Guild Wars 2

people demand d/d ele nerfs so i demand berserk ele buffs. if d/d celestial ele is the best performing build next to shatter mesmer then berserk ele is the worst performing build next to berserk engi.

after the recent balance patch the overall damage of most of the classes went up by a lot, not so for ele because of the nerf to air damage multipliers so the build is actually behind in the damage department.

the defense went up due to the possibility to pick a 3rd traitline but is kind of negated because of the overall higher damage in the game.

many of the scepter skills are lacking, but going melee is not a possibility because you don’t want to get kited as a berserker/marauder and berserk staff is more or less a free kill.

a buff to the following skills would be very nice:

scepter fire auto attack – needs increased speed and less burning duration
scepter fire dragon tooth – needs ground targeting (requesting this for almost 2 years)
scepter water shatterstone – needs to become an aoe chill field
earth scepter auto attack – needs to faster and less bleed duration
dagger earth churning earth – double the damage or half the casting time
focus fire flamewall – increase size
focus water freezing gust – needs a wider casting cone
glyph of elemental harmony – increase healing by ~2k
mist form – cooldown reduction to 60s
arcane shield – cooldown reduction to 60s

tornado – no more transformation. instead it summons a ground target tornado for 10 seconds based on your attunement that deals damage, knocks enemies around and is a combo field based on the attunement you are in while casting. it applies conditions to enemies and boons to allies.
fire -> fire field and burn. might for allies
water -> water field and chill. regen for allies
earth -> possible a smoke field but tricky.. and blind. protection for allies
air -> lightning field and weakness. swiftness for allies.
cooldown increased to 180 from 150.

It’s sort of a joke that Scepter has been so bad for so long.

I’m kinda ok with Dragon Tooth as it is now, useful for siege destruction :P

Atoss.1056:

I’m kinda ok with Dragon Tooth as it is now, useful for siege destruction :P

it is good for unreachable siege destruction. but tbh i’d rather give that up to get a better functional skill overall.

Scepter air1 also needs to do more damage. It barely outdamages healing signet…

ResJudicator.7916:

Scepter air1 also needs to do more damage. It barely outdamages healing signet…

In my opinioni, air AA shouldnt be buffed, maybe only be it more fast for pop more time heling signet but i think make too strong air auto means the fresh air build will be much spam of air 1 e 2. I really want all the others AA buffed a lot. In this way u have to play smart your attunement for make pressure at your enemy and out of air, and spike burst going in air.

you already keep the air1 channel up out of air to proc the FA so buffing this would not be the best idea as it already is the best auto attack. i’d rather have the other ones brought to usefulness. another reason why air auto is good is because it hits “aoe”, everybody standing in the electro line gets hit, also if you cast it and they go into stealth.

Fresh Air lacks sustained damage. Your opponent can survive way longer against fresh air than he could against every meta zerker build as long he dodges your phoenix.

IMO, that’s one of the main problems with fresh air. It can wreck certain zerker specs because you can frontload a lot of instant damage in the hopes of a 100-0. But against any build with some sustain, it will take you forever to get a down if you miss just one phoenix. Mesmers and thieves don’t have this problem. Even if you dodge the mesmer’s initial shatter combo, iZerker, mirrorblade on 6s CD, and even the GS1 autoattack do enough damage to down someone.

Case in point: You can kill a bruiser ele as a mesmer or thief. As a fresh air spec, a decent F/W/A bruiser ele can survive almost indefinitely. (Ofc an E/W/A ele could probably survive forever in any 1v1 against any zerker).

All eles have for reliable damage are the fresh air procs (which, combined with Air1, basically equal the autoattack DPS of other zerker classes). Adding phoenix to that frankly isn’t enough to be threatening to non-zerker builds that know how to dodge / manage defensive CDs.

The other issue with fresh air is a lack of disengage potential, which is really what let’s thieves and mesmers shine in that role. Rather than giving zerker ele the same levels of stealth as thief/mes (which would not be thematically fitting), I think it’d make sense to improve zerker ele mobility substantially so that they can disengage that way.

that’s why you need to bait stunbreaks and dodges on fresh air. it has always been like this, i won’t say this is optimal because other classes/builds don’t have to do that but it’s just how it is.

you can cast dragon tooth to bait a dodge and gale to bait a stunbreak (just that you don’t really have a follow up cc…) and land your pheonix then. or if your gale is up again and their stunbreak has a longer cooldown you can 100-0 them with a full combo. tbh playing berserk ele is the build on which you have to know what your facing very well.
the mobility is not such an enormous issue with the superspeed on air against most classes, just thieves and warriors can be a pain.

tbh what i hoped for with the expansion was en elite specialisation with sword/dagger and stances to have a high mobility evasion/block build. instead we got some strange mix of stuff we already had and aura shouts.

having said this, fixing the stuff that i listed above would already help a bit, to make the time we have to wait for the 2nd expansion less painful…

DT won’t bait a dodge against anyone who has a clue. Even a crippled opponent can just stroll out of it. That leaves you with gale on a traited ~34s CD as your only bait skill. (Or, if you’re playing yolo S/D, then you get Earthquake + Updraft). Tying phoenix to those CDs gives you a net DPS that is way lower than what other zerker classes are capable of.

Again, try killing a bruiser class as fresh air, and then try again as mes or thief. Depending on the bruiser build/player, it might not be easy on any of those classes, but it’s a helluva lot more doable on the thief/mes because they have both burst and the sustained damage. Fresh air ele just has the burst, which gives your opponent a lot of breathing room between bursts.

Otherwise, I generally agree with what you’re saying about needing to bait dodges. The issue isn’t that. The problem as I see it is twofold. First, it’s simply inevitable that sometimes your opponent will be able to negate your phoenix. Either because they have more dodges/stunbreaks than you have baits, or because some of your stuff is on CD. When that happens, your net DPS drops so low you might as well be playing a cele ele. Mesmers, thieves, and mediguards don’t have such drastic valleys and peaks in their DPS.

Second, the very act of syncing up your phoenix with either lightning flash, or one of your dodge-bait skills like gale, further lowers your effective DPS because those skills have a long CD.

As a general rule, I think you have to know all the other builds pretty well on any burst class. Thieves need to know which key skills to blind, the timing on dodges, etc. Mesmers need to know animations well to reliably land interrupts instead of wasting them on the aftercast animations (which don’t proc interrupts), and they also need to know how other builds work well enough to know which CDs to pop and when to pop them.

A minor change A.net could make would be to change One With Air so superspeed procs on evade, which gives zerker eles a skill-based repositioning ability.

Jekkt.6045:

people demand d/d ele nerfs so i demand berserk ele buffs. if d/d celestial ele is the best performing build next to shatter mesmer then berserk ele is the worst performing build next to berserk engi.

after the recent balance patch the overall damage of most of the classes went up by a lot, not so for ele because of the nerf to air damage multipliers so the build is actually behind in the damage department.

the defense went up due to the possibility to pick a 3rd traitline but is kind of negated because of the overall higher damage in the game.

50% of the scepter skills are bad but going melee is not a possibility because you don’t want to get kited as a berserker/marauder and berserk staff is more or less a free kill.

i demand an overhaul/buff to the following skills:

scepter fire auto attack – needs increased speed and less burning duration
scepter fire dragon tooth – needs ground targeting (requesting this for almost 2 years)
scepter water shatterstone – needs to become an aoe chill field
earth scepter auto attack – needs to faster and less bleed duration
dagger earth churning earth – double the damage or half the casting time
focus fire flamewall – increase size
focus water freezing gust – needs a wider casting cone
glyph of elemental harmony – increase healing by ~2k
mist form – cooldown reduction to 60s
arcane shield – cooldown reduction to 60s

tornado – no more transformation. instead it summons a ground target tornado for 10 seconds based on your attunement that deals damage, knocks enemies around and is a combo field based on the attunement you are in while casting. it applies conditions to enemies and boons to allies.
fire -> fire field and burn. might for allies
water -> water field and chill. regen for allies
earth -> smoke field and blind. protection for allies
air -> lightning field and weakness. swiftness for allies.
cooldown increased to 210 from 150.

there are many more skills that could benefit from an overhaul but trying to force all of them into usefulness might be a bit much.

“Churning Earth” does have so pretty high dmg on a good hit I can get 20k.
As for scepter most of the attack are slow to compensate for the amount of dmg and condies that scepter can do, with the blind Appling every couple of secs.
I think what should be the attunement entering effect shouldn’t be base it should be traited in a different way other than a base, you don’t know how many times i’very swapped into fire and sunspot has taken a crit from me.

tbh the condis on scepter are mehish, and higher attack speed + lower duration equals the same damage so i don’t see a problem here.

Fire and earth auto should be made for condi damage not directt. The scepter can be a burst weapon and a condi weapon. Burst with phönix + dragon tooth + air lighning. Condi with fire and earth auto.
Eles are lacking a bit with earth condi build and there is no reason to ton that down even more. Especially the earth auto shoul be dedicated to condi damage and never to direct damage because good fast damage would make earth OP. So the earth auto should hit slightly faster and even have more bleeding duration, but if you increase attack speed then its propably good to decrease direct damage by the same %.

My balance packet to make more build diversity jsut by changign some numbers would look like this:

Scepter:
Fire auto. Decrease casting time to 1s, reduce direct damage 33%.
Dragon Tooth: ground target.
Air auto: Make it a normal single target 3/4 cast with 300 damage
Earth auto: Make it fly 50% faster.
Water: Make shatterstone detonate instantly but it does no damage just stacks of vul.

Glyphs: Make all glyphs that now have 1,25 cast time a flat 1s cast time.
Make the trait for glyphs -33% CD not -20.
Arcane: Make the trait also a -33% CD.

Fire trait Conjurer: Don´t give the fire aura. Give a boon for the element when casting it like Elemental Attunement.

Fire Burning precision: Reduce ICD to 2s. (expecting a burn nerf here).

One with Fire: make it +50% aura duration.

Geomancers defence: Make it a 10% condi duration reduction not more damage reduction.

Earth trait Serrated Stones: Make it + 30% bleeding duration instead of 20%.

Water traits: Make Soothing Disruption give 15s vigor instead of 6s regen + vigor.

I know that is huge and disrupts eles cantrip bound survivability greatly and thus will be not popular, but the cantrips bound to it with traited condi removal on regen is extreamly powerful and lets not much room for annything else then water + cantrips + Soothing Disruption + Cleansing Water.

it’s not about the damage of the auto attacks but rather the speed, it’s clunky and slow so if you wanna proc fresh air because somehow it didn’t proc already it’s extremely bad to have such a long casting time. for condition users nothing would change at all if the dps was still the same.

You cannot demand anything ;p

I agree something needs too change with scepter. Can’t put my finger on it but I suspect it is primarily the horribad auto attacks.

and the uselessness of shatterstone, it’s the most unwanted child of that weaponset.

They’re not going to redesign anything. From what it’s looking like they’ll never be ready to launch the expansion this summer. Every profession has not been balanced, they didn’t even have the sounds for the warhorn, no hardcore content was shown, there is only 1 Stronghold map, no real beta has been done for WvW…