Guild Wars 2

Really love my gear’s look at this level.

“I definately think something needs to be done with Elementalist traits. They are by far the most boring and typically useless traits in the game”

My only comment on this is that you must not have seen the necromancer traits, sorry to say it but necro’s have the worst traits in the game right now, some of them are more interesting i’ll give them that, but 90% of them are entirely useless with the skill kit necro’s have available to them and with the current bugs floating around with necros.

That being said, not all of the traits affect only said attunement all the time, most of them in the attunement trees do yes, but there are a chunk of them which float between each other. and if you’re putting a solid amounts of traits into a specific tree you should be focusing on the trees you’re dumping these points into vs trying to use every single element constantly. EX: spec’ing Fire and Water mostly, stay in first for 5-6 seconds while you throw down several abilities then swap to a lesser trait like air and use an ability or two then swap into your next major trait of water and lay down some frost damage/chilling and throw out some heals for everybody then swap into earth and throw out an ability or two, by then your fire should be almost back up.. now you’d getting the benefits of your traits for 85% of the battle vs constantly. Now mix in the fields and blasts of certain elements, if you used say healing rain with staff while in water form or geyser right before swapping to earth, throw out an eruption as soon as you get in to play off of your combo field and grant additional healing from your water field (further increased by the stat points from your water trait increase effectively putting those trait points to use still even if the traits themselves weren’t necessarily in effect.) Elementalist is an extremely in depth class that you’re going to have to get creative with, with 20 possible skills per weapon set (vs your other classes 10 not to mention the longer cooldown timer between swapping weapons and switching between 3 elements.) there isn’t going to be that major of a disadvantage, not as much as you people are trying to make out at least. I’m not saying balance changes aren’t needed, but we don’t need to buff every class to warrior status we simply need to even out the playing field a bit more, the classes which are vastly superior need to be a little toned down and the ones which are below the average playing field need to be bumped up.. i’d say right now Elementalists are sitting solidly somewhere in the middle and as such they need minor tweaks not blatant boosts.

Some things on quite a few of the classes need buffs, some things on them need tweaks and others need flat nerfs. In open betas they’re more concerned about flattening out the major problems and server stability issues than they are making the vast majority of class balances that will be needed. Now i’m only level 17 with my Elementalist so i can’t really say much on it but at that level i’m 1 shotting packs of mobs in short bursts using d/d, not to say they’re u/p or o/p though. Looking at my level 80 necro when he was leveling up, this already requires substantial amounts of greater effort to accomplish and Necromancer forums filled with nothing about crying of how underpowered they are. Taking a look at the problem is pretty focused around the very class mechanics that make the elementalist what it is, it has the most complicated and intricate class mechanic out of every class in the game which is by nature going to make it the most difficult class to play and master (which has been said before, but it’s true.) So in order to make the class easy for anybody to play well they’d have to redo the class mechanic entirely from scratch to make it easier, something as simple as adding a second equip set for weapons to the elementalist with it’s current mechanics would be enough to throw the balance completely out and make them entirely too powerful, simply rotating the weapons/attunements for their biggest spells while avoiding the hefty cooldowns.

You also all need to stop comparing classes to Warriors, they’re currently overpowered, nobody denies that. Buffing every class to the same status as Warrior would in turn make everything but sPvP pointless, Warriors need more nerfs than other classes while some of the classes need buffs..once again and Elementalists are going to be the hardest to find that sweet spot with their array of some odd 60 unique weapon skills and the some odd 100 possible different combinations of weapon skills. That’s also while excluding Conjured weapons though those are easier to balance out than the others and are currently our only way of altering the range of our abilities. In short try to be patient and just keep trying out new things/practicing your button mashing strategy till the balance changes arrive. If your problem is the class mechanic just reroll now because something like that will take a great deal longer for them to change vs simple balance changes.

Don’t get me wrong, i’m not complaining about the wells we do have i’d just like to see more options, yes dark fields are fantastic but i’d like a little more variety at some point is all i was trying to say. we’ve 2 wells that are situational, 1 that does a fair chunk of damage and another one which does low damage but has utility to it for anytime wells then well of blood which is fantastic.

Is anybody aside from me finding the lack of wells which they have to choose from a bit infuriating? We’ve a vast amount of trait’s which we can take for wells while other things only have 1 or 2 traits dedicated to them and yet we only have 4 utility wells and well of blood to select from, at least give us an elite well eventually so that we can have 5 wells on our bar considering only 2 of the wells do damage making it an inopportune selection for any sort of sustained damage if we were to spec most of our traits towards them. That is probably what upsets me the most honestly, 2 transformations and 1 summon but not a single well to choose from in the elites section. that and you can earn 5x the skillpoints necessary to max out your skills without a whole lot of effort. I understand the game is new and that eventually there will most likely be more skills added to the game but wells are one of the necromancers selling points and such little dedication was put towards them.

I never said i agreed entirely with you, must have been TL;DR for you. They’re a support class, they have the largest pool of debuffs they can apply at a single time and can set up a massive number of combo fields for people to take advantage of, they can bring back downed players with the touch of a button and mitigate massive damage off of yourself/allies while restoring some health. almost every skill they have has some sort of debuff to it, that’s what they do..they debuff enemies and accel in drawn out battles. Also i’ve gone into world vs world on my necro and applied tons of pressure onto the enemies forcing them into suicide runs or retreats time and time again while coming out of suicidal situations alive, maybe you should try more than 1 or 2 tactics and give all the skills a test run with various trait setups before you go crying, i’ve yet to have a party do anything but praise my necromancer when i’m around.

it’s your condition damage if i’m not mistaken, it won’t affect the dps of the skill it’ll just add duration onto the existing poison on the enemies (or add a short duration on them if they weren’t initially poisoned.) At least that’s how i’ve seen it working from the numbers which tick. should be the same for any other field/finisher combinations which have similar things that happen.

Necromancers can do plenty, i’ve a level 80 one and haven’t really been having any issues, i get myself into situations i’ve seen other classes die in plenty of times and come out on top, the two damaging wells can dish out a chunk of AoE damage (although it is a rather hefty cooldown), the few sources of poison they do have are pretty lethal when used properly. the biggest thing is they really shine in party play, they might not be able to dish out quite as much damage as some of these other characters but they still provide a solid spot in a party, mostly because they can really support the other classes fantastically. They have a myriad of abilities which allow them to set up combo fields for other’s to take advantage of, can provide a few boons while supplying the up close people with constant regeneration, heal others with the well of blood and debilitate the enemies with one of the largest varieties of debuffs out of any of the classes. it doesn’t have to be all about the bleeding and the poison, nor the minions or even the burst damage.

If you absolutely have to define your characters as a role then yeah, they’re not a tank, a DPS or a healer, they’re a plain support class which has a little bit of everything in that supporting role but still bring some damage to the table and can still take a decent hit if they’re using death shroud properly. Just keep in mind this isn’t your typical mmorpg, the best parties i’ve had are ones where people weren’t trying to define a specific role..the ones which expect people to stick to a single role at the ones where i’ve wiped time after time after time again on the simplest of things.