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Observations/criticism and ideas


tekfan.3179

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First off let me give you an idea of my perspective: My main is an ele and I've played since launch with some phases of inactivity. Pretty much only PvE, with a few dips into WvW for the occasional reward-track or back in the day, when it still was required for world completion. I've been doing T4-fractals for some time, raided for a few months but the latter not very excessively. I had the times when eles wouldn't get a place in a dungeon-group, been through the age of the ice bow when ele was meta for dungeons, witnessed the power of the old meteor storm and how staff-ele was used for high level group content and am now here. None of that is supposed to frame me as an expert, I just went through a lot of balance-changes with this class. So let me just dump of some observations/criticism and ideas.

As strange as this sounds, after eight years of balance and two specializations, this class feels clunky, restrictive and unrewarding to me, compared with the other classes I've learned to enjoy. A reward for mastering the elementalist is non-existant in my opinion, instead it feels like dps, condi-dmg and CC are just spread over four attunements instead of two weapon-sets and I only get access to those abilities in even remotely the same fashion as other professions, when I finally master the elementalist.In theory it could be fun to re-assemble skills from other professions with three other skills...yes, could be, but isn't. With additional cooldowns on skills and attunement-swaps everything takes longer, requires more time to get back to what you did before and is highly vulnerable to interrupts. The interruption may just be a dodge, as ele still has the squishiest base-stats regarding survivability.

The elementalist used to be one of the top-damage-dealers in raids. Back in that time, I think the ele had an overall better balance in PvE.Consider raids, or more specifically, the youtube-vids we see from the specialized raid-guilds: First the golem training. A target that doesn't move and doesn't fight back, with the hitbox-size you want. All the perma-buffs you need for you and all the perma-debuffs for the golem come from a console on your whim. In the final raid ten trained players work to emulate those conditions and deal with mechanics while likely communicating with each other over voice-chat.To say it mildly: You don't have such conditions in PUGS, which is exactly the reason why we see "Show LI", "250 LI" and other notices in the LFG-tool for raids and strike-missions. Without the damage and no buff to survivability, the ele now runs tight spaced rotations to keep up with other professions which are easier to keep alive. Interrupting your damage-rotation to CC, dodge or heal now pulls you under the average, since the higher dps from back then is gone since balancing the ele towards other professions at the golem.

Another rigidity is that you're locked into one specific weapon-set during combat, or more specifically: One range. This was less of a problem when staff was a better choice and you could run around with your high-range weapon, which was also fine on close range. While some attunements offer a few long-ranged skills on melee-weapons, your ability to engage in content can be quite stumped when you can't switch on something with longer range in combat. An example for this would be the "Phase-shift"-ability on bounties.

As I mentioned ideas, let me get that off my chest:So what to do about the ele that I could come up with?Frankly...I think reworking the class entirely may be the best approach. My impression until now is, that each time some aspect of the ele or one of its specs was worked on, the rest of the profession suffered. Therefore working on core-aspects that stretch through all the specs as well, could yield the best results.Right now we have standard burning builds and aura-support.There are two ways to go: Push the effectiveness on certain skills up so dps/CC/healing and whatever can be done on par with other professions without a total dent in efficiency when reacting to something, or work on cooldowns, whereas I'd probably prefer the latter since it would address the slow auto-attack on staff.Maybe remove the global cooldown to switch attunements, so skill-combinations run faster. Reduce attunement-cooldown if the related trait-line is equipped in the build. Reduce the skill-cooldown of skills which are interrupted by a dodge. Allow for weapon-swap in combat for the price of putting all attunements into cooldown. Give the weaver a trait so Main- and offhand-attunement can be switched directly(for example F1 for fire main, doubletap F1 for fire offhand).Carefully reworking the elementalist to play more dynamically and a little more forgiving if you change what you're doing, while also looking out not to overdo it, would benefit the class and its specs as a whole, without requiring too much changes for whatever is being worked on for Cantha.

As a last request to Arenanet: Please make the special ability of the new specialization dynamic and not some kind of stack-mechanic like you started to do it with weaver.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I agree. I am in the same situation. I've been playing this profession since launch and I have been defending it just because raid benchmark says it's still somewhat good. Now all i have to say is that this class is no longer fun to play. I mostly ran fractals, WvW, PvP with my ele and there are so many more balanced classes in my account which do more dmg and faster by simper means and are not clunky and do not feel as unfair to play. Plus those classes have perks that ele does not have. Loved this class since launch and I tried everything to make it fun again. I had 3 full sets of armor templates + accended armor sets and I every time I try to play this game again I just end up looking for suitable build for hours just to realise nothing works anymore like it should. Even ele forum has been dead for ages because people know there is too much wrong with this class. PvP forum does not remember this class exists. I've seen sooo many ele-players given up. It's not rewarding to play this class in any game mode anymore and it has to change dramatically.

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