Guild Wars 2

draxynnic.3719:

Ganathar.4956:

draxynnic.3719:

Considering that one of the main criticisms to overload is its vulnerability to interrupts, what about giving it a stack (or however many seems balanced) of Stability when overloading instead of improving Protection? Since you’ve got Swiftness running while overloading you should still be able to kite to reduce incoming damage (if anything, more easily, since you don’t need to face the enemy to hurt them while overloading) but making it take more than one interrupt to stop it will make overloads much more viable.

Stability on overloads could be a solution, but you also need to keep in mind that the tempest has almost no decent options to defend from damage while overloading, except maybe arcane shield or armor of earth if you are desperate for protection. That means that you become a target for burst instead, because you get stripped of your active defenses, which are essential for the survival of the elementalist. Swiftness can help a little, but it’s not enough and we have plenty of access to that on the base ele specs and skills anyway.

You get protection while overloading out of minor traits as well as stability, so that’s a 33% reduction in damage, and from memory you can use instant-cast skills while overloading, which is a large portion of elementalist defensive skills. So I’m not inclined to think that an overloading elementalist is any more of an obvious target to spike than a dagger/dagger elementalist, although in a condition-heavy environment one might want to bring Cleansing Fire, other traited cantrips, or other sources of instant-cast condition removal.

Which means that if tempest ever becomes viable, cantrips will be the only choice once again. The PvP build diversity expansion potential is looking amazing! I’m guessing that the weapons of choice would be D/D as well, right?

Edit: Not to disregard your stability suggestion, it’s much better than what we have now. I simply can’t understand how overloads as a concept made sense for this profession. It is the squishiest class in terms of base stats and needs many active defences. Instead of doing something to address this for more build diversity, they came up with an idea that makes cantrips even more mandatory.

Wintermute.5408:

Testing reaper shouts

Thanks btw :P

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

After seeing how things worked out on Tempest we think it’s safe to lower the cast time of these skills as the “slow” theme can be expressed through other methods like greatsword and reaper’s shroud.

It’s pretty sad how Robert seems to listen more to the tempest feedback than the one actually responsible for the spec.

How about we change the skill without changing the animation and without taking away its support theme? We can even incorporate the aura theme that shouts seem to have.

Here is an idea, please do note that I’m not a theorycrafter so the numbers could be off.

Rebound 90 seconds cooldown.

Shout and infuse yourself and your allies with surges of energy, applying arcane aura for 8 seconds and making your next overload have no cooldown.

Number of Allied Targets: 5
Radius: 600

Arcane aura

When struck, gain 2 seconds of quickness.
When struck, you apply 1 second of daze.

Kidel.2057:

nope, ele is the core problem. You can’t add anything to a class that can already do everything.

nerf ele, remove some boons and some firefields and see how tempest usage skyrockets.

Nerfing ele won’t stop the tempest from being the worst elite spec in the game. It would have to be so severe that ele would end up being the biggest joke of a profession, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Can you also tell me how to build an ele focused on conditions? I would really like to know all about that.

It would be nice if the tempest did something different, but it’s too late for that now. The best that we can get out of this is access to a few new boons and support tricks to make the spec a bit less underwhelming. So far we only have boon sharing on one skill in warhorn. Oh yes, we also have that AoE stunbreak and the AoE cd reduction, that even the most coordinated groups that use teamspeak will not be able to utilize effectively. I really can’t take those two support options seriously. Most of the tempest’s support options are based on stuff the ele can already do, so I believe that we should think of how we would like to support our allies in a different way.

draxynnic.3719:

Considering that one of the main criticisms to overload is its vulnerability to interrupts, what about giving it a stack (or however many seems balanced) of Stability when overloading instead of improving Protection? Since you’ve got Swiftness running while overloading you should still be able to kite to reduce incoming damage (if anything, more easily, since you don’t need to face the enemy to hurt them while overloading) but making it take more than one interrupt to stop it will make overloads much more viable.

Stability on overloads could be a solution, but you also need to keep in mind that the tempest has almost no decent options to defend from damage while overloading, except maybe arcane shield or armor of earth if you are desperate for protection. That means that you become a target for burst instead, because you get stripped of your active defenses, which are essential for the survival of the elementalist. Swiftness can help a little, but it’s not enough and we have plenty of access to that on the base ele specs and skills anyway.

rotten.9753:

Kidel.2057:

I don’t get all this QQing. Even an experiended Ele as WP says that ele is already in a great place. If Tempest ends up being a support-oriented alternative, I don’t see any problem here.
You can’t have everything.

An experienced ele as WP also says tempest sucks.

On the sidenote, I don’t understand why there is so much QQ’ing about dragonhunter, The spec looks solid, fun to play and immersive. The guardian is part of the meta in pvp, pve and wvw. One of the best teams in EU was using double guards. So why the whine fest?

There are a few major issues such as longbow projectiles being too slow to hit anything, traps being counter-intuitive, traits having poor synergy and virtues being lackluster. That covers most of the complaints in a brief manner I think. This is of course coming from a non-guardian main, so feel free to check their forum out yourself.

It is also rather obvious that they didn’t get their feedback addressed nearly as well as necromancers, mesmers and revenants. At least they actually got some trait changes though.

Edit: I wasn’t paying enough attention, the point went completely over my head! Well played rotten. Well played indeed.

Kidel.2057:

nearlight.3064:

Dear devs,

Please give all of the overloads breakbars and stun them if the breakbars are broken like revenant shield.

Love,
a sad elementalist.

you can’t move in rev shield #5, while you can move pretty quick in overloads, and you have 4 of them. There is no comparison here.

I don’t get all this QQing. Even an experiended Ele as WP says that ele is already in a great place. If Tempest ends up being a support-oriented alternative, I don’t see any problem here.
You can’t have everything.

You technically get 4 skills, but it’s pretty much impossible to use all of them in a single rotation, due to the 5 secs that you need in an attunement to activate the overload. Even if it was somehow possible to do this, you would be sacrificing all of your weapon skills and non-instant utilities during this timeframe. Learn about opportunity cost please.

Overloads also have lots of drawbacks associated with them, do you want a comprehensive list of those drawbacks? For this reason they need something to make them worth using, it doesn’t have to necessarily be the revenant shield #5 mechanic though.

Also, while eles are in a good place atm, tempest is not and that is what this discussion is about. I also don’t believe that tempest would be a viable support-oriented alternative atm.

Vanth.5439:

This is a joke, right? How did they manage to completely ignore all the feedback they got? Everyone complained about the exact. same. things.

Also, “LB skills were well recieved”… what?

Yeah, I was quite shocked at that. It sure looks familiar to me…

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The longbow skills were generally well received, but Symbol of Energy felt on the weak side compared to the rest of the weapon skills.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The concepts behind overloading an element were pretty well received, however you called out that the time cost of overloading compared to the final rewards were too unbalanced.

What really impresses me is that not only Robert made awesome changes to the reaper and the chronomancer, but he also responded to guardians and elementalists that were asking for their own changes. He did this while he was not even responsible for these professions. Keep up the good work Rob!

I truly wonder what is going on with our developer…

Extremely sluggish projectiles

Very promising indeed!

I really need to level my necro for this spec. I like the way most of the feedback was answered.

rotten.9753:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Most OP profession in the game has their damage and sustain increased by 50%… still complains lol…

When will ele actually be balanced to not be god’s among us mere ants of professions?

I’m not even sure how would you respond to such a post. Hyperboles, facts from alternate reality and generalisation.

Does the fact that vanilla ele is OP mean we should accept that terrible “elite” spec as granted? Then what’s the point of the spec since it won’t be used anyway might as well remove it altogether.

Yeah, in that case they may as well tell us “Sorry, but we weren’t able to come up with a good concept for an elementalist elite spec this time so we didn’t bother. We hope to bring you an especially awesome spec next time!”. I mean if the elite spec is worthless, it may as well not even exist at all.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I find this a bit strange. From my short stint as a tempest, the problems seemed to stem from the lackluster traits. I’m surprised to see not a single trait change.

I’m not sure damage was the problem.

Yes this is my biggest problem at the moment. The more I look at the traits of the Tempest, the more I become convinced that I won’t go anywhere near that spec. As I said in another thread, I would rather get renewing stamina by itself than earthen proxy, even if its effect was doubled. This is how bad I believe most of the Tempest traits are and I could seriously go on with the comparisons.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Ganathar.4956:

Duke Blackrose.4981:

There has been a continuous train of complaints surrounding nearly every specialization release that has, quite frankly, grown bothersome. And there is simply no excuse for it.

Look at the necromancer and mesmer forums and you will see that they are very happy with the changes that they received. It is only the guardians and the elementalists that have endless complaints about their specs, hardly “nearly every spec”.

Mesmers initially complained that they got shield.

Necromancers complained for some time that their new spec did nothing new for the class’s role (as it emphasizes things that the Necromancer already has – damage, chill, vuln, and self-might).

rotten.9753:

To reiterate over, aura traits are spread over five different spec lines, let that sink in.

If one were talking about a utility line, that would indeed be terrible. But auras are a core concept. It is healthy to have aura traits in every trait line. You don’t need to take them all, and it’s good for build variety to include options to take them everywhere. It makes building auramancer a more varied and complex concept.

That said, there just isn’t enough viability in some lines (like Earth), and the aura traits clearly aren’t weighted for equality to make the choice impactful.

Mesmers complained based on the weapon choice only. When they saw the traitline, the class mechanic and the rest of the skills, they came to realize that it was actually good.

Necromancers did complain quite a lot about the state of the reaper, you are correct. This is the reason why reaper got the awesome changes that it did. If the necromancers hadn’t made their complaints known and hadn’t given the feedback, do you seriously believe that they would have gotten these changes? The changes themselves came directly from the feedback, just look at the necro forums.

The only problem here is that the guardian and elementalist feedback was mostly ignored. What positive feelings should eles and guards feel if they get this treatment?

Wasted Hero Points

Even though I’m one challenge away from maxing them out!

Ohoni.6057:

I quoted the context.

Regardless of what anyone wants from the class or the elite spec though, the tone of this thread is just completely unjustified as a reaction to a mid-beta change (or lack thereof).

It is sort of justified because beta is when you should be making enormous changes to test new things and figure out what works. I also can’t imagine people being happy when they look at the reaper and chronomancer changes, which were awesome and utilized feedback, and then come back 3 days later to see that their delayed changes are far worse and barely had anything to do with the feedback provided.

rotten.9753:

Argol Vazin.3061:

Clearly you don’t play ele or you don’t understand

Tempest does not fill a new role. that is a fact. Anet asked for feedback if the elite specs offer a new role. the answer is no.

Attunment camping is a Playstyle we can already do…and better then tempest. PvE staff is 80% camping

Nah, it’s a whine fest because we cannot appreciate getting the ele v0.5 instead of ele v1.0b

It’s also quite funny that people claim that the ele has build for everything. Eles have no good condition builds (which will get worse when burning gets a rightful nerf) and they have no ranged single-target spec. Let’s not even get started about PvP in particular where D/D is the only current choice. Since the elementalist lacks build diversity in PvP so much, I believe that the elite spec should have been made with PvP in mind instead of this slow spec that is easy to interrupt.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

There has been a continuous train of complaints surrounding nearly every specialization release that has, quite frankly, grown bothersome. And there is simply no excuse for it.

Look at the necromancer and mesmer forums and you will see that they are very happy with the changes that they received. It is only the guardians and the elementalists that have endless complaints about their specs, hardly “nearly every spec”.

Just compare the changes between each profession for the first BWE. It should be very clear to you why the guardians and the elementalists are the ones complaining if you make this comparison.

Tempests didn’t even get 1/3 of the amount of changes that reaper did and if you look at the polls and the feedback for BWE1, it is a general consensus that Tempest was a worse elite spec than reaper, despite the reaper’s shortcomings. I’m pretty happy about the reaper changes though, it may just be the elite spec for me in HoT, depending on further changes and how the unannounced specs pan out. Necromancers finally got something positive after all these years!

I suspect that druids will get wells instead since they can also fit the theme of the druid imo. All current elite specs except herald (because of how legends work) got skills from an already existing type of utility. While I don’t think that all of the rest of the elite specs will follow this pattern, it is likely not a coincidence. Both traps and shouts have runes that are associated with them. It is possible that druids will get wells and that a new rune for wells will be implemented.

sebradle.7034:

Linken.6345:

sebradle.7034:

A lot of peopke keep saying that anet said that Elite specs provide an entirely new role for the class. I cant seem to find an interview that states this. All I can find is them saying that it provides new ways to utilize previous mechanics. I don’t think they ever excluded making elite specializations that cover similar areas that the regular profession already has. Look at the herald it has a lot of support, base revenant already has support with both ventari and jalis. The herald is just a new way to support.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxLkfXwxLTs

36:42 sometimes its that easy mate.

Thank you. Didn’t know I would have to find a point 37 mins into a video that was quite easy. But thanks for the response. Also he doesn’t say that there so… maybe you should watch the video lol. Colin says “grows it into something new” and “new profession mechanics that fundamentally change how the ranger plays”. That is really vague and doesn’t exclude giving tempest a more melee support focused role. They did change how the profession mechanics fundamentally work. Actually isnt that one of the largest criticisms of the tempest that you now don’t switch your attunements every second and now it is the complete opposite of how you’re “suppose” to play ele.

Anet fully intended to have elite specs give an entirely new role to their respective classes. In fact the first question that they want answered for the BWE1 feedback is if they succeeded in giving new roles with their elite specs.

Just go to this news article and read the first paragraph under BWE1-Feedback.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-first-beta-weekend-event-begins-august-7/

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Conncept.7638:

DD does not need nerfing, burning does, and bleeding needs the buffs that should have gone through in the same patch as the burning changes, were it not for completely uninformed gun-jumping forum feedback.

We are not guardians, the elementalist is designed to run duo condition builds, burning and bleeding. Balancing our condition builds around monoconditions is the quickest road to ruining our condition builds for the foreseeable future.

And yet we only have a single, useless, bleeding trait and no real support for bleeding anywhere else

This just makes me wonder why our elite spec wasn’t focused on conditions. This is an area where the ele was sorely lacking before the burn buff and let’s be serious, burn will be nerfed anyway.

Coulter.2315:

Dreggon.6598:

Coulter.2315:

Dreggon.6598:

It’s not unreasonable to assume that dedicated players will be earning several hundred mastery points, and any new masteries introduced in following patches would be immediately gobbled up by people like myself with an overabundance of mastery points.

The system is literally design to avoid this very thing, you’re proposing something opposite to what the devs want.

Its not a good idea.

Could you provide a source for this? I have not seen any developers mention it.

Do you think they are hoping to introduce a progression system which can be preprogressed in?

My source is just some inductive reasoning given the system they designed and common sense answer to my above question.

Anet is definitely trying to minimize pre-progress. Their removal of the Karma boosters from enchanted boosters and their decision to not add a Karma bonus to the new boosters are likely for this very reason.

Coulter.2315:

Ganathar.4956:

GummiBear.2756:

and then everyone will hord up on tomes and instaunlock every single masteries a few minutes after HoT is released… That is beyond stupid

Anet could just make tomes continue to give you spirit shards at 80 instead of giving you levels. That way, there would be no abuse of tomes to unlock the reward tracks instantly.

Writ of experience still exists.

The system they chose was deliberate so people couldn’t cheese their way through the Mastery system immediately. Having the Mastery Exp dependent on the area it is earned allows them to not worry about people hoarding items to burn through requirements at the launch of each new expansion.

Its a goood system.

They could always disable the functionality of writs at max level. However, there may be people hoarding xp boosts. There is a decision to be made here for sure, but having xp being useless after a certain limit doesn’t seem to be the solution to me. It needs to be useful for something, even if it is not masteries.

The effectiveness and the fun factor of an elite spec do not depend on the amount of weapon skills that you can obtain. If that was the case, Elementalist would actually be in an amazing position with 8 weapon skills on warhorn, even though it is an offhand. Reaper also gets 5 weapon skills from GS and 5 from the new deathshroud. That must be the best elite spec, right?

Well… If you look at the feedback in these forums, you will see that Chronomancer, the spec with the least weapon skills, is the best so far. This is because the functionality of the new class mechanics and the trait lines are by far more important. When you trait into an elite spec, you are forced to take the traits and the class mechanic, while you don’t actually have to use the utilities or the weapon.

Imo, having a one-handed weapon does have advantages besides the shortcoming that you mentioned. It may have less skills, but it has more potential for combinations because you can use it with another weapon of your choice. My only gripe with all of this is that Anet decided to add no main hand weapons whatsoever, if the datamines are to be believed. What’s wrong with main hands? Is there some sort of design problem?

Edit: looks like some posters beat me to it with some of my points

GummiBear.2756:

and then everyone will hord up on tomes and instaunlock every single masteries a few minutes after HoT is released… That is beyond stupid

Anet could just make tomes continue to give you spirit shards at 80 instead of giving you levels. That way, there would be no abuse of tomes to unlock the reward tracks instantly.

Burjis.3087:

I won’t call that a design flaw. It would be a design flaw if the specialization doesn’t come with some sort of disadvantage to compensate what you’re getting.

True… but what you are getting has drawbacks already, with the aforementioned 20 second attunement cooldown. It simply has too many disadvantages atm, or perhaps too little reward.

Burjis.3087:

I don’t know what I’m missing, but so far, I haven’t seen a single disadvantage to choosing Tempest as an elementalist specialization as compared to going just vanilla elementalist.

Yeah, your attunements recharge longer IF you use an overload (if I’m understood that correctly) which means that if you don’t use overloads, your attunements will function normally but you will still have access to many other options.

For example, if you pick Reaper as a necro, you will lose your death shroud range options like life blast but gain good melee options instead. How does the tempest fit into that logic?

If you don’t use overloads, the tempest spec is completely worthless. Haven’t you noticed how a very large amount of the traits exist purely to make overloads functional? If you don’t use overloads, you are effectively losing valuable traits. If you do use overloads you lose the benefits of attunement swapping. This is the precise flaw of the design so far.

Seigfried.5938:

I suspect fresh air with tempest, continuously overloading air is going to be a thing. The other overloads are next to useless with those long cool downs. Everything about tempest and overload otherwise goes against the arcane ele

I think that the point of this spec was to get elementalists out of arcana and have them try a different playstyle, which is a pretty good goal. The problem is that the tempest playstyle doesn’t seem all that competitive atm, which means that this goal won’t be reached without drastic changes.

For me tempest seems to be the least interesting one. I was really expecting to be underwhelmed by the warhorn, but I realized that it has some potential with some cooldown adjustments. Additionally, I found a decent skin for the time being, but there is not much variety. The shouts aren’t that bad either, but they don’t excite me much.

The real disappointment is the trait line itself. It doesn’t seem to offer the defenses that a frontline elementalist needs and has too much focus on making overloads a viable option. Why do we need three minor traits to use overloads properly? Isn’t the risk of interruption and the 20 second attunement lockout enough of a problem as it is? Not to mention that tempest doesn’t offer anything new except a little boon stripping with warhorn.

When I look at the other specs, I see bigger changes. Of course I won’t complain about it because there are professions out there that need way more help than elementalists. Still, these are the reasons why tempest is my least favorite spec so far and I hope for something better in the future.

Zenith.7301:

Ele doesn’t need more damage modifiers. As if staff ele needed even more damage.

Just make traits with more offensive party support, like a trait that gives 10% attack speed to the party.

The problem with this line of thinking is that tempest actually competes with the other trait lines. You don’t get tempest for free as a fourth trait line, so a damage modifier wouldn’t make tempest necessarily stronger than base elementalists. Of course that doesn’t mean that a damage modifier is needed, overloads could be stronger instead.

Ele is not the only class that did not get its needed revamps in the last patch. Necromancers and rangers also need some serious work, since their role in PvE is questionable at best. Hopefully, Anet will address their issus, and ours, in a patch before HoT. I really don’t want to go through the expansion with a useless scepter and bad elites.

Khenzy.9348:

Leo G.4501:

snip.

I think the current implementation of the elementalist promotes ‘stance dancing’ while the tempest clearly interfers with that. Let me clarify that I always tend to speak from a purely sPvP perspective, I just don’t see staying there channeling a 3 second cast being of any benefit when I’m risking my attunement CD on an interrupt, when I could just be doing my usual stuff and gain almost the same benefits with less risks.

I know Tempet is trying to promote a different approach, or strategy, but if is not as good as other alternatives it won’t get used, ever. Remember, this spec is trying to offer more of the same just performed in a different way, so both play-styles have to be compared. That’s why I think Overload numbers would have to be extremely high to even be taken in consideration, honestly. Let’s say you enter water and proc healing ripple+evasive arcana heal+healing orb/healing wave+SoR ticking away, all of that while never stoping doing my rotation, providing a pletora of boons and doing some dps at the same time. These are often all the clutch heals you’ll ever need as well. If you channel water overload, it just needs to heal for far more than all of that combo to be worth it, remember you’re are taking huge risks in order to do so. That’s not currently the case.

Leo G, we can definetly conclude it’s all a matter of numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I see huge potential with this spec, I think it’s just not quite there yet. As others have said, if all they want is a WvW fronliner, without any stability, blocks, invulnerability or mobility, it’s going to get squashed, fast.

I just want to say that I completely agree with this. Not only are the overloads not worth it with the current numbers, but the tempest does not have the defensive capabilities that a front-line spec requires, especially for the squishiest class in the game. The tempest does seem to focus a lot on support, but we already have a good amount of support in current trait lines that also give survivability or damage alongside it. I think that the major traits don’t offer enough survivability in general.

I also noticed that tempest is the only elite spec that sacrifices all of it’s minor traits in order to make it’s unique mechanic usable. Singularity gives you overloads, while speedy conduit and hardy conduit make overload channeling slightly less painful. No other elite spec has to sacrifice all of their minor traits to use their mechanic, this is a huge problem. What if two of these minor traits helped you survive in the front line instead, even when not overloading?

As for PvE, the spec will not be taken if overloads don’t make up for the damage modifiers of the spec that you give up. Nobody should try to argue that HoT will have more difficult PvE with different mechanics or mob AI, because better mob AI may actually end up working against the AoE nature of these overloads. That is depending on the changes of the AI of course.

You can post this strawpoll on reddit too. Maybe you will get a bit of a larger sample size that way.

I really wonder why people are arguing over the difficulty here. Anet didn’t make the fight more difficult on purpose, they just didn’t implement the ability to crit the bosses properly.

The casuals should wait till the next hotfix and see if the fights are fine with the amount of intended crits instead of whining. The hardcores should start requesting exclusive group content that can only be accessed via the guild interface. There is no point in making open-world bosses require tightly organized groups because it encourages exploits in order to gather the people that are needed for such an endeavor in a single map.

Lol nope, sorry, April Fools
Have a good month!

Simon.3794:

or you mean rifle engi and staff ele are already being punished

or you can compare to other classes with 4 one handed weapon.

which is by design.

Yeah, the TC is pretty much wrong but there is an issue with the stacking sigil changes that wasn’t mentioned in the OP.

Ray.2640:

Make an out-of-combat weapon swap option available to engis and eles.
Like all the other classes but then the ~ button is grayed out while in combat.
Now you can have your stacking sigil on the off-set while still being tied to only 1 weapon set (in combat).
This has been requested numerous times before the sigil issue was even an issue at all.

This is not a viable option because it will shift the disadvantage to the other 6 classes instead.
Eles and Engis will have the effect of the stacking sigil plus the effects of the two sigils on their weapons all the time while other classes will have this only 50% of the time.

In order for this to be balanced one of the following changes must happen:

-Remove stacking sigils.
-Make a third slot for only stacking sigils that is separate from the weapon for all professions.
-Make stacking sigils only apply their buff when you are using the weapon that has the sigil (buff is gone when you swap but comes back with the same amount of stacks when you go back to the weapon with the sigil).

Zutha.5091:

The funny thing is people have realised for a long time the weaknesses of an ele and after 5 months of “internal testing” things will not change… So do we wait for another 4-6 months again or kitten off?

Just leave and come back in 3-5 years. The game may have a situation that somewhat resembles balance by then.

But in all seriousness, balance updates should be happening every month instead of every 5 months even if it means that they are a little smaller. There are just some things that are recognized as blatantly broken straight away and there is no point to employ a “wait and see” approach for some of the more obvious imbalances and exploits.

Axelwarrior.9084:

Well, yeah, they’ve given us a way to fix the survivability problems everyone’s been complaining about. I don’t get it, do you want them to buff the Elementalist’s survivability for all builds?

Yes because the biggest problem with eles is that they are too weak baseline and need traits to become decent which pidgeonholes them to bunker or glass with no form of survivability.

This post summarizes it perfectly.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Elementalist-survival-PvE/page/2#post3807363

Edit: if baseline ele is buffed some traits might need to be nerfed but that is perfectly fine.

CutePicsHunter.7430:

I would also include next traits to category
It’s a GM trait but it doesn’t deserve a 30 point investment;

Elementalist

• Earth: Stone Heart
  Attunement-based traits are awful just because ele needs to rotate between all attunements in order to do something, and when you’re walking around with earth attunement and spamming literally useless auto-attack, you’re, well… not so useful.
  If you’re going to implement THAT sort of traits, then you should remove cd on attunement swap, or make minor grandmaster trait grant no cd on associated attunement. So if you put 25 points into fire, you should be able to use fire whenever you want.

Stone heart is in fact a build defining trait because it encourages to stay in earth. A really good way to stay in one attunement is to make a conjure build and stone heart may be enough to make such a build possible in PvP. Some experimenting is needed but a new build could arise due to this trait so let’s just wait and see.

The only ones that I see as potentially useful Blinding Ashes and Stone Heart, assuming that they fit in new decent builds. Their placement promotes build diversity but are they enough to make fire and earth builds viable?

The rest are bad, lightning rod requires interrupting which is not that common but in some cases the reward could be worth it if it does insane damage. It’s too bad that it is unusable against many condition abilities and asura players.
Aquatic Benevolence is useless because healing is not a viable role, if healing ever became viable it could be decent.
Elemental Contigency requires you to be hit which is something that you don’t want as an ele. The funny thing is that the retaliation boon for fire attunement requires you to be hit again if you want to make it do damage!

And here I thought that the devs wanted to buff eles… Well, no surprises here, eles always end up getting nerfed even if Anet admit that they need buffs.

Edit: Also, don’t forget about the ele and engi disadvantage regarding stacking sigils, it all adds up.

Alright, let’s all roll warriors, let’s play to win!
But seriously this is an MMO, not a fighting game. Unlike a fighting game an MMO is updated and should strive for balance. In an MMO you always compete against others whether you like it or not while in a fighting game you can play against the AI or play against friends instead.

And in regards to cheese builds, the article mentions this.

Depth in Games

I’ve talked about how the expert player is not bound by rules of “honor” or “cheapness” and simply plays to maximize his chances of winning. When he plays against other such players, “game theory” emerges. If the game is a good one, it will become deeper and deeper and more strategic. Poorly designed games will become shallower and shallower. This is the difference between a game that lasts years (StarCraft, Street Fighter) versus one that quickly becomes boring (I won’t name any names). The point is that if a game becomes “no fun” at high levels of play, then it’s the game’s fault, not the player’s. Unfortunately, a game becoming less fun because it’s poorly designed and you just losing because you’re a scrub kind of look alike. You’ll have to play some top players and do some soul searching to decide which is which. But if it really is the game’s fault, there are plenty of other games that are excellent at a high level of play. For games that truly aren’t good at a high level, the only winning move is not to play.

The problem with GW2 cheese builds are that they have too many effects that CANNOT be countered because they are passive. Passiveness is GW2’s cheese, we are not asking for every class to be as difficult as the ele, but the passives need to be toned down or replaced with something active.
Do fighting games have these powerful passive effects? No, they don’t and for a good reason.

Yup, cooldowns are awful just like the two above posters stated. I can understand the cooldowns of most weapon skills since we have more of them but the cooldowns of our utilities are ridiculous.

I usually compare ele heals and utilities to those of a warrior to get my point across since warrior is my 2nd most played class and I know more about it than the others.

Here is how it is.
In terms of heals a warrior has HS which is superior to every heal an ele can get. Even with the 8% nerf and the revert on the nerf on SoR, SoR still won’t be nearly as good. In terms of utilities just compare these little gems here.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Balanced_Stance
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Armor_of_Earth
—-
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Endure_Pain
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mist_Form
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Arcane_Shield

Now I know that utilities are not completely balanced between professions because different professions offer different tools and are balanced with ALL of their capabilities in mind. However, one would think that the class with the lowest armor and health would get defensive utilities that are at least equal to those of the class with the highest health and armor.

style.6173:

At this point, I’m sure a lot of people play multiple classes.

Which means that they should “generally” have a better understanding of which classes overperform and which classes underperform.

style.6173:

People who play ele sure do write a lot of threads.

Judging by the OP’s posting history I’d say that he mains a thief.

selan.8354:

erm, yeah in roaming eles are barely seen since all the nerfs hit 1v1 eles. but in wvw eles are part of the meta in raids. although war and guard trains could almost run wvw all by themselves….staff ele is the most viable light armor in wvw raids due to 6k meteorshowers(no red circles, make it hard to doge that aoe), cleansing water, cc and high aoe dmg.

Allie said that Meteor Shower is supposed to show a red circle and that it’s a bug that will be fixed in the next patch. Just one more of those bugs that remain from the game’s release, that’s all. I am fine with fixing the bug but I wonder how much it will affect ele viability in WvW raids.

Mbelch.9028:

Well it’d be a waste to let the thread die.

Yeah, but we can’t just keep bumping without having anything constructive to post.
So here is one for you. If I am not mistaken, another inconsistency is that attunements proc confusion while weapon swaps don’t. Even though confusion isn’t as severe as chill I think that this is another issue that should be brought up in the CDI.

Also confusion is probably more severe for engi kits because engis swap more often, so that is definitely something that needs a fix.

Chaba.5410:

Why did ppl stack boosters in the first place?

Some people got too many from PvP and just couldn’t spend them all, others got them from achievement chests and black lion chests and never used them because they simply didn’t play PvP.

The people who get kittened the most from the removal of the boosters are the ones who bought them for gems and never got to use them and the ones who got them from black lion chests because they could have gotten a booster that they would actually use.

However, one could argue that PvPers get kittened as well because the daily PvP achievement rewards where balanced around giving glory boosters. If the PvP dailies have nothing to replace glory boosters they will simply have inferior rewards to the PvE dailies.

Mbelch.9028:

Well. Over 3000 views. Wonder if any of them were a Dev. I’d love a comment pretty please.

Looks like we will have to wait for the ele CDI when the Devs will actually pay attention to our issues. Until then, I believe that asking them to look at this thread is a waste of time.

Cold Hearted Person.6154:

SirDrygan.1823:

I don’t think Arenanet cared about this. This is not the first time they have done it like this, and it will not be the last time.
My guess, saving cost on voice actors…… just one generic Ah! Ahhh ahhh! Errrr ahhh! ahhh would save thousands of dollars in voice acting fees…… since they don’t need to hire any voice actors to begin with….

You know, they dont really need any special voice actors for the job, they could just record few developers voice acting, its not that hard to act some short sentence, infact many game companies used their own developers voice acting for some less important characters in their games.

Sometimes devs even voice important characters. Metzen immediately comes to mind with his pet characters Varian and Thrall.