Guild Wars 2

Earth: Defensive bleed attunement? So stand there and #1 until hell freezes.
My fix: Elemental Attunement +50% condition duration for weaponskills, current durations balanced around this.

1. increase +power boost, only 1 bolt per attack, 3stacks of bleed per bolt.
   #2 much higher toughness maybe around 300?, lower duration to 4-7seconds, on second use add 2-3stacks of bleed per bolt with 7-9sec duration, low base damage, high damage scaling.
   #3 200-300aoe ground targetable blinding field for 3seconds, 20second cd.

What this would change:

I feel that being a projectile spell #1 should not have the added “weakness” of being 3bolts per cast, bleed damage for power elementalist build would be aimed more against bunker guardians etc, so being weak against retaliation would be counterintuitive. Damage would be balanced so that it comes out slightly lower than air #1+#2 spam even against low armor targets with power build.
With the Elemental Attunement buff you would still have somewhat strong bleeds with power build, but stacking more duration would not make it overpowered, calculated from max +duration traits/gear keeping 13ish stacks (seems pretty standard on cond specs I have tested across the classes).

Having high damage scaling would give power builds an option of an additional burst with #2, while keeping the damage low enough for cond builds, would give extra bleed burst for cond builds, or might be saved for decent defense boost as well.

Instead of a “hope it hits” non controllable aoe blind, you would get one that actually can help against a burst and decent for supporting downed/stunned ally.

Complete effects:
As you might have noticed I would make Elemental Attunement do something, and you can actually use them somewhat usefully with Lingering Elements, +20% more radius for Churning Earth? 20% lifesteal for first few damage spells from air/fire? 50% longer chill/burning? 25% Armor Pierce for fire aoe combo?

Also I wanted staying in an attunement to be an option depending on the situation
As power scep Fire for lots of minions/melee. Air should always come first in single target dps for low armor targets. Water if you are waiting for some help or glyph heal etc. Earth if you have only bunker Guardian to attack.
As cond spec, Fire for aoe burn mayhem with +50% duration, Air for vulnerability stacking or decent burst vs glasscannons if you have earth on cd, Water for defence again here, Earth for main dps.

While at the same time keep the fast swap possibilities like DT+phoenix, #1#2#3 from air, #2 burst from earth, heal/chill from water if part of the combo missed and target did not die so you can wait for next (slightly weaker because of 20sec cd spells) cycle.

The combo would be much more complex this way than updraft/signet of earth, DT, phoenix, firegrab+arcane spells and much less weaker against a single dodge/stunbreak/immune etc, it would also be significantly longer so the damage would not be all up front in 2seconds, of course the damage should lowered somewhat so failing to dodge/strafe few of the spells would not mean immediate death, but strong enough that if target would just be standing there it would surely mean death, especially if you “wasted” two slots for arcane spells.

I wanted to make cond builds more viable because currently swapping away from earth just means that you lost most of your dps as cond ele, now swapping away would certainly mean loss of dps, but you would gain some other condition of value, aoe burn from fire would still do decent aoe dps, chill/weaken from water would make you very defensive and you could stack decent amount of vulnerability to help your team dps in air.

Its quite possible that I have not thought out every change fully, but this is the basic idea that I think should be behind every weaponset in the game, not just 1-2 spells for damage and rest maybe useful if that and #1 autoattack filler with no real meaning besides cond builds.
Because we only have 5spells per weaponset, most of them should have some kind of dual purpose imho, like the air spells being somewhat same that they are now, but could be used as vulnerability stacking for cond build, reactive blind, or a part of nuke combo.

-Thank you for reading, please leave comments on your ideas about the skill design.

Even though I say that, I actually only take a look at the “flaw” on the design ideas in my mind by the way of my most played weapon which is scepter as elementalist, I think pretty much all of the weapons/classes could use similar “improvements”, but as I know only elementalist well enough I’ll only discuss that.
Please leave comments on what you think.

Air: This attunement was the biggest disappointment for me as an old GW1 player. #1 is supposed to be a “I’m doing a lot of dmg to you and I’m here if you need me” type of spell, and the dmg ramp up is there so you could avoid the bigger parts of the damage by los or dodge.
Only thing is, the damage is barely nice at the end and the cast time is so “fast” that you can’t be expected to be lossing every 4seconds. #2 shouts filler and #3 is just a blind.
So what was supposed to be “superior single target damage attunement” is just “press #2 and run around doing a bit of dps", sure the single target dps is best after cooldowns, but its very, very boring (and not even that much better than water #1).

My fix: Just took the “perfect” system from GW1 and modified it for GW2, not a bad thing imo, if it works.
Elemental Attunement 25% armor pierce for weaponskills.

1. 1sec cast, fast projectile, ½second cd and high base dmg, lowered damage scaling.
2. ½sec cast, nonprojectile, very high base damage, 5stacks of vulnerability for 4-6seconds and 3-4second cd, lowered damage scaling.
3. instant cast, nonprojectile, very high base damage, 20second cooldown, blind, lowered damage scaling.

What this would change:
With high base damages and lower dmg scaling both cond and power specs could use this attunement for direct damage, cond would get less out of it, but still get somewhat reasonable numbers.
You would get 3 options in air, #1,#2,#3 for very nice burst that all land nearly at the same time, very hard to predict, but once used your dps would be low.
#1, #2, #1, #3, #1, #2, #1 for more sustained bursty dps, easier to read because after first bolt you could try to strafe the next 3 thus evading lot of the damage.
Cond spec could use air for stacking vulnerability, less noticable with current trait system because you could also be running power spec with 30fire and get +30% duration.

Fire: Its fairly well made attunement and I would only change #1 because currently its there only for burn debuff if you need one for firegrab.

My fix: Elemental Attunement 20% range and aoe for weaponskills (base values lowered to compensate).

1. 1sec cast, ground target, 300-400 aoe, 1sec burn, -50% of the dps of air #1+#2 spam single target, possibly 3-4target cap to prevent being overly powerful vs large stacks.
2. Ground targetable and fast enough that a target caught in the middle would need either a dodge, swiftness, extremely fast reactions or been moving while casted to evade.
3. Maybe slightly faster travel.

What this would change:
Fire would be truly an aoe attunement, you could still use DT+phoenix for single target burst, but unless you have 2+ targets you would be doing less dps than in air and superior if there was 3, even after using DT and phoenix, you might want to stay if there was 3+ targets in a clump, like minion necros, mesmers or just stacking melee at a point.

Water: First two spells seem a bit strange, why would you want vulnerability in your defensive attunement and why doesn’t #1 have any kind of defensive utility?
My fix: Elemental Attunement, 10-20% of damage dealt by weaponskills heals you, obviously necro stuff but I could not make up anything better that would synergy nicely with Lingering Elements.

1. each projectile would put 1seconds of weaken.
2. 6sec cd, instead of vulnerability would inflict 2-3second chill.

What this would change:
Power builds would get decent passive healing and some kiting ability/control support and single target weaken until swapped out of attunement (low duration).
Condition builds would get higher duration for weaken that would still be useful after swapping away and longer uptime for chill, again not so good with current traits.

…

GW1 possibly best pvp game I have ever played.
GW2 possibly hugest flop aside from D3 I have ever played.

You don’t have to look at your skills when swapping attunements, most 2 and 3 skills have shorter or about as long cd as the attunement cd is so you know they are up every time you swap, 4 and 5 skills have longer cd and they wont be up on the first pass and after that you can glance at them quickly whenever you need some longer cd and decide if its close enough for waiting.

What annoys me is that the “short” cooldowns on each attu you “have” to spam on useless places because of the weakness of autoattack, so you will always want to be swapping attunements or you are losing dps, if autoattack was stronger you could actually save some attunement and use blind or knockdown there when NEEDED not just spamming somewhere because you are just about to swap away.

I also agree that cond/power weaponsets could be different, but then again that would force different builds to only use one weaponset, idk.

You should definitely play tournaments instead of hot join even if you are alone, its 20times more fun and first map is not really about winning anyways with random group, if you manage to win the first one, you might talk some strategy because you probably have few decent players in there, at MOST I would say to play hot join for learning your basic combos and whatnot, then of to tournaments as fast as possible.

Personally I have totally ignored glory now, its just something that happens and I play just for the pvp, don’t even try to make a grind out of it, there are 60, 70, 80? glory lvl vendors in the game so you might not ever make it that far anyways so why bother stressing about it. :p

When I do solo tournaments I usually either rush to their animaldude first and try to ninja it (ele is fast and decent burst so its possible) and if it is successful it gives a nice morale boost to a totally random group so its nice, if I don’t feel like “risking” it I try to defend our animaldude from the enemy ninja’s, most ppl don’t really pay attention about the ninjaers until its too late so its a big help to stun/snare them etc so they don’t have time to ninja.
Also the “normal” second spawn is 11:00-11:20 or something like that and third is ~7mins if I remember correctly (probably 4mins from the last kill), so even if your team is totally ignoring that fact, you can train pretty much any spec to solo the animals on mists, there are training versions of every pvp npc there, so if nobody is helping you, you can still do it solo.

That’s my 2cents.

I agree with the problem with not having healers = no meaningful impact with positioning, melee can dive all the way past whole enemy team to hit the glasscannon ranged class in the back because he does not have to worry about not getting heals. Also you have to fight very close to the node at all times or you are mostly useless, delaying incoming opponents is fine further away, but once they get to the node, you have to be there too.

Gw2 needs some sort of mechanic to make positioning meaningful, I have no idea what it should be, I assumed that anet would have figured it out because they did away with holytrinity in the first place.

I actually think of my ele as a melee class currently, there is no way of me keeping proper range, outside of enemy focusing my team mates rather than myself, AND my best nukes happen to be ones that I have to be in melee range anyways so…

ps. I also agree with gw1 having the most fun healer ever in any pvp game, especially mo/a protection healer with short cast times and decent mobility. <3333 I miss it so much.

Well the suggestion in this thread was for retaliation to stack in intensity……….. so yeah

I don’t know if I like the idea of some guardian hunting my dragons tooth cast animations and pressing 10stack of retaliation button to oneshot me without any possible way of avoiding the damage.

Could someone give me this ele build that gets perma swiftness, fury and vigor using just dps rotation and pretty high uptime on regen with 30second might stacks for total of 20 pls, I would really like to see and test this.

Krathalos.3461:

He wasn’t one shot. He was in a like 2v1 (at least) and died, then came to the forums complaining that he got hit for <12k by one attack.

Well one of the screenshots show only dmg source with 14k backstab 5.7k steal, thats going to oneshot any ele build that I’ve been playing so far :P

I’m not arguing about taking away dmg from thief, I actually wholeheartedly agree with you that thief should be sneaky evasive melee burst dmg class, I just don’t think the burst should come from one ability (or have the possibility of), but rather a skill combo of some sort, like hit 3abilities in a row and if the first two hit successfully the third will do huge dmg etc, something fun like that, not just press 1-2butas and pray for crits…

Stealth would be fine with me, if it would actually work properly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thief come out of stealth when the swirl effect that indicates end of stealth comes, he can easily hit 1-2seconds freely before the stealth actually drops, that has to be the most annoying thing in the whole game tbh…

Ofc you can make some mass stealth build, but focusing too much on it will kitten your dps so its ok I think, maybe the aoe stealth field should only apply stealth once because the duration of that thing is just huge and it comes back even if you attack something…

Xolo.3580:

GW2 PvP is advertised with being about movement, yet that movement is reduced to dodging around and strafing in small circles. Range and positioning play barely any role most of the time, …..

Range and positioning do not matter imho because there is no battle lines like normal holy trinity pvp mmo’s have, you know, healers in the back, ranged in the middle, melee in the front. If you dive to far past their ranged line as melee you will get swapped on and instagibbed because your healer is too far and you are in the middle of every possible dmg source…

Gw2 does not have this, everyone does damage, you have to stay very close to the node to be of any use so basically everyone is very close to melee range at all times, only option of keeping some range is to be at some hard to reach spot like the ledge in keep at foefire.

Respawn timer should also always be static, for example once you die you have to wait 30seconds every time, maybe even a bit more? idk.
The point would be that dying would have an actual impact, currently you die, ress in 5secs and get back to some point in 10seconds, death has no meaning, thus downed state has a lot less meaning as well, if you wont get insta ress, you might as well die and ress to get back sooner, whats the point of downed state “fighting” if you lose actual combat time doing it? The maps are not so huge that you would REALLY want that ress so you wouldn’t have to run back…

No matter the build, there should never be possibility of ~one shotting anything in a true pvp game imho, aside from the self +dmg taken debuff mentioned here. Whenever you put +critdmg modifier in a pvp game, it will go horribly wrong at some point.

Once again gw1 had it perfectly, all crits were +50% of weapons max dmg, no random +200% crits that could one/two shot stuff if you got lucky/unlucky, ofc assassins had a huge spike anyways, but it came from ability combos, not from random crits…

Aside from not having real pvp ladder or anything, I have found that I just simply don’t enjoy the basic pvp combat of the game, the idea of no more set roles is fun and all, but for me, it has not really worked out nicely.

I’ve tested all the classes and all of them seem fun on paper (skill calc), but once i’m in game it just is not what I was hoping for.

“Shukran.4851: because ele is one of the most difficult class to master. so assuming equally experienced players against , the one with ele will need more attention and “stress” to win against other classes. if you master ele you are strong because you have 20 skills against 5. but it need practice and time…”

I feel like this “20skills vs 5 so more hard” is pretty misleading, there aren’t really any specs that would benefit from all of the spells properly, cond dmg comes from only 2 attunements, burst builds use air->fire+arcane spells, once stuff is in cd you just run around like a headless chicken not doing anything meaningful and tbh “mastering” s/d burst is really really simple because you can only do it one way…

“Pray.9751: Burst builts are far more viable yet have rather huge problems aswell. Most commonly seen is scepter/dagger and dagger/dagger. The main problems with those is that your autoattacks literally don’t do anything (well besides air d/d maybe). "

This is my biggest problem with ele, burst build has a 40sec cd on the complete burst and once you are on cd, you are doing VERY low dps, I’ve watched few high skill (98% win rate = pretty skilled imo) teams using eles and basically only time he does damage is once when entering battle with all cooldowns and after 20sec in battle when one arcane spell and phoenix comes up again, air autoattack+second skill does somewhat ok’ish dmg, and churning earth can do some decent high range aoe dmg if you manage to hit it somehow, thats about it…

But the build is still useful because your burst will be up ~every time you roam to next place, actually I would go as far as to say its almost overpowered, dragons tooth + phoenix (you can always hit those two with updraft) + firegrab & arcane spells after the enemy has dodged = pretty much dead enemy, unless it was bunker pally with protection up.

ps. “Arheundel.6451: Do you know you can dodge the interrupt attempt of downed foes?”
So rather than getting interrupted, you would interrupt yourself, yeah that makes sense.