Guild Wars 2

Flux Qemist.6712:

Just a thought.
New Grand Master trait for water magic:

Immune to conditions whilst attuned to water.

That is incredibly overpowered. You realize that in PvP, it’s not last man standing, it’s capping points. An elementalist could sit on a point forever and people who run condi builds wouldn’t be able to do anything. Even if it was last man standing or any other game mode, it would still be overpowered. Honestly, I hope you were trolling.

Fair point – I was largely addressing wvw mode where there is no shortage of condi based roaming builds – largely Dire stat.

Having said that even in PvP those who run condi builds can’t do anything to a diamond skin traited ele, so whats the difference? either way they would need to send a team mate to dps using a power spec in which case the ele would have to fight ergo changing attunements which a nearby condi build opponent can capitalize on in a 2v1 scenario.

The way I see it is that it would give the ele some sustainability which is severely lacking at the moment, and yeah in retrospect a chance at holding a capture point.

I have to admit I haven’t thought through what the wider implications would be but I would like to see a big change to the way attunement swapping works.

Something I really loved when levelling my ele up was constantly shifting between the different elements and weaving my skills together for greater effects. The trouble was I later realised that 90% of the time sticking in just my dps element was usually by far the best way to play and the utility provided from providing water fields or the occasional blast finisher or speed buff was far and away not worth losing 10 seconds of dps (this is true in both solo play and group play). I have all of this fun utility but it’s rarely useful enough to justify locking myself out of fire for 10 seconds and certainly not something I’d ever work into normal group play except very situationally. I realise WvW is different but it still sucks to be more or less locked out of damage when in heal mode.

My proposed change would be to remove attunment cooldown completely (apart from the on swap skills) and instead have charges that build up 1 every 10 seconds or so. Each time you swap you lose one charge. That way you could seamlessly jump into earth ready a blast jump into water and drop a water field and then jump back to fire to continue fighting. Makes the game play much more dynamic and allows you to take advantage of all that utility we have without having to make ourselves useless to do it. I doubt a change like this would go through, but I would love to see it. I don’t think reducing the current cooldown is the answer because we still come back to the fact that swapping out of your dps element is generally bad if you are then locked out from it and again it limits how much skill waving you can do. I guess more things like Fresh AIr would be nice, but I’d hate how restrictive that would as you could only really do it for one element.

Of course the other thing I would change is base survivability. I see no good reason why we have such a low base vitality/armour. I guess it was to balance out the utility and self healing but our self healing isn’t that great and as explained above neither is our utility most of the time and plenty of other classes have utility and self healing and we are by no means the undisputed kings of this. Also those classes don’t have to lock themselves out of doing any meaningful damage in order to do that healing or utility.

Finally I would change the number of clunky skills that are super easy to dodge in pvp. Our dps isn’t terrible per say but in pvp it often feels like it is unless you play a super glassy burst spec because so many of our heavy hitters require someone to stand completely still and shut their eyes for a for seconds. I know stuff like hundred blades is fairly easy to avoid as well but it doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of Dragons Tooth. Many of our auto attacks leave much to be desired as well which is where a lot of the consistent dps is meant to come from, but the Septer auto attacks are rarely anything someone will care about.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

phaeris.7604:

Re: thief dodge/cc.

You’re kidding right? On my thief eles are easiest class to kill, with LB rangers 2nd.

As a thief I have so many gap closers and my damage is so big I only need a few hits to put you down on an ele.

Good luck dodging me when im in stealth. What cc are you talking about. I lose conditions as soon as I enter stealth.

Roaming on my ele is 100x harder than on my thief. Mainly because every single class is a danger to an ele and you can’t really pick and choose your fights. My low health and armour on my thief is compensated for by my huge burst. Not on the ele!

This.

we are a class that has had its reason for having Low health and Low armor removed – Them being the high burst which was nerfed, Healing which was nerfed, Mobility which was nerfed…

I can understand why Ele had such low health and armor at the start of the game but since all the nerfs and buffs to everyone else, it simply isnt warranted anymore. Even if the nerfs were removed, i don’t think we would become gods again due to how much other classes have been changed and the current meta.

Wyrden.4713:

so, fire focus skills really need a change, water 2 on focus needs change
conjure weaps r fine
we need more base hp or buff our dmg
rtl needs cooldown reduction, like 30 sec normal and 25 sec if u hit enemy?
earth dagger 4 needs cooldown reduction
well w this changes ele would pretty well be balanced i guess?

No idea about focus, i think i used it to simply unlock the skills and havent used it since. I would say the Conjures (except FGS) are in need of work. Either the Duration removed or the number of uses removed, i would prefer the number of uses removed. This would of course mean slight changes to some of the skills.

I agree with either need our base stats increased to compensate or increase our damage which we can’t have due to the fact we are forced into defensive options due to the fact we start at a disadvantage thanks to the low health and low armor.

I would say: 30second basic cool done if you don’t hit anything, 15seconds if you hit something. Considering it isnt a stun break, you can still be CC during it and everything else

D/D wise, i personally think all Earth skills need to be adjusted. The auto attack is terrible. Ring of Earth is okay. Magnetic Grasp likes to bug out and refuse to hit the person even if they are in range. Earthquake cool down is like 15-20seconds too long and i think that Churning Earth could use a few tweaks. I know its meant to be a heavy hitter and everything but the cast time is simply to long to make it of any use in PvP and the fact that you need to use another 40second cool down utility to even stand a chance of it hitting, says it all….

+1 to this!

Something else that needs to be fixed for Dagger/Dagger, Auto attacks. They are all rather weak damage wise.

Fire – Needs each Flame spike or what ever it is to do at least 50% more damage. Nearly 1,500 Power i know not amazing but still doing 603 damage IF ALL 3 projectiles hit the target is simply pathetic.

Water – Not meant to be a huge hitter, could at least add healing to it or something and increase the Vul stacks to say 3 stacks, 3 seconds or something

Air – Pretty solid, could be a tad bit more powerful though normally getting about the same sort of damage as Fire auto (assuming all 3 hit) which isnt amazing but not the worst

Earth – The Damage isn’t the point to this skill My suggestion, Decrease the duration and increase the Bleeding stacks, 3 stacks for 4 seconds would be a great change. Though i would also like to see the animation and the skill itself changed. To something like the others that can hit multiple targets and increase the range as well to at least 400-500

Cantrips:

Amor of Earth: Decrease cool down to 75 Seconds. Make it it increase Toughness by 50% For the 6 second duration

Mist form: Duration increased to 4 seconds. Immunity to conditions for duration. No longer locked out of weapon, heal, utility and Elite skills.

Cleansing Fire: Cool down decreased to 20 seconds, Cure 3 conditions, Cure 2 conditions per every target that gets inflicted with Burning.

Lightening Flash: Decrease cool down to 35seconds, Increase range to 1,200

Conjures: Remove the Usage Limit. Pretty much that.

Signets:

Signet of Fire: Passive: Grant yourself Fury(3seconds) every time you Burn a target(1second ICD) Active Burn(9 seconds) your Target and grant yourself 6 stacks of Might

Signet of Water: Passive: Convert a condition into a Boon every 10seconds, Active: Turn all conditions into Boons for the duration of the condition (increased by Boon duration) – 90second cool down.

Signet of Air: Passive: Grant your self Quickness(1second) on a Critical hit, 5second ICD. Active: Grant yourself 5seconds of Quickness, -25% Movement speed

Signet of Earth: Passive Increase Toughness and Gain Protection(4) when you get hit with a critical strike, 10 second ICD. Active: Become immune to damage for 3 seconds.

Arcane:

Arcane Wave – Fine the way it is.
Arcane Power Fine The Way it is.
Arcane Blast – Decrease to 15second Cool down
Arcane Shield – Decrease to 60second cool down. Immune to direct damage for 4 seconds.

-adding damage conditions like torment to water(ice-skills like frozen ground, frozen burst) and confusion to air for better damage output.

-traits connected to an atunement define your combat a bit too much. just for example: i want using signets and the fitting traits, i need to use earth a much a possible to get the fixed trait effects from this traitline. While other classes have mostly 1 trait for one weapon out of 2 weaponsets, the elementalist needs to use more traits for one element out of 4.
so i would like to see more elemental friendly traits in other traitlines and less shattered traits that basicly could be one single trait just to fit the elemental effect like might for fire.

-range change within battle (maybe a weapon slot for each attunement, which means that i put my staff on the fire atunement and dagger on air and that will cause me to use the staffskills for fire and daggerskills for air in combat, so i have to atune to fire if i want higher range)

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Something else that needs to be fixed for Dagger/Dagger, Auto attacks. They are all rather weak damage wise.

I wish that the weakness of autoattacks was limited only to D/D : every ele weapon has an abysmally low autoattack. This raises up a core problem :

Game Mode : PvX

Proposal Overview
Redesign some weapons autoattacks and some weapon skills.

Goal of Proposal
In the actual state, the damage, control and support functions are all mixed up between weapons and attunements :
Eg : dagger offhand is nuke weapon in earth, a terrible support in water and a good cc in air, fire #4 has no comparative advantage compared to focus fire #4.
Eg : scepter fails to be a condition oriented weapon. In the actual meta, it is used to stack might with a plethora of blasts.

The redesing should bring clarity to the role of each weapon and help design better and more efficient builds if coupled with a core revision of the trait lines (but this is an other topic).

Proposal Functionality

1) Scepter is about performing blasts and applying various damaging conditions (in every attunement).
-> We could use scepter in some (hypothetical) condition builds and keep the infamous scepter-hammer loadout viable.

2) Dagger main hand is the melee/short distance weapon (mostly direct damage)
-> Completely redesign the earth autoattack : it should not be about bleeds (this role is for the scepter). It should be about being tough in cqc. The autoattack should be a melee chain that gives protection in the end (frowns at guardian hammer).

4) Focus is about support -> provide boons and auras ; group cleanse (that heals for each condition it removes) and crowd control.
-> flamme wall is in the same niche as ring of fire, these two skills should be reworked to offer something different. Right now these are just to sightly different fire fields and nothing more.
Eg : flame wall -> burns ennemies that passes through, give might or fury to allies going through (with internal cooddown to prevent excessive stacking)

Associated Risks
Can destabilize the actual builds without bringing viable replacements. However, the changes I propose are about autoattacks that are not used in the meta.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Something else that needs to be fixed for Dagger/Dagger, Auto attacks. They are all rather weak damage wise.

snip

This is something I can get behind. Right now D/D as a set struggles with Warrior Healing Signet without Fresh Air to maintain Air Attunement as the autos outside of Lightning Whip are not strong enough to out-damage the HPS passive. Normalising AA DPS of 1-2 more attunements outside of Air to bring them closer to Lightning Whip DPS would go a long way towards shifting D/D ele out of 30 Air, 20 Earth, 20 Arcana towards a more balanced setup. It would also open up nerfs to Scepter/X burst without affecting ancillary setups, which will become an issue if S/X sustain is further buffed.

The problem still remains that Lightning Whip is still mathematically and mechanically the strongest, being a 300 range Cleaving attack that outperforms Dragon’s Claw, Vapour Blade and Impale (lol) by significant margins. I feel that outside of DPS upgrades to Vapour Blade and Impale, Dragon’s Claw should be brought up to a level similar to – yet distinct in utility from – Lightning Whip.

Bringing up Zelyhn’s Skill data of Dagger mainhand (I’ve added DPS in coefficient per second in bold):

Dagger Main Hand

Dragon’s Claw: 0.375 (3 hits)| cast=0.5 aftercast=0.5 (DPS=1.125 coeff/sec)
Vapor Blade: 0.33 (2 hits) | cast=0.4 aftercast=0.6 {vuln 6s per hit} (DPS=0.66 coeff/sec, increasing to 0.739 coeff/sec @ 12 stacks of Vulnerability)
Lightning Whip: 0.7 (2 hits) | cast=0.5 aftercast=0.65 (DPS=1.217 coeff/sec)
Impale: 0.5 | cast=0.8 aftercast=0.25 {bleed 8s} (DPS=0.476 coeff/sec + Bleed to 42.5+0.05xCondiDamage /sec, maximum 7 stacks of Bleed for 42.5+CondiDamage x 7×0.05)

As you can see, almost everything is inferior to Lightning Whip, which is why you see some setups running Fresh Air for greater Lightning Whip availability right now in D/D.

• I believe that due to this, Dragon’s Claw could be made Piercing and have its deviation reduced such that more than 1 hit is guaranteed out to 400 range. 3 parallel projectiles would do much to normalise Claw with Whip already as the coefficient per second difference is on the order of 0.1.
• Due to Dragon’s Claw’s lesser ability to cleave targets, I believe that the coefficient should be raised by 0.1 per projectile to bring Claw DPS to the range of 1.425 coefficient per second. This would make Claw superior to Whip DPS at the cost of single target focus. Adding Piercing would then put Claw on the mechanical level of Whip – giving D/X Ele a second option and reducing the reliance upon Fresh Air for appreciable AA DPS.

I think our autos should give us situational utility instead of straight dps, because I don’t feel that having powerful autos is really the way to go, nor is the current ele system of always having a better option really good either. More stuff like staff earth and water (very situational but at least they have some purpose other than just damage), and less stuff like d/x earth auto (mediocre damage and one stack of bleed at 300 range… yay).

Chris.4670:

-adding damage conditions like torment to water(ice-skills like frozen ground, frozen burst) and confusion to air for better damage output.

That would be a pretty cool idea. I think adding Torment to Water Auto attack, 1 stack, 5 second duration that gets inflicted on everyone it hits would be a decent non-overpowered change as it wouldnt even be that huge a a damage, Could then start having Water as the “kiting” sort of Attunement with Frozen Burst as well, 3 seconds of Chill, Glyph of Elemental Power for more chill and such it could really work. You would have to stay in Water for a while for the Torment to get to a point where its a huge threat. Or they could add it to Cone of Cold. 1 stack of Torment, 5 seconds on each tick

I really think Shocking Aura should proc some stacks of Confusion as well. Currently our Auras are rather lacking and with the ICD it makes them even worse. Say 5 stacks of Confusion for 5 seconds or something on hitting someone with Shocking Aura up. they could even add it to Ride The Lightening that all targets hit by it are inflicted with 5 stacks of Confusion for 5seconds make it even more damaging when you hit someone.

@Vodcom.

I actually really like Fire 4 in Dagger. It deals great damage and is great to placement in a position you know the enemy are going to be going. I think it would be better (if it doesnt already) to inflict the burning on those already in the AoE of it when it is used though.

I much prefer Dagger/Dagger as condition weapon. It has SO much access to the most damaging of conditions – Burning and Bleeding. It just needs a few tweaks here and there to the weapon to make it a truly viable option.

In my opinion this is what should happen to Dagger/Dagger:

1) Add Torment to Water – Either Auto attack and/or Cone of Cold
2) Add Confusion to Air – Ride the Lightening
3) Reduce the insane cast time of Churning Earth
4) Make Fire Grab 100% critical hit on targets With Burning
5) Improve Auras so they are a more viable form of defence

6) Improve Auto attacks
6.1) Fire – Deals More damage to burning targets
6.2) Water – Inflicts 1 stack of Torment, 5seconds
6.3) Air – Fine, maybe up the damage a tad
6.4) Earth – Redesign, so that it hits Multiple targets

7) Magnetic Grasp – It should pull your target to you.
8) Earthquake – Reduce the cool down
9) Fire Grab – Reduce the Cool down
10) Fire Grab – Reduce the cool down
11) Frost Aura – Reduce the cool down
12) Cleansing Wave – Reduce the cool down
13) Updraft – Reduce the cool down

As i stated, i think Dagger/Dagger is the better option for Conditions. Removing the Bleeding from Earth Auto attack would be a bad move, it needs the skill to be changed so that it hits multiple targets, the duration of the bleed would have to be reduced to compensate though.

I see three problems with the way that Elementalists are, for design reasons and for the current state of the game, in order of importance (in my opinion)

1) pre-cast times. What I mean here is the time that a skill takes from when you press the button to when the damage/effect triggers. Scroll through all of your attunements and all of your weapons and cast all of your skills. You will notice how a lot of skills have a rather long pre-cast time. You could argue that this is also the case with other classes, but the Elementalist is meant to be bursty, fast paced, and quick. Even some of our mediocre or useless, more or less, abilities have long cast times. Flamewall, ice shards, shatterstone (oh god) shockwave, static field, etc. I could go on for a while. Imagine if some of these skills had faster animation/cast times while you were in sticky situations, or if you were rolling through a combo. Combat would be much cleaner and it would flow more.
2) cooldowns. this has obviously been brought up earlier in this thread, so I won’t go too in-depth. Attunement cooldowns should be reduced to something like 9 seconds with 0 arcana and maybe 5 seconds with 30 in arcana. I only see problems with off-hand cooldowns on focus and dagger, and cooldowns on certain utility skills, such as armor of earth.
3) Less trait-based healing. Nearly all elementalists you will find have at the bare minimum, 10 in water magic. A majority of us will have to go higher to maintain the survivability we seek, often sacrificing a lot of damage in the process. I suggest introducing unique ways of acquiring health through the use of our skills. For example, fire grab would give us a ~1000 heal should we land it on a burning foe, or we receive ~500 health for each projectile we catch with Swirling Winds or enemy we stun with Static field. Unique ways of healing, in my opinion, would increase our survivability while also encouraging us to try and make optimal use of our skills, rather than spamming them when the incredibly high cooldown has been cleared.

Scar Of The Lotus.5631:

3) Less trait-based healing. Nearly all elementalists you will find have at the bare minimum, 10 in water magic. A majority of us will have to go higher to maintain the survivability we seek, often sacrificing a lot of damage in the process. I suggest introducing unique ways of acquiring health through the use of our skills. For example, fire grab would give us a ~1000 heal should we land it on a burning foe, or we receive ~500 health for each projectile we catch with Swirling Winds or enemy we stun with Static field. Unique ways of healing, in my opinion, would increase our survivability while also encouraging us to try and make optimal use of our skills, rather than spamming them when the incredibly high cooldown has been cleared.

That sounds interesting.

Healing for D/D builds:

Fire:
Ring of Fire – Healed for each target that enters or leaves the ring
Fire Grab – Healed for 25% of Damage done. the skill would be changed to deal 75% of the total burning on the target in damage

ie – if you have 10,000 worth of burning damage on the target. That is removed and you deal 7,500 damage and are healed for 2,500 health.

Water:
Vapor Blade – Add a healing component
Cone of Cold – Increase the Healing
Frost Aura – Healed for each attack

Other ideas could involve conditions, like you gain say 50% of the damage done by Burning as health.

Since no one is speaking up for the S/D minority of all Ele I’ll add my two cents.
While no not directly related to the damage output, one of my main problems still centers around it. Because while we can’t do as many dmg as warriors (well, no-one can), Ele still can do good burst damage. What annoys me is how said damage is to come by.

If I want to hit something HARD, as s/d I need:

full zerker + might + fury + Lightning Hammer

It’s sacking, stacking, stacking, then switch to LH for max dmg… then I either kill very fast or I die very fast because of my 11k~12k health. Healing halfway through is out of the question of course because I’d need to drop the hammer for any good heal and the damage is gone until my cooldowns are down to the point where I can start stacking up to 25 might + fury again.

Yes, it’s the point of “glasscannon” builds to hit hard and die fast, but as an Ele you have a good chance of dying fast before you ever get the chance of hitting hard. That’s something I want to be taken care of. My problem here is NOT that I’m squishy, it’s that while being squishy I don’t have the damage ouput to compensate for it. So:

1) Better survivability. How this is achieved is something I’m opening for suggestions about. As said before, simply giving Elementalists a bit more HP is not going to solve the problem. We need better utilities and better minor traits + please…

2) Do something about the cooldowns on Ele. I don’t want to have to trade in Arcana just to reduce my elemental cds to 10 sec and I don’t want to have to rely on utility spells with 60 sec+ cds to not die the instant something decides to burst me.

3) Weapons on Ele are a big problem too imho. There are a lot of issues with the conjured weapons that were mentioned by others already. On top of that right now we have the problem that what at least 80% of all ele play is D/D because the alternatives just aren’t worth using most of the time.

I love this class so much, please do something to make playing it as fun again as it was when I started with gw2.

I would remove attunement cooldowns and add weapon swap. I would get much more bags in EotM.

Make things like static field last along time so that they become part of the terrain of the fight. Make churning earth sit there for 30 seconds waiting for your command to explode. Imo things like this would be interesting.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Just FYI – We’ll be rolling out another round of Collaborative Development soon. I’ll be working with the balance designers to help get some well-rounded feedback from you all. Start thinking about what 3 things you would change, and keep an eye out for the CDI thread!

Turn elementalists into a ticking time bomb that is easily dismantled unless behind the hands of a very twitchy handed pro player on difficulty level: Asian. I’m serious, k thanks.

Well ive been playing the elementalist since the game release on and off, and its been one big struggle (constantly dying all the time, no matter if I go for more health, toughness etc. – nothing really seems to help)… sure, we expect the class to be a bit weaker (defence wise), but for that trade-off we should get the highest damage (regardless of range). Its kind-of strange that anet reforces this, making daggers have the highest damage (so moving us up to the front). Surely a ele should be at the back of the group, dealing large amount of damage, and/or supporting the other classes.

Having just under/avg makes it a very poor class, and feel that its not much use (or worth the hassle). Okay, I could make another character and regrind to level 80, but why? when I should have a fairly good level 80 ele? If I wanted to run upto a monster and hit it with a sword I would of created a warrior or something.

The forcing players to switch attunements, so they can on the ‘off-chance’ make a combo is just poor (nor worth the effort). Long attunement cooldown’s are just silly. I feel most of the elites arent that good, a lot of the ‘bonuses’ only last a few seconds (but take 30+ seconds to recharge) and there isnt enough points for traits (if we are master of all, then let us have more trait lines – especially at the cost of 30 per line).

I dont think whacking more health on it is the solution either; ive seen 14k dmg in a each hit myself (so even with more health you would die). I think the highest problem is a lack of defense skill; like Stone/Ice Armour etc. And the fact once your health is down, you know your character will be killed shortly afterwards. There is no real way to recover from a 10-12k blow.

The class needs a major overhaul, and until it does I wont be playing.

ps. I also feel the staff needs a major boost to its damage output, and there should be a build where a shield could be used (ie. sceptre/shield).

Dude, ele staff can put out ridiculous amounts of damage with lava font and you are supposed to be relatively close to the action to benefit from party boons and blast finishers.

I would scrap global attunement cooldown as the stat for the arcane line.

Instead I would set the base attunement cooldown to 15 seconds. Each of the 5-point minor traits in the Air, Earth, Fire, and Water Trait lines would — in addition to its current effect — reduce the cooldown for that element by 1.5 seconds. Each 15-point minor trait in those lines would reduce the cooldown for that attunement by another 3.5 seconds (for a total of 5 seconds).

The Arcane line stat bonus would be a morphing pool of 10-300 stat points that adds more of the two stats associated with each of the other Trait lines while you are in the matching attunement. So if you had 30 trait points in Arcane, you would have 300 morphing points. That would give you~

• 150 power and +15% condition duration while in Fire attunement
• 150 precision and ferocity (the new crit damage stat) while in Air attunement
• 150 toughness and condition damage in while Earth attunement
• 150 vitality and healing power while in Water attunement

This puts the emphasis on attunement cooldown in the lines where you want to specialize while positioning them low enough in each line that you could scatter 15/15/15/15/0 with 10 points left over for and attunement dancing specialist.

The morphing points would allow you to use the Arcane line to reinforce what you’re doing with each elements rather than dilute it.

change burning speed to home in on target. and if there is no target, works the same as it is now.

how can we have a spell that has an unreliable factor i.e. does not hit when directly in front of enemy. why can’t this spell work the same as savage leap, swoop, ride the lightning, fiery rush etc.

why anet has to go through the lengths to make this spell “unique” and in the process making it worse? what is the reason?

niconori.7235:

change burning speed to home in on target. and if there is no target, works the same as it is now.

how can we have a spell that has an unreliable factor i.e. does not hit when directly in front of enemy. why can’t this spell work the same as savage leap, swoop, ride the lightning, fiery rush etc.

why anet has to go through the lengths to make this spell “unique” and in the process making it worse? what is the reason?

The point of Burning Speed is not as a gap closer but actually as a line skillshot. Parallels can be found across all classes. If you fail to land a Burning Speed it is not because the skill is “unreliable”, it is because you are not aiming it, or you have incorrect spacing. Running D/D, the correct spacing is the range 130-300, which is the range where all your skills are guaranteed to hit, yet outside of melee range where D/D does not have the EHP to survive for long. Indeed, if you Burning Speed at 300 range you will end up in the perfect position to land a followup Fire Grab on a Burning Target.

My only beef with Burning Speed in any capacity but more against D/D in general is the fact that it completely lacks snare clears. Prior to the Water Magic nerfs, Elementalist had no issue with Chill, Cripple or Immobilise as its cleansing capability was unparalleled. Now, however, Immobilise is extremely dangerous for Dagger mainhand Elementalist and it is easy to be kited to death.

To wit, an alteration to Burning Speed could be to make it break Immobilise (+/- Cripple or Chill) instead of giving it the proposed Evade Frames. The evade frames proposal outlined in the Feature Patch preview is completely senseless and does not address the core issues, but then again, that hasn’t stopped Arenanet before.

MonMalthias.4763:

niconori.7235:

change burning speed to home in on target. and if there is no target, works the same as it is now.

how can we have a spell that has an unreliable factor i.e. does not hit when directly in front of enemy. why can’t this spell work the same as savage leap, swoop, ride the lightning, fiery rush etc.

why anet has to go through the lengths to make this spell “unique” and in the process making it worse? what is the reason?

The point of Burning Speed is not as a gap closer but actually as a line skillshot. Parallels can be found across all classes. If you fail to land a Burning Speed it is not because the skill is “unreliable”, it is because you are not aiming it, or you have incorrect spacing. Running D/D, the correct spacing is the range 130-300, which is the range where all your skills are guaranteed to hit, yet outside of melee range where D/D does not have the EHP to survive for long. Indeed, if you Burning Speed at 300 range you will end up in the perfect position to land a followup Fire Grab on a Burning Target.

My only beef with Burning Speed in any capacity but more against D/D in general is the fact that it completely lacks snare clears. Prior to the Water Magic nerfs, Elementalist had no issue with Chill, Cripple or Immobilise as its cleansing capability was unparalleled. Now, however, Immobilise is extremely dangerous for Dagger mainhand Elementalist and it is easy to be kited to death.

To wit, an alteration to Burning Speed could be to make it break Immobilise (+/- Cripple or Chill) instead of giving it the proposed Evade Frames. The evade frames proposal outlined in the Feature Patch preview is completely senseless and does not address the core issues, but then again, that hasn’t stopped Arenanet before.

you are just describing “unreliable” in a different way. and i am not asking anything to be changed, it still works as a skillshot if you deselect your target, but rather i am asking for a new function, to home in on a selected target. is it too much to ask for?

this opens up ways to combo as well. why do i need to use 3>4>5 why cant i 5>4>3 or whatever. why do i have to start a combo with 3? can’t i have more options?

i like your idea btw, please give us both anet!

remove immob stacking.
element switch should be on a 9sec base cd(or whatever it is now with 30 in arcana, 9 or 10), no matter how many traitpoints you have invested in arcana. to make it still worth it traiting into the arcana line statwise you could for example add a -x to -30% condition duration stat to it scince eles that dont go for a full anti condi spec are pretty vulnerable to conditions due to their low hp pool.
beside that i think elemental attunement should be at least a minor trait (e.g. 15 arcana), cause we eles realy rely on that one. and remove immob stacking
another very important thing to change imo would be evasive arcana….i think a nice solution would be deleting the trait, making every 5 point trait from the element trait lines a standard class mechanic, and add the evasive arcana effect depending on the element to theese 5 point traits. the importance of the arcana traitline was a main issue with ele scince release, and with this change it wouldnt be necessary anymore to trait so far into this traitline, but it still wouldnt be a bad choice.
atm an elementalist that doesnt want to be a full glasscannon has to use 45 traitpoints to get the healing he realy needs, and still will be very squishie. with this change you only would have to use 15 traitpoints for the so important healingeffect of the traits. #remove immob stacking
another awsome change imo would be, like someone mentioned previously, removing the heal from dagger #5, but adding a waterfield with the duration of the engis healturret overcharge. this would allow a lot more elementcombos and would reward teamplay and communication aswell. and you wouldnt have to run staff to get any other combo field than a fire one. immob stacking needs to be removed…
another thing that was mentioned several times already: revert the rtl cd nerf!…i think 20s if you hit a foe and 25s if you dont hit anyone would be fine.
beside that i think an amulett with the power798, healing284, precision284, vitality284, toughness284 stats would help a lot aswell.

remove immob stacking btw

and for the sake of counterplay add any kind of it to the instant dmg skills an elementalist has….maybe by adding a delay with a passive animation to the skills or something….maybe all of them should work more like arcane shield or guardians shield of wrath….for example for the air skills, if you dont get hit in the duration of 1 or 2 secs the skill deals the current amount of dmg, and if you get hit the strike that would hit you gets automaticly blinded and the enemy gets hit by about 75% or 66% of the dmg…..obviously there would have to be some kind of symbol in the effect thing below the hp bar, and the animation should be visible for the enemy, maybe, some small lighnings above his head or smth ;D
ah, and remove immob stacking
and pls listen to Olli

need some serious buff for mh dagger also. is there any reason to be using a mh dagger over other weapons?

Sickness.9831:

another awsome change imo would be, like someone mentioned previously, removing the heal from dagger #5, but adding a waterfield with the duration of the engis healturret overcharge.

The skill is a 40 second cool down skill….why exactly should the heal be removed? This would actually be a nerf. It should do its current thing AND have a few second (3 or 4) waterfield. Seeing as the heal has a 40 second cool down, in its current state (like most weapon, heal, utility and elite skills) the cool down simply is unjustified.

Get rid of conjured weapons and give us access to the real versions!

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Sickness.9831:

another awsome change imo would be, like someone mentioned previously, removing the heal from dagger #5, but adding a waterfield with the duration of the engis healturret overcharge.

The skill is a 40 second cool down skill….why exactly should the heal be removed? This would actually be a nerf. It should do its current thing AND have a few second (3 or 4) waterfield. Seeing as the heal has a 40 second cool down, in its current state (like most weapon, heal, utility and elite skills) the cool down simply is unjustified.

I know I would much rather be using skill 5 on staff

Lostwingman.5034:

Dude, ele staff can put out ridiculous amounts of damage with lava font and you are supposed to be relatively close to the action to benefit from party boons and blast finishers.

Yea staff ele has kittened burst damage if you know what you are doing. I myself have been able to level zergs countless times with staff.

Maskah.1486:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Sickness.9831:

another awsome change imo would be, like someone mentioned previously, removing the heal from dagger #5, but adding a waterfield with the duration of the engis healturret overcharge.

The skill is a 40 second cool down skill….why exactly should the heal be removed? This would actually be a nerf. It should do its current thing AND have a few second (3 or 4) waterfield. Seeing as the heal has a 40 second cool down, in its current state (like most weapon, heal, utility and elite skills) the cool down simply is unjustified.

I know I would much rather be using skill 5 on staff

yeah, right, removing the heal would be a bit harsh…i think lower it by 50% would be fine. so healing and using 1 blast would equal the current healing you get. so it would be a nice buff.
…yeah, bad thing is, if you are in a pvp match you cant switch weapons, and the only way to get any different combo field than a fire field is using staff…which kinda sucks. this change would make more combos between elements, and another way of using your blasts than just stacking might possible at times you are not fighting with your teammates who can eventually give other combofields.
i dont think the cd is too long, maybe its just cause im used to it, but it feels right for me personaly when considering it is an additional healskill weve got.
the skill would be fine if it would be like this: waterfield 2s at your location, radius 240, about 800 healing(240 radius), 1 condition removed(240 radius), number of targets: 5, 40s cd, 3/4s casttime

another thing that just came into my mind was adding a 2s smoke field to the churning earth cast, that activates when you almost, or even entirely, ended it….lets say you get a smoke field at 3s of the 3 1/4s cast, and your combofinisher blasts right into the field, as long noone layed down another combo field earlier. didnt think about that in detail yet, just thought it would be awsome. i think even the cd would be ok tho considering the eternal casttime…would enable some clutch rezzes/disengages

niconori.7235:

is there any reason to be using a mh dagger over other weapons?

its fun to play^^

Sickness.9831:

yeah, right, removing the heal would be a bit harsh…i think lower it by 50% would be fine. so healing and using 1 blast would equal the current healing you get. so it would be a nice buff.

That would still be a nerf. If you require 2 actions to do the same thing as it currently does with one action – that is not a buff at all. That is nothing more than a nerf. You can’t always blast your fields in combat. You have to take into consideration all the cool downs and such.

For it to be a 40second cool down. It needs to do its FULL heal and have a water field. I mean even with just over 700 Healing Power Cleansing Wave heals for 2,020 health. That is equal to 50.5Health per a second….

It should really be buffed a little, 25% buff and have a water field. Considering its insane cool down it currently is not that great. Or Maybe instead of a Waterfield. Grant everyone affected with a reasonable Regeneration. Say 5-10seconds.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Sickness.9831:

yeah, right, removing the heal would be a bit harsh…i think lower it by 50% would be fine. so healing and using 1 blast would equal the current healing you get. so it would be a nice buff.

That would still be a nerf. If you require 2 actions to do the same thing as it currently does with one action – that is not a buff at all. That is nothing more than a nerf. You can’t always blast your fields in combat. You have to take into consideration all the cool downs and such.

For it to be a 40second cool down. It needs to do its FULL heal and have a water field. I mean even with just over 700 Healing Power Cleansing Wave heals for 2,020 health. That is equal to 50.5Health per a second….

It should really be buffed a little, 25% buff and have a water field. Considering its insane cool down it currently is not that great. Or Maybe instead of a Waterfield. Grant everyone affected with a reasonable Regeneration. Say 5-10seconds.

it would be a buff scince you could heal for insane amounts with this skill…..in 2 secs it is like absolutely no problem to blast in this field twice, and if your teammates are patient or you communicate with them it will be no problem for them to blast in at least twice aswell….that would be an additional 4k heal with like no healing power(if im not mistaken, didnt try it, but i think it was something like 900healing per blast without healingpower)…..you cant tell me thats a nerf man…. in some situations it would be worse than before, but in others it would be like sooooo much better..
the idea with the regeneration isn t good at all imo….a 10s regeneration instead of a 2s waterfield?!…no. no dude!…never!….a waterfield just adds so much utility, you cant get even close to that with some regeneration.

I think it is crazy that people are asking for dagger to be more of a support and utility weapon when it is clearly not.

I would request only one real change – half all cooldowns on all weapons.

This will bring out so much more diversity in play/rotations and bring us in line. As QoL give us some more utility to our skills (like mesmers have) for example – Updraft a stunbreaker

so, things went as expected: tiny/diminutive sustain has been given to us, but we have yet to see if that will make us survive more in actual combat.

After playing with Scepter:

Fire:

Flamestrike – Cast time is rather long Decrease the Burning to 1 second. Reduce the cast time to 1/2second. Could do with a little damage buff as well.

Dragons Tooth – This is just SO much worse than Drake’s Breath. Lower Burning potential by quite a bit. On my current build Drakes Breath is 9k potential Burning for all those in range. That Burning alone is 4 times stronger with a 1 second lower cool down. Just for the added Blast. The delay in it is rather annoying as well.

What i would change : Make it leave a Lava Font sort of thing and lasts 3-4seconds that applies 3second Burning to foes in the Lava Font. Speed it up a bit from the cast to the drop by like 50%

Phoenix – Rather long cool down. No Burning. Decent damage

What i would change: Targets in the way of the Phoenix get a 3second Burn so potential of 6seconds if they get hit on both times.Targets at the explosion area are inflicted with 6seconds of Burning. Decrease the cool down to 10seconds. Decrease the Vigor down to compensate(?)

Water:

Ice Shards – Decent cast time. Low damage. Maybe increase it a little bit.

Shatterstone – Cast time is rather long. I would increase the damage a little bit and reduce the cast time to 1/2second.

Water Trident – Damage a bit low, could do with a little reduction in cool down. The rest is pretty solid.

Air:

Arc Lightning – Okay. Not much possible without making a bit too strong for burst builds.

Lightning Strike – Can be very strong. Okay the way it is.

Blinding Flash – Okay. I would maybe make it AoE in like a 180-240radius

Earth:

Stone Shards – Okay. I would maybe make the direct damage a little and make it Peirce the targets would be really good.

Rock Barrier – I don’t know, just don’t really like it. Toughness is okay. The damage is rather weak and makes it not really worth using it. Not quite sure what to do with it. Maybe make it so that it Cripples with each each hit.

Dust Devil -AoE Blind in a line isnt so bad. Maybe Reduce the Blind duration to 5 seconds. Decrease the cool down to 10seconds. Increase the damage a little.

mainhand dagger air’s lightning touch – give it the ability to daze enemy or stun enemy from behind. so it synchronizes with lightning rod.

and im concerned about lightning rod’s damage.

lightning touch do 50% more dmg when target is stunned or knocked down <- that would make it more fun to use.

My first request would be:

1. “Can a dev play an ele for 8 hours a day in wvw for a week in tpvp and wvw”
2. There is no need for a second request. Everything people point out is glaringly obvious if you actually played the profession…. e.g. get 1 of your TWO (yes only two) balance dev’s to stop playing warriors.

Make ALL fire skills more powerful.

Refill ALL endurance when attunements are switched.

Tornado Elite should make you invulnerable.

Hmmm, to players saying that thief is so op and whatever. My main is dd ele and thieves are easy kill, really (or they will run away). Thief is so easy to read – try the tactic to spin in place not to be hit in a back by backstab and pop shoking aura in right moment, after he stuns himself just make updraft and your fire burst – now he’s dying. Countering classes are – engi and mesmer (pu build – crazy stuff).

What i would say about changes – that blind on burn is quite nice, i could make some builds with that, but what i don’t like is very big nerf to the celestial – useful almost only on ele.

Other thing – nerfing boon duration runes (ele needs to use defensive boons to counter low health and low armor). My build with this got pretty much destroyed.

Next thing – if you want to make class which could be condi spec – ele is not. Why? Because ele has only 2 damaging conditions and need to change attunement to add more condi – it gives the time for conditions to expire or gives a chanse to cleanse it. Same thing with guardians – they will never ever be condi class – too few condies (simmilar thing was with thief, but i’m seeing buff there – that confusion). Compare it to necros who put like 4 condies in one skill or engies with x different conditions on every skill. So to make condi spec on class you should add more condies (damaging most likely). It could be like confusion each time you swap attunement (on trait of course) or torment in earth, ew something like poison in water.

In other hand you are trying to make attunement specific builds – don’t do that. Ele has 4 attunements and should switch them to have maximum effectiness, not like other with the option to swap weapons and focus on one (thats why arcane traitline was so powerful so as fresh air), not stay in one because there he has condies or something like immunity for criticals (don’t make grandmaster traits to be bound with one attunement).

Other thing – why ppl are using water traitline – because ele has worse stats in game and extra heal or condi removal is really nice to have. Overall it is not as bad class in wvw terms, in pvp it was too much nerfed (there base stats are especially important, cause in pve/wvw there are more stats and gap isn’t so big). As for pve – staff is bad (too low dps, support/control isnt too good in this game), in wvw not bad. Focus – only pve. Scepter good in pve, bad in wvw (only on duels), cause of too big survability sacrifice. For dd – it is predictable (fire – burst, air – control, earth – control/dmg, water -heal), but good in almost all situations. It shouldn’t be able to see the attunement buff for the enemy – they can react too fast with that (he’s going to fire – oh he’ll use burning speed, air – aura, autoattack etc.), much easier then for me to see the waeapon, especially toolkit of engi. They could still see the fire/whatever around our hands. Other thing – with this patch arcane abilities are going to be much weaker (crit dmg nerf), so something should be done with them – I would say total remake – cause they’re unbalanced – whith ele you can burst like hell with that (before patch), but you have total 0 defence then (to kill zerk ele is like to take half hp of zerk warrior, or even less).

To sum up ele is my favourite class, most fun to play and quite skill deamanding. Please consider those changes that I pointed and just make more options, not nerfs to existing builds.

Wondering if anything posted in this thread was going to be implemented or has been?

Mattmatt.4962:

THIS:

Fire: Condition Damage
Air: Direct/Burst damage
Water: Healing
Earth: Defense

Just get rid off this.
We ALL complain about the fact that beeing the squichiest class, we have to spec defensively and that then we can’t deal reasonable damage. With THIS stupid side of view, how do you want the ele to be able to balance offense and defense ? It’s impossible cause with this you split defense and offense.

There already was burning fire and they added blinding ashes which is a little underpowered but a trait that goes in the right direction. I hope we’ll se more trait like that.
But on the other side, they put stone hearth (100% underpowered by the way) in earth, in a RP point of view, i understand why, but still, this is the bad direction ^^

Fire while beeing the power line begin to get nice defensive trait. So to answer your question, they didnt say anithing, but, it seems that they begin to followe what i quoted (or maybe it just total random XD)

-

While writting, i had an idea for water: a trait that chill opponent on something like “critical hit incoming”. But have to beeing hitted is often a bad idea for ele. So i think to “on heal” (not only utility heal, but every skill that provide heal) but with the amount of heal skill that we got, this could be OP.
Water has a few “dps trait” but all in adept, water need a few in higher tier.

Wow. I read through these pages without looking at time stamps. The whole time I thought, “wow I hope the devs look at our base health and armor, and the cooldown rates of our highly used skills like RTL/EQ/FG,” to go back and see that those things were mentioned a whopping 4 months ago.

That’s seriously discouraging. I remember I left this game a while ago because devs didn’t seem to do much about issues that the majority of the playerbase would speak up about. (back then it was when I was maining a necro). To come back to the game knowing that these things were talked about 4 months ago and nothing has been done about them isn’t instilling any hope. =\

Mattmatt.4962:

Mattmatt.4962:

THIS:

Fire: Condition Damage
Air: Direct/Burst damage
Water: Healing
Earth: Defense

Just get rid off this.
We ALL complain about the fact that beeing the squichiest class, we have to spec defensively and that then we can’t deal reasonable damage. With THIS stupid side of view, how do you want the ele to be able to balance offense and defense ? It’s impossible cause with this you split defense and offense.

There already was burning fire and they added blinding ashes which is a little underpowered but a trait that goes in the right direction. I hope we’ll se more trait like that.
But on the other side, they put stone hearth (100% underpowered by the way) in earth, in a RP point of view, i understand why, but still, this is the bad direction ^^

Fire while beeing the power line begin to get nice defensive trait. So to answer your question, they didnt say anithing, but, it seems that they begin to followe what i quoted (or maybe it just total random XD)

-

While writting, i had an idea for water: a trait that chill opponent on something like “critical hit incoming”. But have to beeing hitted is often a bad idea for ele. So i think to “on heal” (not only utility heal, but every skill that provide heal) but with the amount of heal skill that we got, this could be OP.
Water has a few “dps trait” but all in adept, water need a few in higher tier.

getting hit is not the problem, u will always get hit somehow… on hit procs would be bad if it would be like : each time ur enemy hits u, u apply vulnerability, yes we get hit but, the problem is we wont get hit often due to us playing defencively mostly, so on hit effects with an ICD is not bad, but thenew trait has an ICD of 10 sec and its global not per attunement. thats way too long

Anomaly.7612:

Wow. I read through these pages without looking at time stamps. The whole time I thought, “wow I hope the devs look at our base health and armor, and the cooldown rates of our highly used skills like RTL/EQ/FG,” to go back and see that those things were mentioned a whopping 4 months ago.

That’s seriously discouraging. I remember I left this game a while ago because devs didn’t seem to do much about issues that the majority of the playerbase would speak up about. (back then it was when I was maining a necro). To come back to the game knowing that these things were talked about 4 months ago and nothing has been done about them isn’t instilling any hope. =\

yep, we have been making suggestions for SO long and been pretty much ignored. It will be interesting when the Ele CDI or what ever its called happens and these suggestions come up again (and they will) i wonder what (if we get any!) response will be.