Guild Wars 2

Looks pretty interesting but i think the idea of a sword mage kinda got scrapped, i remember some threads around reddit with ele sword skills getting data mined before the release of HoT and the tempest reveal, we ended up getting a trumpet with flatulence sounds instead, oh well. Tbh the way i would have loved this to be was with a wave like mechanic, short range but whenever you swing the sword you create a wave in front of you that can be avoided by jumping or dodging (jumping over it would make it reasonable from a pvp perspective) and then you can have all sorts of fun with those, healing waves, shockwaves and have the ele instead of spinning like mad do some sort or blade weaving dance throwing shockwaves in front like cone attacks and keep the thing simple, giving dual effects to skills like a revenant has to a class like the ele with already plenty of buttons to push is too much especially when you want a sword character so you may want things flowing a bit faster. i like the elite you designed though, but 15 seconds is a bit too much, i’d say 5 seconds is a bit more reasonable, think about it, it’s a sword, you want skills going off really fast so they would already have a low cast time with no cooldown it would be overkill, what’s stopping me from say using this elite and then spamming 10 lava fonts under 1 boss, a bit too much i think, so 5 seconds might be more ok since you have to account of the skills mixing with the other ele weapons or trait lines.

I have the gear so i tested this on the low health static golem with 0 buffs, was looking at it from a rotation perspective and wasn’t looking at all on the damage since i was looking more for fluidity in the build than raw damage output.

From a support perspective i guess it gets the job done, would zephir’s boon be better instead to bump up your damage by 4%? as i said i was looking more at fluidity and it feels a bit clunky to use, it works, just feels a bit weird.

I wanted to be a bit more supportive as well but still keep more fluidity in my rotation so i went for water.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJBIhdSfJ00AW2A4zAwhJWaAMicQRYQKUACAfQ3Lbnd0C-ThRBABUq+zVK/A4EAYmSwHeAA4pHAA-e

Instead of signet of fire you can use aftershock or arcane wave for group reflect or extra blast finisher.
Tidal surge+frozen burst is a nice aoe heal combo together with wash the pain away.

It offers decent enough healing to the melee next to you as well as provide you with a nice fluid rotation.

Rotation is simple enough for damage:

Overload Air>glyph of storms> switch to water>Cone of Cold>switch to air>Lightning Whip until overload air is off cd>>>>repeat it all over again.

I used to run full ascended celestial on my ele until a week or so ago when i switched to berserker, ran it for over a year, it’s fun and if you go for earth you can pretty much solo quite a few group event champions from the skill points in HoT, but it does kinda take a long time to down them. Pretty much playing in god mode with this in pve, for wvw though i have no ideea since i didn’t ever bother trying that with my ele.

I am either hitting the loading screen and not loading in the map or get shown an error code. (Code=19:9:19:1715:101) that tells me that i cannot access the login server, yet i am already in Divinity’s Reach, already playing, already chatting with guildies and friends.

It seems a radomly working workaround for me is talking to the npc next to the portal to get inside rather than entering via portal which either ends up in a loading screen that loads nothing or an error code but it seems it doesn’t work always

Trule.3549:

I’ve played the build a bit and I can see that its easy to keep up protection while in earth after overloading. I’m not sure how this works though, I can’t see any traits that give protection for 20 seconds… and it only happens in earth attunement…

In this case it’s Overload Earth (Ride your stored earth magic around, granting protection to other allies you move over and crippling enemies, then deliver a final blast of power to the area. Using this skill causes the attunement to have a longer recharge.) and Sand Squall (Apply protection to yourself and your allies, then increase the duration of all boons currently existing on you and your allies. Gain magnetic aura). If you also pick up the trait elemental shielding from the earth line then any aura you cast will also grant protection.

I have been messing around face tanking stuff in the HoT maps with full ascended celestial and earth-arcane-tempest http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFEQJBLhdyxA0gJ23AYhJwhJW2AM396fdwO8ACATgiewOoNC-TBhagAAK/G1DgqE0X9HA-e. This seems to work fine for general solo pve even if it takes ages to kill anything, so definitely not raid or dungeon worthy.

I can’t decide if this thread is for real or someone is making fun of the nice community players who have spent a good deal of time trying to figure out proper, balanced suggestion to make tempest a better specialization.

Here’s something i had in my bookmarks for a long time. A post made by Dulfy where she transcribed some of the info from a live stream.
Developers:
Josh Davis – Host
Jonathan Sharp – Game Design Lead
Karl McLain – Game Designer

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/282wjy/balance_philosophy_developer_livestream_notes/

Purity of purpose/Holes and Roles/Opportunity Cost
Purity of purpose: You don’t want something that does too many things at once. If everything does everything to equal levels, you don’t have this purity of purpose. You want things streamlined so players know how to use it and not too many tools within one toolbox.
Holes and Roles: You don’t want a single class to do things better than everybody else or else they end up as Apex predators. You want to put hoes in the roles so they don’t do everything good at once.
Opportunity cost: If an utility skill have too much utility, it overshadow other utility skills and no one would use the other utility skills. There need to be an opportunity cost for using for skill over the other.

and this bit here…

Elementalist: Flexibility, jack of all trades, large skillsets. High AoE potential. High skill floor – hard for new players to jump in and high skill ceiling.
Weakness: Recovering from burst damage, but water attunement can help sustain the damage. Versatility is strength but also weakness – higher cooldowns on weapon skills. Inability to deal with booned enemies.
Official design: Versatility through weapon skills – we want to maintain that. Defense against sustained DPS is good and they are very supportive in most roles they assume. Low base HP is an intentional design so we can give them more support. Poor defense against spike damage is also intended so they have to wary about spike damage. Escapeability: Too much in the fast and helped them against spike damage. Inability against booned enemies is a specific hole in the role since they can AoE from ranged.

While there have been some ups and downs with ele i find it has generally stayed close enough to it’s design intentions. I have seen good players do some crazy stuff and bad players that couldn’t figure it out if you gave them a manual and a phone help line.

In my personal opinion, i find your suggestions in the original post as rather rushed and ill thought with no regard to any sort of balance.

The smoke field suggestion was downright amusing, did you at any given point ever consider the fact that ele has lots and lots of blast finishers and can access whirl finishers as well? what is to stop the ele from becoming a thief with near perma stealth or spamming blind bolts in pvp matches.

Invulnerable while overloading? why not make it so that elementalists never die, from anything, ever, it is pretty much what you are saying. That you should be allowed to nuke everything while completely invulnerable. God mode much?

I admit tempest has issues and warhorn is a mess, but players have found ways to play it, like say fresh air-arcana-tempest. It isn’t perfect and at some point the developers will probably give us better alternatives, but until then try to refrain from poorly thought of suggestions, it shines a bad light on the ele community as a whole and makes everyone look like they have no clue how to play and the developers will never listen. Check out some of the other threads with suggestions, there are a couple of them that are actually pretty good, and not game breaking.

To be honest i am a big fan of the slow leveling thing, i generally do it with world exploration, the slowest way possible. That being said i am kind of confused about your play style.

My main is an ele, and i will tell you up front, that there isn’t as much of a middle ground, especially since you are talking about playing below level 80, if you want that sweet burst dps then you will have to play as a glass cannon so fire+air+arcana. Switch arcana for water for a tiny bit of survival but in all honesty you will have to be level 80 to actually enjoy the full benefits of this. In your case stick to fire and then either train air for more damage or water for a bit more healing.

Ele is the squishiest class in the game by far, lowest armor with lowest health and gear becomes obsolete so fast while you level that it’s pointless to bother upgrading it with sigils and runes. The gear will become obsolete in mere hours as absolutely everything gives xp and levels you up and gear drops are plentiful .

I would say that for leveling you want scepter+focus, this should provide decent survival and damage then grab gear and focus on power and vitality stats for leveling. The whole "epic solo, i am the god of all that is great and shiny " kind of only happens at level 80 for eles.

If you go to the pvp lobby you can try builds and skills on dummies and such. As far as resetting your traits goes, you can modify your traits and skills any time your are out of combat, doesn’t cost anything, you just need to have the traits you want to switch unlocked with hero points(and yes they do become unlocked forever so you only pay the cost once). You can only do a hero challenge once per character.

You should be warned though that while elementalist is an incredibly fun profession it also takes time to master so don’t be surprised when enemies stomp all over you, learn from it and with a little patience you can have fun in any part of the game, be it pve, pvp or wvw.

Koviko.3248:

Shadow.9418:

I’ve had some decent success with full ascended celestial and air/arcana/tempest, s/d fresh air and glyph o storms in air attunement but it isn’t exactly something stellar.

Tempest and Arcane are kind of competing ideals, so it’s hard to justify using them together. Not to mention you lose out on all of the synergy of the other traitlines with either.

You are completely right, but let’s face it, at the moment the only synergy you can properly get going with tempest is the water line, and i do not want to use the water line, i want to nuke critters like there’s no tomorrow. Why? because that’s what pleases my evil little heart. So i take arcana for Elemental Enchantment and Bountiful Power then add in air for fresh air and i spend 90% of the time bouncing between fire and air attunements. This is what i managed to get working for pve, for pvp i find tempest a waste of my time, i don’t like it, it’s not working as should, not even the overloads are there when you want or need them so i just stick to scepter/focus with water/earth/arcana build and try to annoy people from a distance since getting close to someone these days means they stomp all over me.

I think the community is honestly doing it’s very best to try to make use of the “elite” specialization, even coming up with completely out of the box thinking like dropping all your weapons and using only conjured weapons + overloads like @Maebe.6321 tried here. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Tempest-PvE-Events-I-love-Overload-Conjurer/5702850

Lyger.5429:

Like would it really be that gamebreaking? There are so many restrictions and consequences when using overloads. Why can’t they just make the ele at least immune to damage or something, you can’t damage storms…
Nerf numbers if you have to but at least make them useful.

NO! please, please just NO! It would indeed be game breaking, for elementalists.
As ele you have 3 skills that already grant full invulnerability: Obsidian flesh, Mist Form, Vapor Form.
This is also not counting partial invulnerability Ring of Earth, Swirling Winds, Magnetic Aura, Arcane shield, Diamond Skin trait and in it’s current incarnation “Rebound!” that negates lethal damage, heals you, then if in earth drops a Magnetic Aura.

Think it through fully, we already have an insane array of survival skills, if you were to become invulnerable during overloads then the devs will need to cut some of the survival on the current skills and each has it’s own niche and it’s own ballance and reason for existing, not to mention massive nerfs for damage across the board that would be required for a class that can possibly have near permanent uptime of some sort of immunity. I would rather just have a usability fix for tempest and some small trait rework. The stability and stun break on overloads is only there to actually make the overloads usable, be happy you got those at least or tempest would not be usable at all.

Feel free to disagree, i won’t mind, but i think you may want to consider all your survival options before asking for what would most likely be permanent invulnerability.

So the way to get the tempest to work is by using only conjured weapons and overloads? That… is just not right, but at this point i’m willing to try anything to see if we can get tempest to work. Only success i’ve had was with fresh air/arcana/tempest and d/f or s/f , but it’s kinda terrible to be honest.

This is not about buffing tempest, the current defensive and offensive capabilities are decent enough, the problem is that when it comes to actually using them, they fall flat because of warhorn with the unusable and high recharge skills that do close to nothing and because of the new mechanic of overload. think about it like this…

Oh noes i have a pack of pocket raptors on me and i need a heal but i already used it and…oh here’s the solution, overload water and run away like scared little girl attunes to water…. waits….and waits… and waits …dies 1 second before the heal is available… this is pretty much my experience with tempest. It’s far worse in pvp where you have actual people trying to bring the smackdown, it’s either go bunker or go home there.

The tempest fails not because of how much damage it can do, overload fire and air are decent enough same for the defensive capabilities, but the problem lies with actually using them, when you want to use an overload, it’s not there, add an offhand weapon that has absurd cooldowns for very little impact in a fight and you see how this is going downhill. I’ve honestly given this some thought and from the live streams and what i have seen inside the game, each profession got an elite specialization that either gives a new mechanic or adds to the existing one, except for elementalist. It seems that they are trying to use the same core mechanic of switching attunements but instead of adding to it and shaping it into something unique, they have taken from it and crippled it completely by forcing players to wait before using a skill and then locking them out of the attunement if they dare to attune to something else. I am actually being punished if i want to use more than 1 attunement, only reason people even play it at the moment is because after using the same builds for ages, berserker staff or cantrip ele, they are bored to tears, resulting in them either trying tempest and going back to staff or cantrip eles or actually dumping the class completely because the alternatives are so much better, they have their own issues sure…but at least they can play them to some degree or another.

I’ve been keeping an eye on this thread, hoping for some miracle that we would actually get some sort of dialog going with the developers, somehow i doubt this will happen, and if by some sort of miracle it does, it will be a standard “we’re aware of your concerns and working to address them as soon as possible” with no other info and the matter is closed for discussion.
For the past 3 years i have been reading these forums and until a little while ago i only bothered to post a few times thinking it’s a waste of my time, i’d like to post a quote here that is pertinent to the issue at hand. This was posted 29 days ago.

Karl McLain.5604:

Bam!
Thanks everyone in advance for your constructive feedback. Please keep in mind that we’re getting close to day zero and that the smaller the change, the more likely we’ll be able to discuss and action that feedback. This isn’t the end, however. We’ll continue to make changes, when necessary, after HoT releases, as well.

Thanks!
-Karl

So… not to seem like a spoiled, entitled 5 year old but… what happen to the discussion? to the possible action on the feedback? This isn’t the end? seems like the end was a long time ago and nobody bothered to tell us about it.

One thing i know from experience about companies that produce goods is that complaints from business partners are a top priority, while complains from “the market” are catastrophic, now don’t get me wrong, i am not saying that as customers we are always right, but we do have certain concerns we would like to have addressed (many like @Shadowphazon.7529 pointed them out) with more than the standard company reply. For a company that provides entertainment having customers (vocal minority or not)be happy should be a top goal, after all we are not talking about buying a bag of popcorn or a cheap movie dvd from the sales bin, this product is designed to give us tens of hours of enjoyment, years even, having it broken on upgrade is not exactly fun.

It is my honest opinion that the elementalist community does not desire to have an “elite” specialization that is nothing more than a god mode class. I think that what we really want at the end of the day is an elite specialization that flows together cleanly with all the rest of the elementalist lines, it does not have to be overpowered, it does not have to solo 5 legendary enemies at once. If Arenanet was unable to deliver such a thing then how come reapers are around, months ago before the beta events necromancer was being bashed around by players on forums like a punching bag, complaining with merit that the class had problems and they only keep up with it because of the love they have for it. The developers responded by making what seems like the most fun specialization i have seen in a mmo, it gives me flashbacks to dervishes and necromancers back in Guild Wars 1, when i tried it back in bwe2 i had this stupid kitten grin on my face for like half an hour. For my fav class which i have been playing since i started GW1 and kept up with in GW2 we received the master of storms flatulence, it does exactly what we could do before except by forcing you to pick up fresh air/elemental enchantment if you want to at least even attempt to lower the kitten cooldowns on attunements and deal some damage or a choice between cleansing water or powerful aura, either you remove some conditions and heal up a bit or you share auras/support with your team. There are countless such issues that players have been complaining about since BWE2 and not even a response when we know for a fact that the developers actually read these forums.

It would be nice to actually get some response about some of the issues that have been brought up since the second beta event and are still current i guess.

In pvp tempest seems to be decent enough, it makes me wonder if there is much of a difference between the previous celestial cantrip eles and the current tempest build. You took regen on cantrips…. now you take regen on auras isn’t this kind of like the same thing? sort of… ? I thought that tempest was a new way to play elementalist, getting locked out of an attunement or camping 1 attunement seem like nerfs instead of buffs to what was a very fun class with a pretty decent skill curve to master.

In pve tempest is a bit of a strange beast, warhorn is basically useless and it will actually turn your character from a master of the elements to a master of flatulence (seriously, if you guys can’t figure out a better sound effect then remove the sound completely), i guess we know where all those ele storms come from now. What is the deal with heat synk? because at the moment it looks like a really terrible version of persisting flames… except with a 30s cooldown, i can imagine using it if you didn’t have access to the fire trait, but since it’s only sharing 2 boons which pretty much every other profession can generate better anyway, why on earth would i wanna use it, i might as well just keep on auto attacking.

I’ve had some decent success with full ascended celestial and air/arcana/tempest, s/d fresh air and glyph o storms in air attunement but it isn’t exactly something stellar.

Wasn’t there talk of a rework for ele scepter skills at some time before launch of HoT. So far i’ve only seen dragon’s tooth being a ground targeted skill and no other changes.

I haven’t had a chance to play around in the HoT zones yet and tempest feels a bit weird to me but i’ve been doing pve in full ascended celestial gear for most of the year. I think most people don’t take into account that while you do lose out on some direct damage you do gain a bit of condition damage.

Since i was a bit curious if it will work i tried a tempest build with water 132/ air 121/ tempest 333 (or 323 but i kept getting tossed around allot so went with stability). I went to the first way point of verdant brink and aggroed 2 veteran stoneheads at once since they looked to be the biggest guys around and it’s the only part of HoT i have unlocked. You can survive just fine but killing stuff takes a while mostly because of the waiting time before you actually manage to get an overload going, maybe someone with more experience than me can take a look, but so far if you want to play an unkillable ele, full ascended celestial in pve is the way to go.

Personally i’ll keep using daggers, focus and occasionally a scepter with a fire-air-arcana or water build as this seems to be much better at reacting to enemy mobs. It’s gotten me past lots of level 50 mai trin fights before HoT and will probably get me past some other nasties that the expansion brings. So far tempest is a bit of a let down to me, not because of the overload mechanic but due to having to camp out an attunement, it makes my fav profession feel sluggish and boring rather than the a classic ele build that feels like an out of control element smashing god, even with defensive gear.

Looking forward to read what the more experienced players around here think about full celestial tempest.

Some of my achievement points are missing. On the login screen i had a little over 8k, once i entered LA i had 7977 points. The points to next reward show 8500 as my next reward chest so it properly shows i collected the 8k chest already.

Thanks for the reply Erebus.7568, i guess that the way i see d/d compared to s/d could probably be written off as either my own play style or my setup and gear, i agree s/d does a ton of damage

You make a very good point to the aoe range being kinda small without blasting staff as far as geyser goes i gave up trying to put down the kitten thing under my allies a long time ago, i do my best to use it while i run around, i place it in front of me to a point where i think i will reach and i’ll probably get it to tick once on me before it goes away, obviously this is terrible and far from ideal. In pve there are plenty of moments where it might help a few melee or something but in pvp when everyone keeps moving i wouldn’t even bother trying to cast the kitten thing.

I think you’re right about walking out of aoe, as it stands only people you can realistically hit with those skills in pvp are either players who are caught unaware or can’t dodge, are under some sort of cc, etc. Most you can get from such skills on a consistent basis is to scatter players.

The reason i was mentioning the weapon switching and i think i kinda expressed what i meant poorly, is that you switch weapons between fights, ofc that works better in pve than in pvp. I would never say to anyone “oh you have 4 attunements learn them” or anything along those lines, i understand the limitations of the current system. I think that for eles a nice solution would be borrowed from Guild Wars.

Create weapon sets but only allow eles to switch between them between fights, this way it will not break the whole ele has 1 weapon with 4 attunements thing we have going on but it saves allot of time searching your inventory or hero panel for the weapon you want to equip (on top of any loot i may have i always carry 2 daggers, 1 scepter, 1 focus and the staff). Just click the set icon or press the hotkey for one of the weapon sets when you get out of combat and you instantly have a new set, this isn’t perfect, but you have to agree it would be allot better than things currently are and it would not impact the mechanics since you can only switch out of combat.

As a class i don’t think that giving us the ability to handle everything with just the staff is a good thing, that’s just my personal opinion. Would there be any incentive left to even try the other weapons? The staff needs tweaks to skills but other than that making it awesome for every situation might get really really boring, not to mention make eles the new thief ( you know like omg thief owns so hard, let’s all run thieves ), let’s at least have this class with a bit of a learning curve.

Having an ele as main i understand what the OP is talking about, having said that there are certain things that i think should be taken into account.

Staff is pretty much a nice balanced weapon that works very well in a group situation, we have mobility, cc, healing and damage. Keep in mind that ele as stated before is supposed to be harder to master. Personally i treat ele weapons as situational, when i need a weapon that can do good group play and support i like staff, using scepter with focus is great for single target damage and defense while scepter/dagger works nice if you want to get offensive. I see d/d as mostly a burst setup, more experienced eles feel free to correct me here.

The changes you are proposing to staff are indeed interesting but i honestly see them conflicting with the skills of the other weapons, i mean, why use the instant blind from Blinding flash if Lightning Surge could be instant, people tend to ignore the fact that lightning surge, at least in my build packs quite a bit of a punch on top of the blind.

You mentioned geyser and water blast. Geyser could certainly use a bit of a bigger aoe range, but correct me if i’m wrong, isn’t this affected by blasting staff? i recal that when i ran that trait it made geyser bigger. and Waterblast is especially nice as it is to autoattack a boss and if someone is in melee range they get a small heal, it’s not much but it should help them a bit. The way i would change this skill is in a similar way to chain lightning, the first (and only the first) hit is damage and then it bounces between the next 2 or maybe 3 allies and delivers it’s heal, add a slightly bigger ranger than the heal already has and limit the number of jumps. I think this is probably the only this you can change with this skill, the current version of it is situational but it works ok for it’s purpose.

Lava font and meteor shower. I would like to keep lava font as it is, perhaps bump the damage just a little bit, but as it’s stands it’s great for those moments when you wanna break yourself out of a cage fast (cliffside fractal for example) or adding a bit more damage on a stationary target. The meteor shower i perfectly agree with, you should me able to move, perhaps like in a swirly floating way to avoid breaking a nice animation (you gotta admit it’s kinda fun).

Ice spike and eruption. Well, if you make ice spike faster then it’s gonna be a mess in pvp, can you imagine the problems? would render most dodging mechanics useless, i’d see the same problem for making Dragon’s Tooth faster. Eruption is a sweet skill, i agree with Alilinke.7690 that it’s an issue and making it work as a blast finisher is hopeless the way the skill is currently designed.

Sorry if my post is too long, in my personal opinion staff is not as terrible as it first seems, autoattack speed does need a bit of a tweak for fireball it’s a bit slow but i think that for it’s purpose of a nice overall balanced weapon with just a few minor tweaks to make skills feel a bit more responsive we’d be in a really nice place. If we want more single target damage scepters and daggers are an ok option in most situations not to mention the unbelievable survival focus gives.

Happened to me last night, i am an elementalist and used the fiery greatsword skill 3, fiery whirl, i stopped right next to one of these lava pools and was pinned there, i had no dodge, no movement, my party went to allot of effort to shield me from the damage so i could still be useful and fight. The fight ended and i was still stuck so i got the idea to switch one of my skills to lightning flash, this got me unstuck and was able to continue with no further issues to the next fractal.
Until this gets fixed i advise any eles to go into this fight with lightning flash equipped, mesmers have blink and it should work too, and if you have a mesmer in your party that’s still mobile, ask them to throw you a portal, i haven’t tested this but it should work too i think. If it’s anywhere near how lightning flash works at least.
*edit: was level 28 fractals if this matters