Guild Wars 2

IndigoSundown.5419:

Senario.2038:

By making it easier I would argue that it opens up more opportunities for other classes to be included in various builds bc it is no longer required to have 8 classes of your 10 man party being taken up so you can provide adequate boons to the group. Yes it could backfire and cause people to take only dps classes but imo if dps is risen for the group by taking more dps classes then the remaining slots need less dps to actually remain competitive in finishing the raid.

The questions then become:

1. Which professions are taken now only because of their ability to supply meta-desired boons and would these professions have fewer meta slots as a result?
2. Would a meta really allow for less than the best DPS possible given their role from any raid member because there are greater numbers of high DPS professions?

To be honest that would be assuming that of course they take a different class as a result of something not being needed as much. I do think that it would open up more slots to run w/e so long as you run xx amount of good dps.

These are questions I can’t really answer but I would hope so as with less support classes a party would be more squishy with dps. But because they have that extra dps they can take more varied support classes if that makes sense.

Top level will have full dps probably beyond support but pugs will have a bit more freedom to choose a wide array of classes imo.

Maybe test it? 10 ppl buffs for open world and PvE, 5 for PvP and WvW.

Kuya.6495:

What’s the general impression on the ele forum on what needs to be buffed?

Imo
Rework Scepter
Buff Ele offhand dagger – Doesn’t stand up to warhorn in PvE and it does less damage despite being the DPS offhand.
Warhorn – changes only needed in PvP. None needed in PvE.
Fix Cooldowns that weren’t a problem last patch and damage that wasn’t a problem like fresh air d/wh. Lots of rotations got messed up and the cooldown nerfs were really terrible forcing everybody to go even more meta rather than play other builds other than the overpreforming one (staff). Nowadays if you run anything other than staff it is basically considered non-optimal in PvE and in PvP you’re still trying to run dagger focus auramancer except without a good amulet.

As far as that goes anyway. Traits are complicated and I honestly am fine with Air/Fire being if you want dps and Water/Earth being if you want defense.

However; I do think that we need more options on elites. Tempest is mostly supporty and it only does more damage bc overloads fill in the spots where you would otherwise autoattack. If we had an elite that was focused on moving/small target dps with active mitigation then you would see the chance to actually take some dps instead of having to take water/earth bc you now have active mitigation.

That is my 2 cents. Of course we need to buff up the traits a bit because quite a lot of things simply are trash or specs that simply don’t have a role anymore like Arcana.

Xilluxi.4162:

So I’m coming back after a very long break. Enjoying myself so far. In most other games I usually play healer support (yes I understand that there is no need for healers out of raids in this game). So anyway, I gave druid a shot this time around and though it’s nice it just isn’t clicking with me.

I am reading a lot of negative stuff about ele, though it’s my preferred class and first level 80 character. I also love light armor looks. I remember they used to be quite strong but most of what I read is that they are really low tier, especially in pve. This worries me because PVE is my playstyle, though ofc I won’t shy away from the occasional pvp/wvw.

Yes, I have done research about the nerfs. I have read and read. Yes I know, I know. Play what you want there is no best class. Please don’t respond to this thread with those types of answers.

I’m looking for real, solid advice with actual explanations. Is it even worth going back to my ele right now or should I tough it out with my druid until a-net changes something? As I don’t have much experience to a-net’s response time with these types of things do you think a change is even needed/likely/going to happen soon?

What are the main problems with ele, and where are they lacking most? Are they useful in raids, fractals, can they solo through some of the HoT content? (Yes, I know all characters are special snowflakes and have a use, but I mean compared to other high tier pve classes). My main focus is PVE, I will PVP but that’s not my focus.

Any help would be appreciated. I know some would say just go for it and play what you want. However, I tend to invest gems and a lot of time into my characters and don’t really like alting so I don’t want to make a decision I will regret (if I go back to my ele).

Thank you for your time.

Edit: On a side note, what are other classes that are high tier in pve right now? I like magic feeling classes. Please, none of the every class is good stuff we all know there are preferred classes for certain things. I’m talking for solo pve, fractal, raid. Thanks again guys, for your time.

I mean, it is worth it to go back to ele if you really realy enjoy the class. However the fact is that we have the lowest hp and the lowest armor in the game taking the most damage and going down the easiest.

Druid will do significantly less damage than ele still but in general druid is a class that has a solid position right now in PvP and PvE. You ALWAYS want a druid in PvE. I’ve seen them being used mostly in raids but they have been helpful in fractals (condition damage variant). Even in open world I would say I appreciate them bc they give heals and team buffs which increase my own dps.

Ele is used in Raid pugs (mostly bc I believe they haven’t moved on to the current top tier meta) and rarely in fractals as condition damage reigns supreme (toughness scaling and boon thieves).

Other classes that are top tier right now in PvE (maybe a little bit of PvP)?
Light Classes
Necromancer – really good in PvP and PvE right now. Condi damage is great in raids and in fractals. Pretty decent in open world too imo. Always wanted in PvE.
Mesmer – Really good in PvE not sure on PvP but they don’t do damage they give out every boon in the game and it is amazing. Plus perma quickness and most of the time alacrity. They are always wanted on teams in PvE at least but aren’t easy to play.

Other classes that may be magicky and good?
Revenant – simplistic but good simply bc of naturalistic resonance. Half decent defense and good output of boons and other things.

Quick reply: I’m not a scepter guy but in general…
Dragon Tooth – Cast time needs to be 1/2 sec and time before drop needs to be 1-1.5 sec with a 1/2sec landing time. Generally takes too long

Dust Devil – some blind maybe?

Generally I think scepter needs to be a more condi focused weapon for ele. One that puts out decent power damage but the condi is more. Things that would be good would be weakness. Not sure about torment but in general ele would need more condis to be a good condi class and I think scepter is possible for it (though sadly you would lose some burst due to the nature of condi).

Just add more blinds (to earth) and possibly more condis.

Tidal Surge – Unfortunately this skill is already really good, it does twice as much healing as offhand Dagger 5 without the condi clear and does CC on a lower cooldown. I do think the animation is a bit slow but…in all honesty I’m wary of any unneeded buffs as they likely will get the class double nerfed. One step forward two steps back you know?

FrostDraco.8306:

The ele forms clearly have a different opinion than you

Again, you are talking to me like I care. If you can’t be bothered to argue for your position, then you are free to leave. I’m not holding a gun to your head. But instead you resort to name calling.

kitten please.

Just paraphrasing here but you CLEARLY care, considering you spend so much time responding to me. If you didn’t you’d drop the subject and not waste your time on it.

You can cry about ad homenim and logical fallacies all you want but I tried reasoning with you at first. Pointing out fallacies and crying foul when I originally tried to be reasonable with you just shows you don’t have an argument.

How exactly do you propose ele give up a niche if they want to fufill a role? Any more than they already do having to take water or earth for tankiness, fire or air for dps? You’re arguing that they should give up more than taking two traitlines of three to fufill a role. Elites are obviously geared towards a certain role and while we only have one right now if more come out we can more properly spec for dps or for healing which would be tempest right now.

Honestly, you’re obnoxious and I will continue to bother you so long as you care enough to respond. As far as I’m concerned? Your opinion isn’t relevant to Ele because you offer nothing useful. You cry foul and say I put forth violence when I simply point out that others have a negative opinion of you because of your own attitude.

You literally linked a Metabattle build for condi that ANYBODY could’ve put up not to mention they were both over 150 days old (one of which is almost a year old now) and NEITHER Of which use the new trait system. The fact that you even THINK that this is valid for proving your point just makes your point ever more irrelevant. Neither of those builds are a reasonable pointer to ele actually having a condi build. And obviously ele condi is in the toilet right now.

Supreme.3164:

Here

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Isaiah_Cartwright

I’m afraid that he’s part of the balance team, his role as skill balancer…was well known by the GW1 community, he’s the one behind the famous smiter’s boon nerf (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Talk:Isaiah's_Balance)

I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the one behind RTL nerf, he clearly states in the video that he never wanted eles to be more mobile than other professions (among other things)

That is unfortunate. Somewhere along the line it seems something got lost and maybe we really don’t have somebody who does put a lot of thought into the nerfs.

Bc even if Rtl was on a 10 second cooldown it wouldn’t be more mobility currently than thief or druid o-o. And that is assuming it is 20 sec on miss and 10 sec on hit (traited).

Any respect I had for him for the short time I thought he may be half decent just evaporated lol.

Could you explain to me what happened with smiter’s boon? I never played Gw1 so I am unfamiliar with it.

Supreme.3164:

FrostDraco.8306:

Xillllix.3485:

The elementalist is celestial by nature so they’ll probably bring the celestial amulet back instead of working on improvements, which is more demanding. One thing is certain: they can’t balance skills properly at all and the ele lead doesn’t know how the class functions.

So you are mad because they removed a cheesy jack of all trades bunker build? Then you make the claim ele is celestial by nature.

I can’t even.

Ele has been at the top of the food chain for the longest. The same reason you love the class, is the same reason they have been nerfing it. Food for thought.

Ele is indeed celestial by nature @Xil is correct on that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRo6W22FfTI

The dev himself confirms the idea of ele being a celestial class by design and you don’t need even a dev to prove that…just look at ele weapon sets and look how every each one of them has a mix of direct, condi dmg with healing

Who is this dev, does he still work at Anet? He seems like he understands ele at least somewhat better than Karl. And doesn’t seem to dislike the class (again like a certain sub group of the balance team currently).

Only thing I really disagree with him in is the jack of all trades type comment as it no longer applies. Either you are near the top or you aren’t worth anything as in the case of engi. Jack of all trades only really is a good spec in PvP situations and never in PvE situations. That and guard and rev do a little bit of everything too.

To be fair I kinda agree with the OP, I find it kinda odd that it only spreads to 5 in PvE. Obviously limit it to 5 in WvW (nothing needs to be balanced around Open world, open world should be w/e).

By making it easier I would argue that it opens up more opportunities for other classes to be included in various builds bc it is no longer required to have 8 classes of your 10 man party being taken up so you can provide adequate boons to the group. Yes it could backfire and cause people to take only dps classes but imo if dps is risen for the group by taking more dps classes then the remaining slots need less dps to actually remain competitive in finishing the raid.

It is an interesting discussion but I don’t have a real horse in the race for this one. I do raid but whether or not it is changed matters very little to me so don’t attack me for having a different opinion.

Unfortunately I will have to…not disagree but rather add some nuance. Whether or not it is nerfed won’t change anything. Typical arguments people have used to justify ele nerfs and prevent ele buffs include but are not limited to.

1) They do a bit of everything (Note, Rev, guard, and now ranger do a bit of everything if you don’t count engi.)
2) BUT THEY HAVE 20 skills -

yeah but lets look at staff. Fire has good skills all around but I find it hard to think that Air 2 and 4 are anything but things you won’t use for the first and a short term swiftness application. Water 2 does damage but it is lower than either air or fire, water 4 is a chill field. And earth 3 is magnetic aura and 5 is a shockwave thing that isn’t all that useful.

Skills on staff that aren’t glorified buffs and somewhat usable as CC or damage…5 on fire, 2 on water, 2 on air, 1 on earth (eruption).
Mainhand dagger has Lightning whip, burning speed, water 3(blast finisher). The others are very situational and honestly not all that useful outside of PvP.
Offhand focus has air 4 and 5 and earth 4 and 5, as well as water 5 ish.
Warhorn has fire 5, air 4 and 5, and water 4-5.

In all honesty the amount of decently powerful skills on each weapon very closely matches what other classes have with 2 weapon sets for swap.

3) But other classes were bad for xx years – Well I hate to be the one to say this but saying that ele now needs to be worse or not get buffs simply because other classes had a time when Anet didn’t know what to do with them seems to come from a very biased and revenge-minded position. Ideally Anet should know what to do with each class and in realistic situations each class should have something to offer to the group whether it be PvP or PvE. As it stands they don’t.

4) Ele is still good, stop complaining. – As if debate or healthy discussion wasn’t allowed. This is silly.

So as much as I would be fine with nerfing meteor shower if it meant we got decent buffs to skills that are otherwise meh I know for a fact that nerfing it won’t do anything. Anet has people on the team that actively have biases against Ele as shown with the balance stream when icebow was nerfed. I don’t have any problem with the nerf itself as people still used it on staff…however they showed themselves to be unprofessional by stating how excited they were for nerfs to icebow (which got posted on reddit) and of course doing a Mic drop (but not actually dropping the mic) on the stream. Any professional wouldn’t do that in other gaming companies. They would explain why and try their best not to show any biases.

Xillllix.3485:

BlackBeard.2873:

Arthur is correct here.

Fresh air is still usable, and raids can be cleared in more casual groups with it, but you aren’t going to see any serious groups taking it.

Fresh air, and many other ele builds really took it in the gut with the last nerfs to alacrity traits, and air overload.

I don’t think they like the class, from memory:

Recently
13% nerf to skill recharge
Healing nerf
10% Damage nerf to air overload
Lava font cd nerf
Ride the Lightning stealth nerf

Earlier:
Might on Cantrip nerf
Blindness on burning nerf
Diamond skin nerf
Protection stacking nerf

Before that:
Ice Bow nerf
Line-casting and Meteor Shower nerf
Meteornado nerf
Healing and cleansing nerfs
Ride the Lightning nerf 3

Before then:
it took a petition to save Elemental Attunement
Ride the Lightning nerf 2

Even Before then:
Mist form nerf
Ride the Lightning nerf 1

What I wouldn’t give for an actual dedicated dev or dialogue about ele with anet to show how you can properly balance it according to difficulty of play and in comparison to other classes. But their attitude when nerfing icebow and others showed that…
1. They need better community relations bc bragging about a nerf shows bias and is unprofessional.
2. They showed that they really only know how to balance classes that are reliant on autoattacks and skills 2-5 for support as opposed to ele and engi which are more reliant on 2-5 and at least in ele’s case their autoattacks are pretty garbage. The fact that lightning whip is actually half decent is made irrelevant by the best build using it being unviable in a raid setting with similar dps numbers to other classes with way more team utility most notably guardian though I dont think guard should be nerfed. If anything we need a variety of builds to be useful rather than just staff.

1 staff ranged
1 melee (preferably not full support)

That is all I ask tbh lol. I miss the thrill of playing melee ele but now I cant justify it in any setting as staff does better in nearly all situations

FrostDraco.8306:

Senario.2038:

tbh I’m not even sure why you’re here when all you do is say “Ele needs to be bad at everything” and “Ele is fine”. Which are completely contradictory.

This proves you don’t agree with, lest even read my whole post. This is a strawman, and I am seriously not going to waste my time on someone who only reads half of what my actually argument is.

And since when is “Ele is decent at everything”, or “Ele is a good substitute”, saying that ele needs to be bad at everything? It’s almost like you didn’t even bother to read what I wrote, and from what you say, you didn’t bother. If you can’t respond to my actual argument, then I’d ask you not to bother responding at all.

And saying “I would disagree in general” isnt saying I disagree? Highly obnoxious and assumptive of you to think I didnt read it because I refused to waste time on a 5 hr reply that you would dismiss because your ego wouldnt allow a different opinion .

The fact is you act contrarian to all the evidence provided to you in this thread and your opinion on ele becomes ever more pointless because you put out blatantly wrong statements like ele has a condi build or that the amount of builds placed on metabattle determines viability. The fact that you have so much of an ego that you think that me disagreeing with you means I didnt read your post is astounding. I read it, and it is a waste of time reasoning with somebody who will stick to their guns not to mention I would disagree with upwards of 90% of your arguments.

The ele forms clearly have a different opinion than you and we can back it up with evidence. Again, if ele gets more straight up nerfs maybe you’re right and ele was fine. But if nothing happens or it gets buffs it is more likely that it is weak right now as shown by usage of classes in raids, pvp, and wvw.

You think you are clever but really youre just a contrarian who thinks he is a special snowflake despite several players disagreeing and you being unable to handle it. There is a reason somebody keeps saying they want to punch you in the face. You have an attitude that reflects that response.

I can respond to whoever I want. If you cant handle it I suggest you go somewhere else.

FrostDraco.8306:

Ele’s put in half the work and get the same reward. Ele was bad early on because no one understood how the class worked. This isn’t a problem with the class, this is a problem with the players being ignorant. As players learned how to play ele has been in the meta for the longest. And reroll a thief? Do I need to show you countless theads where people are telling each other to stop playing a thief after Anet gutted acrobatics (an almost mandatory line), and nerfed multiple weapon sets, and still do so till this day?

Meta battle builds-

Engi builds:
1 raid, 3 fractal, 6 pvp

Ele builds:
5 raid, 3 fractal, 4 pvp

Rev builds:
2 raid, 1 fractal, 3 pvp

Guard builds:
2 raid, 2 fractal, 6 pvp

Remember you said ele isn’t doing good in pve? Why is it that ele has a decent amount of builds for every game mode? Compared to all classes? Your claims just do not match what we are seeing in game.

I’m not even going to address the rest of your response in detail because it would take HOURS and honestly it would be an exhaustive post about how I disagree and you don’t understand ele considering you thought that ele even had a meta condi build and that Thief was entirely single target despite many of their attacks also cleaving. You simply are not worth my valuable time as you would likely stick to your guns and not be swayed. I have my opinion and it differs from yours considerably. If Ele gets nerfs next patch (and no buffs) maybe you’re right but if it gets nothing or buffs then I’m most certainly right in that they simply are too weak now to even be considered.

The amount of builds people put on Metabattle is not an indicator of how good they are tbh. The Auramancer spec is terrible for PvE. All the amount of builds on Metabattle shows is that people have gotten creative and thought it was a good idea to build x y and z. But it tells you nothing of the nuance of where you use these builds and why you use them. Condi Druid is on there but as far as I can tell it is actually only useful in 4-4-2 setups in organized groups. Otherwise it helps more with pugs to run healing gear.

I completely disagree with you on every point you tried to make

tbh I’m not even sure why you’re here when all you do is say “Ele needs to be bad at everything” and “Ele is fine”. Which are completely contradictory.

Hello, I have noticed that there are a lot of elite spec ideas floating around the forum and I felt like it would be best to have a compilation thread where people can share their general ideas without creating a huge wall of text.

Basic format is….for example
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Name of the Spec- Strategist

Niche the spec fits into- Small, mobile target power dps.

New weapons, if any – Mainhand Sword

New mechanic(Keep this simple, no more than 1-2 sentences) – Attunements upgraded to styles with passive effects for 10 sec after swapping to the style triggering every couple of spells and charges carry over between attunements. For example; Fire – aoe damage on spells, Air – lightning bolts on target spells, Water – self healing on spells, earth – blast finishers on spells.

New utilities and heal- Stances (Don’t put an explanation on these and stick to existing utility types).

general idea and notes(again 1-2 sentences at most)- A dps focused spec that will have active mitigation through stances and generally is like daredevil in that it is selfish and promotes use of the main ele mechanic which is swapping attunements regularly. I’d like to see a real auto attack chain instead of lightning whip.

Note: General ideas only, don’t create a wall of text explaining all the traits and the utilities and the numbers. Everybody has different ideas on what is balanced and of course different modes of focus so lets leave that discussion to other threads.

Benevolence.8019:

I play fresh air burst and dunk most people with it.

But it’s a very high skill-capacity build to master. The damage is unparalleled though. I get top damage or kills most games.

Imo it’s just as good as thief at being the roamed (and it kittens on thieves).

Ele is fine. Just learn to adapt and don’t suck.

To be honest it sounds like you’re playing against bad players lol.

FrostDraco.8306:

Snip

Let me address your “argument”. First of all Ele is “still strong”. Now the classical definition of this is that they have a role in all game modes or at least 2/3. Dps in PvE typically, some sort of role in PvP (I do not claim to speak on specifics), and of course WvW which is typically backline for water fields and meteor finish.

Lets look at PvP – Ele has very little active mitigation, low armor, low hp, and high healing power scaling with low base heals. This essentially forces ele to need at the very least healing power, vit, and toughness. Celestial worked so well bc it also gave them damage however imo being forced to build healing power is holding many builds back. That said it is clear that no team picks up ele anymore and would rather go for a more self sustaining class. You can try ele but that doesn’t mean it’ll be any good.

Chances are, and this is an assumption don’t get your panties in a bunch, you think ele is still good in PvE. Well you would be wrong on that part. Dagger Warhorn is no longer viable as on a good day with a perfect rotation and permanent alacrity it gets sub 30k dps. You need minimum 30k to be viable if you play a dps class which ele is in PvE.

You can say “oh wait Ele is supposed to be absurdly strong on big immobile targets while thief should be good vs small mobile targets!”. Fair argument however the data shows us otherwise.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4zoswe/qt_gorseval_speed_kill_420_left/

Enter qT’s speedruns with 10 people. This is gorseval, one of the top two fights ele SHOULD dominate in. Their dps should be easily over the top of what thief can do due to not only needing to clear orbs but also the fact that gorseval is a big immobile target with the only better target for ele being keep construct. Now that you’ve looked at the topic do you notice anything weird?

OH They only took 1 ele, and they didn’t do it for dps reasons. They did it because ele has the only weapon with enough range to stay on stack and kill orbs. And to be perfectly honest a dragonhunter could do that now with the new symbols. They replaced every single ele with a daredevil on a fight that is supposed to favor ele.

What do you have to say to this? This is the ideal time for ele to shine and yet they are not in an extremely optimal setting. Is it still fine? No of course not, that was rhetorical. In PvE once you get to high level play doing many different things at average effectiveness is by far not as good as specializing in one thing. Ele was one of the two classes I believe were built for pure power dps, the other being thief and unfortunately when you have classes designed to function like this in PvE consistency is important. Not only is ele no longer consistent but its dps is in the pits compared to thief and it does not offer enough team utility to make up for the lacking of dps.

My perception is that people vastly underestimate what a thief can do. I’ve spent sparse amounts of time on thief and what I can tell you is that it is infinitely more survivable and easy to play than Ele as it takes 7% less damage base, has three dodges now, and isn’t limited by cooldowns(making it much more consistent at dps without alacrity). Saying that “oh all they do is dps” is interesting bc that is almost all of what ele does too. I never agreed to having tempest be a support spec and honestly I don’t care about the supportive features getting nerfed, interestingly enough thief venom heal will heal the thief for an absurd 8k+ and the team for 5k on 5 targets which would almost be better than old wash the pain away if it was on even 10 sec less cooldown. However a damage class having to compete over damage and not suitability is absurd. There is a trend with ele and engi in that more effort = less reward and anet rarely if ever looks to improve that situation. Even more so when they buff up classes whose optimal rotation is 111111 and occasionally 2 and maybe 1 other skill.

As for WvW – some guilds still take ele, but I know T1 and a lot of them have been experimenting with lower cooldown water fields as ele’s is now on terribly long ones. There is so much AoE that meteor is less needed as well.

Now answer me this. Why should a class not do anything well if they do a little bit of everything? By your logic guardian does a little of everything. Team heals, team boons, damage, and yet it has solid damage builds. Revenant can do pretty much everything too, and they’ve been in a good spot for a while. Due to the design nature of the game every class can do a little bit of everything. The difference with ele is that you have to use your traits to trait for what you want to specialize in instead of simply taking the damage traits and being self sufficient.

Also you seem to ignore that Ele is surprisingly difficult to play. People may not think so but playing ele is a lot about aftercast cancelling and that is what separates the great players from the bad ones. As it stands Anet offers two classes that are sufficiently difficult to be considered high-skill. Engineer and Ele. Both of which can do lots of things well and both of which are being phased out of various metas bc they don’t specialize in anything enough to be worth taking.

Making a character weak at everything bc they can do everything works for a competitive moba with very simple controls and balancing. It does not work in an MMO where min maxing is very very prevalent and classes often can fill the same roles.

Edit: also you would be completely wrong about saying “Ele has been top tier forever” (paraphrasing). Ele was pretty bad early on, so bad people literally just told you to reroll thief bc you could do more and it was simpler to play. I don’t find it right to ask ele players to put in 2-3x the work of other classes and get 1/2 the reward. The same goes with Engi players.

Because Thief can Auto attack and get the highest dps in the game in PvE.

Simply press 1 and you can achieve 34.5k in organized settings XD.
Its so efficient that it is replacing elementalist (old king of big immobile target dps) on their specialty (big, immobile target dps).

Also it takes 7% less base damage than Ele due to medium armor, has 3 dodges, and lots of useful initiative skills for more dodges making you 10x more survivable than many other classes so long as you know what you’re doing.

Tarasicodissa.7084:

LazyDad.2037:

ehh warrior is not selfish Tara.. You are wrong about that.

That said, for the duo, Herald is solid, Druid is also good pick. And as others said a Guardian.

Doubt it, as a warrior main I should know.
Tell me what does warrior bring into a duo setting that other class cannot (and even better)? Might from PS is nothing, you can stack that on ele along with 2 mitnues of fury. EA or banners are pretty much meh. Good for party of 5 players, but won’t do so much for duo. Ele can do CC, and has superior damage. Thief has very good damage, mobility and can provide stealth for long skips (combos well with ele for blasts).

Don’t get me wrong, warriors are good. They are a necessity for group play, pretty decent solo and okay even for duo, but there are other classes who can do it better.

As I said. If you want to be optimal, go for either ele/ele or ele/thief. If you want to just have fun, then don’t worry about the class at all and just play whatever you like.

You can stack that on ele…by wasting all your blast finishers and a lot of dps and it’ll run out due to cooldowns of said blast finishers. Warrior on the other hand keeps up constant 25 stacks for as long as the fight lasts.

I’d duo a Rev or a Mesmer with Warrior. Rev can give boon duration and perma fury/protection and Mesmer has alacrity and quickness (rev for smaller fights, mesmer for larger, longer lasting fights)

FrostDraco.8306:

Xillllix.3485:

The elementalist is celestial by nature so they’ll probably bring the celestial amulet back instead of working on improvements, which is more demanding. One thing is certain: they can’t balance skills properly at all and the ele lead doesn’t know how the class functions.

So you are mad because they removed a cheesy jack of all trades bunker build? Then you make the claim ele is celestial by nature.

I can’t even.

Ele has been at the top of the food chain for the longest. The same reason you love the class, is the same reason they have been nerfing it. Food for thought.

Now I pose to you a question, is it justified to leave a class with absolutely 0 reason to play the game? Want to play PVP? Nah choose something else, want to play WvW? Groups have started to take other water field generating classes.

Want to play PvE? Ele is being phased out even in their best fights like Gorseval only being kept around because they have the only weapon that can clear structures while on stack. (aka if you’re the only one with it calling you the “best” is honestly not a big deal. Bc you’re the only one competing for the spot).

I don’t think it is entirely fair to say that Ele players want the class to be OP. They just don’t want to be useless in every mode. And no, saying “Well other classes had their turn so now it is yours” is not an argument…it is defending extremely bad balance.

They could easily fix this if they took out boon thieves and readjusted toughness scaling to match what is in raids. The raid bosses are decently well balanced in terms of the amount of damage power and condi do. However Condi is a lot better in fractals due to the higher toughness.

Thing is they probably won’t listen to anything in this subform just like they don’t listen to anything in pretty much any of the other subforms.

And they’ll still be bad at balancing for more complicated classes. They do well when it comes to press 1 to win classes but others they just don’t understand. They nerf everything bc they don’t know how to make the class balanced. They don’t know how to make the class balanced bc they don’t listen to people who play those classes (engi and ele are covered under this).

I’m going to say that even in PvE Ele is suffering. qT just posted a Gorseval speedrun with 10 people and while this should be one of the two bosses you can and probably should stack eles the fact is they only kept ele around for Orbs. Meaning that Ele dps is that lackluster in any realistic setting that you’re better off taking Thief and Guardian. Only taking ele to deal with mechanics like orbs. Note this is a boss that you should be a top pick for dps but they just replaced almost every ele except one (to deal with shards/orbs) on one of Ele’s two best bosses. The other being Keep Construct.

I’ll leave the active mitigation talk to others who are more familiar with PvP and WvW however lets talk about the usability of PvE builds and how they match up to others. Again, I acknowledge that this forum is mostly PvP however I do think we should take a look at some skills.

I preface this by saying
1) Numbers are based off 25 stacks of might on a PvE build
2) The objective here is to make dagger the weapon you choose if you want dps. If you want to be supporty you should take focus and if you want a good mix you should take warhorn.
3) Burning speed cooldown is changed to 12 sec base, no other changes.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Warhorn – Warhorn is in a weird place, you want it to be good in PvP yet it is ele’s strongest melee weapon being supporty+damage in PvE. Obviously this is a bit weird as Warhorn has always been a support weapon. You can’t nerf its damage bc lets be honest an autoattacking thief gets 34.5k dps and on a really good day a d/wh ele gets 29k dps. However I think looking at its pre nerf state would give us a bit of insight on changes that SHOULD be made for another weapon…

Offhand Dagger: Now offhand dagger is an interesting thing, it used to be good. We all know that. But now it is a shadow of its former self and you can’t really call it a DPS based offhand ele can take bc wh is better. Needless to say it isn’t a defensive weapon either. So in a game where Focus is full support, Warhorn is a good middle ground of support and dps, what should offhand dagger be?

The answer of course is DPS. But how do you make it match Warhorn (pre nerf, so it is viable)?

FIRE

Ring of Fire – This skill has a bunch of problems. Mainly being super painful to bad players in PvP but also bc it can either do a ton of damage if they are going in and out of the ring or almost nothing bc they aren’t in the ring or they are but not crossing the edge.

Changes

Ring of Fire
-power scaling increased to 1.5 from 1.25.
-Burning application changed to pulse 1 stack of 2 seconds of burning every second for its duration within the ring (including the edge). Base duration of the field unchanged.
-Range normalized to 300 (to match air auto and firegrab)
-Cooldown is now 12 seconds.
-Removed: Constant application of burning by going in and out of the ring’s edge

Reasoning -This change is mainly to add some consistency to the skill while trying to keep the dps realistic. The skill is either a “does too much damage” or “doesn’t do enough” and by changing this we also put it in line with the idea of being a dps weapon. Ultimately the numbers make the tooltip damage…
2021.56 direct damage on cast
3968 damage from burning (all applications, 496 dmg per 2 or 2.5 sec)
and 598.95 dps. On a 10 sec cooldown.

To put this in perspective…
Wildfire does 8005.39 direct damage in 10 pulses and 4960 damage in burning which is 648.2 dps pre nerf and 540.22 dps post nerf. Pre nerf numbers were viable. Post were not.

Now we move onto the next skill.
Fire Grab – This skill is actually almost fine. Almost nothing needs to be changed about it as 20 sec cooldown is ideal when traited. The only change I would make.

-Power Scaling – Upped from 2.8 on burning opponents to 3.0. No other changes

Reasoning – Combined ring of fire and fire grab should in theory out dps warhorn. Dagger being a damage weapon it makes no sense for it to do less than wh especially when neither of these skills offer any real team utility besides fire fields.

-Effective DPS numbers of Fire Grab assuming burning opponent: 3500*1000*(3.0/2597) = 4043.1 / 20 = 202.16 dps
Total approximate fire dps 801.1.
152.9 higher than pre nerf.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

AIR

Ride the Lightning
-Cooldown decreased to 25 seconds. halved on hit.
-Power scaling upped to 2.5 from 1.0
-Added 5 stacks of 10 sec vulnerability

Reasoning – Ride the lightning is an interesting spell in that for some reason it is the only spell that does damage on offhand dagger but it actually does terrible damage.
To put this in perspective

Warhorn’s Lightning Orb has a 0.45 power scaling coefficient however at 3500 might the numbers show that (3500 × 900) x (0.45/2597) = 545.8. And the average times this skill hits is about 14 times on a regular sized enemy. Which of course = 7641.5 damage for this one skill. Before this was on a 16.5 second cooldown which would equal 463.1 dps. Currently it is 382 dps.

By comparison RtL under these changes would do (3500 × 1000) x (2.5/2597) = 3369.27 damage but on a lower cooldown of 10 seconds traited and on hit. Making the dps = 336.9 dps.

-This is significantly lower than Lightning orb however it should be compensated by the fire changes.

Updraft
-Skill Cooldown decreased to 25

Reasoning Cyclone on Warhorn does damage, applies swiftness, and does breakbar damage. So it is essentially better than this skill.

-463.1 dps for old LO on wh
-336.9 dps on proposed changes RtL
-Less damage on RtL by 126.2

EFFECTIVE DPS DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PROPOSED CHANGES AND OLD Pre-NERF WARHORN.
26.7 dps. Actual difference? Probably slightly higher as burst skills tend to be more usable while buffs like harmonious conduit and fresh air are available.
-NOTE: this does not account for the damage change on overload air which I believe should be reverted. However that is unrelated to the proposed changes as they are made assuming nothing changes from now.

If damage is not actually good then…Ring of fire to 8 seconds base field. Otherwise no other changes needed as these changes will put dagger in the range of the damage pre nerf warhorn did which I believe is a good balance for a weapon that is supposed to be a dps spec. (This change is likely not needed).

Unrelated:

Signet of Restoration

-Healing power coefficient dropped to 0.05 from 0.1. Heal per spell raised to 300
-OR healing power coefficient remains the same and raise the heal back to 252.
Reasoning: Signet heals have typically been really high selfish heals. Currently ele’s healing power scaling is really holding it back from getting buffs so it can actually play without investing in Healing power. Healing power is a useless stat and by forcing Ele to invest into it so heavily you essentially make skills unviable for use without it making them useless. 300 puts it in the range of what the other classes can do with their healing signet.

offhand dagger.
Water
Cleansing Wave – Added 8 sec ish of personal regeneration and reduced CD to 35 sec, added personal heal for 1300 (total 1300 self, 1300 to team and self, and 8 sec regen).

Earth
Churning earth gets 2 stacks of stab on activation for 2 seconds.

Healing Ripple
-added damage (low damage)

Edits: Fixed the burning numbers to account for the condi damage might gives you. And various Maths to show how it is not broken.

Retsuko.2035:

Thanks for the feedback
The alternative build is the build that really matters. Find it better over the initial one I posted. Anyways, some responses from me.

Senario.2038:

on the WvW front you don’t nearly have enough toughness nor do you have enough vitality to actually survive in the front line and it would be hard in the middle. In addition to this your damage is a little on the low end. I’d think that most WvW front/mid eles would take focus because of its usefulness in projectile destruction and defense. Also, you went over the boon duration cap. 68.8% is way too high as you will likely get a Rev pulsing naturalistic resonance which is +50%. You don’t need sigil of concentration either.

You’re saying that I have too low survivability and damage on the low side? You do realize it’s nearly impossible to increase both (with runes/sigils disregarded). I’m aware of the boon duration cap and revenant’s usefulness. The alternative build has 55% boon duration, making it 88% with concentration. It takes in mind that I get that in PvE without revenant buffs. The boon duration buffs on my build are from food and traits as well, so it’s easy to replace them for another. For example, the food I’m using in the build is mussels gnashblade, replacing it with mussel soup would give me more vitality and I’ll keep the 10% damage reduction, which is also useful for survivability. In PvE I might be using food that enhances my DPS though.

Senario.2038:

Open world is pretty easy so in all honesty going full zerk with scholar runes should be easy enough.

I’m not exactly a beginner… I know PvE is easy, but that’s also why I come up with this build. In open world PvE you don’t have to maximize your damage for best results. It’s not like raids. Already have the gear and build for stuff like that. Like I’ve mentioned in my first post, the purpose of the build is to have an ele to casually cruise through open world content with ease. From experience I know that this build should do more then enough damage to contribute to the masses (with the right rotations). I agree that with all the old content it would be easy to just go all out on damage with fire and air because mobs from the older content hasn’t been made very well or challanging by ANet. The newer content however, act a little less predictable, where even unpredictable condition is dealt that can’t be anticipated. So if you have no or very little means to cleanse conditions, you’ll simply die a lot.

Senario.2038:

As for your utilities…Taking signet of fire, glyph of storms, and either lightning flash or FtB! should work just fine. Ether renewal is a bit of a long cast for healing and during that time you are most certainly not doing damage. You’re likely to get hit with a stray hit and lose more hp than you just gained.

Signet of fire is a damage enhancer, it’s useful in a DPS build, but this is obviously not a build made for max DPS I like glyph of storms, much used by myself, certainly something I’d still use often depending on the situation. I’m addicted to lightning flash and FtB is pretty good because of it’s somewhat lowish cooldown.

I have been using WTPA for quite some time, but the nerf to the heal is somewhat of a deal breaker now. Before tempest I always been using ether renewal. I know it has a cast time, but never really found much difficulty in using it. Be it WvW or PvE, always found the time to cast it. The great thing about it is that the amount it heals in total is decent while cleaning condi at a low cooldown.

You do have a point when it comes to the water traitline and whether I need it or not. I should get enough condi cleanse from my ether heal (every 18 seconds). But I guess it’s also a matter of what would I need for certain situations.

You must be wondering, why give counter arguments? it’s my way to discuss and think of my build and see if there are flaws in my ideas. So thanks

By going for a halfway point you succeed at doing neither job well. You don’t NEED boon duration. I hardly can see where exactly you would get the boons that you output to make that boon duration worth it, you have zero healing power to make regen heal a ton and you simply apply a lot of boons through auras. Problem is that no amount of rotations are going to make up for the stats that you’re missing. The extra regen won’t help you, it doesn’t heal enough. The extra vigor would be worth it, except you’re giving up a straight 10% damage boost and insurance your overloads actually go off. Extra fury is alright but without crit damage what will 20% crit do for you? Ferocious winds would equal a 12% damage boost on your current gear and more if you had something with more crit chance.

Truth is you can run anything in open world but if you choose to run a tanky build don’t expect to actually be useful in anything that isn’t faceroll(which in that case you could run without any gear and still win). Your crit chance is 50% ish which I guess is alright but at the same time you don’t really get all that much crit damage. With your build you end up at sub 190 which is about 30-40% less dps for a little extra health and toughness that in the end won’t really matter.

Again – Frontliners in WvW have at the bare minimum 3k Armor. Getting that with decent health on an Ele is a very difficult task. Even more so bc you actually try to put some damage in it. I would not be able to suggest either of your builds in good conscience for either of those game modes and you’re better off making dedicated sets for each mode.

As for healing…Don’t run Ether Renewal in PvE. You don’t need the condi clear, the time you spend channeling it is enough to get hit once (thus nullifying any heal you did get) and just take the healing glyph. In WvW at least it is somewhat legitimate but I’d rather take a burst heal and re-trait air to Earth for condi clear in addition to what water provides.

If you are fully willing to ignore my suggestions go ahead and make the build. I mean why ask for advice if you won’t take it?

on the WvW front you don’t nearly have enough toughness nor do you have enough vitality to actually survive in the front line and it would be hard in the middle. In addition to this your damage is a little on the low end. I’d think that most WvW front/mid eles would take focus because of its usefulness in projectile destruction and defense. Also, you went over the boon duration cap. 68.8% is way too high as you will likely get a Rev pulsing naturalistic resonance which is +50%. You don’t need sigil of concentration either.

Open world is pretty easy so in all honesty going full zerk with scholar runes should be easy enough. Fire, air, tempest (elemental bastion is still good). If you need more healing you can always use glyph of elementals. Generally condi clear isn’t needed all that much in PvE as if you learn to dodge you’ll be fine. Even if you don’t learn to dodge you’ll be fine. If things die before you do you are doing your job properly. As for air…take Ferocious winds. The extra damage is most certainly important. Harmonious conduit makes sure you can actually have your overload go off and stacking that buff+fresh air buff (swap to fire after OL Air → wildfire → Burning speed, swap to Air before it hits → You just successfully made burning speed which hits hard do 20% extra damage.). Water is unfortunately very iffy if you want to take it and while it won’t really hurt you one way or the other in PvE at least take aquamancer’s training if you refuse to take fire.

As for your utilities…Taking signet of fire, glyph of storms, and either lightning flash or FtB! should work just fine. Ether renewal is a bit of a long cast for healing and during that time you are most certainly not doing damage. You’re likely to get hit with a stray hit and lose more hp than you just gained.

bearshaman.3421:

Dravis.7681:

As a new player (started 3 weeks ago) who picked Elementalist as my first class and will hit level 80 with tonight… I find this thread rather depressing. :-/

Enjoy the class. There will always be people who will whine because something isn’t exactly the way they want it, and they will be “loud” about it. It’s a good class, and a lot of fun to play. Go forth and be happy!

Until you realize that you really only do well if playing staff on big, immobile targets. If you try to fight smaller mobile targets you would be better off rolling a thief and autoattacking.

Enjoy the class, but keep in mind the reality about the numbers. It isn’t looking good and defending the nerfs as anything but a badly implemented change is silly.

Not a bug, it triggers when you get hit, when you are above 75% hp, and have a condition on you.

Yeah…I know…it counters itself. But egh =/.

Supreme.3164:

There is something more to say : Personal Bias

It is rather obvious, the devs are humans and like everybody else they will develop a personal bias, a like and dislike of certain elements in the game.

Do pls read this article:
http://blog.weflyspitfires.com/2010/06/08/how-do-developers-determine-class-balance/

You all must realize that balance in a game can end up being a little too opinionated , that leaves room for biased balance decisions

The devs themselves can’t really help it, most of the process happens subconsciously : some professions that should receive a major nerf looking at the data alone..end up receiving a minor slap on the wrist that in the dev mind should be enough, ofc the opposite happens also.

Am I just being paranoid?…hardly I tend to believe

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3meihg/roy_cronacher_on_twitter_wait_until_you_see_what/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK1N_vqJPac

The guy in the video was in charge of druid and scrapper development..coincidence?
Roy was in charge of herald development…again coincidence?

I remember that, I remember calling him unprofessional concerning the way he thinks elementalist should be balanced and of course I stopped watching their streams because of him. The point you make about how Druid (fine) and Herald (also very good) are still ok is very interesting. Scrapper is also an interesting point bc it works very very well in PvP modes and just isn’t suited for PvE if you have a chrono for quickness.

This is why I make the point that we need a developer who will be an advocate and understand exactly how ele works rather than letting our current Dev Karl just confer to the rest of the group’s opinion on how it should be balanced without actually understanding the class.

Say what you will about Roy, I don’t like the guy. But assuming he understands the classes you point out, almost all of them have recieved appropriate balance in small doses that aren’t even a big deal in most cases. Scrapper again being the outlier but Engi suffers from the same issues as ele where you can’t just balance around 1 skill you need to understand all the little tricks you can do with the class.

That said, if we were strictly to take the PvP mode and determine balance, scrapper and Rev should’ve been hard nerfed as well. Instead they just deleted the elementalist profession from the mode lol.

This is generally what happens when you nerf across the board instead of nerfing only the things that are the problem (Staff). By nerfing everything you stifle any other alternative builds bc now they do less as well so you have even less reason to run them compared to staff.

I absolutely love dagger/wh and dagger/dagger builds but in perfect honesty there is very little reason to run them outside of doing certain mechanics in raids (ice field clear on matthias for example). Just roll a thief – Press 1. 34.5k dps.

maddoctor.2738:

Sometimes I question the logic behind some balance decisions. For example what they did with the cooldown nerf.

Let’s say that Elementalist DPS in PVE is a problem, because mobs will stay in the AOEs and never move. Let’s agree that Lava Font was doing too much damage, again in PVE.

The sensible solution would be to lower the DPS of Lava Font, increase the CD of Lava Font, reduce the duration etc Reducing cooldowns of other Fire skills like Meteor Shower was another option for nerfing Elementalist DPS in PVE.

But what did they do? They essentially nerfed every single cooldown. Was the Elementalist problematic in other Attunements? No. Why did they have to nerf everything instead of just what was problematic?

Actually they did increase the lava font cooldown. Generally this is a bad change mainly bc there are specific rotations made for Ele that are more complicated than simply pressing 1 and occasionally 2 as with other classes. Increasing the cooldown is a terrible way to nerf Elementalist DPS in PvE compared to simply adjusting the numbers on staff and leaving everything else alone. They nerfed every cooldown because they thought nerfing cooldowns was a legitimate way to nerf the class which relies on skills 2-5 instead of skill 1 like other classes. Problem is…most ele 1 skills actually really suck besides Fire auto on staff and lightning whip on dagger.

In my opinion they didn’t even need to touch Air Overload but they did.

While it doesn’t actually matter for open world/map completion generally staff is the best. There are lots of big targets out there and lots of immobile ones.

dagger/warhorn is the only dagger spec that is viable with fresh air but in all honesty it is a lot more effort to get less payout than a Thief autoattacking.

I’d be overjoyed if they did Mainhand Sword as a damage spec (with active mitigation. Maybe Stances or physical abilities).

After getting a lot of nerfs for getting a support spec I am hoping that is what we get. That said few things must happen for any damage ele spec to be good in PvE at least.

1) Air auto needs to be very good, no debating this as air is currently the best attunement for consistent dps, without air you get things where your initial dps is good but then you slow down.
2) Active mitigation of any kind, preferably not spread out between the utilities but actually on the weapon. Burning speed is a great example and if we had something similar on mh sword that would be good. Maybe include a teleport+blind.
3) Some sort of new mechanic that would make it worth taking that spec if you wanted small/mobile enemy dps. It has to out match overloads for small/mobile enemies.
4) stay far away from any team utility. team utility will get the class nerfed while personal utility will likely remain mostly balanced.

Things that would be nice and maybe necessary – Buffs to offhand dagger. No two ways about it, if mh sword is an elite then you pretty much must use offhand dagger for dps and it has been nerfed into oblivion. Fire grab is alright if traited (though preferably i’d like it to not be a “trait or do less dps” skill.). Mainly just fix Ride the Lightning. 25 sec, 20 sec traited, 10 sec on hit. Just increase the power scaling on it and make it more dps combined with mh sword than wh lightning orb which is crazy. 8k worth of damage without crits on LO. putting that all on RtL would make the skill too strong. But even if you doubled its power scaling it would still be 4k ish damage short of LO’s dps.

Dawdler.8521:

Somehow.4769:

- remove the heals from water spells but add effect zones. If people wants heals they’ll have to burn some finishers in there. Have the players work as a team to get access to these team heals. Give clever ways to the elem to heal while fighting.

Fantastic, you want to add identity to elementalist yet you would absolutely kitten over the one build that can designate itself group healer in WvW by putting all the load on comboing rather than the massive AoE healing the elementalist can build himself in the water tree. When its 50 people, they arent going to “work as a team” as if its a 5 man tightknit party. AoE is king.

Thats PvE thinking for ya.

Or it could be one person making a bad suggestion. I play PvE and honestly I don’t like most of his suggestions =/. Of course if you want to be the typical type of WvW player who hates PvE players for no reason other than that they are PvE players go right ahead.

To be fair – Necro has minions which tank for them and they are a naturally tanky class.

That said I believe I read somewhere that fractal bosses have about 3600 toughness past lvl 50 wheras raid bosses have 2600 which is a significant difference in terms of dps between power and condi.

In general not enough ppl know their class well enough and Necro is currently pretty easy to not only survive but do consistent damage (because all you need to do is apply condis and forget. Even from a range).

You could fix this with 2600 toughness, and more hp. But there is no real solution for Necro’s inherent tankiness that doesn’t infringe on any other gamemodes too much (or even raids).

I predict that they’ll nerf it again.

Jerus.4350:

Saying an argument is nonconstructive doesn’t make it so. Fact is pre-HoT (and actually pre that last big trait altering before HoT) fractals were all Bloomhunger difficulty. Hell way before you could do fractals beyond what you could get AR for and people did them!

As for Chaos I find that last fight very fun on guard. Block/aegis rotations, I can face tank him while providing Aegis for the group so that the third attack doesn’t daze them when they don’t have enough dodges. Problem is finding a group that can break the bar fast enough >.<

But what does telling people to “Git gud” accomplish? Does it help the player actually achieve said goodness? Or is it more of a generalized statement that doesn’t really contribute to their understanding of the game? It is basically the latter which is why I say it is not a constructive argument to make. You say get better yet you offer no advice or no way for said players to get better besides “do easier content and get less rewards” which honestly isn’t an option as people would rather quit the mode than be forced to move down a tier. In all honesty I agree with that sentiment, If something is not worth your time it isn’t worth your time. Doesn’t matter how challenging or non-challenging it is. If it isn’t worth your time it isn’t. You can scream to the heavens “git gud” and it still won’t change the fact that you’re offering no real solutions to get these players to be better players that doesn’t involve basically forcing them out of the gamemode. Again, I can do the content pretty easily but expecting a lot out of players when the majority of players are really really bad and not providing adequate stepping stones is troubling. Fractals have never really had a “do this or die” mechanic and honestly I think it is going a bit too far and again expecting too much out of your average player. “Do this or get punished” is probably better.

Jerus.4350:

blah

But again that isn’t constructive, saying that “Oh people have gotten used to rewards so they expect it and that is bad for the game” is not a great argument. You’re arguing that people playing for rewards and that they expect it is bad when to be perfectly honest if there were less or no rewards then why would they play the content? WvW suffered the problem for a long time, you actually lost money playing it so the playerbase diminished to only the really really hard core. That resulted in the deaths of many servers as players stacked on the top servers to get anything done. Fractals are supposed to be stepping stones to raids, not on par with them and while so far they’ve done half good half iffy I’d be very cautious about any further reworks.

It is not constructive to say “Oh you people who did T4 fractals, you seem to be failing a lot go drop down to T3 and get less rewards and git gud” because now you’re fostering an attitude that a lot of players can’t deal with, nevermind the fact that while you have made “Fractal friends” other people generally don’t do. I don’t remember doing fractals with the same group twice in a long time. If I was a regular player and I spent 1-2 hours on a single fractal or maybe even more than 45 min and the group keeps failing on T4 the first reaction I’d have is not to go to a lower tier and do it, the first reaction is to simply not do the content. Fractals are supposed to be the new dungeons/a bridge between raids and open world, calling them top tier content is a bit of a stretch. If you make them as hard as raids why not you know…just do the raid? Or do nothing? Less players playing a mode isn’t going to help the mode, if anything it’ll just make it feel like content that is blocked off by the elite in a mode where a lot of players already don’t do fractals bc it is too elite.

Again, I think you’re expecting way too much out of the average fractal player and you need to have harder difficulty to be slightly above what the average player can do. Bloomhunger is out of this balance simply due to the insta-wipe mechanic which should be reserved for raids.

As for Sarah, I never complained about the damage of the auto attack. My main issue is that on his autoattack chain he has a stun. That pretty much forces you to bring stability (meaning certain classes) or dodge every third attack which honestly is kinda too often to keep dodging without a lot of endurance regen being applied to you. On the punishment end the breakbar is something I’ve seen groups struggle with due to the short time period and people being squeamish about CCing the boss, half of the group opting to just run out of the spinning AoE. There is very little “Punishment” time for his autoattack chain and the only other time you get to punish him is if you break his bar which is not very consistent as fractal players simply don’t CC regularly. I’ve tried to teach them, I’ve failed and I don’t have high hopes that’ll ever change.

I get that in your mindset and in my own mindset you have to put aside time to figure out how to get better, however having fractals be something that you really need to set aside specific time for (aka find an organized group/go with online friends) would ultimately kill the mode as not everybody has a fractal group and not everybody is good. Having to get online at a specific time for specific people to do specific content is unhealthy for any game mode to any reasonably normal person who has a job/has a life. I adjust constantly for raids, that said it is honestly a pain in the butt to find a group that will actually complete the content if you pug it and if you don’t happen to be that skilled at making online friends or have specific times every day to set aside you will not be able to do the content. They will take one of their alts and planning your life around a GAME is really really bad for the game and players. Only raids should be limited by this, fractals should remain definitely puggable and not an exercise in frustration for 2+ hours if you don’t happen to have a group. You can’t just say “Just make friends” That isn’t how it works.

I also come from a fighting game background and we did everything we could to keep the game relevant(thankfully it is still very relevant, top spot in viewership at EVO) by helping out or teaching players how to be better incrementally, accessibility being very important is something I’ve experienced first hand and if you make things too hard right out of the gate they just don’t feel it is worth their time. Again, the average player is a lot less skilled than anybody online commenting on forums will even think about and my personal opinion is that you can make fractals harder just be very very cautious because as soon as you step over the bounds too much the average player will lose interest in the content.

bearshaman.3421:

Senario.2038:

bearshaman.3421:

The problem with dedicated developers is that they would suffer from the same myopic viewpoint of the game that a lot of players have. A team approach prevents a lot of strife between developers, and will, in the long run, lead to a more balanced game overall imo.

Except when nobody on the team understands the class -> Look at engineer. It seems nobody understands the class bc patch after patch they nerf engi and they are still good in PvP and pretty bad in most PvE (you only really take them on vale guardian). They don’t know how to balance it. Same with Ele scepter lol.

In my view it is better to have 1 dedicated dev per class who really understands the strengths, weaknesses, and what is good/bad to give to the class. Karl clearly didn’t get the memo because if anything would’ve made ele OP it is more team utility and healing and tempest was intended to be all team utility and healing.

Engi is one of the better condi classes out there, and honestly it hasn’t been nerfed that much. scrapper got a couple things, and those really only affect pvp. I’m not sure where you are getting this idea that engi is in a bad place (maybe in pvp?).

In any case, sure, they may take a class in a direction we don’t like, but at the end of the day, it’s opinions. There is no right or wrong about class direction (look at all the screaming in the ranger forums over druid sometime), and if they go in a direction we don’t like, that doesn’t make it wrong, just undesired.

Also the problem with what you propose is: if one person handles a profession, eventually it has to be balanced against the other classes anyway, so they will end up having to confer with the others. And oh look! you’re right back to working as a team. It’s the reality of the situation. Can’t do profession development in a vacuum.

I think you’re misrepresenting my argument. My argument isn’t “Do profession development in a vacuum” My argument is that you need a person on each profession that understands the profession fully to be able to reason with the rest of the group in order to get the best outcome(best way to nerf and or buff depending on the class) for what you’re trying to go for. I never said you shouldn’t have them work with each other but when you have somebody who doesn’t understand the class at the head of the class’ balance when you come to the table of “how to nerf” 20% CDR from 33% without reducing cooldowns that weren’t a problem seems like a good idea. No Ele player would’ve thought that was a good idea and other classes’ heads would’ve thought it was ok bc they don’t understand ele and they don’t understand the distinction being made between their classes’ weapon skills and Ele attunements and the way the class plays.

By saying “Oh you’re saying ele should be balanced in a vacuum” you’re essentially ignoring any sense of detail of my post.

And on Engi – You’re uninformed if you think Engi is in a good place. They have great single target condi dps…if the enemy isn’t moving. In addition to this while they do have theoretically the highest single target it pales in comparison to what Necro offers as a condi class through Jagged Horrors, corruptions, and most importantly EPIDEMIC. Being able to double up on boons from everybody on the team on a boss with just 2 Necros is great. I personally don’t think it is imbalanced but it most certainly shows just how much being useful to the team is that Necro is more useful than Engi in almost every case for PvE regardless of DPS.

Engi is not taken on any raids except Vale Guardian where you need knockbacks. Any other boss and it is much better to simply run another Necro and double up on/manage conditions. Being “one of the better classes by the numbers” doesn’t mean they’re actually useful in a real applicable setting. If DPS was the end all be all we would just run thieves for all small/mobile targets and engi for condi. But we don’t. Doing mechanics in a raid is >>>>>>>>> most reasonable/not OP damage differences.

Sarahfull.4930:

Senario.2038:

snip

I do see your point every day, PuGs who shouldn’t be in T4. I thought it was just me because I have set a VERY high bar for myself and applied that personal rule to myself for awhile.
Still.. I don’t want to be one of those people who go " oh nah, anet said this ages ago! " although fractals was one of the late game content for people to test themselfs..
Maybe I’m too bais to see straight.. I’m still salty over the change to a fractal run being one island and the buff to rewards but that’s just me.

I don’t like the idea of time being an out for harder content. You say if it got too hard, only " good " people would be able to do it around reset and the number of people in fractals would drop as there would be lots of failing PuGs. I think that’s how it’s meant to be, you do it with friends and sometimes you PuG and come across a gem and make friends.

I never played guild wars although you hear often about this underworld dungeon, surely that also has the same effect. Dead times when you don’t have enough people to do it. Isn’t that one going strong still and was/is popular now?

Sarah.

I’ll quote this one but also respond to Was Na. I think both of these posts are proving exactly the point I’m trying to make. You can argue that “It is supposed to be that way” and that “You’ll make friends” but even if I’ve been in a good group people don’t naturally want to add you as friends, people don’t want to have to make sure they get on at a certain time just to do the fractal. These “Friends” will do the fractal around reset with or without you bc in such a case they’ll grab another person. Forcing it to not be a pug experience (you can’t pug it) means that the mode will be dead for any time a few hours after reset and if failure becomes the norm you get a gamemode that is significantly less healthy because less people play it. So far they are 50/50 on the right balance so I’m waiting to see but as far as I’m concerned Chaos was a success and just needs some small tweaking (no stun on third autoattack chain on last boss) and Swamp was a failure for the overall health of the mode for your average player. People are surprisingly bad and will continue to do so because any criticism is taken as a personal attack. In general I think you’re reasonable Sarah and thanks for seeing my point even if you kinda don’t agree with it. I’m just cynical about the whole “you’ll make friends to do it with” or “Its supposed to be a more elite content”. Less people playing means they have no chance to get better at the game. You want to put the content in a sweet spot where it is just difficult enough that they have to learn the game a bit more (not too much) but they can still pug it without specific classes if you provide them something that is too difficult they just stop doing the fractals. Swamp’s instakill mechanic is one of the things that I feel is just outside the sweet spot for your average fractal player where Chaos fractal up until the boss is very well designed into making the players do little things to adapt a bit while not asking too much(It won’t instakill the party forcing them to start over). My only real problem with chaos is again → Stun on third autoattack for boss which makes melee builds have a headache and you’re forced to bring Stability which is a boon not available in enough quantity on all classes so when you require bringing it that is asking too much (honestly you could bring a good guard for stab lol).

As for Was Na…I think you missed reading my post? You seem to think I can’t do the content which I most certainly can lol, it is easy compared to bloodstone bisque Matthias or something like that. Your attitude is exactly what I’m talking about with the “Echo Chamber”. You’re attitude is essentially “Git gud or get out” which isn’t constructive nor does it teach players to be better players. You need to have difficulty that is very carefully balanced to require learning very slightly and not too much so that people just stop the content. Again, I cite Chaos as something that for the most part does this properly with the only issues being the final boss (and lets be honest ppl are usually terrible at breakbar and stab is limited).

Saying “Git Gud or get out” is not constructive, if you really wanted to create fractals that are a midstep they need to be just outside the range of what the average (not better than average) player can do otherwise you hurt the play -ability of the mode. You can say you’re fine with that and that only good players should be able to play but that is again not constructive. If you don’t give them a chance to become good telling them to Git Gud isn’t going to make them become better players. This is the exact reason why they want a stepping stone to Raids and why Raiding as a whole isn’t actually a super popular mode and is likely overrepresented on Forums where many players care enough about the game to get on forums and talk about the game and thus are more likely to play the content.

I think the distinction I make here is that while I don’t mind them making fractals more difficult as I can and have done raids successfully (fractals are more or less pretty chill which I enjoy compared to raids) they do kinda ignore the average level of skill of a player in Fractals. Most people are honestly pretty bad, they don’t want to run meta builds a lot of the time, they don’t know rotations, and they most certainly don’t use fractal potions regardless if it would make it faster+even easier for a few silver.

Recent experience in Chaos and Swamp T4? I’m playing a FULL GLASS ELE in chaos I should honestly be the first to go down in the party but in chaos they just all went down before me and couldn’t dodge for crap (or use movement skills to get out of the large aoe so you don’t insta die/actually CC, but we all know nobody CCs out of raids).

In Swamp – The meta Reapers literally can’t see bloomhunger charging from across the fractal and they get run over. Same with pretty much most of the group, they can’t see the leaps and just dodge. You get so much endurance in that fractal it is silly not to have it available when you need it!

Anet is expecting way too much out of your average player, telling them to git gud is honestly not good constructive criticism and it is that attitude that will make them quit. I’d rather have the current fractal difficulty and be able to get on and pug it if I want than T4 being dead bc all the casual players don’t play T4 and the good players are all finished no more than a few hours after reset. Having to plan my day around getting on and doing fractals at that time would be silly, I have work, I have a life, I can’t be expected to get on and do the content at a specific time bc nobody does it after and if they do they are probably bad. Just like how I only raid on my day off during the week.

tl;dr Personally I’m able to do any sort of difficulty that is between fractals currently in raids. But Anet and the general playerbase asking for more difficult content online are kinda in an echo chamber of “We can do it, if you can’t git gud” and expect way too much out of your average player. If you have no average players, the game mode is dead.

Good: Events are pretty independent of global timers so you can pretty much find something to do whenever you get on. Air combat is great and it is an easy to navigate area. The loot is a gold sink that gives you more than what you paid on the TP if you sold the materials.

Neutral: People don’t taxi for anything except jade which is unfortunate bc if people just taxiied this map more it would be good.

Bad: The drops of unstable salvage items are way way too low to be any match for even silverwastes. You can spend a good amount of time in the map and only get 7 refined of most tiers except T6 of mats. Imo this is at least 1/3rd or less of what it should actually be to match up to silverwastes (not even considering Auric Basin Multiloot). That is my only real criticism of the map that if you wanted materials of a variety of tiers on a lvl 80 map you need to have the drop rates of those salvage items be that much higher because instead of getting a single material tier you’re getting every type which decreases the amount of any one tier you will get.

bearshaman.3421:

The problem with dedicated developers is that they would suffer from the same myopic viewpoint of the game that a lot of players have. A team approach prevents a lot of strife between developers, and will, in the long run, lead to a more balanced game overall imo.

Except when nobody on the team understands the class → Look at engineer. It seems nobody understands the class bc patch after patch they nerf engi and they are still good in PvP and pretty bad in most PvE (you only really take them on vale guardian). They don’t know how to balance it. Same with Ele scepter lol.

In my view it is better to have 1 dedicated dev per class who really understands the strengths, weaknesses, and what is good/bad to give to the class. Karl clearly didn’t get the memo because if anything would’ve made ele OP it is more team utility and healing and tempest was intended to be all team utility and healing.

Wolfric.9380:

Well most people who complani don´t care about PvE and want balance + diversity and this regardless how long a class was meta. Annyone who brings comments like “now it´s your time on the bench” are disliked in balance diskussions ;-).
This counts for all classes. It´s not ele specific.
The impression is that there are not enough resources invested in “Class Care”.

Would disagree because on reddit there has been two major topics within the last two weeks that was pretty much a large majority of PvE players (and a lot of PvP players as well) who did care about balance/diversity and did care about the nerfs. I’d love to see Arcane and Earth be suitable substitutes for fire traitlines in PvE but fire is too good, Arcane needs the least amount of reworks to be competitive with Fire and Earth could be set up for a condi based ele build in the future. Or just give it some damage modifiers and be done with it.

Avador.8934:

I have no idea why you quoted my post when you are not commenting it at all :P
Btw some of your ideas for OH dagger are pretty good.

I was tired and forgot to respond, :P If my suggestion differs from yours I most likely disagree with the proposed changes :P.
Except for
Soothing Power: Now additionally allies under the effect of Soothing Mist have reduced incoming condition duration by 10% (or 15% maybe?)
Serrated Stones
Latent Stamina

I do think Arcane fury needs to do some damage on attunement swap (5 sec cooldown) that way it opens up the door for pretty much every attunement to be used in fresh air builds. Even if it did 1 damage.

@Kyon: Problem here is that it is a utility, not a heal skill. I think I would be hard pressed to find any utility that actually heals (not apply regeneration) on use baseline. Shadow Refuge is the only one with significant amounts imo and honestly ele doesn’t need shadow refuge. You would be better off giving Arcane shield a 25-30 sec cooldown, maybe more damage, and a blind (AoE) on activation, interestingly enough you can make it require less enemy hits and decrease the cooldown even further to make it more effective if you need it to be. I am highly wary against increasing sustain as active mitigation through blinds I think would be a lot more effective and definitely balanced for PvE and in PvP would make up for the fact you have less active mitigation but if you really really wanted more sustain….
Signet of Restoration – heals for 252 each time you cast a spell (passive). Assuming on average you’re rotating and doing 1 cast every 0.75 seconds the heal passive now heals for a competitive amount with glyph of elemental harmony. Adjust numbers as necessary to be competitive with glyph of elemental harmony untraited as traiting for any heal would be difficult. Things do more damage now and old healing values really don’t hold a candle to anything in any mode. If you wanted self sustain you would go with the highest self sustain and nothing else (glyph of harmony). If you wanted team sustain you would go for wash the pain away! Changes to arcane Brilliance (0.5 sec cast time, 1k more base healing, maybe damage scaling) would do wonders for PvP as well. Ether renewal needs less changes but +200 more base healing would be a useful change due to the long cast time. I do not think all of these are balanced but I do believe the Arcane and signet heal changes are much needed to actually give any sense of usefulness to either of those two heals.

I would say to be wary about Roaming builds as they are completely different than talking about PvE (My focus, raids) and PvP (something I feel less qualified on but feel should be accounted for on some skills). Rune of the Defender is not in PvP and thus shouldn’t be accounted for. It is fine in WvW because you’ll be taking a lot more damage than that and in all honesty balancing for WvW is tough because it always changes and they haven’t shown that they will split balance for PvE and WvW. They have shown to do that in PvP. One way to fix WvW balance for ele though besides fixing the cooldown blunder…remove the 10 person limit on their CCs. Done. They only needed either the stab change to be removed only 1 per second ish or reduce target number on CCs.

Avador.8934:

Both of you have some interesting ideas. And I’ll put my two cents in as well. Here is my ‘ideal changes’ list I made some time ago…

WEAPON SKILLS:
Scepter
- Flamestrike: the secondary strike is now aoe, affects max 3 enemies (radius 180)
-Dragon’s Tooth: aftercast reduced by 1/2 sec
- Shatterstone: radius increased to 240
- Water Trident: also removes 1 condition
- Stone Shards: precast reduced by 1/2 sec -> casting time reduced by 1/2 sec
- Dust Devil: Base damage increased by 100%
Focus
- Flamewall: now applies 2 stacks of burning instead of 1
- Freezing Gust: Base damage increased by 100% and now it’s aoe, affects max 3 enemies (radius 180)
Dagger MH
- Ring of Earth: When used, a buff appears that properly shows the projectile block
Dagger OH
- Fire Grab: Damage vs non-burning foes increased by 10%. Damage vs burning foes increased by 15%.
- Frost Aura: CD reduced to 25 sec
- Cleansing Wave: CD reduced to 35 sec
- Ride the Lightning: CD is now 20 sec base, you don’t need to hit a target anymore
- Churning Earth: This skill now has its previous animation
Staff
- Lightning Surge: Casting time reduced by 1/2 sec
- Windborne speed: This skill now grants 2 seconds of superspeed + 10 seconds of swiftness
Warhorn
- Heat Sync: You now gain 2 additional stacks of might if you spread boons to an ally
- Wildfire: The firefield appears faster.
- Tidal Surge: Cd reduced to 30 sec
- Water Globe: Cd reduced to 30 sec, the water field travels slower

UTILITY SKILLS:
- Signet of Restoration: Casting time reduced to 1/2 sec
- Arcane Power: Cd reduced to 25 sec
- Arcane Shield: Cd reduced to 50 sec, duration decreased to 4 sec, now blocks all attacks during that time instead of just 3, after 4 sec it explodes if you block an attack, this change also applies to Final Shielding
- Armor of Earth: Cd reduced to 50 sec
- Mist Form: Cd reduced to 50 sec
Earth Shield
- Stone Sheath: Now blocks all attacks during its duration and applies bleeding to foes that hit you during channeling, but only in range to 600.
- Magnetic Surge: Base damage increased by 200%
- Magnetic Shield: Casting time reduced to 1 sec
Flame Axe
- Lava Axe: Now explodes when hitting a foe, damaging nearby foes (max 3) too, might duration is increased to 10 seconds
- Explosive Lava Axe: Damage increased by 15%
- Burning Retreat (Flame Axe): This skill is now changed to Blazing Axe. Throw a blazing axe that bounces between foes and allies, granting might to allies and damaging and burning foes. Creates a fire field between you and the 1st target struck.
- Ring of Fire (Flame Axe): This skill is now identical to dagger’s Ring of Fire skill.
Lightning Hammer
- Lightning Leap: Damage increased by 100%
- Wind Blast: Now applies 3 stacks of vulnerability
- Lightning Storm (Lightning Hammer): This skill is now ground targeted (900 range) and is now identical to Lightning Storm (Glyph of Storms), but cd reamins the same and does not apply vulnerability
Ice Bow
- Frost Volley: Damage increased by 30%, casting speed of this skill is increased -> casting time reduced to 1 1/2 sec
- Frost Fan: Damage increased by 50%

- Signet of Water: Now heals you by a small amount if condition is removed. Active skill is now aoe (3 targets max)
- “Feel the Burn!”: Damage increased by 20%, burning duration increased to 5 seconds
- “Flash-Freeze!”: Cd reduced to 25 sec.
- Tornado/Whirpool: When this transformation is active, base Toughness is quadrupled and base Vitality tripled (similar to Plague)
Fiery Greatsword
- Fiery Eruption: Radius increased to 240
- Firestorm (Fiery Greatsword): This skill is now identical to Firestorm (Glyph of Storms), except the cd

TRAITS:
- Conjurer: Instead of gaining fire aura when picking up a conjured weapon, players gain 2 stacks of might and additional boon based on the conjured weapon (Lava Axe:
3 stacks of might / Ice Bow: regeneration / Lightning Hammer: fury / Earth Shield: stability / Fiery Greatsword: 5 stacks of might)
- One with Fire: This trait now additionaly grants fire aura when you cast a signet
- Serrated Stones: Damage done to bleeding foes is increased to 10%
- Rock Solid: Duration of stability is increased to 3 sec
- Diamond Skin (if this wouldn’t be op): Now automatically removes conditions while above health threshold. You don’t need to be struck to remove them.
- Stop, Drop, and Roll: Cd reduced to 4 sec
- Soothing Power: Now additionally allies under the effect of Soothing Mist have reduced incoming condition duration by 10% (or 15% maybe?)
- Arcane Fury: Duration of fury is increased to 3 sec
- Elemental Attunement: The non-aoe version of this is now baseline. This trait now makes it aoe and increases duration of these applied boons by 20%.
- Latent Stamina: This trait has been reworked: Now when you dodge while you are under the effect of vigor, you gain some endurance back and the duration of that vigor
on you is increased (+2 sec maybe?)
- Tempestuous Aria: This trait now also reduces recharge of shouts (20% or 15% I guess?)
- Lucid Singularity: You are now healed by X amount when an enemy tries to put a movement-impeding condition on you while you are overloading.

Glyphs changes I suggested here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Glyphs-rework/first#post6267069 (btw, those skills above with changes linking to some glyphs are used with the current vesion of glyphs) + the changes to Glyph of Storms may be better from Kyon in post above me, so I would like to maybe replace that…

This post will be dealing with specifically just the weapon skills. I will not speak on scepter bc honestly I don’t really like scepter and I don’t play scepter so I don’t feel qualified to make change suggestions. ALL NUMBERS ARE FULL ZERKER GEAR. We can have a discussion on the contribution of healing power later and base numbers. For now I feel like there is a lot to work on especially in offhand dagger.

Focus

-This weapon is balanced for the most part, that said cooldown adjustments to make the traited cooldowns match the old traited cooldowns. This didn’t need a nerf and every skill on the weapon needs to have the old cooldown back if traited. This weapon is pure defense and should not be given damage.
Warhorn

-Again change cooldowns to be the same as when we had 33%, this didn’t need to be nerfed.
Mainhand Dagger

Burning speed(fire 3) – 10sec cooldown
Frozen Burst(water 3) – 10 sec cooldown
Shocking Aura (Air 3) – 20 sec cooldown
Ring of Earth (Earth 2) – 5 Sec cooldown (Buff to show when it blocks projectiles)
Magnetic Grasp (Earth 3) – 10 sec cooldown.

Offhand Dagger
-This one is a fun one…and honestly needs a whole ton of work. This is SUPPOSED to be the damage weapon but wh beats it in every case. Wh is supposed to be utility+damage.

Fire (This needs a lot of work as especially in PvE, Wh 5 is better all on its own. In order to come close to matching it you need a few buffs. I’m sure these might be too strong for PvP)
-Ring of Fire – Reworked. 10sec cooldown: Now pulses 1 stack of burning every second for 2.5 seconds duration each for 8 seconds baseline to any enemies in the area 3 targets if too strong 5 targets if just right.
Reasoning: I want to minimize how much effect the trait persisting flames and the cdr for fire traitline factors into this rotation. The best way to do that is to give it a low cooldown baseline so that it’ll be up usually before you even finish coming back to the rotated skill even without the trait. The trait will help but it doesn’t overshadow other traitlines in terms of damage all that much/too much.
-Flame Grab – 25 sec cooldown, 0.5 sec cast time.

Water
-Frost Aura – 30 sec cooldown
-Cleansing wave – Cooldown Reduced to 35 seconds. Heals for what it heals now in an AoE+removes a condi. Added – 8 Sec of regeneration and a 1200 self heal only. Why? Take a look at tidal surge, it is on this cooldown, with twice as much healing as cleansing wave and CC. And it does all of these in an AoE. Cleansing wave regen and second heal is ultimately selfish to make up for the fact that you really can’t blast finisher wh 5 with dagger 3 on d/d due to the lack of water fields.

Air Needs a bunch of work due to the repeated nerfs to ride the lightning and how much better warhorn is. Again this is from a PvE perspective and I think I’d be totally fine if it was split numbers wise for PvP. Again they can do it, look at lava font.
Ride the lightning – Added 5 stacks of 10 sec of vulnerability. Cooldown Reduced to 25 sec, reduced to half on hit. (Effective 10 sec traited and with a hit). Base damage increased to anywhere between 887 – 1242.5 (2.5-3 times higher preferably on the lower side if data says average lightning orb hits 8 times, but if it is 14 as the wiki says then 1200 range).
-WAIT ISN’T THAT OP?! Actually no, if you really look at the numbers lightning orb hits 14 times on average and does about 410(540 with might) damage per hit while inflicting vuln. That is 5800(7560) damage without crits on just a 20 sec cooldown. Ultimately it should be having high scaling with power and at 887-1242.5 at 2.5-3 times stronger at a 10 second cooldown it just barely matches and comes up to the same ish amount as lightning orb on warhorn. Unfortunately ride the lightning simply is on a too long cooldown to be useful and should we really be complaining when ancestral grace is the same thing except better and ground targeted and heals? Mobility is less of an issue and if it was we can keep a 30 sec cooldown and halved on hit with slightly higher damage.
Updraft – 25 sec cooldown, does roughly the same amount of breakbar as wh 4. Not much to explain here. 40 seconds even if you add in the trait is too long for a breakbar skill with no damage.

Earth
Earthquake – Cast time reduced to 0.5 seconds. Cooldown reduced to 25 seconds.
Churning Earth – Pulses 1 stack of stab every second for 2 seconds. Blinds enemies in the area on activation (1 time application). Cooldown is fine

Not much to explain here. Churning earth needs stab to be any good. Blind is also needed because nobody is going to let you channel for 2 seconds, not even PvE mobs. Ideally earth should be a lower dps blast finisher machine where fire is dps, air is consistent dps, and water is the “oh no I need healing” attunement.

A lot of these offhand dagger changes are focused on burst and should be very interesting as opposed to a lot smaller hits for wh with more utility.

EDIT: STAFF
This one is tricky, you can’t buff it too much and you can’t make it useless. One thing for sure I’d do though is test something then continue to reevaluate it over time.
Generalized changes
All cooldowns lowered to make traiting for them match the old cooldown. 25 sec for meteor shower, 5 seconds for Lava font, Static field is 30 sec, etc.

Now for meaty changes
Fire
-Lava font damage decreased, I would say don’t absolutely make it terrible but it needs to either do less damage if it is the bulk of ele damage or…
Meteor Shower 1) Meteors now do not fall randomly within the AoE, they fall at specific spots which are the same every cast, apply this to every AoE skill in the game and most of the bolts should be hitting around the center of the cast. REEVALUATE DAMAGE AFTER THIS CHANGE.
2) Less meteors cast at the beginning of the skill, move them to the end so you have to go through the full cast animation. (Reevaluate damage)
3) If damage is too high on big targets lower damage, if not meteor is fine. (still would like to see it being "Competitive* on large targets being within 1-5k optimal dps difference, preferably higher.)

Reasoning: The whole reason staff is so hard to balance is because of the random nature of the meteor shower and subsequently Icebow 4 and any glyph of storms activation. The impacts hit randomly and can result in much much more damage. By eliminating this randomness we can actually balance it more properly without taking into consideration the RNG of simply hitting a target more times than normal. If a big target is standing still and gets hit 5 times then it will be hit 5 times if you cast it on the same spot. This allows them to balance enemies by their size (certain thresholds will be hit more or less by meteor) and by their mobility which they are already doing. Staff was too good and unfortunately for PvP players trying to use staff I don’t think we should consider PvP staff at all as the game mode pretty much is not useful for the weapon (does not mesh well).

FUNNY SEMI SERIOUS SUGGESTION
Keep Construct
-Removed “stunned” status when in the burn phase. (Stacking tempest defense with bolt to the heart is crazy. Not sure why they even made it be stunned in the first place. It is already a big target which is great for Ele.)

Kyon.9735:

@OP
Too many passives and overpowered might stacking across the board.

A couple of ideas to make non bunker Eles work. I have a lot more but I don’t want to make a long wall of text.
Goal – Increase active defense

Final Shielding – Increase threshold to 40%.

Reasoning: Glass eles have low base HP. Chances are they’d get burst even before the 25% threshold procs.

Rock Solid – Activating a signet grants you 1 charge of Arcane Shield. Heal yourself for a small amount when the charge is consumed (around 1k hp).

Elemental Attunement – Make it baseline. Nerf the effects so that it only affects the user unless Arcane trait line is taken.

Elemental Surge – Add effect: Remove 2 conditions when an arcane skill hits your target.

Conjures – Reduce CD to 30s. You won’t and should not camp in conjures in the first place.

Earth Shield – Breaks stun.

Arcane Shield – Reduce base CD to 45 secs. Heal yourself when all 3 block charges are consumed (same healing as rune of defender).

Reasoning: The current effects of consuming 3 charges are not reasonable enough for enemies to stop hitting you.

Signet of Water – Active: Convert all conditions into boons. Passive: Breaks stun. CD increased to 40s, remove cast time. Passive: 33% chance to Chill your target on hit. ICD 8s.

Signet of Air – Active: Teleport to your foe (900 range). If you hit your target, stun them for 1s. Breaks Stun. CD 25s.

Reasoning: Much needed mobility and additional burst setup.

Lightning Flash – Reduce Base CD to 30s. Reduce damage.

In general a lot of these changes work however the ones I feel don’t are…
Final Shielding – Cooldown would still be way too long to be any use in any active mitigation while I do agree the threshold needs to be higher. Round it off to 50%.

Rock solid – Change not needed as one stack of stab is already amazing in an aoe. Also way too much extra healing simply for attuning to earth (Why earth?) that makes no thematic sense and honestly if you changed anything on earth

Serrated stone – extra damage you do to bleeding foes to be 10% (to reduce reliance on other damage traits and being inable to take earth due to less output.)

Elemental attunement – fine where it is on the arcane tree as it actively promotes attunement dancing which is what arcane is made for. The real problem is how arcane contingency is pretty useless at 1 time every 10 seconds you get a boon if you get hit (bad gameplay) and it is pretty much one of the only ones that may be worth it in that tier. One of the ways to fix it is as I stated above. Another is to swap final shielding into the first trait tier and bake renewing stamina into elemental contingency (replacing the “Get hit” effect on all of them with; Do a crit/10 sec. Granting a boon and Vigor on crit.). There are plenty of ways to fix it. You can even move boon damage to the tier if you really needed something. I suggest against nerfing the damage mainly because fire and air are so dominant for damage. Reasoning is that Arcane is supposed to be what you take if you want to get lots of boons for yourself and focus on dancing attunements to get good damage. You give up the cooldown trait for one entire line which is huge.

Elemental surge is fine – No changes needed besides cooldown changes on arcane skills to keep higher uptime on it (and of course make it not compete with bountiful power).
Conjure changes are fine – 30 sec is great and not too low. 60 seconds for FGS due to it being an elite, but buff the damage it does.
Arcane Shield – lower the cooldown to 30 sec and remove the healing. We do not need more healing as that will not only be generally unhealthy for the class in PvP (fine in PvE) but imo blocking 3 hits would be amazing at 30-25 sec cooldown. As I said I’m more for arcane skills to be low cooldown fairly high damage or in the case of shielding – more utility to not instadie.

Water signet change – Good but instead of all condis (Too good for a utility slot) you can just make it convert 3 ish. We should not be making it as strong as an elite and you shouldn’t need that much condi cleanse outside of wvw with regeneration curing a condi.
Air signet change is fine, would be very useful in all modes.

Lightning Flash – fine, but honestly I’d totally give up the damage just for the range that mesmer has on blink.

Additional thoughts I didn’t think of before –
Cleansing fire trait does not belong anywhere in fire and should be in water for cantrip focus or removed alltogether and the condi clear from the trait being baked into the water traitline somewhere.

Arcane Fury needs to do damage and apply fury (damage is on an internal cooldown of 5 seconds, fury is every time. Even if the damage is 50 it would still be good.). Reasoning: A big reason why fire is so dominant is bc it does damage on attunement swap and it does good damage. By giving incentives/reasons to use earth or Arcane as damage specs you open up build diversity with what exactly works well and what is viable. As it stands in PvE you take Fire, air, Tempest end of story. If earth and arcane were on par with fire at least you would see either of those two being taken in melee ele builds. Staff would still take fire and that would be fine. Water should remain as a pure healing/cantrip spec and honestly Piercing shards should probably be reworked. Extra vuln time is not worth it and neither is 20% damage only in water (possibly the worst attunement for damage, you swap to it to drop your water heals and swap out ASAP). Soothing power should be baseline or replace piercing shards.

Speaking of –
Latent stamina in tempest needs to be moved into healing ripple in water bc it has no business being in tempest.
Temp Aria into the first tier and add 20% shout cdr.

Imbued melodies in tempest needs to give the boon duration regardless of weapon.

AS A NOTE: I say all of this without any real premise of what entirely new traits will take the place of ones that are pretty “useless”. Active def is important and I feel ele should have some but in all honesty I would like to see these reworks first

While I can tell you put a lot of time into this I am not sure this is the correct way to take Ele in. Many of these changes again put the class outside the realm of what is possible on other classes or would be very much not needed. I understand that this sub is mostly made of PvP players from my observations but I do think some of these are ultimately useless for PvE specifically raids.

It would take forever to go over everything I disagree with but some ones off the top of my head – No don’t change the revive speed. Arcane needs to be an alternative to fire or air for a dancing attunements build. Second tier of major traits there are two that are absolutely useless in elemental contingency and Final Shielding. I would say Bake in Contingency into elemental attunement and actually move bountiful power into elemental contingency’s place. Replace bountiful power with maybe something along the lines of Increased boon duration on yourself (so you choose between dodging/pure damage/and longer boons). Final shielding cooldown 30 seconds, same with arcane shield but you can trait arcane shield. This imo is much better than long cooldown.

As for the arcane utilities and heal…
Brilliance just needs 1k more hp on the heal base.
Power – cooldown needs to be essentially 15 sec at most.
Wave – 25 sec cooldown base
Reasoning for all of these are that arcane skills are generally not that very good…they need their own niche and where shouts are utility + medium/low cooldowns. Then arcane needs to be low cooldown+damage. (and nothing else). This will help all builds of ele but imo will be most effective on melee eles with Scepter/Dager mainhand mostly because giving up fire’s longer lasting fields on staff is terrible.

Cantrips need to be pure utility not damage. Conjures…well there isn’t fixing conjures unless you make them OP but tbh I think that they would need to rework most of them except Icebow. And Glyphs are mostly fine besides power and renewal where imo power just needs to be on crit with a lower internal cooldown and have lower downtime. Renewal needs to be a long cast revive skill that pulls the target to you and starts ressing them. It needs to be generally worse than search and rescue because again, ele is NOT about team utility and shouldn’t be. They should be more selfish but be great in damage and dancing between attunements.

In general – we learned from Tempest that giving a class that already does so much a lot of team utility breaks the class. So therefore we need to give them things to use for themselves and of course damage to the class. I have a lot more suggestions using fine tuning on lots of cooldowns for weapon skills (I could go on FOREVER on how bad offhand Dagger is. Wh is damage+utility, Focus is utility, dagger is supposed to be damage yet does worse damage and less utility than Wh).

In general:
Fire = Big damage
Air = Consistent damage
Water = Pure healing and Cantrips
Earth = Mitigation of damage
Glyphs = fine
Arcane = Needs to be low cooldown high damage (works best with arcane traitline for attunement dancing on close range builds)
Shouts = Fine
Signets = Make water better but stick with condi clear, Signet of healing needs to do 250 heal per spell in PvE only (PvP I can see why it is a problem)
Cantrips – Need to be more utility than damage

General changes: Lots of weapon skills need reworks or cooldown changes. Staff needs huge reworks to not be so OP on big targets but should never have been nerfed with across the board cooldown nerfs and instead should have been damage nerfs to lava font and reworks to how “random” Meteor shower is and due to its randomness and higher percent chance of hitting big targets needs to be accounted for. In general they took a hammer to ele when they need to adjust skills with a scalpel (same with engineer imo)

Celeras.4980:

Are you really complaining about having to PvP to do the PvP dailies? There are WvW, PvP, and PvE dailies from you to chose from. That’s where “play how you want” comes from. This would be like PvE players complaining that they wanted to get their achievements from only killing Skritt.

If you’re curious though, they removed the achievements that were only attainable in Conquest so the daily rotation was completeable in Stronghold. You know, so Stronghold players could get their achievements done too. AKA: “Play how you want”.

They are still playing PvP. They are just playing a custom arena. Nothing hard to understand about that. And I’m sure ranked and unranked players would be appreciative to only have players who actually wanted to try and win rather than get a few points then get the daily done.

Darknicrofia.2604:

icy.9250:

I have to totally agree with MadRabbit — this “update” is a load of crap:

Daily Achievement Adjustment
Daily PvP Capture and Daily PvP Defender have been removed from the daily rotation.
Daily Top Stats and Daily PvP Matches Played in Unranked or Ranked Arena have been added to the daily rotation.

When I’m good and ready, I’ll do your ranked PvP. But why destroy the awesome custom daily maps community with LOFT, UGF, MAD and others?

I refuse to draw a stupid roman numeral over my head just because some stats guy wanted 4min less waiting time.

Imagine that, you’d have to actually…pvp in a pvp zone to get…daily PVP rewards?

Will the PvE people who care nothing for pvp mind if I can get my hands on HoT legendaries by doing only pvp and want nothing to do with grinding for leyline sparks and amalgamated gemstones?

No, no PvE person would care if you could get a legendary or whatever done in PvP that you could do in PvE assuming it takes a similar amount of time. Literally add reward tracks that give amalgated gemstones and ley line sparks and what not, it would actually be good for the price of amalgated gemstones and give an actual faucet of them into the game rather than it being an extraordinary cost.

And you shouldn’t care that people farmed dailies. Not really your problem and besides that the reward tracks are pretty junk in terms of earning gold compared to simply playing PvE. They were however good for getting dungeon collections done in case you don’t have them done yet and want collections.

I guess since now you can’t find dungeon parties very easily or at all and now people must play unranked or Ranked pvp to get those reward tracks filled out you’ll see a lot of Afkers. I might afk myself sometime later today. I could care less about any silly PvP ranked mode or unranked mode in a failed Esport game.

I hope the people celebrating that somehow it is good for them to deny other people their daily will soon suffer a few afkers in both ranked and unranked just for the daily.

Because you know, it isn’t like the previous system kept the daily farmers and the actual players separate so players didn’t have to complain about farmers because there were none.

No real reason for this change, on a side note the PvP potions were sadly one of the last few options to actually getting the collection completed for dungeons. Dungeons aren’t actually run anymore so completing that collection is now impossible unless you are an avid PvP player. And lets face it, the game mode isn’t for everybody. WvW isn’t for everybody either, some people even despise PvE. But sadly now you are forced into PvP because esports for Anet.

I would say go play Thief. You’ll find no better mobility and high damage than Thief which is currently sitting at around #2 in dps and I’m pretty sure it is number 1 or 2 in terms of mobility for PvE.

I would like a simple change that they at least DOUBLE the amount of tokens you get for every dungeon in the game. This would allow newer players who just want to run a dungeon still run it and get some gear while they are at it.

It also helps make the achievements not so terrible to get as there are still collection achievements for all the skins in a particular dungeon.

Tokens should be given out like candy now as the tokens cannot be directly turned into a significant amount of gold. And certainly not liquid gold.