Guild Wars 2

If you want to buff ele’s survivability, then you need to increase mobility on weaponsets.

Make Rtl have a 20 second CD. The range nerf alone was enough, it doesn’t get me out of situations anymore because I am most of the time still in 900-1200 range after I’ve used it. (AKA in range of snare abilities, along with the 40s CD) Yes, 1550 range was ludicrous, and a bug, but all you needed to do was fix that.

Give focus some mobility. Swirling winds for swiftness? Something.
You could change Earth 3 on scepter and mostly no one would bat an eye. Make it a 900 charge forward, blinding people along the way.
I can’t speak for staff. I don’t ever use it enough.
Just ideas.

Disagreed.
A significant damage nerf across the board on all classes (including ele scepter burst and arcane skills) is the solution in my opinion (only talking about tPvP, don’t care much about WvW). It would allow to keep most of everything as foundation without injecting in new elements and numbers to play around with (which fails more often than not with anet, let’s be realzies), and nerf broken skills like healing sig, zerker stance and all that without risking to throw one class or the other out of the meta. It would also make it more difficult and rewarding to actually rack up kills, promote support roles more while allowing a bunker guardian nerf (that has been needed since the start of the game but no one bothered coz no numberZz). All in all, you could bring the class you like to play the most as long as you have the proper role and bring something to the table, be it downstate control/boon stripping, nuke-type damage and good mobility, strong group utilities or group support through boons and healing, and wouldn’t be restricted to the “warrior coz it does everything better” or thief being the go-to roamer/main single target damage dealer.

KarsaiB.9475:

Disagreed.
A significant damage nerf across the board on all classes (including ele scepter burst and arcane skills) is the solution in my opinion (only talking about tPvP, don’t care much about WvW). It would allow to keep most of everything as foundation without injecting in new elements and numbers to play around with (which fails more often than not with anet, let’s be realzies), and nerf broken skills like healing sig, zerker stance and all that without risking to throw one class or the other out of the meta. It would also make it more difficult and rewarding to actually rack up kills, promote support roles more while allowing a bunker guardian nerf (that has been needed since the start of the game but no one bothered coz no numberZz). All in all, you could bring the class you like to play the most as long as you have the proper role and bring something to the table, be it downstate control/boon stripping, nuke-type damage and good mobility, strong group utilities or group support through boons and healing, and wouldn’t be restricted to the “warrior coz it does everything better” or thief being the go-to roamer/main single target damage dealer.

I don’t know. Reducing damage across the board for every profession is weird.
Ever get into those bunker 1v1’s that never end? They are NOT fun. Reducing damage like that is going to force more play like that, and in the end its tiring, long, and especially NOT fun.

Read the second half of my post. It would allow to nerf survivability as a result without butchering certain skills/specs/classes. Make everyone more fragile, yet less damagy is the way to go imo. Would make team support and group plays necessary to keep on winning consistently. Would also fix loads of imbalances (aka thief direct damage, warrior aoe, necro counter pressure, etcetc).

The way this game is heading with the reduction of crit damage, bunker and condition builds will be more “meta”. Weird because many other mmorpg prefer damage over boring defense specially as a mage type. You don’t need rtl to get out of situations. All you need are fgs, swiftness (or traveler rune 6 effect) and lightning flash. That’s all the mobility i personally need with my s/f burst ele while roaming. Those that state that s/f is not good for roaming are just players that are good with only dagger/dagger and suck with the other weapon sets within pvp.

Dont agree at all that this would fix everything. Ele survivability shouldnt be like thieves in wvw, where you run in and try to burst someone down and if it doesnt work you instantly run away at the speed of light.

More mobility options and a fix so RTL has a 20s cd all the time would be awesome but it wouldnt do a lot for spvp builds or team play

What eles need are more active defenses like evades and blinds in their weapon skills (I don’t think Anet will ever give them a higher base HP or armor). Eles can’t rely forever on long CD cantrips which only extend their lives for a few more seconds before getting bursted down again.

So I played GW1 a lot, and one of the roles I liked playing with my Ele was the burning/condition builds. Burning was truly significant in the first one. You could only drain someone at max 10 ticks/sec, and burning could account for 7 of them right off the bat. All the other conditions the Eles have are great, don’t get me wrong, but really you only get burning for damage(i’m not even going to talk about bleed, seriously.).

Many people have mentioned that burning can be easily removed, or can’t be applied enough. I disagree. I think it is perfectly able to be applied for long periods on a target, or sprayed in short periods over groups easily, which is appropriate. Some people think the Ele should get something like poison or torment, I also disagree there. They should continue to be the masters of the four elements solely. So I think the following is frankly the ideal solution for opening up many condition builds for elementalists.

Replace the ‘Persisting Flames’ train in fire (11) with ’Wizard’s Fire’

Wizards Fire: Burning damage is doubled.

Boom. Over. Done. Elementalists can now focus on burning as their primary attack, because elemental wizards should be able to burn people to cinders if that’s their thing. Burning, which is stacked in time, could still be easily removed, and people would remove large stacks because not removing them would be bad otherwise. Condition removal would be more important in matches. Elementalists in this trait line would have to use 30 points in fire and GM trait to achieve this(and of course would still be Ultra-Squishy as usual), so balanced easily.

Also, they could probably achieve this with like 5 lines of code, so it could be implemented like yesterday.

If you want to be a condition elementalist, +1 this post and ask for Wizard’s Fire!

@vash: that would lead people to stay stuck into Fire attunement. No good. All attunements need damage doubled (in certain cases I’d say go for 3x) depending on the build.

What if I want to deal massive damage with water and eat flames to regen health? “Play as you want” anyone?

Make nukes actually nuke, give us back mobility, give us sustain = Elementalist fixed for good

@Grevender –
Sigil of Fire
Cleansing Flame
Lava Axe
Fiery Greatsword
projectiles through fire fields after switching out…
Just to name a few burning sources out of fire, still lots of reasons to switch anyways, always good to know the uses for all elements(again, combos).

Any reason you wouldn’t want ele condition build to be viable? If so, how then?

@Vash: aye I know that, and also I am 100% ok with conditions being awesome for Elementalist. I am just pointing out that giving weight to a specific traitline will defeat the core mechanic of attunements dance.
To further clarify: I see your idea as good, but its potential has to be split into all four attunements to preserve our core mechanic. I am all up for making Elementalist muuuuuuch more complex to play, if that would be faaaaaaaaaaaaar more rewarding than it is now – zero – because if a player want to just press “win” to end a fight he/she can already choose to play thief or warrior.