So after farting around with Guardian, Mesmer, and Necro, I have been trying to pinpoint the “flow” issues with the various classes, that is what parts of the class seem to not fit with the playstyle of the rest of the class. For instance, scepter for Guardian seems to not fit the other weaponstyles of Guardian, even though it is a ranged attack and should be different. I believe it comes to the travel speed of the projectile and the quasi-aoe attack. For necro, dagger seems to be a sticking point for me, since it is a melee weapon with only 2 distance closers available to necro. Mesmer is a different animal entirely from all of them, with it’s own issues.
So with elementalist, and this seems true for all staff users, but more so with elementalist, the wind-up time for ranged attacks seems very slow, with melee being fast (as it ought to be, due to the risk), scepter being slow, and staff being very slow. I understand that the compensation for a slow autoattack is a plethora of large aoe effects. However I feel that an entire half second could be shaved off the animation and still keep the auto attack slower than scepter (as is possibly intended) while helping speed up the single target damage. The staff is great support, but the oft-heard complaint is it falls short in single target damage on fights with a more powerful foe – staff lacks burst. I feel that a faster autoattack would go some steps towards fixing this while still keeping staff in the realm of support/aoe weapon.
Finally, I would like to discuss the major mechanic of Elementalist. I like the idea of stance switching, however, I believe that a short-term boon (ala minor trait 5 in arcane) ought to be granted. Giving us access to another row of skills isn’t granting anything especially unique to the class, as we can’t weapon swap. So my solution for making the attunement dance more palatable: grant a short term boon unique to the element and change arcane 5 to something else entirely.
The last thing, that I am sure has been brought up before, is the traits that grant bonus damage and cooldown. Since elementalists can’t switch weapons, but are encouraged to switch attunements to be effective, why are our +damage% traits tied to a specific element? Our cooldowns are tied to our attunement as well – so we are encouraged to switch attunements and then seemingly penalized on our effectiveness for doing so by switching from an element we are potentially stronger in to one we are weaker in, simply because we must dance through all the lengthy cooldowns in order to be competitive in dps or support effectively. Also, do “gain X on weapon swap” effects actually even work for an elementalist? We lose access to different stats on weapons also, which is a disadvantage. Is my perception and analysis on this issue correct?
As one person pointed out, it feels like some developer fell in love with the notion of attunement swapping, to the detriment of making the mechanic work as well as it ought to. It needs to be revisited. I fully believe that if it was reworked to flow together more efficiently that the class would be much more viable and work as intended.
Thank you for reading thus far. I am interested in what people think about what I have said here and what suggestions, if any, people come up with.
