Guild Wars 2

Is it just me, or does it feel like stat itemization and weapon/attunement themes feel really off? I feel like the only really defining trait of weapons is the range they have, whereas attunements dictate the type of damage or control it comes in.

I understand that classes in GW2 are more or less generalist; you might gear and spec for DPS, but you still shift into other roles once in awhile to toss out buffs, off-tank for 2-seconds so your main tank can heal or something, etc. The problem is that it’s really tough for Elementalists to “specialize” since our weapons have a very loose theme, while our attunements are pretty strict when it comes to them. Traits don’t help, either, and seem to want to shoehorn you into an element, rather than a playstyle, but I’m really more or less talking about weapons and attunements, here.

Regardless, let’s break down the elements across all weapon types:

Fire – heavy damage and burns
Water – supportive/healing
Air – “harder” CCs, utility, damage…?
Earth – survivability and bleeding

The problem I have with this is the fact that because each weapon is affected by each attunement, there really isn’t much flavor to them. It’s hard to choose a stat type to align with your ideal playstyle because the Attunements are all over the place. An Elementalist stacking Condition Damage with Scepter/Dagger seems to be really losing out compared to other classes (off the top of my head, Shortbow on Rangers) because Fire and Earth benefit from Condition Damage, but Water and Air do not. (In my own personal opinion, Air is one of the more useless attunements on a Scepter, but using a Dagger in the OH helps balance things out.) Power is always a good choice for a DPSer, but does it really benefit, say, Staff Water abilities that much? From what I’ve read on this forum and personal experience, Staff is definitely the way to go in dungeons, but in a situation where a DPS Elementalist just needs to focus on dealing damage (health pools are looking good, don’t need to worry about slows or chills), can you justify switching into Water?

There are also other things that you really can’t itemize for, too, because they’re just static by nature. Staff is a good one for this because there is nothing that really benefits combo fields as a whole. You can increase boon duration to make your Might or Regen last longer (through traits and runes/sigils only), but you can’t really itemize a support Staff other than Healing Power (which only benefits water) and survivability stats (which only benefits the players, rather than the skills themselves). There’s no way you can really make combo fields as a mechanic better without changing a whole bunch of other things. Increasing field size has too many other variables to consider (which ones deal damage, which ones have an effect that trigger only on the edges, etc.) and increasing duration is iffy because of zoning issues. There are also no stats that modify cooldowns, which is predominantly the limiting factor of Support Staff, but it would be universally overpowered if a cooldown reduction stat existed on gear for pretty much every class.

I honestly think that the weapons should dictate damage form or overall capability, while attunements should just work on the flavor. For example, the only weapon that even attempts follows this trend is the Focus, which is arguably situational, but survival oriented. The weirdest thing is that the Water abilities are comparitively aggressive or damage oriented. On the other hand, if you look at Dagger Offhand, it has two very supportive abilities (although I feel they’re justified because having to sit through a poison and cripple with 35% HP really sucks…), whereas the loose theme of Daggers is Close Range-Damage. D/D Earth can be itemized amazingly for (look at all that bleeding! AND you get a knockdown!), but if you take a look at D/D Air, is Power/Condition Damage gonna’ help you there? Crit would probably be a lot better for D/D Air.

There’s also the concept of, “Hey, you’ve got 20 weapon skills, so it makes sense for each individual ability to be weaker,” to look at. Thinking about it, yeah, it does make sense, but when the abilities don’t scale with your stat of choice, you’re actually much weaker than you should be. Each individual ability being weaker only makes sense if you look at it from a certain angle. If one weapon set was all upfront damage and worked great with Power/Pre/Crit Dmg, then sure, every skill on the weapon should be a little weaker because you’re doing your crit-direct-damage double whammie really well. But when your weapon set is direct damage, condition damage, boons, combo fields, projectile reflection, area slows, etc., then it’s hard to justify having dramatically weaker abilities with little stat affinity. Weakening abilities for jack-of-all-trades, master of none classes only works if they can do everything at a mediocre (or better, but not quite “best”) level at any given moment. This is definitely not the case for Elementalists, in my opinion. Having a central theme to your core mechanics is great, but there are certain things that shouldn’t really have too strict of a theme (breakdown of elements at the top), whereas others should be firm (weapon skills).

/endrant Phew! So, thoughts, opinions?