Guild Wars 2

chibbi.3706:

I would say blacktruth is first, and everyone else is scrubs compared to him so i’m not gonna bother ranking them.

Agreed he is the best, the only player to play the one high skill cap build in the game so well.

I like courtyard, it can be snowbally but so can all the other maps, and it is a nice change of pace. Build templates would make it much nicer though so you don’t need to scramble out of your conquest build.

Elxdark.9702:

Random Weird Guy.3528:

Elxdark.9702:

Chaith surprised me, people always understimate him but he played as a beast, did he fail any moa? I don’t think so and even with soldier amu he was doing enough dps to pressure foes.

Not bashing Chaith or anyhting, but you realise that the animation on mesmer moa is far more recognisable and therefore easier to dodge than the AoE moa skill from elixir?

Well ya, you have a point.
But He threw the moas in the right moment(rampage, cleave, disengage) I remember that AoE moa when orng was ressing rom and all died from that play.

Elixer moa is 1/2 second cast time + slow moving projectile for a fairly small radius aoe while signet moa is 1 second cast time but more range and no travel time so it is pretty balanced in that regard.

However the key thing is that it seemed like everytime Chaith threw down the moa it was at the perfect moment. On top of your example he did a great job at stopping ROM’s rampages generally only allowing him to get off one or 2 skills.

Gmtsai.6349:

nearlight.3064:

Gmtsai.6349:

I believe that Abjured changed their comp after they lost WTS 2 to ORnG. They found out something’s broken, they change their classes. Simple fact. The reason why they are playing double DD Eles again is because of this new patch. And everyone including themselves know that DD Ele / Nerco / Engi is broken.

Well to be fair, double ele has been extremely common in NA ESL’s, in fact the onlyteam that the abjured came even close to losing a map against (but didn’t) was Mime’s team, which ran both double pre-nerf mantra mesmer and double elementalist, yet they still won despite that team having a more brokenly OP comp at the time.

I don’t know wakkey as much, but phantaram has a ton of experience playing elementalist and is considered to be among the best in the game, it’d be strange for him not to play it. Granted in their prepatch comp they didn’t run an ele at all because shoutbow was overall better support at the time and medi-guard had overall more surivability. Now look at the trait changes, medi guard isn’t as good as it was before, and shoutbow was gutted aside from that odd settler’s build that lypion used. Yes they could have gone bunker guard and rampage warrior instead, but ele being indirectly buffed by being able to take fire seemed like a better choice.

And I also disagree that necro and engi are broken. I think necromancer is balanced in its current state, but lacks build diversity becuase you need to go cele or soldiers to stay alive as well builds and condi builds fold to focus fire too easily. And engi I’d argue as underpowered, because condis were buffed while engi still has weak cleanse, and traitline changes and power creep made cele suck for engi, so you either have to be a tanky CC support soldiers build, or go burst engi and hope mesmer/thief doesn’t look at you.

Also, as a necro main who knows the potential, and limitations of the class, its furstrating to see so many people hate on Nos, when all he’s doing is being the best player in the world at the class he mains..

That’s why I was saying that this game is sad because the balance team decides champion team in the game.

If this year, balance team decide to nerf ele and buff warrior, ROM will be unstoppable while phantaram just a mediocre player that plays hes own class at the high level.

If that was the case phanta would probably just play guardian or Mesmer both of which he is proficient with. This is why multi-classing is so important, as you never know what the devs will do as ultimately they determine what is strong. Everyone still has access to all the same tools. they just have to chose which ones they use.

Tao.1234:

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

LOL at people thinking double ele won abjured. They won because they were simply outplaying and outrotating everyone else. Especially ORNG was extremely bad at rotating and even capturing or holding free points.

Also, there was a moment where those two eles downed 4 ORNG people.

I don’t recall the exact circumstances of this scenario, but let’s be honest this would have to be a combination of both a massive misplay on oRNG and a massive amount of luck for the eles. Or the eles just jumped them while they were around 20% hp each
and all stacked up to be aoe’d down.
The overall trend that should be noted, as opposed to the random outlier you mention, is that abjured was completely avoiding staying in those large mid fights against 3-4 oRNG because they were simply losing all of them even with even numbers. oRNG was completely demolishing them in the almost all of the big group fights because their comp was designed around winning those fights. This would be largely from Tage’s bunker guard having more res capability then any 2 abjured players combined making converting downs to kills almost impossible. The fact that they made such a massive screw up to lose a 4v2, when they are winning almost all of their 4v4’s can’t be called anything other than an anomaly.

Abjured came to play conquest, oRNG came to play death match. The game mode turned out to be conquest, that is why Abjured won.

vangedas.7358:

Laraley.7695:

vangedas.7358:

Toker easily. He was the one that really messed up oRNG plans. Eles were just tanks.

I disagree with this, both Wakkey and Phanta played very well. Being able to survive in outnumbered fights against players like oRGN is difficult and they did a great job.

I didn’t say they didn’t play well :P They did.

Thing is they both had different roles and they both did amazingly at their roles. It is like comparing a really good apple to a really good orange, sure you can have a favorite but it just comes down to opinion on which is better.

They all played incredibly after the first round. Nos looked like the weak link but really, he was always the focus target and to that end he did a fantastic job especially considering no way for him to disengage.

USA USA USA USA USA USA

and canada

Jayden Ennok.3687:

And what about average time a scrub level player needs to learn to solo the easier paths (on ele)? Just asking to know whether I am too re…kitten for this or I just haven’t put enough time to it.

New Lupi is much harder than old lupi, and according to a previous thread, old lupi normally took players 10-30 hours of practice to get their first solo kills… So you will probably need quite a bit of patience.

Jekkt.6045:

ArthurDent.9538:

I am going to go ahead and try to be the optimist. Yes the overloads are weak, and in their current state will be completely outclassed by pretty much everything. The good news is that is largely an issue of number tweaking (though more on demand stability will likely be necessary, to not be complete interrupt fodder) and therefore it doesn’t necessarily need to stay under-powered. For instance we could just give them 10x more damage and then they will be overpowered so it is not a hopeless case (of course still waiting on scepter and glyphs to be made ok).
It does have two things going for it, the first is the effects for the spells are pretty cool looking and they generally have unique effects and feels to them. Animations generally are much harder to change than simple number tweaks so if they look terrible at the start, they likely won’t ever look any better. With these pretty nice animations, the skills generally are quite unique in their behavior compared to other skills in the game particularly the air and water warhorn skills.
The other big thing that tempest has going for it is that it will force you to completely change your play style to make it work. Some may see this as bad since “change is the devil” and it may ultimately not be as fun as a standard attunement dancer. However it is always nice to have a change of pace and something new to learn even if just for messing around with. Being forced to spend 5 seconds in an attunement to get the overload (assuming they balance overloads to the point where they are worth using) completely breaks the standard rotations, and forces you to change. Perhaps a new standard rotation will be learned, perhaps it won’t be very rotationaly based at all, or perhaps tempest will be forever nonviable, regardless eles will have to play quite differently with tempest then they traditionally have.

problem with fire overcharge: the whirl on it is bad, it gives you 1 whirl finisher. the skill would be great if it kept producing bolts from whirling through fields even when the fire tornado is a standalone.

problem with water overcharge: the heal is lol, not worth using at all

problem with air overcharge: i would never even consider using this. air auto attack does the job just as well and doesn’t ask for an interrupt or a focus.

problem with earth overcharge: this skill is a gtfo skill, no real use except disengaging because of the break bar. even for a spike setup its bad because it’s impossible not to foresee it.

Yes, I realize the overloads are all really weak now, the point being is that is easy to fix, just tweak a few numbers and we could have something balanced and worth using (or even horribly op, it is just a matter of numbers really aside from being so susceptible to interrupts).

I am going to go ahead and try to be the optimist. Yes the overloads are weak, and in their current state will be completely outclassed by pretty much everything. The good news is that is largely an issue of number tweaking (though more on demand stability will likely be necessary, to not be complete interrupt fodder) and therefore it doesn’t necessarily need to stay under-powered. For instance we could just give them 10x more damage and then they will be overpowered so it is not a hopeless case (of course still waiting on scepter and glyphs to be made ok).
It does have two things going for it, the first is the effects for the spells are pretty cool looking and they generally have unique effects and feels to them. Animations generally are much harder to change than simple number tweaks so if they look terrible at the start, they likely won’t ever look any better. With these pretty nice animations, the skills generally are quite unique in their behavior compared to other skills in the game particularly the air and water warhorn skills.
The other big thing that tempest has going for it is that it will force you to completely change your play style to make it work. Some may see this as bad since “change is the devil” and it may ultimately not be as fun as a standard attunement dancer. However it is always nice to have a change of pace and something new to learn even if just for messing around with. Being forced to spend 5 seconds in an attunement to get the overload (assuming they balance overloads to the point where they are worth using) completely breaks the standard rotations, and forces you to change. Perhaps a new standard rotation will be learned, perhaps it won’t be very rotationaly based at all, or perhaps tempest will be forever nonviable, regardless eles will have to play quite differently with tempest then they traditionally have.

alain.1659:

Well that is the problem with the new changes. Mesmer and ele were some of the skillful professions earlier. Now they are called “facerolls” and that is not fair. I can not play my mesmer because it is boring. I can not play my main, ele, because dd is a real faceroll, and staff, my favourite weapon, is so underpowered that even I feel lucky when I encounter a staff ele.

Only profession I enjoy is engineer, but it is hard to master, hard to learn. At least I got that for me, which is nice.

Which before patch, cele engi was considered faceroll by many. Just goes to show there is no such thing as an intrinsically skillful build. If anything gets buffed enough, it will become face roll no matter how high the skill cap is.

Mirror blade damage wasn’t the problem, it was the lack of counterplay from the ease at which you could eliminate its drawback of an obvious animation and all but guarantee it landing. Now it is still stupid easy to land, but it is simply less rewarding for doing so which I feel was the wrong change to make. PU and CS+MoD were the culprits here and both were left relatively untouched which is sad.

In general staff is more defensive (or way more offensive but jihad ele is super gimmicky) while dd is more offensive. Staff also does better in larger fights, while dd does better in small skirmishes. Both are quite good really.

Saiyan.1704:

In the past 2 WTS tournaments, Cele Ele D/D have performed the same.

• Kings of conquest mode 1v1’s
• Extremely resilient to the point of being a tank in 1v1 and 1v2 scenarios
• Very few weaknesses compared to other classes
• Moderate team supports when syncronized
• Able to leave immediately in clutch situations
• Great mobility

Burns haven’t played that big of a role in WTS/ESL tournaments compared to what Eles already were. Those QQ’s are from solo, unsynchronized teams running in and out of fire fields, but that’s not to say human errors don’t occur. 6 to 9 burn stacks from just RoF can still happen, it’s just rare seeing it. All the same, it adds salt to the wound,

First it was Might, now it’s Burns. It’s easy for the community to single out a recently changed mechanic but that’s not neccessarily the reason why Eles are stronk.

You reference ele’s heavy representation in wts 1 and 2 as evidence ele has been overpowered this whole time though this is simply not true. Before this big patch ele was pretty much perfectly balanced and here is why. What you completely neglect is what happened after the second wts which is very interesting. Abjured completely reworked their comp dropping both of their eles in favor of guard and warrior. oRNG also dropped their ele, Blackjack, which one of his posts on this forum indicated that the reason was their belief that ele was falling out of the meta.
This was a time when ele’s meta build was dead on as the median for the top builds for each class. Shoutbow, dp thief, and cele engi were the top 3 used on every team. Then it was debatable between hammer guard and cele ele for the 4th and 5th slots with shatter Mesmer not far behind. 4th/5th out of 8 classes is the median which should mean balanced, unless you are the mindset that everything was op. But then everything needed to be scaled back.
So what changed? Ele got extra trait points like everyone else, the only relatively major change that came to them was burn stacking which actually benefits eles much more than other burn heavy classes due to how attunements work. Almost all of ele burning comes from the fire attunement. Pre patch if you ate all of the burning skills, you could wait out the attunement, then cleanse and get about 10-15 seconds without needing to worry about burning pressure.
With burn stacking, if you eat a drakes breath, you either need to clear the 4 stacks quickly or you will take all of that damage. After which, the ele can still easily be in fire attunement, where you can get hit by maybe a ring of fire, a burning speed and with the new reduced cd, a second drakes breath. (yes you would have to be dumb to eat all of that) Before that would be about 15-20 seconds of burning but you could use one cleanse after they leave fire and you would only take maybe 5 seconds of actual burning. Now the burning does its damage so quickly if you aren’t cleansing nearly immediately you are taking lots of damage. This forces multiple cleanses for one fire rotation which largely eliminated the downside of ele being unable to stack burns out side of fire attunement.

Wait so now the burning on fgs is op? Did I miss something?

Velimere.7685:

Celestial D/D Elementalist and Cleric Bunker Guardian are one spec?

Not to mention every condi build and engi build, but yeah totally niche.

Fire grab is no doubt one of the hardest skills in the game to land on a moving target, all I can really say is practice definitely helps. Updraft > burning speed > fire grab is super predictable, so generally you should only use it if you know your enemy is out of stun-breaks, but if they are, you can land it easily. Or you can just pansy out and use it for cleaving downed bodies and anyone attempting to res, since they don’t move easy targets.

As for churning earth my advice is just never to use it aside from pre-stacking might before a fight. PVE calculations have shown you get more dps out of a fire rotation or even just spamming lightning whip. That makes it not worth using even before you consider the massive risk of being rooted for 3 seconds with all of your damage easily capable of being nulified with a single dodge/blind/block/interupt/etc. The skill is just high risk low reward.

DaShi.1368:

If by nerf, the OP means remove from competitive and PvE play completely, then yes, this is a realistic way to nerf mesmers.

As long as mesmer has it’s incredible utility, it will always have at least a small place in the pve meta regardless of how bad its damage is.

For reference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsm2DKThi5M&feature=youtu.be

This is the world record run for a dungeon path, the mesmer did almost no damage personally, just summoned 2 phantasms at the start, however still managed to be the most important member of the group.

Regardless this is the pvp forum, so don’t know why I am responding to this.

One thing that I am surprised hasn’t been brought up but is an obvious change would be greatsword auto attack cancel casting. Give it the same treatment as lightning whip and necro axe for consistency reasons. I would assume the reason this wasn’t fixed with lightning whip was that mesmers were struggling a bit in that meta but now that they are ludicrously strong, this is simply a small and obvious fix to make now.

The question is how many people does “we” constitute?

Walking in and out of Ring of Fire stacks too much (and too long) burn stacks.
? Stop walking in and out of it. -Grouch

hahahahahahahahahaha

I think tornado could be pretty good with a boost to vitality and toughness (vigor and regen from soothing disruption don’t cut it lol). Lightning rod makes the damage pretty good and while it is easy to kite it is great at stopping reses and stomps. It is just so glassy, you give up all your defenses to be a slow 17khp hit me sign. It still probably wouldn’t be as good as rampage or lich, as it is way easier to ignore but it would at least be useable.

I have been loving lightning rod on dd, hits pretty hard with each stun, and the weakness is nearly as strong at damage mitigation as protection, stacks with protection, and even provides offensive value since they can’t dodge as frequently. Sure weakness is easier to cleans then protection is to rip in general but this isn’t so for thieves and mesmers which are the most dangerous bursters now.
For the master slot I prefer reduced cool downs on air skills over tempest defense but both work well. One gets you slightly more shocking aura up time and potential for massive burst on stunned targets, while the reduced cd’s still allow for a really high up time on shocking aura plus short cool downs on updraft, and ride the lightning!

laquito.5269:

ArthurDent.9538:

Silly post, condi’s are by and large just like power, they aren’t magically applied, they come from enemies hitting you with their skills just like power.

lulz good joke there. Burn Guard does absolutely nothing but blocking through passive play and they’ll still apply 5+ stacks of burning that tick for 2k/s There is absolutely zero active play involved in some condi builds & runes. Condi builds are supposed to be damage over time whilst power builds are frontloaded burst damage. Currently theres barely any difference between condi burst and power burst and if burn ticks for more than 1k/s you know something is wrong with the game.

The blocks aren’t automatic aside from the random virtue of courage every 65 seconds, where that one tick wont kill you. The other blocks are active skills generally well telegraphed and to counter the burning all you need to do is stop attacking. Perhaps you need to stop bursting into shelter.

Silly post, condi’s are by and large just like power, they aren’t magically applied, they come from enemies hitting you with their skills just like power. Yes condi can get damage boosts from random procs like incendiary powder, but you know what, same thing with power. When rngsus is in power’s favor and they land a crit, they do way more damage than they would have all because they stacked precision and got lucky. That condi build doesn’t benefit from precision unless they are traited for a proc which helps to make up for the lack of critical condition damage.

Some people claim power is more skillful with better telegraphs and more counter play. Often though the opposite is true. Power has tons of instant unavoidable damage such as fire and air, stealth bursts, meditations, fresh air, spinal shivers. Meanwhile on condi even if you do get hit by the unavoidable stuff, there actually is a counter, called cleansing. Sure you can’t cleans all of the condis and they can also be reapplied but you shouldn’t be able to do that. If you want to cleanse all conditions from all sources all the time, then you just want to straight up hard counter all condition builds. How about we also have a way to straight up hard counter all power builds like protection now applies endure the pain and reduces all incoming direct damage to zero. Then have some builds that actually have perma protection like hammer guardian and voila balance.

Of course all this rambling has nothing to do with actual balance, where conditions can actually be over powered. Frankly they aren’t right now. Burning damage is pretty crazy right now, but so is direct damage, and right now the most popular amulets are zerk or marauder. That seems to indicate that if condi damage needs to be shaved, then power damage needs to be shaved even more since it is still the stronger option.

Wheatty.1892:

It hits a total of 3 times when you target it behind the mob
-once when travelling through it
-once for explosion damage (main bulk of damage)
-once when travelling back to you

Not quite right, it seems to tick damage as it travels if it is positioned properly and with a bit of luck you can get multiple of those damage ticks to hit the target as it passes through it. 3 hits total is an expected number but more are definitely possible.

It is funny, this has been bugged since patch and I believe it has only been brought up once or twice. No one really cares though since everything else going on is so crazy that what would have been insanely op in the old meta is somewhat negligible now.

Mesmer is basically the hard counter to rampage, stealth to wait it out, blink to get out of reach on a ledge, blinds spam to make you unstunlockable, and the cherry on top of the cake moa. Most of the other classes on the other hand, get wrecked by rampage unless they have a few select cooldowns available to them.

I feel the same way about engi for some reason. Hardest class for me by a decent margin though the forums seem to think it is faceroll easy mode.

Salvage it, gets unlocked for the wardrobe and those old ones can still be salvaged for ectos and darkmatter unlike the new ones.

I didn’t think this patch would buff ele however I turned out to be wrong. I still do believe that this is almost entirely due to the burning changes, which when I made my predictions were an area of uncertainty whether they would be a buff or nerf. Simply tone down burning and ele is in a good spot. Very few of the traits have changed, none of the skills, and only one trait was made baseline it is very much the same ele that was falling out of the meta before patch only with the extra grandmaster everyone received, and insane burning damage.

The spite is real lol, can’t say I blame you though, corruption skills definitely seem to have been screwed.

It is tough to pay attention to everything going on, so you just have to prioritize. If you know that there is a zerk warrior on the other team, you make sure to keep and eye on him. You will miss things from other players that you would notice in a 1v1, but ultimately, you should be doing much better than if you spam randomly. At the very least make sure you are spamming decent rotations, such as might stacking or burst rotations on the focused target.

sephiroth.4217:

Xillllix.3485:

Celestial is the only thing the ele has. Nothing else is really viable for competitive play.

Try settler Burn Ele with Balth runes.

Fire/water/earth.

Have fun with 11k hp in this meta once your obsidian flesh runs out

Zin.6170:

In random games I play, they are indeed the strongest class. How that relates to team setups or any organized play is in question though.

Then again, I’m playing rampage warrior today and it feels every bit as strong.

They will be even stronger in organized team play as their stronges asset, portal, requires a bit of communication to make effective. Without voice com’s Mesmer is much weaker.

bhagwad.4281:

Ok. After water it is! Can ether renewal be interrupted? If so, can you tell me what the animation is?

Ether renewal is probably the easiest heal in the game to interrupt, interrupt it and the ele is free lunch to a condi build, which is why few eles run it. The animation is a 3.5 second channel with a very distinct sound of a dull wind and some static like sound and an animation of electric orbs circling the the ele as they glow a bit. Additionally since it is channeled skill interrupting it at any time puts it on full cool down.

Generally the condi removal they have is from water attunement, and often traited cantrips especially cleansing fire which instantly cures 4 on a 32 second cooldown (3 on 40 if untraited). So once you bait out cleansing fire, the next time they leave water they are pretty much completely vulnerable.

Go perma stealth with caltrops, he doesn’t even fight back ez pz.

Note: I don’t endorse using this method but it does let you solo pretty much any boss that doesn’t have a dps check such as simin or brie.

Ekletik.3724:

Are you guys still running full celestial ? I’ve heard it has lost its tankiness…

But gained a lot of damage, which is still nice.

The combo has been available for months now, maybe over a year, blinding ashes and burning precision even got their icd’s increased.

Laraley.7695:

Quadox.7834:

Laraley.7695:

xDudisx.5914:

Laraley.7695:

xDudisx.5914:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Best change in the patch. Brainless dodge spam sucks

This ^.

The vigor change is one of the top 5 changes coming with the class balance. It will reduce the evade spam some builds can get. It will also make all those extra endurance traits/skills/food have a use in the game.

That would be okay if they actually buffed the passive defences of classes that depend on vigor, you know. But if they’re going to do this major nerf and it’ll be the only thing nerfed, what good is it going to do?

Classes that depend on vigor? Well maybe it is time to run a more defensive build. A nerf to builds that could run 100% offensive zerker and have insave survivability via evade spam.

Does fresh air have insane survability? Is it meta? Does it depend on vigor? No. No. Yes.

So BUFF the fresh air build then. A build being weak is no reason to change how an entire boon works.

Well, did they do it? That’s the point, they nerf vigor but give nothing to the builds that depend on it.

No more icd on fresh air that is your buff…

ronpierce.2760:

Laraley.7695:

ronpierce.2760:

Laraley.7695:

ronpierce.2760:

Laraley.7695:

xDudisx.5914:

Laraley.7695:

xDudisx.5914:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Best change in the patch. Brainless dodge spam sucks

This ^.

The vigor change is one of the top 5 changes coming with the class balance. It will reduce the evade spam some builds can get. It will also make all those extra endurance traits/skills/food have a use in the game.

That would be okay if they actually buffed the passive defences of classes that depend on vigor, you know. But if they’re going to do this major nerf and it’ll be the only thing nerfed, what good is it going to do?

Classes that depend on vigor? Well maybe it is time to run a more defensive build. A nerf to builds that could run 100% offensive zerker and have insave survivability via evade spam.

Does fresh air have insane survability? Is it meta? Does it depend on vigor? No. No. Yes.

So, run the Cinder ele build 66600 and take advantage of blind spam as your defense instead, while also getting to take Fresh air now. If people could make it work before, I don’t see how they couldn’t afterward…

Yep, because that will help you so much in a teamfight when BA’s cd is not per target.

It has still already worked for some people.. What do you want? An actual tanky Zerker? o.O Sheesh…

That’s why barely anyone runs this build?

It’ll get buffed (Including Fresh air makes a HUGE difference…) And lets be honest… Being forced into Water+Arcana was because the boon crutch made it powerful. I’m confident 666 or 6606 will be pretty good.

Unless you are talking about a different fire air earth build, then that one is being murdered thanks to the complete removal of the fire shield on signet use trait which was the core aspect of the build. I am unfamiliar with any other builds that use similar traits without signets.

Sigmoid.7082:

Xillllix.3485:

It’s just going to make the lockdown gameplay even worse. They shouldn’t nerf it at all. It’s the only thing squishy classes like elementalist have.

Got problems if you cant live without dodging every 5s and dodging every 6.7s is death.

It really is an extremely large difference, you may look at your numbers and say 1.7 seconds difference isn’t a lot but I would say a more accurate way of viewing it is that your dodge cooldown has been increased by 33% which is massive. If you don’t think that is a big difference, how about we just increase the cooldown of all your skills by 33% since you know no big deal.

It just needs a cast time reduction, about halved would be good. Right now it is just an exremely high risk relatively low reward skill. A 3 second rooted cast time that can be completely negated by a single dodge, block, blind, interrupt, and is requires you to be close to your enemy would need insane damage to be worth that risk. And while the damage is very high, pve dps calculations have shown that the skill is actually a dps loss not worth using even in a situation where all the risk doesn’t matter. So we can up the damage to basically be able to one shot many builds even without going full glass, or we reduce some of the all or nothingness of the skill by dramatically reducing the cast time which seems like the obvious choice.

oZii.2864:

Guardians have a trait that chills on critical hits with a hammer, but since they aren’t big conditions monsters outside of burning nobody talks about that trait much except how bad it is.

Lol you have been out of the game for quite while, that hammer trait is actually in the new spvp meta build for guardians which is one of the top 4-5 strongest builds right now approximately at the same level as dd ele. Just a funny observation on how the times have changed.

Forgotten Legend.9281:

they changed it for one reason: the new sunspot gives fire aura every time you attune to fire. if you take both traits to give boons when you apply an aura, you get 5s protection, fury, and swiftness every time you apply an aura. sunspot essentially has a 10 second cooldown (8.5 seconds when you take arcana). before you consider any other source of auras, that’s a potential 60% uptime of protection, fury, and swiftness. just from attunement dancing.

as for conjurer: to make it more support oriented, the trait could make the stat bonuses from wielding the conjured weapon, into a shared buff with any allies withing 300-600 range of the person who wields the conjured weapon.

as for signets: written in stone could also turn the active effects of signets into 300 range AoE’s, in addition to it’s previewed effects.

You are getting into 6/6/6/6/6 territory right now. To get protection, swiftness, furry from auras that is fire, air, and earth right there. So now you can’t take arcana which you said they would still take. That leaves you only without water which is much stronger than the 3 lines you did take so that wouldn’t be that great anyways.

To be fair vigor is nearly useless against fire and air sigils since they will just proc on anything. If they were to nerf them, vigor would become much stronger as active defense and dodging key skills would matter more.

Compared to the old builds, ele was most likely buffed slightly mainly because you can now run 3 full lines, which every other class can do now so it really doesn’t matter. A few traits got minor improvements as well. However we also got a lot of nerfs: vigor nerf hits us the hardest of any class, -10% on celestial can be huge though not quite sure how that 10% is calculated with all amulets being changed, loss of vitality and boon duration from trait lines which were extremely important with boon duration being unreplaceable, and vitality restricting amulet options heavily). Then we have the fact that every class barring perhaps necro gained massive buffs which will inevitably make us MUCH weaker by comparison. I don’t think it will be quite as bad as pre april 14 patch, however I will be surprised if any top teams still take elementalists once the meta settles down a bit. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised.

That could be very interesting, or really op. I say add them, and find out.