Why Water is only useful for healing?

I was wondering: when and how it was decided that Water attunement spells & Water Specialization should only be useful for healing?If I'm not mistaken, in Guild Wars 1 the Water spells (and the Chill effect) had some offensive capability.

That's one of the things that bothers me most about Guild Wars 2 Elementalist: if you wanna DPS, the options are Fire and Air. That's it.Why we can't have a Frost Mage?

I just hope that in the future, there will be some rework (because let's be honest, this class needs a rework) or Elite Specialization that enables a Frost DPS theme.

Most of the water skills arent even useful for healing tbh because they do """damage""". All the real heals come from traits, stats, utility skills, and boons lol

Water is mainly "support and control", not just "healing". Water is heal, regen, cleanse, chill, vuln and there is even a bit of hard CC.

The reason why water suck at DPS is because ANet choose to give a "role" to each attunment. Still, note that one of the highest core dps build use water attunment as it's main damage attunment, it's just that instead of the weapon skill, you use the conjure weapon skills.

"Elementalist specializations are also rather unique in that each of them directly improve one of the attunements. For instance, the Fire specialization mostly improves use of fire attunement spells." - wiki

I believe weapon skills and attunements should be the one to do the healing, condi, dps, cc, etc. The specializations of ele are no wonders fail, they are like Domination line inclined to no other combo or mechanic on mesmer but to improve GS and anything beside GS is trash with this line even core machanics. The so called uniqueness in specs is the downfall of the class. The specs should improve the skills depending on the theme they fill. Air should focus on providing speed, vuln., etc. out side of Air, like doing so triggers so in Air so you make use of the spec no matter what element you're in. Water should provide chills, heals, etc. when a specific condition is met. As of now, the condition of each spec that needs to be met to make use of the line is to be attuned to this element. The specs should improve all attunements with respect to the element they define, not kind of make an attunement useful or not. Right now it is most likely a 2 traits only class (Arcane/e-spec + the attuned element), you can only make use of 1 spec at a time until you swap attunements to make use of the other traited spec only.

I think at this stage the point is rather moot. Elements have always had their strong flavours; it's the whole point of the Elementalist concept. Frankly, I think it makes lots of sense how Anet broke the flavours up across the traits and skills. Change the concept of the class isn't really an option; it's why most people play a class.

I agree these hard boundaries are a limitation of the class; that's why there is Weaver.

Did you ever get hit by Water Staff 2 in WvW from a Weaver?

Kitten hurts man!

My record is 11k (getting hit by).

@"Auburner.6945" said:"Elementalist specializations are also rather unique in that each of them directly improve one of the attunements. For instance, the Fire specialization mostly improves use of fire attunement spells." - wiki

I believe weapon skills and attunements should be the one to do the healing, condi, dps, cc, etc. The specializations of ele are no wonders fail, they are like Domination line inclined to no other combo or mechanic on mesmer but to improve GS and anything beside GS is trash with this line even core machanics. The so called uniqueness in specs is the downfall of the class. The specs should improve the skills depending on the theme they fill. Air should focus on providing speed, vuln., etc. out side of Air, like doing so triggers so in Air so you make use of the spec no matter what element you're in. Water should provide chills, heals, etc. when a specific condition is met. As of now, the condition of each spec that needs to be met to make use of the line is to be attuned to this element. The specs should improve all attunements with respect to the element they define, not kind of make an attunement useful or not. Right now it is most likely a 2 traits only class (Arcane/e-spec + the attuned element), you can only make use of 1 spec at a time until you swap attunements to make use of the other traited spec only.

I am of the opinion that the weapon should determine the kind of damage one does rather than the element. Thus, daggers could be power DPS oriented in all elements, sceptre the condition based weapon, focus the defense one, and staff could remain as the utility weapon (and retain the drastically different skills based on element).

Instead of making all water skills weaker by design with some miserable healing portion (at least in my opinion...), they could make a water traitline minor give all casts while attuned to water provide some healing around the target. Or they could provide healing in all attunments, but double the effect while in water.

Something like that would allow elementalists to better fit a specific role without feeling that some elements are pointless to take.

Well, Ice Bow does physical damage but increases condition duration and healing power... Go figure.

Issue with ele is either everything is out of the place or just too tied to one fourth of your capabilities. Just like how aura buffs are spread over all traitlines and weapon sets and utilities. But cleansing? Nope. Go Water or die. In that regard, smothering auras was a good start, and could be usable in a world without mirages, scourges, or any semi-decent condi build. To be fair there's also diamond skin in earth but well, it is what it is.

@MyPuppy.8970 said:Well, Ice Bow does physical damage but increases condition duration and healing power... Go figure.

Issue with ele is either everything is out of the place or just too tied to one fourth of your capabilities. Just like how aura buffs are spread over all traitlines and weapon sets and utilities. But cleansing? Nope. Go Water or die. In that regard, smothering auras was a good start, and could be usable in a world without mirages, scourges, or any semi-decent condi build. To be fair there's also diamond skin in earth but well, it is what it is.

Diamond skin was so much better before, but too OP against condition classes, so now that's what it is.

But, basically, there are more options for cleansing condition beyond water line, it's just the others need a bit more help (or condition application needs to be toned down for the specific classes mentioned).

Old ideal and old means of balancing the ele class. It dose not work so well now with tempest being a thing and all the base healing nerfs. Water line realty needs to be more boon support aimed with cc support and tempest should be the healing aimed line.

@Fye.7594 said:I was wondering: when and how it was decided that Water attunement spells & Water Specialization should only be useful for healing?If I'm not mistaken, in Guild Wars 1 the Water spells (and the Chill effect) had some offensive capability.

That's one of the things that bothers me most about Guild Wars 2 Elementalist: if you wanna DPS, the options are Fire and Air. That's it.Why we can't have a Frost Mage?

I just hope that in the future, there will be some rework (because let's be honest, this class needs a rework) or Elite Specialization that enables a Frost DPS theme.

I agree it does not make sense not to mention water is not performing well to begin with for its so called designed purpose.

The skills aren't the problem , the problem is that you can only trait into damage with Fire or Air due to how the trait lines are set up. Water has plenty of damage since it can stack vulnerability, but there's no real way to utilise it with the current (broken) trait system on Ele.

Per-element traits were a really bad idea..

the spells are tied to weapons and each weapon has its own "theme"

Focus is defensive, d/d are short range, fast casting, mobile spells, scepter is more mid ranged condition damage oriented, and staff is long ranged heavy dmg /heavy support weapon.

I DID try to play as a ice mage using scepter/focus + ice bow + glyphs (of storms, of elemental summoning) and it was pretty fun and i did get some huge numbers going even tho scepter is a condi based weapon.

Aquamancer training adds 10% dmg, and piercing shards add another 20% dmgIce shards are very fast to cast and have quite good dmg when full zerkerShatterstone is your main dmg dealer, it can be hard to get it to hit moving targets but once you learn you can stack up 25 vulns very fast and boy do those damage modifiers add up!Water focus skills are for cc, and with ice bow and glyph of storms you have some very nice aoe burst spells.

Dragons tooth still has a powerful punch for an opening strike, and switching to air is also a very good option for some added burst damage.

This kind of build focuses on water and air for dmg, which isnt as different as to using a staff fire and air for dps. Eles are great at switching 4 attunements, and crippling your self to only ever using just 1 is pointless.

1 thing to note about all this is that during solo play i felt a lot more squishier than when i play staff zerker build..and there are a few reasons for it namely :

• 900 range instead of 1200
• im missing my very long evasion roll form staff 4
• aoes do not persist and tick dmg, meaning the option to spam numerous aoes on top of your self as you go down, in order to bring your self back up is fairly limited
• water is turned into dps, so there is no more 4-6k healing combo of switching to water, cast geyser , blast it, cast rain for condi removal that you could do with staff water
• lack of aoe cc like frozen grounds, static field, shockwave, unsteady ground. (you still have frozen gust,comet, gale but they are more of a single target cc)
• Your dmg is changed from mass pulsating aoes and long range splash auto attacks into medium ranged single target quick bursts of dmg

@Vukorep.3081 said:I DID try to play as a ice mage using scepter/focus + ice bow + glyphs (of storms, of elemental summoning) and it was pretty fun and i did get some huge numbers going even tho scepter is a condi based weapon.

Aquamancer training adds 10% dmg, and piercing shards add another 20% dmgIce shards are very fast to cast and have quite good dmg when full zerkerShatterstone is your main dmg dealer, it can be hard to get it to hit moving targets but once you learn you can stack up 25 vulns very fast and boy do those damage modifiers add up!Water focus skills are for cc, and with ice bow and glyph of storms you have some very nice aoe burst spells.

I tried this out today and the damage was way better than I expected. I couldn't work out what was the best choice for my third traitline though - what did you choose?

After a while I realised I was only really using the Air traitline for Inscription - switching to air attunement actually seemed to lower my damage, so I guess I was doing something wrong.

Also I got killed a lot. It's hard to kite with Shatterstone...

I'm glad some other GW1 Water Elementalist show some love for water spells... but unfortunately, Water spells in GW2 just doesn't cut it much.... If you run water heal say like in fractal, people (pug especially) will snapped you. Run dps withWater? suck even more. Anet give necromancer chill dps in the traitline, why not improve water trait line making water spells deal chill and chill deal dmg? I still run my Water Traitline with Tempest or Weaver, and from time to time I will get those dps monster elitist complaining my dps meter doesn't match their standards. Water attuntment also don't deal long chill duration, and it doesn't heal as much as Druid.... in the end it feel like jack of all trade. =/! I hope in next expansion if there is any.... they can make an attuntment specific Ele just like back in Gw1! (Even though I highly doubt its gonna happen)

It's long been my opinion that, for staff especially, non-Fire attunements sacrifice too much damage for the utility they offer. It makes it completely unviable to use those attunements outside of a specialized contexts, forcing you to thematically accept playing a Fire mage. Even Air struggles to complete with Fire outside of highly specialized builds.