As a means of re-balancing the Elementalist, I had a thought, and I don’t know if its been posted before.
One thing that has bugged me is the overlong cooldowns, combined with mediocre effects, damage or otherwise of most of our skills, both weapons and utility. The idea that we have double the skills means half the power FOR BALANCE doesn’t make sense, seeing as how an Elementalist player cannot output skills twice as fast as other professions. This leads to watered down versions of other professions’ skills, and forcing an Elementalist player to play to the hilt 100% of the time to remain relevant.
What i was thinking is that an Elementalist should be able to switch attunements at will (no cooldowns), make most of the skills more powerful AND shorter cooldowns, BUT make each element’s skills extremely focused. For example:
Fire – all skills are AoE damage. Skills like Fire Shield and Flamestrike would be completely revamped to ensure multiple target ability. Nearly all skills would inflict Burning.
Water – all skills are AoE CC, with major healing components and very weak damage capability. Nearly all skills cause Chill, with many causing Weakness. Having one or two skills with Poison might fit in thematically.
Air – all skills are single target ONLY, designed to be our 1v1, dueling element. Nearly all skills would inflict Vulnerability, with several also inflicting Blind. Also our mobility element, with many skills providing Swiftness and/or Vigor.
Earth – all skills are condition only, giving access to pure condition builds. Bleeding, Torment, and Cripple would be the big ones, with major access to control effects like Knockdown, Launch and Daze.
So instead of having four attunements with a hodgepodge of damage, control and support, you have four highly focused attunements which each do something specific. In the above example, you only have two direct damage attunements, one for AoE and one for single target, one condition attunement and one support attunement.
Since each element is so focused, there wouldn’t be as much of a need to blow through all skills and CDs as fast as possible, since the various skills would be individually stronger and have less interactivity. You wouldn’t need to use every Blast finisher on a Firefield just to generate Might for yourself to do decent DPS, as the skills would be more powerful. Now, blasting for Might would have the same benefit as any other profession, and not be a requirement just to break even.
Traits that rely on weapon/attunement swapping, such as Elemental Attunement can easily have ICDs added to avoid power creep, or revamped to be more synergetic with a profession design that utilizes attunements based on the tactical situation, rather than the requirement of rapid cycling.
But the tl;dr version is that I don’t want to have to switch to Water for Frozen Burst as part of a necessary Might stacking rotation, I want to be able to use it to snare foes or blast a field for some other beneficial effect, while at the same time not locking out other attunements that I might need as the battle situation changes.
. I agree with you though, I don’t want the class mechanic to change I find the current function incredibly fun. I do however wish RTL was never nerfed or maybe had a 30/15cd and MG was actual reliable. I also agree with Ash, we lack good condition application.