Buffing Support Ele by Moving Fury Generation to the Earth Specialization

While Fury isn't a unique buff, it is somewhat hard to come by with really only the Druid and offensive Elementalist providing it for the party in any noticeable amounts. Having Fury come from the Earth Tree would add value and open up more builds for support Elementalists while being a slight nerf to DPS Ele, which is currently at the top of both small & large hitbox benchmarks.

Reworking Earthen Blast, a movement impairing Minor Master trait that gets little use anywhere else (Even in WvW and PvP, you're better of taking the Grandmaster trait Elemental Surge if you need cripples), to provide fury generation when comboing blast finisher with a field seems like the most straight forward option mechanically. The fire trait that's losing the fury, doesn't need any further rework as the extra damage on Lava Font is already quite strong.

Thematically I see three option:

1. Keep the trait as is, fire fields comboed with blast finishers grant fury. Call it "Molten Fury" or any other magma related name.

2. Have the trait work when comboing any field with a blast finisher, but lower the time it provides it for by a few seconds to compensate. The fire fields were never particularly hard to come by anyways since everyone is trying to stack might. Earthen Eruption/Blast still works well as name here.

3. Rework the trait into some other type of 5-10 man fury generation.

Any one of these would be a small step towards giving Ele the tools it need to be a viable support pick (and maybe breathe some life back into the earth tree). My personal choice is number one, since it's a relatively clean switch.

! P.S. Two more changes that would help significantly: the first is to rework Strength of Stone from a toughness->condition damage converter to a +150 stat for party bonus. Both Expertise and Condition Damage fit thematically, though Expertise might need to be bumped down to +75. Whatever you do, don't go with toughness. It'll help a tiny bit in WvW, but for the most part is a dead stat in PvE. Even in WvW, I'd probably choose the Stability buff from the same tier over the passive toughness. *This one might not be properly balanced and needs a careful check to avoid power creep.!! The final change would be a slight rework of the underused signet system to take advantage of the Major Grandmaster trait Written in Stone. I've played Ele for some 600 hours across all 3 game modes and still had to look up what the Water and Air Signets do. But, this one deserves it's own thought out analysis, so I'll leave it for later.

I don't think that's the way to make ele a viable support. There are also other less disruptive ways to improve support ele. This would probably make offensive else quite mad.

Offensive Eles are the top DPS in almost all situations, and usually have permanent fury provided by someone else already (the Druid). The only times it really comes into play is when you roaming solo in WvW or in niche PvP builds. And nowadays they'll just take air for the Minor Grandmaster trait Raging Storm (Fury on crit, self-only).

In other words, no they won't be mad. PvE Ele has no reason to miss it because weren't the ones providing the bulk of it, and PvP/WvW literally won't notice it's gone.

Regardless, it seems silly to balance in terms things around what makes DPS Elementalists mad when actual balance should be the goal here. We're top of the charts by a significant margin. Even a full -10% damage decrease (which this isn't, realistically it's more like 0-3% depending on fury up-time in the group) would leave us still at the top of large hitbox DPS and near the top in small hitbox. Top tier in one, more than viable in the other.

Support Elementalist on the other hand is hardly viable at all right now. And no, I don't think this alone is enough of a change, but doing too much at once would be disruptive like you mentioned. I had some other suggestions that would bring it more in line with a Druid, but I'm guessing that they might've been looked over in your haste to protect the class from something you incorrectly saw as a nerf.

What are the other ways you're suggesting for making support Ele viable?

@NaturallyNick.4058 said:Offensive Eles are the top DPS in almost all situations, and usually have permanent fury provided by someone else already (the Druid). The only times it really comes into play is when you roaming solo in WvW or in niche PvP builds. And nowadays they'll just take air for the Minor Grandmaster trait Raging Storm (Fury on crit, self-only).

In other words, no they won't be mad. PvE Ele has no reason to miss it because weren't the ones providing the bulk of it, and PvP/WvW literally won't notice it's gone.

Regardless, it seems silly to balance in terms things around what makes DPS Elementalists mad when actual balance should be the goal here. We're top of the charts by a significant margin. Even a full -10% damage decrease (which this isn't, realistically it's more like 0-3% depending on fury up-time in the group) would leave us still at the top of large hitbox DPS and near the top in small hitbox. Top tier in one, more than viable in the other.

Support Elementalist on the other hand is hardly viable at all right now. And no, I don't think this alone is enough of a change, but doing too much at once would be disruptive like you mentioned. I had some other suggestions that would bring it more in line with a Druid, but I'm guessing that they might've been looked over in your haste to protect the class from something you incorrectly saw as a nerf.

What are the other ways you're suggesting for making support Ele viable?

Well, as a dps Ele who uses this trait, I would actually be quite mad. And there's nothing unbalanced about this trait, but removing the fury would make the trait fairly worthless. This is a change that's just not needed.

Honestly I'm not the guy to ask about support ele, I haven't played it much. Its just not a great idea to change a trait that has been good for a long time. I mean, look at how people reacted to arcane fury...

I took a look at your posted Build Help thread to see what's up and I honestly think you just haven't played much Ele yet. You're saying things like "the power of that trait comes from it's fury gen," (it comes from the extended duration on your fire fields) and so on, then your other threads from this last month are all: "Fresh 80" and "New to ele/tempest, need advice." Anyways, don't worry. We Elementalists would still be incredibly powerful even with this change. Even the solo ones.

Your build also seems to be largely concerned with open world PvE in which almost anything works, so unfortunately it isn't much as a frame of reference for endgame instanced content. Regardless, have you tried running the Major Grandmaster trait Pyromancer's Puissance (Fire X-X-2)? You'd likely see a significant DPS increase from the might there, as opposed to the fury you're so worried about here. You can also get fury from your auras through Air 1-X-X as well as 2 seconds on a crit from the Raging Storm minor trait. Heck you're supposedly running low-level fractals, using the air spec and not even choosing Bolt to the Heart for the ~10% damage boost or even Fresh Air. There are so many things in your build that are unoptimized (no sigil of force, half zerker, half rampager, no expertise anywhere?) that the fury from Fire (X-X-3) should be the least of your concerns.

Anyways, I'll post any other considerations I come up with for your build in your thread so we can continue this specific discussion there.

@"NaturallyNick.4058" said:I took a look at your posted Build Help thread to see what's up and I honestly think you just haven't played much Ele yet. You're saying things like "the power of that trait comes from it's fury gen," (it comes from the extended duration on your fire fields) and so on, then your other threads from this last month are all: "Fresh 80" and "New to ele/tempest, need advice." Anyways, don't worry. We Elementalists would still be incredibly powerful even with this change. Even the solo ones.

Your build also seems to be largely concerned with open world PvE in which almost anything works, so unfortunately it isn't much as a frame of reference for endgame instanced content. Regardless, have you tried running the Major Grandmaster trait Pyromancer's Puissance (Fire X-X-2)? You'd likely see a significant DPS increase from the might there, as opposed to the fury you're so worried about here. You can also get fury from your auras through Air 1-X-X as well as 2 seconds on a crit from the Raging Storm minor trait. Heck you're supposedly running low-level fractals, using the air spec and not even choosing Bolt to the Heart for the ~10% damage boost or even Fresh Air. There are so many things in your build that are unoptimized (no sigil of force, half zerker, half rampager, no expertise anywhere?) that the fury from Fire (X-X-3) should be the least of your concerns.

Anyways, I'll post any other considerations I come up with for your build in your thread so we can continue this specific discussion there.

The build you're referring to I left behind awhile ago, and I'm not using sigil of force because for the moment it costs too much. I have a condi sword build now with half rabid half rampagers (only because my crafting is low, just haven't invested the time there yet, and that was the closest I could get cost effectively to something better like grieving). I trait earth and fire for that. I keep up perma fury using fire grandmaster 1 for high crit rate as I'm using sigil of strength and the burn on crit is helpful. I don't use fire grandmaster 2 in any of my builds because I never stay in fire very long (staff is the only weapon that really camps fire). I also use a weaver fresh air scepter build with air and arcane, focused on maximizing ferocity and getting to 100% crit. I only use air currently for fresh air, but if I were to play staff I would use bolt to the heart (I just find staff a little boring). I may not have too much time playing ele, but I've been over the builds on sites like metabattle many times, so I get the idea behind the major builds, and I've spent a lot of time learning the rotations and why certain traits are used over others. I'm certainly no expert, but I feel I understand the class well enough to say I don't think you're suggested change is a good solution. Yes, fire grandmaster 1 makes fire fields longer, which is good (especially if running staff with lava font, otherwise its good but not great), but that alone isn't much of a grandmaster trait. Plus it would just be odd for earth to have something about blasting a fire field. You did mention it could be all blast finishers, but I feel that what it is already is better design than that. It seems this would be messing with something that already works well, and I'm sure the community would be angry at fury sources being changed AGAIN for Ele. I do think Ele should have better support options, but it doesn't seem like this change would be all that helpful (or popular) to ele as a class, especially since its primary role IS dps.

In case of pvp Earthen Blast has uses so I wouldn't be exactly happy about your change:1.Cripple on demand always useful when dealing d/p daredevil and other close encounters2.It can trigger FA for free3.Elemental Surge is not always reliable4.We stopped with fire might stacking long time ago since so many can classes steal, remove or corrupt

It's not like I really defend earth and cry if it was changed. Many of us stopped using whole trail line long ago...but if druid would be hammer nerfed then bunker weaver might be a thing.

I personally would liked if we had fury source in weapons. And condition damage group buff? I would rather pay you to me give that extra toughness - there want be ever probably working pvp ele condi build.

The nature of big reworks that whatever you like them or not they effect every game mode and ele's pve reality and ele's wvw/pvp reality...are complete different dimensions. I could bet that many pvp mains would want raids to never happen.

You make some good points about Earthen Blast, Godlike. In part I didn't want to make the Earth tree too strong, but what do you think about switching Strength of Stone for fury generation? This post is mainly focused on Buffing PvE support, but it wouldn't do to gimp PvP at the same time. I think that this would be a decent compromise. Maybe even more balanced than before, in that you have to pick between reduced CDs in Earth Attunment or Fury for your group.

To be honest with you I don't know why we talk about earth trait line - it's more focused around our selfish survivability. Most of pvp/wvw ele's would be more then happy to have arcane fury back so why not make it also group buff for example? Arcane has few tricks for support builds.

Edit: ups I forgot about tempest + aura protection...Damm. Ok now I see why discus earth.

Keeping it to the fire trait line but changing it to "all your blast finishers give fury " for X second (such as the engi one that give might+power) then it's fine ... most of the time it has been ruin by another random AOE dropped on the ground that is not fire so ... it would be a much more reliable grand master trait .

PS: u can reduce the duration if you thing that's OP ... but with fury on attunement swap no longer in the game ... it seems pretty balanced to me.

Running earth has a support ele couldn't be the only option ... why not WAter-fire-tempest then? with fire trait line giving more might and fury.

That's a big part of it, but I also don't think that tree needs much of a buff. It's stacked as it is. It has the best damage for at least half of builds, arguably the best utlity, and then has the second best healing on top of it (2 cc cleanse and a heal on a dodge. Plus tons of cc and self buffs) It would be pretty easy to end up just buffing (or significantly nerfing) DPS Ele on accident if you change up Arcane. Earth is nearly a dead spec though. It's on life support at the least.

The other big part of choosing Earth is that the idea for making some of signets more support oriented ties in well with Written in Stone. Here are the relevant parts from the Elementalist redesign thread:

@"NaturallyNick.4058" said:I'd make PvE Support Elementalist more viable with as little direct effect on other Ele builds as possible. Mainly by focusing on revamping a few of the signets and underused Specializations that wouldn't be taken unless you're already supporting.

1. Rework the Signet of Air passive to provide x% chance of lightning bolt strike on a hit/critical hit for the party (Power based, using the allies stats), Active: 1-2 second daze/stun.
2. Signet of Water Passive: remove 1 condition cleanse every ten seconds in AoE for 5 people (15 second CD in WvW/PvP?), Active: 2 AoE CC cleanse
3. Signet of Fire should probably be left alone. It's in a good place now for offensive Eles where some builds use it and some don't.
4. Signet of Earth, on the other hand, isn't isn't in such a great place and is almost never taken. Having it's passive be x% chance of bleeding on hit/critical hit for the party (based on the allies stats) would give it priority in some nice comps at least. Active: Take the immobilize up from 3 seconds to 4 seconds or give it a 1.5-2 second knockdown for the increased break bar damage.

Since a lot of their buffs and the majority of their healing are tied to auras/shouts, they also have to carefully weigh the number of signets they would take. More than one or two and it'll be quite challenging to keep up your buffs. On top of that, the Ele would have to run boon duration gear since they can't effectively use Sigil of Concentration, which prevents them from adding in any significant damage. This would help in keeping it restricted to supports and preventing power creep.

It wouldn't be too hard to balance against non-support builds either since you'd need Written in Stone to make full use of it. The overall damage buff just needs to be around that of a Druids (with Written in Stone), but less than glyph of storms/ice bow/lightning hammer so that it doesn't become a mainstay on DPS ele (not hard since they won't taking Earth Tree for the WiS trait).

! Another option for the Signet rework: This one would require a bit more effort on development side and be harder to balance, but it does add a more distinct "flavor" to support Elementalists. Have the Earth and Air signets work so that they passively store up the damage they would've contributed over the last "X" number of seconds , and release that damage in single lightning bolt or a earthen spike/stack of bleeding. Earth and Air signets cooldowns would need to be reduced (9-15 seconds?) to prevent massive burst damage, and the CC would have to be scaled down to match cooldowns as well.

! Since the passive wouldn't be storing up damage while on CD, you would need WiS to make the best use of it, further discouraging DPS Ele from taking as well as helping to mitigate any powercreep. Thematically it would differentiate it from the druid's AoE supporting damage by carving itself out a niche as a focused damage support. Having the total damage contribution of a Support ele be a bit less than the Druids should leave both in a great spot, since Eles provide more heals and their supporting damage is single target.

@Nath Forge Tempete.1645 said:Running earth has a support ele shouldnrt be forced tho ... why not WAter-fire-tempest then? with fire trait line giving more might and fury.

It's less about forcing them into one specific build and more about giving them options. I've played a good bit of Fire/Water support Tempest in fractals and while it's okay, it doesn't provide anything special beyond that. it's basically just a bad druid with the occasionally handy reflect. That said, it's a lot of fun for doing the lower-leveled daily recs when you're trying to speed through with a PUG so it would still be viable.

I don't see any good way to buff the Fire tree for support Eles without rocking the boat for almost literally every other build. Arcane has the same problem in that both of them are stacked trait lines. If Eles were going to do anything, they should drop the water tree and go Earth/Arcane. They'd have fury from Earth (ideally, as well as the signets from the change) and then the speed resurrection, the heal+CC removal on dodge from Arcane. Elementalists overheal with water already so the 15% bonus isn't particularly useful and they're getting cc cleanse from elsewhere. It would basically be exchanging some protection uptime, a few AoE auras and a little bit of healing all for the speed rez.

The other one to consider is Fresh Air/Earth, with the idea being to keep up max vulnerability through air overloads while still providing the usual support buffs. A bit risky since you're lacking CC cleanse and extra heals, but still great as a offensive support build.

I don't think they'd be really hurting for options since that's 3 different builds there just off the top of my head.

The problem with the only option of druid as a support class in raids is it gives way too many things... so if other supports classes can give almost as much as druid it won't be viable as a substitute to druid.

Less selfish abilities -traits - skills and more effectiveness in things that already exist without buffing dmg (so especially a support oriented effect on traits or a specific traitline)

The Druid giving too many buff through its spirits is definitely the big hurdle that support builds would have to overcome if they were going to replace it in some situations. However, the suggested Signet changes should do a lot to offset that and bring them more in line.

A support needs to provide a minimum of 5 things to be competitive: Healing(+Regen)/Might/Fury, a damage bonus in the form of skills, and a +150 bonus to a stat somewhere in their trait lines. The Fury and Signet changes address the missing parts of the first two, and the last one isn't absolutely imperative. It could even be added in during a later balance patch after seeing how the new support Ele performed.

Either Water or Earth would be able to fit a +150 stat bonus in their middle tiers. Ideally, I'd swap 5-10 man Fury generation in exchange for pretty much any one of the Earth minor traits. (Druids can maintain it passively using a pet or with a single skill otherwise, so it's not exactly a high value boon.) Finish by turning Strength of Stone into an AoE bonus of +150 to a useful stat and then they should be up to par with the other support options.

Brainstorming ideas for the stats : Expertise, Ferocity, Condition Damage, Toughness all seem to fit the theme with Expertise being the only one not already provided by other classes. Toughness would be all but worthless in PvE and Vitality has a similar problem. Precision and Power would never be turned down by anyone, regardless of game mode. A party-wide Expertise bonus could also make sense in the Major Master part of the Water tree, replacing either Soothing Disruption or Cleansing Wave, with Soothing Disruption being the most ripe for a change.

@Razor.6392 - chill in 90% of discussion has nothing to do with pvp. More on how to make tempest alternative to druid in raids ect@Nath Forge Tempete.1645 - arance fury change propably has no affect on pve but in pvp/wvw it was big nerf, to not sidetrack form topic: for example in pvp we cannot use hybird amulets with 30% crit anymore like mender and have damage.@NaturallyNick.4058 - Truth to be told druid is just too good because every our idea just make mess in our builds or force us in awkward trait lines. The simple way should be nerf druid. Still a think the safest way is to give us fury as source from utilities skills, so best idea to go with your idea to do rework signets ( everything besides signet of restoration - it works quite nice for us in pvp). Still i would like to see it as something already in this skills then effect of trait.

Ele is a jack off all trades support class before the either expansion were released. It was the I can give a little team might stack, regen, condi clear or prot boon to the team on demand. However since hot came out ele is less in demand since necros/reaper have their boon corruption abilities buffed and now since POF many more classes has anti boons. We are boon drive damage class or light support with mechanics that are far out to date. Most of the nerfs are coming from a raids standing point that slowly effects pve and wvw, when unquestioned it will be standardized in pvp also.

You can't fix ele if they aren't aiming to fix it. They are currently try to make ele less popular and usable in raids so other classes in raid can get fair treatment. But in reality the should just add a -15% damage environmental buff on elementalist players in raids , just like in the first game. cough cough. They we won't had to be hit with all these nerfs for the past 2 years.

I mean you can't fix the profession when they want to make it less desirable. Anet looks at stats and people still play ele if it's clunky and mediocre. Therefore nerfs will still come and any buff or balances will just have to wait.

Try again in 3-4 months But then again I've been trying since 2015 for just a small buff in arcane tree line. And that line got nerfed 5-6 times since then.

@Waisenpai.6028 said:

You can't fix ele if they aren't aiming to fix it. They are currently try to make ele less popular and usable in raids so other classes in raid can get fair treatment. But in reality the should just add a -15% damage environmental buff on elementalist players in raids , just like in the first game. cough cough. They we won't had to be hit with all these nerfs for the past 2 years.

I mean you can't fix the profession when they want to make it less desirable. Anet looks at stats and people still play ele if it's clunky and mediocre. Therefore nerfs will still come and any buff or balances will just have to wait.

It makes me quite happy to see there are still players in the ele community who can see the obvious..I almost thought that all left was a mass of pve fanboys , yes they're desperately trying to make ele less desirable in all game modes given the sheer quantity of pve players using it...so far they succeed only in making ele, the perfect pve choice while being useless anywhere else....but again being this a pve game first..I doubt things will change anytime soon, it's faster to just use another main as I did

I'm curious, if you want fury as a support ele (I assume auramancer), why not trade Earth for Air and take Zephyr's Boon to get 100% fury uptime from auras? You'll lose protection and stability but your standard druid setup doesn't have those either.

The air trait is an option but fury alone isn't enough to bring support Ele into the meta, otherwise we'd be seeing a bunch of Water/Air supports already. Keeping it in the Earth tree would tie in well with the suggested Signet changes (through Written in Stone), which would almost certainly be enough to make Support Elementalist viable. On the other hand, just buffing the Air tree wouldn't work since it's already quite strong and would end up totally imbalanced.

Leaving it in Earth so that they can provide the protection and intermittent stability keeps the classes distinct as well. Ele will still be the slightly more defensive support (perfect for T4 fractals and now viable for Raids) while Druid would be the opposite (great for Raids/speed clears and still viable for T4 fractals).

aw gosh I didn't think about air as a healing tempest ! but the lack of supporting traits in air would be hard to make it work well .... ligthning rod maybe to apply weakness since it has been changed last patch to proc even on breakbar monsters . Should try that soon (maybe it will be better on tuesday's patch)

It doesn't work very well. You may as well take Fire for the easier might stacking. Air/Water is the best if you want an offensive build, because it helps you stack vulnerability, but Vuln is usually maxed already. The other choice is to run Air/Earth to maximize your Ele specific buffs, but then you can't keep full up-time on the buffs anyways.

No matter which you choose, you're working twice as hard for maybe 70% of the effectiveness of the other supports.

We don't have anyone or a team that mains an ele in anet in all 3 spectrum in the game that plays the game to it's full ability. They rely on other sources and people that will dab in as an ele from time again. Hence the total move to support for hot and simple ds, which has been nerfed by POF. Conditions aren't really an issue with Weaver but the boon corruptions still being a major issue. The lack of swapping to attainments directly makes its quite mechanical eg: going to earth attunement with arcane trait in order to gain protection is a pain when playing as weaver. Since you will lose your chain damage and have to skip or by pass many low damage chains that are needed.

Weaver lower damage than core ele but it has many soft condition removals.Core ele damage and protection on demand.

Either way I feel the damage for ele in wvw and spvp is too low. Need a boost to Dagger main and off hand and sword.