we won’t be 100% useless. We also need a buff in the overall damage of all our skills, by about 60% atleast. Eles damage is pitiful compared to other classes. I have to press 57 buttons on my ele to do half the damage I can on my warrior by just sitting back and pressing 1 button, and that’s IF I sacrifice all defensive capabilities of the ele to do so while a tanky spec of any other class can greatly outdamage any of our damage specs. That just isn’t right.

Also aside from that, we need some changes to traitlines.
Arcane no longer gives reduction in attunement cooldown. Base attunement swap is 9 sec. Arcane now provides boon duration and aura duration. Auras will become our new mechanic this way. Add a trait in arcane that gives auras on attunement swap based on what attunement you swap to. Evasive arcana needs to be changed. It should be more offense based. Remove cleansing wave from it and add frozen ground. Move the cleansing wave to the water traitline where it belongs and combine it with stop, drop, and roll.

Basically my problem comes from; DPS staff with as little as possible into arcane, and survavility without cantrips.

Right now all the defensive spells are selfish, on too long CD (armor of earth has 90 secs CD, selfish, yet guardians give a protection/regen and a stability/retaliation shout teamwide, 24secs CD, of course they are going to take a guard…). We have no way to dispense damage with staff, the weapon only works vs golems and PvE dumb AI.

Overall a couple of fixes could be;

-Make staff more responsive, fire #2 has to be instant like necros mark, a lot more spells have to hit harder, less winding time and less CD, MANY of them.

-Attunements need to be cut, 16 secs is insane, most good spells on staff eles kitten nal have 30-40 secs CD, whereas a warrior will have a 3-4 secs AoE stun on a 8-10 seconds CD….
-Fire traits have no use other than the power stat
-Blasting staf, needs to be integrated into the weapon. That or give us a -20% CD and 10% extra damage, not give us how the weapon should be like to begin with…

the problem is not that the ele is weak the problem is that most of the other classes are too strong imo

Nikkinella.8254:

Just reverse all the nerfs that have happened to ele since beta. Given all the buffs other classes have gotten, we’ll STILL be underpowered if that happened. But atleast we won’t be 100% useless. We also need a buff in the overall damage of all our skills, by about 60% atleast. Eles damage is pitiful compared to other classes. I have to press 57 buttons on my ele to do half the damage I can on my warrior by just sitting back and pressing 1 button, and that’s IF I sacrifice all defensive capabilities of the ele to do so while a tanky spec of any other class can greatly outdamage any of our damage specs. That just isn’t right.

Also aside from that, we need some changes to traitlines.
Arcane no longer gives reduction in attunement cooldown. Base attunement swap is 9 sec. Arcane now provides boon duration and aura duration. Auras will become our new mechanic this way. Add a trait in arcane that gives auras on attunement swap based on what attunement you swap to. Evasive arcana needs to be changed. It should be more offense based. Remove cleansing wave from it and add frozen ground. Move the cleansing wave to the water traitline where it belongs and combine it with stop, drop, and roll.

but thats what anet always does..they buff weak classes..i think they should just nerf classes that are too strong

Even if they nerfed all the other classes, ele would STILL be the weakest. It needs significant buffs and has needed them since beta. It was always the weakest class, it was just unpredictable. But now everyone is used to all of the eles tricks so it’s weakness has just been made more apparent. All it was ever good for was harassing people and then pulling away before it got killed. It had mobility and healing and that’s it. Now it doesn’t even have that. The small niche it had in this game is gone. Play as all the other classes, then play as ele. It doesn’t even feel like it belongs in the same game because it’s so below other classes. Despite being the weakest class, it’s still the most fun to play as, which is why i’d want to see it buffed to actually be on par with all the others.

It’s quite funny almost everything that they took away from us they gave to warriors. As if a high dps survivable stunning machine is acceptable and a mediocre dps, low health squishy harasser is not…

yes warrior is just a joke how it is atm…

/dream mode on

I would Reduce armor of earth to 60s.

Lightning flash should be again a stunbreakers.

Rtl should be 1500 range and 20sec cd in combat and out combat but ONLY in PVE to travel in the maps.
Rtl in pvp should removes cripple and immobilize from you and should daze/cripple when it hits a foe.

Reduce arcane shield to 40-50s.

reduce mist form to 60 and at the end of the mist form you should regenerate all of your endurance or when the mist form finishs it will burn enemy if i’m in fire,chill or heal if i’m in water,blind in air and cripple in earth.

When an arcane skill is used it should apply a condition to a foe,for example if i use arcane wave/blast and i’m in fire it should apply burning for 2-3 secs to foes,in air it should gives blind/vulnerability/daze,in water it should heals allies or chill enemy foes and in earth should cripple/bleed enemy foes.

I would replace Zephir’s Speed with Renewing stamina.

I would improve Arcane Precision, 7,5% chance is too low,just increase to 20-25%.

Scepter’s water skill 2 “shatterstone” is useless in pvp,it should be like a necro’s mark with a larger aoe with a little bit of longer cd.

Scepter’s fire skill 1 “Flamestrike” should have a lower casting time like ¾ and not 1¼ and unblockable skill factor.

In Earth i would put a trait that gives to me invulnerability(focus 5 earth) when i go below of 25%hp, 60sec cd.

Fire Grab and Churning Earth when hit foes will rip 2-3 boons on them.

I would reduce attunement recharge rate to 12/14s or less.

I would improve focus’s skills.

I would improve staff’s skills.

I would improve conjurer weapons.

I would improve signets.

Vote me.

/dream mode off

What kills an ele?
-warrior,i played one hammer/shotbow- gs/mace-shield- gs/mace-shield,is it a joke…?4k everywhere.
-necro : condispam,fear chain is too hard to deal if you have less than 1/2 of warrior’s life.
-thief s/d : too many evades.
-some kinds of conditions spammer engis.
-retaliation. i’m with a s/d build and it hurts a lot

eles need only a little bit of adjustements to became viable in tpvp.

ps : i play ele since i bought this game 1 year ago,and i’ll play this class because i love it.

It’s funny reading at some of the skills comparison, we are suppose to be a support class, but our aura need to be traited to actually offer group support, while other classes get short CD support and and group support.

Makes you wonder the process Arenanet goes through for their so called balancing.

well but the problem if the improve staff there will be so much aoe dmg going on :/
i love staff tho

Personal opinion I feel that as far as D/D elementalist goes it is still a good spec. It has to be traited a bit more defensively now IMO.

I would love to see a some way to possibly make eles rotation a bit less predictable like it is in a fresh air build but open for all attunements. I think that would go along way in helping elementalist out.

Fix lingering attunement to make it work for all attunements.

Merge 1 with fire with Flame Barrier keep as a adept minor. Bump chance to 30% base. Replace Flame barrier with another trait.

Zephyr’s speed bump to 25% merge with One with air. Replace 1 with air with something else.

Stone Flesh – I think is fine as is for adept minor maybe bump to 120 toughness at level 80. At least just make it work with lingering attunements.

Soothng mist – Fine as is

Arcane Fury – Fine as is

well the disengage is quite a problem tho imo

Sensotix.4106:

well the disengage is quite a problem tho imo

I agree

I think the CD on RTL at 40 untraited is a bit to long now. It could use a CD reduction I know the Devs don’t want Ele best at particularly anything so I think a medium for both sides would be 25 base duration 15 on successful hit if they want to go that route. So traited you would get a 20 sec RTL base and 12 sec on successful hit.

The change I know was made because they wanted to give it some risk/reward play. The way RTL is though you have to attempt at point blanks range to try to guarantee the reduced CD because it is easily telegraphed move outside of melee range. So you don’t really want to use it unless you are disengaging or you have backup and are chasing. The damage doesn’t justify using it as an attack unless you are power/crit/crit dmg heavy if you aren’t built like that then you are better off lightning whipping.

It has its pro’s and cons vs other moves of this type of other professions since it isn’t affected by movement impairment skills and is instant cast.

Even when I wasnt running tanky I still benefit more from saving it for disengage than using it to attack.

oZii.2864:

Even when I wasnt running tanky I still benefit more from saving it for disengage than using it to attack.

Pretty much. It’s damage coefficient is only 1.0, which is less than Lightning Whip’s 1.4. They should at least give it a blind or vulnerability or just revert the CD.

zencow.3651:

oZii.2864:

Even when I wasnt running tanky I still benefit more from saving it for disengage than using it to attack.

Pretty much. It’s damage coefficient is only 1.0, which is less than Lightning Whip’s 1.4. They should at least give it a blind or vulnerability or just revert the CD.

Hmm the blind suggestion isn’t to bad at all and fits. Like the blinding flash you get from EA with a bit bigger radius can be explained thematically by the fact that there is a slight flash or explosion of light at the end of the skill. Still AOE if the blind affects any target in that radius then you get the reduced cooldown. 300 radius seems fair since its a tracking skill I would prefer 600 for my own selfish reasons though.

I like your suggestion of blind alot though.

Did some research on the arcane tree,
probably my time is in vain because someone probably already did this already,
the time attunement recharge rate is reduced should be 60%. at 30 Arcane.

If that was true you had 6.4

But if you skill 30 Arcane you get around 8.5 to 9.5 seconds (cant exactly judge that timer)

Which leads me to the following assumption:

Attunements Rechargement is NOT calculated like This:

Rechargetime = BaseRecharge * (1 – n*2%)

With n=30 => 6.4 Seconds

But RATHER:

Rechargetime = BaseRecharge * (0.98)^n

With n=30 => 8.7 or 8.8 Seconds (depends on how the game handles 8.7277……), you are at kitten percent instead of 60.

Where n is the number of spent points into the arcane tree.

Fixing this to the way the Game tells you how your arcane tree works, would for example be a good buff for attunement-swapping based builds.

I wished the devs would take 5 mins and check this thread there is really quite some work going on and all in all there are awesome and good ideas!

Duran.3196:

Did some research on the arcane tree,
probably my time is in vain because someone probably already did this already,
the time attunement recharge rate is reduced should be 60%. at 30 Arcane.

If that was true you had 6.4

But if you skill 30 Arcane you get around 8.5 to 9.5 seconds (cant exactly judge that timer)

Which leads me to the following assumption:

Attunements Rechargement is NOT calculated like This:

Rechargetime = BaseRecharge * (1 – n*2%)

With n=30 => 6.4 Seconds

But RATHER:

Rechargetime = BaseRecharge * (0.98)^n

With n=30 => 8.7 or 8.8 Seconds (depends on how the game handles 8.7277……), you are at kitten percent instead of 60.

Where n is the number of spent points into the arcane tree.

Fixing this to the way the Game tells you how your arcane tree works, would for example be a good buff for attunement-swapping based builds.

It’s “increased attunement recharge rate” not “reduced attunement recharge time”.

You’re doing the math wrong….

With 30 in arcana the CD on attunement is 9.375s, here is why:

You can switch to the same attunement 4 times per minute, increased rate means that you can switch 60% (30 arcana) more times per minute (or hour or any fixed time span), so it’s 4 (times per minute) * 1.6 (60% bonus) = 6.4 times per minute and that means 60 / 6.4 = 9.375 secs attunement CD.

Is that clear?

This is a good thread sensotix and is civil. Maybe they have looked in here and not said anything but hopefully they have.

hope they will check it thanks for the feedback tho!

STRanger.5120:

You’re doing the math wrong….

So are you.

Its 16 Sec Base Rechargement time, so if you interpret it like you do its 16* 1/1.6 = 10 and not 15/1.6 which is 9.375.

Just misinterpreted the sentence^^

Rounding times first but then giving a not rounded time suggests a precission you cant hold.

Still, for the elementalist to require a full skilled trait line in order to archieve the same swap time that other classes have as base CD.
So if the Trait works correctly reducing base CD to something between 12 and 14, would be a good buff then.

Duran.3196:

Still, for the elementalist to require a full skilled trait line in order to archieve the same swap time that other classes have as base CD.

Why say that in a negative tone.
For an Ele to have the same Weapon swap between two elements yes it’s a full 30. However there are four.

ensoriki.5789:

Duran.3196:

Still, for the elementalist to require a full skilled trait line in order to archieve the same swap time that other classes have as base CD.

Why say that in a negative tone.
For an Ele to have the same Weapon swap between two elements yes it’s a full 30. However there are four.

Yes but the overall power of each attunement line is weaker than regular weapon sets.

The way Ele has been designed in this game, 20 or more arcane is required just to make the class playable. When a large proportion of the playerbase is speccing 20+ arcane just to make the class playable, reducing the attunement timer to something more reasonable is just common sense.

ensoriki.5789:

Duran.3196:

Still, for the elementalist to require a full skilled trait line in order to archieve the same swap time that other classes have as base CD.

Why say that in a negative tone.
For an Ele to have the same Weapon swap between two elements yes it’s a full 30. However there are four.

What’s the point of the equivalent of 2 extra weapon swaps when we give up health, armor, and variable range for them? Not to mention that many ele skills simply aren’t as good as those of other professions.

silvermember.8941:

It’s funny reading at some of the skills comparison, we are suppose to be a support class, but our aura need to be traited to actually offer group support, while other classes get short CD support and and group support.

Makes you wonder the process Arenanet goes through for their so called balancing.

No. We are not supposed to be a support class. All professions are supposed to be able to DPS, defend, or support as well as any other.

Heck, the elementalist profession description even mentions something about doing high damage in a single attack to make up for toughness.

Anet trying to shoe-horn elementalist into a support role is one of the reasons ele is a joke of a class.

The two aspects of the game in which elementalists even approach something like desirability are in WvW zerging and possibly DPS in dungeons. The first is pretty much solely attributed to our fields. Elementalists aren’t desired at all—it’s their fields people want. And in dungeons, the most effective build for elementalists is…to play gimmicky conjured stuff and pretend to be a warrior by abusing lightning hammer or FGS.

Elementalists were the only profession that didn’t have a showing at the recent tournaments. That should tell you what the state of the profession is in.