Guild Wars 2

The real reason that, in the end, no matter what they do to traits, all elementalist builds will trend towards bunker builds is because we’re the only class in the game to have the worst armor AND the worst base hitpoint totals.

You can’t do anything if you’re dead.

No, it’s because the traits are simply better. My gear gets more and more offensively-based the more experienced I get.

If Fire wasn’t such a horrible trait line I would love to use points in it. But it is, it’s genuinely horrible.

I think there’s some truth to what you’re saying, particularly about the base hit points. I’ve never tried it but I imagine it would be pretty tough to run a d/d ele with 12k hp. As time has gone on I’ve incorporated more offensive-based gear into my build but I still lean mostly towards defense just because it leaves me with more margin for error.

Our weapon skills only add mobility in exchange for the loss of health and armor.

Investing deep into Fire and Air doesn’t do anything to increase our viability. The only logical thing to do is to invest in Water and Arcana. By doing that we swap attunments faster; granting access to all our skills quickly and gain the health / condition removal tools we need to offset the low health and armor.

Every class does this by the way. Even Guardians spec bunker. Thieves and Mesmers can get away with speccing damage due to stealth. Right now you can argue that the Elementalist has the best bunker.

The classes are very poorly designed in GW2.

The classes are fine, it’s the traits that are sub-optimal. If every trait line was as good as water/arcana you’d see a lot more builds.

Ugh. I know. It absolutely sucks. I have to spend a minimum of 40 points into Water/Earth to even be a little survivable. We do not have enough versatility. I literally just posted a topic complaining about ele’s lack of options. If we had more varied amulets that focused on different attributes (or if they worked like in WvW) then we would be so much better off!

Calae.1738:

Our weapon skills only add mobility in exchange for the loss of health and armor.

Investing deep into Fire and Air doesn’t do anything to increase our viability. The only logical thing to do is to invest in Water and Arcana. By doing that we swap attunments faster; granting access to all our skills quickly and gain the health / condition removal tools we need to offset the low health and armor.

Every class does this by the way. Even Guardians spec bunker. Thieves and Mesmers can get away with speccing damage due to stealth. Right now you can argue that the Elementalist has the best bunker.

The classes are very poorly designed in GW2.

Some builds give mobility, not all.

I agree with the rest of what you said, though. Either way, this proves how limited we are in choosing ours builds. I HATE it. I have made builds for every other class and while some are more limited than others, none are as limited as the ele. :’(

Fire and air line would have to have some absolutely insane damage traits to make up for the opportunity cost of not speccing into water/arcana.

I believe that as ele you must have :

1) min 1400 toughness
2) min 13k HP

Anything below these numbers is literally a free kill, therefore the ele is really limited even in the choice of amulets

The focus instead of dagger does add some very solid defensive abilities, but they are on pretty long cooldowns. So it’s very team reliant

emikochan.8504:

The classes are fine, it’s the traits that are sub-optimal. If every trait line was as good as water/arcana you’d see a lot more builds.

The Earth trait line is so terrible that the only way for me to get armor is on gear. 6 seconds of protection from Elemental Attunment and the cantrip Armor of Earth is one of the few forms of damage mitigation available.

They need to add condition removal tools in Fire and Earth for me to even consider them.

Sadly you need points in water and arcane, no matter what. Extra healing and vitality is needed. You also want your boons to last longer and be able to attunement switch faster, so you can basically already be sure that 30-60 points will be invested into water + arcane, which leaves little for an offensive build.

If just vitality, healing and attunement recharge rate weren’t so important for eles. If I play staff, I won’t do with less than 20 water and 20 arcane (Blasting Staff I feel is a must). If playing with S/X, D/X, 10 arcane is ok, but 0 points? Never. And at the very least 15 points into water, for the attunement heal. Then again you likely go 20 to decrease the CD of cantrips, as you can’t live without instant stunbreakers/condition removal.

The only aspect of the ele that works really well currently is the defensive part (condition removal and healing).

If no other solid options exist, people are more likely to stick with what makes them survive.

I find it good and bad that EA was nerfed (on a sidenote).

• The good thing is that bunkers have less access to healing than before (although not by much and barely noticeable).

• The VERY bad thing is that builds that weren’t aiming for the bunker variant and relied on of the healing and condition removal of EA (focus builds for instance), took an arrow to the knee.

It makes bunker builds slightly less effective, but hinders ALL other possible builds a lot more. This particular problem hinders the SPvP part of the game. Not WvW or such currently.

People in this thread need to learn to dodge and kite.

I run a berserker build with my elementalist. Crowd control is your friend, and outdamaging absolutely everybody is a fantastic bonus.

Good luck kiting and dodging your way out of everything in PvP

Provost.6210:

People in this thread need to learn to dodge and kite.

I run a berserker build with my elementalist. Crowd control is your friend, and outdamaging absolutely everybody is a fantastic bonus.

The damage doesn’t out weigh the survivability I’m afraid. In fractals 40+ you’d get one shotted by almost anything and be a liability to the group. In PVP players would just sneeze at me and I’d die.

Seems people in the forums are always speaking of required builds without specifying their use. yes, lol, a character needs hit points and toughness in PvP where a dodge (a simple example) will not lose agro or when we have a target over our heads.. So, what else is new? We are in light armor. Having said that, I run 0-10-15-15-30 and do just fine. I just use a staff when there are numbers around. Seriously, its silly to expect to run into melee range of intellegent players and survive for long. They know we are easy targets in light armor. How come many of us do not?

I think a few people are missing the point… We’re talking about the limited options for ele. Yes, the few builds that work well are great. Congrats. We don’t all want to waste 30 points in Arcana and 20-30 in Water, though.

I don’t think Earth is useless, but I guess I like that it gives toughness and condition damage. I always spec into Earth and get V (Elemental Shielding).

sapphyredragon.6437:

I think a few people are missing the point… We’re talking about the limited options for ele. Yes, the few builds that work well are great. Congrats. We don’t all want to waste 30 points in Arcana and 20-30 in Water, though.

I don’t think Earth is useless, but I guess I like that it gives toughness and condition damage. I always spec into Earth and get V (Elemental Shielding).

I am not so sure. If you are having problems outside of pvp surviving without a bunker build, there are other issues. Bunker builds are not at all needed in pve. Vitality, yes, but bunkers, no. The skys the limit in the number of builds one can craft with good vitality that do not need to have 30 in water to get decent vitality either.

This is especially true with exotic gear which frankly makes the game so much easier to play. I went thru all of Orr with under level karma green gear and found it very challenging. With exotic it is a cake walk, relitively speaking. Dungeons are so much easiler with exotic gear I can not tell you. Leveling up we were all level appropriate as soon as we qualified in green karma gear or inexpensive crafted gear. If people are having issues running these dungeons, which are almost all underlevel, in exotic gear, something is wrong and the build is probalby not the issue, as long as a character has decent vitality. And that doesn’t mean pvt gear either. My exotic rings and accessories have a total of 28 toughness. My gear is Lyssa gear which carries precision as its main attribute. There are no pvt runes on that. My build has only 15 in water. I have 17,000 health. I do just fine with that in Wvw and Pve. I do decent damage. I just don’t pretend I can run into a group of players in Wvw, outmanned, and survive lol.

Primary issue is that water and arcane are too useful, considering our low base survivability.

Both give us access to free heals in exchange for… doing things that any elementalist should be doing regularly during gameplay. Water gives us a 30% increase in base HP if we max it, which is huge when we’re made of paper. Arcane gives boons whenever we switch, extends the duration of said boons and the passive regen from water, and a massive cut in cooldown time which increases the rate at which we can trigger all of the above.

There’s very little reason not to take both when they have so much synergy with each other, especially when that synergy boosts our most lacking aspect (survival).

I’d say either the other trait lines need a major buff, or water and arcana need nerfs… but nerfing water and arcana would take away what elementalists pretty much require to stay alive.

A first step would be vastly improving the 5 point minors for Fire, Earth and Air. Soothing Mists just blows them out of the water – a passive regen for up to 5 allies against:
- Chance to burn enemies when struck in melee range : Something that we should actively avoid
- Move 10% faster.. when we get 5 seconds of swiftness which doesn’t stack with this whenever we attune to air, and probably don’t spend more than 5 seconds in air anyways (heck, staff and offhand dagger will both also cast a spell for swiftness which will outlast lingering elements)
- 80 toughness while attuned to earth, providing less effective damage reduction per second than Soothing Mists provides via regen to an entire party.

Step 1: Make these bonuses apply to the entire party at the least. Burning enemies when they hit any ally makes it far more useful, as a balanced party will have melee characters
Step 2: Consider seriously overhauling all 3 effects anyways. Perhaps:
Air: Generate a passive aura that blocks one (ranged?) attack, then regenerates over 5 seconds; alternately make Air’s passive speed buff stack with other boosts.
Fire: Chance to cause burning when you hit enemies; alternately just deal flat damage when hit instead of burning things (so it doesn’t screw with condition players)
Earth: Reduced damage from conditions / block conditions at a set chance

And all of this only starts to help deal with the problem. There needs to be traits in the master/grandmaster tier that are enticing enough to pull people away from 30 water/30 arcana. Earth needs better damage reduction somewhere, air needs better damage avoidance (Knockback enemies and reflect projectiles when attuning to air as a grandmaster trait? Switch Renewing Stamina and Inscription between Air and Arcana?)

Disclaimer: I have no idea how balanced any of these suggestions would be for PvP. I’m primarily a PvE player.

The Fire line only helps fire. On a class that encourages swapping attunements having 10-30 points in a line that only assists one attunement is kinda a bad investment.

The Air tree has really bad Grandmaster traits that are Master level quality. The only time you end up specing 30 Air instead of 20 Air is if you want the crit/crit dmg.

The Earth tree is lackluster. It’s trait setup is poor to encourage Condition builds. Signets in general are terrible because they’re 30s cool downs with 3-4s effects. Signet of Fire is good, but has an issue with it being Power and not Condition damage. Water is novel but is vastly outpaced by the Water line’s condition management. Air is outpaced by permanent swiftness which is easy to obtain in a variety of specs. Earth isn’t bad but could use a 1s bump on it’s active effect. A lot of it could be solved if they moved Geomancer’s Alacrity to Adept to allow for a Condition build which would synergize with Signets (which are more conditions). The rest of the defenses that this tree gets are vastly outpaced by the Water tree (outside of the 10 points for the free “Armor of Earth” which is what you commonly see).

Water is your quintessential Elementalist tree. It has many small working components and heals that all add up to a large amount. It also improves our most powerful utility slots: Cantrips. It provides supreme condition management with Cleansing Water especially with our numerous sources of Regeneration.

Arcane used to be absurdly good as well back with Evasive Arcana was a blast finisher for everything. Instead it’s been pretty lack luster ever since and can easily drop to 20 points and still cover all the major abilities while still rocking good attunement cool downs.

When you break down the trees like that, it isn’t hard to see why people spec the way they do. They need to sort out the Earth tree to really bring the Condition/Signet build on par with other builds as well as open up Fire’s benefits to work on additional trees while looking at coming up with some alternatives for Grandmaster Air (the reactive stun isn’t bad but you see that kind of thing as a Master trait for other classes). If they do this, we should see some good build diversity.

Baladir.2736:

sapphyredragon.6437:

I think a few people are missing the point… We’re talking about the limited options for ele. Yes, the few builds that work well are great. Congrats. We don’t all want to waste 30 points in Arcana and 20-30 in Water, though.

I don’t think Earth is useless, but I guess I like that it gives toughness and condition damage. I always spec into Earth and get V (Elemental Shielding).

I am not so sure. If you are having problems outside of pvp surviving without a bunker build, there are other issues. Bunker builds are not at all needed in pve. Vitality, yes, but bunkers, no. The skys the limit in the number of builds one can craft with good vitality that do not need to have 30 in water to get decent vitality either.

This is especially true with exotic gear which frankly makes the game so much easier to play. I went thru all of Orr with under level karma green gear and found it very challenging. With exotic it is a cake walk, relitively speaking. Dungeons are so much easiler with exotic gear I can not tell you. Leveling up we were all level appropriate as soon as we qualified in green karma gear or inexpensive crafted gear. If people are having issues running these dungeons, which are almost all underlevel, in exotic gear, something is wrong and the build is probalby not the issue, as long as a character has decent vitality. And that doesn’t mean pvt gear either. My exotic rings and accessories have a total of 28 toughness. My gear is Lyssa gear which carries precision as its main attribute. There are no pvt runes on that. My build has only 15 in water. I have 17,000 health. I do just fine with that in Wvw and Pve. I do decent damage. I just don’t pretend I can run into a group of players in Wvw, outmanned, and survive lol.

I guess this thread is probably about all types of play, but I was talking about PvP. I don’t PvE…. lol. Sorry.

PvE is pretty well balanced for all classes, I would imagine. You at least have more options for everything that influences your attributes (besides your traits, of course).

I feel as though they created elementalist to excel in PvE, but they weren’t really sure what to do with it in PvP. It is really only good as a bunker build overall, everything else is situation dependent. Some builds more than others.

Kodiak.3281:

The Fire line only helps fire. On a class that encourages swapping attunements having 10-30 points in a line that only assists one attunement is kinda a bad investment.

The Air tree has really bad Grandmaster traits that are Master level quality. The only time you end up specing 30 Air instead of 20 Air is if you want the crit/crit dmg.

The Earth tree is lackluster. It’s trait setup is poor to encourage Condition builds. Signets in general are terrible because they’re 30s cool downs with 3-4s effects. Signet of Fire is good, but has an issue with it being Power and not Condition damage. Water is novel but is vastly outpaced by the Water line’s condition management. Air is outpaced by permanent swiftness which is easy to obtain in a variety of specs. Earth isn’t bad but could use a 1s bump on it’s active effect. A lot of it could be solved if they moved Geomancer’s Alacrity to Adept to allow for a Condition build which would synergize with Signets (which are more conditions). The rest of the defenses that this tree gets are vastly outpaced by the Water tree (outside of the 10 points for the free “Armor of Earth” which is what you commonly see).

Water is your quintessential Elementalist tree. It has many small working components and heals that all add up to a large amount. It also improves our most powerful utility slots: Cantrips. It provides supreme condition management with Cleansing Water especially with our numerous sources of Regeneration.

Arcane used to be absurdly good as well back with Evasive Arcana was a blast finisher for everything. Instead it’s been pretty lack luster ever since and can easily drop to 20 points and still cover all the major abilities while still rocking good attunement cool downs.

When you break down the trees like that, it isn’t hard to see why people spec the way they do. They need to sort out the Earth tree to really bring the Condition/Signet build on par with other builds as well as open up Fire’s benefits to work on additional trees while looking at coming up with some alternatives for Grandmaster Air (the reactive stun isn’t bad but you see that kind of thing as a Master trait for other classes). If they do this, we should see some good build diversity.

THIS.

Bad trait design isn’t the only reason. Just look at our kittenty weapon skills. Everything can easily be avoided if you can’t CC the enemy to death, which forces us into D/D for maximum control.

So why going glass, if you will miss most of your skills anyway?

Thanks to the EA nerf, staff also lost most of it’s use, which leaves us with Scepter, that has endless delay and pretty much useless water/earth skills.
(Conditions could be nice, but then you also need to stay alive long enough again —> Bunker)

red.2387:

The real reason that, in the end, no matter what they do to traits, all elementalist builds will trend towards bunker builds is because we’re the only class in the game to have the worst armor AND the worst base hitpoint totals.

You can’t do anything if you’re dead.

For me its cool because I like support and godlike survivability but it sucks when it is the ONLY thing we can do well.

red.2387:

The real reason that, in the end, no matter what they do to traits, all elementalist builds will trend towards bunker builds is because we’re the only class in the game to have the worst armor AND the worst base hitpoint totals.

You can’t do anything if you’re dead.

That and elementalists can’t burst. Thieves share the lowest hitpoints and I think comparable armor, but they can backstab heartseeker down you in under a second or two if you’re not careful. Elementalists can’t spike you into the ground before you can attack, so we have to prepare our collective anuses to get hit. While preparing to get hit, we look at our HP and armor and go “welp. it’s either bunker or death” and so bunker it is.

Oh yeah, and traits for everything suck kitten. You’re giving up too much to gain too little if you don’t use water or arcana. Personally I run 10/10/10/30/10…It was the most offensive build I could make without derping myself…and I still can’t kill bunker guardians. Oh you better believe I’m kitten.

red.2387:

The real reason that, in the end, no matter what they do to traits, all elementalist builds will trend towards bunker builds is because we’re the only class in the game to have the worst armor AND the worst base hitpoint totals.

You can’t do anything if you’re dead.

The real reason is because:

- Arcana line provides more bang for buck with attunement switches, which you’re going to do anyway since it’s the way to best play the ele class

- Water line gives you more condition removal, heals and survivability through cantrips than any other class gets from its survival traitline, it’s just a very overpowered grouping of traits

- The traits of both those lines are simply better than the other 3: fire traits are not as good as they only really help fire, air has only a couple of stand-out options which you can pick up as low-hanging fruit, earth is just too condition-based to be useful

I play 25/25/0/0/20 in WvW. I have 15K health, 2300 power, 33% crit, 85% crit damage using Staff with Berserker/Valkrie (power/prec/crit dmg, power/vit/crit dmg). My gems are the same stats. I have 10% added fire damage, extra damage to burning victims, extra damage to victims under 33% health, and additional radius on AoE.

Yes, I die easily if focused and don’t play solo. When I am standing behind the Staff Guardians and support specialists, I am an AoE juggernaut. I do very well in WvW and often overwhelm people who don’t realize how much damage I can do in such a short time over an area.

wispi.2194:

I play 25/25/0/0/20 in WvW. I have 15K health, 2300 power, 33% crit, 85% crit damage using Staff with Berserker/Valkrie (power/prec/crit dmg, power/vit/crit dmg). My gems are the same stats. I have 10% added fire damage, extra damage to burning victims, extra damage to victims under 33% health, and additional radius on AoE.

Yes, I die easily if focused and don’t play solo. When I am standing behind the Staff Guardians and support specialists, I am an AoE juggernaut. I do very well in WvW and often overwhelm people who don’t realize how much damage I can do in such a short time over an area.

Which is, more or less, why Staff won’t ever really get buffed to be usable in any other scenario. It excels so much in the scenario you describe (I do the same thing as well only on a 30/20/0/0/20 build) that it’s simply impractical to make it usable in any other. It’s a victim of it’s own success.

>Which is, more or less, why Staff won’t ever really get buffed
> to be usable in any other scenario.

exactly :/
Aoe in this game is a bit bugged. If it would be balanced to 1v1 it obiously would become overpowered in XvX.
One idea is to make aoe damage to split betwen the victims. So if you hit one opponent he gets 3k, but if you hit 3 opponents each of tem gets 1k so your damage is still 3k… but this wil create whole set of new problems anyway :/
While this game has nice 5v5 balance it has problems with 1v1 balance and ZvZ. In WvW aNet tries to improve the balance by limiting aoe to 5 targets making big ZvZ like small 5v5 battles but this obiously failed and was defeated by very primite life forms like “zerg ball” or more advanced “caterpillar zerg”
Current WvW is based on swarm intelligence rather than commanders, complicated/effective tactics, inviduals etc. In one word – WvW failed.

Glass cannon might be a bit more viable if the trait that grants vigor on crit was moved to fire or air. It seems out of place in Arcana atm.

ThiBash.5634:

Glass cannon might be a bit more viable if the trait that grants vigor on crit was moved to fire or air. It seems out of place in Arcana atm.

yep, but after moving “vigor on crit” to fire 50% eles would rage quite this game
Btw. until arcana improves attunement recharge rate and boon duration it is almost mandatory traitline for all ele builds except for staff “nukers”.

Lavadiel.6231:

it is almost mandatory traitline for all ele builds except for staff “nukers”.

Yes, that’s true also. :-)

Maybe if the cooldown reducing traits also reduced the attunement’s recharge, but didn’t stack with Arcana? That would certainly promote single/dual element builds a bit more….

>That would certainly promote single/dual element builds a bit more….

personaly this is not what I would aim for… ele beauty, superiority and excellence comes from attunement rotation.

The Ele definitely needs work. It is a jack of all trades but master at none!; which makes it a support class at best. Playing through this class was frustrating and way more expensive then should have been do to all of the deaths. I had to add as much toughness and vitality as possible just to stay alive in level 80 areas. This leaves my damage output unsatisfying. Some may not realize this until they have played other classes through like the Warrior or Guardian. It shouldn’t be more of a choir and less enjoyable to play the Ele class or any other classes that need work! The fact that the Ele class has such weakness is also further irritated by the cost of Waypoints and Armor repair which feels more like punishment and especially so on this class!

Now sense everyone seems to be building their Ele’s basically the same way this is also another problem. What is the point of having other options on building your Ele if all the other builds suck? Are the other build options just fluff? What is with Arcana anyways? That isn’t one of the four elements. A fifth option is great but why cant I have a great Fire Ele or a great Water Ele? I would like to see the Ele class brough more in line with the current best classes in GW2….and please Arenanet don’t weaken the other classes as you often do bring the weaker classes up. Make the game fun for all class and all builds of all classes.

Cinnamon Goddess.3869:

Now sense everyone seems to be building their Ele’s basically the same way this is also another problem. What is the point of having other options on building your Ele if all the other builds suck? Are the other build options just fluff? What is with Arcana anyways? That isn’t one of the four elements. A fifth option is great but why cant I have a great Fire Ele or a great Water Ele? I would like to see the Ele class brough more in line with the current best classes in GW2….and please Arenanet don’t weaken the other classes as you often do bring the weaker classes up. Make the game fun for all class and all builds of all classes.

I so agree. <3
I hate that everyone tells me to build a certain way. If I have only one or two “options” for my build, something is wrong. Mind you, most classes have a couple of preferred builds, but you don’t get insulted in-game for using something different.

I must say, while I very much enjoy my D/D bunker set up, it does seem pretty rediculous that we don’t have something in fire/earth/air that actually fits the bill of the supposed vision for the class. I signed up to blow kitten up! Where’s the splosions?

Ppl trend towards bunker builds because they only recognize two builds in this game: pure bunker and pure glass-cannon… everything else is apparently “horrible” because it’s not max/min-ed to death.

Players need to be more creative and vary the builds… stop blaming it on “bad trait lines” and start looking at more than just “if i don’t have X hp and Y toughness then my build must be bad”.

I rock a balanced condition/survival DD build that runs 15/0/20/20/15 in WvW and I do just fine.

Lavadiel.6231:

>Which is, more or less, why Staff won’t ever really get buffed
> to be usable in any other scenario.

exactly :/
Aoe in this game is a bit bugged. If it would be balanced to 1v1 it obiously would become overpowered in XvX.
One idea is to make aoe damage to split betwen the victims. So if you hit one opponent he gets 3k, but if you hit 3 opponents each of tem gets 1k so your damage is still 3k… but this wil create whole set of new problems anyway :/
While this game has nice 5v5 balance it has problems with 1v1 balance and ZvZ. In WvW aNet tries to improve the balance by limiting aoe to 5 targets making big ZvZ like small 5v5 battles but this obiously failed and was defeated by very primite life forms like “zerg ball” or more advanced “caterpillar zerg”
Current WvW is based on swarm intelligence rather than commanders, complicated/effective tactics, inviduals etc. In one word – WvW failed.

For organized groups, actually “zerg ball” fights are extremely commander dependent with complex tactics and strategems at work. Go watch vids of good guilds fighting each other, espeically if you can find ones with voice over so you can hear what the commanders are calling out.

That said, I do wish there was a nukier build to ele that felt worth while. I really like staff, and really enjoy it, but when it comes time to pew the boss i’m just like “meh. If i was on my warrior i’d hit him for like 12k every few seconds as HB came back.” I’d be happy to atunement hop to do the damage… just give us a build that can.

Lavadiel.6231:

>Which is, more or less, why Staff won’t ever really get buffed
> to be usable in any other scenario.

exactly :/
Aoe in this game is a bit bugged. If it would be balanced to 1v1 it obiously would become overpowered in XvX.
One idea is to make aoe damage to split betwen the victims. So if you hit one opponent he gets 3k, but if you hit 3 opponents each of tem gets 1k so your damage is still 3k… but this wil create whole set of new problems anyway :/
While this game has nice 5v5 balance it has problems with 1v1 balance and ZvZ. In WvW aNet tries to improve the balance by limiting aoe to 5 targets making big ZvZ like small 5v5 battles but this obiously failed and was defeated by very primite life forms like “zerg ball” or more advanced “caterpillar zerg”
Current WvW is based on swarm intelligence rather than commanders, complicated/effective tactics, inviduals etc. In one word – WvW failed.

For organized groups, actually “zerg ball” fights are extremely commander dependent with complex tactics and strategems at work. Go watch vids of good guilds fighting each other, espeically if you can find ones with voice over so you can hear what the commanders are calling out.

That said, I do wish there was a nukier build to ele that felt worth while. I really like staff, and really enjoy it, but when it comes time to pew the boss i’m just like “meh. If i was on my warrior i’d hit him for like 12k every few seconds as HB came back.” I’d be happy to atunement hop to do the damage… just give us a build that can.

I wish they would just change the Attunement cd to like 12s. Change it to so that we get the 5 point traits of fire/air/earth/water passively as part of our attunement mechanic, put in new 5 point traits that improve those passives like the One with Fire Trait, and change Arcane to be like Lingering Elements instead of decreasing attunement cd, and put in a trait that gives -2 to atunement cd where the lingering elements trait was. IMO that would open up builds and encourage use of the class mechanic.

>For organized groups, actually “zerg ball” fights are extremely commander
> dependent with complex tactics and strategems at work.

complex ? dude, its just swarm… look at eve online battles/commanders

>Go watch vids of good guilds fighting each other

http://youtu.be/LR_qQydIPvY?t=10m2s
and the great finale
http://youtu.be/LR_qQydIPvY?t=14m20s

yea, go watch and then compare.
Ofc I saw the “great” wvw battles on yt and participated in many. At the current game stage pvp matches are 50x more complicated.

I feel like they need to…

Increase base survival ability and nerf water and arcane to compensate.

Decrease the base recharge time for attunement swapping.

Decrease some skill cooldowns, fire grab is in no way competitive with hundred blades for example but has a cooldown 5 times longer. I’m only experienced with dagger dagger ele, i feel water 4 and 5 need lower cooldowns also.

Balance utilities. Why are all the stunbreakers cantrips? I wouldn’t mind playing a signet auramancer build but i have a hard time playing without a stunbreaker. Does anybody use glyphs? How do the utilities compare to other classes? Is a 90 second cooldown on armor of earth which only effects the ele fine when a guardian can use stand your ground and hold the line on the entire party for much shorter cooldowns?

I wouldn’t know but i think there’s much balance work for this game still to be done, pve and pvp. I hope at some point i can play my ele in the pve dungeons and feel like I’m contributing just as much as i would on my warrior or guardian.

I tried staff in WvW and it was suicide.
Why did they ever nerf this?

GrandmaFunk.3052:

I rock a balanced condition/survival DD build that runs 15/0/20/20/15 in WvW and I do just fine.

That…. is hardly impressive. You still have 20 in water and 15 in arcane. If you made a build with 10 or less in each, then maybe that would prove the point that the trait lines aren’t bad.

I run 30/0/30/10/0 on my main and I’m not too bad. Honestly, a lot better now that I know weapon swap sigils work for eles. o_O

Kirin.7306:

I tried staff in WvW and it was suicide.
Why did they ever nerf this?

Staff is mostly support now. =/
But hey, they are REALLY good at support! lol

Fire and Earth are our worst trees.

When I look at Fire all I see is talents that boosts Fire. It goes completely against attunment swapping which makes no sense what so ever.

When I look at Earth I see condition damage. Well lets see how good condition damage is. Oh that’s right I forgot; bleeds only stack to 25 in group content and your bleeds won’t get applied when other people are applying them. Burning stacks with other players who apply it and keep knocking off your damage ticks. Survivability? I’d rather invest in Water and get the toughness from gear instead.

If I invest deep in Fire and Earth; my survivability goes to crap and my damage is severely crippled.

Exactly how I feel about condition damage. They really need to fix the way it works. And since it doesn’t seem to even work the way it should half the time, I don’t know how they’ll do it.

I would say that all of our trees tend to focus on one element too much, but especially Fire and maybe Air and Earth. They really need to do something about our traits.

sapphyredragon.6437:

That…. is hardly impressive. You still have 20 in water and 15 in arcane. If you made a build with 10 or less in each, then maybe that would prove the point that the trait lines aren’t bad.

I run 30/0/30/10/0 on my main and I’m not too bad. Honestly, a lot better now that I know weapon swap sigils work for eles. o_O

My post was not meant to impress anyone, it was meant to illustrate that build variety is possible and that maxing out trait lines is not required.

sapphyredragon.6437:

I would say that all of our trees tend to focus on one element too much

I think you might be missing the point here.

Calae.1738:

Fire and Earth are our worst trees.

When I look at Fire all I see is talents that boosts Fire. It goes completely against attunment swapping which makes no sense what so ever.

When I look at Earth I see condition damage. Well lets see how good condition damage is. Oh that’s right I forgot; bleeds only stack to 25 in group content and your bleeds won’t get applied when other people are applying them. Burning stacks with other players who apply it and keep knocking off your damage ticks. Survivability? I’d rather invest in Water and get the toughness from gear instead.

If I invest deep in Fire and Earth; my survivability goes to crap and my damage is severely crippled.

Condition play isn’t as bad as you make it seem.

Solo play you never have to worry about bleed caps or burn sharing. Conditions in this setting are extremely powerful. You can’t even stack to 18 bleeds because things die off (even tho we could do it if they didn’t die off) between the third cast on Eruption when condition spec’d.

Group play (dungeons) usually works out well if your group isn’t also running conditions. The other day I had a group with all 5 of us doing bleeds. That’s just a poor group make up no matter how look at it but it’s what you get for doing PUGs. An organized group would discuss their builds and how to best work as a team. You might swap out in this scenario and you might not. Comes with the territory for any class.

Large scale play there’s nothing for it, conditions suck in this scenario. I am hoping they one day make it so instead of conditions disappearing after the cap they just do a flat amount of damage instead.

In PvP there’s enough condition removal that you should be able to go nuts with conditions and never think twice.

The real shame is that compared to other classes, our base bleed durations are absurdly high. Most condition focused classes (Necros, Thieves, Engineers) have to spec deep into conditions just to get the same as our base durations in many cases. With additional condition duration you can even make our Chills and other conditions pretty noticeable duration as well. This is unfortunately where the real shame comes into play as Condition duration is in Fire which is useless on a whole for anything not Fire (least of all Conditions). If they improve Fire to affect other trees more and offer more synergy with burns then it might not be so bad for a Condition based build that’s built around Carrion gear (massive Vitality), Toughness from Earth, and large amounts of condition duration/damage.

GrandmaFunk: And my point is that if you were trying to show variety in builds, you fell short. You still focused on Water and Arcana which proves the lack of variety.

No, I am not missing the point, I just thought that what I meant was inferred in the statement. They make it so that we need to switch elements a lot to stay alive, but yet there are a LOT of traits that are only good if you stay in one element.