Guild Wars 2

All the changes in the world mean nothing unless you take people away from the Arcane tree. The difference between a 15 second Attunement cooldown, and a 9.6 second one is absolutely monstrous. So unless you change the Arcane tree bonus and make the 9.6 second base (or make 12 seconds base, and 9 with full Arcane), versatility will never exist.

Actually, you could also make it so Elementalists can specialise in a tree, which would make those ridiculous Fire, Air, and Earth only traits actually useful. But I believe most people like the constant swapping.

P.S 45 characters max for the title is not enough.

Oh I almost forgot: Blasting Staff.

This trait is insanely powerful for Staff Elementalists, yet it also forces you to go 20 into Arcane. If you want to improve Staves and create versatility, address this as well.

too late, the ship left already, I highly doubt they will look at the skills and do a complete overhaul until a year (or more) from now. But yeah, I agree, it cuts into the build too much, if you want to staff, you HAVE to go arcana 20 for blasting staff VIII

Well if they introduce more things like fresh air, then I think that helps a bit with the recharge situation. As for blasting staff, yeah, that’s pretty important for staff users, but for it to exist it’d have to be in some line right?

I could see the your concerns resolved if every, or multiple lines had their own staff buffs/synergies, or if the trait was split up and attached to other traits in individual attunement lines (each trait only buffing the aoe size of it’s element as part of the function).

Even putting Blasting Staff at 10 would let people try some crazy (will fail) 30 fire 30 lightning 10 arcane builds.

Also despite the buff to the 30 fire trait, fire is STILL a useless tree to invest in. IMO, instead of nerfing bountiful power, they should have moved it to the fire tree to ya know actually let our damage tree have some decent damage and making it worth investing in. Then added some sort of defensive boost in the water tree to replace the moved trait. That plus making blasting staff and the 9 sec attunement thing baseline would open up tons of new build possibilities. And replace the blasting staff trait with a skill that does 200 to toughness while wielding a staff or something like that.

^Agreed.

15chars

Avatara.1042:

Oh I almost forgot: Blasting Staff.

This trait is insanely powerful for Staff Elementalists, yet it also forces you to go 20 into Arcane. If you want to improve Staves and create versatility, address this as well.

I go full Arcana with Staff but I don’t use Blasting Staff. I think it’s over rated. XD

Well it boosts the AoE of 7 abilities.

the argument you are making doesn’t have to do with versatitlity. You don’t have to choose arcane if it doesn’t work for your build. Also arcane is design to benefit all attunement so it doesn’t make sense to put that trait in any other line.

Well it boosts the AoE of 7 abilities.

True, but if it doesn’t suit your needs why take it? Or if the are more important skills to take than it why take it/

Avatara.1042:

Well it boosts the AoE of 7 abilities.

I’m not entirely sure of the numbers and the particular skills there but the only skill that seems to benefit most from Blasting Staff is Lava Font. The increase in AOE of this skill is huge and very very noticeable. The rest don’t need a bigger radius IMO. More meteors can potentially hit a target a number of times more when the AOE radius is not increased so the density of one meteor per square unit is higher and the original radius is already big enough in most scenarios IMO. Static Field also poses the same issue. I can easily stun targets with a smaller circle since targetting them to be inside a bigger radius gives them a higher chance of realizing they are inside a Static Field and then choose not to move any further since this weird AOE only stuns on the perimeter of the AOE rather than the lot of it. Rain, Frozen Ground, and Eruption have already big enough sizes so the increase in AOE is either over the top or pointless. Geyser, on the other hand, disappears way too fast and is only useful for blasting IMO so making it bigger is like meh.

Anyway, we are slightly off topic here.

Back to arcane attune. As I have suggested in another post, they should give similar traits to other elements like the new Air major grandmaster trait Fresh Air so that going full Arcana will not be so mandatory.

Here are my suggested names for the new traits for each elemental traitline:

Highway to Hell
Fresh Air
Rolling Stones
Too Fast, Too Fluid

First, I’m going to say on the whole I agree with this topic from the perspective of what’s considered your standard/average Elementalist build. Arcane VIII is a great ability for staff users to being borderline mandatory. On most of my builds (I play quite a few) I end up going at least 20 Arcane for the swap timers especially with D/D.

Second, I’m going to say I have also found a build that rather defies most of the things discussed in this thread (specifically requiring 20 Arcane and Fire being useless) and I’m having a total blast with it.

I think they missed the point with elementalist. The problem is most of traits in a single line affect only one attunement, instead of boosting elementalist overall. Why does Internal Fire work only in fire att? The good start would be fixing Lingering Elements to work with more traits in one line, not only with the first minor. And this new Fresh Air trait.. why cannot it recharge ALL attunements but with different condition? For example, on crit but with 12s cooldown. That would be nice alternative for going 20 and more in arcana.

silvermember.8941:

the argument you are making doesn’t have to do with versatitlity. You don’t have to choose arcane if it doesn’t work for your build. Also arcane is design to benefit all attunement so it doesn’t make sense to put that trait in any other line.

Well it boosts the AoE of 7 abilities.

True, but if it doesn’t suit your needs why take it? Or if the are more important skills to take than it why take it/

I am just going to pretend you are joking.

yup, 20 arcane is a must and with the new changes 30 water has become less of a requirement…. Way less…. So instead of 0/20/0/30/20 I’ll probably be going 0/30/0/20/20.

mbk.4926:

I think they missed the point with elementalist. The problem is most of traits in a single line affect only one attunement, instead of boosting elementalist overall. Why does Internal Fire work only in fire att? The good start would be fixing Lingering Elements to work with more traits in one line, not only with the first minor. And this new Fresh Air trait.. why cannot it recharge ALL attunements but with different condition? For example, on crit but with 12s cooldown. That would be nice alternative for going 20 and more in arcana.

Well you have to remember from a design perspective they design a class for X, Y and Z but the player base ends up only using it as Z. The original design very well could have been one where if you put 30 points into Fire and 30 Water that you would spend most of your time in Fire and Water and not really utilize Earth and Air.

However over time, and especially with the popularity of Arcane builds due to the initial strength of Evasive Arcana, the players’ “meta game” take on the class is that swapping attunements is mandatory and there can be no other alternatives in play style. Really if you look at it the whole thing is circular: Players spec deep into Arcane -> Arcane encourages swapping attunements -> Players come to the conclusion the only way to play Elementalist is to swap Attunements -> Players spec deep into Arcane.

This situation is further complicated by another player “meta game” standard which is that most Elementalists will end up speccing into Water as the secondary attribute for defenses and recovery. This is another factor heavily encouraged by design as Water also heavily juices up our most powerful utilities (Cantrips) and we were designed to have the lowest HP pool (despite being more of a Ranger style defenses we got Thief HP without the Thief’s countless evasive moves which the Mesmer got both o.O ).

The devs actually do understand all of this and are trying to unball the mess that the Elementalist meta game has devolved into it. They’re just doing it extremely slowly with this being one of the biggest steps towards that goal. This of course grates against many of the players who have come to accept that “Z” is the only way to play the Elementalist and so we see the rage. One glance down at my post history will show you that sitting in Fire attunement and doing DPS is tantamount to heresy around here. Anything that goes against the current meta game standards for Elementalist devolves into huge multi-page arguements where 1-2 people are saying something against the meta and 5-10 are telling them they’re “wrong.”

Hopefully by the game’s first anniversary, that will no longer happen.

I still don’t understand why mesmer and ele hp isn’t the other way around. Mesmer have op escapability by class design and eles only get op healing by speccing full water and arcane. A glass canon ele is extremely kitten by our hp pool, while a glass cannon mes is just fine, even if they were to have less hp. And a better hp pool wouldn’t make healing builds much more op anyways, since max hp isn’t much of a concern when you can consistently keep a lower one near max with heals anyways.

Didn’t they buff warrior’s base hp and def awhile ago since they felt they weren’t tanky enough? When do we get our boosts so we aren’t so squishy a light fart can kill us? even if we wear full toughness gear we can barely get above what is considered glass for some other classes def.

I admit it would be nice to have a higher base HP pool. With my knight/berserker set up for WvW I have close to 1,700 toughness. But that does nothing if I only have 12K HP. Elementalists shouldn’t need at least 20 in our defensive line just to have enough health to not die instantly when we enter combat.

We need better HP or we need better defenses built into our weapon sets. I was very surprised when our “Defense” attunement Earth had literally no blocks/Retaliation/Invulnerability/defensive walls. Focus is the only weapon with sufficient defense, but it has so little offense it’d never make a good offensive build weapon.

Just today I was running a new offensive build. Trying out a heavy fire (I know, I know) build focusing on raw offensive and arcane utilities for finishers. I did great damage and could wreck groups in a team fight. But a ranger kept picking me off.

The ranger spammed his attacks through the duration of my Mist Form, continued on through my healing rotation, and then kept blasting me with arrows THROUGH my Magnetic Aura (Ended up getting him down to 75% because of his own attacks) and he still ended up destroying me before I could burst him to half because I spent the entire fight trying to stay alive.

I know staff is a terrible 1v1 weapon and my build was pretty glassy, but one would think I’d have been able to do better as my opponent continued to mindlessly shoot at my anti-projectile defense for it’s full duration.

Ehecatl.9172:

I know staff is a terrible 1v1 weapon and my build was pretty glassy, but one would think I’d have been able to do better as my opponent continued to mindlessly shoot at my anti-projectile defense for it’s full duration.

Because shortbow spam #1 requires so much skill rangers don’t even give a rat’s @$$ if you have a projectile reflect bubble around you. Ha!

Anyways, I hope this Fresh Air does give opportunity for burst ele builds to emerge despite the still glaring lack of reliable defensive abilities without the crazy cooldowns.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

I’m not entirely sure of the numbers and the particular skills there but the only skill that seems to benefit most from Blasting Staff is Lava Font. The increase in AOE of this skill is huge and very very noticeable. The rest don’t need a bigger radius IMO. More meteors can potentially hit a target a number of times more when the AOE radius is not increased so the density of one meteor per square unit is higher and the original radius is already big enough in most scenarios IMO. Static Field also poses the same issue. I can easily stun targets with a smaller circle since targetting them to be inside a bigger radius gives them a higher chance of realizing they are inside a Static Field and then choose not to move any further since this weird AOE only stuns on the perimeter of the AOE rather than the lot of it.

Larger static is very beneficial in WvW, agree that in PvE its not that useful.

Ehecatl.9172:

I admit it would be nice to have a higher base HP pool. With my knight/berserker set up for WvW I have close to 1,700 toughness. But that does nothing if I only have 12K HP. Elementalists shouldn’t need at least 20 in our defensive line just to have enough health to not die instantly when we enter combat.

Agreed its ridiculous that 20 in water is mandatory (moreso than a large investment in arcane IMHO). Its like the base health goes back to very early alpha and beta builds, before the great ele nerf after BWE1, when our low base health made up for the greater burst we had at that stage.

If they wanted ele to have the options of attunement swap gameplay and single/dual attunement gameplay then there should be traits that improve combat power for staying in the respective elements to offset the loss of gaining new boons/fury.

There are 2 traits that I can think of which do this but both are horribly niche.

1 is the flame barrier (5point fire minor trait) and the other is the 10 point air trait (name eludes me).

If they bring in more traits like the 25 point fire trait then we could actually see single (imho this is terribly boring) or at least dual (this is decent) attunement builds.

As far as the OP’s suggestion, I highly doubt it is going to get changed unless a radical class rework is made.

Here is something new.

How about make the 15 pts http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lingering_Elements make the attunement cooldown decrease to 9 (and have 12 as base). Make the arcane points go towards bonuses per attunement (for instance http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sunspot is % stronger for each point in arcane)

If this is done, all problems will be solved me thinks.

Swim.6830:

Here is something new.

How about make the 15 pts http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lingering_Elements make the attunement cooldown decrease to 9 (and have 12 as base). Make the arcane points go towards bonuses per attunement (for instance http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sunspot is % stronger for each point in arcane)

If this is done, all problems will be solved me thinks.

This is a nice idea. Lingering elements is too weak to really matter anyway. I can live with a mandatory 15 points in arcane (since I am an attunement swap fan) but I still dont know if I can give up evasive arcana’s 2000 hp heal and condition removal every 10 sec :-(

I agree with OP, they need to swap Attunement Recharge Rate for something else. I wouldn’t mind seeing condition AND boon duration being in Arcana, and fire getting something new that could make the traitline more interesting (also making the traits worthwhile would help).

Perhaps fire could allow conjure weapon utilities to become more useful. Again, the weapons themselves could use a wee bit of attention first, as to make it appealing in the end. Just a random thought..

I actually found, after some practice, that swapping attunements was a bit more fun, but also gave me access to the other abilities on my bar, that allowed me to contribute more to the team…being able to put down water fields for healing, ice fields for cc. that rumbly earth snare that causes cripple…again for cc…and random blinds and stuns from air attunement.
even though I sometimes find, if I’m not paying attention, that I’ll sit in fire attunement and pelt them with fireballs and lava fonts and flameblasts.

I think maybe part of the problem, event though I don’t really see it as a problem, is that arcane and water are really useful for staying alive, and nothing else in the other trait lines is.
If the earth trait line gave a serious boost to toughness or some other means of protection, as the earlier poster pointed out, like shields, protection, retaliation, etc, (although, theoretically, I could see retaliation being a part of the air trait…as in air blowing attacks back on the attacker to cause damage…something like that)…then I’d be more interested in investing points in that. But bleeds, and additional damage to bleeding foes…I don’t know, that just seems kinda weak.
I’m not sure I’m that impressed with this Fresh Air grandmaster trait, either…although I guess having all air attunement abilities refreshed on crit is pretty decent…especially if you can keep critting.

I’m sure that will be far too powerful and for the thief loving dev’s at anet, and it will be nerf’d in a week or less when we can suddenly start killing thieves on a regular basis.