Guild Wars 2

This topic will layout in full detail of why the standard bunker build is so viable, solutions to encourage single-attunment gameplay and solutions to possible problems that could arise to my theory-crafting. The first thing I want to discuss is the elementalist and the art of surviving. If you look at every class, they all have a means of survivablity unique to them. For thieves its burst damage and stealth, for mesmers it is clones and confusion, guardians its massive heals and large hp pools. What the elementalist has is high mobility and burst healing. This is the problem; elementalists only have the abilty to burst heal from water attunement swap and evasive arcana. These two skills are the single largest heals that an elementalist has. Each healing for about 1.6k with only 300 healing power! So a common trend forms. People max out arcane and water to get those benefits. Now, lets look at another problem with single-attunement play. The skills are too mediocre to have such long cool-downs.. It is impossible to sustain damage in one attunement for long because most of the skills have too long of a CD. This is where I think an idea I had can come into play. Elementalists should get a skill cooldown reduction for each point invested in that traitline. 30 in lightning would mean a 30% recharge reduction. That would mean RtL would be around 14 seconds and updraft around 32 seconds. But wait a minute, couple that with 30 in arcane and you have an op ele. OH NO! Jk. All they need to do is double the recharge time on attunement swap, but double the amount of reduced time given for each point spent in arcane. If looking at the standard d/d build of 0 10 0 30 30. That would mean RtL would be 18seconds and updraft would be 40ish. Not a huge game changer However, the 30% skill cooldown reduction in water would mean a huge jump in the amount of uses for cleansing wave. All that is needed is to reduce the healing scale and/or make it only get rid of 2 conditions. We still have another problem though. How will I get the benefit of burst heal if I don’t invest in water and arcane? The problem is that no other traits are given a healing option when it is needed. Example: Add a trait into lightning that has a 100% chance to heal on critical lets say ever 3 seconds. For fire, give them a regeneration every time a burn is applied. Every skill line should have some opportunity for sustained healing and those traits should all be in the grandmaster traits to discourage massive burst healing builds. This solves 3 problems: The high CD for each skill, the forced burst healing bunker build as the only build with any way to heal and the potential for the current bunker build from benefiting substantially from the first 2 solutions.

I could see a problem with 30 fire 30 air berserker builds having too much heals. Testing would need to be done and ratios adjusted accordingly. Lets say the heal on critical scales with healing power by .75. 600 hp would give 400 hp every 3 seconds. And lets say for fire it is 20 heal per second for 5seconds and stacks 5 times. In 6 seconds it would be 1200. Enough for sustainibility but not a match for other heals

That could encourage different gear for more healing. Just think of all the builds and ganeplay it could open up

I call an ele a noob if he spends most of the time in on fire attunement and/or has signets equipped. In my opinion all signets are totally useless (in PvE). For each signet there exists a better alternative:
- Instead of the Healing and Water Signet, use Ether Renewal to heal more points and remove ALL conditions and Glyph of Storms to chill multiple enemies for more than 4s.
- The passive effect of Air Signet is useless in combat and for the active effect you can also use Glyph of Storms on earth attunement for mass blinding.
- The bonuses given by the passive effects of the Fire and Earth Signets are too low for character stats on the scale of 10^3.
- The active effect of fire signet is useless too because a mob burns already most of time even without this signet.
- The active effect of the earth signet is not totally useless. It’s very good in PvP but for fighting mobs in PvE it’s not woth taking with you. There are seldom times where you have to immobilize a mob. You get more benefits from simply using Arcane Wave as an additional Combo Finisher.

Argh wrong thread, my post should ne placed in “The ‘wrong way’ to play ele”…

Interesting ideas, but Im afraid those chances could come with imbalancing issues.

IMO those are the main problems about ele traits:

1. Fire/Earth/Air traits are much more weaker than those in Water and Arcana. I think many people would sacrifice traits from water/arcana if only there would be viable options in the other trait lines. E.g. I would sacrifice healing for more burst damage. But the fire traits are horrible.

2. All our anytimers are sooo bad compared to other professions. The damage is mediocre and we got no chains. I play both ele and warrior, both with balanced item builds. My warriors 1h sword crits for 2k/2k/4k (+ bleeds), my eles air1 crits for 1.4k/1.4k. Thats pathetic.
IMO those bad anytimers force us to go deep into arcana to reduce attunement cooldowns. Our 2-5 skills are mostly on high cooldowns which is ok, because we have 20 skills. But after using 2-5 you are forced to swap attunement because skill 1 is a waste of time. So you feel to be forced to go for 20-30 arcana to reduce attunement cooldowns.

Solutions:

- bring our anytimers damage en par with the other professions + add chains
- completely rework fire traits (the whole line is crap)
- rework few traits from air + earth to bring those lines en par with water/arcana

I’m sure we would see many new and less healing oriented builds after those changes.

I tend to disagree on some ofcwhat you said. Fire does suck. But lightning would get other traits like 20% more damage on stun and knockdowns. Makss it better with less cd. Earth would need more auto attack dps I think. I can see imbalances happening but hey ele as it is now is worse off

teg.1340:

snip

I agree with this, the water/earth/arcana trait lines are so good that it overshadows Fire and somewhat the Air one.