Guild Wars 2

Many ele players feel forced to put points into arcana in order to feel like they are not locked out of their skills. Let’s discuss ways we’d like this system improved.

One major problem is we need more cross atunement synergy between skills to promote atunement swapping:
D/D is well designed in how fluidly skills from one atunement flow or set up skills from another. We need this type of play across all weapon sets. Stacking blast finishers with s/d comes close but is not as interesting IMO.

The other problem is the high base CD on swapping:
As a very rough idea, what if the recharge gets reduced depending on how many atunements are on cool down. This will reduce the handicap that occurs if we execute a multiple atunement combo which normally can lock us out of a lot of skills simply for using the synergy between some skills.

I believe the devs agree atunements need some improvements, judging from the addition of fresh air (which I love but has a few balance problems), so let’s see if we can brainstorm some good ideas.

If they are going to play with the traits they need to make it work like fresh air. For example, make it so every time 5% of your health is taken in one hit your earth attunement recharges. That would work very well with stability and protection going into earth traits. Fire is a bit tricky because nothing really synergizes with it that well. The entire trait line needs to be redone before they think about implementing anything like that.

I am pretty sure the developers don’t even care at this point though.

Lowering base cooldown would help a great deal, IMO. Another thing I think they should do is tweak some of the “Gain this bonus while in this attunement” traits to be a great deal stronger, but really limited in duration. So for the Earth Minor Adept you change it from “+Lv Toughness while in Earth” to something like “+Lv*5 Toughness for 5 seconds after attuning to Earth, or for the first 5 seconds after entering combat while in Earth attunement.”

This gives you reasons aside from the Elemental Attunement trait and the trait that gives Fury on attunement to actually DO the attunement dancing. You get good bonuses for doing so, and can use them strategically, like swapping to Earth right when a big attack comes your way.

Kamui.3150:

or for the first 5 seconds after entering combat

This.

Base attunement recharge should be reduced as well as suggested, and trait for skill CD reduction in a given attunement should also reduce the attunement recharge time.

Pathos.5132:

One major problem is we need more cross atunement synergy between skills to promote atunement swapping

What about combo fields & finishers? Don’t they provide enough synergy? What about scepter? Hurl→Lightning Strike gives a massive burst? Not synergy?

There’s a lot of synergy already.

I think the problem is less that attunement dancing is not rewarding enough but more that the best way to play PvE is to spam your hardest-hitting skills; in the regard of the Ele that’s Lava Font, Lightning Whip or conjures.
As long as PvE stays this simple I doubt all the utility and support inside those 20 weapon skills and thus attunement dancing will become beneficial, and knowing how ANet has managed GW1’s PvE I don’t think GW2’s PvE is going to change.

DesertRose.2031:

I think the problem is less that attunement dancing is not rewarding enough but more that the best way to play PvE is to spam your hardest-hitting skills;

For staff PvE, that’s actually attunement dancing. If you cast your Meteor Shower, it’s very rewarding to then switch to water for an Ice Spike (fury from swap + vulnerability), then to air for Blinding Surge (another hard hit + fury extension) and then to earth (for the final 2 seconds of fury and to prepare an Eruption for the Lava Font/might stacks combo). It gives a lot of boons and most of the #2 skills hit harder and have a larger area than Fireball.

ThiBash.5634:

Pathos.5132:

One major problem is we need more cross atunement synergy between skills to promote atunement swapping

What about combo fields & finishers? Don’t they provide enough synergy? What about scepter? Hurl->Lightning Strike gives a massive burst? Not synergy?

There’s a lot of synergy already.

I mentioned the might stacking combos of s/d in my OP, I think thats one way to have skill synergy, but its not as interesting as the interplay of d/d skills. Massive burst off of instacast spells its not synergy, the spells do not affect each other. now if one spell stacked alot of vulnerability or some other on hit debuff for a short time, that would synergize with our instanukes and also give our opponents a tell for when the burst was coming, giving our nukes some counterplay.

Staff is what i believe needs the most work on increasing synergy, and hopefully the incoming changes will help.

as long as attunement dancing will be encouraged/improved, ele will NEVER fill his role of jack-of-all-trades, master of versatility… he will just continue to be use everything you have and then die… we have quite long cd on many skills, usually very bad autoattacks and are forced to attunement dance… due to that, arcane line is mandatory and a bit spammy playstayle as well, because we dont have many choices what to do… use 2 3 4 5 and switch attunement…

Pathos.5132;

I mentioned the might stacking combos of s/d in my OP, I think thats one way to have skill synergy, but its not as interesting as the interplay of d/d skills. Massive burst off of instacast spells its not synergy, the spells do not affect each other. now if one spell stacked alot of vulnerability or some other on hit debuff for a short time, that would synergize with our instanukes and also give our opponents a tell for when the burst was coming, giving our nukes some counterplay.

What about the snares making possible your dragon’s tooth will hit something, or a knockdown? Or water’s chill/daze combo? The very combo you mention, vulnerability + damage, actually exists in scepter in the form of Shatterstone.

Staff is what i believe needs the most work on increasing synergy, and hopefully the incoming changes will help.

Staff has the most synergy of all ele weapons. Apart from the combo fields (fire/air/water) and finishers (earth), Ice Spike can be cast right after Meteor Shower for vulnerability, Frozen Ground/Static Field to keep them in said shower, Magnetic Aura to protect them while casting it and 10 points in Arcana means they can also get Fury while making said switch.

There’s so many combos/synergy with staff I cannot imagine why you’re not seeing it. Are you trolling?

FrownyClown.8402:

Fire is a bit tricky because nothing really synergizes with it that well. The entire trait line needs to be redone before they think about implementing anything like that.

There are already pretty good things in the fire trait line. And more then that things that synergize a lot with other trait line.
- burning precision (adept) is a pretty good addition if you wanna have a condibuild
- Ember’s might and internal fire are pretty logic
- Pyromancer alacrity, same here that’s in line with the other trait line
- Fire Embrace is the keystone for a signet auramancer build
- Persisting flame seem pretty interesting (even more with the next change to conjure weapon)

The only things that i feel out of place may be Pyromancer’s puissance. I don’t think it deserve a grandmaster trait place. I would swap it with conjurer and change conjurer by :
“you no longer share your conjure weapon but they have an unlimited charge number”.

I don’t play elementalist with a deep investment in arcana But it already work just fine. I don’t think we need a change in CD swaping. It’s just a rythm to take.

The main reason I suggested having short duration and high power effects when swapping attunements was because generally our skills are lacklustre. We can fire off our most powerful stuff, but then we’re on CD for about 40 seconds for the same cool combo to come up again. We REALLY need short cooldowns on our skills if they’re going to be lower in damage than the other classes and we’re required to shift around. Things like Ride the Lightning and Updraft need to be on 20 sec CDs in order for us to be able to effectively use them, similar with Churning Earth and the Dagger 4 skill. If they’re parts of our combos, then they NEED low CDs for us to be able to effectively use them.

ThiBash.5634:

What about the snares making possible your dragon’s tooth will hit something, or a knockdown? Or water’s chill/daze combo? The very combo you mention, vulnerability + damage, actually exists in scepter in the form of Shatterstone.

I’d agree with you if dragons tooth had a shorter animation, targets have plenty of time to get up and and dodge after a gale or updraft. Shatterstone is a lackluster skill and useless in pvp, it has the same problems as dragon’s tooth. Also it only adds 4 stacks of vulnerabilty which can be stacked much faster by procs from 25 in air. Compare this to Warriors brutal shot (8 stacks) or Ranger rapid shot (10 stacks). If it came out faster, yea it would definitely provide the synergy i’d like, but casting it is a waste of time right now.

ThiBash.5634:

Staff has the most synergy of all ele weapons. Apart from the combo fields (fire/air/water) and finishers (earth), Ice Spike can be cast right after Meteor Shower for vulnerability, Frozen Ground/Static Field to keep them in said shower, Magnetic Aura to protect them while casting it and 10 points in Arcana means they can also get Fury while making said switch.

There’s so many combos/synergy with staff I cannot imagine why you’re not seeing it. Are you trolling?

The only pvp staff build I know of is a clerics build bunker that cant kill anything so I wont speak of staff in pvp (crossing fingers for good changes next patch). IIRC it was calculated that leaving fire is always a dps loss, the other atunements are only useful for support and control. Switching just for fury is a bad idea as many classes output much more fury to the group and in order to have that at all you need to put points into arcana, the point of this thread is to relax the need to go into this tree at all and to reward builds that use the other lines.
The one native finisher in staff is slow and can only be used in conjunction with your own fields once.

I think you’re getting the wrong impression of my point of discussion. I’m saying we need more synergy between skills and improvements to the cooldown system we currently have in order to promote stance dancing. I never said we have none. I said I want the level of interplay for our weapon sets to match up to D/D which I believe is the most well designed.

Pathos.5132:

I think you’re getting the wrong impression of my point of discussion. I’m saying we need more synergy between skills and improvements to the cooldown system we currently have in order to promote stance dancing. I never said we have none. I said I want the level of interplay for our weapon sets to match up to D/D which I believe is the most well designed.

You may be right about me getting the wrong impression. I suppose it would have helped if you’d mentioned PvP in your opening post. Either your thread is about synergy between attunements, or it is about PvP balance. You claim the first, but it’s actually the latter.

The synergy exists already, where you initially claimed there was few to none. What you really mean to say is that the current skills don’t work very well in PvP. That’s a completely different debate.

The only pvp staff build I know of is a clerics build bunker that cant kill anything so I wont speak of staff in pvp (crossing fingers for good changes next patch). IIRC it was calculated that leaving fire is always a dps loss, the other atunements are only useful for support and control. Switching just for fury is a bad idea as many classes output much more fury to the group and in order to have that at all you need to put points into arcana, the point of this thread is to relax the need to go into this tree at all and to reward builds that use the other lines.
The one native finisher in staff is slow and can only be used in conjunction with your own fields once.

I’m not so sure I agree with leaving fire being a dps loss. When I play in a dungeon, my (synergy) chain usually consists of Meteor Shower (roughly 15k+ damage), followed by Lava Font (5k), an Ice Spike (4k), a Blinding Surge (3k) and then either Chain Lightning for 2k each, or a Static Field followed by Stoning and then back to Fire through Eruption (4k) for a blast finisher. That’s no small amount of damage, especially considering that my fireball only does around 1700 when it crits. Of course that won’t work in PvP (though it does surprisingly well in WvW), but the synergy (for PvE at least) is obvious.

As for going into fury, of course other professions provide fury. I’m not gonna switch just for the fury, it’s just a nice bonus. And finally, having points in arcana isn’t so bad for your dps when you have things like Sigil of Battle and Rune of Altruism. It doesn’t provide as much Power as the Fire traitline does, but it’s not a small amount either.

However, I realize now that you’re discussing PvP so it doesn’t really apply here.

What build are you using for PVE staff? I use a lightning hammer spec and depending on if im in soldiers or zerker my fireball crits for 3-5k, adding font and burn damage and it just flat out outperforms the other atunements for dps. Those big numbers on ice spike and eruption mean nothing when you divide that by their animation time, its a net loss of dps. To even go through that rotation you need a good amount of points in arcana which is again counter to what I want to discuss.

And I’m not focusing on pvp balance here, I mentioned that currently staff is useless in pvp and thats mostly due to slow missile speeds and that it does not outperform the other sets in anyway. I also said in response to your claim that staff has lots of fields and finisher with the fact that only earth has finishers and they can only be used once every 9-15s by yourself, and in a group setting its easier to have just have other blast the fields. The best example of staff synergy that i find useful is frozenground>shockwave>unsteady ground/lava font which is great in both pve and wvw, though i usually forgo that and use signet of earth because its easier to land and lasts longer. And most pve fights dont require kiting so i can happily just spam lava font anyway.

Its my opinion that our skill synergy is low, if you believe otherwise, alright. But there’s no reason to not want more interplay and complexity to their interactions. Discuss that, not whether or not you think my opinion is wrong.