Guild Wars 2

Okay, so I think that most people will agree with me when I say that the Air and Water attunements in our weapons feel a bit off. Fire and Earth are just fine. Water attunement in Staff is excellent and needs no changes, but that’s kind of the thing. If you look at Water on Staff, you can see what makes it so different from Water on Scepter, Dagger and Focus, and Air on all of our weapons: It’s got combo fields.

In the Water and Air attunements in Scepter, Focus and Dagger (either hand), there are no combo fields. There’s also only 1 combo finisher (Comet). Air on Staff also has just the one lightning field.

That’s kind of odd considering the situation with the Fire and Earth attunements. Fire has so many ways of putting down combo fields: Burning Speed, Ring of Fire, Flame Wall, Burning Retreat, Lava Font. Fire and Earth are both chock full of finishers: Dragon’s Tooth (it’s supposed to be, anyways), Phoenix, Stoning, Eruption, Shockwave, Magnetic Grasp, Stone Shards, Hurl, Earthquake, Churning Earth, Magnetic Wave.

So the relative dearth of these features in Air and Water is bizarre. Half of us is lush with fields and finishers, the other half has almost none. It’s an odd distribution of them, and so those two attunements don’t really gel with what the rest of the Elementalist is doing. Also, what’s up with us getting just the one Lightning Field (two if you count the one in Lightning Hammer). Fully a quarter of what we do is dedicated to lightning stuff, but that’s all we get. Those also happen to be the only two Lightning Fields in the game, so what gives?

Ice Fields also don’t get much love.

Let’s fix that!

Water’s main themes are low damage, healing, vulnerability and chill. It’s more utility and soft cc than damage. The skills we currently have mostly represent that theme pretty well. Some of them just happen to be rather lackluster/sucky. The ones I think need the most love:

Shatterstone (Scepter #2)- This got nerfed (seriously?) for release, and I’m pretty sure nobody knows why. It wasn’t good before the nerf, and it’s even worse after. The thing can’t hit a moving target, does too little damage, and takes up too much of our time to be really worthwhile if we want to use it to stack vulnerability. So what do we do?

We have it put down an Ice Field while it’s charging up. Any foe who enters this Ice Field is chilled for as long as they’re in the field plus one second. The Ice Field can persist for one second after it explodes, so it’ll be there for a total of 3 seconds. That, I think, will greatly increase the skill’s value such that people won’t actively avoid using it. Indeed, people might actually prefer to use it in some situations, they may actually switch to Water attunement just for it.

Frozen Burst (Dagger #3) – Okay, so this skill seems to exist entirely for the chill effect. I know this because the damage it deals is among the lowest of all damage-dealing skills. Having this in our damage-dealing weapon doesn’t make much sense, and I think most can agree that we don’t really like the skill as is. If it’s going to be a soft cc skill where a damaging one should be, then it should be a darn good one. So what do we do?

Many people want it to be a blast finisher. I think we already have plenty of those (and actually wish we had more of other types of finishers). No, I think it needs to put down an Ice Field. The field doesn’t even need to do anything except be a combo field. Have it exist for 3 seconds and give it the same radius as the skill (which is fairly small). So now we could get the chill that the skill provides and then perhaps a little more if we follow up with a finisher.

Ice Shards (Scepter #2) – Projectile finisher? This is otherwise one of the least exciting attacks in the game, largely lacking in any sort of flavor or utility.

With that, I’ve nearly doubled the number of Ice Fields in the game, and those are just the obvious inclusions. The Ice Fields work towards Water’s theme by giving us more soft cc options if we’re clever about it. Putting more healing (water fields) into Scepter and Dagger doesn’t really fit too well, so I refrained.

The Lightning Fields are less obvious, unfortunately. There aren’t any skills that we could easily tack a lightning field onto such that it would make any thematic sense. Some rejiggering is required. What we could do is give us more finishers in the attunement, though.

Air Attunement’s main themes are high single-target damage, hard CC, and mobility. More Lightning Fields would work towards this theme perfectly. More finishers could send us in a more versatile direction.

Lightning Surge (Staff #2) – This isn’t a bad skill. It’s a better skill than most people think, actually, but that’s largely the problem. The fact that the blind is an AoE isn’t very obvious (it’s almost impossible to tell how big it is) and doesn’t come into play very often. So how about if it put down a lightning field as well?

Again, the field itself wouldn’t even have to do anything. It would merely exist. Make it exist for 3 seconds, give it the same radius as the AoE blind. This would be one step towards making Air Staff more attractive.

Windborne Speed (Staff #4) – I’m mostly just throwing this out there, but what if this was a whirl finisher? We don’t get many of those. I think having one in what would otherwise be an easily glossed-over buff that’s only very rarely used in combat would be pretty awesome.

Swirling Winds (Focus #4) – This is a situational skill, but it’s pretty awesome in the situation it’s good for. What could possibly make it more awesome for more general use is turning it into a whirl finisher. I mean, the thing is called “Swirling Winds”, it screams whirl finisher. It’d give me more cause to look at /Focus when not in a projectile-heavy environment.

Ride the Lightning (Dagger #4) – Magnetic Grasp is a leap finisher. Why isn’t this? Why can’t we have any finishers in Air attunement? We certainly don’t have many fields.

Lightning Grasp (Dagger #2) – If this skill was changed to be exactly like Chilling Burst but with weakness instead of chill and put down a lightning field for 3-seconds, would anyone miss the old skill? Methinks probably not.

So yeah, these changes wouldn’t really fix our offense problem, but they also wouldn’t rekindle the problematic bunker build that was very deliberately nerfed recently. What they would do is add some extra utility and versatility to some otherwise overlooked and underused skill sets.

I made a post in that Finishers thread about just this. In general, I feel that the balance of each weapon is off. To me, it’s like Staff is suppose to have lots of fields but few finishers. Daggers has finishers but limited to Earth, Scepter has a decent blend but nothing in the realm of combo fields and Focus is utility heavy but still lacks fields. Whether the devs want to preserve the balance the weapons has or shift it to be more even, additions could definitely be added to all the weapons, primarily in their usability/combo-ability on teams.

But yeah, my perspective tends to lean toward Air and Water being deficient in the combo-ability quotient. They just lack and lean heavily on what performance they add to the profession. That might also be why I choose those trait lines to specialize in (Water and Air). Because I’m always striving for balance, fire and earth are already great without any traits so the water/air traits help to power up those attunements.

Fire and Earth are great for combos and damage (with fire delivering faster, in most cases while earth provides a bit more CC on the side); with Water traits, being in water regens HP for me and allies, I get healed by swapping to water and my heals are generally not worthless thanks to the +healing; with Air, it provides me with a large source of my damage (namely the +crit damage and precision which are also the focused stats of my gear) and auras granting fury. All in all, those traits just bring up Water and Air to a somewhat even level with Fire and Earth but not for the same reasons.

I actually find this okay, and the point of all my rambling is, if the devs don’t want Air and Water to be as combo-able as Fire and Earth, that’s fine because combos are fire and earth’s ‘schtick’. In that case, Air and Water need other sideways alterations to make up for their lack of combo finishers/fields. Basically, they either need combos or they need to be powered up as compensation.

Okay, after having tried an auramancer build out, I can now say I sorta understand why RTL isn’t a leap finisher.

I’m on the fence as to whether giving D/D more ways to give itself auras would be overpowering or not. Giving us more options for the leap finisher really wouldn’t as it would just loosen up the attunement dancing order. You have to go fire->earth as of now; would being able to go fire->air be too much? Probably not, IMO.

Now, if we make the changes I suggested, then we’re able to go water->air or water->earth. Is that too much? Maybe.

Mostly, my criticisms do stand after this experience. I still do wish we had more types of other finishers. It was nice when Dust Devil was a whirl finisher, though I don’t think we really need more finishers in Earth.

To be honest, there aren’t that many weapons that create fields to begin with. Hence weapons that do tend to be ‘special’. And there’s a reason for that. Take fire fields for example. As you all know, each finisher shooting through it causes burning. That means that the dps potential for a fire field is far higher than for a non-field spell. Which in turn means the damage output has to be lowered in order to balance things out.

As for why there’s less finishers, I dunno. But as far as fields go, I think it’s pretty much just to make a difference between the weapons. One’s weak but can be comboed a lot, the other’s strong on its own but cannot be built upon.

MrQuizzles.6823:

Ice Shards (Scepter #2) – Projectile finisher? This is otherwise one of the least exciting attacks in the game, largely lacking in any sort of flavor or utility.

Either being a finisher, or a flat damage buff is the only real option. My build uses water atunement in scepter as a dps spec, it is decent enough but beyond the auto-attack you have no real burst.
The build feels like a warrior with regen using a bow, only your bow can only auto-attack.

They simply cannot give fields and finishers out everywhere. I would say they want to keep water fields to minimum and lightning too, because too much of them might trivialise healing and swiftness.
Fire fields buff might, very strong buff obviously, but not as dramatic as say AoE healing combo. Thats why there is loads of fire fields.

Water and Air are in no way lacking in strength, in fields sure, but is everything supposed to have fields. Staff has the fields, but dagger have the burst. Scepter and focus water have some lacky attacks yes, and scepter air, but they can’t really improve that much due to traits.

So I would like seeing Scepter water 2 having a chill field for about 2 seconds (total 3 sec chill). You could then follow it with unleashing earth 2 for very nice chills.