Guild Wars 2

Don’t you still owe us the CDI for the Elementalist? Rangers got their one, elementalist didn’t.

@Regina:

What are we working on right now? Feature Pack 2 (in ~two more weeks), Season 2 of the Living World (coming back this fall), the WvW Fall Tournament, and the World Tournament Series PvP global tournament are just some of the things we are currently working on that we can tell you about right now.

I’m trying to remain as polite as possible, but I really got the need to tear apart that comment.

The Second Feature Pack doesn’t even contain slightly the amount of changes that should have been there after a work process of 6 months, not to mention after 2 years.

Though Season 2 is a huge improvement in comparison to Season 1, it doesn’t even contain slightly the amount of new content that should have been there after months of work and 2 years after release.

The WvW Fall Tournament isn’t something new and didn’t require a lot of work to be restarted again. It doesn’t contain any changes to the current WvW system as well, it’s warmed up content.

The Would Tournament Series in sPvP may be something huge to be organized, but that’s not the job of the developers. Their job is to improve spvp, including balance, maps, modes, matchmaking and rewards. They didn’t do their job well. The competitive scene is nearly entirely gone, only very few viewers are still interested in gw2 pvp streams.

And since several interviews already stated that you are neither working on new dungeons, nor new skills, weapons, SAB or anything major besides LS 2, I’m seriously wondering what exactly you are working on at all. The time you need to release a new patch in comparison to it’s content just doesn’t work out.

GW2 was a game that started with huge innovations, thus being absolutly great and amazing. However, innovations always need adjustmens, reworks and fixing. None of this happened for 2 years now. To be absolutly frank: I’ve got the feeling that you don’t care about GW2 anymore, because you know that there is currently just no concurrence out there that can compete with what GW2 offers. However, what will happen when some real competition comes up?

Weaknesses and strengths shouldn’t just be balanced around classes, but around builds and weapons. This means, that all classes should have more or less the same starting position, but having different ways to build into similar things. Actually ArenaNet promised once, years ago, that every profession can do everything.

Every class should for example be able to build either around dmg (burst/dps/conditions), support (healing/boons/protection), utility (cc/mobility/versatility) or some sort of tank (protection/high sustain/bunker).

Being tanky means to sacrifice dmg. Being very mobile results in sacrificing sustain. Having a lot of cc results in either sacrificing dmg or tankyness or mobility.

ArenaNet needs to balance around builds, not just professions. They need to design like 4-5 different builds specifically for every profession and balance the game around these, adding more and more builds through new traits and weapons later. Players should have a high incentive to use those builds because they have a strong inherent synergy with up- and downsides.

Just to clarify what I mean with a very simple example:

An elementalist that focusses his traits, weapons etc. mainly around the element earth isn’t mobile, but tanky and deals mediocre dps with conditions. Depending on the usage of his other points he can either focus more into being supportive (water) or being a threat (fire). Building into air doesn’t synergize well with earth.

An elementalist that concentrates mainly on fire has high burst dmg, but low sustain and is very squishy. Depending on the usage of his other points, he can either build into high mobility and more dmg (air) or into more cc and tankyness (earth). He doesn’t synergize well with water.

Those examples are ofc extremly simplified and shall only serve to clarify what I want to say with balancing around builds that have inherent up- and downsides.

Ofc there is PvP in Guild Wars 2. It’s just Player vs. Point.

OP in a casual environment actually just means toxic. Toxic builds/skills/classes/combos/designs aren’t healthy for a game and need to be adjusted/reworked/removed.

Just as an example: Hambow Warrior is toxic. It doesn’t make fun to play against, it’s no challenging build, there is little you can do to counter the warrior while the build itself remains incredibly effective. It has too much AoE, dmg, cc and is very tanky/sustainable. Due to that, it destroys many other build possibilities for other classes, it ruins the current meta and basically exploits the design of conquest. It has no real downsides. A non-toxic build/design always involves up- and downsides, creating real possibilities to be countered or played against, so that both parties, player and opponent, actually have to think about using their skills instead of just spamming them.

That leads to my second point: Current condition spam is toxic. Not conditions as such are toxic (well, save for poison), but the spam is. There is not enough counterplay, not enough tension when playing; you actually just have to faceroll.

Other examples for toxic designs that should never exist in pvp, because they lead to boring and dull combat situations: perma stealth, perma cc, onehitting burst, immortal bunkers, passive heal etc. pp.

On the other hand, OP in a competitive sense means really that a build allows a skilled player to own his opponents easily. In a competitive sense, thief currently is absolutly op, because most classes don’t stand a chance against a good thief.

Edge of the Mists has a whole host of differences from the WvW maps that we built before launch. One of those differences is the number of waypoints. Not only does each side only have 1 waypoint, but they can’t even capture and use the waypoints at enemy keeps. Do you think that the amount of travel that you have to put in makes the maps feel better? Does it feel like there is a consequence for dying and that you can whittle down an opposing force?

Having less waypoints basically is a good idea because it forces more strategical decisions. Unfortunatly in zergs that doesn’t matter. Zergs are one of the worst points generally in WvW and PvE.
Yet it makes the game harder for roamers or smaller groups, as they already have enough problems to stay out of zerg situations and still have a possibility to do little (for example capturing reactors). I’d wish for more “little group” content. A possibility to encourage smaller groups without just placing waypoints everywhere are fraction-bound portals and teleporting events, that allow small groups to travel long distances – for example infiltrating an enemy castle to steal supplies, wurm tunnel, undermining enemy defenses etc. This way smaller groups would have the possibility to avoid zergs and still being able to do something.

It’s bullkitten. It isn’t even challenging due to boss fight mechanics, it’s only challenging due to laggs and zerging around. Most of the time it fails due to stupid people not having buffs, stacking only at red and not being able to dodge. Absolutly unenjoyable, something like this must always be put into an instance.

0/10, failed entirely

Pure garbage. Absolutly unenjoyable. Lore was abandoned. Rest of the game was abandoned.

After the LS has finally come to an end and after having seen the whole arc, especially in the last update, I’d like to give my personal feedback on it.

To rate it with grades from 1-6, the whole LS deserves a 4 and the last update a 6 – considering that 6 is the worst possible grade. To clarify it: The LS basically is a great idea – but the execution was lackluster, horrible and simply bad. It was just all over a big fail, save for the very last cutscene.

• throughout the whole LS the true gw2 lore was entirely ignored, abandoned and contradicted – instead of some real gw2 feeling all we got was a plain stupid villain sue, having neither a good background, nor an interesting character, nor anything making the LS worth to play
• throughout the entire LS only few things have been added permanently to the game, most of them not even worth to mention
• most things that were left permenantly are completly garbage, like toxic spore events, scarlet attacks and southsun cove
• wasting – yes, I do definitly call it wasting – ressources on this LS has left the rest of the game nearly untouched, allthough huge parts of it desperatly need reworks to make use of their potential, as they are currently in a devastating estate

Especially I want to mention:

1. PvP and WvW: Nothing good has been done in any way to improve balance and game modes. Balance is in the worst state possible since launch.
2. Reworks to Dungeons: Most dungeons and encounters are dull, unbalanced, boring or just all over the same. GW2 has a lot of innovations when it comes to combat, yet it still needs a lot of polish. That polish has been entirely missing since launch.
3. New maps: Altough there are blocked passages to new maps like in the steam mountains, to the crystalline desert and in mount maelstrom, the only new maps we got were southsun cove and zephyr sanctum – and last one was removed.
4. New skins, new weapons, new skills, new traits, new everything: Where is it? The few things that were introduced are pretty lackluster, like ascended armor.
5. Rework to personal story: It’s dull, it’s annoying, especially due to Trähörn. The cutscenes are bad, the dialogues are static and boring to watch. There aren’t enough ps, they don’t cover the path from lvl 1 to lvl 80 and offer only few true choices when it comes to individual developement.

There is more to mention, but I stop here. Gw2 has the potential to become the best game of this decade, without no doubt. That is one of the reasons why my feedback here is so extremly negative, because it makes me sad how badly that potential is made use of.

But I definitly want to say something about this last update of the LS, as it deserves a lot of harsh critic itself – Warning: Spoiler.
[spoiler]

• The way it was presented was just horrible. Scarlet was wounded? Why exactly? Did we seriously kill her by finishing her? With stability?
• The characters of the LS performed very badly in the last personal story instance.
• It’s zergy, not challenging due to boss fight mechanics, only challenging due to laggs and gear check.
• The dialogues were just horrible.
• Sense and lore is completly missing.
• Why did Scarlet need all these weapons just to attack Lion’s Arch?
• What about all the other dragons in the meantime? What about the Tengu?
• What happened to the pact? Since when is it possible to build a villain lair beneath the priory? Are they seriously that stupid?
• We fought a dragon, but we can’t just bomb away an oversized driller?
• Far too many bugs that destroy the content completly, especially when it comes to rewards. Was it even tested?

[/spoiler]

So, all in all, I can only hope that his LS was only an experiment, so you were able to collect data and ideas how to do it better. Hopefully we do see a lot of improvements when it comes to the next arc – because this is actually the only thing i’m looking forward to seeing, because the last cutscene was just awesome. Hopefully you concentrate on quality now, when it comes to a real enemy: Modremoth.

Conjures are overall bad design and don’t fit the elementalist at all in their current estate.

The elementalist is supposed to combine the forces of 4 elements to gain certain effects (dmg, support, mobility/utility, cc). He is supposed to be versatile, that’s also why the attunements as such are pretty weak. The design philosophy kinda is to combine them, so you have to use 4 weapon sets to gain the same effects like other classes that only have 2 weapon sets (which is pretty badly balanced currently).

So I have no idea why they did actually implement conjures. If they gave some possibility to specialize, like frostbow would be used for superior healing, lightning hammer for superior cc, earth shield for superior tankyness and lava axt/fiery greatsword for superior dmg, it would kinda make sense. But neither skill sets nor traits nor anything does currently support that design.

1 – Elementalist —> tons of design failures, useless skills and traits, horrible balance
2 – Ranger —> too much spam, too many useless and bad traits, bad balance, pet AI
3 – Thief —> very, very bed design… needs a lot of redesign, needing as well many nerfs and many buffs to get away from its current spam and faceroll concept

So, it looks like Meteor Shower should have a red circle. Is there a chance that it is being culled out in the situations you experienced?

Off Topic: I do seriously have to wonder. There are thousands of threads about giving the elementalist a god kitten needed buff since you overnerfed them again and again, especially at the wrong spots, again and again. You didn’t bother to answer any of them, neither constructive ones nor flame after getting heavily frustrated – with reason. Then there is one single thread about nerfing a strong elementalist skill, placed on a badly designed weapon that has its only use in wvw and partially in pve. That’s the one you gonna answer?
I call that biased.

On Topic: Giving Meteor Shower a red circle doesn’t exactly work. On the one hand side, it would just be too huge, so it would just probably cause several server problams and laggs. On the other hand side, giving every single meteor its own red circle – what logic would demand – there would be even more spam. Yet i would agree on making the skill more noticeable by giving it some kind of ground effect (burned earth for example).

@ Peter buch This is a very very long list, according to which like half of the abilities eles have are totally useless in all situations. I expected weapon skills to be a rarity on this list since you don’t have to “pay” for them unlike utility spells which are in very strong competition for the merely 3 slots we have.

Sadly, you don’t seem to play the elementalist very often. That’s quite the point about elementalist: To compensate for having 20 weapon skills, he got 4 weak attunements, a bunch of terrible skills and needs many many traits to become effective – and yet a lot weaker than any other class. He needs to put in twice as much effort to gain less than any other profession, still having twice the downsides. Horribly bad design.
Not to forget the funniest thing about it: He still has to take bad skills because he just doesn’t have any other choice. He needs to take armor of earth to get stability on a 90 second cd, while guardians can give their entire group stability on a 24 second cd.

You asked for skills that

have no place in current meta but also [are] useless due to imbalance or bugs.

Half of all elementalist skills perfectly fulfills that definition. And as I said already, not even to mention traits… There it’s even more garbage.

Racial skills are supposed to be bad. They are just there to increase the race feeling and to have some fun. They are not supposed to have any further influence on the game. Otherwise certain races would have advantages due to skills.

Race skills must never have any further influence on the game at all.

Elementalist

Staff

• Air – Chain Lightning – balance issue: dmg too low, too many projectilces on staff
• Air – Lightning Surge – balance issue: cast time too high, dmg too low, effectivity too low
• Air – Gust – balance issue: far too weak, far too easy to dodge, doesn’t chase the enemy
• Air – Static Field – balance issue PvE/sPvP: Without any use in pve, rather pointless in pvp except for a single possible stun (if there is no stability, teleport etc.) —> Suggestion: Elementalist receives some kind of buff when inside the static field (+30% crit dmg or +20% crit chance?)

• Earth – Stoning – balance issue: dmg too low
• Earth – Eruption – balance issue (pvp): needs to cripple somehow, otherwise it’s too easy to dodge

Scepter

• Fire – Flamestrike – balance issue: just generally too weak…
• Water – Shatterstone – balance issue: casttime too high, building time too high
• Earth – Dust Devil – balance issue (pvp): too slow, counts as a projectile

Dagger

• Air – Ride the Lightning – balance issue: cooldown too high, too easy to dodge
• Earth – Magnetic Leap – balance issue: elementalist rather stuns himself for a couple of seconds instead of leaping to its foe…
• Earth – Churning Earth – balance issue (pvp): too easy to dodge/avoid

Focus

• Fire – Flame Wall – balance issue: entirely too weak
• Water – Frozen Gust – balance issue: entirely too weak
• Water – Comet – balance issue: entirely too weak
• Air – Gale – balance issue: entirely too weak

Underwater
Not going to mention underwater skills. Needs to be rebalanced completly. Water deals the most dmg.

Utility

• Ether Renewal – balance issue: cast time too long

• Arcane Brilliance – balance issue: cast time too long
• Arcane Blast – balance issue: senseless skill
• Arcane Power – balance issue: useless skill

• Armor of Earth – balance issue: cd too high
• Cleansing Fire – balance issue: doesn’t stunbreak anymore
• Mist Form – balance issue + bug issue: Movement speed too low, conditions keep ticking, no other skills avaible while in mist form, cooldown too high, can be used for invulnerable finishing and rezzing

• All Conjures – design issue: Don’t fit the elementalist’s design at all.

• Glyph of Elemental Power – balance issue: just absolutly weak
• Glyph of Lesser Elementals – balance issue: useless after lvl 80
• Glyph of Renewal – balance issue: cast time too high, cd too high
• Glyph of Storms – balance issue: low dmg, useless outside of earth, dmg of all storms is more or less the same

• Signet of Fire – balance issue: bad active effect
• Signet of Earth – balance issue: bad active effect
• Signet of Water – balance issue: bad active and passive effect

Elite

• Tornado – balance issue: dmg too low, utility too low and elementalist too squishy
• Glyph of Elementals – balance issue: too weak
• Conjure Fiery Greatsword – balance issue + bug issue: conjures don’t fit the elementalist’s design, fiery greatsword can easily be exploited (3 against walls, 4)

Not going to mention traits. Already sad enough that so many of our skills are that horribly bad.

The first ‘feature build’ as we’re calling it, won’t go live until the current Living World story arc wraps up. The next feature build will contain substantial PvP updates, the balance items we talked about on Friday, and hopefully even more things that we aren’t ready to talk about yet.

The scope of the balance changes going in is massive. Honestly, putting all of the changes we talked about on Friday straight into the game today would have been extremely kneejerk, and I’m sure many of you would agree that some of the changes needed additional eyes on them before they hit live. We want the time to go through the feedback and make adjustments, and we’re already doing that.

I’m sorry if we gave you the impression that there would be a balance update today – that was not our intent.

Your game needs massive changes now. Not in a month, not in 2, not at the end of the LS that remains bad until scarlet is finally killed. You’ve waited far too long and scrued up the game with every patch even more. What you have to do is reverting nearly every single balance patch that has been made the last six months. You need to restrict AI spam massively, restrict perma dodge and stealth massively, restrict condition spam massively and nerf all the stupid power creep in this game. Only afterwards there might be a little chance to balance the game.

So bring up these changes fast, no matter how much it might affect the entire gameplay on a negative or positive way. Anything would be better than the current estate of the game. Frankly, you did a very poor job.

And afterwards you can use the tons of good community feedback to make the game enjoyable again…

General:

The worst

• far too much AI spam and condition spam due to necros, spirit rangers and mesmers
• new mesmer signet is entirely broken
• warrior remains absolutly broken having far too much CC, dmg and sustain
• skill requirance for thieves is below zero as you can basically ignore your initiative now —> perma dodge even worse

I would seriously recommend you just to disable necro pets and spirits in PvP for like 1-2 days just to see how it works. These 2 days would be a lot more enjoyable than the past year actually. Beside that, reduce all condition durations.

Concerning elementalist:

The Good

• build diversity significantly increased due to reduced attunement recharge rate, all over better grandmaster traits etc.
• ranged arcane wave —> especially nice for staff and scepter builds
• new blast finisher with new healing skill (so less dependant on blast finisher with evasive arcana, yet the healing skill is too weak)
• Lingering Elements partially fixed, yet far too weak for being a 15 point minor trait

The Bad

• Cleansing Wave (Water X, curing one condition when attuning to water) is now a master trait —> massive nerf for every single elementalist build because you need healing and you need condition cleanse desperatly as there is no other possible defense. And for being a master trait, this one is utterly weak.
• Diamond Skin —> Far too weak in any teamfight or more than 1 vs 1 scenario, even in 1 vs 1 useless against people with brain. Pls change it towards being either immune to certain conditions when attuned to earth or reducing condition duration by something like 75% when attuned to earth.
• Arcane Brilliance —> Pointless in PvP because it doesn’t give you any condition cleanse.
• Elemental Attunement is now master tier for no reason. You can’t justify any further nerfs for the elementalist without giving him massive buffs.
• Elementalists now have several possible grand master traits to specc into, but they still need either 30 points in arcana or 20 points in water for the heal. It just doesn’t work without heals and condition cleanse. The elementalist has the lowest hp pool and armor, additionally his heals have pretty bad base stats because developers thought he had too many. Make healing ripple being a 5 point minor trait, like every other 15 point minor.
• Condition based builds don’t work on the elementalist.
• Several utilites like glyphs and conjures remain useless just due to their concept. Conjures don’t fit the design of the elementalist at all. Pls think about redesigning them completly.
• most adept traits are just pointless or don’t do anything at all, still I have to take them because I need the master or grandmaster traits. Poorly designed. For example, the new air trait that gives you superspeed for 1 1/2 seconds when attuning to air —> useless in PvE, PvP and WvW.

The missing

• reworks for focus —> Far too low dmg, far too low sustain and mobility. Entirely useless for bunker builds because earth 5 doesn’t allow you to cap points.
• reworks for staff —> Useless for PvP because you can’t kill anybody. Too many projectiles, too easy to dodge, too slow, too clunky. Especially air.
• buffs for scepter water 2 and earth 3
• reverted nerfs for RtL and signet of restoration (how can you justify the current warrior healing signet with having the elementalist’s signet nerfed for like 30% in pvp pls?)
• rework for fire minor 5 and 15
• reduced internal cooldowns on cleansing water

Summary
To be honest, as an elementalist I’m feeling even weaker now than before patch. It’s like I just can’t do anything at all anymore against condition and AI spam, not to mention warriors. S/D Fresh Air Burst build has been significantly nerfed due to cleansing wave on master tier. I’m neither having the sustain, nor the dmg, nor the CC or teamfight utility of other classes, not even closely. There is no reason for picking an elementalist than just for fun. Every single other class is just better in absolutly everything.

Elementalist: Lingering Elements

Currently planned bugfix: Lingering elements will now work with flame barrier, stone flesh, soothing mists and zephyr’s speed.

Problem: Remains bad because these 4 passives aren’t useful (except for water slightly and earth a little bit) and you would need to invest 5 points into every traitline.

Solution: Make Lingering Elements work with ALL passive attunement based traits (including the 10% more dmg traits and piercing shards) but therefore change it, so only one attunement does linger —> you can be attuned to your current attunement and the one before for a certain duration (to make it balanced, I would suggest 3 seconds instead of 5)

Little maths: By dancing through your attunements, you could stack up your dmg (so it would fit the elementalist stance dance design perfectly) to a maximum of 20% additional dmg for 3 seconds, 30% additional dmg when entering or leaving water attunement for 3 seconds and 10% additional dmg in only those attunements where you are using the certain traits.

Class feeling/Personal thoughts: This way, lingering elements would allow us to create a true elementalists combining the forces of his attunements – for example water+air, fire+earth etc. I would just love that. It gives us a little possibility to specialize without getting rid of the class mechanic. As well Lingering elements wouldn’t be mandatory for every elementalist build because you can only use it with 15 points in arcane, so you couldn’t get 2 grandmasters in your traitlines. You would need to make decisions.

I think this trait needs better wording. I hope you all understand why that trait would be wildly overpowered if it carried over everything particularly all 10% damage bonuses. You could simply slam through all attunements and then get 50% bonus damage. Similarly making other things work with this would requires those traits get lowered in the base case as well. I think this is a fine 15 point minor trait on its own and we can reword it and then discuss the merits of the other traits on their own.

To me, that is a better starting point for discussion than attempting to balance all of these effects with how they might work with a minor trait in Arcana. That would predicate the entire profession around that trait which is not what we want out of our minor traits.

Jon

You could just make Lingering Elements linger 2 attunements at maximum. So it would be a dmg increase of 20% and a dmg increase of 30% if you leave or enter water attunement with piercing shards. Would be pretty decent and rather balanced, as the elementalist’s dmg is rather low in comparison with other classes. Additionally you could think about decreasing the duration, so it would only increase your burstdmg, not your overall dps.

Fire-Traitline
Flame Barrier
VI – Internal Fire – Deal 10% more dmg when attuned to fire
X – One with Fire – Flame barrier proc chance grows while attuned to fire

Air-Traitline
Zephyr Speed
X – Air Training – 10% more dmg when attuned to air

Earth-Traitline
Stone Flesh
VII – Strength of Stone – deal 10% more dmg when attuned to earth

Water-Traitline
Soothing Mists
IV – Piercing Shards – Deal 20% more dmg to vulnerable targets when attuned to water

This would allow the elementalist to switch through his attunements to stack up dmg. It would fit your design philosophy perfectly. Of course it would be a balance issue, but everything is a balance issue and currently the elementalist himself is a huge lack of balance.

You could even think about making a lot more traits stronger, but only working when attuned to that element. For example:
- the new Diamond Skin —> working only when attuned to earth, therefor complete immunity to conditions when above 75% instead of 80% oder 85% —> working with lingering elements
- Geomancers Freedom —> reduces duration of weakness, chill, cripple, poison and immobilized by 80% only when attuned to earth —> works with lingering elements
- Embers Might —> deal more dmg to burning foes —> increased to 10% but working only in fire attunement
- Burning Precision —> 30% chance to inflict burning on crit —> increased to 100% with 4 seconds ICD and 1 1/2 but only workin when attuned to fire

This way you would make every attunement more special and you would allow us to combine attunements to create a true elementalist. Lingering elements is the perfect trait to create a new design for elementalists, making it on the one hand side so useful, that many elementalist builds would like to use it (so reducing build diversity, means maybe to move it down to adept tier) and on the other hand side you would allow elementalists to specc into specific attunements to create a water/air or a fire/earth elementalist etc.

Lingering Elements
All passive bonuses for that attunement should linger. This means Flame Barrier, Stone Flesh, Soothing Mist, and Zephyr’s Speed.

That’s all? Really?
The trait was useless since beta because it did nothing because it was buggy. Now, after more than a year, you fix it to not be buggy anymore. But still it does nothing…. Wasted points. You got a perfect exemple for a trait that could DEFINE an entire class and yet you leave it being useless.

Noone cares about these 4 passives: flame barrier is pointless as you don’t want to get hit, zephyr speed gives you only 10% and doesn’t stack well, stone flesh doesn’t give you enough defense to be tanky and soothing mist does remain anyways even after you left water attunement and doesn’t heal a lot either.

If you say that it shall linger ALL passive effects, then make it linger all passive effects. Not just a few of them that are pointless anyways. That would be a fix and allow a lot more build diversity. You don’t fix it, you let it remain as useless as before.
Just please don’t!

Feedback concerning elementalist

The base cooldown of the attunement that you just left is now reduced from 16 seconds to 13 seconds. Attunement cooldown rate now increases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now Attunements go from 13s to 10s instead of the old range of 16s to 10s.

Great change! Thumbs up, that was definitly desperatly needed.

Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VII – Vigorous Scepter. Moved to Adept tier.
Arcane VIII – Blasting Staff. Moved to Adept tier.
Arcane IX – Windborne Dagger. Moved to Adept tier.

I can see what you are trying to do there. You want to make it impossible to have both, all buffes AND permanent vigor. But keep in mind: That is a huge nerf and elementalists are very squishy and yet forced into melee range. I can understand that you want to tone down the buff-spam (and I totally agree with you), but especially for the elementalist you need to give something in return. With Vigorous Scepter it would be still possible to maintain a high endurance-regeneration, but as far as I remember, that trait was buggy or didn’t stack with other buffs/traits.
Beside that, the attunement-based buffs just fit the class so perfectly, it hurts a lot to give them up.
And pls take a look on lingering elements!

Water VIII – Arcane Abatement. Moved to Adept tier.

The traits giving reduced fall damage don’t have any strong effect on combat outside of WvW and maybe skyhammer. They are passive and boring, generally, so pls give us possibilities to trigger them without receiving falling dmg – e.g. on some skills like updraft or on special utilities (lightning flash?).

Air XI – Tempest Defense. Decreased the cooldown from 60s to 25s.

Tempest Defense is a defensive grand master trait in an offensive tree, that just doesn’t fit the role at all. Air should be all around single target dps, mobility and some CC. No matter how much you reduce the cooldown, the trait remains bad because it is utterly wrong-placed there.

Air V – Soothing Winds. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.

Still a very mediocre effect giving you only very low healing power for a lot of precision. How about a secondary effect like giving some few air skills extra effects, like windborne speed (staff air 4), whirling winds (focus air 4) and maybe lightning touch (dagger air 2) so they do heal a little bit?

Arcane III – Arcane Retribution. Moved to Master tier. Decreased cooldown from 90 seconds to 45 seconds.
Arcane IV – Final Shielding. Decreased cooldown from 90s to 75s.

Just too passive.

Earth XI – Diamond Skin. This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%.

Great one! Fitting earth perfectly and making some bunker builds stronger, countering the very condition-heavy meta. Yet i’m bit curious, all conditions? Even immobilize, chill, blind and cripple? Or just damaging conditions? If all conditions, I’d think it might be a little bit too strong, countering not only condition builds, but all kind of cc builds.

All in all, I see that you are starting to listen to the community. Some great changes incoming. But please… don’t wait so long for all of these changes. Another entire month were pvp is completly insufferable? Please not.

The Good
- better access to skill informations and trait descriptions (just missing sometimes more information about internal cooldowns and something like that)
- improved targetting (big thumb up)
- a lot of bugfixes
- new condition dmg indicator
- a lot of QoL improvements
- the attempt to enhance support builds (yet the problems aren’t just the build possibilities itself, but the current content doesn’t require support builds)

The Bad
(especially concerning elementalist)
- AoE extremly reduced (harsh nerf for every elementalist build, especially considering all the KI and pets in the game —> definitly the wrong way)
- core issues remain completly untouched (like attunement recharge, jack of all trades, forced into 30 points arcana, extremly squishy and yet always in melee range, forced into certain utilities, low build diversity, focus remains unviable and clunky, staff remains bad)
- every buff to the summoned weapons remains pointless as long as the concept about them isn’t changed —> giving up all 4 attunements for 5 extra skills just doesn’t work
- traits ware barely touched, new Air V doesn’t have any sense at all due to the speedcap —> pointless
- bad utility skills weren’t changed at all (like glyph of storms)
- hidden nerf to arcane skills !!! in dmg
- the balance of the elementalist wasn’t touched at all —> nothing done to create build diversity, to give him better roles, zero true buffes after all these nerfs and after being not played once in the MLG, absolutly no change in the meta
—> very disappointed in this patch, I expected a lot more to come

Missing
- reworks to traits and skills (you did some senseful reworks like the new unsteady ground (earth staff 4), but all in all you didn’t touch the majority of pointless and useless and bad skills at all)
- fixes to important bugs that consist since beta —> e.g. lingering elements
- removal of bad balancing attempts (like dhuumfire, RtL nerfs) and replacing them with something senseful
- improvements to focus (Fire 4,5/Water 4,5/Air 4)
- visual improvements on skills
- rebalancing the classe’s hp pools (why does elementalist have such a low base hp pool and the mesmer such a high one?)
- nearly no improvements concering countering stealth, teleport spam, AoE spam, condition overflow, down state and capturing points —> zero game optimisation

As some mod seems to have changed the thread title, I can at least guess that it has been read.

After you’ve released some very nice updates, like tequatl rising and twilight arbor aetherblade path, I actually was very excited about the upcoming halloween update. I knew already that last year it was just amazing and especially the balance changes made me curios.
But then I’ve read the patch notes and played the new update and well, let’s say… after just 2-3 hours I’ve already seen everything. The clock tower is wonderful – like it was last year, just even better now. The mad king’s labyrinth is great – basically like it was last year. I don’t like the lunatic inquisition, the game rather feels pretty boring because it is so slow-paced. The story instances are amazing, there you really did a great job and made them a lot more enjoyable than in earlier updates.
But that’s it. Nothing anymore. I’m already quite done with the update, just need to get some daily achievements to complete the story. I can only hope that there is still something huge to come, otherwise you failed halloween pretty much.

But what disappoints me the most are the balance changes. There aren’t any. You didn’t touch any core issues, didn’t change anything major, didn’t care about any balance. After it took you months to prepare that update I expected a lot more than this. You made only very few changes to traits, barely any changes to those skills that aren’t used because they are bad and you didn’t do anything to set things right in that horrifying current meta. The Necromancer was rather buffed instead of replacing Dhuumfire with something senseful!
Especially your changes to the elementalist disappoint me. You rather gave him a lot of nerfs instead of some desperatly needed buffs, you capped his AoE even more, reduced a lot of his AoE and didn’t change anything about the things he is lacking, even after he wasn’t played at all in the MLG. You only gave the summoned weapons some buffs, but these remain bad just because of the concept to give up your 4 attunements for 5 other skills. Focus remains untouched, scepter and dagger as well, staff remains bad because it is slow, static and easy to dodge as it has only projectiles.

The QoL changes you made were very good and definitly needed, but that’s it. More you basically didn’t change. Nothing for underused builds, nothing for underused skills, nothing to rework the traits and to enhance class systems. There was one single useful and senseful change to the traits of the elementalist, the new major 5 point trait in air giving you super speed, and that one seems buggy as your speed is capped anyways. Completly pointless.

So all in all, I’m sad. I’m really disappointed of what you have done, especially after you did such a great job in your last updates I thought the game would go into the right direction. Am I wrong?

I love the new dungeon. It’s challenging, it’s interesting, it’s new and not completly over the top. And the best is: You don’t need raw dmg to solve it, you need at least some little tactics (like tons of reflection/projectile block at ooze gate). It just makes fun.
But the achievements suck like hell.

Just wanna say that you head up into the right direction now, ArenaNet. You did a great job with tequatl – hopefully we see far more adjustments, reworks and improvements of PvE and PvP in general like this. Some dungeons need some similar revamps. But all in all, it’s a great first step forward, allthough it really took you a lot of time. I love the new tequatl and the other world bosses are a lot more interesting as well now, just overflow sucks…
Hopefully you proceed equally with the living story, the personal story, new maps and map revamps, dungeon reworks and mainly class reworks that are desperatly needed. I’m regaining some faith that there are still intelligent people at ArenaNet. Just pls, especially for balance, don’t let us wait an entire month for a huge balance patch. We need at least some tweaks desperatly to make pvp interesting again.
From now on I’m looking forward a lot more excitedly. Keep on like this!

Great! Great changes, finally! You really go into the right direction Thx for so much transparency, finally. Tons of good changes incoming. It took you a lot of time, but better late than never
Just hopefully among all these great changes to make the game truly a lot better you do take some of the current builds that are too strong into consideration as well and don’t buff them even more. Beside that, wonderful! I’m amazed.

Very nice post @Jonathan, enjoyed reading all of it. It’s nice that finally we got a greater response of what is happening inside ArenaNet and it’s nice as well to see what you are thinking.

But to be honest, I’m still missing a lot from your side. I do know that developing a game is a lot of work. I do know that it takes a lot of time. I do know that you are just human beings. That’s not the point why I’m getting so kitten frustrated about Gw2.

I do wanna know from you, in what direction you wanna push this game. How you want to balance each class, I wanna know more about your goals and how you planned to achieve them. Currently you do a lot of balance changes and most of them seem to be completly senseless, unneeded or in the wrong place. Give us a statement, why you balance like this and where you wanna get every class – not just make strange, unexplained and sometimes even stupid changes without naming a reason.

I can wait months as long as I do know and see that you are going in the right direction. That you keep your promises you made, like that you don’t want grinding, that you wanna enable new builds for every class, that progression and discovering shall be the main parts of the game. With every new patch I see you doing exactly the opposite. With every new patch you get farther away from how the game was intended to be. And it’s getting kitten frustrating that you just refuse to max out the potential Gw2 has without making actually major changes. Just little things could already improve the game a lot and I just don’t see you doing anything like this.

I do understand as well that you have to prioritize things. But just as an example, there are still a lot of major bugs existing since beta. That just mustn’t be. These bugs definitly have priority.

Beside that, congratulations about PAX. You managed to make GW2 an e-sport. I do not know, why you wanted to do this. I do not understand, that you stopped balancing just for a tournament with only a few players. I don’t get at all how you could focus your resources on something like that allthough there are so many things that are a lot more important. That’s not just annoying, that’s not just frustrating, that’s making me sad. Still, congratulations.

characters created <> character’s activity

As you can easily create five different characters, these numbers don’t count anything. They don’t say anything about the amount of active elementalists. I’d even guess, that at least for spvp elementalists are the least played class.

If i remember correctly Anet stated that clones were not supposed to be used as decoy’s but rather a fuel for damage from shatters.

If I remember correctly then mesmers were designed to defend themselves through deception. A non-targetable clone wouldn’t quite fit this role. Beside that, there aren’t only shatter mesmers.
I can’t quite take ArenaNet’s statements seriously anymore. Somehow I really got the feeling that every single “old” developer either left ArenaNet or got replaced with a new one that doesn’t have any idea about the game. Just some examples – “We want to enable more builds for the elementalist.” “We don’t want grinding.” “The Queen is gonna say something spectacular.” “Every decision you make will have major influence on your character.” etc. pp.

The game definitly needs something like that (either this or make pets generally untargetable unless you click on them). Only exception should be mesmer clones, as it is their purpose to be targetable, therefor they don’t deal dmg.

The current meta isn’t any better, it’s the worst eversince. Beside that most of these builds you posted there are either kinda the same ones or not viable, the current meta isn’t just so terrible because of the viability of classes. It’s all about brainless AoE and condition spam, braindead cc chains and horrible minion/spirit spam. There is nearly no skill involved, teamplay is less important and tactical decisions are not needed; just roll your face over the keyboard.
There aren’t even more viable builds. Current team setup:
- Spirit Ranger
- Necromancer
- S/D thief
- CC Warrior or Grenade + Bomb Engineer
- Bunker Guardian

6 viable builds with 8 playable classes. That’s horrible, that’s bad, that’s stupid. But I have no doubts, ArenaNet’s balance team will manage it to get everything worse.
So yeah, enjoy this meta.

Scarlet has locked the arena down and is in there now doing mean things

If you help Vorpp reverse engineer the portal you can go in and kick her out, which will let you get back in to the arena proper.

I would love to help Vorpp.
I would love to enjoy the new content (and especially to get achievements).
Just one problem:

OVERFLOW

So I looked into this, and I thought it was fixed. Are you still seeing it? Where are you seeing it? What’s getting through? Keep in mind that condition damage will still tick, but NEW condies should not be able to go through.

Knockbacks and knockdowns like guardian hammer 5, lupicus dome, guardian staff number 5 etc. still go through. Sometimes I’ve got the fealing that you are still effected by spectral wall and mesmer focus 4 as well, there I’m not quite sure.

After you already nerfed mistform so extremly hard it’s just getting ridiculous that we are still getting effected by conditions. We can’t do a kitten being in mistform and are still damaged? Sense? Can absolutly agree with

Since we can no longer cleanse conditions in mist form I think it’s a bad idea to let them still tick. Even if it does not remove the conditions it should at least prevent the damage.

Guardians and hammer warriors can’t dump 20k AoE damage from rotating through 34 skills in the space of 4 seconds (counting the attunement themselves and boon/damage they provide plus the elite conjure/whirlwind). Hello…

Elementalists can’t either. Beside that, elites on ele are crap. Stop trashtalk.

Not to mention guardians are slow turtles, while eles can travel half a map in seconds and come back for more mayhem.

Again, stop trashtalking. Elementalist mobility got nerfed extremly hard. Even guards can catch up now.

But yes rangers are over the top, that doesn’t give excuse for Eles to top them up. I think everyone practically agrees the rangers need adjustments. No class, ele included should be balanced against that, or we’d be introducing endless power creep.

I hate people that are just writing to have something written. You probably didn’t even read one single post in this thread, so seriously, what are you doing here beside of flaming?
It’s not about buffing the elementalist on stupid ranger, thief or nekro lvl (but yes, he desperatly needs some buffs in his current state – he was far too overnerfed), it’s about that he has major design flaws consiting since beta, tons of bugs, has suffered from stupid and hilarious balance changes and is pushed towards a bad-at-everything-role where it becomes a disadvantage for every team to have an elementalist.

You mean other than the strongest AoE blasts and AoE KD/Launch and AoE heals? The eles got nothing going for them?

Seriously what other class that you mentioned above can do that?

Guardian has a lot stronger heal and arguably same amount of AoE power. Nekros, Rangers, Warriors and Engineers have more AoE Power (and especially conditions). No idea what you mean with AoE KD. If you are talking about AoE CC, guardians are stronger, warriors are stronger, rangers don’t have hard ccs but a lot of soft ccs, nekro has fear and engineer has extremly strong cc.

At least you have something to laugh…

Build diversity is actually not bad for the mesmer. There are basically a lot of possibilites, burst (shatter), dps (illusions/phantasms), conditions (shatter), support (mantra), deception (cc, glamour). I’d always consider the mesmer as one of the strongest classes in pvp, just because it becomes very hard for a player to get the mesmer when he is dropping his target consistently and then just tab targetting illusions. That’s horrible for single target DDs. Little design issue there – as long as the tab targetting isn’t fix’d, any buff to the mesmers illusions and deceptions will make him op. When it is fix’d, mesmer will be up.

The point about the mesmer builds is just, that some are either not needed (who needs a healer?), or buggy or just not very good compared to others. Mesmer isn’t the only one with this problem. That leaves him with 1-2 builds for pvp. For PvE mesmers definitly don’t need any buffs at all, rather nerfs.

Still the mesmer will always be good. He has the best utility ingame, is extremly useful for any kind of teamsetup, delivers high dmg and burst while still being hard to catch and he has an excellent skill:reward ratio. In his current state he definitly doesn’t need any buffs at all. His only problem is the condition spam meta, he is still playable, just not as broken overpowered as necromancers, spirit rangers and engineers.

After this current meta problem got adressed, it becomes arguable if the mesmer needs some changes. Spot on changes – buffs and nerfs.

Since you love Fresh Air so much, with 30 air and a valkyrie amulet/zerker jewel, you have the same 22% chance to crit that I do here. Unless you prefer berserker amulet, in which case you will have a 0% chance to crit as you lay dead on the ground.

eeeehm…. quite no

I’m running a 0/30/0/10/30 build with wurm runes and berserker amulet, having closely 17k hp, ether renewal, arcane wave, lightning flash and arcane shield. 49% crit chance and good crit dmg, all around ~3,2k attack dmg. High burst, good dps and being not too squishy against burst and conditions. I tried several times to spend the 10 points that I have currently in Water on fire or earth, but both didn’t show up as effective as in water.
I’d definitly say, that the build I use is more focussed on dealing dmg, while your ones rather goes into the direction of being a bunker. I don’t believe that you are able to deal the same dmg. You are probably able to live longer, allthough I’m actually still not very easy to kill (unless being focussed by cc warriors and necromancers at the same time… but not even guardians can survive that).

Lightning Whip has 300 range, which is twice as much as you see on other melee attacks (hundred blades et al). Certainly this is still not a ranged attack, but combining the gap closers (RtL, burning speed) and snares (water 3, earth swap, earth 2/3) with that 300 range makes it difficult to kite.

Lightning wip does deal 40% more dps than the Scepter Air 1+2, therefor it’s affected by the AoE cap and can be dodged rather easily. The problem is just, that you are definitly forced into melee range – I’m not. To deal the maximum of my dmg, I have to get into close range as well, but most of the time I can stay on range. That’s a huge downside of your build, as you will be #1 target, getting hit by every AoE and symbol and well. You won’t really have a chance to deal the maximum of your dmg in close range combat.
Just btw., Dagger water 3 and earth swap aren’t snares. Both are soft ccs and slows, earth 3 is a true snare. Just to clarify the terms.

First you complain about my crit chance being too low, then conclude that 10 in air (less crit chance) is good. Air 15 and air training are both solid damage traits as you may have seen in your fresh air builds.

Well, just your opinion vs my opinion. I won’t argue there, we both have different experiences. I did just experience that it’s not worth it to go for 20 points in air. It’s worth it to go for 10 points in air and then to spend the other 10 points on something else (earth, fire or water). Or it’s worth it to go for 30 points in air. That’s up to our personal preferences.

I think a lot of people overrate the impact the water traits (cleanse and heal) have on team support because we have found ourselves running them for so long. One extra condi removal is rarely going to have a large impact, similar to the one 1.5k heal that is being lost. It’s just that the sheer number of heals we can give (dagger or scepter mainhand, cleansing wave, EA roll, water 15) stack up to give a nice little burst heal. I have found that sacrificing one of those heals is not a huge deal; it only becomes more apparent if you begin cutting others (focus offhand or less than 30 arcana) as well.

You may have forgotten that elementalists can swap into water attunement while stunned and especially feared. That’s why healing ripple and the condition removal is so extremly strong, even stunchained you still have a chance to survive and if fearchained you have a chance to get rid of the fear. You partially solve this problem by getting rock solid, but you lose a lot of heal therefor. Water Traitline gives some nice vitality additionally and vitality is more useful than tenacity in the current condition meta.
The rest I agree. The point is, that elementalists either need healing ripple or EA. They don’t need necessarily both, but at least one of them. That’s not a balance issue, that’s a design flaw.

Beside that, taking a look at your numbers I don’t quite buy it that this should be a dps build. Especially as you have very low crit chance and crit dmg and no Fresh Air (fresh air is a huge dps buff, I’d even say for ~15%). Yet you are in melee range, so decent players can kite you or just dodge your skills.

In my opinion, it’s just not worth it to go for 20 points in air. 30 points in air is good due to Fresh Air, 10 points are good just to have som crit and bolt in the heart. Having 20 in air you just don’t gain anything superior. To go for bunker doesn’t deal much less dmg there, tried 0/0/20/20/30 once and it worked, was pretty much pure bunker, but it’s ofc less useful than any guardian.

All ele’s should be starting 20 earth for rock solid and ether renewal in this meta IMO.

Tried this already long time ago. I’m open-minded for new builds, so I know the weaknesses and strengths of them. 0/20/20/0/30 has some extremly weak points, it’s not quite worth it:

- pure bunker build, to go for dmg isn’t possible (therefor you would rather need 30 in air) —> pointless, guardian bunker is a lot more useful
- low dmg, you can’t kill anybody unless he is a pure glass cannon, doesn’t pay attention and doesn’t has any defensive utilities
- very low hp pool, no condition removal when swapping into water, no water 5 minor trait, no healing ripple
- low condition dmg

Ofc a build like this works in soloq, hotjoin and low tier matches. There I tried builds like 20/30/0/10/10 as well, using signets and fire aura to get a lot of dmg and yeah, I had success sometimes, but it doesn’t compensate the weaknesses of this build, having no healing at all and being squishy like hell, while your dmg output can easily be dodged. Against decent players something like this doesn’t work.
I tried 10/30/10/10/10, 10/30/0/20/10, 10/30/0/0/30, 0/20/0/20/30, 30/0/0/10/30 etc. pp. I like to figure out new builds and playstiles because I love diversity – that’s why other classes don’t please me, I need to have a very complicated and difficult class with a lots of skills to manage. But on the elementalist it just doesn’t work without points in arcana and/or water. Air traitline is actually only useful because of Fresh Air either. Design flaws.

Design flop? I’d say that the elementalist is one of the most well designed classes in this game, just one of the hardest to balance. Many issues with the elementalists now are balance issues, although there’s certainly a few contradictory design decisions for traits. Elementalists aren’t spamming clones, they aren’t spamming stealth and transforming the game into a “fight-the-tab-key” esport, they aren’t spamming skills without cooldown over and over, they don’t rely on passive playing and pet armies, etc. I’d say that elementalists and warriors are the most well designed classes in this game, with guardians close, and I only didn’t put Guardians up there, because I feel their virtue system’s is sometimes a bit more spammable than it should, or sometimes lacking some impact or just plain unexciting (passive aegis every 40s). (I don’t know enough about engineers or necromancers to talk about them.)

Gameplay Design <> Class Design
Both belong together, but you still have to differ between them.
I agree, that the elementalist has a pretty fluent and dynamic game play – well, at least on D/D and due to the recent changes on S also on S/D, staff and focus are rather… meh. Among all classes he probably has the best skill:reward ratio. But other classes have this as well, others probably like Mesmers more or engineers, both have equally fluent gameplay styles as well. Basically every class has the possibility to have a dynamic gameplay and challenging gameplay, that belongs mainly to their weapons and traits.

But the class design is something else. And there the elementalist isn’t just a little bit contradictory. There are not just some few mistakes, that can be solved with tweaking some numbers for balance, the design shows huge failures. After just a little bit of time and comparing the elementalist with other class designs, with other trait designs and weapon designs and utility designs, you notice immediatly, that he was definitly one of the classes that were created firstly.
And as long as these design mistakes consist, it won’t be possible to balance the elementalist.
To explain to you the consequences of all the design mistakes the elementalist currently has (so see which design mistakes are meant, just take a look at page 2):

- as long as water and arcana are mandatory and everything else is bad, there won’t ever be build diversity
- as long as the elementalist doesn’t have a possibility to specialize, there won’t be build diversity (only jack of all trades)
- as long as the elementalist is forced into melee range with low armor, hp, protection, cc and dmg, his only real possibility is to go partially bunker
- as long as the elementalist is forced to go for bunker and is still pushed into the jack-of-all-trades-direction, it becomes impossible to get him balanced —> he will always be either op or up, because he either has everything or nothing
- as long as other classes are by far better in absolutly everything than the elementalist, there won’t ever be a role in any group for him
- as long as content doesn’t require supportive characters, as long as boons are so spammable like now and so not something rare, special and situational, as long as cc isn’t needed (nor possible) there won’t be a role for the current elementalist
- as long as he only has 2 conditions that are spammable by every class, there won’t be the possibilty to go for a condition elementalist
- as long as the bugs he has eversince aren’t fix’d, most traits and skills remain useless

Elementalist doesn’t need just some nerfs and buffs for balance. He needs reworks, not just a few of them, he needs several major ones. Currently 70% of the elementalist is crap. Focus is crap, staff is crap, conjured weapons are crap, utilities either don’t work or aren’t useful either, fire traitline is useless, earth traitline is weak and every elementalist build needs points in arcana and water. That hasn’t been addressed since beta. And that makes me sad, because as far as I know ArenaNet, they will just nerf the mandatory traitlines like arcana and water instead of giving the elementalist the desperatly needed buffs on other traits and the reworks and bugfixes. And then the elementalist will be completly destroyed.

You don’t have any chance in this forum that a dev reads your post, allthough it’s a pretty good one. The only chance I see is that you mail these questions to one of the devs or Jonathan Sharp himself and publish the answers afterwards – or you go into the spvp forum. Devs visit the class forums maybe once in a month, probably even less.

Actually tornado does do damage. o.O

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tornado
Damage: 122 (0.35671)?

Could be the dmg skill with the lowest dmg in the entire game. Not quite sure about that. I don’t count 200-300 dmg per hit as dmg, not on an elite. Especially not, as you throw your foes away and can’t dmg them then.

I’d like to point out, Necro OP is a glass cannon, no defense, no group buffs/support, condi machine.

Team of 4 spent over 10mins trying to kill a high defense/escape Ele, before actually getting a stomp.
They may not be top damage, but they suck it up/escape & buff/support others in a way necro’s & rangers can’t.

What a b u l l s h i c e, no other way to describe this stupidity. Necro has one of the highest base hp pool (above 20k), an extremly strong DS and tons of soft cc with conditions like cripple, chill and weakness. That is not even close to squishy and definitly the opposite of being non supportive for a team. Support doesn’t only consist of spamming buffs.
If it takes you 10 minutes to kill an ele, as 4 people, no matter how much bunkery he is, then I’ve only one thing to say: You are incredibly bad.

up/escape & buff/support others in a way necro’s & rangers can’t.

You obviously don’t play this game, so get out of the forums. Rangers no escape, no buffs and teamsupport? Get brain.

Thieves can stealth you left and right. For ridiculous durations. And you’re saying swirling winds would be comparable to say… Shadow refuge? You’re saying Ele could be a viable alternative to Thief? That would be bloody great, don’t you think? But I don’t see this happening, even with Swirling Winds as a Smoke field.

Thieves are currently op and because of this mandatory for every competitive team, engineers as well. So no, I don’t want the elementalist just to replace this role. Thieves and engineers have to be nerfed and buffed on other spots, stealth needs an entire rework. I want the elementalist to be useful, balanced, fun and viable. Not stupidly broken.

After fighting Readymade I think staff is 110% viable. Guess players still can’t learn to adapt.

Staff is good for teamfights greater than 4 vs 4. It’s useless in 1 vs 1, 2 vs 2 and 3 vs 3 situations. One main problem is the AoE cap – with so much AI in this game, it becomes impossible to hit a player. Especially competitive play doesn’t consist only of teamfight situations, so staff isn’t quite viable. It becomes impossible to kill a foe with it if he just moves and dodge rolls sometimes.
Don’t get me wrong there. Staff is very close to be perfectly fine and useful for PvE, PvP and WvW. Only very few skills have to be changed there (mentioned this already in this thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/How-staff-should-be/first#post2593394). The main problem for every elementalist build is the bad trait design.

I believe, that the elementalist needs one major change to get already a lot more build diversity: He needs his attunement effects from BETA back. These effects got changed, so you need the 15points minor trait in every traitline to get them – sun spot, discharge, magnetic wave and healing ripple.
Because of this every elementalist is forced to have either 15 points in water and 20 in arcana or 10 points in water and 30 in arcana, because elementalists desperatly need their heal and fast attunement recharge.

So these 4 effects have to be given permanently passive, maybe a little bit weaker, like healing ripple only healing for 70% of its current value. This way elementalists wouldn’t be forced anymore into Water, because they have the heal they needed, and they can go into earth/fire. Water would be still viable to become bit more tanky and supportive.
In a second step the 15 points minor traits could be changed towards a direction that encourages to stay and to specialize on attunements, instead of being a jack-of-all-trades with no strength at all. This way arcana wouldn’t be that mandatory as well, as you don’t focus on permanent attunement switching, unless you want to be a jack-of-all-trades.
So you can either specc into raw burst dmg (fire), single target dmg and mobility (air), tankyness and CC (earth) or healing and support (water). Arcana would give utility only. For example, these new 15 points minor traits could be something like for every second you stay in combat in this attunement you gain one stack of a certain buff – dealing for example 1% more dmg in fire for every stack, up to a max of 30 stacks, 1 stack per second. Works together with lingering elements (so you can basically “combine” elements).

After a change like this you can discuss other balance changes, so like nerfing the elementalist by making it impossible to switch attunements while being stunned, but therefor giving him 1-2k more base hp etc.

Staff actually doesn’t need major changes. Rather some little improvements on a few skills and better traits. Traits are the main problem for every elementalist build, arcane and water are too mandatory, rest is too weak, without having 15 points in an attunement tree the attunements don’t fulfill their purpose – earth doesn’t protect, water doesn’t really heal.

I’d only change these little things on staff:

Fireball – Increasing the AoE a little bit, increasing dmg by ~10 percent or increasing the missile speed a little bit.

Water Blast – larger Aoe, stronger heal, little bit more dmg
Ice Spike – becomes a blast finisher

Chain Lightning – The first hit deals 50% more dmg than it does currently, the second hit does deal 100% of the current dmg, the third hit deals 50% less dmg (this way you would encourage staff users to use air rather for singletarget dmg, while fire is for AoE).
Lightning Surge – Reduced cast time to 1 second and inflicting additionally weakness.
Static Field – Dealing (mediocre-low) dmg every second to foes inside the circle. Currently the skill is ok or mediocre for pvp and wvw, but very bad for pve. With some little dmg it would be pretty good for PvE and in PvP/WvW you would force foes to decide, if they either want to get damaged or stunned or that they have to waste a teleport/invulnerability/etc.

Earth is fine.

Swirling winds to be a Smoke field.

That would already be far too op. With some little blast finishers you could make your entire team invisble while a teamfight for quite a long duration, so enemies drop their targets and additionally every ranged class using missiles has no chance to deal dmg. Eles would be forced to wear focus and would be mandatory for every team just and only due to this skill.

Focus needs to be pushed into another direction. It was supposed to be a defensive ranged single target weapon, so, in opposite to the offhand dagger, it deals lower aoe dmg and offers no mobility, but offers stronger defense for example through CC. That doesn’t work, the design of focus is pretty bad right now – water and earth are dealing the dmg, fire and wind are purely defensive. It doesn’t other anything, neither strong defense, nor CC, nor mobility. I would always prefer an offhand dagger, every single skill is better.

Currently most focus skills are pointless – fire 4, water 4 and 5, air 5 and 4 only rarely useful, earth is fine. These skills need improvements.
Some suggestions:

Fire 4 – Flamewall – A wall of flames is bursting out of the ground, knocking back foes and creating a fire field for 7 seconds. —> Giving some good CC to the focus.

Water 4 – Frost Wind thingy – Chill getting stronger with every tick, dealing more dmg over time, longer duration and chill is getting inflicted with every tick (so you just can’t remove the chill immediatly)

Air 5 – Ice meteor thingy – Getting a larger AoE, larger animation and higher dmg, therefor the speed becomes lowered. Stunning for 1 second, enemies that are chilled become knocked down for 2 seconds.

Air 4 – Whirling winds – 2 possibilites: Either giving it dmg (so like lightning hitting into it randomly and ealing some dmg) and making it a lightning combo field, therefor maybe reducing the range and increasing the cooldown, or making it similar to the electric circle in the aspekt arena minigame.

Air 5 – Can’t be blocked and deals some little dmg.

I really dont think that ele and especially mesmers are bad designed classes.

Beside that I agree with most you’ve written, I do highly disagree with this. Both have horribly stupid design mistakes that haven’t been adressed since beta. And absolutly nothing, really, nothing has been done to solve these problemes.
Just think about it: Elementalists don’t have armor, they are wearing clothes. They have the lowest hp pool ingame (little bit more than 10k). Yet they are forced into close range combat without having strong protections, cc or dmg either. The only true defense they can make use of is healing themselves – so they are forced to spend points into water and arcana, as they are very dependant on attunement switching. Zero possibilities for build diversity – horribly stupid design. And additionally Anet wants to force elems into being a jack of all trades. Just – what? Isn’t there a limit to stupidity?
Mesmer design is a lot better – beside of the better animations. Their only true design failure is having too much AI, that wrecks up PvP because of tab targetting etc. Mesmers have a lot higher base hp pool (19k I think) and strong defense through deception, stealth and AI. Same for thieves, they may have a low base hp pool as well, but therefor they wear medium armor and have tons of strong stealth. Both classes still have better dmg and cc than the elementalist. They only lack some survivability through heal (allthough thieves are pretty good at it as well.)

11k fire crit? I only make 6-8k depend of armor… And no I dont play scrub traits that die faster than a rat get bite than him self….

My build it’s 0-20-30-20… Its Survival/DPS with D/D specc. When I have 2-3 ppl on my I can survive kinda long time before I die. Many times can I take 1vs2… But if i meet good ppl, its really hard 1v2. But 1v1 its ok.

You have zero points in arcana. Every decent player kills you without any problems, as you need ages to swap back into water attunement.

With Blinx’s Soldier’s build, Tornado is a surprisingly useful elite to use at times, especially on the temple’s gate.

Tornado has only one single use – knocking enemies back. It doesn’t deal dmg, it doesn’t make the elementalist tanky, it doesn’t make him a threat and it doesn’t inflict any dangerous conditions either. So you can use an elite skill once in 160 seconds to knock enemies back. That’s not useful, that’s just horribly bad for an elite. Other classes have the same thing as utility skill.