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Concerns about Elementalist


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This is coming from a WvW perspective.

Ele is a hybrid class, that's it's crutch. Now if somehow the ele can be spec'd in some sort of way that it becomes a master of a specific element or 2 allowing them to be highly specialized at either: Dps (Fire), Mobility (Air), healing (water), or defensive (earth), maybe then it's more viable. So instead of being able to swap between 4 elements, they can only swap between 2 (or even 1 if we want to go that route allowing them to be extremely specialized).

It's nice to be able to swap between 4 elements; however, it seems to be more of a crutch due to the constant swapping to attain the desired goal with the end goal often being sub-par to what another class can provide. Let the ele master 1-2 elements vaulting them up to something viable, and like it's said above, allow them swap between 1-2 elements.

For me, I used to love using my ele in WvW for outputting dps, now they no longer make sense to use. Revenant puts out a lot more while having more HP along with some decent utility buffs, and the necro puts more while having better defense and HP, even despite it's lackluster mobility.

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Thoughts on the PvE elementalist experience:

  1. Weapon skills and traitlines sometimes feel wildly inconsistent.
  2. Specializations face the issue of always starting off really strong and then getting nerfed into down to line-often to the detriment of other possible build combinations. Seriously, stop the cycle of adding % modifiers and later on nerfing them and/or the skills.

For one thing, other classes have different weapon sets that each have a clear identity. Ranger longbow focuses on long ranged direct damage, guardian greatsword focuses on melee AoE direct damage, and the revenant hammer mace/axe combo focuses on condition damage. But looking at something like the elementalist staff, it's a mixed bag because the elementalist is innately so versatile but almost always defaults to ranged direct damage-because it meshes so well with fire and air traits. That leaves the other two elements: earth and water which are primarily used for crowd control (HAHAHA) and snaring/healing. Except, healing requires focusing on healing power, which no power elementalist will use and snares can only last so long.

My general thoughts on this issue is that each weapon set should focus entirely on one, maybe two roles. With other classes, they have two weapon sets they can switch to, which can effectively be used to serve a single role. For example, a deadeye using D/D and rifle--we all know it's most likely a direct damage build, focusing on long range and melee range.

The elementalist doesn't have that sort of luxury. Instead, we have 20 skills, 5 to each of the 4 elements. Each element's skills have a theme and I think that's what's hurting the elementalist badly right now. By theming skills to a particular element for a particular role, you're creating a mixed bag of functionalities on weapons when other classes rarely encounter that problem.

I'd be more interested in reexamining and redefining each weapon kit's role while using each element as a theme on how it would do that. For example, staff is going to focus mostly on direct damage, crowd control, snares, and positioning. One possible route of reexamination and redefinition of the staff's kit would be:

  • Fire staff: stays the same
  • Air staff: line-based ground targeting damage and crowd control skills, blinding flash would be replaced with something else, gust could be ground targeted like plasma blast.
  • Water: no longer has healing components. Skills now focus on chill, vulnerability, and short stuns in circular AoE form, burst damage from a faster ice spike.
  • Earth: no more bleeding and weakness. Skills now focus on cripple, immobilize, and knockdowns in circular and line AoE forms.

Using this example, the staff has a far more clearer role and allows for a further reexamining and redefining of what each elemental trait line could offer to each weapon set. Maybe fire could have one line focusing on might generation, another line focusing on direct damage, and the third line focusing on burning applications and improving them. With air, one line could focus on extending crowd control durations and rewarding interupts, one line could focus on applying mobility buffs and debuffs, and the third line could focus on applying blinds. The point I'm trying to make is that the current traits aren't as helpful with the current weapon set's roles as they could be because the weapon skills feel all over the place.

On the subject of specializations, this one stings really badly. At HoT's release, the tempest had incredible damage output. Then as time went on, that damage output was nerfed multiple times. At PoF's release, the weaver had incredible damage output. Then as time went on, that damage output was nerfed multiple times. See the pattern? This cycle needs to end and stay dead. When I was practicing the unnerfed weaver raid build, the one thing a more experienced raider told me is that my rotation's main goal was to try and maintain the elements of rage buff. Let's face it, the weaver has a ton of percentage traits that add more power, condition damage/duration, or straight up direct damage to the class. These have to be gone. It'd be better if the skills themselves were as good without having to rely so badly on the crutch of percentage stat increases.

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Here is coming from WvW perspective, and the following opinions is about staff-ele because staff is a necessary weapon while working in a team.for WvWtempest/core :

  • Overloadings : They are cool but it's hard to complete upon 4s channeling, high risky(full countered by scourge) and bad rewards after completing overloadings. Improve it plz.How about apply "resistance" or any effect ignore(not immune) condi-dmg during overloadings to "Lucid Singularity"?
  • Lava : -40%dps need to be separated upon specialization. Unlike weavers, tempest and core ele have no range-dps skill. Ignore this if you want tempests focus on healing.
  • signet : eles have -98%movement-condi duration(food+water signet+Geomancer's Training+melandru runes), dont think this design is good in competition.

for all (WvW/PvP/PvE)weaver :

  • Rework/adjustment (A problem about speciality . This moment weaver unlike an ele, much like as a quick-hand warrior with less health/armor/no stable CCs in time)Change global CD 4s back to 1s and tempest attune-mechanic is good to apply it on weaver. Example : While "attuning/leaving"** air-attunement will make it going in 5s CD before reactive and global going in 1s CD, means that we can sacrifice some survival to cast eles' CCs in time via attuning the 3rd/4th attunement (much like a card game system).For trait flexibility, "fresh air" can work with above-mentioned well, but need a nerf like 5s ICD and use acrane as a burst way(cri by arcane can active more then once during ICD, like reaper's "Chilling Victory").rework will make ele can active over 5 weapon skills between attunings in 5s and need some inspections.
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WvW and PvPI don't talk about PvE.

I'd like to see the signets buffed. Signet of Fire is nice at the moment, but I think the others are still somewhat lacking.

Signet of Air has a boring passive effect and an even more boring active one. Give this signet an overhaul or something, like a high-burst active effect. You could even make the passive effect give resistance. We might even use it after that.

Fire is cool. Don't change it.

You knocked off one bleed from Earth before and I don't know what the reason was for that. Make this skill AoE, just like Signet of Fire. Don't remove anything from this one, because I like it a lot and I use it a lot.

Hmm, Water. I tried this using this with a heal build + mercy runes (WvW). I like the idea of it having a revive feature, but I don't think 5% is enough. Increase it to 20% and it might become a great utility to use.

Change Elements of Rage back to how it was.Eruption needs to be WAY faster.

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Ele cast/animation time is also way too high.

There are many skills that looks good on paper, but then under perform due to the fact that it has after cast and other useless animation time. A skill with 1s cool down tuning can under perform by 25% if it happens to have 0.25s after cast. Things add up a lot. That's why Thief and Mesmer perform much better. They don't have as many useless cast/animation time as Ele does.

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@Razor.6392 said:Pve builds:

  • Very squishy with complex rotations. Why roll ele when you can just rollface with simpler classes?

As a mostly-solo PVE player who burnt out on WvW a few years ago, this really jumped out at me, because that's what I find myself thinking when choosing which of my characters to play.

By way of background, I'm an altoholic who's been playing since beta (about 6400 hours now) and celebrate diversity with 41 characters (so far).

I've put about 340 hours into my four Elementalists trying to find ways to make them more suitable for general open world and group event gameplay, but inevitably come away feeling underwhelmed.

The big picture problem with Elementalist is its relative lack of efficiency and appeal compared to other classes.

Elementalist costs too much to play for too little benefit. It takes too much to do too little, and because of their inherent inability to take a hit, I'm quite confident that over the past six years, I've revived more Elementalists than all other classes combined.

I love the theme and concept for the profession and would LOVE to play Elementalist more, but for me, at least, it's never the best choice for any job.

ArenaNet, please make Elementalist worthwhile.

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I'm not even sure where to begin with the issues that this class has. This post will mostly be about all game modes, because minor tweaks and number changes cannot fix the fundamental problems that elementalist has. If you only want to apply a certain change to one game mode for split balance, then it has to be numerical and not touch on the mechanics. This is just not enough anymore. Sword has been getting number changes since PoF release, and ele doesn't seem anywhere closer to being meta in PvP or WvW roaming than it was on PoF release. Even though many other classes got PvP nerfs while ele has been getting lots of sword buffs. This has been almost one year of sword buffs and things still feel the same. I won't say much about specific weapons, skills or traits here. It's more of a general look into the shortcomings that the class shows consistently across the board. If I were to talk about specifics here, it could become a book of sorts :#

First of all, the weapon skills are just too weak. There are some specific weapon skills that are very powerful DPS wise on a static target if you stack a bunch of damage modifiers. However, if that's not the metric that you use to determine how good a skill is, then ele is filled with lackluster weapon skills. There are so many skills that are vastly inferior to similar skills that other classes use. The comparison between freezing gust and winter's bite has already been made several times in this thread, so I don't think that I need to describe the massive difference in power between these 2 skills yet again. The funny thing is that elementalist players consider focus a good weapon. This is the weapon that has freezing gust and those terrible fire skills, flame wall and fire shield. That speaks volumes about how terrible the alternative offhands are. Then there are lots of skills across all the weapons that have needlessly long cast times, delays or aftercasts. The aftercasts are especially hurtful, because not only do they delay your next action, but on paper they make the skills seem better than they are. Tooltips do not show aftercasts after all. Auto attacks are also usually very bad, with a small number of exceptions like fireball and lightning whip.

These sorts of limitations were obviously there to keep elementalists in check, because they have 20 weapon skills. It used to make sense back in the day, but with the current level of power creep most ele skills are now way worse relative to other classes than they used to be in the core game. It gets even worse when you realize that some classes got lots of new skills as part of their elite specs, like firebrand with tomes. Additions such as these have severely diminished the advantage of having 20 skills. This is an issue in all game modes. In the competitive modes having a small number of skills stacked with effects is way better than having all of your effects spread across lots of skills, because that just gives your opponents a chance to recover. Also, having slow attacks is a huge issue there, because players can actually see them coming and can move out of the way. You don't even have to dodge when you can walk out of it before it does anything. The slowness of skills is even an issue with PvE. It is one of the primary reasons why elementalist DPS is so unreliable and hard to master. With all that being said, I believe that having a good look at all the weapon skills and buffing or re-purposing them appropriately is the most important thing that the balance team can do to fix elementalist. Weapon skills are the foundation of every profession. If the weapon skills are not good enough, then the traits and utility skills simply cannot make up for it. The best that you can hope to do with a bad foundation is to make the class OP through bad gimmicks.

Another issue with elementalist is the lack of survivability options that do not require major investment. Elementalist has the lowest base armor rating and HP pool and it has no inherent defense mechanics that you get just for taking the class. Even the elite specs do not get much free defense. Tempest gets a little bit with protection on overloads, but overloads themselves are simply terrible to use in so many situations, so I'm not even sure if I want to count them. Weaver gets some free barrier when it uses dual attacks. This barrier is such an insignificant amount that it may as well not even exist. I wouldn't notice the difference. However, not getting free defense is not a major issue by itself. The problem is that in order to get decent defenses, the investment that elementalist needs is way higher than on other classes. If you want decent cleansing, you need water no matter what. If you want to prevent direct damage, you don't get many good options. Since there is a lack of options for ignoring damage, you have to try and sustain. Sustaining requires healing power, vitality and water, which forces builds to to go full bunker if they want survivability. What makes it even worse is those pesky damage modifiers that you are forced to give up. Every class has damage modifiers, but elementalist is balanced around having the most, which means lower base DPS, which means even lower damage when going full bunker. The amount of damage modifiers is in itself a huge problem for the class, and it becomes very apparent when you try to build defensively. I believe that removing some of the damage modifiers and making some of that damage baseline is in order.

Also, what is up with all the boon power creep that has been going on lately? Elementalist used to be one of the best classes for generating boons for itself, which was feature that was supposed to make up for the lack of inherent survivability. Now it feels like almost every class is better at generating boons for itself. Was this intended or was elementalist completely forgotten in all of this boon power creep?

There are many other issues that I could talk about, but this post is already long enough as it is, so I won't continue anymore. There are many constructive posts in this thread that talk about them anyway.

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I can somewhat agree with many players here. I am mainly a PVE player, and I REALLY want to like ele, and I thought weaver would be the one, but sadly no dice, AMAZING concept, just.......1) Elementalist is already a class that requires a medium to high skill ability with it, as you have 4 weapon sets as your base mechanic. Not gonna lie, my results for playing it be rather poor. And adding suddenly lower cooldowns (that are in fact hard cooldowns VS core mechanic free swap to non-used recently element) in exchange for mix'n match elements and combos sounds nice on paper, but actually playing it just makes it more complex. Where once you might have tried to keep mental track of an elements skill cooldowns, now you have even lower cooldowns requiring more precision to micro manage, plus 4 hybrid skills.2) Quite frankly ele is a burst cannon as core mechanic. 4 weapon skills, pop all skills, swap to the next, burst, continue. As a whole not sure how I feel about this. I'm trying to build effectively, and yet veteran and up enemies give me a hard time (new content) because the life pool they have plus their new skills directly counter power AND melee bursting.3) Skills

  • Signet of restoration working on only one cast with Arc lightning, and any long duration cast.
  • Freezing Gust (Water focus 4) is a single target low damage chill.... (look at chillblains for comparison), quite bad......
  • Obsidian flesh (earth focus 5), 3 seconds invuln for 50 second cooldown. High tradeoff (but again the idea of ele is to shotgun skills, in my understanding).
  • Some aura granting weapon skills (Frost - Ice dagger 4, Flame - Fire focus) in my opinion are kind of just there for the concept of the quick skill burst then swap to the next set..... I mean the Sunspot trait deals damage AND gives fire aura when you swap to fire..... no the trait doesn't need a nerf, Flame shield needs a buff
  • Eruption (earth staff 2), 1 1/4 cast time with delayed explosion
  • The massive damage tradeoff on water skills for often minimalistic healing (hello new water sword auto)
  • Two ults that change your skills, and one thats just a buffed up minion. Do we not have enough skills? Wheres the fun ult for this class?4) Traits
  • Pyromancer's Puisance, just bad really. one might, flames only, many players can get max might fast and easy in groups, and as solo you pop your skills and move on
  • One with Air, superspeed on air attune..... why?
  • Inscription, cast a glyph get a boon..... feels like it was just kinda tacked on to the recharge TBH
  • Elemental Contingency, could be good, but doesn't really compete with the other two
  • Bountiful Power, could be good but needs 5 boons minimum to match any other traitlines smallest bonus damage trait, and 10 for the better ones. could be good if doubled or 5%

Most of these are my personal experience tho. Again it's a class that requires medium to high proficiency in micromanagement and rapid decision-making if your not just swapping and popping. Anyone that disagree's otherwise probably falls under one of those two categories. Swapper and popper, or able to micromanage.

At least fix water focus 4...... give it a duration or something, make it a mini blizzard.

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@Ghin.1653 said:I can somewhat agree with many players here. I am mainly a PVE player, and I REALLY want to like ele, and I thought weaver would be the one, but sadly no dice, AMAZING concept, just.......1) Elementalist is already a class that requires a medium to high skill ability with it, as you have 4 weapon sets as your base mechanic. Not gonna lie, my results for playing it be rather poor. And adding suddenly lower cooldowns (that are in fact hard cooldowns VS core mechanic free swap to non-used recently element) in exchange for mix'n match elements and combos sounds nice on paper, but actually playing it just makes it more complex. Where once you might have tried to keep mental track of an elements skill cooldowns, now you have even lower cooldowns requiring more precision to micro manage, plus 4 hybrid skills.That's exactly what makes ele stand out among the other professions and what makes it, imho, such a fun class to play. I understand that its tricky, clunky, hard to learn, tough to understand and maybe not always very effective...but it's fun!

Eruption (earth staff 2), 1 1/4 cast time with delayed explosionThe reason for that is that you can cast a field over it to combo with. In fact, if you're quick enough, you can cast both Eruption and Ice Spike, then Lava Font, and get 6 stacks of AoE might (and 20 seconds AoE fury if traited). Due to the skills' delays, you can use them in 2 ways. Either you cast Lava Font first, or you cast Lava Font last. That makes them highly flexible.

Bountiful Power, could be good but needs 5 boons minimum to match any other traitlines smallest bonus damage trait, and 10 for the better ones. could be good if doubled or 5%Arcane is more of a support oriented traitline. Compared to the other 3 support traitlines (Water, Earth and Tempest) it's relatively powerful. Expecially considering the ele can supply 5 boons themselves easily (Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina).

Most of these are my personal experience tho. Again it's a class that requires medium to high proficiency in micromanagement and rapid decision-making if your not just swapping and popping. Anyone that disagree's otherwise probably falls under one of those two categories. Swapper and popper, or able to micromanage.Yeah, I'm probably one of those players. That's what I like about ele. Given that there are 8 (7 if you discount engineer as well) other professions that are more plain, can we please change the ele in a way that preserves its unique playing style?

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WvW perspective

Reduce cast time of overloads by half.

Focus should grant auras in each attunement.

Healing needs a buff by 10% or more on staff.

Dagger healing needs 30%+ increase in effectiveness.

Shouts need their CD reduced significantly.

Air shout superspeed with higher uptime alone would increase the demand of tempests.

Each shout should grant aura respectively to its attunement, especially shout heal should grant light aura.

Auras need a buff in duration to 5.5-6secs.

Rebound needs a 40 sec CD and a higher uptime.

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Look no further than GW1 if you want to give back that special vibe to the elementalist as a class, in GW1 we were far from being the meme class that we're now on the contrary, elementalist was one of the most feared classes : a plethora of devastating aoe/single dmg skill with competitive casting animation and not the insulting joke of GW2 where you have skills that not only root the players but also require 1s+ casting time plus 1s+ of casting animation which is bloody absurd.

We need structural changes aka light rework and not the usual number crunching , we need to give that control/dmg combo back to the class, this was the basis of the elementalist in GW1, check the earth line:

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Earth_MagicIt gives control, offers non strippable defense against direct dmg, it made ele , one tough cookie to digest for anybody...no heal burst monkey "strategy"...pure control/disable to sustain yourself and that principle should be given back to eles

We need to give that intimidating aura back to the class, how is even possible that a midget armed with a rifle scare people more than somebody who manipulate the very force of lightning ? I don't see any other MMO where people laugh/ignore a burst elementalist/mage...https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Air_Magic

How is possible that there are other classes in game that can manipulate fire/burning better than an elementalist? The fire line used to offer so many effects, control and devastating stacks of burninghttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Fire_Magic

There are different ways to manipulate the water : create frost armors, blur the vision of enemies, slow their movements, heal allies...but in GW2 all ele does in water is heal burst trying to stay alivehttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Water_Magic

We need changes that matter and that improve ele competitiveness in all parts of the game, the design has been left behind while other professions can easily keep up with the ever increasing power creep

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I can make a list of things that needs to be changed to keep up with other classes power creap from core to tempest to weaver they all need tweaks and buffs..atm im on my phone so real quick what pops into my head atm is cleasing fire. Its a 40 sec cd that cleanses 3 condis...what you did with warriors shake it off needs to happen with cleansing fire. At least 2 charges and bring its condi clearing up to 4 at least on a 25-40 sec cd. That will make the skill useful in this heavey condi meta. Il add more later.As for tempest and there shouts they are all on 40+ second cooldowns making them hard to use effectively when your in combat with this fast pace charge heavy cc heavy meta. The super speed shout is really useful but you can be immeditly cc-ed again right after or having perma immobi on you cuz the single utility condi clear only clears 3 condis every 40 secs. Aftershock is another example of a skill left in the 2015 era(4 years old un changed with the rest of the games power creap and the new era of charges).

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First thing, and this should apply to all classes:There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the ass. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

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@ThiBash.5634 said:The reason for that is that you can cast a field over it to combo with. In fact, if you're quick enough, you can cast both Eruption and Ice Spike, then Lava Font, and get 6 stacks of AoE might (and 20 seconds AoE fury if traited). Due to the skills' delays, you can use them in 2 ways. Either you cast Lava Font first, or you cast Lava Font last. That makes them highly flexible.

I love this style of game play and I use that combo pretty often. However, I feel that these days it's too much effort for almost no payout. Some classes can generate 25 stacks of might for doing less. The balance is really out of whack here.

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PvE-player here.

I've played the game since the beta. My elementalist has by far the highest playtime among all my characters. Recently I've started to put some more effort into my piano-play to get into raiding...right on time for the nerfs. I'm not the type of player to recite all the traits and their respective values, but I'd say I'm a decent ele-player.

I'm mostly playing on staff. I was really excited for the sword...but after playing through the PoF story with sword and dagger right on launch...let's say the weak implementation of sword on launch left a mark.

I've dipped my toes into other professions. Mostly I'm surprised how easy survival is on those characters in open world or story instances and how easy it is to keep damaging your enemy while you're surviving. This feeling builds up pretty fast, even though I mostly have no deep ties to those professions. Low cast-times and less skills that root you to the ground while they still do high damage, some have inbuilt defense or very interesting buff-packages...it feels more fluid, more dynamic.

The ele nowadays feels stiff. With a ton of high cast times, skills that root you to the ground for several seconds and the oh so powerful rotation is messed up easily by a single interrupt because god forbid the ele could attack and defend at the same time. Recently, when I had to collect the materials for the roller beetle saddle, I was once again reminded how long it takes the ele to even auto-attack, given how long I had to camp one specific spawnpoint to get a steam creature before a warrior insta-leaped into it or a longbow-ranger shredded it with a single skill before my projectile even went on it's ballistic arc.

While I could once play a jack of all traits and master of non without any rotations, learning specific rotations allowed the ele to become a master in things like stacking might, or healing, or dealing damage, or supplying stability. All of those narrowly defined and nothing of it in parallel, because that's how rotations work. But apparently that was too strong, so everything was nerfed over time. Everything the ele stood out with was cut off.High, vertical mobility with lightning flash? Ahaha...now you can almost dodge as far as that skill shadowsteps you. High dps conjures? Useful utility on conjures? Pffft.

With specializations, other classes got roles that allowed them to do two or more of those cut off things in parallel. The druid heals, supplies 25 might, resurrects and can place spirits for passive buffs. A well played chronomancer sustains a ton of buffs, among those the unique alacrity, offer blocks for a whole party and can even tank. Not to mention the amount of CC the mesmer dishes out, while a weaver has to interrupt its dps-rotation and switch through multiple attunements to reach all CC-skills. Both professions also have higher health pools and survivability than an ele while they fullfill those roles.

When Tempest came with HoT, it became a dps-spec with some options for support. PoF came out, Weaver became the new dps-spec for ele. Tempest got...left behind.The specs followed the mindset of the nerfed "streamlined" elementalist and mostly just gave it new ways to deal damage, until...wait for it...the ele stood out for doing too much damage. Cut.The specs played more with attunement-mechanics instead of adding any of the roles that were cut off from the ele.

Playing sword or dagger in PvE may be a solution to focus your damage on a single target, but if you deal just the same damage as everyone else while being way more fragile, there is really no use to go melee.

The following suggestions may seem overpowered, but I'm not expecting them to be introduced without adequate balance.

Short term:

Buff the dps back up. It won't fix the ele, but at least it makes it viable again.

Reduce some of the cast- and rooting times. Give the ele a more dynamic feeling.

Rework auras to be a viable asset from open world up to raids. To be usefull for eles, turn on-hit-effects into passive effects. Might as well give the Tempest the ability to cast auras on ten people at once.

Long term:

If you're opposed to let the ele out-dps other professions in melee, shift more passive survivability or vitality to eles in melee-combat, or consider removing the difference in health pools between the professions.

Consider reworking Evasive Arcana into something that doesn't require to sacrifice a dodge, given the squishiness of the ele.

If it's not possible to have multiple options on different specs, rework the specs to represent an option. Improve the support-focus of the Tempest, improve the damage-focus of the Weaver. Just an example what could go into support-attunements with low damage...-Fire: Burn boons from enemies, raise firewalls to burn projectiles, dispense might, passively increase power for your party-Air: Stuns. Dispense Quickness and Swiftness for your party-Water: Pretty much like it is now, but some more condi cleanse, passively increase the vitality and healing of your party-Earth: More CC and reflects, passively increase defense and condition duration of your party

Rework conjuresInstead of placing one weapon in your hands and one on the ground, give the utility-skill an ammo-mechanic. Using the skill places a weapon in your hands. If you carry a weapon, the utility skill changes, allowing you to place another weapon on the ground. Dropping the weapon in your hand changes the utility skill back. Having the second summon always at hand instead of running around to pick it back up would be a huge QoL-improvement, make it less likely that you pick up a conjure instead of rezzing someone as well as reducing visual clutter at world bosses.The icebow could use either more damage or more chill. The cc on icebow 5 should be higher for the long cast time.Earth Shield could need an actual block. Maybe even grant aegis to you and your party if you drop it.Lightning hammer feels okayish...Not really sure how to make the fire axe viable.Fiery greatsword is not bad, but could feel a little more powerful for an elite skill with that cooldown.

Wishlist(not neccessary in my opinion, but would be fun):

Change the elite glyph of elemental to be more like the flesh golem. Permanent and with underwater-forms. For the air elemental you'd just need to add a bubble around the current model, for the fire elemental surround it with the effect of boiling water, the earth elemental could become a mud-cloud that follows you and the ice elemental could turn into an undulating ice-wall.

Pseudo weapon-set: The ele can't switch weapon sets, but it would be nice to have some slots to store a second set of weapons in the equipment-tab.

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@Ganathar.4956 said:

@ThiBash.5634 said:The reason for that is that you can cast a field over it to combo with. In fact, if you're quick enough, you can cast both Eruption and Ice Spike, then Lava Font, and get 6 stacks of AoE might (and 20 seconds AoE fury if traited). Due to the skills' delays, you can use them in 2 ways. Either you cast Lava Font first, or you cast Lava Font last. That makes them highly flexible.

I love this style of game play and I use that combo pretty often. However, I feel that these days it's too much effort for almost no payout. Some classes can generate 25 stacks of might for doing less. The balance is really out of whack here.

Agreed. I feel that's the real issue though. The fact that a druid can stack 25 might for 10 people just by using their regular healing skills is a bit insane. I feel that 6 might stacks (plus fury) should be a nice reward for making a tricky combo work...6 might and fury shouldn't feel 'meh'.

Also, the 5 stacks chill cap makes any sort of comboing (especially projectile finishers) with Frozen Ground pointless. I'd really like to see that adressed as well.

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@"ReaverKane.7598" said:First thing, and this should apply to all classes:There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the kitten. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

Personal bias and factual analysis are used to describe the situation , this creates feedbacks and skewed perceptions tend to lead to reality where 2-3 professions dominate in everything and everywhere. Before coming down with any evaluation, you're supposed to take in consideration both the PRO and the CONS...not just one while conveniently forgetting about the other.

I don't know precisely to what you're referring to when you talk about "ele being high" and that now ele players are simply having a childish tantrum for this "small nerf" as described by you.

So may you be talking about pve?....I am not a PvEr but from what I observed there : ele was doing the biggest dmg in a coordinated group and that huge dmg came at the cost of any resemblance of sustain , "kindly" provided by the group, if I remember correctly ele was doing 10k or so dmg more than next class and this apparently was/is considered broken by the community

Putting your personal bias aside ....care to explain why ele should have the same dmg as the next profession, while having none of the sustain? Where is the balance in that?

If you want all professions to have same level of dmg...they should have also the same level of sustain more or less..this is a sound, logic argument.

May you be talking about PvP/WvW?..honestly I would be too tired of typing the same arguments again so....maybe you should just tell us how ele is strong and how players are exaggerating for a "small nerf"

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How can this profession be so weak for so much time? I don't really get it! The squishiest of them all has to do crazy rotations just to find itself in the medium tier dmg dealers/healers or whatever else. Ele need to have 1-2 meta builds for all modes (as any other profession) and that's it - you should make it happen, Anet. Why would you play ele when I can accomplish a lot more with a lot fewer efforts. I want to one shot ppl (30k dmg) with my ele too.. with maximum 1-2-3 buttons. I need unblockable 30k dmg skills and I want people to run from me when they see me. I haven't experienced this while I play ele, ever. Did I break 2 keyboards because of crazy rotations? And whats the point? Players start calling me a fool for playing my favorite profession. The worst part is that they are right considering that everything else that moves is doing better than you.

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This a general suggestion that I hope the devs were thinking of with the nerfs to ele.I have seen several people in this thread talk about reversing the nerfs to ele. I would suggest instead of reversing the nerfs; make the mechanics of skills and utilities better so that we can do a bit more damage and be more useful in all game modes because mechanics are better not just bigger numbers.An example of changing mechanics to make ele better instead of just bigger numbers: Change to conjures like has been suggested many times instant cast or all low cast time, cd 30s 2 ammo to all conjures except fgs which is like 90 or something no second conjure on ground maybe even if you are holding one the skills become a ground target to put second on the ground. Make conjure elemental skills better to be more reliable and controllable maybe even permanent until killed. These two and more are good suggestions how to make mechanics better (also smaller after cast on allot of skills would be nice to make them more smooth).so ya please don't just make numbers big make skills fun to use, and not feel clunky and then numbers can be tweaked to change to be balanced.

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Core elementalist weapon changes I'd like to see :

-Auras- I suggest additional effects to each aura

1) Fire Aura : reduce condition damage by 10%2) Shocking aura : unblockable3) Magnetic aura : absorb 25% damage

-Dagger Main Hand- more ability to stick to target1)Frozen burst gain 2nd skill called Frozen embrace , pull back enemies hit by frozen burst within 600 radius for the duration of the chill applied (3s)2) Magnetic grasp CD reduced by 2s

-Dagger Off hand- more mobility, utility and damage

1) Ride the Lightning base CD reduced to 20s, halved CD effect reduced to 10s2)Updraft CD reduced to 30s3) Churning earth gains an effect aura Sliver armor - block next 2 attacks while channeling4) Frost aura CD reduced to 25s from 30s

-Focus- Increase efficiency and map presence

1) Firewall additional skill on usage : Liquid Flame - detonate firewall in aoe radius of 320 for 400 base dmg and applies liquid flame on 5 targets max and deal 2x the base dmg if the enemy attack/cast spell for 4s; cast time is huge, reduce to 1/2s while removing aftercast2) Frozen gust - Chill replaced with Slow lasting 4s3) Obsidian flesh base CD reduced to 40s from 50s

-Scepter- Make it finally playable

1) Dragon's Tooth : base dmg reduced to 600 from 800 and base burning from 10s to 6s, cast time reduced to 1/2s from 1s and moving animation same speed as comet2) Phoenix CD reduced to 15s from 20s3) Water's trident knockback foes 240 distance in a PBaoe burst4) Blinding flash renamed Weakening Flash , applies 3s weakness on 10s CD

-Staff- Make it harder for enemies to catch up and easier for eles to survive on their own

1) Burning retreat : added a 2 count recharges same cd of 20s2) Meteor storm : removed the root3) Lava font : revert the nerfs4) Gust : increased radius , CD reduced to 20s from 25s5) Unsteady ground : duration increased to 5s from 4s swap place with shockwave6) Shockwave : becomes PBaoe , base dmg increased to 450 from 190, removed bleeding, 2x immobilize last 4 and CD reduced to 25s

These changes are minor respect to the power creep other professions have received for years, they would only make ele that much harder to kill and make it able to reclaim their rightful place in the competitive environment

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@Arheundel.6451 said:

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:First thing, and this should apply to all classes:There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the kitten. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

Personal bias and factual analysis are used to describe the situation , this creates feedbacks and skewed perceptions tend to lead to reality where 2-3 professions dominate in everything and everywhere. Before coming down with any evaluation, you're supposed to take in consideration both the PRO and the CONS...not just one while conveniently forgetting about the other.

I don't know precisely to what you're referring to when you talk about "ele being high" and that now ele players are simply having a
childish tantrum
for this "small nerf" as described by you.

So may you be talking about pve?....I am not a PvEr but from what I observed there : ele was doing the biggest dmg in a coordinated group and that huge dmg came at the cost of any resemblance of sustain , "kindly" provided by the group, if I remember correctly ele was doing 10k or so dmg more than next class
and this apparently was/is considered broken by the community

Putting your personal bias aside ....care to explain why ele should have the same dmg as the next profession, while having none of the sustain? Where is the balance in that?

Talk about personal bias! Maybe the bias is on your court? I don't have any stakes in this, i play all professions, not really playing favourites. Ele is the one i play the least for two factors: Staff ele, which is the most viable build, is too static for my tastes, and i never really liked the "mage" archetype. But i still enjoy the class, and weaver is a fun change. I think it would benefit the class to have specializations that specialize in a single element or a smaller combination of elements (like a earth/fire only lavamancer, or a air/water Stormancer), that would provide the much needed focus, instead of keeping Ele as a jack of all trades.

Also, note that i never said there wasn't an issue, i just said that it was getting more attention than it merits, with classes like necromancer and revenant having a ton of mechanical issues to sort out, and only a couple of gimmicky builds viable.

Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has more than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find all of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And still with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

If you want all professions to have same level of dmg...they should have also the same level of sustain more or less..this is a sound, logic argument.

Yes it is, and like i said already, in PvP there was only two classes that broke the meta so hard that it became unplayable, and those were Chrono and tempest. Either class could (and still can to a point) be built to be almost invulnerable by sacrificing most of it's damage.

May you be talking about PvP/WvW?..honestly I would be too tired of typing the same arguments again so....maybe you should just tell us how ele is strong and how players are exaggerating for a "small nerf"I think i've covered all the game types in both my posts. Because you know, i've actually played the game with all classes and don't have horses in any race, which allows me to be objective.There's numbers above for pve. To an extent those numbers can carry over to WvW. In PVP, like i said before, ele suffers from the lack of upkeep to core weapons, since sPvP builds have revolved mostly around dagger/dagger or dagger/focus. And because those weapons are still in 2012 numbers, like a lot of other weapons, it's normal that ele isn't as viable.

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@"Quasar.1756" said:Ok, so let's get to the nitty gritty of things.What is the "biggest' issue with Elementalists? - and - What can Anet do to satisfy / appease the Elementalist community of GW2?

In reference to WvW

Trying to keep it simple: I feel Anet designed ele to be a difficult class to play and originally balanced that with it being a powerful class. Then they decided, nerf by nerf and step by step, to leave the complicated part in and reduce the powerful part. Now ele has complicated rotations for damage that falls below that of several other easier to play classes, and skill casting that freezes you in place for long periods and achieves just ok damage. In WvW ele can have great condi clear using Ether R, Diamond S, and the linking of Cleansing Water -> Soothing Disruption + Woven Stride and all the many ways to get regen/speed from cantrips and/or weaver traits and utilities but even so you find other classes, mainly necro and mesmer, that can apply conditions much faster than it's possible to remove them. This is a serious lack of balance; a build fully oriented to condi clear at the expense of offensive options should be on par with top condi application in order to provide a fair game.

As a conclusion I'd just say that Anet has been unclear on Tempest/Weaver design.

Make up your mind please... will this be a complicated, versatile, high learning-curve, powerful class, or all the previous without the powerful part?

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@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has more than most!Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find all of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And still with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utility

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For me ever since GW1 Ele has always been the King of AoE. That is what has defined the profession for me. If Ele should be changed, I think this goal should be kept in mind.

That being said I must argue to all the people in this thread complaining about how Ele is not good at anything anymore, now that Thief took the top single target dps spot, that Ele even in it's current state is doing rather well. If you want to talk about professions that actually need reworks just take a look at Revenant or Necro.

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