Snip
Part I
First step would be indeed making Elemental Attunement a baseline. The problem with ele is the fact it has the lowest hp and armour pool AND it depends on healing. You have very little ways of mitigating the potential damage unless you trait for protection on earth, which still worse than for example Blurred frenzy or stealth since protection can be stolen/removed/corrupted. The fact they think you should trait for this and put it as a GM trait makes me feel like they do not understand how difficult it is to play without these traits. Such a squishy class shouldn’t be revolved around healing, but rather avoiding the damage.There are several ways to fix this, but many of them seem rather crazy such as increasing the hp pool, removing cd from attunements…
What they need to do is simply improve the base defensive mechanisms of ele, while removing/nerfing/reworking traits that improve only ele’s defense, such as Geomancer’s defense, Stone heart…Ele cannot really afford losing more support traits (Evasive Arcana, Healing Ripple, Elemental Attunement…etc.).
The problem is that self healing of celestial ele is a bit too high, but it doesn’t bring as much support as shoutbow. The radius of all heals is rather a joke, it doesn’t have banner and it’s more vulnerable to burst despite of all healing. The issue is that nerfing ele sustain while not touching the support is has is tricky.
Cantrip Mastery just should be a baseline. There is no justification for those skills having such high cooldowns. Armour of earth is on 75 cd cooldown while you get 6 sec of prot and stab (without boon duration) that can be countered by single steal/shatter/corrupt boon. Mistform is again 75 sec cooldown while you cannot use your skills and it lasts 3 seconds. Compare it to Distortion, which can be up to 4 seconds on 47 seconds cd traited AND you can use all your skills. Same goes for lightning flash/Blink. Making it a baseline would mean other builds could pick up some cantrips while not being forced into water and you know…just because it’s dumb for cantrips to have such high cooldowns.
For other builds to be viable, there are things that need to happen:
1. Ele needs to get boon hate, it’s such an important thing for a dps spec to have. I would say this is very likely since they hinted this could happen.
2. It needs to have at least one on demand interrupt. Both comet and gale have quite long cast times and it’s VERY difficult to time the interrupt right seeing as lots skills worth interrupting have lower cast time than the cc skills.
3. Stealth. This would help ele gameplay so much. Obviously it wouldn’t have as much access to stealth as thief, but one or two abilites that would allow you to stealth and disengage would help tons. Fresh air has bascially no way of leaving a fight if fgs is on cd.
4. Rework to scepter. All AA’s on scepter are bad, Dragon’s tooth is still not ground targeted, shatterstone is still not worth casting and rockbarrier still have 1 sec cast time.
5. Actually having good skills on sword (or a different weapon depending if it’s really sword, hopefully not offhand). It’s crucial to have good autoattacks, without that the spec will just become the same fresh air is now. Nice burst but bad sustain damage. Just look at Spatial Surge or thief dagger chain and compare it to Flamestrike, Stone Shards…
6. Teleports. Once ele is out of cooldowns (50, 75 sec), it’s gonna have a bad time in a fight. There should be ways of getting out of AoE kitten that don’t have such high cooldowns. I would say this is likely, sword is really asking for teleports. Also, Arcane shield should be on 60 sec cd.
7. Rework on focus would be nice, too. Fire shield is just a joke and Freezing Gust is not really that useful either.Not all of these things need to happen, but if ele gets none, it just won’t have any viable dps specs.
Only thing I disagree here on is that the mesmer auto is good. Spatial surge does terrible damage just like most ranged autos. Mesmer sword auto is better but still / weak compared to almost every other melee auto.