Guild Wars 2

This is a suggestion for dealing with the complaints about the game being short on Endgame.

The complaint itself is weird, as this game is packed full with amazing content. The Orr temple battles, the Claw of Jormag fight, venturing to lower level areas and fighting meta-event bosses like the Hylek Priestess, all of this meta-events are pretty amazing content which is amazing fun to replay many times.

The problem is, once you have slain any of this meta-event bosses once, you already have the sense of accomplishment over their defeat and you have no incentive to go through that meta-event chain again.

This issue can be very visible in Orr, where a mass of players (including myself) would farm the easy events in Penitent Camp, Shelter’s Gate, Jofast’s Camp for karma and gold, instead of travelling around all 3 areas of Orr and taking over all of the temples.

Why do we focus on the easy events that become a grind pretty soon rather than face the temple bosses? The answer is simple: Meta-event rewards are the same as those easy camp defense events, and as such are the slower route to karma and gold.

I think there’s a potential to easily fix peoples’ complaints about “lack of endgame content” by simply upping the meta-event rewards significantly.

If taking over an Orr temple would grant x3 the amount of gold and karma it currently does, and grant as much as x6 the amount of rewards to players that completed at least 3 meta-event steps rather than joining for the last event only, I believe this will cause people to congregate to meta-events not only when they read “Claw of Jormag is up” on map chat. It will cause players to actively travel around the map and search for more meta-events to complete, which makes for a much more epic experience and will also reward people with shorter amounts of time to spend online.

I believe making this sort of change could drastically affect what people consider is ‘endgame’ in GW2 without eating too much resources, and without affecting the economy too severely.

No it’s not a bunch of clueless ppl, it’s because of rendering issues

It’s a bit more than a rendering issue though. They keep just standing around while taking damage. They don’t try to strafe around even though they know someone is attacking them. They don’t AoE around themselves. They don’t look for the Thief’s name in red to know which direction he is or try to target him with tab.

Guardian greatsword AoE, Elementalist meteor shower and the chill AoE, engineer bombs, there are a lot of ways to deal with someone sneaking around that none of them are using.

That’s a bunch of seriously clueless people. You’d think they’d have one halfway decent greatsword guardian among them.

It is pretty ridiculous at this point. Pretty much most of the top tPvP players agree that the Mesmer is the strongest profession 1vs1 and that they are a must in tPvP at the moment.

Yet you don’t see the Mesmer forums choking with ‘nerf mesmer’ posts like you see here in the Thief forums. When people wish to complain about Mesmer “OPness” they do it on the Structured PvP forums, like they are supposed to.

This forum on the other hand has degenerated to a bunch of foaming at mouth “nerf” posts which is quite unwelcoming to people new to the Thief profession who wish to get some help from their peers.

That really depends if you focus on D/D or P/something. The smart thing to do is use both, each weaponset when apropriate.

People who only focus on D/D and barely use pistol bleeds don’t need much +condition duration since Death Blossom lasts 10 seconds which is quite a long while. Still, they need to make sure their +duration can be divided by 10. Every +10% condition duration is 1 extra second the death blossom bleed will tick. If you have +15%, 5% will be wasted so aim for +20% or +30% for pure D/D.

As a condi thief that does use Pistol as well as D/D I found that a good +condition duration is +50%. It’s not hard to get to, doesn’t require too much traiting (I have 15 points in deadly arts), and you still have plenty of resources left to get your bleeds to tick for 112~ so you don’t sacrifice damage for duration.

It’s important to work with increments of 25% for the Pistol, since it’s base duration is 4 seconds. So +25% means a 5 second bleed and +50% means a 6 second bleed.

Also remember that Superior Sigil of Agony stacks and you can get +20% condition duration by using two of those. I find Carrion equipment better for Condi thief than Rabid because of the pistol – you gain just as much if not more damage from bleeds by extending pistol duration to 6 seconds than you would from gaining 1 extra 5 second bleed on a 2 second cooldown (sigil of earth). Pure D/D builds might prefare +crit chance with superior sigil of earth with shorter condition durations and a chance for extra stacks.

Superior Rune of Divinity is really not good for condition builds. It’s a runeset best used by builds with high power and high crit chance, due to the +crit damage on it.

The reason it’s not good for condition builds is that +% bleed duration is -really- important for condition thieves. Unlike Warriors and Necromancers we don’t have traits that prolong our bleed durations by much, and pistol’s base bleeds duration is 4 seconds.

It’s very important to stack enough bleed duration to take that up to 5 seconds of bleed minimum, and preferably 6 seconds.

I don’t get it. Is this pure trolling or some passive aggressive Ranger QQ?

Shortbow 1 for thief does’t do much damage compared to other weapons. Ranger shortbow 1 inflicts a bleed, so of course it’s lower damage.

Still amusing though – so many calls for nerfing random things on Thief forums by now, next we’ll have a ‘Nerf Aquatic Helmet’ thread.

With a few professions as exceptions, the game generally benefits most offensive characters that do not completely negate defense.

Pure glass cannons with no stealth or clones as defense are a very bad way to spec, as having your armor as less than 2300 would mean you take exponantially increased damage.

So I’d say “normal” characters are the best way to spec, with offense being focused in your build a little more than defense.

Death Blossom still does 1500 direct damage (which can crit up to 3000) plus 1500 more from bleeding, for a pure direct damage build. To thieves that are addicted to 7k+ crits from backstab that doesn’t sound like much, until you take into consideration that it’s a fairly widespread AoE.

Change some of your equipment until you have at least 2300 toughness. Any less and the damage you take is exponentially higher.

Run with 3 cantrips when exploring Orr. They break stun, which means you also snap yourself out of knockbacks much faster when using them, and some of them remove immobilize.

With 3 cantrips and 2400 toughness I have very little trouble traversing Orr on my Elementalist.

Traverse, say, maybe I’m reading too much into things, but from your comment that thieves aren’t useful in condition heavy teams I assume you’re not taking condition thieves into consideration, which leads to another assumption on my part that you don’t find condition thieves too useful in tournament play.

I was wondering as a condition thief that so far only plays in PuG games, if I were to join tournament matches with my current build – what role should i try to take on and what team compositions I might be useful for, if at all?

It doesn’t work that way at all. You only get the bonus on using an elite if you have 6 runes in your armor. If you have 5 runes, it will do zylch on elite activation.

This is the last time I’ll be responding to you, so please, read very carefully – it’s silly to stick a condition damage only ability in the middle of a hotbar with 4 abilities designed to deal direct damage, or directly support the dealing of direct damage. Of course you can find uses for your other abilities, but they are being -underutilized due to poor design-. Reread the part I blocked out, because thats the key.

It leads to builds that either don’t use (power/crit doesnt use DB, unless your desperately trying to dodge a HB with no stunbreaks and no endurance) or underutilizes your other abilities. I’m glad you like the crap damage heartseeker does in a condi build, and you’ve found ways to explain how awesome your 500 damage CnD is (so you can backstab, right?), but you’re still ignoring the main issue. Until you acknowledge it, you’re just trolling.

You are the person who keeps blaming people who disagree with you with ‘failing’ and ‘trolling’. I keep explaining how different skills have different functions other than damage, and you just say ‘but they don’t do enough damage’.

I love your engineer example of P/P and your insistence on it. Their auto-attack does 2 seconds of bleed. They have a 2 second poison on a 10 sec cooldown. They have 3 sec blind+confuse on 15 sec cooldown. And they have 2 second burning.

This means that this 4 skills, used in succession, barely catch up to one use of Death Blossom that lands 3 bleed stacks that last 10 seconds.

An engineer that gets +50% condition duration will only earn one more tick on their conditions. A condition thief will get death blossom that lasts 15 seconds or more.

Condition removals are of course important to fight a condition thief, but they do not nullify them. Almost all condition removal abilities classes have only remove one condition, with a possible three removed on a 60 seconds cooldown. That’s a lot of time to stack conditions on people. And that’s why you apply poison to them, and weakness, and cripple, on top of the bleeding. You burn people’s condition removals out and you take them down.

A D/D condition thief specced well is a destructive force. Thankfully not many people realize it yet.

Telenn.6945:

- public events that dont scale well. going from sickeningly easy in large groups to almost impossible to duo.

Got two characters to L80 and full exotics and barely ever ran into event scaling problems.

- game client that cant handle large fight. ghost armies appearing out of thin are.

This will probably be tweaked, though I still prefare it to the alternative of FPS hitting less than 1, which was what really happened in Warhammer Online.

- unbalanced classes

You’re comparing this game’s balance to WAR’s? Have you ever seen that video of 3 bright wizards wiping out 24 enemy players?

- alot of worldvsdoor

Was a common problem in Beta, I rarely see it happening on live.

- wvw dominated by aoe

Again, not even 1% as bad as it was on WAR. In WAR you’d be killed in 2 seconds by AoEs from a single caster. In GW2 the “worst” AoE is on the staff elementalist, and every single one of their AoEs telegraph they are about to land at least 1 second before they start doing damage, making them easily avoidable.

evilapprentice.6379:

All the ones I said. You’re rather far off the point. If you’re building up condition damage to run DB in D/D, you’re sacrificing the effectiveness of everything other ability – the poison from lotus strike ticks 1-2 times, so you’re not using it for damage (its a utility). Your heartseeker does garbage damage because you’re power is mid-range and you have no crit (or, you have great crit and kitten power if you run the rabid ammy). Cloak and Dagger is also laughable – the damage is not great, and all you’re using stealth for is getting close to your target so you can DB again, because backstab does kitten damage in the build.

Mixing and matching of abilities is stupid – we can’t build to please both, so we’re sacraficing some to most of our hotbar whenever we pick a focus, and I’d like to see that fixed. Look at Engi’s pistol/pistol – It screams condition damage, and guess what- not a single ability there is out of place. Why can’t we have that?

You are missing the point. A condition build does not need every single skill to do condition damage. They need every skill to be useful to them in some way.
D/D skill one’s poison does not tick for 1 or 2 with a condition spec, it ticks for 3 and stacks with poison for 16 seconds from steal, not to mention the added weakness.
Heartseeker is a gap closer.
Dancing Daggers cripples 4 opponents. You don’t use it for the damage, you use it to slow targets that are running away, or to prep your own retreat, and as an added bonus your +condition duration lengthens the cripple effect.
Cloak and Dagger stealths you. Of course it has bearing on the conversation. The more stealths you have, the more time you break your opponent’s targetting on you.

As a condition spec I rely primarily on Death Blossom and Pistol’s auto attack, and yet there isn’t a single skill I never use. The trick is when to use them.

Your engineer example has one big flaw – it stacks conditions that last 2~3 seconds (without speccing for more) while death blossom stacks 3 bleeds that last 10 seconds (15 in my build), is an AoE, and also an evade. Adding more skills that would add even more condition damage on top of this one ability that does more damage than all of Engineer’s P/P skills combined would be silly OP.

You don’t have to only use your auto attack to cause perma weakness. As a condition build you use death blossom for example, and when you’re out of initiative you use the auto attack. You get enough initiative? Another death blossom and back to auto attack. This means you maintain 9~15 stacks of bleed on the target along with perma-poison and perma-weakness (this is a PvE example, mind you). A little +condition duration (as well as this trait) makes sure the weakness and poison durations will not run out.

The trait is fine. With a bit more help from runes/sigils it really helps bump the 2 second poison on dagger’s auto attack to 3 seconds poison, which makes it easy to maintain constantly.

Also, if you make someone run out of their condition removers (which you should aim to do as a condition specced thief), you can get a 16+ second poison running on them using steal, which means even if they try to run away from the fight they’ll have a terrible time trying to heal up.

Dariya.9380:

A thief that does 14k backstab crit has 1900 toughness (meaning he takes x1.5 damage than he would if he had 2500), and around 10k health.

Did you mean 900 toughness? Because 1900 is way too high for a glassy high-damage Thief. My build/setup is very glass, maxed for damage output and I have 966 toughness.

I actually meant armor (toughness+defense). I keep confusing the terms. Thanks for catching that, I’ll edit.

evilapprentice.6379:

LiuliRenai.3928:

This threads always ends up with Direct Damage thieves wanting even more damage than they already have at the expense of Condition thieves.

No.

Fail on every count – I’m a condition thief who wants my abilities to make sense. I’m sorry that you like your DB build, but its silly that of your 5 weapon skills, 2 are completely useless, and 1 is severly underused – DB is the ONLY WAY you can do damage.

Fail on every count – it is not your skills that don’t make sense, it’s probably your build. On D/D my skill 1 applies both poison and weakness for more than 3 seconds and can be stacked to always be up on the target. My steal also adds to the poison and weakness durations. Great for PvE, great for PvP in some situations.

Heartseeker as a condition thief is not the hard hitting ability it is for direct damage thieves, but with Carrion gear it still does a good chunk of damage for low health people, and more importantly it’s still a charge.

Skill 4 is a cripple, which has it’s duration extended by my +condition duration.

Skill 5 stealths me.

So which are this skills which are supposedly not used in condition builds?

This threads always ends up with Direct Damage thieves wanting even more damage than they already have at the expense of Condition thieves.

No.

A thief that does 14k backstab crit has 1900 armor (meaning he takes x1.5 damage than he would if he had 2500), and around 10k health.

TheBob.9863:

Shredicus and LiuliRenai you people are ridiculous whiners that have no intention of responding to this post instead came here to whine about thief’s burst or PvP overpoweredness. Please just get lost or make your own whine threads in regards to that aspect, this isn’t about PvP or burst.

You are hilarious. I play a thief, it’s my class. Acknlowledging that my class is quite strong and might end up with some tweaks in the future <> whining. You should adapt that attitude, things wouldn’t seem so dire when changes will come, then. If changes miraculously won’t come? I won’t care, I’m a thief.

Do notice how my previous post very intentionally used words like ‘a bit’ and ‘slight’.

Memser, Thief, and Guardian are 40% of the professions in this game.

I play as a thief and finally reached level 80 and it was a complete pain in thekitten The thief is by far the most underpowered class

As a thief farming for money in Orr… You have got to be kidding me.

It takes 4 seconds to unload 20k damage worth of DoTs on large mob groups and then you kite and dodge as you wait for stuff to die. How are we underpowered?

To the OP, it’s good in low levels to pick up some +toughness and +vitality (also good in higher levels really), as well as defensive utilities like Blinding Powder.

This game’s mechanics punish pure glass cannons severely by exponantially spiking damage done to any profession with zero toughness investment.

I think the thief forums are in pre-emtpive crying mode.

We know we can stack up a bit too much damage, we know some slight nerfs will be coming, so our subconscious guides us to cry about every tiny slight coming our way in the hopes it will somehow lessen the impact of future balance changes.

Reynfall.1547:

http://t.qkme.me/35iks8.jpg

Ok, the original poster has shown his debate level with this post. Might as well lock the thread.

Doing any of this will make the skill OP. As a condition thief that mainly uses Death Blossom I can tell you this skill is already quite devestating. In PvE it’s the thief’s best AoE and you can destroy large groups of mobs solo in Orr. In sPvP winning 2v1s with it is not uncommon, which is rather huge in this game.

If you are going to use Death Blossom you simply need to build your character accordingly – I recommend a pistol on weapon swap so you’ll have more bleeds while your initiative regenerates.

Stop kicking kittens, John. D:<

Actually WoW doesn’t do this and nor does LoL or DotA2 amoung many other popular games. It’s is total crap what Anet is pulling. If I make a guide for their dungeons and people watch and watch the ADs for my guide(aka intellectual property) why shouldn’t I get compensated

You are seriously misinformed.

Here’s a breakdown of exactly what the situation is, and what it has actually always been, given by a youtube person that does a lot of GW1 and GW2 videos, WoodenPotatoes:

http://youtu.be/byg3emEocio

Improvisation removes cooldowns to all skills of one type when you steal. For my utility skills i picked two deceptions and one signet.

The problem is that when I have one or both of my deceptions on cooldown, stealing will only remove the cooldown 50% of the time. I am guessing this is due to the trait trying to remove the cooldown from the signet, which I almost never use for it’s active ability.

This trait is very situational as is for a trait requiring at least 20 points. It should be changed so it will only remove the cooldown of a utility skill line that has at least one of it’s skills on cooldown.

The underwater skills the Thief gets on both the Spear and Speargun are lacking. What’s worse, they only fit thief builds that focus on single target direct damage.

There is no AoE skill besides the poison line escape which isn’t really much of an AoE or a poison.

The only way to stack builds is the auto attack on Speargun, which is of course a very weak and short duration build since it is an auto-attack.

Please add a viable AoE skill and a proper bleed skill to either the Spear or the Speargun.

I tested this after reading this thread and KaiserCX is correct. The bonus movement does work in combat.

It’s easy to test – aggro a weak mob and run away from it, and activate your signet’s active effect while running. You will notice a visible slowdown in your running speed while the signet is on cooldown.

While I find Elementalist to be a profession which has serious problems (especially in sPvP), I disagree with this thread.

The Trident imho is the best Elementalist weapon, offering a ton of damage and a lot of CC. The thing is that unlike other Elementalist weapons it’s auto attacks are purposefully weak. So do not rely on them. Use all your abilities and switch attunements constantly and you’ll always have something off of cooldown, almost all of which are amazing skills.

(I posted the following on another thread as well:)

The synergy between different skills in each attunement is something I wish other weapons had (especially staff).

I tend to switch fire→water→lightning→back to fire again, using my auto attack very little, as this switching means you’ll always have something off cooldown.

Fire’s skills do excellent underwater AoE and burning damage. Water has an incredible charge move that does immense damage, a powerful and short cooldown heal that also gives regeneration and works on your party, an escape backwards skill that leaves a defensive ice wall behind you that you can explode. Lightning has two excellent CCs and a weird teleport bubble that seriously confuses your foes. Earth is bleeds focused, yet offers even another powerful CC.

How to fix the OP’s stealth issues:

1) Blinding Powder.
2) Spec into the trait that offers 2 second stealth on steal, and the trait that extends your stealth by 1 second.
3) Spec into the trait that renews any of one type of your utility skills when you steal, and use it with mostly deception skill. This way it will renew the cooldown on your Blinding Powder when used right.

Works pretty excellently for me in both PvE and sPvP, and I’m not even a backstab build.

Cluster Bomb’s tooltip says it should stack 3 bleeds, yet it only stacks one. Surprised this wasn’t mentioned with all the attention the skill is getting here.

In regards to Tridents I think people undervalue them. They see they have weak auto attacks and fixate on that.

Yet I think the Trident is actually the best Elementalist weapon. Almost all of the skills are excellent, and the synergy between different skills in each attunement is something I wish other weapons had (especially staff).

I tend to switch fire→water→lightning→back to fire again, using my auto attack very little, as this switching means you’ll always have something off cooldown.

Fire’s skills do excellent underwater AoE and burning damage. Water has an incredible charge move that does immense damage, a powerful and short cooldown heal that also gives regeneration and works on your party, an escape backwards skill that leaves a defensive ice wall behind you that you can explode. Lightning has two excellent CCs and a weird teleport bubble that seriously confuses your foes. Earth is bleeds focused, yet offers even another powerful CC.

I see myself constantly switching atunments with staff and that’s what you are supposed to with it, you talk like you should keep yourself in one attunment, that’s not the idea.

Actually what I am trying to get at is that I also think a DPS specced Elementalist should be switching attunements during combat, or at least get some benefit out of switching attunements. Right now the situation is that a Staff elementalist that is already in fire will lose half their DPS (if not more) when they switch attunements and be locked out of most of their damage for 15 seconds for very little gain.

Also you are heavily underestimating weakness, it’s a great condition in pve.

I think Weakness can be a good debuff when it lasts more than 1 second. Lasting 1 second means you constantly need to maintain it with your auto-attack, which does very poor damage.

I’m not sure what use to it there is when it only affects a single target in PvE and doesn’t work on Champion. If there are some situations where people find it useful, I would like to know what they are.

Yukishiro.8792:

The original post made me cry. The idea that earth is the worst element and useless is crazy. Earth is one of the best elements in staff. Weakness on auto attack is great in a lot of situations. Eruption allows you to easily stack 14 stacks of bleed on a very large radius. Shockwave and the earth4 snare give you tremendous control.

Repeating myself a bit but ah well.

Weakness is not very good when it only lasts 1 second and forces you to endlessly spam one ability. Also, who is it useful against? It’s not useful in PvP where most people have high crits and/or condition damage to easily counter it. It’s not useful against PvE mobs since it only hits one target. It doesn’t work at all against Champions. This leaves Veteran fights, which are usually best to burn down with fire quick anyway while your earth elemental is still alive to soak up the hits.

Erruption takes about two seconds to cast before it takes effect and it telegraphs itself quite visibly and loudly making getting out of the way immensly easy. You can’t hit well with it in PvP, and in PvE Lava Font is much easier to hit with, starts doing damage faster, and also does a lot more damage.

Unsteady Ground has a tiny AoE area that can easily be dodged. Mostly useable for bottleneck in PvE, yet I usually just use Static Field or Frozen Ground for those as they work better.

Shockwave is sort of nice, but has a long cooldown.

Best class in WvW, worst class in sPvP.

Elementalists are probably the worst class to be in sPvP.

However, they are still pretty decent if not good in every other aspect of the game. I’m not sure what the problem is. Grinding the events in Orr at L80 it is rather fun to see my AoEs crit for 2500 on 10+ mobs every second, and Cantrips offer me a lot of survivability.

Redfeather.6401:

I just want to comment on Air.

Chain Lightning has huge range. It hits targets that aren’t even close to one another. It’s jumping nature makes it too difficult to bother avoiding and I’ve never seen groups even bother. It also hits the primary target twice if there is only one other target in range.

I was also liking this ‘hitting primary target twice’, especially when hitting ranger->pet->ranger. However even if i hit the same target twice, I would only meet the amount of damage one Fireball does, while missing on the extra damage from Flame Burst. I at times use Air at the start of the fight, but once all the CC are on their long cooldowns it’s time to ditch it until I need a fourth immobilize break.

Static Field doesn’t telegraph itself. It pops around a player with no warning. If that player is being focused fired on, then every projectile adds vulnerability to them. It’s essentially a nasty trap. It’s also a good way to stack swiftness when comboing with blast finishers.

So let’s say that player was unable to dodge out of the Static Field and ends up with 10 stacks of vulnerability. That means he takes +10% more damage. It would still be better to just DPS him down with fire as you are at least 20% of your team’s DPS (in sPvP tournaments in this example). Unless you are a support build of course – Support do get a lot out of stance dancing as I mentioned above, it is a shame most of it comes from traits and not skills though.

DonQuack.9025:

Also “It’s almost never a good idea to switch attunements mid combat, as you’ll lose most of your DPS.”

Did you just say that? You seem to be stuck on dps is the only way to do things

Actaully I did mention support builds.

In my personal opinion Staff Elementalist can either go heavy DPS or Support. If you go Support, you offer a lot of amazing buffs to your party through the Elemental Attunement trait. You can also use combo fields as you switch attunements for their passive buffs anyway, and it is a nice addition.

However Elementalist’s combo fields aren’t that great, with the exception of Water Attunement’s. Yes, I am disrespecting the Blast, I haven’t found it as useful as people claim considering I’m locked 10~15 seconds out of my full DPS. And Water Attunement’s useful skill are on a 20 to 40 seconds cooldown.

(Continued. I ran out of text room, but figured it’s alright to post a lengthy message as I’ve put most of the text in spoiler tags.)

Water Attunement:

Water Attunement is mostly useful as a starter, or when you step out of combat boundaries to heal yourself quick and go back into the fight. Staying in this attunement mid combat is only useful for Support specs. However, support specs are mostly useful due to the Elemental Attunement trait granting powerful boons on a short cooldown, and those boons dwarf all the abilities in Staff’s Water Attunement.

Fire Attunement:

Every single skill in Fire Attunement is not only excellent, it works in unison with the other skills in Fire Attunement as well. The short cast times on Lava Font and Flame Burst makes this abilities very useful as you can cast them while kiting and dodging. Burning retreat gives you a small edge of survivability that frankly none of the Air Attunement CCs offers with their long cooldowns. Unless you are support specced, there is very little reason to attune out of Fire in the middle of combat, as it would mean losing at least 50% of your DPS for 10~15 seconds.

And this is a problem. The Elementalist’s profession mechanic is Attunements. Yet having double the skills of other classes means nothing if those skills have cooldowns which are twice as long (Gust vs. Ranger’s Point Blank Shot), and/or are badly synergizing with other skills in their attunement. This is a problem that mostly plagues Staff, other Elementalist weapons fair much better.

Ironically the weapon which I personally feel offers great skills that work well with one another and rewards you for switching attunements to make the most of all your skills is the Trident. I wish the Staff was more like it.

Staff has a few problems. Mainly it’s fire skills are better than the skills of other attunements to the point where it’s only beneficial to to use other attunements as either combat starters or for escape. It’s almost never a good idea to switch attunements mid combat, as you’ll lose most of your DPS.

There are of course Staff support builds which work excellent with attunement switching but consider this – the best abilities of both Water and Earth in those builds come from the Elemental Attunement trait in Arcana, rather than skills within the attunements themselves. A support build that can grant their team 7 seconds of regeneration, haste and protection every 9 seconds can just switch attunements about, using the actual skills of the attunements is the smaller bonus.

Another problem of Staff is that as an AoE centric weapon, all of it’s Ground Target AoEs (with the exception of Static Field) will not work immediately. At least a second will pass before their damage will tick. It would have been fine if at least one damaging AoE started working immediately, but with all of them delay actually doing AoE damage with this AoE weapon is quite uncommon in sPvP, where people can see the obvious tells of an incoming AoE and just move sideways. Necros and Rangers do not have that problem with their Marks and Traps.

There are problems with individual skills as well and how they work inside of their attunements, especially in Air and earth:

Air Attunement:

(Individual skills critique is offered in the spoiler tags.)

Air Attunement supposedly offers CC to the elementalist, but the cooldowns on all of the CC is very long, and only Gust is truely useful. Time spent in Air trying to CC players or mobs is time that you could have spent doing a lot more damage in fire attunement.

Earth Attunement

Overall Earth Attunement is the worst Staff has to offer. The AoE bleeds while none of the other skills do condition damage, making it work badly in any spec. There is no real attack skills in this attunement with the exception of the telegraphed AoE either.

All Elementalist Elite Skills are pretty terrible.

The Tornado does not only force you to move into close range as a squishy ranged profession, you can also be immobilized while in Tornado. That’s not only a sPvP problem, a lot of mobs in Orr will immobilize you.

So you stand there stuck in Tornado form, immobilized, can’t heal, can’t use utility skills… Yeah, it’s not a good Elite.

The one saving grace of Tornado is Whirpool, it’s underwater version. For some reason I can’t understand, Whirpool’s damage hits are actually consistently once per second, while Tornado’s seems to randomly only hit once in 1~4 seconds.

So the only good Elementalist Elite is the underwater one… Which is currently bugged and does not work outside of sPvP.

The passive traits Sunspot (15 points in Fire Magic) and Electric Discharge (15 points in Air Magic) are not only incredibly weak and a waste of a trait. They actually do the player a diservice. Earthen Blast (15 points in Earth Magic) at least has it’s cripple effect.

The problem is that when you are switching attunements out of combat, which often happens when elementalists switch to Air to cast Windborne Speed while they travel, this traits would activate and aggro all nearby mobs. So now you end up with mob attention on you, and in combat speed instead of non combat speed, when you meant to travel elsewhere.

This is a problem everywhere in PvE, and especially in Orr.

The damage this traits do is also ridiculously negligible. There is no point for them to exist, as this damage never does a spot of differance. While other professions sometimes have amazing passive traits (Engineer), most Elementalist passive traits do not add much to the profession.