Guild Wars 2

Lingering Elements: Attunement bonuses linger for 5 seconds.

The boon you get from Elemental Attunement doesn’t change in duration with this skill. I assumed it meant the 5 point bonus in each tree, but taking the trait and switching in/out of Earth sees you lose your Toughness bonus as soon as you swap. Considering how useful Blast Staff is for WvW and how we need points in Arcana if you want to swap effectively, having a broken trait doesn’t make our already difficult lives any easier.

Lingering Elements doesn’t affect Elemental Attunement. It affects the 5-point traits in each of the other 4 trait lines, and any other trait that only is in effect when you’re in an attunement.

Haven’t you noticed that, with Lingering Elements, what happens is that, when you switch from, say, Water to Fire…

You see BOTH water and fire attunement icons on your little list of buffs, for 5 seconds?

This means that everything that affects SPECIFICALLY you being in that attunement will also linger for 5 seconds.

So the Earth trait, +80 Toughness, lingers. The Air trait, +10% move speed, lingers. The Water trait, regenerate HP, lingers. Flame Barrier? Lingers.

You know what else lingers? “+10% damage while in Air attunement” traits. All that stuff.

Affects that happen specifically when you switch attunements, however, such as applying boons to yourself, applying an aoe effect, those do not “linger” any longer.

I’m also wondering, exactly, how this interacts with skills like Glyph of Elemental Harmony and traits like Inscription or Elemental Surge or Evasive Arcana. I will need to test those out specifically, but I suspect that you get boons/effects from both attunements.

@Drake yes, that’s how you would assume it works. But to quickly test it, go to the Mists and put 15 points in Arcana and 5 in Earth. When you switch out of Earth, you keep the little icon on the bottom of the screen but you immediately lose your extra toughness.

And what’s weird is that if you do the same thing in water, your regen refreshes for those last five seconds. And considering how hard it is to test the other skills, I think we’d be better off getting a “it’s all fixed” message.

Rainsfords.7419:

@Drake yes, that’s how you would assume it works. But to quickly test it, go to the Mists and put 15 points in Arcana and 5 in Earth. When you switch out of Earth, you keep the little icon on the bottom of the screen but you immediately lose your extra toughness.

If THAT is the case, then it would be broken, yes. Definitely should report that!

So yeah, I did some testing in the Mists, and you’re right, it doesn’t affect Stone Flesh. It DOES however… affect Soothing Mist. You think it would affect both. I don’t have a reliable way to really test Flame Barrier or Zephyr’s Speed.

I have, however, been testing various skills for this trait, as best as I can without going out into the real world or getting help from other people, and have been updating the wiki accordingly.

So apparently I don’t have an edit button, again. But right now it doesn’t feel like Zephyr’s Speed lingers with this trait. Unfortunately, I have no objective measure to find out.

The only thing that I have noticed to “linger” is soothing mists. And by that I mean soothing mists does not apply to your character right away when you switch to water attunement, it takes a couple seconds to kick in before it actually appears, you can actually switch out of water attunement before soothing mists kicks in. Lingering Elements allows soothing mists to trigger (or re-trigger) even after you’ve left water attunement. (soothing mists is a 10 second buff that refreshes every ~5 seconds, it will “linger” by itself but it cannot trigger or refresh outside of water attunement, lingering elements extends the duration that it can trigger or refresh).

Everything else is broken when it comes to lingering elements. From the 5 point minor traits to the +10% dmg when in x attunement traits. Fixing this could go a long way to making elementalists better. (as well as shoe-horning elementalists into requiring ~20 pts in arcana to be effective, but thats another topic entirely)

There are certain other effects that take advantage of this, though there are some that seem like they should, and don’t. Elemental Surge and Glyph of Elemental Power benefit.

DrakeWurrum.6049:

So yeah, I did some testing in the Mists, and you’re right, it doesn’t affect Stone Flesh. It DOES however… affect Soothing Mist. You think it would affect both. I don’t have a reliable way to really test Flame Barrier or Zephyr’s Speed.

I have, however, been testing various skills for this trait, as best as I can without going out into the real world or getting help from other people, and have been updating the wiki accordingly.

I don’t think it affects Soothing Mist.

Soothing Mist get’s applied every once in awhile and has a 9 or so seconds duration when I glanced at it, so it remains in other attunments regardless of that trait.

Well I’m a bit slow lol.