Guild Wars 2

No worries Dolan. Hey if you want to make it up to me (because you feel very guilty) click on my sig to support my two elementalist suggestions. A post saying how awesome they are would certainly make me forgive you for your terrible offense

As for talking about the conjures in my thread, you are right: I don’t. I whine about LH builds a bit because I think it is not the right way to play the elementalist in challenging content; but apart from that I just say that everybody must learn how to use all skills. It’s not really a guide.

Hello all

I have two suggestions for the elementalist. These suggestion are made with PvP and PvE in mind. All the numbers stated are just indicative and would have to be reviewed for balance.

A general critique of the elementalist is thakittens damage is rather subpar. This can be explained, but one of the major causes is that we have attunement specific traits. These traits are considered weak because we can not often benefit from them due to having to change attunements frequently.

This brings me to my first and most important suggestion:

1) Lingering elements
-Fix lingering elements to work with all attunement bonuses
-Make lingering elements a natural mechanic of the class (no need to trait for it): attunements will linger for a short duration (3s) after swapping out.
-Make the minor arcane 15 trait to extend the duration of the lingering (to 6s).

The idea behind this change is that I would be possible to mix elemental traits as we swap around. This way it would be possible to combo attunement bonuses, for example: swap from air (with 10% bonus damage) to fire (with 10% bonus damage) to get a strong damage increase for a short duration. This change is true to the theme of the class, it is fun, and it feels like really bending the elements to our will. This would result in a slight damage boost for most builds.

My second suggestion is especially interesting if the lingering element suggestion is put in place.

2) “Fresh Fire”
A mechanic similar to that of Fresh Air for fire, but in less easy.
For example: every time you inflict burning damage to a foe the cooldown of your fire attunement is reduced by 2s (5s ICD).
This is true to the theme of the fire attunement: dealing direct damage and conditions. It would bring an interesting mechanic in PvP since your enemies may want to cleanse the burning not only to take less damage but also to prevent you from reducing the fire attunement cooldown.
Such trait would combo with traits like One With Fire (if lingering element is traited) to keep a permanently boosted flame barrier.
The trait could proc for every instance of burning on each foe, so that if you are burning 2 foes you get 2 *2s = 4s of reduction in cooldown for second. Which would be an interesting mechanic in PvP and PvE.

_

The idea behind those suggestions is to make the arcane trait line less necessary but also more desirable at the same time. Also this would improve the fire trait line. The results of these changes is a more extended ground for build diversity. These changes would also likely result in a minor damage buff, but it would be at the expense of clever decision-making.

I strongly believe in the two suggestions. I hope they can be reviewed with care.

Love the game!

Actually we are quite relaxed, aren’t we?
This forum has become a troll forum, we even asked to rename it but the post was deleted

Loosing 100 toughness is a reduction of about 5.2% of our EHP.
This is not a very significant change to our passive survivability.

With 10% more condition duration we stack burning to at least 13s, and more if we consider burning speed. On our own it is not enough to maintain perma burn, but we are not alone. I think we can safely assume that the group can provide the 26% of burn uptime that we miss to benefit fully from our bonus damage on burning foes.

I think this is a better conditional deal than the earth trait. This is because we bet less of our damage on it, and the conditions are about as easy to meet.

This is not really a big improvement anyway, but I think that because of the flexibility this change provides it is quite desirable.

I was just thinking about something:
10 in earth gives us a conditional 10% damage
10 in fire gives us about 10% as well (100 power and 5% damage), the increase is only slightly less beneficial after 7 might stacks (at 25 stacks of might the difference is -0.8%) but virtually unconditional and it gives us a little condition duration as well.

So I think I am going to swap to 10/30/0/20/10

Edit: if I factor in the 10% increased condition duration then this is actually a dps increase due to burn.
Also this gives us the flexibility to take 10% bonus damage in fire. I am going to edit the guide accordingly.

Huh?

The only thing that is bunkerish in my build is going from 10 to 20 in water to get cleanse and heal on attuning to water.
And I explain in the discussion that I take them because I can make sure my group is not under 90% hp so we can all use our runes of the scholar (and vital striking), and we are not impeded by weakness or things like this.

I was not aware that bunkers run 30 in air nowadays, pardon my ignorance!

To be completely honest I have given this quite some thought and the best change I can find for the elementalist is with lingering elements.
-Make it a natural mechanic of the class: attunements linger for ~3s
-Change the minor arcane trait so that it increases this duration to ~7s
-Make it work with all attunement bonuses

Think about it and you will see how interesting this change is.
With such mechanic, the attunement-specific traits which are usually lackluster will be useful. We will be able to “combo” attunement specific traits.

Then if I was to really push my suggestions I would say we need a mechanic similar to that of fresh air for fire, but less easy. For example: each instance of your burning that damages your enemies reduce your fire attunement cooldown by ~2s.
This would make fire very viable for PvP (combo with One With Fire and the new lingering elements for example) as well as an interesting choice for PvE.

Honestly I cannot think of more interesting/balanced(slight buffs)/thematic changes, if I was a developer I would not hesitate!

But warrior will still deal insane damage, that’s perfectly working as intended, they won’t nerf that.

And swirling winds

I don’t know about you but it seems to me there’s a massive failure in that concept.
The game is complex. Understanding everything about its dynamic combat system is hard. But more than this: being able to make strong instantaneous decisions, instantaneous reflexes, and prevail encounter after encounter, is a true feat of strength.
That is the meaning of having ascended, to me.
I am sure it is also what the minds behind the initial concepts of Guild Wars believed in. They made the fractals. It made sense.

Farming like a zombie and mastering the crafting table does not reflect that, in my very honest opinion.

I’m throwing whites at the mystic toilet because there is a rare chance at getting something better, that’s bloody compelling!

Yes there seem to be some kind of correlation between the game modes where people spend the most gems and the rewards … how strange …hm

Well it’s not the fault of the design of the skills in themselves.
What’s really lacking is the content!

Fractals are much more challenging than most dungeons, and cannot even be compared to world bosses.
I thought we would get rewards according to the level of challenge…

And now you just did /forum

There was one game where crafting was very very good: star wars galaxies (before a certain patch where they wowised everything).
But apart from crafting the rest of the game wasn’t that great .. well you could be a Jedi and craft you own lightsaber and be hunted by actual player bounty hunters, but apart from that as well it wasn’t that great.
The crafting part however, was the best I have ever seen so far.
The first concept was that you could collect materials anywhere in the vast open world, you could build harvesting plants, and the type of raw materials you would get depended on the area. There was a bazillion types of raw materials.
The second concept was that you could use almost any of these materials to craft items such as armor, weapons parts, speeders, buildings (I had a palace ..), spaceships, food, medecine, and lightsabers! The type of material you would use would affect the properties and quality of the item crafted.
The last concept is that you had to make many smaller parts (like walls, doors, pivots, windows, etc) before assembling them to make the final item (house). The quality and properties of each of these parts would affect the final item.
So there were players known for crafting the best scopes for rifles, or the best shields for spacecrafts.
You could experiment a lot with the raw materials and with the type of parts used.
This crafting system was so deep that crafter was a “class” on its own.

I miss that.

WoW’s crafting wasn’t as great but at least it made sense.

Gw2’s crafting just feels like playing on Excel. I play on Excel all day at work, I don’t want to do that when I come back home.

haviz.1340:

1. Crafting Panel.

So much win

Nikaido.3457:

He wants to be that guy who sits in the back doing nothing but spamming heals.

Control and support are essential in decent runs but he doesn’t want to have to do these roles while also being a dps and having to pay attention to his dodges.

Truth is most people asking for a “healer role” are just asking for anet to give them the ability to be carried by their group.

Even thieves do support when they use smoke screen and blinding powder to blind trash mobs. Warriors are doing control when they interrupt things with their mace 5. etc.

Agreed.
That’s why we dished anchor and booner guards.
And bunker ele.
You get the idea

Yes, I am interested in evaluating 30/30, I will tell you how I find it very soon.

I am very glad you enjoy D/F fresh air. More and more people are trying it, especially after the LH bugfix, and I strongly believe that they are right to do so.
Good luck climbing up the fractal levels!

Arc lightning’s damage is displayed in cumulative numbers. The number that appears on the last tick is the total damage that you have done during this cast.

No fury is roughly a 15% boost to damage if you didn’t have fury before (assuming full zerker gear, full air traits, etc)
But I am not talking about persisting flames here.
When I talk about 10% damage from points in fire I mean the ouput of 100 additional power and 5% damage to burning foes.

We have about 12k hp with my build, so swapping to water heals your for about 10% of your life (and that of your allies).
If you have runes of the scholar and vital striking then a large part (15% if the modifiers are additive like I believe) of your damage is conditional on your hp. Also, other members of your group are likely running runes of the scholar.

As for condition cleansing, we don’t use cleansing fire, and magnetic wave has a long cooldown. Ether renewal is awesome, but it leaves 15 long seconds between it uses during which you will be vulnerable. This is why we often need a second source of cleansing, just in case you get hit by an important condition in the meantime. The combo of the two is something I really like.

Compare all this to the 10% damage you could get from additional points in fire… If you do challenging content it is a no-brainer.

Also I would like to add that in a PvE perspective, a simple boost in our damage of about 5 to 10 percents would appear reasonable to me. They could do this simply by fixing lingering elements in the way that it would become a natural mechanic of the class (no need to trait) and work for all bonuses, but for a shorter duration (3s); then the arcane 15 trait would just boost this duration (to 5-6s).
Such change, applied to a fresh air rotation, would boost our damage by a small amount with the right traits. It would also open new ground for build diversity.

I would not consider playing 30/30 yet, it simply has too many limitations.

0/30/10/20/10 is my all time favourite because its damage is good, its utility access is good, and I can’t bring myself to play without the support it provides.
Even in 70+ fractals, the heal and cleanse on water attunement is so valuable that I am prepared to loose 10% damage for it.
Our health and toughness are so low that one hit pretty much kills us. However I find it so stupid to die to simple conditions like burning or to deal less damage due to weakness! If you manage to heal and cleanse your allies everytime you swap to water then your are doing a very good job (also it helps to benefit from runes of the scholar and vital striking the most).

Acutally I do consider this. I agree that most of our skills have a “out of the box” fact. For example, Impale (dagger earth 1) hits no matter the Z axis, obstacles, etc, so it can be abused this way. Similarly Lightning Whip (dagger air 1) has 300 range (normal melee range is 150) and so you can often hit melee attackers with an advantage. This could explain why our damage numbers are lower, but it does not really. In fact, if we look at a skill like Dragon’s Claw (dagger fire 1) we can see that it has limiting facts rather than advantages like LW and Impale. This skill only deals decent damage (3 hits for 0.375 power coefficient per second) if you land the three of them, and to do so you need to be within short melee range (roughly under 100), at which points it deals 1.13 power per second on a single target. So there is this limiting range fact, but also it is a projectile (it can be reflected). Now compare this to the warrior’s axe auto-attack: it has a coefficient of power per second of 1.36 (20% more, cleaves) and its only limiting fact is that it is a combo so you should not interrupt the cycle. In short, we have less damage and more limitations.

Overall the Elem is simply over-balanced for:

pros:
-versatility and adaptability

cons:
-lowest armor and lowest health
-weak skills (arguably)
-constraining class mechanic

The widespread opinion of the community is that these cons are too many and that they offset the pros too much.

Edit: However it is one of the most entertaining classes to play

It was a bugfix: the initial design of FA was with 5s ICD.
To the best of my knowledge it does not proc when air is not on cd.

So they brought the conjures’ weapon damage from 969 to 925, I see.
It is indeed an odd change. Maybe it is their way of saying “don’t use builds dedicated to conjures” and I can understand that: like Nikaido said D/F fresh air is just so much more fun to play, and it works decently enough.

JPSnow.8296:

This post is kinda useless people on an are going to say there better and people on euro going to say they are better. Just play with your friends and have fun where ever you are. Just by going by server status na is way more populated per server

Yes but EU is better

Well the top PvE players are in EU
The top PvP players are also in EU
The top WvW payers .. what?

Just use all the weapons you have: bring lots of people here, talk about RTL and lightning hammer, +1 on every post, we can make reply to us!

Hell we could even break the forum rules and link here all the posts we have made in the past, it worked in some other forums, it can work here.

Do or do not, there is no try!

They are massively responding on PvP threads at the moment, I am sure that they are monitoring the level of contentment of all the community so now is the time to strike!

I don’t mean to be the one defending the devs in a thread that is clearly voicing our concerns, but this game is very complex, it is the most complex game I have played in my life in fact and I still believe that they are doing a job that I can qualify as good.

This thread is not the place to state how broken or not broken the elem is. These subjects have been debated more than enough in the past months and it has become clear that we need some attention.

This thread is a call for their attention. We have been asking for it many, many times. Now is the time to give us some answers.

I am sure they have read all our thoughtful posts. I am sure they are also thinking about changes, just like us.

What would make us happy is a few paragraphs from the devs telling us about it. How they view the class, how they feel about it, what are their lines of thought.

We need to know that something is being done.

The devs will reply to this thread if we make enough noise, so make them come!

Yes actually I would like to developer insight on the class.
Please once you are finished with the PvP forums head right up here!

Ok, can you try to guess about how much less damage you are dealing?

After a quick test I noticed that the damage is consistent with the tooltip and the wiki. Were the conjures doing abnormal damage before?

Again, do we have any data on what has been changed, if a change there was at all?

It was meant as a joke

I think that if you divide the number of people who whined by the number of people who tested you will collapse our dimension.

Hmm actually that would not be a bad idea!

Well I would like not to say dredges, but I can’t, so dredges it is.

Is it to presumptuous to assume they will allow us to loot ascended weaponry in fotm 50+ ?

I think you meant overpowered not overrated.

Or you could do what I am going to do.
Soon everybody will be a 300 mf, so materials will drop easily.
But not ore and wood.
Anet wants people to go back to the less visited zones.
They will do this to gather rare ore and wood. It makes sense.
My belief is that after one or two months you can buy each of your weapons for 25-35g each, no big deal.

Also when they release ascended gear we won’t be able to carry 6 sets like we did before, so we won’t be able to circumvent the armor breaking mechanic to do high level fractal runs, but at the same time we will have more AR, again no big deal.

We don’t know what the bugfix was, we also don’t know exactly how much weapon damage the conjures have, in fact we don’t know anything.
But we know that conjure builds were boring as hell anyway.

A little tap on the back to those who like to complain about the fact that we do not have access to weapon switches:

We only have to spend half as much gold to upgrade our weapons to ascended!

I think dredges should use their digging technology to randomly appear in every single fractal. Not just a few dredges of course, the complete repoping bandwagon thing with the boss!
This way, no more avoiding them.
And then they steal AR.

Lava axe has a coefficient of 0.77
LW has a coefficient of 0.7 but hits twice, so 1.4

Yes, missing burning speed is a substantial dps loss (around 8%).

LW does more dps than water spells, yes, but switching to water allows you to proc fury and electric discharge. If you simply add the damage of electric discharge to your water spell you see that it does more damage than LW.

I forgot two.
And also Drake’s breath has a 0.5 coefficient per second (so 2 in total), but it is still worth using because the burn it provides is a dps increase.
Edited accordingly.

You would need comet for that, but yes theoretically speaking it is possible.

Conditions do not crit.
Firewall deals low damage and has along cooldown, but indeed it is easier to land blast on it due to its longer duration.

Just for fun, take a look at this FA rotation:
(format: spell | animation time | total coefficient)

Start in Fire
Burning speed | 0.75 | 2.4
Drake’s breath | 3 | 2
Swap to Air during cast
Electric discharge | 0 | 0.7
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Swap to Earth during cast
Ring of earth | 1 | 1.2
Swap to Air during cast
Electric discharge | 0 | 0.7
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Swap to Water during cast
Cone of cold (interrupt with LW after 2 ticks) | 1.2 | 1
Swap to Air during cast
Electric discharge | 0 | 0.7
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Lightning whip | 1.15 | 1.4
Swap to Fire

Fury uptime: 70%
Burn uptime: 80%

Total time: 17.5
Total coefficients: 22.74

Coefficient per second: 1.30

If I am not mistaken the player hitbox has a 90 radius. I expect most bosses are bigger and some are even large enough to get hit by multiple ticks of burning speed’s trail.

Edit: I mean diameter.