Guild Wars 2

maddoctor.2738:

Very nice trait list here, excellent work Creslin ^^

A small typo problem: Burning Rage is a minor trait (Grandmaster) not a Major

About Zephyr’s Boon, I might sound like a total noob here but how do you keep perma-fury on?

Perma-Fury can be attained by having at least 5 points in Arcana (you get 2 seconds of Fury whenever you swap attunements) and then Zephyr’s Boon in D/D. The more boon duration you’ve got, the better (I usually run with 30 Arcana, Superior and Major runes of the Water, Superior Runes of the Monk; I’m all about the boon durations). So then you just swap attunements often and use your auras (shocking and frost aura in D/D) when appropriate, and it’s easy to get permanent fury.

Heck yes, I can finally roll with the most obnoxious color combinations possible, and people will be able to both see and appreciate being beaten by someone who looks like Rainbow Brite vomited all over them.

Toversletje.9345:

JonPeters.5630:

Can I start? Icy Mist. This trait is really bad and should be merged with Soothing Wave to make room for a fall damage reduction trait.

this skill was sooooo much better in the beta. anyway mistform is primarely used to avoid damage so why would you stay close to the damage source? its useless yes

Personally, I usually use my time in Mist Form to heal myself. It gives me a bit of time to do that without interruption, which is extremely useful. If I can also damage and chill enemies while I’m doing that, then all the better.

Er. Mah. Gerd.

Quit bickering about the balanced for attunement swapping thing. We don’t have weapon swaps, many of our weapon skills appear to be less effective and on longer cooldowns because of our increased access to other skills, and there’s an entire trait line dedicated to swapping. Certainly, some parts of us were balanced with attunement swapping in mind. Other parts of us didn’t seem to take it into account when being created, and those parts are generally perceived as cruddy, lacking zazz.

Fall reduction traits are not worthless to everyone. They are quite helpful in WvW, as those maps tend to feature many cliffs that elementalists have a tough time with.

MethodicMockingbird.6520:

I disagree with most of these points.

1. For the most part, yes, that’s true. However, I’ve seen some Ele’s that stay in Fire and just burn things and that’s all they do and it works. If they get into a dangerous situation, they either run or die, but isn’t that always the case?

2.Disagree completely. I feel no need to spec into Arcana at all; not for cooldown reduction, not for shiny boons, not for dodge finishers.

3.Pretty much agree.

4. Disagree; We have plenty of builds, and they all work; some just can’t handle being “different”.

5.Again, Disagree. Specced in any direction an Ele will work; they’re fluid and versatile, one of (if not the most) the most versatile classes in the game.

6.Disagree. Best in what way? Provide some proof or reasoning, otherwise, all you could be meaning is that D/D is the best build for close-combat and movement, which is true.

7.Agree… Until you meet those Attunement-specific Ele’s (and believe me, they’re out there)

8.Um… Not sure. I don’t play Scepter often, so this don’t affect me very much.

9.I agree partially with this, except, you CAN drop the weapon, and it always spawns an extra for any friends that might need/want to use it. So it has its uses.

10.Agree.

Here’s the thing, you can go against the conventional wisdom and not swap attunements, you can use those traits that help a specific attunement, you can use weapons other than D/D, you can stay away from the Arcana trait line, you can refuse to make an auramancer build, you can gear for something other than survivability, it’s all possible. What I’m largely saying, though, is that if you do any of these things, you won’t be as good as you would had you done them. By making any of those choices, you’re essentially hobbling yourself. That shouldn’t be true, which is what all those statements are saying, but it sadly is.

From what I see, you actually agree with the sentiment of all those statements, you just don’t accept the reality they spell out.

And if you say “I’m not in some auramancer spec and I do fine” without having actually tried said auramancer spec, then you can’t really comment, can you? I thought I was doing fine. I went 0/30/10/0/30 D/D, focusing on crits. I could dish out a lot of damage, but not as much as some other professions like Warrior or Thief. At the same time, I couldn’t survive as well as either a warrior or thief. It was most noticeable once I got into Orr or did dungeons. Melee wasn’t a thing I could survive doing in WvW.

Then I bit the bullet and tried a 0/10/10/20/30 auramancer build (before the EA nerf), and I never looked back. I was flat out better than before, and not just by a little bit. All those things I couldn’t do before suddenly became within reach. I wasn’t faceplanting constantly, enemies weren’t singling me out as the easiest to kill (aggro in this game isn’t determined purely by damage). I could contribute more in every situation.

So yes, you can do other things, but the problem is why would you? Some twisted sense of wanting to be unique? If you believe that’s worth torturing yourself over, then go for it. For the rest of us, we’d like more options for our characters that allow us to be just as viable. We would LOVE for what you’re saying to be true, but it’s just not.

5. Elementalists do better speccing for survivability than damage. Who’da thunk it, eh? Elementalists make great bunker builds because of the many ways in which we can heal ourselves. At the same time, our damage specs are sorely lacking in cannon to make up for the huge amounts of glass they are.

6. Dagger/Dagger is currently our best weapon loadout. Before the EA nerf, Staff and D/D were at least on equal footing, but that’s no longer the case. Scepter isn’t terrible, but it could use sprucing up in a few places, and Focus is used least of all.

7. Many of our major traits, especially the ones that enhance a specific attunement, aren’t very good. You’ll find that the traits that show up most often in builds are the ones that work across attunements. The ones that enhance a specific attunement rarely ever show up at all. The reasoning behind this is because, if we’re supposed to be switching attunements often, then what good is a trait that only works with one attunement? Certainly not as good as a trait that works with all attunements, that’s for sure.

8. Shatterstone (Water Scepter #2) sucks and we’re not sure why it was nerfed for release. Seriously, what? It was bad during beta back when its cooldown and cast time were one second. Then you doubled both of those? Screw that. The thing takes so long to explode that it really only hits stationary targets. The thing takes so long to cast that our time is better spent doing anything else. If the skill suddenly vanished, replaced by nothing, then nobody would care because nobody uses it. Having it is already a lot like not having a skill at all.

9. Conjures are sub-par. The main problem with conjures is this: We give up 21 skills (including the utility slot) in order to gain access to 5. Those 5 had better be pretty amazing in order to make up for the loss of all our other skills, offering to do things our profession could never do otherwise. That’s not the case, though. Conjures need to go in one of two directions: 1. Something you can whip out, fire off a few skills and then drop and be satisfied. Frost Bow is currently at this point (with its #4 and 5), though we wouldn’t argue with a bit more zazz. 2. Something worthy of replacing all our other skills, something that completely transforms us and what role we take in battle.

10. We’d appreciate better Elite skills. Glyph of Elementals is nice, but that’s the only one I can say that about. Tornado is very much like Shatterstone in that using it in any situation is sub-optimal because our time is better spent doing other things. It is a hindrance, a burden that we would not willingly place upon ourselves. Fiery Greatsword is better than Tornado, but it suffers the same problem as all the conjures.

So anyways, those are the ones I could think of at the time. Feel free to add more or voice any disagreements with what I wrote. I’ve done quite a bit of reading on these forums, though, so I think that these 10 statements pretty accurately reflect our collective opinion on various elementalist issues.

LightningLockey.5938:

Elementalist was never good since the game first came out. I heard the Elementalist was a great class to play in beta though. When did you last play as an Elementalist?

Elementalists can be good, but that’s mostly limited to a few builds (like a d/d auramancer, which is extremely good). You basically have to be survivability-focused these days. Speccing for raw damage output won’t get you nearly as far.

Nimraphel.7819:

snippy snip

I’m mostly just sarcastically pointing out that many people, yourself included, are being a bit overly-dramatic about defending the skill. The thread started out with people saying it was merely balanced, but then others stepped in apparently trying to convince us that it sucks when it quite clearly doesn’t.

You yourself, after pointing out that nobody used warriors in high-level play, called it “weak”, implied it had low damage and then went into a tirade about the multitudinous counters to it that absolutely everyone has and finished by calling it “impotent”. It certainly sounds a lot like you’re trying to convince us that it sucks. It’s a little ridiculous.

The one thing I wasn’t kidding about is that nobody would shed a tear if Shatterstone was nerfed. Having it is already a lot like not having a skill at all, so making it worse wouldn’t change a thing.

SecondtoNone.7549:

Eles have a trait that turns on shocking aura when they get stunned.

It’s an air grandmaster trait, though, so don’t expect to see it very often.

So if the ability is already worthless/useless/weak, so easily countered, then that must mean that nobody builds around it any more. It’s a non-skill like the Elementalist skill Shatterstone. That must also mean that nobody will then mind if it gets nerfed, right?

OH WAIT, no, it’s not like that at all.

Either it’s so bad that nerfs to it are irrelevant and thus not worth arguing over or the people who are saying it’s awful are wrong about its effectiveness.

The elemental, I feel, is pretty worth using in most situations. Being able to choose from 4 different elementals definitely enhances its utility. It’s good for providing just that little bit extra that we need to be able to do something we otherwise couldn’t.

The problem is that it’s really the only one of our elite skills worth using.

Fiery Greatsword blows. Each attack it has is pretty decent, but the whole package is disjointed and weird. The main problem is that it replaces our abilities with something that’s only pretty decent instead of enhancing our abilities with something that’s pretty decent. The latter would be fine, the former is pretty bad.

Tornado is hilariously bad. The only reason to ever use it is as a joke. The ability to blind a bunch of things periodically is okay, but it throws stuff out of its AoE and removes the rest of our abilities. Again, replacing everything we do with something that’s pretty okay is not the same as enhancing the rest of our abilities with something that’s pretty okay. I can blind everything in an AoE with Glyph of Storms, and that doesn’t remove all my other abilities. Glyph of Storms > Tornado.

Whirlpool is okay because I honestly don’t miss my underwater skills nearly as much and the damage is rather good. The huge increase to all our stats also counts for something.

Okay, after having tried an auramancer build out, I can now say I sorta understand why RTL isn’t a leap finisher.

I’m on the fence as to whether giving D/D more ways to give itself auras would be overpowering or not. Giving us more options for the leap finisher really wouldn’t as it would just loosen up the attunement dancing order. You have to go fire->earth as of now; would being able to go fire->air be too much? Probably not, IMO.

Now, if we make the changes I suggested, then we’re able to go water->air or water->earth. Is that too much? Maybe.

Mostly, my criticisms do stand after this experience. I still do wish we had more types of other finishers. It was nice when Dust Devil was a whirl finisher, though I don’t think we really need more finishers in Earth.

I rotate through the attunements, spamming DoTs and condition damage skills and floats/sinks/cripple. Tidal Wave is used as often as possible.

Underwater is just so weird for elementalists since positioning matters so little and there’s no combos. We have a lot of CC, though, and can stop our opponent from attacking us for a decent percentage of the time.

Whirlpool is awesome, of course. Very different from what Tornado is like.

Heimlich.3065:

MrQuizzles.6823:

This appears to have been fixed in yesterday’s patch. At the very least, the tooltip reports a 60-second cooldown when you have the Cantrip Mastery trait outside of PvP. I didn’t time it to see how long it actually took.

Turn on the option to display skill cooldowns, enable Cantrip Mastery and activate Mist Form. In PvE areas, the cooldown timer starts at 75 seconds.

This really isn’t that hard.

Yes it is, you shush.

The Lightning Fields are less obvious, unfortunately. There aren’t any skills that we could easily tack a lightning field onto such that it would make any thematic sense. Some rejiggering is required. What we could do is give us more finishers in the attunement, though.

Air Attunement’s main themes are high single-target damage, hard CC, and mobility. More Lightning Fields would work towards this theme perfectly. More finishers could send us in a more versatile direction.

Lightning Surge (Staff #2) – This isn’t a bad skill. It’s a better skill than most people think, actually, but that’s largely the problem. The fact that the blind is an AoE isn’t very obvious (it’s almost impossible to tell how big it is) and doesn’t come into play very often. So how about if it put down a lightning field as well?

Again, the field itself wouldn’t even have to do anything. It would merely exist. Make it exist for 3 seconds, give it the same radius as the AoE blind. This would be one step towards making Air Staff more attractive.

Windborne Speed (Staff #4) – I’m mostly just throwing this out there, but what if this was a whirl finisher? We don’t get many of those. I think having one in what would otherwise be an easily glossed-over buff that’s only very rarely used in combat would be pretty awesome.

Swirling Winds (Focus #4) – This is a situational skill, but it’s pretty awesome in the situation it’s good for. What could possibly make it more awesome for more general use is turning it into a whirl finisher. I mean, the thing is called “Swirling Winds”, it screams whirl finisher. It’d give me more cause to look at /Focus when not in a projectile-heavy environment.

Ride the Lightning (Dagger #4) – Magnetic Grasp is a leap finisher. Why isn’t this? Why can’t we have any finishers in Air attunement? We certainly don’t have many fields.

Lightning Grasp (Dagger #2) – If this skill was changed to be exactly like Chilling Burst but with weakness instead of chill and put down a lightning field for 3-seconds, would anyone miss the old skill? Methinks probably not.

So yeah, these changes wouldn’t really fix our offense problem, but they also wouldn’t rekindle the problematic bunker build that was very deliberately nerfed recently. What they would do is add some extra utility and versatility to some otherwise overlooked and underused skill sets.

Water’s main themes are low damage, healing, vulnerability and chill. It’s more utility and soft cc than damage. The skills we currently have mostly represent that theme pretty well. Some of them just happen to be rather lackluster/sucky. The ones I think need the most love:

Shatterstone (Scepter #2)- This got nerfed (seriously?) for release, and I’m pretty sure nobody knows why. It wasn’t good before the nerf, and it’s even worse after. The thing can’t hit a moving target, does too little damage, and takes up too much of our time to be really worthwhile if we want to use it to stack vulnerability. So what do we do?

We have it put down an Ice Field while it’s charging up. Any foe who enters this Ice Field is chilled for as long as they’re in the field plus one second. The Ice Field can persist for one second after it explodes, so it’ll be there for a total of 3 seconds. That, I think, will greatly increase the skill’s value such that people won’t actively avoid using it. Indeed, people might actually prefer to use it in some situations, they may actually switch to Water attunement just for it.

Frozen Burst (Dagger #3) – Okay, so this skill seems to exist entirely for the chill effect. I know this because the damage it deals is among the lowest of all damage-dealing skills. Having this in our damage-dealing weapon doesn’t make much sense, and I think most can agree that we don’t really like the skill as is. If it’s going to be a soft cc skill where a damaging one should be, then it should be a darn good one. So what do we do?

Many people want it to be a blast finisher. I think we already have plenty of those (and actually wish we had more of other types of finishers). No, I think it needs to put down an Ice Field. The field doesn’t even need to do anything except be a combo field. Have it exist for 3 seconds and give it the same radius as the skill (which is fairly small). So now we could get the chill that the skill provides and then perhaps a little more if we follow up with a finisher.

Ice Shards (Scepter #2) – Projectile finisher? This is otherwise one of the least exciting attacks in the game, largely lacking in any sort of flavor or utility.

With that, I’ve nearly doubled the number of Ice Fields in the game, and those are just the obvious inclusions. The Ice Fields work towards Water’s theme by giving us more soft cc options if we’re clever about it. Putting more healing (water fields) into Scepter and Dagger doesn’t really fit too well, so I refrained.

Okay, so I think that most people will agree with me when I say that the Air and Water attunements in our weapons feel a bit off. Fire and Earth are just fine. Water attunement in Staff is excellent and needs no changes, but that’s kind of the thing. If you look at Water on Staff, you can see what makes it so different from Water on Scepter, Dagger and Focus, and Air on all of our weapons: It’s got combo fields.

In the Water and Air attunements in Scepter, Focus and Dagger (either hand), there are no combo fields. There’s also only 1 combo finisher (Comet). Air on Staff also has just the one lightning field.

That’s kind of odd considering the situation with the Fire and Earth attunements. Fire has so many ways of putting down combo fields: Burning Speed, Ring of Fire, Flame Wall, Burning Retreat, Lava Font. Fire and Earth are both chock full of finishers: Dragon’s Tooth (it’s supposed to be, anyways), Phoenix, Stoning, Eruption, Shockwave, Magnetic Grasp, Stone Shards, Hurl, Earthquake, Churning Earth, Magnetic Wave.

So the relative dearth of these features in Air and Water is bizarre. Half of us is lush with fields and finishers, the other half has almost none. It’s an odd distribution of them, and so those two attunements don’t really gel with what the rest of the Elementalist is doing. Also, what’s up with us getting just the one Lightning Field (two if you count the one in Lightning Hammer). Fully a quarter of what we do is dedicated to lightning stuff, but that’s all we get. Those also happen to be the only two Lightning Fields in the game, so what gives?

Ice Fields also don’t get much love.

Let’s fix that!

This appears to have been fixed in yesterday’s patch. At the very least, the tooltip reports a 60-second cooldown when you have the Cantrip Mastery trait outside of PvP. I didn’t time it to see how long it actually took.

Conjures aren’t objectively bad, they’re merely situational. Busting out a conjure at some random point is only going to hinder you due to the loss of all your other weapon skills. When going through the Fractals of the Mist last night, however, I actually found a few situations where I’d switch one of my utility slots to a conjure. to great effect.

It’s mostly how Frost Bow’s #4 works so well against structures and other things with big hitboxes, but Fiery Greatsword’s 3 and 5 achieves similar effect when used well. The CC in Frost Bow and Lightning Hammer are also quite valuable.

Mostly, though, they’re the sort of thing you cast, fire off a few shots and then discard. You don’t want to have them out all the time, or even to their natural conclusion in most cases.

The thing that gets me the most is that the blast finishers (after the timer fix) on EA should have been a model for how a good grandmaster trait should be. It wasn’t mindless “lol op” facerolling; it was anything but. It required setting up fields, it required accurate positioning, it required sacrificing our endurance. It gave us a legitimate trade-off that would reward smart and active play by allowing us to elevate our characters in a variety of ways depending on how we set it up.

Some used it for healing and support. Others used it for might. Heck, I sometimes used it for swiftness. It benefited all attunements in both solo and group play.

Is this not the sort of gameplay that should be encouraged? To me, exactly that sort of versatility and active play is what the elementalist is all about. Elementalists are the antithesis of facerolling, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s what I love most about the class.

Evasive Arcana was a sublime grandmaster trait, one of the few worthy of being in the grandmaster slot, the sort of trait every other grandmaster trait should strive to be.

Now, though, it’s been ruined. A dev should at least tell us if its current behavior was intended or not, and if it’s not, then a fix should be top priority.

Lightning Flash should so remove immobilize, though.

What wizard has ever said the following:
“Hey, I’m going to teleport away. These roots that are holding me in place? Let’s take them with me.”

But there’s just a dearth of damage-dealing in water attunement in mainhand dagger. Dagger is supposed to be the high-damage weapon, but water attunement just doesn’t play along with that. Neither off-hand weapon can add very much damage to it, and Frozen Burst deals virtually no damage at all. That just leaves Vapor Blade and Frost Breath, which aren’t spectacular damage dealers.

Regardless of whether or not water is supposed to be the support attunement, the state of water for daggers just doesn’t gel with what daggers are supposed to be doing.

Frozen Burst needs more than just a 20-30% damage buff. At level 80 with some 1400 power, it hits for 200 damage. 200. I don’t think there’s a damaging skill out there that hits for less. It needs to deal 5-10x as much damage to be even marginally worthwhile.

Ooh, that’s right. I’m assuming the OP made the same mistake I did and conflated stuns and dazes.

Yeah, so D/D elementalists have only one skill that can daze, and that’s Shocking Aura. It lasts for 5 seconds and has a 25-second cooldown. There is also an air grandmaster trait wherein shocking aura gets applied when some form of CC hits the elementalist. It again lasts for 5 seconds and can only trigger once every 90 seconds.

That’s it. That’s all a D/D elementalist can do to daze you. He could have one more if he whipped out the Lightning Hammer conjured weapon, but I doubt that anyone’s doing such a thing.

So I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. The “loads of dazes” is probably you not noticing that he’s got shocking aura on and hitting him regardless.

If you’re also counting knockdowns/blowbacks, then a D/D elementalist has 2 others. Updraft is a blockback on a 40-second cooldown. Earthquake is a knockdown with a 45-second cooldown.