Guild Wars 2

Great analysis of which traits need some love and some good suggestions in most cases about what to do about it. Wholeheartedly endorsed. Hope the devs are paying attention.

The problem in my opinion is not the attunement swapping and the cooldowns that come with it. The problem is the mediocre damage the class puts out.

Alternatively they could go the opposite route and buff our defensive stats and abilities, but I think the much better choice is to keep us squishy and boost our damage instead.

The class was clearly designed with that in mind. I really don’t get what spooked ANet so much during the beta that they had to make it our damage output so weak (admittedly, I never got to try the pre-beta-nerf version of the class).

Something that might work is coding it so you can swap once while in combat, but then you are locked out of swapping until you go out of combat again. That way you could swap once to make a choice on what range you want to take on that fight at, but wouldn’t get the OP (imo) advantage of being able to swap back and forth.

Short answer: Not really.

Less short answer: Not really, but there are some things you can do about it with defensive gear, traits and utilities (at the cost of much needed damage).

In combat swaps might work with a lengthy cooldown, I think 30 seconds wouldn’t be long enough.

The OP comes from the potential of swapping back and forth. With something like a 180 sec cooldown (like an elite skill) you really are only going to swap at most once per fight in most cases. So it becomes a choice of deciding that this is a long range fight and that is a short range fight and swapping accordingly. But no swapping back and forth during a fight, that would definitely be OP.

Actually, now that I think about it, what might work best is the ability to swap once in combat but you are locked out of swapping again until you go out of combat. Perhaps a bit more complicated to code, but would probably be more balanced.

Try it out and decide if you like it better? You can try it out for free in the mists to get a sense before you actually buy real gear for pve and Wv3.

I agree with you, in pve the discrepancies are very noticeable and I really think the ele deserves more damage output.

In pvp the picture is more complicated. The bunker builds can be effective, but even so they are about outlasting your opponent and whittling them down, not about killing them fast or efficiently like some of the other classes can.

I missed the notorious beta nerfing event so I really don’t get what ANet was so afraid of that they decided they had to make ele have the worst survival stats and damage output in the game, all in one class.

I learned not to bother chasing a legendary weapon. So thanks for that!

Do you really expect anyone to help you without context? What class? What build? What gear? What mobs were you fighting?

Downed state is no longer terrible and dagger/dagger set-ups are getting pretty good. Scepter is still mediocre and staff is still a pain solo (but awesome in groups). However, if you are really having that much trouble staying alive you may want to try a way more survival oriented build and gearing strategy. 30 water, 30 arcane, 10 whatever, with, say, power/vitality/toughness gear is a solid choice, for example. Also consider the possibility that the class is just not for you… the squishy is never really going to go away.

The traits you picked are generally fine for a mostly survival oriented build. You might get more millage out of quick glyphs instead of bolt to the heart, it’s your only damage trait and doesn’t fit really.

Or move those points to water or earth. What gear you pick will really end up defining how this build plays, lots of toughness and and vitality will give you a bunker build, or you can go for more offensive stats but still have some nice defensive traits and utilities.

Also, scepter is kind of in a sad shape these days I’m finding. Dagger/dagger has actually gotten pretty good in recent patches for damage, and staff is obviously the ultimate group support weapon, so you may want to consider those alternatives.

Healing power is one of the most awful stats in the game in my opinion. The returns on stacking it are so minimal that I really recommend not over-emphasizing it.

It would probably help you make your build if you changed your mindset from being a “healer” to being a “supporter.”

The Ele has so many great tools to help a party other than just a few heals. We can provide great buffs like protection and regen and lots of might stacks for the whole team. We have great crowd control to mitigate damage in the first place. You’ll be happier with the results if you design your build to bring all these tools to bare rather than just healing.

I like the changes in the last patch, but personally I’m of the opinion that the elementalist could still use an across to board damage buff to most of our abilities.

Alternatively, a rebalance of the ridiculously long cool downs and animation times on what are supposed to be heavy hitters but are really just mediocre damage abilities so we can use them more often might do the trick if ANet continues to be so afraid to let the class off its leash.

The problem is really highlighted for me when I’m running around Orr attunement dancing like a mad man to still take quite a long time to take trash mobs down, when I see classes like a mesmer or thief run in and down them in three or four hits. How that is supposed to be “balanced” I really don’t understand. I never got to try the class in the beta before the major nerf everyone talks about, but it’s clear to me in it’s current state that it just takes way to long to kill things with it relative to most other classes.

If they didn’t have things like this to remove money from circulation prices on the trading post would inflate out of control. It’s a small price to pay to help keep inflation in check.

LOL. You want something new and fresh… as long as it’s exactly like WoW. Has it occurred to you that maybe it’s your expectations that are the problem?

There’s another game you can go to if you love to grind. I hear they even have panda’s now too.

I just want an out of combat swap, for convenience’s sake, to reduce the unnecessary interface micromanagement.

My mindset is that this is the class I find the most fun, even if it most certainly does have a ton of bugs and balance issues that I hope get looked at soon.

I think its intentional. Keep in mind when these spells were designed they came with a lot more damage. So making it hard to land your spikes made some sense. Then came the panicked Beta ele damage nerf, without them bothering to look at our cast times, cool downs and animations to compensate.

Not only do we have a lot of bad traits and few truly synergistic options, but lets not forget the fact that a lot of our traits are extremely buggy. The whole situation is irritating to say the least.

The mesmer took some big hits too, much slower phantasm spam from now on.

Cipher.8657:

Great! Glyph of Renewal is now worthless.

Well, to be fair, it was already mostly useless.

Most of the major traits are nothing to get excited about either. I’d love to see a comprehensive trait overhaul for the entire class.

Stack less condition. Stack more power. Problem solved.

From the sound of it you might like clerics set? Power/toughness/healing. Maybe mix in some gear with vitality and condition damage too?

My advice is to go to the heart of the mists and play some matches with your build using different amulets to get a better feel for which stats work best for you.

AFAIK none of the speed buffs stack. Some are broken and do nothing at all (e.g. windborn dagger).

Ignore the negativity. There’s a perception among some that Elementalists are a bit under-powered, but only you can decide whether you like the class and are having fun with it.

Figure out which weapon set you like and focus on one until you’ve mastered it. Learn how to switch attunements fluidly and combo abilities in your various attunements. I like scepter/dagger for solo for lots of might stacks, but lots of people like staff or dagger/dagger. You can pick up cheap masterwork equipment on the trading post every 5-10 levels to keep your gear up to date. Cheap sigils of bloodlust are also a huge help for more power.

For your first trait points I’d recommend 10 points in fire to start as the extra power will really help with your damage. If you are struggling your next 10 points can go into water or earth to help your defense, or if you are not having issues you can put 10 points in air for more damage. At level 40 when the second tier of traits unlocks you can try more complex trait combos. Personally I would stay away from arcana until higher levels as the stat boosts in the other trees will help you a lot more early on.

Have fun.

Because the elementalist designer put our traits together on a napkin while having way too many drinks at the bar?

I’ve tried six professions at this point and elementalist is by far my favourite playstyle, despite all the annoying bugs. So much fun. So much more engaging.

Stack lots of power and precision. Might stacks help too (assuming you run S/D you can stack might easily). Sigils for more might or precision are good too.

S/D: Fire 4, fire 2, fire 3, arcane blast, earth 4, earth 5 = 15 stacks of might for your entire party.

My opinion is that I really like the core attunement mechanic and I don’t think it needs changing. I think the OPs suggestions, while well-intentioned, would not work out very well if implemented.

If I were ANet, my priorities for fine tuning the elementalist profession would be:

1) Make downed state #2 an interrupt so we can avoid stomps like every other class
2) Fix the many many bugged abilities and traits
3) Rework the traits in general to give better options, more synergy, and to generally work better with the core attunement mechanic instead of against it.

Then we can see where we’re at and reassess.

Try scepter/dagger for solo pve instead of staff. Things die plenty fast once you learn to stack 12+ might boons on yourself consistently.

Pretty good list. I hope the devs are reading and kick it around the office.

Are you guys for real? Anet is focusing on exactly what they said they would: fixing bugs and exploits. There are a lot more of them to fix, so really I wouldn’t expect any systematic attempts at class balancing any time soon.

Give the Chicken Little routine a rest. The sky is not falling.

Looks like fun!

I just want to say that I find that the fact that we can’t use around half our utilities underwater (typically the ones I like using the most) irritates me immensely.

Longer range on the scepter so I can just ditch the staff completely.

OP: it really depends which utilities you use and how offensive or defensive you want to be. For example, if running cantrips, put 30 points in water and pick cantrip traits (optionally also 10 points in fire for the cantrip might trait). If you like signets, 30 in earth works well. If you want to go more offensive, glyphs work well with Air, or you can go 30 fire and get pyro’s puissance for might stacking.

I love the grove, took my breath away the first time. I think it totally fits the sylvari race.

I agree with many points. Something I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet is that a lot of our cooldowns seem excessively high. This perhaps made some sense before the beta damage nerf when we were a lot burstier, but now I think it should be revisited.

Nicomachiavelli.3046:

(Sorry for the tinyurl link – I guess the forum doesn’t like gw2skills.net’s url format)

It’s because of the semicolons that sometimes show up in their generated url links.

igneous.8153:

And this is not a question of patience or faith in ArenaNet. Such horrible profession imbalance was always fixed in a matter of days in GW1. And yet almost a month after release of GW2 we have heard nothing from ArenaNet about this issue. Other classes have gotten buffs and fixes, we got the square root of jack.

I really think this line of argument is grossly unfair. It’s pretty clear to me virtually all the work on the classes right now is in the bug fix category. That some fixes end up buffing or nerfing classes is pretty incidental.

There are still some pretty major bugs in this game that I’m sure ANet is making their top priority, for example some people are still have crash/stability issues, there’s all the broken dynamic events all over the world, major bugs for certain classes (e.g. engineer, necro) problems with the dungeons, all the problems with the trading post, exploits in need of elimination, etc.

Once they get a handle on most of these major issues I’m sure they’ll devote more resources to starting work on a balance pass for all the professions.

For those who don’t want to go the aura route, another option that I think is overlooked a lot is the inscription trait in the air line in combo with a glyph heavy build. You get more crits while also making it pretty easy to keep your core defensive buffs (prot/regen/swift) up consistently. Good synergy with the arcane line for increased buff duration and more buffs on attunement swap. You can add ten points in fire for the burn proc on crit trait for more offense.

For soloing I like Scepter/dagger. For WvW or for playing in a group staff is always a good choice.

Tweaking and balancing the class is not the same thing as simplifying it. People asking for tweaks to the class are not generally asking for it to be simplified or dumbed down. I love the core mechanic and playstyle and fortunately I doubt ANet will make any radical changes here.

I would dearly love, however, to see them take a hard look at our traits and provide some more interesting, synergistic options, particularly more choices that rewards attunement swapping instead of limiting it.

I also think there’s nothing wrong with doing a balance pass on the core stats and ability stats to help our class reach a better damage/survivability ratio and build risk vs. reward outcomes.

I also think they ought to change the #2 downed state root to some kind of interrupt.

I agree power/precision is the way to go on staff. There’s a pretty good argument though for going power/condition on something like S/D though. I did say choose depending on your weapon choice and favourite attunements.

The #2 skill is the most useless thing ever and really needs to be a knockdown or some other form of interrupt.

It’s ridiculous… great, I rooted the guy right on top of me, that will stop his stomp… oh, wait… maybe I can mist form… oh wait, it starts with a long cool down… guess I’ll just hurry up and die then.

Being limited to one range can be a pain. D/D is fun until you get ranged on you you can’t reach. Staff is fun until melee get in your face.

Keep in mind that power/precision does nothing to improve your dots, while condition damage doesn’t improve any of your direct damage. It makes it tough to balance all 3 stats effectively due to this lack of synergy.

Personally I’d say go either power/precision or power/conditions depending on which weapon you are using and which attunements you favour. And round it off with either vitality or toughness as your third stat for survivability.

Going vitality & toughness + either power or conditions is also viable for a tankier, lower damage build. You need to trait to really support your damage type (e.g. dots) as you will be relying on it exclusively.