Guild Wars 2

Loic.4367:

CKMo.4097:

You are actually proving my point, my friend, about the fact that there is little to no incentive for switching elemental attunement.

I would amend this statement to be “there is little to no incentive for staying in an elemental attunement.”

Now before anyone starts calling me a horrible elementalist player because obviously by what I just said I still don’t know how to press f1-f4 of haven’t figured out how to dodge yet, what I mean is that, besides fire attunement, there’s no benefit from remaining in a attunement, even after specialization.

I agree with the OP, trait investments do fairly little when they focus on an element (alacrity traits, mastery traits, etc). If in a magically perfect world, every attunement would be equally useful and used an equal amount of time by every player as a base, traits could slowly shift that, making it advantageous to spend more time in air and water by specing into those trait lines. But this simply isn’t the case, and the only attunement that’s good for anything besides cherrypicking cooldowns is fire.

Please, to people arguing against the OP, keep in mind that he’s not saying elementalists don’t switch attunements. He’s merely saying that the amount of time spent in them is disproportionate. I’m not saying don’t disagree with him, but keep in mind what the point is.

And to anyone mentioning air being meant for single target damage, speaking as a dagger player, it simply doesn’t exist. 2 skills that deal no damage, 1 that does less than the autoattack, another that deals roughly half that. What good is air daggers for anything but RtL and Updraft? Unless you’ve got Zephyr’s boon, basically nothing, and even then you’re not using Shocking Aura for the skill’s actual effect.

Fantastic reiteration of my words. I’m not being sarcastic.

One of my main points were that Air gives a lot of movespeed buffs…which is redundant. It’s like a waste of things. Unless during Air attunement movespeed buffs all stack on, I feel that it’s a redundant element to use even though it should give a lot of mobility.

I concur with Naryoril

It seems that most people in general agree that air and water leave quite a bit to be desired.

Naryoril.6507:

let me quote 2 parts:

While most players that are spending too much time in fire trait and not in any other trait are obviously and clearly playing elementalists wrongly

Damage is a good thing, but utility can be just as useful given the right circumstances

I mostly use a staff, even when soloing.
Usually i fight the monsters 1-on-1. There is no need to go the extra mile to prevent taking damage since you heal up very quickly after the fight. So you don’t need utility and the quickest and most convenient way to deal with the monster is to deal as much damage as possible. In other words: Stay in fire and don’t swap attunements.

If you don’t travel a lot and kill monsters in fast order (either because you want to stay in one place or because there are so many monsters that you will run into the next one in a few seconds anyway) switching to another attunement as a fight opener also only lowers your killing speed since you’ll have to wait to get back to fire.

This is the normal scenario, switching out of fire would only do you a disservice. You have 100% time in the same element, but imo the player is clearly playing the character correctly.

As soon as you get too many adds or fight a veteran things become different of course since you can’t simply outdamage them in fire and you need to start attunement dancing.

But i agree: it’s a design flaw, especially air. They state that air is the element for large single target damage. But take a look at the staff: There is no single-target-damage spell. Even worse: there are only 2 damage spells in total, even water has the same number. And of those 2 spells one has a long cooldown, long casting time and bad damage (number 2), and the other (the auto attack) only becomes viable if there are at least 2 targets nearby. But if they are too close to each other the fire auto attack is better again (as well as when there is only one enemy). And if there are more than 3 targets close to each other, fire is also better. On top of that it has a huge tendency to bring unrelated monsters into the fight.

So air is not a viable attunement to stay in. At the latest after you have used all your cooldowns, there is absolutely no point in staying in air. Even water is better for that because ice spice has a much shorter cooldown and decent damage. So air is simply useable as a pass through element to use the utility skills you need at the moment (knockback, swiftness or stun and combo field) and then you go on. This seems not to be what the element was supposed to do if you look at their description.

You are actually proving my point, my friend, about the fact that there is little to no incentive for switching elemental attunement.

In essence, if one is playing elementalist, the fire attunement will occupy a vast 70% majority of one’s time, but I am curious as to why arenanet has yet to comprehend the extremely poor consequences of such game design?

There exists 4 elements, and even if a player has tossed all their traits into a specific element, no single element should be our main focus for more than 40% of the time. Incidentally, it is even the 15th trait bonus that gives you an effect whenever you attune back into a trait you’ve spend more than 15 points on, and therefore if you’re not trying to abuse that by constantly switching elements then something is clearly off. While most players that are spending too much time in fire trait and not in any other trait are obviously and clearly playing elementalists wrongly, I cannot help but question whether or not arenanet is also not addressing the simple and obvious fact that the traits are simply not well balanced compared to each other.

Damage is a good thing, but utility can be just as useful given the right circumstances; this is why elementalists had the weapon swap taken away and instead reimbursed with the four elemental attunements. If all elementalist players were polled as to which element they spent the least amount of time in, while I certainly cannot back up my guess with hard facts, but I am guessing that the element you would get as your answer is water, roughly 5% of the time.

As a rough estimate, I would place the average amount of time that all elementalists spend in a specific element to be 5% water, 10% air, 15% earth, and 70% fire. Any of you may feel free to correct me, but do understand that my estimation is A: based on most “newer” elementalists to have a preference for almost permanently staying in fire, and B: that most elementalists have deemed the benefits of air redundant since its primary goals (damage and mobility) are defeated by the attunement of fire and the fact that speed buffs don’t stack, respectively.

Ideally, the goal is for the combined averages of all elementalists to be attuned to all elements equally, ergo, 25% of the time per element. Should I be questioned as to what this would mean for our less than ideal sample pool of online players, I would hazard a guess at either 15% water, 20% air, 40% fire, and 25% earth (given the propensity of a majority of players to want to contribute via damage dealing, and the game’s built in systems of being far more rewarding to players who dealt damage).

In order for this to be achieved, the benefits of other elements should be far more emboldened. It is pure foolishness to think that no elementalists wish to play support; and yet when I asked a friend who does so, he described it vaguely as a “punishing experience”, when all he wanted to do was apply conditions to enemies and buffs/heals to allies, instead of the traditional damage. Of the skills found in water, few are desirable, and of those, a vast majority have overbearing consequences of use (for instance, a personal favorite is Frozen Ground, but a 40 second cooldown for a spell that can be countered simply via cleansing of the condition, and no damage added on, is simply not tempting enough for use).

The other element would be air. While the damage portion leaves not much to be desired, it is simply not used for damage when held up to the scrutiny of any elementalist that has tasted the amount of damage that fire attunement can serve up. I humbly suggest that whilst an elementalist is attuned to the element of air, perhaps speed buffs could stack, as this would put a larger emphasis on the mobility provided by the air element.

As for earth, while I personally think that the characteristically slowness one would expect from an earth element to exist, in practice, becomes too easily predicted and thus nullified with ease by any competent player, or by an artificial intelligence that lacked the awareness of what it had accomplished. As a modest suggestion, I would wish for the element to become more practical, ergo, perhaps arenanet could consider the possibility that out of the 20 spells in an elementalist’s disposal, in every situation, at least one of those spells can easily be predicted and thus be treated by the elementalist’s peers with levity, and in certain extremities, vilification, making the entire experience a difficult endeavor.

I would like for educated discussion, with reasons and examples backing up any claims, and if change is to be advocated, I sincerely hope that the person would include a rough idea of how such change should be brought about.

1: you’re doing it wrong. On average I got a level every 20 minutes in WVW. If you’re looking to grind levels from WVW alone, however, that’s not the point of WVW.

2 and 3: You get tons of money in WVW if you’re playing it right, and therefore gear costs money to repair. I always leave with more money than I entered. You need to stop following the zerg.

4: This I have no comment on; grinding for gear in WVW was never advertised, though I’d like to see some nice items once in a while.

5: This would be a bonus, but right now I actually enjoy WVW as it is, though the queue times should be shortened, I agree.

actually we’re in the dungeon right now
he’s just like you said, and we thought it was a bug
our group figured out that his hp doesnt reset, so we’re kind of cheating by running past him onto the ledges up the stairs and slowly ranging him to death.

edit: the adds still get aggro’d when you’re on the ledge, and it took so long 2 people left, then he reset later on. i think he’s totally bugged and arenanet should just remove those adds, because aldus is op by himself already