Guild Wars 2

The most glaring issues with this specialization are the cast times/aftercasts. In particular, the evasions that are available need attention pretty badly. Bound has a terrible aftercast that roots you in place every time you land, and there’s a slight pause before both dash and impaling lotus that make them feel unresponsive. Dash in particular has a poor animation, which often changes the way your character is facing when you use it, unlike regular evasions.

My biggest suggestion for the spec is to give dash the regular evasion animation, but with the increased distance and flashier effects. I hate to use the word clunky, because it’s been used so many times in this thread already, but that’s really the best word to describe how it feels when you use it.

Overall, none of the animations feel smooth enough. Weakening Charge is probably the biggest offender, there’s a pause before you spin, and there’s a horribly long aftercast — honestly, if you want people to use this thing you need to make it feel like a regular, non-daredevil evasion. Debilitating Arc feels like a throwaway skill that doesn’t really fit the playstyle. If you want it to fill the role of a disengage, it should feel more like Roll For Initiative (only dealing damage with not as much range). I honestly have no idea why Dust Strike has such a long cast time. The whole point of using blinds on a thief is that you’re reacting to specific, high-damage attacks, and unless that attack is longer than 3/4 seconds this is another throwaway skill. Vault is another skill that has way too long of a cast time.

The elite skill is the only new skill that I’ve put an actual effort into trying to use, and it isn’t good. Maybe I just need to learn to use it, but I haven’t landed all three hits in a single team fight or scenario where the person I was using it on wasn’t already downed. None of the other utilities were good enough to consider taking over what’s already available. Like, I don’t know why the devs seem so afraid of making really powerful utility skills on these elite specializations, every single utility is just so underwhelming compared to what we’ve been running for years. The physical skills seem cool and all but you have to design this stuff with the understanding that, if you want me to use a new physical skill, it’s going to require taking something like Shadowstep or Shadow Refuge off my bar, which is to say, it has to be incredibly good.

If you’re a solo player queuing up for Ranked PvP, an enormous chunk of your games are going to be you and four other solo queue players up against a full five-man, premade team. I appreciate that the new “Practice/Play/Compete” options are streamlined and the concept of PvP can be more accessible in this way, but the lack of solo-play option makes a lot of matches incredibly un-fun. Maybe the playerbase is too small to branch out and make more queuing options? I feel like Unranked can remain as is, but it’d be nice to see the solo/team option come back to Ranked, if possible. It’s just really disheartening losing to similarly-skilled opponents solely because they’ve had time to put together the ideal team composition and they’re all on teamspeak.

Is Unranked any better in terms of getting matched with full, pre-made teams? I like playing Ranked because I like going against people who are really good at the game, but I’d rather play my solo queue matches against more casual players if it means not facing the same pre-made group 3 matches in a row.

I don’t understand the people who are worried that Fresh Air is going to die because of the change to Elemental Attunement. You don’t take Evasive Arcana on a Fresh Air build as it is, how is having to choose between those two traits going to kill the spec? The change that hurts Fresh Air most is the fact that they made Bolt to the Heart just a worse version of Executioner instead of leaving it a Master trait. The only people who are going to be taking Bolt to the Heart are people running Fresh Air, and if people are running Fresh Air they’re going to be running Fresh Air. And seriously, on that note, why do thieves get literally the same trait as Bolt to the Heart but with a higher health threshold? The only thing that’s going to come out of making Bolt to the Heart a grandmaster trait is making Fresh Air elementalists that much weaker.

Elemental Attunement is a profession-defining skill, in that it’s a trait that pretty much every elementalist takes, but it isn’t a spec-defining skill. There is absolutely no elementalist that has ever played this game that has taken Elemental Attunement because it defined their role as a boon-distributor. That is just not at all what the trait is, and that’s not a role that exists in the game. It’s basically a quality-of-life trait that really should have been made baseline for the arcane tree. Contrast that with Evasive Arcana, which absolutely defines D/D elementalist. There honestly isn’t another trait in the game that defines a spec more-so than Evasive Arcana defines how you play D/D. It completely embodies the bruiser-type feel of the spec.

If the devs are truly bent on making Elemental Attunement a grandmaster trait, they really ought to make it a grandmaster trait, because it certainly isn’t one right now. I’ve played a ton of different elementalist builds in this game, and I’ve taken Elemental Attunement on almost all of them, but none of the builds have been defined by my taking of Elemental Attunement. Being able to distribute swiftness and protection every now and then does not define the role that I play in any aspect of the game. I agree with whoever said that the current iteration ought to have been made baseline, but only affect the elemenatlist, and the actual trait should have been improved and be made to affect allies as well.

In my opinion, dragon’s tooth needs to either hit harder or be ground-targeted. As it is, the absolute only way that you can land a dragon’s tooth on anyone in PvP is if you precede it with a gale or updraft and immediately swap to fire and cast it. You’re using an extremely long cooldown skill (50s or 40s, respectively), putting air attunement on cooldown, and the only way that your dragon’s tooth is going to hit your target is if your target doesn’t have a stun break available. There’s so much that goes into actually landing it that you would expect it to deal a ton of damage, but it just doesn’t.
For instance, I was playing a game of PvP today and landed a gale + dragon’s tooth combo on a thief (which is uncommon because thieves usually always run stunbreaks with considerably shorter cooldowns than gale), and I landed a whopping 2,000 damage. That’s obviously a case where dragon’s tooth didn’t crit, but if I’m specc’ed for full damage using a berserker’s amulet and sacrifice a huge cooldown skill just to land dragon’s tooth, I shouldn’t have to get lucky and have a high crit in order for it to do any damage. Contrast that with the fact that the same thief can then stealth up and cast a backstab for over 10,000 damage with a decent crit, all while burning zero cooldowns, and you see why it’s crazy that dragon’s tooth is so weak.
If ANet were to make dragon’s tooth ground targeted, they should probably shave the cast time by a quarter second at the very least. Going that route would mean they want to make it easier to land, and even with a ground-targeted dragon’s tooth, it’d still take absolutely visionary timing and positioning in order to land it with the current cast time that it has.

The cast times on the elemental skills definitely need to be tweaked if they’re intended to be effective. I love the ability to choose when to activate their skills, but the elementals are so unresponsive that it’s pretty much impossible to use them intelligently. The air elemental in particular is way too slow; in order to interrupt an enemy player’s skill, you’d need to cast it 4-5 seconds in advance. A daze really needs to be instant-cast in order to be effective — if I see a warrior’s eviscerate and can daze him using my air elemental, that would be an amazing change — but with the change it’s basically blind luck if you interrupt anything at all. I love the idea behind the change, but in practice the cast times are completely out of whack. Because they’re so unresponsive, this change has basically amounted to your elementals doing the exact same thing as before, only with you having to physically go through a 3/4 second cast time every time they would normally use their skill.
I really hope that Arena Net sees this and addresses it, because the change can be totally wicked awesome and lead to intelligent and skillful play, but instead is just an added inconvenience.