Would this make elementalist that strong?

Would this make elementalist that strong?

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Posted by: Maliken.5630

Maliken.5630

Why not delete the attunement recharge rate? Elementalists already have long cooldowns on all their good skills. Why cant i use skills when i need them? When im in earth to do some CC, and then switch to fire for attack, why cant i go back to earth for some defensive skills???? I mean, if they are not on cooldown, why am i still forbidden to use them? I just dont get it. A engineer can also swap his kits when he needs them.
Would it really make the elementalist soooo strong with this change? Im pretty positive it doesnt. It will only make it more versatile, and it would really be worth it to invest in the cooldown reduce traits then.
Maybe its just me, but it just doesnt seem fair to be like it is at the moment.

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Posted by: ThiBash.5634

ThiBash.5634

It could theoretically work, but it would require quite some rework of traits. There’s a lot of traits that trigger on attunement swap, and they’d all have to get internal cooldowns to prevent abuse. There’s also Lingering Elements, which could lead to issues with stacking or such.

And then there’s of course the design element: will it make things more fun, or does the added restriction add a strategical element (in the sense that you have to plan ahead if you want a certain attunement to be available at the right time).

And of course, Arcana would need to be redesigned. So yeah, it’s possible, it could be fun, but it’ll be quite a job to make the change.

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Posted by: Maliken.5630

Maliken.5630

I dont think its that hard. Put internal cooldowns on the traits that trigger when swapping, and let all those cooldowns be reduced for example by lingering elements or when investing in the arcana tree. I just hate that i cant use for example ’Magnetic Wave" because i went out of earth. When i got conditions on me i want to use that skill (if its not on cooldown).

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Posted by: Kyon.9735

Kyon.9735

1. This idea will get shot down by other players playing other classes even before it has a chance. I, for one, thinks it might be a bit OP. It’s like having 4 weapon sets I can swap on at any given time depending on what skill I want.

2. Removing attunement swap cooldown completely might destroy the Elementalist’s profession mechanic. One thing I like about the elementalist is that I have to carefully manage my attunement swapping to adapt to the situation. While I like this class to go up in the food chain, I don’t want it to be flooded with “meta players” who play the class simply because it’s strong like Warrior and Thief profession. Even the most versatile class, Warriors, have 5 seconds weapon swapping.

IMO the real reason Elementalists are underpowered is because of the skills itself. Very high cooldown for “lackluster” skills. Does Churning Earth, a static channeling skill which makes you a sitting duck literally and can be easily telegraph and dodged deserve a 30 second cooldown? Does Fire Grab, a buggy clunky skill which is very hard to hit deserve a 45 second cooldown? Does RtL deserve a 40 second cooldown? I don’t even want to get started with Focus skills.

So I think the best way to buff the class is to review the skill cooldowns and reduce it appropriately. Elementalist is in the lowest HP and armor tier without natural defensive mechanism like clones or stealth, so give Elementalist skills more evasion frames and blinds. I really wonder why thieves, who already is in medium armor, has more access to spammable blinds and evades even though they already have easy access to stealth. One more thing, remove the effects of chill on attunement swap recharge.

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Posted by: ThiBash.5634

ThiBash.5634

I dont think its that hard. Put internal cooldowns on the traits that trigger when swapping, and let all those cooldowns be reduced for example by lingering elements or when investing in the arcana tree.

Designwise it may not be hard, but implementationwise, it will be. It requires changing a dozen or so traits. Any chaneg they make also needs to be tested, translated, documented and checked for interference with other mechanics to make sure it doesn’t affect things it’s not supposed to. It’s not a small job to make this change. And after that’s all been done.

Not saying it can’t be done, or shouldn’t be done. But I think it’ll be a relatively big project.

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Posted by: Zelyhn.8069

Zelyhn.8069

@Maliken
Out of curiosity, are you in any way related to the designer of HoN?

Zelyhn.8069 [rT]
Retired elementalist theorycrafter

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Posted by: Maliken.5630

Maliken.5630

@Zelyhn
I know him, but im not the guy you mean. Just a savage fan ;-)

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Posted by: ArmageddonAsh.6430

ArmageddonAsh.6430

…Just reduce the cool down to 5 seconds. Keep the current traits with a 10 second cool down and i think it would be fine. change Arcane to increase/improve something else. What that could be i don’t know – Maybe Weapon Skill cool downs or something?

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Posted by: Mefiq.7039

Mefiq.7039

Well problem with ele is that to play properly you need rotation, to have good rotation you need 30pkts in arcane that means Eles got not 70 but 40 points to spend and rest are "must have arcana cuz 9 sec cd on swap is better than 1 year cd). It just hurts me when i play spvp as ele and i know that i can either go 30 water for cleanse/survi or 30 air for burst, Earth got GREAT traits but i dont have enough points to invest to earth. Im not saying that arcana traits are bad, Evasive and lingering are great, also vigor on crit is insane BUT if i could have this 5/9 cd on swap and still have 30 points to spend in other traits like 0:30:10:30:0 for maximum dmg/survi would be GREAT. I wouldnt be useless vs condi tanks like i am now with full cleanse…

“Im speaker of Truth” – Mefiq.7039 2015

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Posted by: cheese.4739

cheese.4739

As an example of how balance would be destroyed by removing attunement recharges altogether: the Staff #2 skills.

They give, every 6-second rotation or so:
- fire field + damage
- 5 stacks of vulnerability + damage
- AoE blind + high damage
- blast finisher + damage + condi

If traited for reduced cooldown on Earth and Water skills, you could get very frequent blasts in water fields for a lot of healing along with high might stacks and pretty decent damage output. With the Blasting Staff trait, this can be applied to most of a PvP capture point, which the Ele could be standing in the middle of for the entire period.

Note that this build doesn’t even consider use of:
- weapon skills that aren’t #2 (apart from maybe water 3 & 5 for their fields)
- healing skill
- utility skills
- elite skill
- 20 trait points (currently we’re on x/x/20/20/10 for Earth and Water cooldowns along with Blasting Staff)

It would be OP.
_

We’re really not at all balanced around having instant swaps – else our #2 (and to some extent #3) skills would either be much weaker or have very long cooldowns.

One suggestion that I’ve seen,* that sounds pretty nice, is for attunement cooldowns to start when you /enter/ an Attunement, rather than leave it – so if you’re primarily Fire Attunement, you can cast some spells, switch to Earth, lay down an Eruption, and get it to blast in a Lava Font – without having to wait 10+ seconds in other Attunements while Fire recharges.

It would require rebalancing – primarily by reverting attunement cooldowns to pre-Dec-10, I expect – but it would add so much more choice to how the Ele was played, instead of forcing us to generalise (so we’re not forced to stay out of our builds’ main Attunement(s) when we switch out) while most of our traits still strongly encourage staying Attuned to one element for extended periods.

­*sorry, can’t remember who I first saw suggest it, else I’d’ve mentioned

(edited by cheese.4739)

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Posted by: Sizer.5632

Sizer.5632

The base cooldown should be 9 seconds no matter what just like every other weapon swap, since the attunements always seem to be considered a weapon swap anyway. And make speccing arcane give a different bonus, like a boost to the procs/boons you get on swapping attunements. Now that would help “build diversity”, which the devs seem to talk about all the time even though it never changes since you still have to spec into arcane for almost any build.

Borolis Pass – [TOVL]
Aeneaaa – 80 engineer
Aeeneaa – 80 Ele

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Posted by: yayuuu.9420

yayuuu.9420

As an example of how balance would be destroyed by removing attunement recharges altogether: the Staff #2 skills.

They give, every 6-second rotation or so:
- fire field + damage
- 5 stacks of vulnerability + damage
- AoE blind + high damage
- blast finisher + damage + condi

If traited for reduced cooldown on Earth and Water skills, you could get very frequent blasts in water fields for a lot of healing along with high might stacks and pretty decent damage output. With the Blasting Staff trait, this can be applied to most of a PvP capture point, which the Ele could be standing in the middle of for the entire period.

Note that this build doesn’t even consider use of:
- weapon skills that aren’t #2 (apart from maybe water 3 & 5 for their fields)
- healing skill
- utility skills
- elite skill
- 20 trait points (currently we’re on x/x/20/20/10 for Earth and Water cooldowns along with Blasting Staff)

It would be OP.
_

We’re really not at all balanced around having instant swaps – else our #2 (and to some extent #3) skills would either be much weaker or have very long cooldowns.

One suggestion that I’ve seen,* that sounds pretty nice, is for attunement cooldowns to start when you /enter/ an Attunement, rather than leave it – so if you’re primarily Fire Attunement, you can cast some spells, switch to Earth, lay down an Eruption, and get it to blast in a Lava Font – without having to wait 10+ seconds in other Attunements while Fire recharges.

It would require rebalancing – primarily by reverting attunement cooldowns to pre-Dec-10, I expect – but it would add so much more choice to how the Ele was played, instead of forcing us to generalise (so we’re not forced to stay out of our builds’ main Attunement(s) when we switch out) while most of our traits still strongly encourage staying Attuned to one element for extended periods.

­*sorry, can’t remember who I first saw suggest it, else I’d’ve mentioned

Wow that’s a really nice post! I love the idea of making attunements CD start after entering it. Currently if you want to do damage, you either switch attunements and use 2 OR camp on fire. Whenever you switch to the other element to use some utility skill, you loose ability to do damage for 10 seconds. The exception is Fresh Air, but it works great only with Scepter or Dagger in the main hand, because lightning autoattacks on these weapons are the most power-oriented. It doesn’t work with staff, because Fire is much stronger thanks to Lava font and Meteor Shower.

The other idea I was thinking before is to add a grandmaster trait to Fire, that works similar to Fresh Air, just with the difference that it reduces cooldown of Fire Attunement by 50% for example. This way going for 30 fire would result in having 13s CD on all attunements and 6.5s on Fire attunement without adding points to Arcana and 10s/5s with 30 fire and 30 arcana.

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Posted by: McFribble.2349

McFribble.2349

I really wonder why thieves, who already is in medium armor, has more access to spammable blinds and evades even though they already have easy access to stealth.

Because the Thief can’t nuke someone with heavy hitting attacks from a good range away. This is MMO balance 101.

However, don’t get me started on how stupid the stealth system in this game is.

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Posted by: dukevonart.2691

dukevonart.2691

Having the attunement cooldown start when you switch to an attunement is one of my favorite pet ideas. One additional change that should go along with this change is the ability to reactivate the the attunement your are currently in. There are a few points to be made with it that I think are interesting.

  • This change does not significantly increase the amount you could activate the 15 point minors. The cooldown for attunements is still the cooldown for these traits, additionally this actually makes the 15 point traits more consistent then live.
  • This change does not benefit heavy arcana builds significantly. Heavy arcana builds are typically categorized by constant attunement swapping and minimizing the amount of time in any single attunement. Overall this probably leads to a perceived decrease of 1-3 seconds reduction of attunement cooldown. (cheese is probably right on the need to revert the Dec attunement changes if this were to happen)
  • This change is a significant buff for more focused attunement builds. (As mentioned by cheese) The ability to switch away from and then immediately back to your focus attunement is the primary reason for this.

Other thing that I haven’t perhaps thought enough about are the interactions between cooldown beginning on attunement swap and fresh air. My thought is that for the most part the Attunement Cooldown Change (ACC?) would make fresh air redundant, but there could be some strange cases in PvP. As I have..little to no experience in PvP what are other peoples thoughts on this change within PvP?

(Not sure if I can claim first posting of it, but I can probably be blamed for repeated mentions of it.)

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Posted by: dukevonart.2691

dukevonart.2691

Because the Thief can’t nuke someone with heavy hitting attacks from a good range away. This is MMO balance 101.

However, don’t get me started on how stupid the stealth system in this game is.

I don’t think elementalist has much in the way of heavy hitting ranged options that are not highly telegraphed, reliable (RNG on meteor shower, etc), and/or high enough damage by themselves to count as burst.

As far as stealth is concerned, my favorite pet idea is that using an ability ends stealth and that ending stealth no longer applies the revealed debuff. (In before angry thieves claim I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I don’t know what I’m talking about :P)

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Posted by: cheese.4739

cheese.4739

(Not sure if I can claim first posting of it, but I can probably be blamed for repeated mentions of it.)

Eh, pretty sure I’ve only seen it mentioned by one person, so if you’ve brought it up recently it’s probably you I got it from.

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Posted by: MithranArkanere.8957

MithranArkanere.8957

Engineers can swap between their kits extremely fast, and their skills have usually shorter cooldowns.

Still, the skills and effects that trigger with attunement swaps must have cooldowns themselves, much like engineer tool belt skills have cooldowns.

SUGGEST-A-TRON says:
PAY—ONCE—UNLOCKS—ARE—ALWAYS—BETTER.
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Posted by: Omg Casey.5973

Omg Casey.5973

It would be extremely over powered, just spam air and fire attunement swaps for dps because of sunspot and lightning strike.

Death and Taxes [DnT]
Warrior- Emperor casey
Elementalist- Klyptis

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Posted by: Tsume.3490

Tsume.3490

IMO the real reason Elementalists are underpowered is because of the skills itself. Very high cooldown for “lackluster” skills. Does Churning Earth, a static channeling skill which makes you a sitting duck literally and can be easily telegraph and dodged deserve a 30 second cooldown? Does Fire Grab, a buggy clunky skill which is very hard to hit deserve a 45 second cooldown? Does RtL deserve a 40 second cooldown? I don’t even want to get started with Focus skills.

So I think the best way to buff the class is to review the skill cooldowns and reduce it appropriately. Elementalist is in the lowest HP and armor tier without natural defensive mechanism like clones or stealth, so give Elementalist skills more evasion frames and blinds. I really wonder why thieves, who already is in medium armor, has more access to spammable blinds and evades even though they already have easy access to stealth. One more thing, remove the effects of chill on attunement swap recharge.

This. You are in no way to survive without 30 water and 30 arcana.

Eles should be redesigned. Completely.
As for RtL – 40 sec, yeah why not? It bothers me when travelling it stops for no reason (even if ground is flat).
At the end of RtL often character stops and I can’t move. I have to repeatedly spam movement keys to start moving again. Doh. It happens even with autorun. Not always but often. (imagine that you’re fleeing away from zerk army in WvW and character stops – following with 1 year immobilize).

When fighting mobs or huge bosses (e.g. Oak in Queensdale). Even though I am near it, I use RtL and it doesn’t hit it. It keeps charging into a mob. Like there’s a wall or something, gaining 40sec cooldown on that skill. So much about halving CD if it hits.

Also this living story when fighting a hologram. When she fires laser and leaves these trails on the grund, this after-laser-effect. You cannot RtL across it.

:/

(edited by Tsume.3490)

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Posted by: ThiBash.5634

ThiBash.5634

Engineers can swap between their kits extremely fast, and their skills have usually shorter cooldowns.

But the engineer’s kits require both a utility skill slot and traits to become viable. A grenade or flamethrower kit without traits is very mediocore. And although you get a toolbelt skill alongside your kit, you do so when you take a regular utility skill too, so it’s still a wasted slot.

The ele on the other hand gets those 4 skill sets right off the bat with no slot or trait investment required. So naturally, they’re gonna function a little different. Wheter they’re balanced relative to eachother is another discussion, but to say the engineer’s kits are attunement swaps without cooldown or downside isn’t fully true.

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Posted by: Axelwarrior.9084

Axelwarrior.9084

Yes, it would. There has to be a risk in changing your current attunement, just like there’s a risk in changing your current weapon set in other classes.
If you get in a tough spot and have to switch to earth or water, it wouldn’t be fair to other classes if you could just instantly switch to fire and have high DPS again.

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Posted by: Maliken.5630

Maliken.5630

Engineers can swap between their kits extremely fast, and their skills have usually shorter cooldowns.

But the engineer’s kits require both a utility skill slot and traits to become viable. A grenade or flamethrower kit without traits is very mediocore. And although you get a toolbelt skill alongside your kit, you do so when you take a regular utility skill too, so it’s still a wasted slot.

The ele on the other hand gets those 4 skill sets right off the bat with no slot or trait investment required. So naturally, they’re gonna function a little different. Wheter they’re balanced relative to eachother is another discussion, but to say the engineer’s kits are attunement swaps without cooldown or downside isn’t fully true.

The engineer may need to use a utility slot, but he also gets an extra slot in the forms of F1 through F4 so its not really like hes having no utility at all. Also, the attument swapping need some traits too in order to be even doing something. Im not saying to making the ele exactly like the engineer (i dont even say nerf the engi, because i think he is fine), its just that we have a cooldown on the attuments, plus we even have a “massive” cooldown on the dececnt skills. Even less decent skills have huge cooldowns. The focus fireaura is on a freaking 40 seconds cooldown, sorry but thats just over the top. If the attunement cooldowns cant be fixed then the ele should atleast be given some more normal cooldown skills. Its not just “ride the lightning” that has a too long cooldown. Well, i guess we will see what anet wil do with the balance patch.

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Posted by: ThiBash.5634

ThiBash.5634

The engineer may need to use a utility slot, but he also gets an extra slot in the forms of F1 through F4 so its not really like hes having no utility at all.

True, but if he picked a regular utility, he’d get a toolbelt as well so he’s still losing a slot.

Also, the attument swapping need some traits too in order to be even doing something.

Disagree. Attunement swapping gives acces to damage, conditions, cc and healing just by equipping the weapon. You don’t need a specific trait like Juggernaut or Grenadier to make them work. Those traits aren’t mandatory either of course, but the kits do lose a lot of their potential without them. Attunements don’t require such major investments just to be useful.

The focus fireaura is on a freaking 40 seconds cooldown, sorry but thats just over the top.

Agreed, it’s way too high but I think that is a leftover relic from the beta days, where skills got increasignly high cooldowns based on their slot position. If Shocking Aura can get 25 seconds, so can Fire Aura. But I have a hunch that’ll be on the changes list, seeing as how it’s a nobrainer.

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