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.
