Guild Wars 2

Despite disagreeing with some points, I do like the fact that you are attempting to defend the class. Here are my issues with your reasoning..

“…easy to kill” : Yes… they are.. there’s really no denying this. Regardless of whether you go glass cannon or super tanky, the fact is, you’re squishier than other classes doing the same thing.

“don’t do enough damage” I sincerely believe this to be true. Many other people have stated that they rerolled to another class after playing elementalist for a while and felt the other classes did either more damage in general or the same damage with less effort. This seems to be more evident in Pvp.

“I have to work to play the game” Elementalists seem to have one of the highest learning curves yet have no advantage over another class. Generally, the more effort a class takes, the better the results when you understand the ins and outs. It doesn’t feel like this, for elementalists. Like I stated previously, other classes put out similar damage without the extra effort.

“…underwater skills suck” Not sure how I feel about this since I’m not very familiar with the underwater skills of the other classes… but I do know something. You stated, “Our underwater skills actually do suck, and it’s something you can prove with hard evidence rather than complaints of what you think. I’ll give you this one.” yet say everything else is fine. What gives you the right to decide which complaint is valid and which isn’t? Please, share with me that “evidence” you have. These are all opinions (from both sides) not necessarily facts.

To be honest, I feel like they should just straight-up increase Elementalist skill damage. I see a lot of topics about elementalists being underpowered and a lot of people giving reasons why they feel this way. This is what I got from all of that.

1. Attunement swapping is a good concept but it makes playing elementalist involve more effort. The reward is not greater than that of other classes so why the extra effort?

2. Elementalists have low HP and low Armor (but that’s to be expected since mages generally have more AoE/do more damage) yet.. many other professions put out similar damage (if not more) without being as squishy.

3. Elementalist traits seem to be pretty limiting. Some people prefer certain elements but are forced to use (primarily) a different element due to how traits are set up for an ele. If you want to increase your damage, you have to put points into the fire trait.. Precision = Air, Toughness = Earth, Vit = Water. With this setup, it seems to limit your build choices. If you want to go full crit damage, you put points into fire and air. You’ll be super squishy with the combination of light armor and lack of points in earth/water… but you’ll put out more pure damage. Yet, like stated before, other classes have a similar (or greater) damage potential.

There is no primary support class and each class has a self-heal so healing from the water element isn’t that great. That and there are limited spells to heal (and you can’t swap weapons during combat on an elementalist) so you get stuck with 2 healing skills in a staff support build. So you invest 30 points into healing for little return and lose a great deal of damage in the process. If you’re going support you want to stay alive so you’ll probably have quite a few points into Earth as well… So then you do very little damage and your healing/utility doesn’t really make up for it (which makes you a waste of a party space in a dungeon to some people) It seems like water, is pretty pathetic (which is sad because it’s generally my favorite).

4. Weapon tradeoffs: If you want to go Dagger/Dagger, you gain a lot of damaging spells but you also have to be in direct contact with your enemy to do so. The more points you invest in damage, the squishier you are. The more points you invest in survival, the less damage you will do. Obviously there has to be a tradeoff for doing more damage.. but I feel like Ele’s have it a bit extreme. Scepters aren’t useless but they don’t really excel at anything. Staves have a long range aoe plus utility. Dual daggers have quicker, burst type attacks. Scepters are kinda just there.

Well thought out. I hope something is done soon.

zafery.6784:

I say 3..

Traits need a lot of work , they should either promote sticking to one attunement and make it significantly more beneficial to stay in it or, promote swapping more by adding bonuses to all attunements, wheter you are or not in the trait related attunement… (Or perhaps support both choices.. But that would be too hard to implement with a fixed number of trait options i think)

Damage needs to be balanced, especially air attunement damages are.. Well everybody knows what they are… Single target damage should be a lot higher than aoe dmg.. But other attunements are lacking in both burst and sustained dps, too.. Fire attunement/aoe probably needs less drastic changes, along with earth condition damage though..

Condition/direct dmg build seperation should be clearer i think.. Especially scepter skills are in the grey area.. Both condition dmg and power are useful but neither of them make any attunement (other than earth) shine.. (Might be because of terrible air damages, which would make it direct-damage-based priority attunement)

Elite skills are interesting, change the pace of play ..That’s ok.. But they are not very useful.. And that’s not ok… There should be a boring alternative which would buff you somehow significantly without changing your gameplay (which in turn would be useful always)

There is a desperate need for survival options.. (Surviving means surviving, not prolonging the fight without affecting the outcome.. If you look like you’re going to die, and after all the effort you’ve put in, if you’re still in the same position at which you have started, you haven’t really survived)… That could be achieved with two possible options i think.. One is making the CCs more effective (longer durations) to give the elementalist a chance to go on the offensive once more… Or changing CCs to have an offensive component together with their defensive components.. Both options serve the purpose of prolonging the fight to be more beneficial than they are now.. Because now, if you’re in bad shape (which you will be , if there’s nobody standing between you and the opponent) your most efficient usage of your “escapes” is to escape.. You cannot turn the battle to your advantage in any way, because you simply do not have enough time to react in between your CCs.. Nothing is bringing you back to the fight besides the regeneration of water attunement (which is not bad, but not enough to bring you back, unless you’re support of course, in which case there IS somebody between you and your opponent, and this situation does not apply to you)

Being locked into one range brings many problems with it.. Dagger/scepter/staff choices are not close calls.. Dagger advantages does not justify the risks, Scepter suffers from being good at nothing (Except stacking might.. If you can), Staff is useful when you’re in a group with more than 2-3 other people, below that number you exhaust your offensive and defensive options very very fast.. So for situationally you need them all, but you loose a lot by your choice than what you gain… Other than staff elementalists no other choice excels in one thing (There are other professions, that can fill your shoes better).. Staff elementalists excel at aoe-anything if you don’t know… But aoe dmg-support as an elementalist is good, IF you’re not targeted, and IF there’s more than one target to dmg-support.. That’s why any type of elementalist is great only at WvWvW keep/tower defense.. But i have no idea how this can be solved.. Making dagger elementalist hit like truck, would cripple sPvP.. Making them thougher would be great but how this can be achieved with limited amount of traits (and opening up the possibility of durable aoe-dmgers) i have no idea… Making scepter more dependant on direct dmg or condition dmg would destroy one range option of either dmg type using elementalists…. So this part seems hard to figure out..

Well.. So a lot of things are out of whack if you ask me.. Except from air damage, none of them are ground-breaking modifications… But the total number of game aspects to sort out is a lot…

Very good post.

I agree that their down skills are pretty pathetic. Generally ele’s down when their enemy is on top of them. There are obviously exceptions but I’m just saying for the most part… that root doesn’t really help much at all. Every class has some sort of gap closer or ranged skill so it’s not nearly as useful as an interrupt like other classes have. If you get downed (in pvp) as an ele.. you’re pretty much dead. It takes WAY too long for the mist skill cooldown to activate.

I’m gonna have to go with 3

Landua.4857:

Nuzt.7894:

After playing both past 20 and PvPing with both, I would have to say Engineer, Guardian or the two closest classes your going to get to a pure healer. With that said niether are actually dedicated heals, I found Engineers have the most healing type abilities while Guardian have the most mitigation (shields ect.) type abilities. I love playing heals myself and was actually quite dissapointed that pure heals were not part of the game, I love the game don’t get me wrong but the dissapointment was there.

I’m hoping in future expansions they bring back the monk, some of us believe it or not do enjoy playing a true support class.

i hope so too. i play support in everything.. down to MOBA games on smite and LoL.

Yeah I’m kinda hoping for that as well. I played monk a lot in the original.

Nothing really seems to specialize in healing. I tested a support water elementalist staff build in PvP but it was hardly practical unless used in a structured team.. and, even then, it wasn’t as useful as a damage build. Paladins have some better support skills (in my opinion) and so healing skills with Tome (elite skill) but it’s far from what I’d call a healing class.