Guild Wars 2

Good post, TC. I sincerely hope that a dev reads this.

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.

To make these traits worth it you need to spec 15 into Arcana for lingering elements. Traits like Piercing Shards are actually good now that ANet has made them work. In fact, I’d say the most practical spike build for Eles involves something along the lines of 25 Air, 25 Water and 20 arcana D/D with Piercing Shards and this is already very similar to what people are already using. The pigeon hole gets deeper and deeper.

Arheundel.6451:

TwoBit.5903:

25k potential damage to afkers isn’t worth the trade-off of being a useless piece of tissue after spending all your cooldowns.

Curring.9752:

Is it just me or does everyone assume Eles only use D/D? -.-

It’s the only weapon set that was nerfed into oblivion, and unlike S/D you can actually land your damage skills without wasting all your CCs.

Correction- you mean the only set which wasn’t nerfed into oblivion am I right?
If so yes I agree with you, d/d is the only set which doesn’t force you into using signets to actually land your skills.

Scepter focus outside dragon’s tooth and phoenix, lack strong heavy hit skills, therefore people have tried to use scepter as glass cannon weapon, trying to make the most out of those signet = “1 hit for 1 kill or I die”, outside glass cannon no sane ele would take scepter for sustained dmg

Yeah that was a typo. Unlike DT, the Burning Speed + Ring of Fire combo is a skill shot that you can land consistently with practice even without the use of signets or Updraft. This potentially frees updraft to be used as an interrupt rather than an initiation tool and also makes you less dependent on Signet of Earth which honestly doesn’t do much for eles outside of its active ability.

25k potential damage to afkers isn’t worth the trade-off of being a useless piece of tissue after spending all your cooldowns.

Curring.9752:

Is it just me or does everyone assume Eles only use D/D? -.-

It’s the only weapon set that wasn’t nerfed into oblivion, and unlike S/D you can actually land your damage skills without wasting all your CCs.

Edit: fixed typo

I’ve had trouble getting Earth to work correctly. Water often doesn’t revive allies to full health. Fire and Air seem to work fine for me though.

D/D, x/x/x/30/20 is the logistically the best support for parties in PvE. Melee party members, the ones most in need of healing and boons, would in range to receive your support as swap attunements and use blast finishers for might. It plays very fluidly since the D/D ele’s support and attacks are often one in the same. There’s also the added bonus of your melee attacks being very flashy so other players will tend to give you more credit than you really deserve, increasing the likelihood that they’ll take you along on subsequent runs.

Until we get developer saying otherwise, I’m fairly certain that the Elementalists is the Dan Hibiki of Guild Wars 2 – surprisingly competent in the hands of masterful players, but otherwise a joke character worthy of laughs from both its masochistic users and onlookers. The Designers, who very fittingly aren’t present the forums, have no other desire than to laugh at its users for treating the profession as seriously as they do. There’s no way for the users to win but to admit that they’ve been part of an elaborate joke and then re-roll warrior.

My preferred underwater style is to pretend that my enemies and I are both having a good time as I try and tickle them to death.

I’m not sure if this as been suggested before, but I believe it would greatly benefit players if there was a cooldown indicator for the active effects of sigils and runes. The indicator would function as a visual tool for players to help better time their attacks, helping to better define the extra layer of strategy added to combat by the effects of these upgrades.

I agree wholeheartedly. To add to the points made by TC, one of the most common criticisms about this game’s pvp is that there’s little incentive for those interested to keep on playing. I believe that this issue has been crippling the PvP community. With fewer players motivated to play, there are fewer people on the boards sharing their experiences and discussing their builds because there’s nothing else that they want from PvP.

My experience with PvP is very limited since I planned to hold off on it until my friends could start playing with me, but as of now I’m afraid that when they do start playing they’re going to ask if its worth continuing to do so. The addition of new modes and/or better incentives may at the very least fix my concerns about it. As with the previous poster, I’m glad Anet designed a wonderful game with such an engaging combat system, and with a bit fixing of I’m confident that you guys can bring the PvP community back to a healthy state.