Guild Wars 2

I used to play an elementalist and I liked it a lot.
Now I play a thief and it is just so much easier that I never log onto my elem any more.

I should mention that I play almost exclusively WvW but I think my analysis would hold for that other aspects of the game.

Without weapon-swapping an elementalist can only be strong at one range, long range with staff, melee with d/d, kind of in between with s/d but not as strong as either of the others.

Other classes don’t have this dichotomy (not sure about all but I am just going to talk the strong classes here, we don’t want elem balanced against other weak classes).
Warriors are strong in melee and have powerful long range rifle shots.
Thieves are strong in melee and shortbow clusterbomb is a powerful long range AoE.

Staff elementalist have very good long range AoE, and may be the best support class, but when an enemy gets in melee range the staff skills are just too slow.
Dagger elementalist are very strong but I would not say they are stronger than thieves or warriors (or guardians) in melee and they have no range ability to speak of.

Allowing an elementalist to weapon-swap would not make them twice as strong, it would just make them so they are not weak as kittens (actual word I chose, not language filter) when the fight moves from one range to another.

An elementalist that could swap between staff and d/d would not be the strongest class but it would be able to hold its own against the other strong classes.

Without weapon-swapping an elementalist can only be strong at one range, long range with staff, melee with d/d, kind of in between with s/d but not as strong as either of the others.

This is, for the most part, not true. Staff has no minimum range, it’s good anywhere from 1,200 to 0. D/D, the other extreme, is only effective damage wise when up close, but that skill set has so many gap closers it’s ridiculous. If a player can’t get into melee range, and stay there, it’s their fault not a flaw of the skill set. In WvW, D/D is worthless when standing on keep walls, yes. So don’t be dumb enough to get stuck on the keep walls holding dual daggers…

An elementalist that could swap between staff and d/d would not be the strongest class but it would be able to hold its own against the other strong classes.

An Ele that could swap, on the fly in combat, between staff and D/D would be an unkillable god. It wouldn’t just “hold its own,” it would wipe the floor with every other class, bar none.

If you don’t see this then you don’t understand the skill set of the class.

knockdown, dragon tooth phoenix, ring of fire firegrab, roll back fire charge dragons breath… and you think thats ok?

or how about the ultimate in overpowered…

staff… throw down rain, throw down puddle throw down frost field.
switch to scepter dagger fire
drop ring of fire+dragons tooth + phoenix+roll forward.

now lets just leave the damage you do OUT of the equation for a sec

you have just granted regen, frost armor, 4k healing burst, fury, swiftness, and 9 stacks of might to every teammate………… oh and you can do it all over again in 15 more seconds………. ya thats totally fine.

BishopX.6453:

staff… throw down rain, throw down puddle throw down frost field.
switch to scepter dagger fire
drop ring of fire+dragons tooth + phoenix+roll forward.

now lets just leave the damage you do OUT of the equation for a sec

you have just granted regen, frost armor, 4k healing burst, fury, swiftness, and 9 stacks of might to every teammate………… oh and you can do it all over again in 15 more seconds………. ya thats totally fine.

to be fair, I believe you will only get the area healing from rain. If you blast finish inside multiple combo fields, you only get the finisher from the first field placed (in your rotation, water from rain).

But yeah, you mean I could have all the mobility of D/D, the burst and gap closers, then switch to staff to get mass AOE, lots of CC, and the ability to blast finish my water fields for full hp healing? Yeah, we’d be overpowered unkillable gods.

On top of my head:

Staff healing rain, switch to s/d, DT, phoenix, earthquake, churning earth. (edit let’s add eruption)

That’s 10k healing potential, even more with bonus healing power and evasive arcana, that’s our base health.

Heck in spvp i would just switch between d/d and s/f just to get more combos, now that would be scary indeed: magnetic grasp and dragon tooth would be a nice example; being able to “blast” ring of fire 6 times to get 18 stacks of might; getting 4 auras; projectile and damage immunity from focus with d/d mobility…

No this is not the solution, it would just get Elementalists nerfed, I would agree if it was an out of combat swap: that would remove the need to open Hero panel and manualy swap weapons, I tend to do it a lot in wvw.

A couple of you have said that with weapon swapping elem would be unkillable gods…I really doubt that.
In WvW right now a lone elem is just a free kill. He can’t kill you with his staff — casts are too slow and red ring tells you when to evade — and he has no escape ability.

A weapon-swapping elem would be able to heal a lot, drag out the fight and maybe wear you down but the staff and scepter casts are too slow and even d/d doesn’t burst as much as other classes.

I don’t sPvP myself but when you do, the way it is right now, when someone sees that you are an elem do they run at you or away from you?

^ Occam. About 80% of players I encounter in Spvp learn to fear me by the end of the match. If they’re alone, they usually hesitate about engaging me, only for me to initiate on them and obliterate them. That or they run away. Give me one other weapons set to switch to, and I swear 1 will be able to 1 v 4 and take 2 people down with me.

it would be ok with just a double cooldown system: as soon as combat starts, a first timer starts too, for the weapon you have currently equipped, you cannot change it until that timer reaches 0. Then you can swap, but the timer starts again and so on until you either are dead, out of troubles or boasting somewhere.
You fear we would be godly? just make the swap cooldown longer than any amount of stackable combo boons.

Next excuse for being stuck in a single range of actions?

@Occam

You should check videos by daphoenix555 and IntigoGW2 and you will realize how strong can this profession be when played by somebody experienced. Now imagine if they were able to swap weapons in combat with standard cooldown.

Lone elementalists are free kill only if they are bad or they are specced for something very specific (like glass cannon siege defender holding a staff).

How about the more obvious option?

Give us weapon swap, but keep it so that whatever skill we`ve just used is still on cd for that numbered skill regardless of weapon.

There`d be no cries about OP heals, no Oh kitten! Dead two seconds later because someone saw the Ele` free kill (Hell, even I playing Ele` will target other Ele`, even if they`re middle of a huge pack ;p). No more Kitten, I`m stuck in combat yet again etc…

We already have the lowest health, of which I still don`t understand why.

There`s no reason why a caster class should be stuck to range with lengthy casts for defence that don`t do enough when a player is on top of you, nor D/D & having to /sit & /twiddle, because guards/players are hitting you from walls & you can`t do anything.

Every profession can run about with ranged & melee stuff, Ele` lost out here big time.

This has been repeating many times, and apparently it’s never ending.

The problems with range can and should be fixed with Conjure Weapons. Yes, conjures kinda suck at the moment, but that’s the source of the problem, not the lack of weapon swapping.

DiogoSilva.7089:

This has been repeating many times, and apparently it’s never ending.

The problems with range can and should be fixed with Conjure Weapons. Yes, conjures kinda suck at the moment, but that’s the source of the problem, not the lack of weapon swapping.

I firmly disagree: I refuse to waste an utility slot for a lack of class balancing. It’s a matter that must be dealt at class design level, not gaming style.

I’m fine with elementalists being locked into one weapon set in combat. I would, however, greatly advocate out of combat weapon swapping if only for convenience sake. It gets tiring having to go into my inventory and drag over a new weapon every time I want to swap sets.

Grevender.9235:

I firmly disagree: I refuse to waste an utility slot for a lack of class balancing. It’s a matter that must be dealt at class design level, not gaming style.

Except that what you call a lack of class balancing, is actually the opposite, a tool for class balancing.

Every profession in GW2 has weaknesses and strong points on purpose. A warrior will always be predictable, a guardian will alway be slow and rely on melee-range protection/ damage, an elementalist will always be restricted to a single range.

Being able to sacrifice something for something else would actually be balanced and, in fact, engineers are entirely built upon this idea. Do you think engineers are a disaster of game design or some kind? I sure don’t think so.

The idea of sacrificing utility slots to overcome class weaknesses is interesting, it’s there, and it’s just ineffective at the moment due to the overall power of conjures.

Giving 40 weapon skills to an elementalist would be absolutely crazy in the context of this game, extremely hard to balance, and would probably translate into a general nerf to all our abilities, as if they haven’t suffered enough already from attunements.

I just want an out of combat swap, for convenience’s sake, to reduce the unnecessary interface micromanagement.

I maintain that a weapon swap with very high penalties (40-second cooldown on the actual weapon swap itself and a 20-second unreducable cooldown of every attunement except the active one) would be a good comprimise, giving an Elementalist an “oh crap” button in the case where your weapon of choice just plain doesn’t work without making it something you can use / abuse like a normal weapon swap.

You’d be gaining an extra 5 skills every 40 seconds (and in return losing access to your other 15 skills for 20 seconds due to forced attunement cooldown), thats hardly broken, and in fact would be a detriment to use in any normal situation. But in a situation where you’re using Dagger / Dagger and fighting an enemy that completely screws you in melee, it would be a good emergency function.

This has been brought up before and the conclusion is no different from back then. Weapon swapping is not for elementalists, this has been decided, this is how it is made to work. It will not happen, accept it.

@DiogoSilva: it is lack of class balancing. “Balancing” means every class can do THE SAME, just in a different way. Well, we cannot change range and that is unique, not “balance”. Try seeing the other way around: imagine Elementalist gets a new elite skill “click here to nuke whole map” and everyone else just stare to the void we create: would you call that “balance”? Certainly not. Then why all other classes can change range whenever they want and how many times they want, and Elementalist and only Elementalist cannot?
I already gave my 2 cents on how it would be easy to implement the swap on elementalist without making it game-breaking, and will repeat it here: just add a swap cooldown timer which is longer than the duration of boon stack.
Eventually, they can either opt for that or getting rid of the timer but canceling ALL the boon at each swap: no boon overlap, no game breaking, only balance giving us the range adaptability we lack

Korath.7402:

I just want an out of combat swap, for convenience’s sake, to reduce the unnecessary interface micromanagement.

I’d love this as well. If they think that in combat weapon swiping makes for an unfair advantage, thats cool; but give us the weapon swap out of combat to protect our wvwvw staffs.

I find myself wishing for out of combat weapon swapping most when in wvwvw where I’ll use daggers to travel and staff when I’m in a group. Switching weapons on the fly with the Hero panel can be a dangerous blind few seconds when roaming a pvp heavy area.

I think Grevender has the right idea, a weapon-swap with a long cool down.

I don’t think it should be out of combat only because that would be no help in cases like where you are running across the map, see someone at a distance, cast a few staff attacks, then they turn and charge you and can do nothing but wish you had changed to daggers before getting into combat.

A weapon-swap cool down of something like 20 seconds would let you set up a combo field, swap and use a finisher to get some burst then everything would be as it is now until the swap timer is up.
And think about what it would mean for the second swap, if you started with a staff then swapped to daggers, if you swap back you will be stuck with your weak-at-close-range weapon for the next 20 seconds.
After that you’d be able to set up your preferred burst combo rotation again but I don’t think it would be OP to be able to do that once every 40 seconds.

Only if there is a one minute cooldown, or even longer. I am normally DD, but I carry a staff and scepter just in case. Having a slot to put them in where I could switch would be nice… but the timer would have to start as soon as combat does, that way it can’t be abused.

For example…
Im in a fight with my staff. As soon as combat starts, my switch button greys out and the timer for one minute ticks down. After a minute, its usable.

Most fights would be over in a minute (at least in WvW, if someone is attacking you, it should be) So that doesnt leave room for huge damage/healing abuse until a minute in, and unless you are good at strafing and dodging, you will either have killed your opponent or died by then.

A weapon swap every 40 seconds would still make you overpowered once for every 40 seconds. It would be nerfed as fast as the Guardian’s “Save Yourselves!” was for the last patch (it was a skill that made them overpowered at the cost of a high recharge).

Weapon swapping outside of combat would be confusing to many people, who would then believe it would be an in-combat bug, or demand for an in-combat swap. Maybe a better solution would be the creation of keybinds to automatically equip weapons in our inventory?

@DiogoSilva: it is lack of class balancing. “Balancing” means every class can do THE SAME, just in a different way.

Doing through utilities is a different way to acchieve the same thing.

Also worth nothing, as an example, that a Guardian lacks good ranged options, but they also have plenty of good closegaps, teleports and anti-ranged skills.

Yes, conjure’s should be the answer here. Not every weapon set is good in every format – that goes for all classes. Staff can be used anywhere from 0-1200 range. You are NOT STUCK at 1200 range. Stop spewing this garbage.

If the enemy is about to break through the doors and you want D/D, get out of combat and swap to D/D. Not too bloody hard. D/D may only be effective up close, but you have plenty of CC and gap closers. If you get kited in D/D, you’re doing it wrong.

This class is plenty powerful, and comparing it to things like Thieves which ONLY bring damage and mobility, with very little CC is stupid. Any Ele build can bring AoE healing, condition removal, damage, CC, etc., etc. You can’t say our burst is less than Thief burst and expect buffs unless you also want to lose your essentially built-in support and survivability.

Weapon-swapping would only serve to get every single one of our weapon skills nerfed because having 40 of them to choose from would be stupidly powerful.

And before anyone says, “lol wut survivability?!” feel free to roll a backstab Thief and try to kill my D/D Ele. Then try to do it before I kill you.

Such anger from the aptly named Animosity lol.

I never said elem were STUCK at 1200 range, I said elem S_UCK at melee range with a staff.

Don’t conjures have a limited number of charges? Or is it a time limit? I forget I only used one once because it seemed pretty subpar compared to the other things I wanted to slot.

If you think elementalists are plenty powerful fine. I enjoyed mine while I played it. Now that I have tried a thief and experienced how much better they are I can’t bring myself to log back on my elementalist but I am not going to delete him. I expect that eventually elem will be brought up to thief level or thief will be nerfed down to elem.

I don’t doubt that there are many fine pvpers playing elementalists, but overall, you don’t see many posts in other threads complaining about how OP they are.

A water-traited ele with toughness/ vitality/ healing can stand against anything and still deal decent damage back. But a power ele will take 8k damage from a single backstab, taking away 60% of their HP, and the time it takes to switch attunements and cast defensive skills is the time they take to spam auto-attack and kill you. Yes, you’ll die even with shocking aura on. Power elementalists are beyond terrible.

And yes, conjures are the answer, but conjures need to be more effective. They’re subpar now.

what bout an inbetween just make it quicker to get out of combat. i just hate having to run away for 30 seconds when a single guy turns to a zerg and i ahve to ditch my team. its not like im runing from someone and it still takes forever, thats my only problem. why not make it so if your not hit for 5 seconds your out of combat and then you open your inv and switch. and you can make a separate out of combat thats the same as now for allowing you to go to the waypoint which will stop people from running and teleporting.

Occam.9841:

I used to play an elementalist and I liked it a lot.
Now I play a thief and it is just so much easier that I never log onto my elem any more.

I should mention that I play almost exclusively WvW but I think my analysis would hold for that other aspects of the game.

My main is a Mesmer, my alt is an Elementalist. I play them about equally in PvE and elly a bit more in WvW, though this has nothing to do with their relative power, but with how fun both are.

Without weapon-swapping an elementalist can only be strong at one range, long range with staff, melee with d/d, kind of in between with s/d but not as strong as either of the others.

This is not true. First of all, with every class you pick your primary weapon and build around it. The secondary weapon will never be as strong as your primary choice, unless you go into a less powerful hybrid.

Secondly, elementalists DO have weapon “swaps” in the form of vastly underused Conjured Weapons. A staff elementalist with lightning hammer can deal close range damage, while a D/D elementalist with frost bow can deal long range damage. One could argue that by using those, one loses a utility slot, but then, we have to take into consideration that elementalists have a larger number of skills to choose from in the first place, many of which have clear utility properties and that the same also holds true for engineers (for instance, popular grenade engineers). Granted, Conjures have their problems (main of which is lack of scaling, same as engineer’s kits), but they can nontheless fulfill the role of variable damage range, if needed – most people simply opt against them in favor of further boosting their primary weapon, something other classes can’t do.

Thus, adding weapon swaps to elementalists would be counter productive in a number of ways, whereas improving Conjures to make them more desireable would be a much wiser decision.

But a power ele will take 8k damage from a single backstab, taking away 60% of their HP,

The same holds true for any purely offensive spec, thief, mesmer, whatever. The answer really is simple – don’t go into a fight unprotected, you can’t always initiate combat and you can’t always choose where you’ll fight

Being able to switch weapons in combat sounds great, but I’m afraid that it might make good ele players extremely dangerous and it my lead to weapon skill nerfs, because Anet is balancing around good players and not baddies, which makes sense of course.

I agree with OOC weapon swap and with “revisiting” conjured weapons. After that we will see what is really needed and what is not.

Adding a huge feature like this before fixing all the bugs and balancing all already available skills doesn’t sound like a good idea.

Yeah switching weapons in combat would be awesome but i think you’re looking at the elementalist all wrong.

yeah elementalist have to commit to one range while other profession can have two different one.

But the ele as the the tools with all of his weapons to deal with everything because of his larger skill set. I agree that dépending on the weapons you’re using it’s harder to deal with melee or high range sure, but it is not impossible, and in the other hand you are really strong against the other one.

I don’t know if all this was really clear but short answer:
I don’t think eles should have acces two combat weapon swap

everyone saying conjured weapons are the answer is arbitrarily assuming that I want to deal damage.
Last time I wished to switch weapons was during an hard boss fight: there were lots of ppl battling strong bosses and many were just dying. Since I am d/d I knew that going melee on those bosses would just mean another one down, so I tried to run as far as possible to open inventory and switch: surprise! the area was closed, and “circled” (marked as event area) preventing me to equip the staff staff and actually HELP other ppl.
I just wanted to heal them, without absolutely thinking to engage the bosses.

We need the weapon swap: just add a timer which cancels boons stack and poof the fear of having an overpowered “unkillable god” is gone.

We need the weapon swap: just add a timer which cancels boons stack and poof the fear of having an overpowered “unkillable god” is gone.

I’ve already made my thoughts on this known, but the power of having a weapon swap for Ele has very little to do with boon stacking, and everything to do with just the sheer number of control skills, healing skills, AOE and damage skills available to us should we be given a total a 40 skills to choose from. Just making the boon stack wipe on swap still does not address how grossly overpowered we would be. (if you don’t think we’d be grossly overpowered with a weapon swap option, you’re probably not playing the class up to it’s full potential as it is, doubling the amount of buttons you’d have to press to accomplish the same thing won’t help you with that…)

If Anet ever gave us an in-combat swap, they’d have to go through all of our weapon skills and nerf them (e.g., reduce damage, reduce healing, increase cooldowns, limit combo field/finishers, etc.) to rebalance us in light of access to 40 skills (cause we’re already quite balanced with 20).

People already cry “I have to use 10 skills to do what a thief/warrior/mesmer does in 3, wah.” Should a swap-then-nerf total class overhaul go through, cue the chorus of “I have to use 20 skill to do what a thief/warrior/mesmer does in 3, wah.” It would never end. We are quite fine right now with access to twice as many skills as any other class (save a kit-wielding Engi), make due with them.

Edited to add: Sorry for the “elitist tone” of this post, but we should all be sick of these “Ele’s need a weapon swap” threads popping up on the forums since the day the forums launched. We don’t need it, Anet feels the same (hence why they didn’t include it), and arguing for it would probably hurt the class more than it would help cause they’d have to rebalance everything FORCING every Ele to use it along with 40 weapon skills to maintain their current performance. Seeing as how the Ele class if already one of the tougher classes to play properly (not that ANY class is hard to play) this will not help you. If you’re concerned about getting stuck on the keep walls in WvW while wielding dual daggers, put Frost Bow on your bar and lobby for conjures to be buffed (cause we can probably ALL agree that should happen). Problem solved!

Grevender.9235:

…

I don’t think that your very specific scenario is a reason that we need a weapon swap. 99% you would be able get OOC and switch your weapon or use #2 & #5 in water with your D/D.

Having a weapon swap is not only about boons on you. As a example being able to switch between D/D and Staff enables us to provide a lot of control. You can also provide more combo abilities and stack a lot of boons on allies.

It is not that simple and adding such a feature requires a lot of thinking, because things my easily go wrong (not for us, but for the game balance).

<rant>
I wish some of you guys were a game designers, so you will realize how difficult it is. There are people all over the forum coming with “great” ideas after 2 minutes of thinking. If Anet was implementing such a huge changes without any deeper thinking at all we would be pretty screwed.
</rant>

Sorry for the rant.

I just wanted to heal them, without absolutely thinking to engage the bosses.

To me, that’s actually part of the challenge. With the Elementalist, you really need to plan ahead what you plan on doing. Not just for damage dealing, but for team support as well. The tactical choice you make when picking daggers is to go for damage instead of support…that’s a choice you’ll have to live with! You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Now, you may argue that other classes aren’t hindered by such things but I’ll have to disagree. And that’s because for other classes, the differences lie more between ranged or melee, defensive minded weapons vs offensive minded weapons.

But not like the elementalist, who can choose between party support or solo damage dealer. The real issue here is that the differences between elementalist weapons are more akin to differences between builds than differences between weapons. You cannot add weapon swapping and expect everything to be fine…because it won’t be.

The same holds true for any purely offensive spec, thief, mesmer, whatever. The answer really is simple – don’t go into a fight unprotected, you can’t always initiate combat and you can’t always choose where you’ll fight

Except it doesn’t. A thief has stealth, a mesmer has clones and stealth. A thief has better armor, and a mesmer has beter HP. A thief and a mesmer can burst in 2-5 seconds, which gives them time to finish their burst and defend themselves.

A power elementalist can’t do that. Due to the nature of how elementalists work, we can’t burst in 2-5 seconds. We need double the skills and double the time. That means we’ll never be able to finish our burst, because we’ll die beforehand. The only solution we have is to interrupt our burst to use survival skills, but there’s a large difference between a power elementalist that takes 5k-8k damage even with shocking aura on, and heals almost nothing with their heals, and a defensive elementalist that takes 1k-2k damage per hit and heals a good chunk with their heals. That means that a power elementalist can’t defend themselves, because their defensive skills only delay the inevitable: their death. That would be fine if they could still burst, but they can not burst, or else they die two times faster than the time they take to kill. Burst elementalists can’t do anything the moment they are targetted.

There’s a reason for why you don’t see people playing fire/ air burst elementalists. We’re good at sustained damage (from conditions or normal skills) with our more defensive setups, because we’re constantly switching between damage and defensive skills without dying easily. And that because we have an earth traitline and good amulets that makes us very defensive while boosting our condition damage very high. In fact, condition damage is a good way to keep dropping down the HP of our opponents while we’re busy surviving ourselves. These builds actually work.

Power elementalist builds don’t work. They can’t properly do their function because the bursting power is too weak to compensante for the amount of (offensive and defensive) skills they have, but then their defensive skills are too weak because we’re talking about builds that invested on boosting mediocre burst skills.

It’s threads like this that remind me why people think eles are terrible. Just a large amount of L2P in this profession.

Electro.4173:

I maintain that a weapon swap with very high penalties (40-second cooldown on the actual weapon swap itself and a 20-second unreducable cooldown of every attunement except the active one) would be a good comprimise, giving an Elementalist an “oh crap” button in the case where your weapon of choice just plain doesn’t work without making it something you can use / abuse like a normal weapon swap.

You’d be gaining an extra 5 skills every 40 seconds (and in return losing access to your other 15 skills for 20 seconds due to forced attunement cooldown), thats hardly broken, and in fact would be a detriment to use in any normal situation. But in a situation where you’re using Dagger / Dagger and fighting an enemy that completely screws you in melee, it would be a good emergency function.

Quoting this because apparently people overlooked it and it solves the problem that everyone keeps bringing up about having “40 skills”.

With something like this you’d have access to 25 skills, assuming you blow all your skills before weapon swapping. The other 15 skills of the swapped weapon would all be unavailable for 20 seconds, which would be too long to really consider “access to 40 skills at once” IMO. A 5-skill increase isn’t bad, especially when you consider that in order to gain those 5 skills you’re locking yourself out of all switching for 20 seconds, so you’re losing a lot of versatility for a pretty decent period of time just to “gain” those 5 skills.

Quoting this because apparently people overlooked it and it solves the problem that everyone keeps bringing up about having “40 skills”.

With something like this you’d have access to 25 skills, assuming you blow all your skills before weapon swapping. The other 15 skills of the swapped weapon would all be unavailable for 20 seconds, which would be too long to really consider “access to 40 skills at once” IMO. A 5-skill increase isn’t bad, especially when you consider that in order to gain those 5 skills you’re locking yourself out of all switching for 20 seconds, so you’re losing a lot of versatility for a pretty decent period of time just to “gain” those 5 skills.

Still a fairly dangerous route for a couple reasons. One, 20s isn’t really that long, by the time you’re done using up the 5 skills on the bar you’re half way to being able to swap again.

Also, I can imagine running S/D, stacking like 15 might stacks in fire in a couple seconds, then quick-swapping to staff to drop a meteor shower from God, Lava Font, and Flame Burst onto the enemies node scattering them like roaches. Getting those 15 stacks that quick is very difficult with a staff in your hand, with a S/D? It’s part of everyone’s rotation practically. (you’d have to implement a boon wipe like that mentioned earlier in this thread)

Or if you’re low on health running D/D, swap to water, use up cleansing wave then quick-swap to staff and drop a geyser to dodge roll (evasiva arcana) into healing yourself to full. Now you’re stuck in staff water for 20s, but you can group heal, frozen ground, drop a few ice spikes, and you’re off and running (dying in 20s with staff/water is your hands is next to impossible). You can use up all your S/D burst, then swap out and heal in staff, it brings too much healing potential. Who cares if you’re stuck there for a measly 20 seconds.

All-in-all, why are people still arguing for a weapon swap?!? It brings hardly ANY benefit other than those odd occasions where you’re dumb enough to get stuck standing on the keep walls in WvW with a dagger in your hands and frost bow not on the bar, and opens up a pandora’s box of potential exploits, imbalances, and would require just a complete class overhaul. It’s not needed, can we let the dream die please! The horse is dead, STOP BEATING IT!!

I haven’t read everything but from what I can gather Bsquared has the right idea for a start, I mean staff + S/D combo would be so freakin OP, that would mean you have the most combo fields AND blast finishers (And we all know blast finishers is where the magic happens), not to mention 40 skills to pick and choose at whim, heck some of the combinations I can think of would keep a player permanently CC’d no matter how many stun-breakers they pack.

Now to another point, STOP SAYING THAT STAFF IS LONG RANGE ONLY, kitten me.
If you are smart, which I hope you lot are you would realize that staff is more about dancing just outside of their melee range, how else do you suppose you get guaranteed hits on your AoEs? Force them to walk through your cripple/frozen ground or get the bit eruption hit off? We have so many CC skills to slow them down, evade out of damage or knock them back to get us some breathing room if they’re on our kitten.

Only thing wrong with the Ele is the fact that we have a cannon made out of wet tissue paper and buggy traits but get in line, there are other classes that are in the same boat.

Now I’ll go back to day dreaming about the day we get a poly morph skill in which we get to turn people into kittens. Kittens, Kittens everywhere! ._.

@Bsquared:

don’t worry, you don’t look “elitist”, I am sure you can do your work I am playing since one month and am currently only lv70, so I agree about how much I still have to learn about how to play.
Still, I can’t see any game balance threat to weapon swap if:

- swapping cancels all boons
- negate any combo field from previous attunement
- keeps the skill cooldown timer (i.e: if you swapped after using churning earth, you will wait full cooldown until staff earth #5 is available again)

I would only see a true step forward true balance, giving Elementalist the range we lack now.

@kubets:

you don’t want to stand in the middle of super champion AoE with skills #2 and #5 xD, especially when you know that you can do way better from 1.200 range with a staff.

@ThiBash:

well, I was just soloing, and happened to be involved in the event by pure chance…

@Grevender:

I wrote that your example is very specific and 99.9% of the time you can easily switch to a staff. It is not something you are facing all the time and you are getting frustrated. At least I haven’t and I’ve played 300+ hours on my elementalist.

It is not really an argument for weapon swapping because majority of the time you can leave the combat. Planning in advance also helps and if you see that “super champion” you can (/should) switch to your staff right away.

On one side it will help with scenario like you described. On the other side tho you have either possible imbalance or strange complicated system of boon stripping, cooldowns, combo fields negation, etc. I really doubt implementing such a feature is worth the time and effort currently.

I’m personally against it until other issues are fixed, developers are really bored and they have a lot of time to implement it really well. I doubt it will ever happen.

They could make the cool downs on weapons swap over come the possible OPness. There really isn’t an excuse for the Elementalist being the only class without the ability. Other than laziness or simply not giving a kitten about the class.

As for our weapon conjure skills, well they need a bit of a rethink. You should be able to swap to your other elements and then back to the weapon conjure as long as the timer is still up. An Elemetalist stuck in one element is a dead Elementalist. Right now the skills are pure garbage.

Would be nice, but it would mean nerfs to the weapons as its too powerful to have d/d then switch to staff.

They are both extremely powerful with the drawback is that youre stuck with them. Also if you think elementalist is a lot of work now, try doubling it. Per their M.O. they will balance it around you tap dancing around those keys like Michael Jackson on speed (or is that an oxymoron?)

I think Kilger brings up the real point of difference between those who think weapon-swapping would be OP and those who think it would not.

he says “[staff and d/d] are both extremely powerful.”

I don’t think that is true.
They are both kind of powerful in their own way but not more powerful than what other strong classes get.

Elem d/d is not more powerful than a thief in melee.
Yeah, sure some of you great players can hold your own against a thief but there are plenty of threads where elem complain about how OP thieves are, there are no threads where thieves complain about how OP elem are.
It’s easy to find post by you great players bragging about how you kill thieves. Thieves don’t brag about killing elementalists, they just accept it as natural.
Staff elem have more long range AoE attacks than thieves, but shortbow thieves get 1200 range clusterbomb AoE. It is faster casting than elem staff attacks and only cost 3 initiative so can be pretty much chain cast.
Thieves can switch between their powerful melee skills and powerful long range skills while in combat.

Bsquared makes it sound like it is only the ‘odd occasion’ of being up on a keep wall where it’s bad being stuck with daggers.
If your goal is to actually contribute to your team in WvW you will have you staff equipped almost all of the time. It is the best weapon for an elem on top of the wall or at the bottom of the wall or in open field stand-offs between big groups which happen all the time in my experience.
What are you going to do with your daggers when 2 large groups are pushing each other across a bridge? Are you going to use one of your gap-closers to zip across the AoE filled no man’s land and try to melee someone. Congratulations, you just got tab-targeted and insta-jibbed by 20 people. We’ll rez you when we get there.
Are you going to sneak around the flank and pick off an unsuspecting straggler?
Ooh, congratulations, you got one! But someone else noticed you and mist form doesn’t clear target like thief stealth does. Well, you lived for a few extra seconds. Don’t worry, just lay there. We’ll rez you when we get across this bridge.

Or maybe you open you inventory and change to a staff for the bridge fight.
Yay! We pushed them back. They have broken and are scattering, all we have to do is mop up now. Yeah, go, chase them down. Nice you landed Shockwave and the immobilize lets you catch up to the runner. Uh oh, he’s turning to fight. Crap your staff attack are too slow. Hurry open your inventory. Oh, I’m sorry you can’t switch to your daggers while you’re in combat. Don’t worry, just lay there. We’ll come rez you once we’ve killed the rest of these guys.

@Occam:

You cannot really compare thiefs weapons with elementalist’s one. Apples and oranges. At 1200 range Cluster Bomb is definitely not faster than staff skills, because of the arc. Staff has less damage than shortbow, but lot more utility and it is the same when comparing D/D ele and D/D thief.

When arguing against weapon switching nobody is saying that our raw damage from combining our weapon sets will be insane. The thing is that we have access to lot more skills which also means lot more control and combo potential. To solve all these issues they will need to introduce non-trivial system of weapon switching for us and/or change/nerf our skills.

Also not everyone is playing with zerg in WvW and I don’t agree with your “if your goal is to actually contribute to your team in WvW you will have you staff equipped almost all of the time.”. You can help capping camps (ele can solo them non-upgraded camps too), intercepting dolyaks, clearing the sentries. Denying supply plays a big role in WvW. Often few good players doing these things are more helpfull for the server than when they join 40-man zerg.

And to see how much survivability and harassment potential D/D has even against bigger group of enemies I would like to recommend you checking out for example this video.

You may not want to compare thief skills to elem skills but those are the skills being used to kill you. And for an elem to kill a thief is an accomplishment, for a thief to kill an elem is nothing to brag about.

Occam.9841:

You may not want to compare thief skills to elem skills but those are the skills being used to kill you. And for an elem to kill a thief is an accomplishment, for a thief to kill an elem is nothing to brag about.

Thiefs and elementalists are different and have different weapons. Thiefs are mostly about big damage and their skills are reflecting that. They don’t have the utility of elementalists and therefore allowing us to get their kind of damage would be just crazy.

Also thiefs with stealth and burst are ultimate player-killing profession and therefore it would be quite silly if thiefs were bragging about killing players from stealth in under 2s. In 1v1 where good ele is facing a good thief it is not that easy for the thief to win.

Also skill floor for thiefs are lot lower than the one for elementalist so if you add that to the fact they have their burst + stealth it is quite obvious that most of the elementalist will be a food for thiefs. On the higher level things doesn’t look that bad and it is well-known that anet is balancing around that level of play.

Alright if you like it the way it is. I play a thief now anyway so if you don’t mind being a free kill I won’t keep trying to talk you out of it.

Thats only one part of my argument, the other is the additional work load to make 2 weapons (with 4 attunements each) work!!!!

It would be assumed that we have access to all these abilities while they are balancing. Which includes some very nice fields in staff which could be made extremely powerful with the blasts in dagger. There would be a new round of balancing.

And one of the main complaints I already notice is there are too many buttons to push for this class.

Sorry but I think this would be a step in the wrong direction. If anything push for some long range attacks in d/d, or heavier defenses to outlast a spike.

Giving Ele weapon swap would not only be OP, it would also be incredibly complex to manage, and it is definitely NOT necessary for balance.

For those complaining that Ele is at a disadvantage because they are locked into one range…give me a break, this is theorycrafting at its finest.

I play D/D in WvW a LOT, and let me tell you…my lack of range is not an issue for me. I have a ridonkulous amount of gap closers, and can have swiftness up 100% of the time. I don’t think I’ve ever been kited, and I can catch pretty much any class except for a thief that I lose track of while in stealth.

Believe me, a D/D Elementalist has the ability to force an opponent into melee range if they want.

Occam.9841:

Alright if you like it the way it is. I play a thief now anyway so if you don’t mind being a free kill I won’t keep trying to talk you out of it.

Thank you. You are too kind!

I also don’t think that weapon swapping has anything to do with ele vs thief “metagame” because most of the kills are caused by stealth and burst which is nothing that weapon swaps will help with.