Thaughts about Weaver's Class Mechanic

Hello fellow Elementalists,

after nearly a week of playing PoF and browsing through the Elementalist subforum I 'd like to gather some of the more prominent suggestions and throw my own critique concerning the Weaver attunement mechanic into the discussions:

Things I've read before:

1. Converting Unravel into a F5 skill.
2. Reducing the cooldown of the attunement you're primarily attuned to.

Critique:

1. I think that adding a F5 ability just to fully attune to a single element would be better than sacrificing an utility slot for it. But I also think that Unravel is a bad skill, no matter if it's an utility or a class mechanic.
2. Easy and intuitive change to make the weaver feel much more fluid. (And to save your life in PvP).

My own suggestion:Adding some kind of 'weapon swap' to the Weaver spec which doesn't realy swap weapons but switches the primary with the secondary attunement. It would have the same 10s cooldown as every other weapon swap and could trigger all relevant traits of the attunement which will become the primary attunementa nd weapon swap sigils. The question would be if this kind of weapon swap would interrupt all casts like weapon swap does on other professions.I think that implementing a change like this wouldn't be easy.

Since I've certainly forgot about a lot of other good suggestions maybe you could add them here with your personal opinion about them.

I hope this discussion can get some kind of summary of our concerns about the Weaver.

PS.: Since English isn't my natice language I hope that u can forgive me any gramatical errors or misspelling.

In terms of fun, I'm only enjoying condi weaver (sw/f). As someone with countless hours on ele, I can't help but feel clunky with weaver and the old weapons. They can be effective, but I just don't have fun. The rhythm feels off, and only sword/focus condition build has mee singing while I weave through combat and take out my foes.

Didn't think I would but I absolutely love dual-attunement switching. It really breathed new life into old ele gameplay, and I love dual skills (especially that we get new ones on old weapons too) even if most of them are just different flavors of damage, some unique ones are there too.

Anyway, I don't really have any problem with weaver just forcing dual attunement on you, and you build around that. Tempest forces overloads on you and you can't really not use them either unless you want to ultra-gimp yourself.

By far my biggest gripe with Unravel is simply that it's an absolutely useless skill that basically does nothing. All it does it remove your elite spec gimmick for a moment, which is so bad, even for ele utilities which range from pretty bad to okay already. You can't even switch more than once since it only lasts 5 seconds and the global cooldown is 4.

Unravel should just be changed into a completely different skill IMHO. If we get some kind of version of it as F5, nice, but I personally don't think I need it. Right now eles basically only got 3 utility skills with weaver I feel. Even if being able to fully attune once every so often is nice, it is just never worth the very limited commodity that is utility skill slots.

Unravel is the water stance, right? It should be some kind of condition removal. Maybe lose one condi per second for 5 seconds, 30 seconds cooldown, 2 ammo?

Overall the best change would be Unravel as a condition removal utility, and like you said, reducing the attunement cooldown of the attunement you just switched to (2 seconds maybe?) so fully attuning goes a bit faster (but still puts all other attunements on 4 seconds cd). Then there wouldn't really be a need for a F5.

@Loboling.5293 said:In terms of fun, I'm only enjoying condi weaver (sw/f). As someone with countless hours on ele, I can't help but feel clunky with weaver and the old weapons. They can be effective, but I just don't have fun. The rhythm feels off, and only sword/focus condition build has mee singing while I weave through combat and take out my foes.

I'll disagree. Staff feels pretty fluid and fun to me.

I think Arena Net should employ someone to hit everyone over the head with a foam mallet every time they mention “to fully attune immediately”.

What ANet really need to to do is give a look at the current stances, stone resonance is alright till you see it has a 50s charge cool down for a 3.5k barrier, the heal is just flat out useless providing less healing than the signet in most cases and being even worse than most racial heals. As mentioned above unravel is essentially a training wheels stance and in a few months will probably be entirely useless. Twist of fate is pretty decent, very long recharge for what it is baseline and the elite is pretty much insane.

@Aether McLoud.1975 said:

Overall the best change would be Unravel as a condition removal utility, and like you said, reducing the attunement cooldown of the attunement you just switched to (2 seconds maybe?) so fully attuning goes a bit faster (but still puts all other attunements on 4 seconds cd). Then there wouldn't really be a need for a F5.

This. I'd just have it clear three (same as Cleansing Fire or Magnetic Wave (my new best friend)) and give you a 5 second window to *dodges foam mallet_ do something with your attunement. Or better yet, remove one condition per second of that window, ending when you ...perform its other function.

My major problem is going down to condi damage; I left water traits behind and would like something new. Balancing this with movement (fed up of targets deciding to attack someone else and just walking out of my attacks) or lack thereof makes it ..interesting to play. Condition removal is so stacked on certain traits, the rest are almost invalidated.

I'm a strong proponent of either either 1. or 2. on your list. Either way, Unravel's function would require a change.....I don't vote for condition removal per se. I vote for a stance that removes inhibiting conditions, and grants resistance and regen.

@Selendile.9106 said:I'm a strong proponent of either either 1. or 2. on your list. Either way, Unravel's function would require a change.....I don't vote for condition removal per se. I vote for a stance that removes inhibiting conditions, and grants resistance and regen.

How about flipping inhibiting conditions (assuming you mean movement inhibiting?) into Swiftness (to reduce the reliance on Water traits)?

I am not sure why it needs to be as complex as you want it to be. A real fix to weaver mechanic is to simply let the weaver swap from choosing its main hand atument to choosing its offhand atument on the fly. A F5 skill on a 2 sec cd that lets you jump from the base effect of main hand swaps to the off hand swaps would go far for this class with out adding any more dps "free" cd swaps or even added swap effects.

An F5 to switch primary and secondary elements makes great sense to me.

I really don't like the idea of an f5 unravel. That removes what makes Weaver unique. Instead they should buff and change the stances and dual skills, and make the traits more interesting.

How about a (GM?) trait that allows us to attune to the off-hand attunement first?

You could come up with rotations for the reverse attunement order and stick to it if everything is fine, but you have immediate access to skill #4 and #5 if something goes wrong. Seems GM worthy, imo.

Why exactly do we need a weapon swap to swap primary and secondary attunements? I assume what you're asking for is that if you're in air/fire you want to swap them to be fire/air. You can already do this. If you're in air/fire, just hit fire attunement and now you're fire/air, and if you hit air attunement you're back to air/fire. Correct me if I'm wrong on this assumption.

Why are we suggesting these changes ? dual attunement is a really interesting mechanic, I think this is how elite spec should work. I feel im playing the same class but that requires entirley different mindset and playstyle. I like the shared cds so you're not bound to a rotation and you have to remember cooldowns of other attunements skills, and offhand skills being gated behind double attuning so you have to plan ahead. Plus now there's more ways to engage in a fight, all having different implications.

Tho I still think sword weaver needs improvements in PvP at least, but there are ways to fix this without messing with the weaver's mechanics.

@Shooka.9712 said:Why are we suggesting these changes ? dual attunement is a really interesting mechanic, I think this is how elite spec should work. I feel im playing the same class but that requires entirley different mindset and playstyle. I like the shared cds so you're not bound to a rotation and you have to remember cooldowns of other attunements skills, and offhand skills being gated behind double attuning so you have to plan ahead. Plus now there's more ways to engage in a fight, all having different implications.

Tho I still think sword weaver needs improvements in PvP at least, but there are ways to fix this without messing with the weaver's mechanics.

There's nothing wrong with dual attunement, I think it's great. The issue is we don't have access to our offhand skills when we need them, and those are the skills that actually matter the most. Unravel feels incredibly bad to slot as a utility, the elite isn't much better either when you could bring something like Glyph of Elementals instead. Weaver honestly feels like a downgrade from base ele because those offhand skills are so crucial to an ele's dmg and survivability. Weaver may be able to shine in organized fractals and raids because of alacrity, quickness, and heals. It's also pretty good in WvW as a backline staff dps. Outside of those modes it just feels weak compared to Tempest, which actually has a good offhand weapon which ele otherwise lacks. Warhorn 5 in air and air overload are too good to drop, not to mention dagger mainhand is pretty good. Speaking of mainhand, sword is a huge disappointment. It's so clunky, slow, and weak. For a spec that's supposed to be fast paced, sword doesn't really fit right now.

@Vrita.7846 said:

@Shooka.9712 said:Why are we suggesting these changes ? dual attunement is a really interesting mechanic, I think this is how elite spec

should

work. I feel im playing the same class but that requires entirley different mindset and playstyle. I like the shared cds so you're not bound to a rotation and you have to remember cooldowns of other attunements skills, and offhand skills being gated behind double attuning so you have to plan ahead. Plus now there's more ways to engage in a fight, all having different implications.

Tho I still think sword weaver needs improvements in PvP at least, but there are ways to fix this without messing with the weaver's mechanics.

Agree, but i think the point of many elite specs is they take away something and bring something else back. In Weaver's case I think we can agree the mechanics are very interesting and can lead to a complex playstyle.The problem is sword doesnt offer much in return in that sense. I dont think the problem is offhand skills being gated, that can be considered the downside of the spec, the problem for me is it doesnt make up for it where it should.

@Shooka.9712 said:

@Vrita.7846 said:

@Shooka.9712 said:Why are we suggesting these changes ? dual attunement is a really interesting mechanic, I think this is how elite spec

should

work. I feel im playing the same class but that requires entirley different mindset and playstyle. I like the shared cds so you're not bound to a rotation and you have to remember cooldowns of other attunements skills, and offhand skills being gated behind double attuning so you have to plan ahead. Plus now there's more ways to engage in a fight, all having different implications.

Tho I still think sword weaver needs improvements in PvP at least, but there are ways to fix this without messing with the weaver's mechanics.

The problem is that the bad far outweighs the good. Losing your offhand for a mediocre dual skill is not worth running this spec in most situations, and the sword certainly doesn't make up for it either. One idea I haven't seen yet is we should be able to swap to TWO different attunements before attunement swapping goes on CD, because right now weaving doesn't feel natural. It'll allow us to swap to any element combination we want, while also allowing us to double attune to one element if we need to. It provides more flexibility and fixes the weaving mechanic that otherwise feels slow and clunky. They can increase the attunement swapping CD to compensate for this change if it ends up being unbalanced.

The point is ele is a 4 /5 skill class not a 1/2 the 3ed is weaver only for the most part. Just swamping your 1 2 and 3 is only a less then full effect atument swap from a core ele. Think of it as a 3/5 power swap with a lower cd on the atument but with a much longer gobble cd. So for core ele to run weaver they are giving up a lot of power right there at the lost of fast chose of its 4 /5 skill (3 skill to a point for core only skills).

By letting the weaver chose witch way they are swaping main hand (1,2 and 3 skills) and off hand (4 and 5) makes the class more viable with out the need to have a pure crunches tool of unweaver something you do not see for any other class oe eleit spec. it becomes a waited skill that should be a true offensive utility or at least a buff utility.

An unweave for an F5 realy dose not fit as its a (your not this any more) effect which is an odd chose to put on that class in the first places at any level. What the point of being a weaver if you want an effect to make you not a weaver? Core ele is still there as well as tempest.