Guild Wars 2

Instead of just complaining and raging about how elementalists are so incredibly weak, I’d like to point out the reasons I feel they’re lacking in comparison to other professions. I’ll be listing skills, traits, and other aspects of the profession along with their flaws. Your thoughts and comments are welcome as well.

Dagger (MH):
As is true for all weapons, the weapon an elementalist chooses to equip determines the unvarying diameter in which they can damage foes. Unfortunately, a dagger equipped in the main-hand slot provides the lowest range of all. It wouldn’t be as bad if the damage compensated for the lack of flexibility, but to be frank, it doesn’t. The potential damage from using a dagger in the appropriate range is equal to, if not less than, what an ele is capable of dealing using only the first three abilities of each attunement with a staff from more than twice as far. So what incentive is there for using a main-hand dagger at all?

• Lightning Touch – It lacks damage. It has the same cast time as the air auto-attack, but deals half the damage. Yes, it causes weakness, but very few skills benefit from the chance that a player will be unable to dodge. And as for the defensive appeal, a defensive skill based on luck is far from reliable. (I’ll talk about this again further on)

• Magnetic Grasp – The skill is buggy. It can sometimes cause the caster to move to their target, but remain locked in the animation until the skill finishes channeling, which can take a good seven or eight seconds. It’s really only useful if you’re fighting something that is focused on another target and you’re willing to risk stunning yourself.

Dagger (OH):
I use a dagger in my off-hand slot for both PvE and PvP. I find it considerably useful in PvE, so I’ll focus on where it comes up short in terms of PvP.

• Ride the Lightning – It has risks similar to magnetic grasp, except a lot more common and strangely random. I think most people are aware of this by now.

• Churning Earth – While I love this skill, it’s practically a joke. It has a five second cast, and catching anyone in it is either pure luck or simple ignorance. It’s easy to interrupt, and dodging to avoid it is even easier (Especially considering you can regenerate a third of the endurance needed for a dodge during the cast time). You may think pairing it with lightning touch would be affective, but even with weakness on your target, they can just run out of the circle before you finish casting. I pair it with earthquake and arcane shield and hope that the person I’m fighting will both stay in range and fail to get three attacks off before he attempts to interrupt me. But even if the stars align and all of that happens, I still need it to crit for it to do a decent amount of damage. Oh, and it also recharges for its full 30 second cooldown when interrupted rather than the normal 4 seconds other skills receive.

Scepter:
I feel like the scepter definitely outshines any other weapon choice, and the flaws I see with it are relatively minor.

• Dragon’s Tooth – It’s probably fine for PvE, but the damage doesn’t seem like a fair trade for the effort it takes to keep somebody in its range in PvP situations. A larger range or damage increase would seem like a reasonable fix.

• Shatterstone – It does the same damage as the auto attack, but in a small AoE burst. It is only useful when fighting multiple foes that you can keep inside of its range, which for the most part will only be in PvE combat. It’s a lot easier to spam auto-attack when fighting a single target or another player.

Staff:
The skill set that accompanies a staff is, in my opinion, the one that requires the most effort to affectively use. Eight of the 20 abilities you have are ground targeted, half of which have either cast times in which you can’t move or short moments before their initial damage is actually dealt. I feel like this makes it virtually unviable for PvP, and a poor weapon for any combat involving a moving target.

• Lightning Surge – As a single-target skill, the damage doesn’t fit with the other abilities of the weapon, and its blind is nearly impossible to time correctly with its cast time. Increasing the damage dealt, having the blind cast immediately, or making the blind cast at the end of the skill AoE based would make it significantly more useful.

Focus:
The focus is the strongest defensive weapon available to the elementalist. Paired with a scepter it provides great support and utility, but at the cost of being able to do reasonable damage. I haven’t tried it, but pairing it with a dagger may work nicely.

• Flame Shield – The cooldown doesn’t seem fair for a three second shield that only causes one second of burning per hit. You’d need impeccable timing to use it immediately when somebody uses a skill that hits repeatedly in a short window of time for it to cause any significant damage.

• Comet – Perhaps a little overpowered in PvE situations with multiple mobs, but due to its short delay it’s impossible to hit a moving target with it unless they are slowed. The obvious solution is to use freezing gust with it, but using two skills just so one isn’t wasted isn’t exactly ideal. And it’s actually quite common in most elementalist skill sets.

Trident:
To be fair, I haven’t experienced enough underwater combat to feel confident in my opinion on the skills. Feel free to comment on these.

Utilities:

• Conjure Weapons – As of right now, I think conjure weapons are amongst the most useless utility skills available to elementalists. You’re sacrificing fifteen of your skills for five average skills (Heck, two of the conjured axe skills are fire fields) that have regular cooldowns. It’d be nice if there were a trait that sacrifices the second summoned weapon and gave yours double the normal charges, or a trait that reduced the cooldowns of all conjure weapon skills by twenty percent.

• Arcane Power – It simply doesn’t do as the tooltip says. Your next five attacks do not do critical damage regardless of whether or not you cast all five immediately.

• Mist Form – It’s a three second long partial invulnerability. It blocks direct damage, but not condition damage. It also ends Tornado prematurely if cast while in mist form.

Elites:

• Tornado – Not having access to your heal or other utilities while in tornado form make it incredibly weak for an elite skill. You can easily be kited while it’s active and the damage from switching to the electrified stance doesn’t compensate for it. In PvE scenarios, it isn’t much more useful. Most of the time when there’s a large group of mobs, flinging them apart isn’t the best thing to do. I do use Tornado as my elite in some explorable dungeons as a defensive cooldown to mitigate some of the damage with mass blinds, but it is definitely not worth the thirty skillpoints it costs.

Traits:
I may add my thoughts on traits later on. I’ve got someplace I need to be soon though, and this took much longer to type out than I expected it to.

Alex Kelley.2748:

Staff:
The skill set that accompanies a staff is, in my opinion, the one that requires the most effort to affectively use. Eight of the 20 abilities you have are ground targeted, half of which have either cast times in which you can’t move or short moments before their initial damage is actually dealt. I feel like this makes it virtually unviable for PvP, and a poor weapon for any combat involving a moving target.

Nop, u can move while casting all most all of them, u can’t only move when casting “Meteor Shower”. The only think that it will stop from casting it is if u would dogde something.

From what I have tryed from PvP ( I only do for the monthly, I’m more an PvE person ) it is viable to use staff, from 1vs1 that i have been, i didn’t have any problem’s to chase them and kill them :P.

The only think that they could do, is to reduce the CD on the attunement on the elementals, since the CD without going for arcana it is about 16 seconds, but I think they have done this way, to force us to put some on arcana if we want to lower the CD on the attunement’s

Churning earth is kinda funny in a game that promotes activity , constant moving and dodgeing.

I think taking condition damage in mist form is intended.

Conjured weapons are fun but pretty much not useful for “serious”/effective gameplay.

I can pretty much agree with everything you’ve said.

I want to have the class how it is supposed to be each element is a different kind of play style! Fire is damage aoe/conditions, air is single target damage control abilities, Water is support/heal, and earth is defensive abilities. The difference in weapons should be just weapon range. Ex. Daggers should be more damage then staff but not have nearly the same range.

In regards to Tridents I think people undervalue them. They see they have weak auto attacks and fixate on that.

Yet I think the Trident is actually the best Elementalist weapon. Almost all of the skills are excellent, and the synergy between different skills in each attunement is something I wish other weapons had (especially staff).

I tend to switch fire→water→lightning→back to fire again, using my auto attack very little, as this switching means you’ll always have something off cooldown.

Fire’s skills do excellent underwater AoE and burning damage. Water has an incredible charge move that does immense damage, a powerful and short cooldown heal that also gives regeneration and works on your party, an escape backwards skill that leaves a defensive ice wall behind you that you can explode. Lightning has two excellent CCs and a weird teleport bubble that seriously confuses your foes. Earth is bleeds focused, yet offers even another powerful CC.

Churning Earth – While I love this skill, it’s practically a joke. It has a five second cast, and catching anyone in it is either pure luck or simple ignorance. It’s easy to interrupt, and dodging to avoid it is even easier (Especially considering you can regenerate a third of the endurance needed for a dodge during the cast time). You may think pairing it with lightning touch would be affective, but even with weakness on your target, they can just run out of the circle before you finish casting. I pair it with earthquake and arcane shield and hope that the person I’m fighting will both stay in range and fail to get three attacks off before he attempts to interrupt me. But even if the stars align and all of that happens, I still need it to crit for it to do a decent amount of damage. Oh, and it also recharges for its full 30 second cooldown when interrupted rather than the normal 4 seconds other skills receive.

I love churning earth as well and I pair it with lightning flash. So I’ll start to cast then Lightning Flash into the target or if they are coming to attack me I’ll Flash behind them.

It’s definately intended for mist form to take condition dmg. Just like every other “invulnerability” in the game.

Endure Pain, Stone Form or w/e focus ele skill. Evasion skills, Distortion, etc.

They can prevent condition applying abilities just applying new conditions, but current conditions will remain.

I don’t think that Churning Earth is bad. There’s nothing I love more than just run into a heat of battle, channel it and watch it crit for 6k thus clearing all enemy illusions, roots etc. Especially in tight spots like “hence” and “mine” it’s just perfect and one of my favourite skills in the game.

As for mist form, it doesn’t say anything about clearing conditions. It’s a very strong skill for PvP. More than that actually, it’s the one skill I could never change on my PvP bar.

If I should find something that clarifies Elementalists as underpowered, it’s the water skills. I barely ever use them, the heals are so tiny and the damage is not worth noticing. If it wasn’t for the chills I would never use water.

Lightning Surge. Only sniper skill in game atm. nuff said :P

I feel like ele’s main problem right now is that our direct damage abilities (IE, not condition damage) scale extremely poorly compared to other classes. This becomes a real problem when you consider the multiplicative effects of power+precision+crit damage, leading to the 3k vs 5k crit woes mentioned above. When you consider our low health pool, the difference only gets relatively larger.

I have no problem with being a squishy class, so long as it is possible for me to do massive damage if I spec for it.

I find it strange to see a post about the staff that says it takes more effort. I play exclusively as a staff ele as I find it easier than the other weapon sets. I would call myself a competent player, but not any better than any other ele I’ve met.

Incoming list of hate

Lightning Surge
LS is way too slow to be effective if you are the target, most of the time you will be due to lower health and armour. The increase blind aoe from blasting staff might make up for it, although I cannot tell the effective range at all.

Gust
I have watched every enemy strafe around gust like it doesn’t exist. This skill has only been useful against mindless melee characters that run face first or anyone that isn’t paying attention.

Ice Spike
This should have been a combo field (Blast). It is the only serious damage attack on Water magic. It wouldn’t even be overpowered considering you have to switch to another element otherwise you waste time for skills to cool down.

I strongly dislike how we only have 1 blast finisher (excluding utilities), Eruption. It means I have to, most of the time, rely on Arcane Wave for an irregular blast finish (~30s) as I don’t want to jump back to Earth magic solely for 1 skill while staying idle for the others to cool down or switch to another element and waste more time to wait for Earth Magic to cool down.

The more I write this down, the more I think about how we (staff ele) lack the capability of fully utilising our own combo fields, the very same thing that makes us useful.

It’s clearly that Ele are underpowered right now. Everyone who played an ele knows it and Arenanet better know it too. Like everyone said, we’re suppose to be a swishy class so why does every other class does more damage than us and have more surviability? This is from a glass canon build.

I consider myself a skilled player and I play very carefully to keep myself alive during fights but no matter how careful I am, if the opposide side sees me, I am dead in 10 secs before I could do all my combos.

Also I know spvp is a team game but if I am more skilled than the other guy, I should be able to beat him 1v1. But as it stands right now, I can’t beat any class even if the guy is not that good. The only class I can beat in 1v1 situations is pretty much another eles. And don’t get me started on our retardedly stupid our down state skills are. Other classes actually have skills they can use effectively when they’re down. What do we have? we have one auto attack and one recovery skill. And one skill that is always on cooldown….is this a bug or what?? what’s the point of having a skill that’s always on cooldown lol.

You know something funny, I rarely see any ele in spvp anymore. Out of 10 games, maybe one eles. Maybe people got tired of pulling their hair out trying to play an eles that they are forced to roll another class lol. It’s no secret eles needs fixing. Give us more damage/surviablity or nerf other classes (mesmer,ranger,thief) comes to mind. Mesmer with their one button i win MOA morph and illusions that hit for 7k… Ranger can just mindlessly sit there and spam one I win button without even doing anything else. Thief can get down to 1 hp then stealth and come back full life and kill you….

Qwert.2950:

I feel like ele’s main problem right now is that our direct damage abilities (IE, not condition damage) scale extremely poorly compared to other classes. This becomes a real problem when you consider the multiplicative effects of power+precision+crit damage, leading to the 3k vs 5k crit woes mentioned above. When you consider our low health pool, the difference only gets relatively larger.

I have no problem with being a squishy class, so long as it is possible for me to do massive damage if I spec for it.

+1

The problem with the elementalist is that the whole system of attunements just sucks. On paper it seems like a neat, unique idea with a cool twist to the age-old wizard archetype. In-game however, it’s just a handicap that restricts your abilities instead of defines them.

I have two main problems with the class: melee viability and underwater combat.

First, melee. Our dagger weapons. They don’t do enough damage and they don’t have near enough damage mitigation. While other classes can switch to a ranged weapon if things get nasty; elementalists have no such option. If you’re using daggers you’re full melee. As such our daggers need to give us more defense than other classes, since we can’t get out of melee range without rendering ourselves obsolete. There are some tools, but not nearly enough and they’re far too weak.

Daggers need to provide things like protection, stability, vigor, and much better personal heals and regenerations. Things that affect the elementalist, not the entire group…as that has a tendency to get out of control and hard to balance. With no ranged alternative once we equip daggers we have to be able to stay in melee and keep ourselves alive. Right now we can’t…not even close. Especially with such low base health.

On top of that dagger damage needs a moderate buff. Melee is supposed to gain the advantage of superior damage due to the superior risk. This is true for other classes, but not for elementalist for some reason. Yeah you can tear out a decent fire burst once every 40 seconds but that’s hardly a consistent design.

Next, underwater combat needs a major damage buff. Seriously…it’s pathetic.

Last, downed state needs to be improved. The root is ok, but useless against a mob that kills you in melee (where our biggest problem is), and the vapor form takes too long to come off cd (usually defeated before it does), it doesn’t get the mob off you, and it doesn’t last long enough. Downed state needs some kind of chill (without having to trait) maybe, vapor could regenerate you while you’re moving, last longer and be impervious to conditions. And a way to get the mob off you for a little while would be nice too.

Other than that the class seems very nice. I like the staff and the sceptre and focus are decent and serve their purposes well. Melee however isn’t even an option and underwater is horrific. Fix those and we’ve got a class.

Zaalg.3217:

Next, underwater combat needs a major damage buff. Seriously…it’s pathetic.

I don’t know about that. The water attunement by itself is enough to make underwater combat one of the elementalist’s strong points.

Mist form + Ether Renewal (Cure a condition with each pulse) 15 second cooldown. Pretty awesome, crappy heal. But if you can get used to when to use it, you can solo the fire ele world boss in Asura beginning zone. (Use a scepter / dagger for this at Fire Ele battle – More heals / defense, stay in water / lightning for blind and stuff)

Besides that, as a D/D Ele I find damage complete crap compared to other classes. Although single target damage of a 30 fire 30 air 10 arcane Scepter/Dagger ele Burst damage is amazing. But bad for PvE.

My two cents as someone who has played a lot of MMOs, most at a very high level of play; the biggest problem I perceive with my Elementalist is that most of our spells require us to be too close to our targets combined with a distinct lack of defensive capability. That is, we’re too squishy and yet we’re required to be so close to things to be effective.

There are other systematic problems as well; another main one being that you can’t do consistent DPS without switching attunments constantly to burn CDs on spells. Maybe that’s intended but my impression of the class was that the attunments were supposed to be situational, not necessarily cyclical. Meaning I should want to switch out of fire because I want/need to do X, not because the CDs on my fire spells are too long to keep up good DPS from fire alone. Switching attunments then doesn’t feel like switching gears but more like grasping at straws.

The issue with elementalist is simple: during the betas, many of the other professions got buffed (especially melee) so that their damage output made up for their proximity. Elementalists were left alone and fell way behind. Now, the damage output to squishiness ratio for elementalists is so off that it’s a joke. We do almost no damage relative to how squishy we are (regardless of build). Even if you stack toughness/vitality, damage output will be minimal. When stacking power/precision, damage output is still really bad compared to melee classes but you drop like a rock.

Oh, I could also note that because to DPS I have to switch between attunements and therefore have many damage sources I can’t discern what stats I’m supposed to prioritize. I don’t know if I should going for Crit Damage, Power, Precision, Condition Damage or a balance of both. Fire is pretty bursty so Crit Damage might scale well but you also burn things and then bleed things in Earth so Condition Damage would seem good as well.

I have a guildy who is a warrior who was telling me the other night; “When I use a sword I know I need lots of Condition Damage while Precision and Crit Damage isn’t really needed, but I need those stats for great sword.” He knows what stats he needs for what weapons and what to gear for. I see gear with Power, Condition Damage and Vitality and I know that is Necromancer gear. Elementalists, at least ones who aren’t built for healing, don’t have such clear distinctions.

I think if the attunements were more situational and self-contained we could have that clarity as well. For example, if Fire was mostly condition damage instead of burst with some condition on the side (somewhat of a bad example since Burn wouldn’t be enough for a condition build as it only stacks duration and not intensity), or if Air damage wasn’t bad and actually had burst you could gear for what you wanted to do. As it stands you do a little bit of everything which means you can’t specialize with your stats (which may explain part our DPS problems as well).