Guild Wars 2

In earth attunement the sandstorm causes mass blind and a decent bleed stack, while water’s hailstorm quickly stacks a massive amount of chill on anything in the area. Both of these are on top of a quite respectable damage output. Meanwhile, firestorm and lightning storm have… mediocre damage and a 90% miss rate?

I mean, I wouldn’t expect them all to be precisely equal in usefulness, but that’s a pretty huge difference in utility and power. Can anyone explain this?

Bad game design coming from last minute changes and/or decisionmaking.

I’m sure the obvious answer is the right one, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing some kind of trait or combo that would make them as useful as the others.

Fire/Earth bring the damage, Lighting/Frost bring the mediocre damage and 90% miss rate. You’ve got it confused matey.

because when you summon an elemental, the earth one is the weakest the fire one is CLEARLY the best so it all balances out in the end perhaps to make the stances equal?

BishopX.6453:

because when you summon an elemental, the earth one is the weakest the fire one is CLEARLY the best so it all balances out in the end perhaps to make the stances equal?

Weakest how? Earth Ele may not dish out a ton of damage compared to the fire elemental, but he can take a lot more hits.

Fire is the most damage vs large targets, like bosses that don’t move much (Kol) or static objects (Graveling Burrows) because all the bolts hit the target. Much like staff fire/5. Seriously, it’ll burn through event targets (AC path 3 I’m looking at you) like nothing else.

Rhyse, you mean the air glyph right? Fire is just a standard dot aoe.

As far as this skill goes, I think fire could be fixed with a 1s burn on each hit, idk about air though.

Navzar.2938:

Rhyse, you mean the air glyph right? Fire is just a standard dot aoe.

As far as this skill goes, I think fire could be fixed with a 1s burn on each hit, idk about air though.

Air could cause vulnerability or daze.

I think daze would definitely be overpowered, but vulnerability could work depending on the stacks and duration.

Actually, a brief daze doesn’t sound too overpowering considering how few bolts actually hit. Nothing more than an interrupt though, something like 1/4-1/2 second. Vulnerability would work if the storm actually hit reliably or if it dropped huge stacks of it.

Also I must have won the AoE lottery when I was testing the hailstorm, it’s less accurate than I thought but it still averages 6-7 seconds of chill on small targets.

It might not be very powerful on only one or two opponents, but on a group that much rupting can be very powerful (and devastate some larger pve enemies, but most of them have stability or something anyway)
edit: tested it, averaged around 3 hits each on a target group over about 10 uses.

BishopX.6453:

because when you summon an elemental, the earth one is the weakest the fire one is CLEARLY the best so it all balances out in the end perhaps to make the stances equal?

I wouldn’t call any of the Elemental Summons clearly better or weaker than any of the other Elemental Summons. They just have different roles/niches. Fire is best when you need to put out heavy damage and don’t need to worry about it getting killed by attacks and aoes. Earth is best when your main focus is keeping mobs off of you or team mates. Air I’ve found to best in sPvP/Roaming WvW being fully ranged and providing swiftness and stuns, as well as some dungeon boss fights that are heavily anti melee. The water one chills and heals but I pretty much never use it, however I am sure others find it useful in some situations.

Earth elemental is the king. He does what we cannot.