Guild Wars 2

I do feel like the elementalist has two major flaws, leaving aside the little details. One is the major lack of survivability, that’s why spending points in water is a must…and many people especially those who like to WvW roam go dagger/dagger for mobility.

But the other major design flaw, which makes people invest in arcana is that attunement swapping becomes inefficient without it, which is nothing new. So if you want to invest in a burst build and stay in staff fire, you’ll be stuck in other attunements for too long if you don’t have points in arcana, etc..

Most people seem to be suggesting an attunement cooldown rejection across the board that is only slightly furthered with points in Arcana. But what is beyond is, why do not the cooldown naturally go lower for a specific element if you specialize in that element? Why can’t Earth CD go lower if you invest points in earth for example? especially when most of your traits are not in effect when you are not in earth (and it’s funny that even on top of that, arcana tree makes those attunement bonuses linger for 5 seconds, talk about adding insult to injury)

I understand that GW2 has a systematic design and each trait line gives 2 bonuses and it’d be off the system to give the elementalist 3 bonuses. But why would anyone spend points in any tree if they can’t have a high up time using it spells? especially when the elementalist is forced to switch to other elements for to get mobility or CC…for example all melee weapon sets as far as I know have a gap closer, D/D water doesn’t (and dagree necro). All melee weapons have a CC spell, D/D fire doesn’t. So you are forced to switch and wait a ridiculous duration to go back to the element you specialized in just because you needed to cast one spell from another element.

TL; DR

I believe a a cooldown reduction on all attunement cooldowns might be a little too much. But there should be a cooldown reduction on the elements you specialize in so you can have more up time instead of feeling like you wasted your trait points. The Arcana tree is the jack of all trades tree, but being an element specialist in nearly impossible without it.

Maybe each attribute should have a minor grandmaster trait that acts like you had max arcana, but only for that element. You’d also move the cooldown bonus to this trait (make it 30% cooldown).

So you’d have arcana elementalists that are good with all elements, but also ones that specialize in two elements and can keep coming back to them without arcana at all.

Interesting…but you’d have to make sure it doesn’t stack with Arcana, or you’d get people taking advantage of Elemental Attunement to stack boons indefinitely.

Everyone already goes 10 points in Arcana and honestly just for attunement changing its enough.

Staff already goes 20 points in Arcana for larger aoes, which is MORE then enough. Point is mute

I am using arcana 30 with elemental attunement, renewing stamina and evasive arcana. Arcana that high is good with some specific builds. What really makes me angry is the fact, that the attunement bonuses linger for 5 kitten seconds only. Instead of that I get a 7.5% chance at a crit (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Arcane_Precision) (which is 51% the way I play it with D/D) so the chance is round 3.8% that I get:
Fire: burning for 1 second
Water: vulnerability for 9 seconds
Air: weakness for 3 seconds
Earth: bleeding for 5 seconds
which is a LMFAO for a 25-minor!!! ANEt what the heck were you thinking here? Give me an additional 5 or 10s of attunement bonus and I am a happy customer… but 3.8% chance that anything happens is laughable :/

I have “only” 20 points in arcane at the moment and I still feel like attunment swapping is just a tad too slow. Wish they’d remove it all together, set the cooldown to 9 seconds and be done with it.

Ekove.4586:

I do feel like the elementalist has two major flaws, leaving aside the little details. One is the major lack of survivability, that’s why spending points in water is a must…and many people especially those who like to WvW roam go dagger/dagger for mobility.

But the other major design flaw, which makes people invest in arcana is that attunement swapping becomes inefficient without it, which is nothing new. So if you want to invest in a burst build and stay in staff fire, you’ll be stuck in other attunements for too long if you don’t have points in arcana, etc..

I have no points in water and only 10 in arcane yet I can still solo camps in WvW with S/F. Elementalist can either gain survivabilty from gear or traits. I went with an auramancer build and I have multiple ways to control my opponents or reduce the damage I will take with my weapons.

Also the highest burst build I have seen in a glass cannon 30-30-10-0-0 relies on staying in Air with arcane utilities. D/D is the only weapons set I would consider going 30 deep into the arcane tree with because of the low cooldown on most of the skills. Going that deep into the arcane tree with the other weapons sets are less appealing to me because the key skills would still be on cooldown.

I am using 0-25-0-15-30 for D/D solo play in WvW and PvE (unless in WvW defense or dungeons where Staff or S/D or S/F is required).
Yes really burst builds are 30-30-0-0-10 with air and arcane that hit really, really hard. The survivability however is low and such builds are good when:
a) there are 5 of you doing guerilla tactics (tried it out already with another 4 eles omg so much fun)
b) you like killing people and don’t care about repairing your armor
c) you are a suicide bomber maniac

Mostly b) and c) are interconnected, with a) being the ultimate upgrade to it

I prefer builds that rely on vigor and water and the ability to do good dps while being able to support whoever I meet out there in PvE and WvW. Till now that works for me as I am able to kill nearly anyone at 1:1 (or run away from them) and when in a group, the group does not get killed (that fast – still depending on the skills and brains of those kitten sapiens sapiens / neandertalis you play with)

The real problem I found with arcana isn’t the overall cooldown, but the attunement specific gcd. From my experience, anything less than 20 arcana and it becomes impossible to smoothly transition between the attunements because the global starts to trip you up. If they removed or at least significantly reduced the gcd, I would definitely put more points into the other lines.

Just remove it already.
After playing an engineer i’ve truly realized how stupid the CD is. It greatly limits our choices, combos and therefore creativity.
IMHO

If people don’t want to feel forced into arcana, we should get an elite signet that reduces attunement cooldowns inversely proportional to our points in arcana. The reduction at 0 points could actually be quite generous considering the act of simply attuning doesn’t have much impact without the traits to back it up. I don’t see people complaining about the arcana bonuses being OP. People just want more options. A second option might solve the issue without giving us lower attunement cooldowns for absolutely nothing.

I don’t mind points in arcana being a must so long as the other trait lines are designed assuming you have a minimum of 10 points in arcana. Based on the post about the profession philosophies, I’d say there is a good chance making people feel forced into arcana is intentional. None of the other trait lines combine with reduced attunement cooldowns as well as water does. Plus, fire, air and earth have very little synergy with other trait lines outside of gimmick builds. I say those 3 lines are the ones that need to be fixed before anything else.

See the point I am trying to make, sure even if you don’t play D/D, is that any build that doesn’t have arcana is somewhat of a cheesy glass canon build or something alike. While I’ll be repeating myself here, the point I was trying to make is attunement swapping is our class mechanic and our skills are designed on the basis that we will swap attunements.

We have several element/weapon combinations that completely lack CC and/or mobility which is not seen with any other weapon set in the game…take Staff Fire for example, absolutely no CC. So it’s designed on the basis that we get our CC from our profession mechanic….thus, fine, you can stay in fire all day staff, good luck doing it solo though.

This is similar for example to a condition build necromancer who uses deathshroud, but once they get out of deathshroud they can’t use conditions and benefit from their traits for the next 14 seconds unless they are specced for it.

Now would it be too strong to combine with Arcana? yes it might be….especially if you can stack those buffs. The only one that’d be a big deal is an Earth Arcana build since protection is better and harder to get than the other 3 buffs. Having the cooldown further reduced however for the element of your liking to under 9 seconds is really really not a big deal…Because our base cooldowns in the first place are kind of long. Take D/D for example which is the build you need to spec arcana most for. If you go arcana fire, the only spell you’d be able to use is firebreath since all your other cooldowns are longer than the attunement swap cooldown….so really, it is just the buffs that matter.

Then there’s always the solution of diminishing returns…or 9 seconds base cooldown in the first place that everybody is asking for.

If you lower the cd too much we could have too many perma boons(e.g. 10 sec initial cooldown leads to 4 seconds with 60% off). The cooldown itself is not a problem – I personally think one can go with 15 pts in arcana easy, if you utilize auto-attack a bit more.
The problem is that other traits are not so tempting so people put points into arcana.

Arcana is utility trait, it makes you overall better, Mesmers also have such trait line. It won’t change much as design but I prefer to have better grandmaster traits for the other trees(e.g. reduced cooldown for that element only and non-stacking with arcane global cd).

P.S. I mean no offense but stop thinking Ele is all about might stacks. A lot of players cycle through fire/earth skills before combat to get high might stacks and then have too many cooldowns when they engage.
If arcana does not provide additional Boon duration would you put 30 pts in it?

Ele is not about might stacks but they help with particular builds… Using SSo-Battle is then not required but helpful. In other cases you can go with Energy or Force or Accuracy or stack 25 times Power / CD or whatever you want to.
It just depends on what you want to play – what suits your style.
I can’t really answer your last question, as it provides additional boon duration. I assume that certain builds would still profit from the traits up to arcana 30…

Currently, it occurs to me that the biggest reason for the cooldown seems to be the active boni we get on the attunement swapping itself, so if it were nonexistant, people would feel to need to mash f1-f4 every few seconds to keep those boons up, which would probably be a bad thing, and for that alone, I concur.
On the other hand, I feel that the cooldown severely hampers the gameplay fluency of the class. Currently, it is mostly a bad idea to heavily invest in any single element, because your are locked out of your chosen element for quite a long time.

Example: Let’s assume you want to spec staff condition damage for pve, i.e. bleeds. Your staple skill is eruption, traited with a 4.5sec cooldown. Since you invested in condition damage already, you would like to swap to fire and drop a flame burst as well, and you would like to attack with either fire or air autoattacks. You can do that of course, but it would mean that you couldn’t make it back to earth in time to continue stacking bleeds, so your overall damage would actually decrease for doing that.

So my suggestion would be, put an internal cooldown on the boon gains from attunement swapping, and add -2sec or -3sec recharge for the chosen element to the minor traits in each line.

Aehm it is a stupid thing to mash F1-F4 like a madman only because it gives you boons… Playing like that is suicide.

Well the way it is like it is right now, the ele player has to decide, “will I go for an element or two” – earth in your example and fire – "or will I also invest in Arcana which allows me to work with all elements equally, use the potential of all of them however not at full strength because I don’t have enough points for it?

Your idea would make eles too powerful. I like it because I play one but I don’t see how to implement it w/o breaking the balance and mechanic of the game. If this would stack with arcana then I’d lmao at it totally…

@wintermute.4096 – about the staff. You can use Glyph of elemental power while in fire, swap to earth and spam weakness and bleeds. On top of that you have quite a good chance to cause burning. You get 3 conditions while in single attunement. Sure the burning is not that awesome but it can be re-applied. So it is all matter of choice really..

meh, i run staff on 30/30/10/0/0 for staff purely for WvW. from a primary dd point of view, swapping out of fire is only when u need a few extra location target aoes and the situational cc/heal, dps stays optimal for staying in fire.
people argue that eruption for bleed is important for the dmg but really theres plenty of cure condition and getting the enemy to hit eruption is a 50/50 chance at best unless u setup ccs beforehand in which case ur losing more time on dmg.

while placing at least some point in arcana is a near must in spvp. in wvw theres alot more option considering the seiges, and the # of players involved.

I’m only 15 into Arcane (going to 30) right now and I don’t have any problems with attunement swapping. I usually go Air → Fire → Earth with Water whenever I need to not die and never have any problems, but I guess that’s because I swap often and use up my cooldowns then move on.

My mistake when creating my first elementalist was treating him as a “Fire Mage” ala WoW. I thought, like previous MMO mage archtypes, you would be specializing in one “tree” of magic and that you wouldn’t use the other attunements much at all. That worked ok until I hit around level 30 and things got a lot harder and I had a hard time figuring out why because I was still enslaved to the classic notion of the WoW Mage.

I dont think attunement swapping is only for the boons…it is also for when you want a spell from another element that has a subpar auto attack.

For example, with Staff, Air Auto attack deals almost no damage…Earth deals half damage of fire/air, so useless unless you want the weakness/projectile finisher that will never make up for the reduced damage.

All of D/D auto attacks are really weak for “melee” attacks, save for Air which is kind of very glitch right now missing a lot.

Scepter, Water is decent, still doesn’t deal significant damage. Fire is sort of lame, Air is horrible. Only earth is “good”.

So the lack of good auto attacks is what forces people to attunement swap, not just the buffs. D/D ele almost never uses auto attacks in a competitive fight because they sort of suck compared to all other melee attacks (save for Necro daggers)

I dont have any arcane, seem to do ok. I tend to blow through my attunements fairly quickly too, but I dont mind sticking in one for a bit either if its all on CD. I feel like D/D has great spammables in earth/fire/lightning, the damage is pretty high, and water is nice for the regen if you are just recovering.