Guild Wars 2

DiogoSilva.7089:

Yeah, other professions’ traits not only feel stronger, but they’re also less conditional. It’s so interesting when you pick a (minor) trait, and get to see its consequences/ results regardless of the weapon you are using. Elementalists’ traits are highly unsatisfying because we only see their effects 1/4th of the time, and they’re usually lacking.

I suggested stuff like “fire fields do X” in my post above, but I would go as far as say that fire traits should offensively affect spells across all attunements, much like how earth traits should defensively affect spells across all attunements, etc. After all, that already happens with their stat boosts. When you’re speccing in the fire traitline, you’re not really speccing into better fire magic, but instead you’re improving the overall power of all four elements – with fire making better use of it generally, of course. Under this logic, I wouldn’t mind seeing something like “all your fields apply might” or “your channeling spells apply burning” in fire, or “your channeling spells apply bleeding” and “all your self-casting weapon spells grant you 3s protection”.

I like traits that are immediatly satisfying, even more so when they are visually shown (through animations) or add something to your playstyle. Thus why my suggestions included stuff like “phoenix when you’re being spiked” or “flame burst whenever you create fields”. Both of them create animations, and thus feel like “extra skills”. And they respectively a) improve your kamikaze spike and/ or allow you to survive a spike, and b) add an interesting playstyle where burning/ condition builds involve field spells.

This is what I believe is putting the elementalists behind at the moment, having entire trait trees only effecting you 25% of the time is pretty poor design. Having these traits provide boosts outside of their attunement would be a welcome change to me..