Guild Wars 2

Greetings, all.

My previous post on this subject wandered off the beaten path a bit. Consequently, I’d like to take this as an opportunity to provide a slightly more reserved suite of suggestions for the Elementalist — suggestions that act as slight variations on pre-established themes, or provide slightly more utility.

I’d like to reiterate that I feel the class is moving in the right direction, and I trust the developers — these are just my two cents.

Feel free to discuss and critique!

Dagger:

• Burning Speed: Evades attacks while in motion
• Ride the Lightning: Evades attacks while in motion

Scepter:

• Dragon’s Tooth: Can be manually targeted
• Ice Shards: Now has a 33% chance to Chill foes for 1 second (Note: this suggestion was inspired by Leuca’s suggestion of splitting Ice Shards into a three-skill chain; though Leuca’s solution was elegant, mine is simpler and achieves a similar result, though with a degree of randomness)
• Water Trident: Removes Burning condition on allies

Focus:

• Fire Shield (effect): Removes Bleeding condition when applied (this would effect to all instances of Fire Shield, including those acquired from combo fields); duration increased from 4 to 7 seconds; Burning duration increased from 1 to 3 seconds (I would also suggest a cooldown reduction, but I don’t overstep)
• Freezing Gust: Chill duration increased from 3 to 4 seconds

Utility:

• Signet of Water: Recharge time reduced to 25 seconds; activation time reduced from 3/4 to 1/2; passive effect also applies a bonus to healing power that scales with level
• Glyph of Storms: Ice Storm comets strike a slightly larger area; Lightning Storm strikes inflict 5 seconds of Weakness; Firestorm strikes inflict 2 seconds of Burning

In addition to the above, I have two additional quibbles with the Elementalist in its current state:

• Fire Grab is on a very long cooldown for what it does (short-range burst). I feel it could use some love, but I have no idea what to do with it. The first thing that comes to mind is a conditional method of shortening its cooldown — but it already has a conditional method of doing more damage. It could perhaps apply a condition, but what condition besides Burning is appropriate? Alternatively, it could perhaps apply a boon, but the only one that comes to mind is Vigor or Fury. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to speak up; this is an excellent place to discuss it.

An observation of replies indicates that there seems to be a degree of consensus that the following skills need significant tweaking or redesign:

• Shatterstone
• Rock Barrier and Hurl (Personal Note: currently, the rocks that comprise Rock Barrier act as charges that are consumed all at once by Hurl; I feel that it would be interesting to consume these charges for both attack AND defense, either by hurling them one at a time OR to absorb damage from incoming attacks. For example: “Rock Barrier: Each rock absorbs 33% of a single incoming attack; when a given rock absorbs an attack in this way, that rock is destroyed.” This way, it would work like Protection that only effects five attacks)
• Staff abilities (earth)
• Freezing Gust (Personal Note: I feel it’s fine as a strictly kiting ability; most Elementalist skills are underpowered by design because, for any given weapon, Elementalists have anywhere between 8 and 20 skills available at a time)

Once again, feel free to discuss and criticize!

I like your suggestions overall. Specifically, I’m fully on board with Shaterstone as a blast finisher, water trident removing burning. and improved signet of water. The rest, while they certainly would be nice, don’t seem like absolute neccessities to me.

In terms of adding chill/cripple to scepter, I do think the best place for it is on shatterstone. It would require a general redesign of the ability but would be worth it. Increase the cooldown to 8-10 seconds, double the damage, add 3 seconds of chill and reduce the vulnerability duration. This would overwrite its current purpose of vuln stacking in favor of more control, which I think most ele’s should be fine with.

As per Flame grab, a shorter cooldown would be very nice but without reinventing the wheel on it I suppose it would be nice to have it strip boons. We don’t really have a way of removing boons at all currently, that I can think of at the moment.

I like the refinements you thought of. Bleeding removal upon use of the Fire Shield appears to be a bit random though. Also, I wouldn’t quite like RTL as a leap finisher because that would mean that it would most likely stay in its current form (shortened range and long cooldown). It would never be primarily a mobility tool again.

Finally some suggestions that aren’t extremely over the top. :-)

For the most part, I like them though I’m not entirely sure if granting stability on Magnetic Aura isn’t a little too much. As far as I know, no weapon skills grant stability and MA is a decent skill already.

As for Rock Barrier, 10 seconds crippling may be a bit much. The skill’s a bit niche, but it does have a solid (pun intended) use for either Earth/Air spike, or to instantly cast 5 projectile finishers. If you can get them to launch through an Ice Field (like for example that of your elemental summon), you can get quite a powerful effect out of it. Adding cripple to that might be a bit much.

But that’s just me. Leap finishers seem fine, just gotta be careful it won’t go overboard with Aura stacking.

The RTL needs to have a normal 20 second CD, or a much smaller CD on a hit, as low as 10 seconds. Turning it in to a leap finisher wouldn’t fit it’s intended playstyle, as lighting is meant to be the ‘spam’ element.

Burning speed, turning it in to a leap finisher would be a great idea, so long as it can’t combo off it’s own field.

Dragon Tooth, yes please

Shatterstone has too low of an RC to be a blast finisher, and isn’t powerful enough to justify a longer RC. Better to make the number 1 skill a combo that finishes with shatterstone and give the scepter a new 2 skill that is an appropriate blast finisher.

Water Trident, we could think of something better for this, we already have enough condition removal, and frankly the game at large has far too many.

Rock Barrier>Hurl has multiple functionality problems not solved by mere buffs. Just using it as a barrier is boring and not very powerful, using it for hurl isn’t worth the double cast times. And to top it off it’s useless if you attune to another element.

Fire Shield, the buffs are great, I don’t think removing bleeds is necessary for previously stated reasons. Two things I might do, a lower RC more than anything, it should be the most frequently spammable aura. Or, it should keep it’s currently unnecessarily long RC and be a blast finisher.

Freezing Gust, I would actually like this to leave a frost finisher along its projectile path, as the focus really lack combo fields.

Magnetic Aura, great idea.

Signet of Water, sounds good.

Glyph of Storms, also sounds good.

But I like being able to hit people through walls or other obstructing obstacles with dragon’s tooth..

Although it would be funny to updraft an S/D thief, then dragon’s tooth on top of myself as a read to their shadow step.

My problem with some of your suggestions is that some are for skills that are plenty strong, and some don’t solve the problems the skills have in the first place.

Burning Speed and Magnetic Aura are both pretty strong; adding a leap finisher to a combo field is pointless when you have ample access to blast finishers and a leap finisher on a different element anyway. Magnetic Aura is fine the way it is; the rest of the Earth staff skills are what need improvement.

RtL needs its mobility back, not a leap finisher. Again, we already have a leap finisher in D/ and it won’t provide much.

Dragon’s tooth I’m iffy about, because its current targeting system streamlines combat quite a bit, and its damage/point control is still quite formidable. I can see how making it player controlled would be beneficial, so either or I guess would be fine.

Shatterstone doesn’t need a blast finisher; there’s too many blast finishers on s/x to begin with and it doesn’t solve the lack of damage/terrible delay for no output problem.

Eles have more than enough condition removal for Water Trident to need that change; what it needs is damage and/or some crowd control effect. In GW1 it would knock down moving targets and actually had some viable gameplay competitively at one point.

Giving Shatterstone a blast finisher doesn’t solve its damage delay/terrible dps problems.

Rock Hurl just needs a higher base damage along with an attack speed buff to Stone Shards, to provide viability for both power/condition specs while retaining the utility Rock Shield has by keeping it on if you so choose.

Fire Shield needs a much stronger effect than removing bleeds. It’s sitting on our damage element, yet provides no reliable source of damage increase. Taking a lot of direct hits to fuel its might stacking is not feasible on a low armor/low health class. It also needs an effect that is exclusive to the ele, as it’s sitting on a weapon set and be acquired more rapidly simply by chaining Magnetic Grasp through any fire field. I would advocate for it actually doing damage to foes that hit you (similar to retaliation, but irremovable like Shock Aura) on top of its current effect, and to have the recharge reduced.

Freezing Gust needs more than an extra second of chill. It does no notable damage and the chill doesn’t do anything but.. chill. It has nothing that combos off of it within the set when it could have lots of theoretical applications, such as the chill being a catalyst for Comet to stun instead of daze. This would allow for the focus to still be a defensive weapon while retaining a good amount of all-around utility for the elementalist.

I do rather like your change to Signet of Water, but skills need to be telegraphed and a 1/4 second cast time is moving away from that idea. Look at staff condi necros as an example of bad telegraphing. I would reduce its recharge however and look into changing the passive to an increase in healing power, since a condition removal every 10 seconds by itself is not providing that much when the ele has access to much more on-demand removal.

Addressing your quibbles, I’d advocate giving scepter autos a chain attack with the 3rd inflicting 1 second of chill.

Fire grab should just have a shorter CD. There’s really not sufficient reason to keep it at 50s, since it has no secondary utility and has conditional max damage to begin with. It is relatively well-telegraphed and has a clunky hitbox; I would honestly shave at least 10 seconds off, though maybe 15.

Some very, very good points so far; I’m going to edit the OP to reflect some of the suggestions here.

For the moment, I’m going to keep the Bleeding and Burning removal on the skills I specified. I’m aware that Elementalists already have plenty of condition removal, but I often feel bogged down trying to remove damage conditions AND mobility conditions at the same time; this will allow Elementalists to use Water Trident and Fire Shield to remove damaging conditions, whilst saving their more general condition removal abilities for other condition-based threats.

For those of you who are wondering why I gave Bleeding removal to Fire Shield:
1). Fire is used to cauterize wounds, thereby stopping Bleeding; this is the only fire spell besides Phoenix (which already removes conditions) that I feel could be used in this manner
2). Every single Aura besides Fire Aura has some defensive benefit; I wanted to add a defensive benefit to Fire Aura that was thematically acceptable