Guild Wars 2

Here’s a couple ideas on how to fix the loss of traits when switching attunements:

1. A trait or built in bonus to the time it takes for your main attunement to become available again. For example, if your main trait line is fire, you can switch to earth, air, or water and use the utility cooldowns there, and by that time fire will be back up again, rather than being locked out of fire for another 10 seconds or so. This will allow you to use your utility cooldowns more actively without locking out your higher damage (traited) abilities for longer.

This reduction could be applied in a number of ways: flat reduction in cooldown time, reduction in cooldown on ability usage while outside of that attunement, reduction in cooldown on crits, etc.

2. Add traits or add secondary effects to current traits that either spread specific trait bonuses to all attunements or give similar but reduced bonuses while in other attunements. This allows your main attunement to still put out the strongest of your bonuses but you don’t become too weak when making use of other attunements for their cooldowns. An example of this would be spec’ing deep into water would spread a heal or chill effect to abilities in every attunement.

This spread could be done in a lot of ways: flat adding bonuses to other attunement ability effects(chill or heal if water, etc), adding additional combo field effects to all combo fields (ex: water/ice field along with normal field effects), added finisher effects with or without field present, flat stat bonuses to other attunements instead of being limited to a single attunement (reduced or not), etc.

You can make a super tanky ele for spvp with a toughness/healing water/earth focused staff build. Basically unkillable 1v1 even through quickness burst, assuming you manage your cds properly. The build puts out basically no damage and is really only good for holding a point vs 1-2, but still….

Elementalist needs so many buffs.
1. Summoned weapons are clunky and don’t do enough dps or provide significant utility to make them worth the slot and the long cooldown.

2. Glass cannon builds just don’t work compared to other classes. The burst capabilities aren’t there and there’s no way to dps while avoiding dps (evasion while dps’ing abilities). One or the other is needed to make glass cannon work.

3. Lack of glass cannon builds would be fine if tanky builds had more utility. Basically if you’re not using a dagger offhand, you have no useful pvp utility. The combo field and heal capabilities of the staff aren’t significant unless you have a full tank/heal power build and then you have basically no damage output.

4. Lack of synergy between traits. Basically wasted traits and abilities going into any tree while sitting in off-stance and no significant benefit to stance dancing beyond maxing cooldown usage (read utility skills) and the arcane tree aoe buffs. If you spec into a tree you should feel encouraged to stay in that stance or receive benefits related to that stance while in other stance (faster ability to switch back to the ‘main’ stance or gain your benefits in any other stance, ie all skills can cause burning if spec’d fire, all skills have a secondary heal if spec’d water, etc).

These are the main issues I see. I’m sure others exist but these are what stood out most compared to other classes I play and have seen played.

You can solo/duo/triple/quad queue for free tournaments in spvp fyi. It’s a fun way to play spvp. Hopefully enough people realize you can do this so we can stop getting tournaments with full groups vs pugs.

Orlandu.3781:

This is pretty much the situation. Very quickly after the match starts, at least in every matchup we’ve been in, one server surges ahead and essentially throttles the other two servers. They make a lot of money and get a lot of drops. Everyone else gets a repair bill and a long return journey, during which time the winners are in a geographically advantageous position. Unless a significant resistance is mounted within a short time frame, a lot of players give up. If I log on and my server is being dominated, there is no incentive for me to play W3. When I have played, organised resistance has long since abandoned the struggle, and the rewards for taking small objectives only to draw regional attention from the strong are small. If you don’t relocate, they will find you and probably zerg you, and relocating is another very long walk for little reward, while they swiftly regain what you took. So, when I see an enemy completely own the W3 pie chart, I do something else. Unless the design intent is “whoever gains initial upper hand wins forever”, which seems unlikely, then the design isn’t 100% working. Mobility and time/gold investment are extremely important elements in the W3 equation, and are very imbalanced at the moment.

At the moment there’s really no incentive for a team to come back at all…and this isn’t just about repair bills. What do you get from being in the lead? A few ticks towards % increases on random buffs that you will barely notice. The skins on badge gear are meh and the titles are just a grind fest. If you’re winning there’s a few gold in it and you get to enjoy crushing people. But why struggle back when all it will gain you is a few more ticks towards random bonuses and most likely more money out of your pocket.

What can be done to fix this? It’s not my job to come up with the solutions, but it’s clear that the rewards need to be more significant or an added incentive for the teams that are losing. You could even add extra benefits to the losing server so they have an easier time getting a foothold, like trebs being built automatically in the spawn that can reach the first tower or supply appearing in the spawn when you control nothing. Could even increase event rewards for the disadvantaged servers. Even something as simple as achievements focused on making comebacks (preferably with titles) would be a step in the right direction. A server should want to win, not become discouraged from even competing.