Guild Wars 2

Oniyui.8279:

More again on my disputes with the elementalist changes, and the importance of strong adept abilities.

Every elementalist that doesn’t take 30 in arcane for pvp is going to be a free kill. We’re already on the ropes as the squishiest profession with the lowest baseline hp – and we have the least reliable stun breaks being that they’re on cooldowns over a minute long, very little stability, and we require might just to get decent damage. Losing access to might, protection, swiftness, and regen is absolutely devastating to survivability and our ability to get decent damage needs to be compensated for, making 30 arcane builds more powerful, or reverted. Elementalists rely heavily on getting those buffs, and the only one in our weapon skills is swiftness. To even consider moving Elemental Attunement to a master tier you’d also better be putting all our buffs in our weapon skills and lowering cooldowns and cast times of any ability that gives these effects, and giving us some Stability and stun breaks so we can get to those effects. Of course, doing so would only make 30 arcane that much more powerful while still hurting the other elementalists’ group utility. It really needs to remain at Adept.

Now, again, look at Cleansing Wave. Elementalists don’t put 10 into water because this ability’s powerful. They put 10 into water because it’s absolutely vital to their survival and their group utility. If an elementalist isn’t cleansing their team every once in a while and dies every time they get poisoned then what are they good for? If you move it to master it’s going to be absolutely mandatory for non-water elementalists to take Cleansing Fire and the new fire trait to make up for it, and they’ll be worse off for it not being able to cleanse allies, suffering a longer cooldown, and losing a utility skill to another mandatory ability.

This is my petition to keeping these traits at 10. Bring other viable traits to splash down to 10 rather than moving them up. Rock Solid is a prime candidate as we are sorely lacking in stability.

I’d also like to petition you to lower the cooldowns on our stun break abilities. Make Lightning Flash a stun break, even. Cantrip builds aren’t strong right now because cantrips are strong – cantrip builds are strong right now because many elementalists are working their fingers to the bone and stacking more stun breaks than should be necessary just to stay alive- and it’s still falling short.

From the gw2 discussion thread.

I also in another post I made on these abilities a suggestion that Evasive Arcana be made adept, as much of its strength is in the talents building up to it and a 10 second attunement cd. At 10, it would result in more Eles choosing between talents to splash rather than going all the way to 30 for all the most powerful abilities in the line, resulting in more elementalist diversity and survivability.

What would make that viable? Getting rid of useless traits that get completely and utterly overshadowed in nearly any build. I.E. windbag daggers and the scepter vigor nonsense (also a source of EA’s power).

If they want less people to splash arcane they should also look into improving the minor adept traits for fire, air, earth, and water to be, well, useful. Alacrity abilities could fall in here, as they’re valuable but usually not picked because of how much we change over 4 attunements rather than the simple weapon swap of other classes (often with a 20% cooldown reduction trait with an additional effect, not just the flat 20%) that gives them more time getting the buff’s advantage.

Anet, IMO, has fallen for a fallacy in thinking strong abilities need to be higher on the talent train. Strong abilities need to be at every level for a class to be successful. It’s specialized abilities that should rise to the higher levels of a skill train. A perfect example of this is Elemental Surge – it rewards arcane specialization at the high end of the arcane train. Pyromancer’s Puissance – same. Fresh Air, Powerful Aura, Written in Stone, Cleansing Water, Persisting Flames – all extremely specialized abilities rewarding 30 points, not extremely splash-worthy abilities – as they should be. More splash-worthy abilities need to go in the Adept tier, not less.

More again on my disputes with the elementalist changes, and the importance of strong adept abilities.

Every elementalist that doesn’t take 30 in arcane for pvp is going to be a free kill. We’re already on the ropes as the squishiest profession with the lowest baseline hp – and we have the least reliable stun breaks being that they’re on cooldowns over a minute long, very little stability, and we require might just to get decent damage. Losing access to might, protection, swiftness, and regen is absolutely devastating to survivability and our ability to get decent damage needs to be compensated for, making 30 arcane builds more powerful, or reverted. Elementalists rely heavily on getting those buffs, and the only one in our weapon skills is swiftness. To even consider moving Elemental Attunement to a master tier you’d also better be putting all our buffs in our weapon skills and lowering cooldowns and cast times of any ability that gives these effects, and giving us some Stability and stun breaks so we can get to those effects. Of course, doing so would only make 30 arcane that much more powerful while still hurting the other elementalists’ group utility. It really needs to remain at Adept.

Now, again, look at Cleansing Wave. Elementalists don’t put 10 into water because this ability’s powerful. They put 10 into water because it’s absolutely vital to their survival and their group utility. If an elementalist isn’t cleansing their team every once in a while and dies every time they get poisoned then what are they good for? If you move it to master it’s going to be absolutely mandatory for non-water elementalists to take Cleansing Fire and the new fire trait to make up for it, and they’ll be worse off for it not being able to cleanse allies, suffering a longer cooldown, and losing a utility skill to another mandatory ability.

This is my petition to keeping these traits at 10. Bring other viable traits to splash down to 10 rather than moving them up. Rock Solid is a prime candidate as we are sorely lacking in stability.

I’d also like to petition you to lower the cooldowns on our stun break abilities. Make Lightning Flash a stun break, even. Cantrip builds aren’t strong right now because cantrips are strong – cantrip builds are strong right now because many elementalists are working their fingers to the bone and stacking more stun breaks than should be necessary just to stay alive- and it’s still falling short.

Elementalist

I think you’ve taken the wrong approach in dealing with Elemental Attunement and Cleansing Wave. By making them Master level traits you aren’t broadening the spectrum of builds, you’re killing it. Splashing 10 points in one stream is a good thing. It enables someone to build on 2 grand master roads without getting 10 points of leftover useless crap. Rather than taking universally splash-able abilities out of the Adept level, you should be putting more universally splash-able traits into the other attunements at the Adept level. Moving them to Master immediately hurts builds not focussed on arcane/water.

While on that point, you should also revise the minor adept traits for all 4 attunements to make them splash-worthy… and actually impactful.

I would, rather than moving moving them up to master, move underutilized but universally splash-worthy abilities down the ladder.

First, marry the alacrity abilities to the damage modifiers in the GM minor, freeing up 4 major traits – yay

Second, eliminate the Adept minor traits for Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. Eliminate Elemental Attunement completely. Make the Adept minor traits for Fire, Air, Earth, and Water coincide with their piece of Elemental Attunement.

Third, make Rock Solid an Adept major trait in Earth. Suddenly, 10 points splashed in Earth looks nice.

Fourth, make Evasive Arcana an Adept major trait. Powerful compensation for the loss of Elemental Attunement, but all the supporting traits following it in master tier. Still, many more will stop at 10 now.

For new Arcane Grandmaster, conjure weapons cooldown reduced 70%, only conjure as one in hand, don’t disappear when you weapon swap and instead you just set ’em on the ground.

After all that… I’d take a serious look into the ridiculous cooldown times on our stun breaks. None of them should be over a minute. We shouldn’t have to run 3 cantrips just to stay alive.

In the future the traits still need to be cleaned out, focus needs work, and they definitely DEFINITELY need a spear fighting style made for the water AND land.

I think it would be too easy to exploit by lining it up to intentionally burst. The game’s bursty enough as it is.

I do like the idea of combining alacrity spells with other passive damage buffs. Other classes get their 20% weapon skill cooldowns reduced with sizable buffs to boot. it would also open up 4 new talents options in the tree.

I’m experiencing immense pleasure when playing with my staff right now.

It works with any fire spell, but anything that applies to only fire weapon skills it won’t, such as pyromancer’s alacrity.

It should probably apply to Fiery Greatsword as well if you’d prefer to keep the third utility skill.

It just seems to me fire could use a little love, and I thought of something to consider… what if all #3 fire weapon abilities had some kind of boon burn on them, and what if some talents were made to reinforce that theme?

Just pulling ideas out of a hat is all. Copper for your thoughts!

^ tooltip etc.

I thought their primary use was to grant a combo finisher anyways. Now if we can just get Arcane Shield to be a whirl finisher…

I’ll just reiterate what was said a little earlier that this would have been much more useful if it were just a replacement for the 5 point trait that has virtually no impact. Having a defensive on-attunement effect at 5 and offensive on-attunement effect at 15 for all 4 elements would shore up those weak minor traits. (Yes, that is a suggestion to rework all 4 elements’ minor traits)

Additional way to rework our talents

~Combine our 20% reduced weapon skill recharge trait with the passive buff to the broad passive damage buff from that attunement. This would make sense in line with other professions’ traits that have a 20% reduced recharge to a specific weapon skill in addition to another minor effect. 20% reduced recharge to water weapon skills and additional damage when health is above threshold, 20% reduced recharge earth weapon skills and additional damage when within 600 yards, Bolt to the Heart + Aeromancer’s Alacrity, Pyromancer’s Alacrity + Ember’s Might… freeing up 4 more talent options. .