Guild Wars 2

From the word “go” I was expecting to roll and main and Engineer. The idea of a support-focused “jack of all trades” wielding guns and bombs in a fantasy world seemed totally in line with every archetype I’d care about.

I made it to 35 before I quit in boredom, and I was left confused and unable to articulate why exactly it wasn’t clicking for me. After shopping around a number of alts I came across the Elementalist – after a number of levels with them, I don’t think that it’s a stretch to call them the offensive-focused version of the engineer (jack of all trades, needing to swap between “modes”, etc.)

I want to avoid turning this into a class war (enough of that in real life), but I did want to talk about 3 areas that the ele and engi share – indeed 3 areas that appear to be the main bread and butter of both classes – where the ele blows the engineer out of the water.

Synergy
Once you learn to properly swap attunements it’s like you’re seeing into the Matrix. Skills feed into each other in two important ways: a) The first 5 skills fit together nicely, but more importantly b) they also fit into other attunements, covering weaknesses and providing clearly defined benefits to each other. It feels entirely natural to Ride the Lighting into a fight, make their day worse with some burning to the face, cripple them and knock them down with Earth, then fly away after switching back to Air.

There is no such battle flow to engineers. Kits don’t cover weaknesses or flow into other skills so much as they are a full on replacement. This can be fine for some playstyles, but the way they’re currently designed makes the switch feeling jarring and clunky. It’s hard to say if the root problem is that there’s no focus or too much focus, but it definitely is noticeable.

The fact that kits outright replace utilities further destroys their synergy. The ele has a plethora of utility skills that change depending on attunement – not so with the engi, where you indeed lose utility skills in order to use a kit.

Swapping modes
When I swap attunements, I can guarantee I’ll have access to a set of 5 skills that make sense and have great utility. All 4 elements have at least one damage, one utility, and one support skill per weapon – In other words, it’s never a disadvantage to swap modes.

With engineer, kits always make me feel I’m losing something. In addition to having to give up a utility slot just for the ability to use it, kits tend to make me miss my weapon skills and the variety and utility they give me. Take bombs – I lose my range and all of my support for the ability to use 5 nearly identical skills that cause different conditions. Grenades are cool if you’re looking for raw damage, but man are they boring in execution.

Weapon kits are better, but not by much. Flamethrower allows me to set stuff on fire…but I lose a lot of utility, I lose my range, and I lose that aforementioned utility slot. What did I gain? I can already set things on fire a few different ways, I can already blow people back.

Tool Kit gives me a melee, but you’d need to spec in a direction entirely different than anything else just to survive, let alone take advantage of this archetype shift. And as before, the skills I gain can already be replicated elsewhere – the pistol/shield can bleed, cripple, confuse, and block attacks, and I can do it at range.

Branching skills
Like the engi, certain ele skills can have a number of varying effects. Unlike the Engi, these effects are under my control and predictable. For example, my heal can grant me a boon of my choice depending on my attunement – compare that to the engi where you’re rolling the dice every time.

I understand it’s in line with the flavor of the class to appear random, but isn’t it more in line to appear random yet actually be entirely in control? Give us more player agency to influence results of our actions and you’ll do a lot to make us feel like we own our own devices.

Dunno what your trying to get at, But none of the skills, I find, are really good on an elementalist besides the revive spell, Fiery Great sword, and arcane shield.

the elementalist has far too little to represent any one element, and what seems to work together stem from totally different tree’s so speccing is difficult.

Elementalists have damage, But they also have pointless ground targetting on skills and too many channels.

The “flow” for an elementalist is absolutely horrible for this reason because skills leave you seriously vulnerable, or put you too close in range, and then you have those skills which do next to nothing worthwhile for you really .

This is me playing an elementalist.

In PvE: rely on racial skills

PvP: Use staff and spam 1 with a crit build only changing attunements to get bonuses

I’m shocked to see you have that opinion. Ground targeting is far from pointless – indeed, those are some of your most powerful skills as any class.

And to see you rely on racials in PvE…I cannot even fathom a) what race you’re even playing (all racials are pretty bad) or b) what you even mean by that.

I wish I had something better to respond to your post with, but we’re definitely two different people.

Deployable turrets are far from the most powerful skill an engineer has and Ground targetting + Channel is about the dumbest thing ever in a game mainly about PvP

Fire attunement weapon 5, Glyph of storms, etc etc. Sure they’re aoe, but since they don’t have 2k casting range you’re going to get rolled over while casting it on someone.

and In dungeons, especially in small rooms you’re going to get knocked down quite instantly (in a cancel your channel AND killed sense)

Your conjures have to be ground targetted and channeled even tho one appears directly in your hand already. etc. etc.

Opinions are different view points by definition. You really shouldn’t expect someone to share the same view point as you.

I honestly believe elementalist is by far the most vague class in the game, doesn’t mean everyone else agrees

Absolutely agree. In theory, Engineer is just a reverse Elementalist. You don’t lose a utility slot for choosing a kit because of the corresponding tool belt skill. Elementalist’s attunements are F1-F4 and utility skills 6-9. Engineer’s “attunements” are 6-9 and utility skills F1-F4.

However, Engineer doesn’t feel as fluid or rewarding. I love Staff Ele: drop a delayed blast finisher in earth attunement (Eruption), switch to another element for Area Might/Area Healing/Area Swiftness combo. Little things like that are actually very important for a class to feel whole.

The kits are all competing instead of working together. For example, the only difference between Grenade and Bomb is range, skills are nearly identical.

Um elementalist is the worst profession right now. Engineer is better in every single way than elementalist. Even the amount of combos engys can do is insane.

Lol 15 seconds on all your stances makes elementalist flow? Good luck with that, i find grenades and bombs with no cooldown timer on switching far better for synergy than a elementalist, enjoy siting in fire/staff all day because thats all they are good for at endgame, and even that is subpar dps

I play a staff elementalist and I think the skill designer is some kind of god disguised as a person.
Been playing staff ele for over 150 hours and still finding tricky synergy between elements that I had NO IDEA even existed.