ele is a high skillcap prof. it’s very much fine.
- Scepter DD is a useless piece of kitten with big attacks that will never hit any good player. (if you are playing against people that actually get hit by your Dragon’s Tooth, then you should just go warrior and use Hundred Blades instead for much better results)
- Staff DD is an even more useless piece of kitten than Scepter, for the exact same reason.
- Scepter Condition is an insult to professions with real condition builds.
- Staff support is laughable. Your only real dangerous move is Frozen Ground, and any good player will anticipate and deal with it. Other than that you can pretty much just be ignored as your healing throughput and protection uptime won’t make up for your total lack of damage output.
- Focus is a piece of kitten that give you good projectile protection in exchange for a loss in mobility and damage/offense. And quite frankly, that is a really bad deal in the vast majority of situations as you get an auto-loss against any melee spec.
So that leaves Dagger/Dagger as the only possible build if playing against good players. A skirmisher that has very fast movement and decent burst combined with hard cc that can be well utilized in team battles. But very low defense ability outside the hard cc causes a lacks in sustainability which is very bad for sPvP where you have to be able to fight over points.
Not a bad thing to have in WvW mind you (elementalist skirmisher is quite good for open field battles). But there are better choices for the skirmisher role in sPvP.
Perhaps the most crippling but is the compunded attunement recharge rate (40% of 15 is not 9.). Why do people never comment on this?
9.375s is however 60% faster recharge rate than 15s. (100% faster would be 7.5s)
So, this thread was not intended as an elementalist balancing discussion, but i want to digress:
1) attunement recharge starts at 15 seconds, with 30 points invested into arcana it is reduced 60% to a little over 9 seconds. Check that math… thats right, the 15 seconds is reduced by 2%, then that product is reduced again by 2% and so on a total of 30 times. This is the attunement bug i refer to. I honestly think a 6 second cd might be op.
15/(1+0.02*30)=9.375. Arcane trait line doesn’t decrease your cd. It increases your recharge rate. (it used to decrease your cd by 1% back in BWE1 btw)
2) the class mechanic on ele is attunement swapping. This also stands in for our weapon swap, and has a 15 second starting cooldown. If 1 of our attunements is a heal, and another does the wrong damage type, then there are really only 2 attunements we can sit in per build.
This is the biggest problem with elementalist. Especially with the damage in many attunements being fairly horrible.
Zephyr’s boon only gives me 5 seconds of swiftness/fury instead of the 10 that it says on the wiki. Was this changed recently?
The boons are only 10s if you use Shocking Aura, 5s otherwise.
I’m also kinda interested in the complete change list on the Elementalist nerfs. From what I’ve heard the CD on Arcane Blast/Wave were increased and Flame Grab damage reduced?
After BWE3:
- 15% damage nerf to MS.
- 50+% effective damage nerf to Lava Font assuming the average decent player doesn’t stay in field for more than 1.99s. (20+% nerf in PvE)
- Vapor Form nerfed (health doesn’t reset as high and ability applies downed state debuff)
- AW cd increased by 50%.
- AB cd increase by 25%.
- Vulnerability far less effective against low armored targets.
- Glyph of Elemental Harmony cd increased by 25%.
- Static Field stun duration decreased by 33%.
After Release:
- Arcane Power – nerfed to 3 attacks.
1 Vitality equals 10 hitpoints. 1 Healing Power heals for a total of 10 hp if you hit a full group with 8s of regeneration and one Healing Ripple. (assuming everyone has taken damage)
8s of regeneration and one Healing Ripple is coincidently what a heavy support elementalist with decent boon duration will generate every time he switches into water attunement.
Underwater elementalist is like playing a glass cannon without the cannon part.
The huge lack of reliable defensive utility for a profession with the lowest hp/armor is a far bigger problem than the damage output.