Guild Wars 2

While I agree that possibly the elementalists downed state may be a little over the top in certain situations, I can’t say that I see it as the most powerful downed ability. All the different professions have their own perks within the downed state.
Now I’m not saying that it’s balanced, yet to blatantly say that one is better than all the rest is incorrect.

I have to agree with most of this.
The only real useful arcane trait I find for me personally is currently arcane power. This is because I’m a dagger/dagger elementalist and I can cast arcane power later in the churning earth cast doing massive AoE damage. This is the only real reason that I actually use churning earth.

However the people I’m in PvP against don’t seem to have learned to interrupt or dodge so churning earth is still semi useful. I find I actually get interrupted more in PvE by enemies than in PvP.

Much of the elementalist could be made extremely viable by changing some animation times and tweaks to utility skills, elite skills and traits.

But our downed and underwater combat is ridiculous

Yes except the profession doesn’t really have any slows, just knockdowns on very high cooldowns.

But even if they’re not trying to escape, I’d still consider being in melee range higher skill as dodging abilities becomes more difficult as you have to react sooner. Not to mention that the majority of classes have as many slows as you do, so if you slow them they can also slow you.

Things I’d point out.
-Shocking Aura: Anti skill really, considering it encourages you to get hit, which is horrendous to your playstyle. If you could use it when stunned to counteract the inevitable incoming damage(hundred blades for example) then I’d say that it would be a very useful ability. However in its current state I find it useless except for the fury and swiftness I get with it.
-Lightning Whip: Challenging because you not only have to be close but it consistently misses depending on how you kite.
-Lightning Touch: Has the same targeting as fire grab on a 10 second cooldown dealing minimal damage. I find I rarely use this skill except in boss fights.
-Ride the Lightning is Flat out broken. I had a clear line of sight and got stuck sparking there for a solid second and a half doing nothing. Quite frustrating

@Munchkin
Regarding Attunements, I see what you mean, and I feel that the big problem at the moment is that the “1” skills are quite underwhelming and not very useful in regards to the attunement.
Fire fits the archetype well typically, does great direct damage in an AoE
Earth attunement however really isn’t very defensive, with daggers(the playstyle I spend the most time in) there is literally a single defensive skill(earthquake)
Water attunement does heal and fit the archetype well, and I think that dagger/dagger does water attunement really well, but the healing and damage could use a wee bit of a buff. However I’d prefer to see a passive regeneration buff(like what you get in the trait line) and the trait from the trait line would buff the passive regen effect by like 50%
Air attunement should provide some sort of buff to endurance regen and movement speed. Also considering lightning touch(to my knowledge) has identical targeting to fire grab, it should do at least 4 times its current damage to justify its targeting and cooldown.

In regards to the 20% woes I do understand exactly what you are saying, and I was thinking that the traits themselves should provide 30% cooldown reductions to the one element. Or having a 10% cooldown reduction in like the arcane tree for all elements. But you wouldn’t be able to have both. I am personally of the opinion that 30% would be optimal as it allows for low skill ceiling elementalist builds but leaves the option open for high skill ceiling builds. Unfortunately you can’t really compare the elementalist to the other professions as it has very unique mechanics in regards to cooldowns which have to be handled extremely carefully.

In regards to the staff, eruption, while great in PvE, it’s another one of those skills where, unless you have complete control over your opponents movement, it’s near useless. If combo’ing it with certain fields and such is a huge problem(the only one I can think of is geyser), then I’d see a slight increase of the duration of geyser to be justified(and have the healing more spread out across the duration) so you can actively combo it.
Meteor: Should be more concentrated on the centre of the radius and the number of meteors should decrease as you move towards the outer edges of the radius, something like double the meteors hit in the centre of the field than at the edges of the radius. I also think that the meteors should daze the opponents hit(but that’s just my bias to elementalist talking)

Scepter: Air attunement with scepter is horrendous, I basically find myself facerolling 1 – 3 whenever they’re not on cooldown. It just lacks spice and stuff to make it legitimately interesting. I also dislike how there’s no point dodging if your faced against a scepter elementalist as you can literally dodge nothing when they’re in air attunement.

What people need to realize is that the lower the elementalists cooldown on attunements the higher the skill cap of the class is and people that are new to the class will have to work harder. Everyone will have to work way harder to get damage equal to other professions.

Alright here’s my take on your post as well as some of my own input
1) Absolutely correct, this is a huge problem with the elementalists damage capabilities.
Staff-
Fire- I’m personally alright with lava font, the only change I’d like to see with lava font is possibly a size of the area increase 10-15%
Meteor- I think the animation time needs to synchronize with the damage time better, so when you start using the attack it actually starts damaging the target rather than halfway through the animation.
Water- Ice Spike needs to be sped up a wee bit considering the whole damage of water attunement basically depends on this 1 skill. Maybe a 30 – 35% increase?
Air- No problems with animations
Earth- Eruption takes way to long to be useful in PvP except in the frenzied fights that occur in matches when people are sort of new to the game. It’s also just way too delayed considering the majority of the skills damage is condition based.

Scepter:
Fire- Dragons tooth is simply not going to hit in PvP, it’s blatantly obvious and all you have to do is walk out from under it.
Phoenix- Possibly have the travel time sped up slightly, again it’s a very usable skill in PvE, but only really useful at close range in PvP, so if the movement speed of the skill sped up say 40-50% it would be nice.
Water- Shatterstone, this is possibly the primary reason I don’t use the scepter, because every 2 seconds I have to place another one and I find I simply end up staring at my UI. I’d like to see it sped up extensively if it’s going to be used that frequently.

Daggers- The only real problem with daggers is churning earth, I get interrupted by mobs very frequently and by players even more. The cast time needs to be reduced by at least 40%.

Trident: Magma Orb needs to explode slightly quicker, maybe 15-20%, just to make it a little more friendly in PvE.

2) About attunement swapping, I have to disagree, the cooldown does not need to be decreased. As while we have a higher cooldown than weapon users, we have 4 of them to deal with and use strategically.

3) I have to agree with the 20% woes to a certain degree, but the good thing about 20% cooldown reductions are for people who aren’t all that amazing at the class or want to focus on a specific attunement. As with the reduction of time on one attunement means that staying in that attunement is more important and staying in the other attunements is less important. So, many less experienced players who can’t actively make use of all 4 attunements would strongly benefit from having skills that decrease cooldown time while more experienced players need to be able to select traits and buffs which benefit the profession as a whole.

In regards to dagger/dagger I primarily find that there’s just a tiny bit of tweaking needed. First there is a rather large lack of combo finishers and combo fields. Aside from ring of fire and burning speed(which lasts like 4 seconds and is tiny) and earth attunement there are no combo finishers or fields at all. Compare this to the staff or scepter and the dagger is rather lackluster in this aspect. Having a projectile finisher or another explosion would give the dagger a pleasant boost while making it more useful in PvE and PvP.

Otherwise I’d just like to see a slight tweaking of cooldowns and possibly a damage buff to air attunement in daggers.

I have F1-F4 as Shift 1 – 4
Then 1 & 2 are mapped to my backwards and forwards buttons on the side of my mouse(mouse button 4 & 5) and my heal is middle mouse button 3-5 is remapped to 1-3 and my utilities are QER and my elite is V.

I find this to be extremely effective and I can kite and do every key combination possible with relative ease and flexibility

Agreed, having this feature as optional would really make my time playing guild wars 2 much more fun.

I know you can do it arenanet

To add to this
The scaling of regeneration throughout the game is 100% inconsistent. Early game(below level 20) regeneration is extremely useful and heals a very pleasant amount. However at level 80 it heals for about 50% of what it did at lower levels.

Level 15 Hide in Shadows
Initial Heal: 345
Regeneration: 130
Regeneration %27

Level 80 Hide In Shadows
Initial Heal: 5734
Regeneration: 767
Regeneration %12

I do find this extremely annoying as I like my skills being consistent throughout the game and not becoming more useless as I progress through the game in comparison to other skills.

But yes the healing stat is relatively useless I almost tripled my healing power and the amount of healing that my heal did, increased by about 10%, In comparison to the affects of precision or vitality

I’ve found several times(at least once in every 10 uses) that the explosion blast simply doesn’t occur at all. Be it lag or something else entirely burning speed has something screwy going on and it needs a look.

I’ve also had it bug out where it goes off at the very start of the ability and then does the line of fire. This may be due to lag or something or other but it’s incredibly annoying.

I actually find the amount of burning that I’m able to do with Dagger Dagger in PvE verges on flat out ridiculousness. Between burning speed and drake’s breath I’ll often
Burning Speed → Arcane Wave for DPS/Might Boost → Drakes Breath
Then leave them at half health and watch them burn to death, I find it rather sadistically entertaining.

In all seriousness, getting more condition time in the fire tree as a Dagger Dagger elementalist is downright pointless outside of maybe PvP as a whole drakes breath gives 12s of burning alone on a 5s cooldown. I’m fairly certain that drakes breath is the elementalists single most damaging ability.

Dagger/Dagger
Earth
Churning Earth- I don’t even know what to say,
1) Cut the cast time down by a whole second
2) The ability should apply weakness to targets in the AoE, not cripple and have a weak magnetic affect
3) Give stability to the elementalist for the duration of the cast, due to how incredibly squishy you are and that you cannot dodge.

That might actually make the skill decent.
Air
Lightning Whip- I swear that there is something flat out broken with the skill, 40% of the time that the animation shows it hitting the target it flat out misses and it can’t be used to hit things like stationary turrets.
Lightning Touch- The skill really should be doing quite a bit more damage in my opinion, considering air pretty much puts out less damage than water does with D/D. And the targeting on the skill seems pretty weak as well.

Ride The Lightning’s Targeting is messed up and half the time I end up just sitting in front of the enemy waiting to do something. The skill should also count as a blast finisher.

Fire
Only real problem with fire is that sometimes I find Burning Speed doesn’t explode, which is a significant portion of the skills damage.

Water
Maybe a tad bit of a damage boost? No real complaints though.

I think it’s been said on the forums multiple times that the initiative system is a huge issue as, you must sacrifice extensive amounts of defense for damage and vice versa. While this means that you can play a balanced thief, it also means that those who go far into either damage and survivability can have an extensive amount of it. The real solution is to generally decrease the damage of attack skills and increase the damage of defensive skills. As well as applying certain tweaks.

I’ll start with Shortbow
1) Trick Shot- Overall this ability seems great, my only problem is that it requires you to be fighting 2 or more enemies for it to actually provide optimal single target damage, which I find quite dumb. I’m personally of the opinion that it shouldn’t be able to bounce back to the original target at all. But that’s solely my opinion and not really a big deal.
2) Cluster Bomb just feels a tad clunky for me because it’s not very distinguishable from other arrows and it’s very difficult to detonate without casting a second one, quite annoying.
3) Chocking Gas- At 4 initiative cost I feel like this should last at least 2 seconds longer, maybe up the initiative cost to 5 increase the field duration to 8 but reduce the condition duration to 3 seconds.
4) Infiltrators Arrow- I don’t really understand the functionality behind the blind, why do I want to be getting in close as someone with a bow? Not 100% sure what needs to be done here.

Dagger(MainHand)
Heart Seeker- Personally I’d like to see the skill have the damage increase based off target health outright removed. While reasonably functional in PvP, it’s not really useful in PvE throughout the majority of boss fights and when it is useful, It’s far too useful. It also highly favours burst damage builds and really decreases diversity.
What I’d like to see the skill become is a leap that does 33% more damage than it does when the target is at 100% currently but not have an increase when the targets health decreases. Then on a successful hit it gives you 2 stacks of might. I’d also like to see the range of the leap increased slightly in the event that this happened