Guild Wars 2

Hello all.
Just wanted to post some suggestions in case devs read it for future changes/fixes to our class. (Please upvote the post if you like what you see).
Please note that these are purely suggestions and I would like honest feedback + more suggestions from the ele community
Please do not flame Anet or the elementalist class (directed at other forum flamers) as this will only be counterproductive for us to get the attention of the devs.

Suggested changes to fix the elementalist traits.

1 – CHANGE ATTUNMENTS to 12 sec base recharge and make intelligence give half the benefit of what it does now. (a better idea is to make lingering elements baseline to all eles and make the arcane traits increase the duration of lingering elements by 2% per trait point)

2 – CHANGE FIRE SHIELD/AURA to burn enemies for a longer period when hit and add some defensive component instead of gaining might. (blind enemies when it or redirect melee damage taken as some have suggested). If its a balance issue to change fire shield since it can be accessed by other classes via cross field combos, then change only the focus fire aura.

3 – TWEAK LINGERING ELEMENTS (this is the single greatest fix we can ever receive).
If this functioned properly, we can create combos such as the earth/air/fire minor traits in other atunnements and also create combos with certain attunement traits (piercing shards/air training etc) we could look at a whole new set of cross attunement builds. This should be a number ONE priority fix for our class.

Note : I recently learned that the traits not working with LA is intentional and I am suggesting this nerf to be revoked and the other traits (particularly water 4) to be balanced around this instead of a blind nerf to this trait which destroys a huge build variety.

4 – TWEAK TRAITS in air/earth lines to give more movement and toughness. (I say 20% movement and 160 toughness should be good).

Got some ideas from another thread for tweaking fire/earth 15 point traits and fire 5 point trait.

Sunspot 1– Create a flame dome around you when attuning to fire for 2sec. The dome DEFLECTS incoming projectiles. (Dome will be small and will only deflect not reflect)

Sunspot 2 – Create an explosion of flame around your target burning all enemies caught within for 3 seconds.

Flame barrier 1 – Gives a 30% chance to inflict burning on nearby enemies (240 radius) when casting a spell while attuned to fire. 1 second burn.

Flame barrier 2 – You have a 30% chance to cause burning whenever a foe attacks you. Only triggers when attuned to fire. 1 second burn. (both melee and ranged)

One with fire – Increases flame barriers chance by 5% for every second spent in fire attunement.

Earth 15 should be more defensive to make it inline with the water 15.

Stone Hide 1 – Grants 250 toughness for 4 seconds when attuning to earth.
Stone Hide 2 – Grants aegis for 2 seconds when attuning to earth.

5 – PERSONAL change that I want. Fix diamond skin to work with your characters TOTAL toughness at every instant so that other traits/skills increasing toughness temporarily can improve condition damage.
These changes will make me quit all my other classes and spend 100% on the ele lol

6 – CONJURED WEAPONS – Thread link for improving conjured weapons – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Conjure-Weapons-Weapon-swap/first#post2359108

7 – CD REDUCTION TRAITS

The cooldown reduction traits have to improved to be on power with other professions.
This can be done either by adding a passive effect like bleeds/cripple last longer for earth or swiftness/movement skills last longer increasing range for air (Looking at you RTL) or by increasing the cooldowns to 40% flat to make it balanced. (Explanation in a bottom post).

8 – IMPROVING WEAPON TRAITS

Most weapon traits are terrible with the exception of the staff. The scepter trait should grant permanent (or near permanent) vigor on use to encourage bunker scepter usage and the dagger trait should grant a fixed 25% movespeed like signet of air. Focus should get a trait to improve its overall popularity.

Thanks for reading that wall of text. I would appreciate any feedback + suggestions from you guys. There will be missing traits if they make these tweaks so suggestions on new fire/earth/arcane traits would be really helpful.

lingering elements would not be able to stay as a 15 point trait if it was “fixed”.

Revert RTL. Done. That is all I want and all I think this class needs to do well.

Razor.6392:

lingering elements would not be able to stay as a 15 point trait if it was “fixed”.

It could be swapped with arcane precision then?

Raif.9507:

Revert RTL. Done. That is all I want and all I think this class needs to do well.

Sadly, though I agree with you. I do not see this happening.

Good suggestions. A few of my own:

1. Increase the Ele’s base health. This is vital for improving build diversity. You need heavy Water not just because it has good traits but also because it stops you from getting one-shotted by world boss attacks (in PvE) and splash damage (in WvW and sPvP). It would be ok to decrease our healing a little bit to compensate though with all the other changes to the ecosystem I don’t know if that’s necessary anymore.

2. Split RtL between sPvP and WvW/PvE. Being able to dash 1200 units every 20 seconds on the way to a world event would not break PvE at all, and while we’re already pretty good at escaping in WvW, being able to escape a bit better would make us feel much better without really changing anything.

3. Fix our bugs. This is basically a universal request, though.

4. Lightning Surge’s casting time needs to come down. It’s a good spell but the casting time is ridiculous.

5. Fire Grab needs to not miss all the time. It’s better than it was but still misses too often.

6. Rework the focus.

7. Rework Conjures. They’re a messy assortment of skills, but more importantly, they lock us out of too much of our power.

8. Remove or reduce the delay on Scepter Fire #1. The cast time is fine, it’s just the weird delay between the cast animation and the damage+burn hitting that’s weird.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Good suggestions. A few of my own:

1. Increase the Ele’s base health. This is vital for improving build diversity. You need heavy Water not just because it has good traits but also because it stops you from getting one-shotted by world boss attacks (in PvE) and splash damage (in WvW and sPvP). It would be ok to decrease our healing a little bit to compensate though with all the other changes to the ecosystem I don’t know if that’s necessary anymore.

2. Split RtL between sPvP and WvW/PvE. Being able to dash 1200 units every 20 seconds on the way to a world event would not break PvE at all, and while we’re already pretty good at escaping in WvW, being able to escape a bit better would make us feel much better without really changing anything.

3. Fix our bugs. This is basically a universal request, though.

4. Lightning Surge’s casting time needs to come down. It’s a good spell but the casting time is ridiculous.

5. Fire Grab needs to not miss all the time. It’s better than it was but still misses too often.

6. Rework the focus.

7. Rework Conjures. They’re a messy assortment of skills, but more importantly, they lock us out of too much of our power.

8. Remove or reduce the delay on Scepter Fire #1. The cast time is fine, it’s just the weird delay between the cast animation and the damage+burn hitting that’s weird.

1 – I do not know if they will do this since a buff to our hp can make 0/0/10/30/30 too hard to kill?

2 – RTL just needs to be brought into a 20 sec cooldown irrespective of whether it hits anything or not. Warriors/rangers/thieves will still beat us in mobility even with this change.

3 – Amen.

4 – Agree. I hate non instant blinds since the whole point of clutch blinding requires it to be instant. This is like having an “evade” skill which works after a delay lol. In this train of thought, scepter earth 3 also should be made instant although one can argue that it is an area but for that I say it has a slow travel time and can be dodged anyway.

5 – It has taken me about 20-30 spvp games to learn how to land this spell :-/
(PS: It still misses against enemies with swiftness)

6 – I disagree partially. They need not rework the whole weapon. It is pretty strong.
Fire 4 needs to be a mobility skill (+field ofc) like staff or dagger fire leaps.
Water 5 needs to be changed into something more defensive/healing and as I listed Fire 5 (fire shields in general) needs to be improved.

7 – Conjures just need 2 simple changes. Firstly, the weapons should have 25 charges and unlimited duration. Secondly, they should be swappable with our normal skills.

8 – Yes this is a horrible auto attack for fast paced pvp since you instinctively dodge or cancel at the end of your “cast”, forgetting to account for the delay and missing the spell.

Nice suggestions. Keep them coming :-)

Some other ideas I picked up for fire 5 and fire/earth 15 traits from the other thread.

Sunspot – Create a flame dome around you when attuning to fire for 2sec. The dome DEFLECTS incoming projectiles. (Dome will be small and will only deflect not reflect)

Flame barrier 1 – Gives a 30% chance to inflict burning on nearby enemies (240 radius) when casting a spell while attuned to fire. 1 second burn.

Flame barrier 2 – You have a 30% chance to cause burning whenever a foe attacks you. Only triggers when attuned to fire. 1 second burn. (both melee and ranged)

One with fire – Increases flame barriers chance by 5% for every second spent in fire attunement.

Earth 15 should be more defensive to make it inline with the water 15.

Stone Hide 1 – Grants 250 toughness for 4 seconds when attuning to earth.

Stone Hide 2 – Grants aegis for 2 seconds when attuning to earth.

If they did think about playing with vitality…

Increase the health by 2000 and make the trait bonus:

+2% Health (Adept) / +4% Health (Master) / +8% Health (Grandmaster)

It wouldn’t scale per point, you would have at least one point into the category to gain the bonus to base health only. Any extra health bonus would not get scaled from this trait.

The base health would be 13829.4 at max trait and this would only put it 24.4 points above how it is now if you max the water trait at base health.

However, not maxing the trait would give a stronger health increase to play with other traits.

As for the healing bonus, it will have to be tweaked to compensate for the strong adept and master vitality bonus.

The class is all about playing a balanced role, so everything about it has to be balanced to make it so.

I don’t think increasing damage is the way to go. That just leaves a wider gap between higher damage output and being able to sustain your health.

Also, move Arcane Abatement to Adept for more WvW build diversity or put it into the Arcana trait.

Numbers will have to be tweaked, but I think a balance can be put here that can satisfy the player and the devs.

Airwolf, having more health wont solve the problem of being able to defend said health. Guardians have the same base health, but it feels like they have more because of their armor and upkeep of aegis and protection.

Asurmir.7956:

Airwolf, having more health wont solve the problem of being able to defend said health. Guardians have the same base health, but it feels like they have more because of their armor and upkeep of aegis and protection.

This ^^ most guardians are running around with like 14k-15k health alot of times spec heaving healing, healway build which is a popular guardian build in WvW for roaming 1v4 type of build usually has 1k healing power on top of about 3k toughness.

The difference is that guardians healing tree is also its toughness tree. Warriors toughness tree is also healing, Same with thieves.

As a comparison Mesmers vitality is also the healing tree just like elementalist.

Demon.5082:

1 – I do not know if they will do this since a buff to our hp can make 0/0/10/30/30 too hard to kill?

2 – RTL just needs to be brought into a 20 sec cooldown irrespective of whether it hits anything or not. Warriors/rangers/thieves will still beat us in mobility even with this change.

3 – Amen.

4 – Agree. I hate non instant blinds since the whole point of clutch blinding requires it to be instant. This is like having an “evade” skill which works after a delay lol. In this train of thought, scepter earth 3 also should be made instant although one can argue that it is an area but for that I say it has a slow travel time and can be dodged anyway.

5 – It has taken me about 20-30 spvp games to learn how to land this spell :-/
(PS: It still misses against enemies with swiftness)

6 – I disagree partially. They need not rework the whole weapon. It is pretty strong.
Fire 4 needs to be a mobility skill (+field ofc) like staff or dagger fire leaps.
Water 5 needs to be changed into something more defensive/healing and as I listed Fire 5 (fire shields in general) needs to be improved.

7 – Conjures just need 2 simple changes. Firstly, the weapons should have 25 charges and unlimited duration. Secondly, they should be swappable with our normal skills.

8 – Yes this is a horrible auto attack for fast paced pvp since you instinctively dodge or cancel at the end of your “cast”, forgetting to account for the delay and missing the spell.

Nice suggestions. Keep them coming :-)

1 — Very possibly, though the bunker spec HAS been getting nerfed along the way so it might be ok as it stands to give us more health. My suggestion was to lower our other heals a little to compensate, if necessary.

2 — From what I understood, it was causing trouble in sPvP when the Ele could bunker a point indefinitely and then jump to another point whenever they wanted. Whether that’s ultimately true or not, I wish they would just split it because it certainly wasn’t causing problems anywhere else.

4 — Earth 3 has a slow-ish travel time but you’re not locked up casting it for too long so I think it’s ok as it stands.

5 — Yeah, I mean, I can hit it most-ish of the time, but I still say a silent prayer to Balthazar every time I cast it.

6 — I don’t mean every skill needs changes but as it stands, it’s a rough weapon to fit into a build. You give up the damage, mobility, and CC of an offhand dagger and instead just support (which the Staff does better generally anyway) and defense, but mobility and CC double as defense anyway.

7 — Yep, I actually posted a thread about that a few days ago with my idea of how that could work.

oZii.2864:

Asurmir.7956:

Airwolf, having more health wont solve the problem of being able to defend said health. Guardians have the same base health, but it feels like they have more because of their armor and upkeep of aegis and protection.

This ^^ most guardians are running around with like 14k-15k health alot of times spec heaving healing, healway build which is a popular guardian build in WvW for roaming 1v4 type of build usually has 1k healing power on top of about 3k toughness.

The difference is that guardians healing tree is also its toughness tree. Warriors toughness tree is also healing, Same with thieves.

As a comparison Mesmers vitality is also the healing tree just like elementalist.

I agree that airwolf’s suggestion is a bit complex for Anet to really go through with it.

The reason I suggested the 15 point changes in fire/earth is because they are just not as good as water right now. If we want build diversity, they have to be equally powerful. Fire should have multiple heavy offensive and minor duration defensive traits for it to be viable in spvp/tpvp and earth should have more defensive power to balance itself with water’s heals.

Some of the patch changes to earth have made it interesting (stability/increased toughness while channeling) but it is not enough for me.
How does (my trait choices here) a 7 protection/stability (90 sec cd) + a 3 sec cripple every 9 second compare to a 1500-2000 hp heal + condition cleanse every 9 second. (comparing 15 points in each).

Mesmers just cant be compared to eles because their illusion/stealth and f4/f3 skills give them so much more active defense than our protection/regeneration from the arcane trait. (This not taking utilities into account. Eles have better ones but they are on insanely long cooldowns)

Blaine Tog.8304:

7 — Yep, I actually posted a thread about that a few days ago with my idea of how that could work.

Will add the thread link to keep both our threads bumped :-)

Cool, thanks! If I think of anything else for this thread, I’ll be sure to mention it.

I really like some of your ideas with the trait changes. It would be nice to not have to be required to put 30 in arcana.

Batmang.5421:

I really like some of your ideas with the trait changes. It would be nice to not have to be required to put 30 in arcana.

Thanks! Yes I totally agree with you there. I am sadly an arcana addict :-(
I tried 0/30/0/20/20 once (to try fresh air) instead of my usual 0/20/0/20/30 s/d build and was absolutely annoyed at how clunky playstyle becomes when points are taken out of arcana. (This is referenced to spvp/tpvp since the need for quick attunement swapping might reduce in larger fights in WvW or in PvE)

Bumping for any more awesome sauce ideas.

Added suggestions for improving our CD reduction skills in main post. I will give explanations in reply posts since I do not want to bloat up the OP.

The cooldown reduction traits for elementalists are terrible. Most classes get 20% reduced cooldown on a weapon in addition to certain other passive effects. (Longbow range for warriors/precision+power+toughness+projec reflec for mesmers etc).

We have it bad in two areas

Our cd reduction traits apply only to 4 skills (not counting auto attack) out of a pool of 16 while other classes get 4 skills out of a pool of 8 (exceptions are only weapons that are not dual weilded).

By math alone, for investing in a cd reduction trait we either need passive effects (as stated in the OP) or we need the reduction to be increased to 40%.

This change will also help making atunnement swapping more decision based over just going into an attunement to spam cds.

What if the cooldown traits also chopped off 20% of the attunement cooldown for that element? The Air attunement one could be something different to make it not conflict with Fresh Air, or it could also reduce Fresh Air’s ICD by 20%.

Focus Changes from:
Focus rework, the new bunker weapon?

TGSlasher.1458:

TL;DR
How would this change work?
Step 1: Remove Cleansing Wave from Dagger and replace it with Gust (chill 3 sec 20 cd)
Step 2: Put Cleansing Wave as Focus Water 5 and move Comet to Water 4
Step 3: Revert changes to Ride the Lightning, remake it a 20 or 25 cd skill but 1200 range

This allows the /D to maintain its damage and movement, whilst moving bunker to the Focus (the eles defensive weapon).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Focus-rework-the-new-bunker-weapon/first#post2380780

Blaine Tog.8304:

What if the cooldown traits also chopped off 20% of the attunement cooldown for that element? The Air attunement one could be something different to make it not conflict with Fresh Air, or it could also reduce Fresh Air’s ICD by 20%.

That is an interesting idea however the problem I see with it is that if you have this new cd-reduction trait + 30 points in arcana, your attunement cd is going to be in the range of 4-5 seconds which although good, is pointless since your skills have much longer recharge rates. Of course, this change would make trait lines more attractive than arcana so overall I agree.

TGSlasher.1458:

TL;DR
How would this change work?
Step 1: Remove Cleansing Wave from Dagger and replace it with Gust (chill 3 sec 20 cd)
Step 2: Put Cleansing Wave as Focus Water 5 and move Comet to Water 4
Step 3: Revert changes to Ride the Lightning, remake it a 20 or 25 cd skill but 1200 range

This allows the /D to maintain its damage and movement, whilst moving bunker to the Focus (the eles defensive weapon).

Here are my focus rework suggetions.

Fire 4 – Increase the radius/duration and lower cd (it should be even lower than Dagger fire 4 since it does no damage)

Fire 5 – Reduce the cd to that of shocking aura and change the burn on attack to a blind.

Water 4 – Reduce the cd by 5 seconds or make it an AoE around target.

Water 5 – Swap with Dagger water 5 and reduce cd by 5 – 10 seconds.

Lightning 4 – Its fine.

Lightning 5 – Make it PBAoE.

Earth 4 – Its fine.

Earth 5 – Its fine.

Fixing elementalist is quite easy tbh…. (core issues, not specific weapon ability issues)

There are two things that are chaining us into a minimum of 20-30 arcane.

1. You cannot effectively play staff without being 20 arcane. A staff ele without blasting staff is a useless ele.

2. You cannot effectively play an elementalist with the standard attunement cool down. Simply put, 0 arcane is unplayable because attunement cycling renders the class useless. The new 30 air trait helps some, but honestly, it is a step completely in the wrong direction. Even if a similar trait was added in for each attunement, I think it is complete garbage that an ele has to waste a grandmaster slot on it.

Here is my simple solution:

1. Reduce attunement cool down across the board by the same amount a 30 arcane ele has now (60%). Honestly, this does nothing to overpower the class as each attunement’s abilities have cool downs and most of us are already 20-30 arcane anyways just to be viable (barring a few exceptions). Really, it was a neat concept, but it is one that just failed in practice.

2. In place of the attunement reduction, increase boon duration by 2% per point instead of 1%. This will allow some eles flexibility in dropping water/monk runes perhaps. (balance testing might show 1.5%/level as a better option).

3. Increase the radii of all staff abilities to match that of blasting staff. (in other words we all get blasting staff… we all run it anyways with staff out because we are forced to)

4. Add a different staff specific ability to replace blasting staff in Arcane.

Minimum development time because the changes are simplistic and would blow open the door for new builds.

Then bump up base hp and voila the ele is reborn

Demon.5082:

Blaine Tog.8304:

What if the cooldown traits also chopped off 20% of the attunement cooldown for that element? The Air attunement one could be something different to make it not conflict with Fresh Air, or it could also reduce Fresh Air’s ICD by 20%.

That is an interesting idea however the problem I see with it is that if you have this new cd-reduction trait + 30 points in arcana, your attunement cd is going to be in the range of 4-5 seconds which although good, is pointless since your skills have much longer recharge rates. Of course, this change would make trait lines more attractive than arcana so overall I agree.

If your playstyle is to continuously enter an attunement, blow all your spells, then leave the attunement, then I agree that that trait would be overkill. However, if you really wanted to focus on, say, dishing out damage with Fire, that sort of trait could make it less punishing to your DPS to switch to Earth for a clutch Magnetic Aura. It’d be kinda like how the Engineer will frequently swap into and out of a kit for a single skill use.

Also, I think you made a mistake in your formatting as there seemed to be a lot more text in that post than was displayed when I was writing this response.

A question for people reading this thread regarding the attunement swap cooldowns:

How much of an effect would we see if the cooldown for an attunement started when you swapped to that attunement?

This is to say that if I’m in air and switch to fire, the cooldown for fire immediately begins ticking instead of waiting for me to switch away from fire. This would apply to all attunements.

I’m unsure if this would be too powerful in regards to having 30 arcana granting 9 second cooldowns, but I’d like to know what some other people think of this.

Dunno if it would be too strong at least it would make it more fluid without heavy investment in arcana. At least it will make swapping less predictable

dukevonart.2691:

A question for people reading this thread regarding the attunement swap cooldowns:

How much of an effect would we see if the cooldown for an attunement started when you swapped to that attunement?

This is to say that if I’m in air and switch to fire, the cooldown for fire immediately begins ticking instead of waiting for me to switch away from fire. This would apply to all attunements.

I’m unsure if this would be too powerful in regards to having 30 arcana granting 9 second cooldowns, but I’d like to know what some other people think of this.

This idea is really interesting, but it strikes me as a very big power boost. It basically means you can sit in Fire or Air, then switch to something else and immediately switch back

Also, it would lead to weird inconsistencies where sometimes you can switch back right away while other times you’d have to wait, if you switched too rapidly.

I think Fresh Air is a great way for the game to go about accomplishing this sort of Attunement setup without have so many balance implications. If Anet wanted to do a more large-scale rework, though, this could be one way to do it.

Blaine Tog.8304:

This idea is really interesting, but it strikes me as a very big power boost. It basically means you can sit in Fire or Air, then switch to something else and immediately switch back

Also, it would lead to weird inconsistencies where sometimes you can switch back right away while other times you’d have to wait, if you switched too rapidly.

I think Fresh Air is a great way for the game to go about accomplishing this sort of Attunement setup without have so many balance implications. If Anet wanted to do a more large-scale rework, though, this could be one way to do it.

I would agree, it would be a boost to the power of attunements, but keep in mind that the cooldowns within each attunement would limit abilities apart from on attunement swap effects which could have internal cooldowns to prevent abuse.

Fresh Air got me thinking about this but I’m worried that the direction it follows as its stat gated and currently out classes the other grandmaster trait. It also only really helps for power based burst builds, contributing little to condition based builds that are lackluster due to being stuck in earth attunement to maintain bleeding.

I might contribute more later, but for now I’ll just some small things on my mind.

1) Remove the countdown thing off of summoning glyphs and increase the cd by 60sec. This is important because that countdown duration prevents them from receiving the full benefit of quick glyphs.
In addition, make it a them have a chain skill which activates the elemental’s aoe effect.

2) Since I really doubt devs will be giving eles back any mobility with ride the lightning, how about buffing the skill’kitten effect? They want us to use it to attack things, so just add some more incentive like increased damage, blind, or a decent amount of vulnerability stacks.

3) Rework Glyph of Elemental Power, since it’s a weird skill for stun breaking. Maybe make it work similarly to venom skills or like avatar of grenth for a short duration.

covenn.7165:

Fixing elementalist is quite easy tbh…. (core issues, not specific weapon ability issues)

There are two things that are chaining us into a minimum of 20-30 arcane.

I agree with the Arcane problem but I doubt ANet would remove the “Intelligence” stat in Arcana because that is a part of the class design for the game.

Hence, I feel the simplest solution would be to reduce attunements to 12 second base and have 30 points in arcana reduce it to 9. People will run at least 10 in arcana due to the “elemental attunement” trait (which honestly should be baseline but we can talk about that later) so any general ele will still get a 11 second attunement cd (instead of the current 13).

Blaine Tog.8304:

If your playstyle is to continuously enter an attunement, blow all your spells, then leave the attunement, then I agree that that trait would be overkill. However, if you really wanted to focus on, say, dishing out damage with Fire, that sort of trait could make it less punishing to your DPS to switch to Earth for a clutch Magnetic Aura. It’d be kinda like how the Engineer will frequently swap into and out of a kit for a single skill use.
Also, I think you made a mistake in your formatting as there seemed to be a lot more text in that post than was displayed when I was writing this response.

Yea I fixed that thanks.
Well the problem is not about playstyle, the problem is ANet does not want us to sit in 1 or even 2 attunements and swap out to 3/4 when needed (that is how it should be imho). That was stated by Izzy at his livestream. “Elementalist has 20 skills so we kinda expect them to use all 20”. Its stupid but yea its their “design” so I do not see that changing.

dukevonart.2691:

A question for people reading this thread regarding the attunement swap cooldowns:
How much of an effect would we see if the cooldown for an attunement started when you swapped to that attunement?

I am sorry but this will be very OP (at least for pvp). Imagine, you are at 50% hp, you get into water and blow your heals to get to 100%. Already, around 5-6 seconds has passed. Now if you get out of water, you are supposed to be vulnerable to conditions/burst (unless you have utilities) for the next 9 seconds, but with this design you will barely need 3 seconds before water is back up again (I agree the skills will be on cd but shifting into water when traited in water itself is a 1600hp heal with a condition cleanse and another heal+cleanse if you have EA).

Navzar.2938:

3) Rework Glyph of Elemental Power, since it’s a weird skill for stun breaking. Maybe make it work similarly to venom skills or like avatar of grenth for a short duration.

A very nice suggestion in my other “Auras” thread was that they make GoEP grant an aura based on attunement instead of random procs (which already exist in the Arcane 25 trait).

Thanks for bumping/suggestions/feedback guys. I will update the OP with more suggestions. (I feel stupid for not reserving more posts at the start of the thread )

Blaine Tog.8304:

I think Fresh Air is a great way for the game to go about accomplishing this sort of Attunement setup without have so many balance implications. If Anet wanted to do a more large-scale rework, though, this could be one way to do it.

I disagree. I think fresh air and abilities like it actually are more problematic balance wise and still don’t sovle the inherent problems with the class. I don’t think it is honest to require a grandmaster trait just to be viable without being 20+ arcane.

Simply fix the base problem, which is the attunement switch base is way way too long and blasting staff is a requirement to even begin thinking about using a staff.

Demon.5082:

I agree with the Arcane problem but I doubt ANet would remove the “Intelligence” stat in Arcana because that is a part of the class design for the game.

Hence, I feel the simplest solution would be to reduce attunements to 12 second base and have 30 points in arcana reduce it to 9. People will run at least 10 in arcana due to the “elemental attunement” trait (which honestly should be baseline but we can talk about that later) so any general ele will still get a 11 second attunement cd (instead of the current 13).

You are basically saying a variant of the same thing I just did, but in order to completely decouple elementalists from arcane blasting staff needs to be baseline as well.

The issue is that there are 2 approachs to a problem like “Arcana (and Water) feels too mandatory to be on par”:

-making alternatives valuable. Fresh Air and Earth line improvements are a step in right direction, but needs to be even better and, most of all, extended to fire line.

-making Arcana and Water so obsolete to make Fire and other 2 lines look cool.

Guess which has always been the Anet choice so far when they came to this kind of issues on other professions.

Demon.5082:

Well the problem is not about playstyle, the problem is ANet does not want us to sit in 1 or even 2 attunements and swap out to 3/4 when needed (that is how it should be imho). That was stated by Izzy at his livestream. “Elementalist has 20 skills so we kinda expect them to use all 20”. Its stupid but yea its their “design” so I do not see that changing.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use all our skills. I’m saying there are basically two potential ways of using your attunements:

1) Jump into an attunement for a few seconds, empty it of cooldowns, repeat with another attunement, return when the first attunement’s cooldowns are back.

or

2) Jump into an attunement, use one or two skills as needed, jump into a different attunement, jumping back to the first attunement as needed.

Like how Engineer kits work, which have no real cooldown to enter. I like to run the Toolkit. The Toolkit has 2 big melee attacks, an AoE cripple+bleed field, a 2-second block, and a 1200 unit pull. Sometimes I’ll swap into Toolkit quickly just for the block then switch back. Sometimes I just need the pull or the cripple field. Because you’re not losing anything by leaving the kit, there’s no need to use as many of its skills as possible. You’re actually better off not using skills superfluously simply because you might need them a second or two later. I still use all my Toolkit skills, I just don’t necessarily use all of them every time I enter the kit.

The latter benefits much more strongly from cooldown reduction (depending on cadence, of course) since the skills’ cooldowns won’t be covered by the attunement cooldown.

covenn.7165:

Blaine Tog.8304:

I think Fresh Air is a great way for the game to go about accomplishing this sort of Attunement setup without have so many balance implications. If Anet wanted to do a more large-scale rework, though, this could be one way to do it.

I disagree. I think fresh air and abilities like it actually are more problematic balance wise and still don’t sovle the inherent problems with the class. I don’t think it is honest to require a grandmaster trait just to be viable without being 20+ arcane.

Simply fix the base problem, which is the attunement switch base is way way too long and blasting staff is a requirement to even begin thinking about using a staff.

My preference is for the base attunement time to drop to 12 seconds and for Arcana to give 1% Attunement cooldown reduction per point rather than 2. This evens out if you go into Arcana but also makes Arcana less hilariously necessary.

Blasting staff… eh, I’m ok with it. It isn’t as necessary as Greater Marks is for the Necro and it’s in a much better line to begin with. The Staff is such a strong weapon without the trait, I don’t think it’s that bad having to pay a trait to make it even stronger.

AndrewSX.3794:

-making alternatives valuable. Fresh Air and Earth line improvements are a step in right direction, but needs to be even better and, most of all, extended to fire line.

I agree the earth improvements were great, but I completely disagree with yoo about fresh air. One of the core problems with the class is build variability and this is 100% due to how attunemen swapping works. Fresh air like abilities are the worst possible way in the world to deal with that. I like the concept as a one off …but not as a solution.

Staff radii also needs to be decoupled from arcana and just made to match blasting staff baseline.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Blasting staff… eh, I’m ok with it. It isn’t as necessary as Greater Marks is for the Necro and it’s in a much better line to begin with. The Staff is such a strong weapon without the trait, I don’t think it’s that bad having to pay a trait to make it even stronger.

Huh? The staff 100% relies on fields and AoE and the default radii is absolutely horrid without blasting staff. No offense, but do you even play staff at all? It is the single most critical thing to take as a staff ele, both for damage and support.

covenn.7165:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Blasting staff… eh, I’m ok with it. It isn’t as necessary as Greater Marks is for the Necro and it’s in a much better line to begin with. The Staff is such a strong weapon without the trait, I don’t think it’s that bad having to pay a trait to make it even stronger.

Huh? The staff 100% relies on fields and AoE and the default radii is absolutely horrid without blasting staff. No offense, but do you even play staff at all? It is the single most critical thing to take as a staff ele, both for damage and support.

Well, I’m going for The Bifrost for my Ele, so I certainly hope I use the staff.

I’m not disputing that Blasting Staff is a good trait, but you’re still going to have really strong AoE without it. Remember, AoEs can only affect 5 targets per hit so increasing the size of the AoE doesn’t increase your total possible damage, it only makes it more likely that you’ll reach the cap. If you’re looking for a weapon that really needs its trait to shine, I would direct your attention to the Necro’s staff, especially after the recent stealth nerf to #4. There’s a weapon that basically goes from difficult-to-hit single-target to unmissable AoE with a single trait, and they have to dip into a terrible line with a useless minor trait to get there.

Furthermore, Anet’s already gone on record as saying that AoE is too strong in this game, so this sort of buff is extremely unlikely.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I’m not disputing that Blasting Staff is a good trait, but you’re still going to have really strong AoE without it. Remember, AoEs can only affect 5 targets per hit so increasing the size of the AoE doesn’t increase your total possible damage, it only makes it more likely that you’ll reach the cap.

Not entirely accurate. Certain AoE abilities certainly do hit more than 5 targets.

Sure, damage is going to be the same with or without the trait as long as you are maximizing the number of people you hit or conversely the number of people you heal/cleanse. The radii increase drastically increase the likely hood of not only maximizing the number of people you hit, but reducing the likleyhood that targets will move out of the area before getting hit.

The truth is, that you will not be a good staff elementalist, no matter your actual skill level, without blasting staff because you are minimizing your opportunity. So speaking from a broad range of experience, I have to whole heartedly disagree with you about it not being required.

Demon.5082:

I am sorry but this will be very OP (at least for pvp). Imagine, you are at 50% hp, you get into water and blow your heals to get to 100%. Already, around 5-6 seconds has passed. Now if you get out of water, you are supposed to be vulnerable to conditions/burst (unless you have utilities) for the next 9 seconds, but with this design you will barely need 3 seconds before water is back up again (I agree the skills will be on cd but shifting into water when traited in water itself is a 1600hp heal with a condition cleanse and another heal+cleanse if you have EA).

This is less OP then you may think and may actually allow better balance changes to be made. The healing from Healing Ripple can still only occur every 9 seconds at max, which compared to what it currently is at probably only 1-2 second difference. In regards to balancing Healing Ripple, and the other similar effects, this change would actually create more consistent timings for when they could be used that could then be balanced around, rather than the more variable timings that occur currently.

i want to see windborne dagger work out of combat, like quickening thirst

Nice responses guys. I will edit the main post to add some of the interesting ideas flying around here.

@covenn
Yes we are suggesting similar things but the difference being you suggesting we lose our intelligence stat. ANet may reduce the value of that stat but I doubt they will drop it entirely.

@Blaine Tog
Ah I see your idea. It is a nice idea though the issue is a lot of our on swap traits/boons will have to be redesigned to compensate for the increase in availability of attune swap.
That said, I would love it if I could go into an attune and use 1 -2 skills and swap out and back in a few seconds later. It is much more entertaining doing that rather than sitting in an attune spamming sub par auto attacks waiting for my fields/finishers to come back up. ( I run s/d so you get the issue heh)

I agree with people who say fresh air is not a solution and just a lazy temporary fix. I really hope they do not make this into a design direction and add other traits like “fresh earth” where you get back your earth attune when you are hit for 10% hp or something. It sounds nice on paper but it will make our class too reactionary rather than action/planning.

@dukevonart

Are you sure the healing ripple trait itself has a 9 sec cd? There is no way to test this since we cannot go into water faster than once every 9 sec. Like I posted to Blaine, if they balance our on swap boons/traits around these changes then I have no problem with them. But design-wise, it is very tricky (kinda like the warriors suggesting for f2 skills for defense. Good suggestion but complex to follow through)

Demon.5082:

@dukevonart

Are you sure the healing ripple trait itself has a 9 sec cd? There is no way to test this since we cannot go into water faster than once every 9 sec. Like I posted to Blaine, if they balance our on swap boons/traits around these changes then I have no problem with them. But design-wise, it is very tricky (kinda like the warriors suggesting for f2 skills for defense. Good suggestion but complex to follow through)

I pretty sure that Healing Ripple does not have an internal cooldown. That said, making this change would not lower the attunement swap below the 9 second cooldown that 30 arcana provides. Rather this change would make it so that anyone could always get the effect (at most) every 9 seconds, rather than slightly more than every 9 seconds that it currently is due to any additional time spent in water attunement (for cast times or whatever else). Hence making it more consistent and therefore easier to balance.

For the cooldown reduction traits, one sugesstion I had in a thread a little while back was to also have it affect the elemental utilities we head. So the Fire one would affect Cleansing Flame, Signet of Fire, Conjure Flame, and the others would affect their elemental equivalents. It’s probably not a GREAT boost, but it was a neat thought, at least IMO.

I also agree that lowering the base cooldown on attunement swapping should be done, although I don’t think that Arcana should be tweaked to just be doubled Boon Duration. I dunno what exactly it could do, but lowering cooldown on base swapping would still be a good idea.

I actually made a suggestion thread a while back specifically regarding traits, some of them were probably a bit OP, but I think I had SOME good ideas. Check it out if you get a chance, by some miracle I might have had a decent idea.

Linky!

Grandmaster Fire Trait:
Elemental Grandmaster:
Allows you to use enemy elemental Fields for finisher (Water/Ice and Fire).

or

Grandmaster Fire:
Combat Elementalist Medic:
Remove Burning, Chill and Bleeding. Heal (same as EA water) health and regenerate the same over 5 seconds.

Suggested Change for Fire Aura:
Gain a fire shield / aura for 3 seconds. Fire shield burns nearby foes, removes burning and chill and makes you immune to burning and chill (after all, you are surrounded by fire).

Kamui.3150:

For the cooldown reduction traits, one sugesstion I had in a thread a little while back was to also have it affect the elemental utilities we head. So the Fire one would affect Cleansing Flame, Signet of Fire, Conjure Flame, and the others would affect their elemental equivalents. It’s probably not a GREAT boost, but it was a neat thought, at least IMO.

I also agree that lowering the base cooldown on attunement swapping should be done, although I don’t think that Arcana should be tweaked to just be doubled Boon Duration. I dunno what exactly it could do, but lowering cooldown on base swapping would still be a good idea.

I actually made a suggestion thread a while back specifically regarding traits, some of them were probably a bit OP, but I think I had SOME good ideas. Check it out if you get a chance, by some miracle I might have had a decent idea.

Linky!

Wow umm that is a long read

I will do it later today when I get the time and comment on your posts in this thread.

TGSlasher.1458:

Grandmaster Fire Trait:
Elemental Grandmaster:
Allows you to use enemy elemental Fields for finisher (Water/Ice and Fire).

or

Grandmaster Fire:
Combat Elementalist Medic:
Remove Burning, Chill and Bleeding. Heal (same as EA water) health and regenerate the same over 5 seconds.

---

Suggested Change for Fire Aura:
Gain a fire shield / aura for 3 seconds. Fire shield burns nearby foes, removes burning and chill and makes you immune to burning and chill (after all, you are surrounded by fire).

Honestly, I see the current GM fire traits as decent. One gives might stacking power and the other gives increased field duration+fury.
I like your first suggestion (glad you mentioned fire/water/ice otherwise that would be extremely OP lol). Fire Aura suggestion is also nice, who would not say no to more chill protection.

Demon.5082:

TGSlasher.1458:

Grandmaster Fire Trait:
Elemental Grandmaster:
Allows you to use enemy elemental Fields for finisher (Water/Ice and Fire).

or

Grandmaster Fire:
Combat Elementalist Medic:
Remove Burning, Chill and Bleeding. Heal (same as EA water) health and regenerate the same over 5 seconds.

---

Suggested Change for Fire Aura:
Gain a fire shield / aura for 3 seconds. Fire shield burns nearby foes, removes burning and chill and makes you immune to burning and chill (after all, you are surrounded by fire).

Honestly, I see the current GM fire traits as decent. One gives might stacking power and the other gives increased field duration+fury.
I like your first suggestion (glad you mentioned fire/water/ice otherwise that would be extremely OP lol). Fire Aura suggestion is also nice, who would not say no to more chill protection.

Yea, first triat suggestion was from a pvp stand point, though wouldn’t be of too much use in pve

Fire Aura would be more interesting to me if it applied burning in an aoe around yourself, perhaps something like one second of burning every second during its duration? Not as needed, but the other auras could have similar effects like Magnetic aura applying cripple, frost aura applying chill, and lighting aura applying weakness.

dukevonart.2691:

Fire Aura would be more interesting to me if it applied burning in an aoe around yourself, perhaps something like one second of burning every second during its duration? Not as needed, but the other auras could have similar effects like Magnetic aura applying cripple, frost aura applying chill, and lighting aura applying weakness.

Do you mean in addition to its current function. If it just did burning in an aoe around you then ranged foes would be find when kiting you (or fighting at ranged with sceptre / staff for example)

dukevonart.2691:

Fire Aura would be more interesting to me if it applied burning in an aoe around yourself, perhaps something like one second of burning every second during its duration? Not as needed, but the other auras could have similar effects like Magnetic aura applying cripple, frost aura applying chill, and lighting aura applying weakness.

Other auras are fine. Fire just need to be tweaked a little. Might stacking is ok if you can take the hits but a non bunker ele really cant take the hits (and you need to invest in our damage traitline to get the aura in the first place).

Off the top of my head, the simplest change to fire aura would be to make it burn everyone around you (360 radius). A 2 sec burn applied every sec plus apply a 2 sec burn for every ranged attack made against you (might on getting hit removed ofc).

TGSlasher.1458:

Do you mean in addition to its current function. If it just did burning in an aoe around you then ranged foes would be find when kiting you (or fighting at ranged with sceptre / staff for example)

Demon.5082:

Other auras are fine. Fire just need to be tweaked a little. Might stacking is ok if you can take the hits but a non bunker ele really cant take the hits (and you need to invest in our damage traitline to get the aura in the first place).

Off the top of my head, the simplest change to fire aura would be to make it burn everyone around you (360 radius). A 2 sec burn applied every sec plus apply a 2 sec burn for every ranged attack made against you (might on getting hit removed ofc).

Honestly, I’m not sure how much more powerful a Fire Aura would be with a AoE burn attached to it. That said, there’s plenty of room to adjust for balance changes, such as taking the “might on hit” off as Demon suggested. In regards to the other aura’s not needing changes I generally agree, and was putting up examples of what other auras could do as a thought experiment.

My thoughts on auras in general is that they are, for the most part, reasonable defensive tools that can have a dramatic effect in a fight.

They have limitations though, the largest in my opinion is the differences in melee and ranged attacks triggering them. This makes some auras simply not matter at all depending on what opponent you are facing and what weapon is being used. This is confounded by limited access to most auras with one aura being available on each weapon apart from scepter (combo field frost auras and fire auras are the exceptions) meaning that after entering combat an elementalist’s defense through auras is likely to be very binary (effective or not).

The second limitations that were implemented are the ICDs that were added, which while making sense in regards to the fire aura might stacking, do not make sense in that it severely cuts back their defensive potential against rapid burst and multi-hit attacks. I had assumed that multi-hit attacks were balanced around overcoming blinds and blocks that have a number of hits limitations while being weak to reflect effects such as retaliation and auras.