Guild Wars 2

mouse.1689:

Listen, if you need any proof at all that most people enjoy attunement swapping, consider the fact that essentially every competitive Ele build out there starts with 30 points in Arcane. It’s not because Evasive Arcana is so nifty; it’s because people want shorter attunement cooldowns, not longer ones.

Ignoring “fun” and “enjoyment” for a moment, consider your own fact that essentially every competitive ele build starts with a large investment in Arcana. That’s a sign of the other lines providing poor returns on an investment in them, relative to Arcana’s benefits. That’s not a good thing.

Panda.8169:

I think it could work, but it would definitely be revamping a class that already (mostly) works, and would be a lot more work than they’re probably intending on doing

Agreed, I’d rather they didn’t do anything at all until at least the bugs are fixed, and then nothing huge until we see how everyone works when everything works. This is definitely a “class getting overhauled for the new expansion” -type thing.

Hence all the ideas aimed at making one or two elements good for heavy use, so that you wouldn’t NEED to swap every five seconds.

I can’t remember ever getting an “obstructed” bug, and I find most of the autos are fairly reliable. Stoning is the only one I ever have any trouble with, and that’s only because it’s so ungodly slow, flies in a huge arc, and isn’t homing. Don’t forget you can juke pretty much any projectile in the game without dodging, it’s just easier when they’re big and slow.

Stoning is still the only one worth using for its own sake, because perma-weakness is delicious. I suspect it’s so hard to hit with because it’s useful, to balance the fact that we probably aren’t meant to use our autos for much more than filler.

Conncept.7638:

We’ve actually been working on something which does just this (and a lil’ more) over in the suggestions forum. Have a look, and feel free to contribute in any way you’d like.

An out-of-combat weapon swap is a very different beast from what this topic is about. This is a more fundamental set of changes that would affect attunement usage in combat and build possibilities, weapon swapping is a simple comfort thing.

Water’s regeneration scales with healing power.

I liked the axe, used it when I got caught near an event boss or something and needed just a little more range than my D/D set has. Then I unlocked the greatsword and it hasn’t left my bar since.

The only conjure I don’t really like is the shield, but I feel like I’m not really giving it a fair chance. It has an extra gap closer, a mass pull, and an invuln for crapssake, it’s gotta be good at something.

I would indeed like to see more of the multifunctional, complex skills. I like those, but there’s nothing wrong with a handful of powerful unitaskers. I don’t think the balance between the two is out of whack or anything. Changing up utility skills and weapons is as big a change as switching heroes in an AoS, maybe even bigger. I don’t see any problem there.

As for expanding on classes, I feel like more weapon options per class is almost inevitable. Almost as guaranteed as new utilities/elites. Probably more major traits per tier, too.

FluffyDoe.7539:

And YES, I said copy… because a lot of Dota 2 skills were COPIED from League Of Legends (ie. Pudge pull ~~~ similar to Blitz Crank Pull in terms of the “core mechanics”).

Oh HELL no.

Creslin.1758:

But here’s the thing…you may want ele to be like that but that is not how the class was designed. It was clearly designed with frequent attunement swapping in mind, Introducing broad sweeping changes to our main class mechanic that will imbalance everything just so you can play the class the way you think it should be played makes no sense.

Ideally they’re still swapping quite often for clutch cooldowns, but are able to spend more time in their preferred element without dragging down their effectiveness so much.

I totally understand what you’re saying, and I’d probably stick with a multi-element, rapid-swapping build no matter what because it’s so kitten fun and unique. Still, it doesn’t hurt me at all if other people have the option of building a little closer to a traditional mage.

Honestly, I’d be just fine if Anet stepped in and said that no, we’re never supposed to spend the majority of our time in one element. That wouldn’t hurt me or the people who like the class as is. I’m just having fun thinking of ideas here.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

I couldn’t even entertain this thought. Not being an kitten or anything, its just attunement swapping is what makes the ELE.

Staying in one attunement would just be boring and drastically promote auto attack spamming as sitting in one attunement an ele would use his skills and then just spam auto attack until he could switch. I can’t stand the thought of that.

You posted after I started typing this up, but my response works for your post as well.

hakurface.2619:

Again, here’s the thing, even if you were to boost the base damage of Elements, WHY would you want to stay in a single element.

I’ve suggested one possibility, which is that base power would be about the same as it is now, but a small trait investment would provide buffs that are specifically designed to make one element better at prolonged use.

So if you maxed water, your low-CD water skills would naturally become more useful than air/earth/fire and you could viably stay in that element most of the time, but you would still have the ability to swap to other elements for their clutch CDs and quickly return to your “favored” element.

Done properly, Arcana would not be nerfed by this because they would still have the option of making all their elements a little better and rotating the smaller cooldowns like they do now.

Someone suggested in another topic that the grandmaster minor trait for each element could give that one attunement a drastic cooldown reduction, allowing you to return to it very quickly after switching to another element.

For example, a heavy fire build could drop into water for a quick cleanse and be back to fire within a couple seconds without losing much DPS, as opposed to 9-15 seconds like it is now. A supporty water build could swap to earth/air when they need CC and be back to water in a snap. Earth/Fire would have two skill sets swappable almost at will, and two others that would be still be useful for occasional cooldowns.

The biggest problem I can find with that idea is that it would require the 2-3 skills for each attunement to be viable for sustained use. That’s not the case as often as I’d like it to be for a setup like this. Perhaps a small trait investment in each line would buff those skills a bit, so one person could have sustainable air and fire damage, while another person could go full Arcana plus a few points in everything else to play like we do now. This also puts an opportunity cost on each skill’s power, so individual skills might even be able to be buffed a little.

If you still wanted to play the attunement roulette, there would still be plenty of combinations of Arcana + various amounts of low-mid traited elements. This isn’t aimed at removing swapping at all, just at making more builds viable that focus on just one or two elements.

EDIT: To clarify, I don’t think a longer global cooldown is the answer, but I do think there are ways to make it work. I do agree that each element needs some kind of investment to gain its full power, because that would do SO MUCH to help break our Arcana addiction.

Out-of-combat swap, yes.

In-combat, no.

tarnin.1690:

BobTheJanitor.4936:

Engi downed 2 does still interrupt a stomp though.

downed state 2 does NOT interrupt a stomp. It’s a root, thats it. It might prolong it if the stomper isnt ontop of you but that’s about it. At least the engi can knock people away.

Engineer’s pull does interrupt. Elementalist’s root does not.

I use the fiery greatsword alongside my D/D loadout for a range upgrade, lol.

Leuca.5732:

If eles are to be required to use attunement swapping to be successful, then there needs to be an inherent reward for using any given attunement, or on swap. This reward cannot have a trait requirement. An ele without at least 15 or so in Arcana is completely kittened in SPvP and TPvP, simply because of the lack of attunement passives and attunement recharges.

Our individual skills have such simple effects that the use of one by itself leaves you wondering if you did anything, which only compounds with the need to swap in order to function at a baseline level of efficacy. The justification for this is of course the fact that we have 16 skills on a weapon set.

I suggest looking at this topic, there’s a lot of ideas thrown around on this subject and how to break away from the reliance on Arcana. They’re all “full overhaul”-level ideas, but it’s some food for thought.

Dragon’s Tooth is the only one of the delayed AoEs I find difficult to land, because it’s impossible to properly lead your target with it. Everything else can be made to hit without much effort in PvE, and in PvP they’re good for area-denial.

I haven’t gotten around to dungeons yet on my ele so I can’t comment there, but I mostly use D/D because I find it ridiculously fun. Even then, I still enjoy using the staff so those ranged-only situations don’t bother me much. It’s easy enough to get away from combat to switch, though I AM totally in favor of an out-of-combat-only weapon swap for Eles and Engineers as a QoL upgrade. I’ve never had much want or need to use the scepter, and the focus strikes me as somewhat underwhelming in PvE, probably more of a PvP defensive weapon.

Bugs suck, fix those before balancing, etc etc. Same as in every other forum.

My problem with the class is how brutally unforgiving it can be towards mistakes. That’s only a problem because I am bad and fat-finger the keys all the time.

If you found a way to pull off a long-range blaster build then it sounds like you’re playing the class right.

You don’t have to channel the whole thing if all you want is the burn for Fire Grab, but if you choose to it’s a very nice pile of AoE burning with a surprising range. It’s way easier to work into a spell rotation than Churning Earth, at least.

You go with what you know, I’ve never really watched Avatar but I saw Power Rangers all the time as a kid.

Hauling rocks out of the earth and spearing fools on spikes actually reminds me of Sacrifice and its brand of earth magic. It’s a shame Bore wouldn’t work in this game, because it’s by far the coolest spell I’ve ever seen.

Earth would probably continue being the attunement with the most finishers. I picture a bow as firing arrow-shaped bolts of pure fire/ice/lightning/rock, not normal wooden arrows, and only the solid ones would count as projectile finishers.

The Prestige just needs to persist through dodges, that’s not too much to ask for is it? Breaking on other spellcasts is fine.

The mage would be alright if it just fired a lot faster. As is it’s almost unnoticeable compared to other phantasms, I want it to be like those pink nightmares in the Lovers fight.

I love my asuran ele, D/D is exactly the kind of fast, skittery, explosive gameplay I love. I just can’t get over the fact that he’s a power ranger. A kitten power ranger. I never wanted to be a power ranger but there’s nothing I can do about it.

-Flashy, colorful ninja
-Sparks and explosions everywhere
-Yells to change form/tactics
-Summons weapons and giant robots to fight with

senate.8126:

from this point forward, swapping to a staff out of combat will be called THE OCTAVIUS MANEUVER.

I’m going to start using this one.

Xhaiden.3891:

I’d like to see Longbow myself for the arcane archer look.

Ooh, sounds nice. Both bows are only used by two classes, and energy arrows would be pretty sweet.

Shadow Dragon Ad.2409:

I have to disagree with the length increase just because of how many Fire Aura’s you can get

Ah, I don’t mean to increase the duration from all sources, just the one from the focus spell.

Shadow Dragon Ad.2409:

I dislike the idea of having a detonate button personally and the pathing is fine currently, it just needs to detonate when it reaches where they would be

It may or may not be a pathing issue, but I meant the problem where it sometimes stops moving for no reason and you’re stuck in place with no way to cancel it. A detonate option is just the easy fix for that, ideally it never happens at all. Having it miss or overshoot if juked seems like a natural trade for that much mobility.

rotation implies spinning, you don’t spin when you change attunement, you’re not rotating. it’s not descriptive of what you’re doing at all. call it attunement cycling. wait no don’t do that because you don’t hop on a bike to change attunements

EDIT: My attunement is a 12-speed!

You’ve seriously never heard of “stance dancing”?

Agreed, there’s every incentive to mash the attune keys and very little to stick with one for a while. I’m not saying I want it to be possible to faceroll fire all day and totally ignore the F1-F4 keys, but as is there’s basically no reason not to blow your cooldowns and move on to whichever set of four you need next. This is partly because of cooldowns, and partly because all the elements have plenty of utility by default.

One option is to move some of that utility away from the base skills and into low-hanging traits that grant utility to those skills. These would be picked up naturally while climbing your way towards mastering that element, or plucked from all elements to enable the current spastic Arcana builds to thrive. You could even buff individual skills a bit since there’s an opportunity cost on them now. I’m thinking this would mostly affect lower-cooldown skills in the middle of the bar, the ones used often enough to really define the weapon’s playstyle.

If you went for the big CDs instead you’d wind up with a bunch of long cooldowns that do nothing important without traits, and there would be too little incentive to swap to your non-favored elements. They’d be lacking those big, clutch spells you’re after when you really need healing/mobility/control right now. Hitting the little ones still leaves them as low-CD attacks of various shapes and sizes that you can use while waiting for your favored elements to cool down, which isn’t nearly as nasty a fate.

I also think Pyromancer’s Puissance is an interesting concept that could be expanded upon here. Similar high-hanging, snowball-y traits in each tree could offer incentives for focusing an element or two without getting out of hand in Arcana builds.

EDIT: I really like that idea for grandmaster minor traits. There’s an elegance about it. I don’t think I would have gone as far as triple CD, but something that grants increased uptime for your favored elements and increased freedom to dip in and out of others when the need arises.

I use Justice pretty much on cooldown when there’s anyone else nearby. That sudden, massive burn stack is delicious. Otherwise I tend to save it for when something absolutely needs to die right now.

Does Resolve’s active heal eventually become noticeable, or is it trait-proc fodder? My guardian is still pretty low-level and the heal is just disappointingly pathetic.

I find that most of the warrior’s, ranger’s, and guardian’s weapons are kinda… blah. I wouldn’t call them all outright boring, only a handful are that bad, but I got spoiled on engineer/thief/elementalist early on.

As for the guardian, I love the hammer and staff but can’t stand the sword. I actually have the most fun when I can party up and haul out the supportive stuff, so the mace, shield, focus, and staff all get their time. Scepter/shield is a fun combo that I imagine is fairly rare around here, I pair it with staff and it feels like part battlefield general, part watchful protector.

digiowl.9620:

But i have never noticed any slowdown in auto-attacks while chilled, meaning that chill do not really affect mainhand auto-attack skills.

It’s because chill doesn’t slow attack speed, only recharge speed, and autoattacks have no recharge.

Andele.1306:

Haette.2701 – Actually, clerics turn into acolytes if specialized into death and decay, only wizards (and specific sorcerers and druids) can turn into a necro (unless the rule got changed).

Er… what edition is this?

I apparently made a stupid and managed to forget wizards can get ahold of necromancy spells too. I’ve always seen them built out of clerics, so that’s where my memory went.

Nightmare.2815:

Just wondering, what level are you? When I use it I deal hits starting at about 100-200 up to 600-700 on final with crit (at level 72). Also by the end I have about 20 stacks of bleed by the end.(not all from flurry granted), but flurry still increased the bleed stacks I think by around10. It’s no HB but I don’t know how your only hitting a little over 100.

Are you reading the damage numbers correctly? For multi-hit attacks it adds up the total damage dealt by the attack, so that 700 at the end is the damage you’ve dealt up to that point in the flurry.

Also, the immobilize is the important part.

You can hit stealthed mobs, and pretty easily too since most of them barely move. Skelks run to an odd range and can be harder to hit, but it’s still possible.

It is pretty irritating when a mob keeps rapid-firing or laser-blasting me after I’ve gone invisible, seems like stealth doesn’t drop aggro in the middle of attacks no matter how long that one attack lasts. I feel like “fixing” it to instantly break their focus could have unintended consequences in boss fights, but I agree that something could be done there.

Seriously, talk to any named tengu in-game and they all but spell it out for you. They’re very clearly building them up to be a playable race.

That said, I welcome surprises

Good point on Ice Spike.

About Eruption, I know you can change attunements just like with any other channel/cast time, but breaking the cast does stop it from exploding.

Tensei.9748:

Elementalist is hard to balance. I bet a fraction in any direction makes me over powered or over kittened… Eventually they’ll get the math right.

Exactly. Buffing a handful of abilities to make them useful for everyone also buffs them for people who can use everything at once. Elementalist will likely always look UP to the majority of players.

Survivability and condition damage. I’ve been mainlining Arcana and Earth trait points, and I plan on branching off once I’m satisfied with my survivability.

Actually, a brief daze doesn’t sound too overpowering considering how few bolts actually hit. Nothing more than an interrupt though, something like 1/4-1/2 second. Vulnerability would work if the storm actually hit reliably or if it dropped huge stacks of it.

Also I must have won the AoE lottery when I was testing the hailstorm, it’s less accurate than I thought but it still averages 6-7 seconds of chill on small targets.

While I want to see bugfixes before any balance passes, I do have a few thoughts and responses to your ideas.

“In RPG terms, for those who played D&D and stuff, Necromacers are wizards that are adepts of: raising, creating, or summoning undeads.”

In D&D, necromancers are clerics that specialize in magic that’s probably best described as “taboo.” Death, reanimation, torture, disease, evil, that sort of thing. Reanimation is only one of their tools, and nothing there specifies “human-shaped.” That’s just the easiest way to interpret it.

I like that they take a different tack on “undead” for the necromancer, it gets so boring seeing skeletons in every game and I’m sick of zombies lately. Bone horrors are just as much animated flesh and bone as zombies and look ten times cooler, and it makes practical sense if you think about the fact that they can be shaped for different purposes. The shade is a little odd, but again, that’s an underworld creature and follows naturally from control over death.

Buzzkill.9608:

Agreed and we should have known that the day the game was released and I payed for it.

Ideally yes, realistically that’s never going to happen. I do wish they’d get their priorities straight though, nobody cares about holiday events when there’s this many bugs in every class.

Bugfixes and time, that’s all. I’m already convinced ele can do amazing things, I’m just curious how everyone stacks up in an environment where everything is working as written.

I’m sure the obvious answer is the right one, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing some kind of trait or combo that would make them as useful as the others.

In earth attunement the sandstorm causes mass blind and a decent bleed stack, while water’s hailstorm quickly stacks a massive amount of chill on anything in the area. Both of these are on top of a quite respectable damage output. Meanwhile, firestorm and lightning storm have… mediocre damage and a 90% miss rate?

I mean, I wouldn’t expect them all to be precisely equal in usefulness, but that’s a pretty huge difference in utility and power. Can anyone explain this?

Sounds like your guild was full of kittens. Why would you want to be in a guild with a bunch of kittens?

DreamOfACure.4382:

Having to constantly attunement-swap contradicts the point of traits and specialization.

While attunement swapping should have its benefits for maverick jack-of-all-trades type players, sticking to one element should also have its benefits.

I should be able to focus entirely on Fire, and be able to burn through my enemies like butter, just like how Thieves can focus on crit, burst damage, and executioners to cut down targets within 5 seconds.
And I shouldn’t have to swap to Water/Earth just to keep myself alive.

That’s the appeal of concepts like “Master of Fire”.

I disagree that swapping inherently contradicts traits, many of them focus on skill families and effects that aren’t tied to any particular element, and a whole line is dedicated to the act of swapping itself. I do however agree that there doesn’t seem to be enough options available for those who want to run in one attunement a majority of the time, driving up its strengths at the cost of versatility. Pyromancer’s Puissance is the only one that really lives up to that. I’d like to see a “snowball”-y trait or two for every element, preferably high up in the line.

And no, our price of being able to do everything at any given time is that we can’t do it all at once. If you choose to go glass cannon and tunnel-vision fire attunement, you should be appropriate amounts of cannon and glass. A single element should never be good at everything or then there’s little reason to even have the whole attunement mechanic in the first place. You might as well play any old generic mage class at that point. That’s the downside, the upside of course is that you’ll always have the option to sacrifice your DPS for a while in exchange for earth/water’s increased survivability.

Yasashiku.8275:

Just a thought, but maybe we should get an elite that gives us access to an “Arcane” attunement? Could be interesting.

That… I really like that idea. It doesn’t even have to be a bunch of superpowered skills with a massive cooldown, it could be completely on par with the regular attunements. Just having four more minor cooldowns to weave into our fights would be pretty elite.

I have to say, I hope Anet gets off this kick of making elites into “ultimates.” The elites with low cooldowns and unikittenfects that totally change up your gameplay are some of the coolest ones. I miss those.

Conjured weapons not getting weapon stats is going to get fixed eventually, it’s the same deal as engineer kits. They get full stats in PvP due to the amulet setup, and Anet has said they’re working on it in PvE.

Dual-wielding never even crossed my mind, I came over here after playing engineer and assumed they’d be 5-slot weapons like the kits are. That’d actually be a pretty cool trick.

It’s funny because over on the engineer forum they’ve said that elementalist is the fixed version of engineer.

Grass is always greener etc.

They really do need to fix as many bugs as possible before even starting to balance. Balancing a broken game just means it’ll break again when you fix it.