Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if Arenanet is going to overhaul the elementalist as so many of us hope, but if they are I could suggest a couple of stopgap solutions for the meantime. I don’t know if a pick or taking all would be better, but again just some suggestions.

(1) Rearrange the abilities
Right now you kinda can go with certain weapons knowing they will work a certain way. Rod is basically supposed to be your bigger harder hitting spells, rod your medium hitting but still ranged spells, and dagger the close range spells. Off hand items like the dagger should be about movement and the focus defensive abilites and our equivalent to a shield. But the end result is a few spells that if done slightly differently would increase our odds a little.

Example, why is unsteady ground and shockwave on the staff and earthquake and churning earth on the dagger offhand? If you reversed the placement of these abilities and make unsteady an automatic 5 meters in front of the PC it would fit more with the way the weapons appear to be presented to us.

(2) Change Signet of Restoration
Ok, a signet that heals us as we cast spells? Sounded great on paper, but then I found out that this signet does nothing in the way of increasing our survivability. If you buffed how much it healed by say 150% then this would go a long way to making the class more accessible. For those who would worry about this making the elementalist unkillable, remember that this would not affect our health pools which are very much smaller compared to the current heavy hitters. But it would go a long way to making us harder to kill then simply 2-3 hits from a warrior who isn’t even trying.

Alternatively, increasing another minor heal from say condition damage could also be viable. This means the more condition damage we put out the more healing we receive. In theory this would scale with the amount of danger we face, so bigger mobs pulled means more healing which in the end keeps our odds at about the same.

(3) Weapon swaps and/or reduced cooldowns
Yes this would allow access to 40 abilities, but having a 10 second cooldown should reduce most if not any abuse this could bring. Not to mention that this wouldn’t increase our damage just put variety in how we do it. Alternatively or included would be a reduction of the attunment cooldown from 15 to 10. For a class that seems to favor constant switching of it’s attunments the current 15 second cooldown is extremely prohibitive of that.

(4)Trait redone
Right now there is no real trait line to invest in outside of 20 points into arcana. That is for no other reason then to reduce the 15 second attunment cool down to closer to 10 seconds, much more agreeable. putting 10 into every trait line just to unlock a 20% reduction in cool down just for that attunment seems a waste. Much more agreeable and useful would be a 20% chance to gain the boon of that element for any spell cast.

This means that 10 points in earth would give the trait option to have 20% chance to gain toughness with any spell in any attunment. Water gives regeneration, air swiftness, and fire might. This means that players have more options in how to make their characters play to their style while at the same time with a minor investment make much more survivable characters.

I have no idea if these ideas are actually any good, but this is the easiest stopgap buffs I could think of that wouldn’t require to much time on the development staff if they should choose to do something like this. If not then oh well, still plan to play the class.

Signet of Restoration got nerfed (by about 40% if I recall to the base heal portion) solely because it was too powerful, despite the long cooldown, with a 30/20/20 Earth/Water/Arcana build you were quite literally unkillable in 1v1 and most 1v2 situations if you had around 500-600 healing power. (I know this due to extensive sPvPing the beta weekends because there was no PvE content to do at my level). They decreased the cooldown (40 seconds was lol and even 32 was was pushing not feasible w/ the trait), decreased the base healing amount, and increased the passive healing on spellcast to compensate. However, without Written in Stone, the passive is about as useful as a glass cannon build in Explorable mode Arah, seeing as you will be using the heal quite often.

Weapon swapping would be so ridiculously overpowered on an Ele I don’t even want to think about it, but alas, the skill cap would be somewhere near Mars if that happened, and very few people would have the capacity to deal with such overload. However, I do agree that the 15 second base attunement switch was a huge miscalculation on ANet’s part, even if the cooldowns on swapping are relatively the same (+- one second) thanks to the 2% recharge rate change as opposed to 1%.

The oversight here is the fact that a minimum 20 points are required in the Arcana trait line; not only because you need to shorter attunement recharge, but because all of the passive weapon wielding bonuses are from the 20 point major trait slot (which is about all of the useful traits from that tier). Let’s face it, if you’re using a staff without Staff Blaster you should probably have your brain operated on. Now why is this a problem? Because we’re basically forced to sacrifice 200-300 of a main stat in every viable build for any type of gameplay (be it PvE, WvW, or sPvP). Having light armor combined with the lowest (technically tied for lowest) base HP pool in the game spells mayhem for trying to get a nice balanced set of stats. Couple that with the fact the majority of our spells have long wind-ups and are very easy to dodge and highly telegraphed (lolDragon’sTooth) and you get a rather grim situation.

Everything else I neglected to comment on I believe to be just what you said, quick stopgap fixes that won’t really do any good in the long run. Better to have lengthy waits for optimal tuning/balance than to have a pendulum effect because a quick fix resulted in some oversight which completely changed the meta of the game.