Elementalist Changes

"In this update, we looked to improve the weaver's sword damage and move its high healing aspects further into the water attunement. In this vein, we reduced Riptide's healing and increased Aqua Siphon's base- and healing-power contributions. Additionally, we wanted to improve less-used skills in signets and improve the Glyph of Storms so that some storms have better situational use via differentiated recharges.

Gale Strike: Damage per strike has been increased by 25%.Twin Strike: The damage of this attack has been changed. The initial strike now deals 33% less damage, and the second strike now deals 100% more damage. The overall damage of this skill has been increased by 33%.Shearing Edge: The damage of this skill has been increased by 50%.Natural Frenzy: The damage of this skill has been increased by 50%.Riptide: The healing-per-level aspect of this skill has been reduced by about 60%. Healing-power contribution has been reduced by 45%.Aqua Siphon: The healing-per-level aspect of this skill has been increased by about 60%. Healing-power contribution has been increased by 50%. The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 18 seconds to 15 seconds.Signet of Water: The active form of this signet now heals allies and chills enemies in its area of effect. The passive form of this signet now reduces incoming condition duration by 20% instead of removing conditions. Reduced the chill duration from 4 seconds to 3 seconds. Reduced the recharge from 25 seconds to 20 seconds. This is now a ground-target skill.Signet of Fire: Reduced the recharge from 20 seconds to 15 seconds. This skill now strikes up to 4 additional enemies around the target. This skill now performs a range check when cast.Glyph of Storms: Reduced the recharge of Firestorm from 60 seconds to 25 seconds. Reduced the recharge of Ice Storm from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. Reduced the recharge of Sandstorm from 60 seconds to 40 seconds. All storm glyph variants go on cooldown whenever one glyph is cast.Glyph of Elemental Power: In addition to its previous effects, this glyph now also increases outgoing damage by 25% for each strike. Fixed an issue that prevented this glyph from losing stacks when enhanced attacks were blocked, blinded, or evaded.Superior Elements: Fixed a bug in which multiple weavers could override each other's cooldowns."

Wow on the Glyph of Storms. Gonna be using that more! May give firestorm a shot on my condi sword weaver.

intresting glyph changes. Sword buffs exept riptide nerfed. Also those signet changes are intresting to think about them.

They did buff condis over all on ele it seems i am not sure how it will work out. Other then that it seems mostly unchanged.

Glyph of Elemental Power will be incredible.

@Abelisk.4527 said:Glyph of Elemental Power will be incredible.

Only if it was not charges (i play staff so aoe no good with charges) but it should be realty strong with arcain power stack on top of that too the burst dmg from scepter weaver will be unbelievably strong.

That buff to double attune water is baiting the utility slot for Unravel is still bad especially when the range is still 130, you have to be hugging your opponent with character model facing for it to land :\ this is basically 4s to 8s nerfed access to a decent heal skill.

Sandstorm (10s of near immunity due to pulsing blind) on a 32s CD, glyph heal on a 16s CD (which was already good)...We should be able to do something with that.

Perhaps sword focus...using focus which covers any ranged weakness, glyph gives a massive upper-hand to melee, and sword, which can evade/heal for days.

We'll see...

Nice start to changes though I was hoping for better condition removal outside of water trait lines.

Hmmm.... what I can say.... is glyph typical sword -use skills?? no!... so better idea for me would be to not touch glyph (that can be dangerous) and do more ..much more in only sword-skills (only!). In pvp/wvwvw mode - I don't want to comment (I'm almost not playing there) but PVE mode it's something that really intresting me and - to be honest - I hoped that there would be changes for better. But still sword it's very hard choice for PVE mode... nothing specially changed in that for me. Glyph - that can be not good changes, because now (and Im saying this as elementalist) it's too OP. ehh ... what a pity that sword is still not best choice in PVE mode. Maybe our GM's will notice someday that sword can be usefull in PVE also not only PVP...

signet of water is awesome

Glyph is good in pve, but the cast time makes it hard to use in pvp (except goep)

I have been running Sword/Dagger Weaver in PVE since it came out. I love the combat with it. The updated damage will be a big help. I was not using Glyph of Elemental Power, but with it's update I think I'm going to give it a try. So far, I like all the updates. But, only time will tell...

Riptide nerf is somewhat myopic. As if the 3 skill will ever land on a good thief or mesmer.. its an outright huge nerf to sword healing which we didn't need. We needed that heal to be able to survive against the endless amounts of cheese from various classes.

How it will play out:

Thief or cheese class kites, goes in to burst. Teleports away from all your "increased damage" or sword 3 you wanted to use to mitigate their burst. Goes in to burst again and you die.All it does is reward a kiting playstyle even more which is already predominant over brawler builds. Huzzah.Rather than reward a class that has to plan its actions ahead of time, press substantially more buttons and time those buttons correctly, use its dodges and is weak to cc... you get this where they continue to reward cheese instead.

Also did the math on the three skill and it doesn't even come DISTANTLY close to replacing a portion of the healing you lost on water 2. They should have made it clear they are nerfing sword survivability substantially if they are going to change things.At least have the courage to tell us you want us to be thief bait if you are going to make it so... ugh.

Meanwhile firebrand can still do zerker damage with 4k armor and there are plenty of harder to kill things.

The riptide change wasn't bad.. it wasn't short sighted.. it wasn't an honest mistake. It is something someone who doesn't play the game or isn't capable of understanding it would do.

Glyph of elemental power is especially tempting due to its instant cast and stun break. I feel it's fights for a spot with twist of fate when wielding sword.

Part of me really wishes those fake notes from the other day were real...

@"Sahfur.5612" said:Riptide nerf is somewhat myopic. As if the 3 skill will ever land on a good thief or mesmer.. its an outright huge nerf to sword healing which we didn't need. We needed that heal to be able to survive against the endless amounts of cheese from various classes.

How it will play out:

Thief or cheese class kites, goes in to burst. Teleports away from all your "increased damage" or sword 3 you wanted to use to mitigate their burst. Goes in to burst again and you die.All it does is reward a kiting playstyle even more which is already predominant over brawler builds. Huzzah.Rather than reward a class that has to plan its actions ahead of time, press substantially more buttons and time those buttons correctly, use its dodges and is weak to cc... you get this where they continue to reward cheese instead.

Also did the math on the three skill and it doesn't even come DISTANTLY close to replacing a portion of the healing you lost on water 2. They should have made it clear they are nerfing sword survivability substantially if they are going to change things.At least have the courage to tell us you want us to be thief bait if you are going to make it so... ugh.

Meanwhile firebrand can still do zerker damage with 4k armor and there are plenty of harder to kill things.

The riptide change wasn't bad.. it wasn't short sighted.. it wasn't an honest mistake. It is something someone who doesn't play the game or isn't capable of understanding it would do.

That’s what I was worried about when considering a nerf to Riptide. The skill basically carried the elite set, especially in WvW.

Looks like there is still no reason to use ele AT monthly....

Issues remain the same: still can't follow up cc chains with burst...so why we should care about random damage values?

Riptide nerf is kinda meh especially that it still doesn't matter - druid is exactly in same spot where he was in meta.

It's good that we finally we had sygnet's reworks - new signet of water is my favourite.

Glyph changes look fine...but that's all - I don't like utilities that can do only damage but sandstorm maybe will be some kind of option

But honestly...looks like pvp ele's are hostages of raid meta...PoF what a f***ing joke....

As always good job Karl.

@Lonewolf Kai.3682 said:

@"Sahfur.5612" said:Riptide nerf is somewhat myopic. As if the 3 skill will ever land on a good thief or mesmer.. its an outright huge nerf to sword healing which we didn't need. We needed that heal to be able to survive against the endless amounts of cheese from various classes.

How it will play out:

Thief or cheese class kites, goes in to burst. Teleports away from all your "increased damage" or sword 3 you wanted to use to mitigate their burst. Goes in to burst again and you die.All it does is reward a kiting playstyle even more which is already predominant over brawler builds. Huzzah.Rather than reward a class that has to plan its actions ahead of time, press substantially more buttons and time those buttons correctly, use its dodges and is weak to cc... you get this where they continue to reward cheese instead.

Also did the math on the three skill and it doesn't even come DISTANTLY close to replacing a portion of the healing you lost on water 2. They should have made it clear they are nerfing sword survivability substantially if they are going to change things.At least have the courage to tell us you want us to be thief bait if you are going to make it so... ugh.

Meanwhile firebrand can still do zerker damage with 4k armor and there are plenty of harder to kill things.

The riptide change wasn't bad.. it wasn't short sighted.. it wasn't an honest mistake. It is something someone who doesn't play the game or isn't capable of understanding it would do.

I totally agree. Riptide was the oh shit response to the kite burst of thief, mesmer (though who knows now), and ranger. Double water attune to get to the water sword 3 gives a 4 second more delay (most likely) in addition to the, mentioned above, reduced healing.

Guess we will see. I'll be trying it as it is. I never double attuned previously though.

Might go back to dagger dagger if this hurts too much.

Some meh changes, some silly uneeded nerfs and some point changes - In the end, this is a bad update for ele, as always :/

Pretty excited for the signet changes. I'm hoping they're testing the waters and there's more to come. I can already see the Signet of Water being useful in small scale WvW engagements. Other that seems like not much changed on the support front (almost zero change for PvE). Glyph of Storms wills see more use as a blind, but it's still only for DPS Eles.

You can tell they really worked to give PvP Weaver a buff though. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out since it could translate into a strong roaming build for WvW as well.

This is the new cele ele.

Yeah, the riptide nerf hurts. /Sigh

dudes so the notes don't say it but signet of water can now revive. dude. thats dope.

@ScottBroChill.3254 said:dudes so the notes don't say it but signet of water can now revive. dude. thats dope.

It sure can! It's only 5% but hey, anything to make our skills better at this point haha!