Guild Wars 2

Mekboss.5069:

GW1 did fine by giving us more skills to choose from even though you only had 8 skills at once. The problem with GW2 is that your options are limited so if you hate 2 of your 5 weapon skills you’re kitten out of luck.

This is a good point. While I certainly didn’t like 100% of Gw1’s combat style (just didn’t allow for enough control of movement in my opinion), it absolutely had depth.

I think something the game does incredibly well is that the combat looks action packed.

The problem? It doesn’t feel that way. My mind isn’t engaged the way that it has to be compared to say, Dota or even World of Warcraft.

I’ll use the game that everyone, for whatever reason, loves to hate, as a comparison.
In World of Warcraft, if you see two people engaged in combat, let’s just use a duel as an example, you might see some action, some flashy moves. Mostly you’ll just see a ton of circle strafing. What you don’t see is an incredible layer of depth and reactionary timing required by both players, both striving to get their damage rotations off in an optimal manner, while also countering the other player’s moves.

Guild Wars 2? Essentially just a manner of wack a mole. Daze the heal/rez, dodge the key moves. Yawn. It took me simply a few hours to feel unbelievably comfortable with my class in PvP, not matter which one I chose.

What about PvE?

I don’t care how you spin it, there is literally almost no way to properly determine the difference between an incredibly skilled player and a novice in PvE. That’s because there basically isn’t any.

This topic’s been beaten to death, but we simply need more buttons to push. Not World of Warcraft numbers, because that’s absurd. We just need more…stuff. More intelligent and purposeful stuff. More complexities in our damage rotations or priorities that give us satisfying results.

Currently its very difficult to keep myself playing the game, simply because it isn’t challenging me mentally at ALL.

The amount of negativity in this thread is absolutely ABSURD.

It’s almost like people are angry because someone has success with a class that they convinced themselves were terrible!

Elementalist has an extremely high skill cap, there’s no getting around it. Many successful setups currently for other classes are being used because they are incredibly reliable, easy to use, and powerful at the same time. Elementalist doesn’t have any such build. You will always have to manage your attunements well, and know the entirety of your class to perform on par.

Sorry kiddos, but get over yourselves. It’s okay to be new or poor at a class. You will improve. I was convinced that eles were incredibly useless at first as well. After a week of practicing and tweaking my setup, I’ve been having an incredible amount of success, not even using the build Kyros is using.

Could elementalists use a few improvements to cast time on some spells, and potentially some trait smoothing out? Probably. They are powerful though, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Spoiler: There’s a reason why 90% of the ‘pro teams’ you see on youtube videos almost always run an elementalist: they want to win.

DeanAdamFry.7106:

To improve our survivability without increasing our vitality and toughness I would propose the following changes:

1. Attunements no longer have a cooldown and go on a 0.5 second cooldown after swapping.
2. Add Element only buffs that as long as you stay in this attunement you get the following bonuses: Fire – Retaliation Water – Regeneration + Condition Removal every 10 seconds Air – Fury + Swiftness Earth – Protection.
3. Decrease all weapon skill cooldowns that are over 40 seconds by 5 seconds.
4. Attunement Recharge Trait will now decrease the weapon skill cooldowns in all Attunements by 10%, 20% and 30%.
5. Lingering Elements now has a 10 second internal cooldown.

I think this would be a nice start but you tell me.

These changes are a little too much man. Real balancing requires tact, small (but impactful!) changes are generally key.

I would say potentially reduce the cooldown between swapping would be nice, and I do agree that a 40 second cooldown on frost armor might be a little much.

I’ve essentially played elementalist exclusively in structured pvp, and won multiple tournaments with them with my team. After playing every class, I honestly find Scepter/Dagger to be the most fun, easily. I find the damage actually has a lot of potential with proper traiting and teamwork, and I also am able to dodge more frequently than any class when traited properly.

That said: I find raw damage soaking to be incredibly lacking. In major fights, I can dodge that bull rush, stunbreak that knockdown, remove that immobilization from the thief, and it still isn’t enough, because I die simply to passing autos and standard AoE.

Without going glass cannon, unfortunately, the damage just isn’t there. Our hard hitting spells are already incredibly slow to cast (dragon tooth, fire grab, churning earth) , and need to hit as hard as possible to be remotely worth it.

Not only that, but Mist Form, and at some times even Armor of Earth
Personally I see two potential options: Either increase the overall speed of our spells cast (my favorite), or simply improve our base toughness and potentially vit.

Dragon’s tooth and Fire grab are the main offenders here. They simply cast too slow to be relevant, and many times require an immobilization in order for it to work. Churning Earth could also stand to have 1 second shaved off the cast time.
The Staff abilities, as well, could stand an improvement in this regard.

This would not only make our damage combos feel more fun and rewarding, it would also potentially open up the viability of tougher setups.

Any other ideas? Overall I find Elementalists to be an extremely well balanced and fun class in structured pvp, but definitely could stand for a slight reduction in the amount of setup they require.