SJWhat.9237

The new version doesn't even work in water.

This is the simple short of it. It's not fun. Fun has not been a part of the Elementalist design philosophy for a long time now. They only things they care about are needless complexity, golem benchmarks, and the bare minimum effort implementation. Their design philosophy for the profession is outright flawed.

Making Conjured weapons usable is so incredibly simple in concept that I'm not really sure why they haven't done it yet. 1) Remove the summon at location effect. Make them only appear in your hands. 2) Cut the recharge to 30 seconds. This makes less clunky to switch to since you wouldn't have to place them anymore. Furthermore it would allow you to upkeep them fairly easily since their duration and recharge would match. An ele player can still dump the weapon via weapon swap, but would still have to wait for the recharge to summon it again. Also since the longest weapon skill recharges for some weapons is also 30 seconds it all kind of syncs up. I'm sure the numbers can be tweaked a little bit. Fiery Greatsword would function similarly. Cut the recharge to say 60 seconds, and add the on summon aoe to the caster instead of a targeted location. This would make them functionally different from kits, while making them kit-like enough to be functional as weapon swap for elementalists.

We need dual pistols so there isn't an imbalance of more main-hand options than off-hands. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be nice for it to not be lopsided.

Nice to know I'm not the only beta player with bad precursor luck. Well, not nice really. I don't wish that on others, but weird how there are more than a few of us. Still don't have one.

No. The no subscription model is one of the defining features of Guild Wars 2, and Guild Wars 1 for that matter. I thank Anet for it. You are never pressured to pay for anything or to play for extended periods, and if there is something you want out of the Gemstore then you can convert gold to gems. A lot of online games out there don't offer the option to convert currency. The only thing I would recommend Anet do is maybe switch up login rewards, although some people like the static reward list.

Never going to happen. It's treated like racial elites so it's undertuned for a reason. That said, they could shave it's cooldown a little bit. Maybe down to 120 seconds, or increase it's duration. They should do that for all racial elites. They could cut down their cooldowns even more and they would still be underpowered.

When they announced Catalyst I originally assumed the jade sphere would function like Ventari's Tablet for Rev.

It pains me to say this, but the laziest and possibly most effective way to address conjures is to simply get rid of them. By that I mean get rid of the weapon bundles. Take the most iconic, or most useful skill from each kit and turn that into conjure weapon utility. Keep the animations so it looks like you're still using the weapon. Like keep Explosive Lava Axe, Frost Storm or Deep Freeze, Lightning Leap, Stone Sheath, and Fiery Whirl. Call those the Conjured weapons. Give them modest cooldowns and/or charges. Call it a day. It might slightly step on Arcane skills territory (looking Blast and Wave), but It would take the most useful of the Conjure skills and make them simple on demand utilities.

Having this issue as well. What a great place for a breaking bug. It walls off a whole area.