Enigmoid.1264

Your traits still don't work because they don't fix the main issues with elementalist. They are better, by far, for the most part but they are bandages on cancer patients. In the context of tempest support this is especially clear. Look at druid with stone spirit - 1 utility and 1 trait (which buffs all the spirits) puts significant protection on the entire party (10 people). Compare with having to take the entire Earth traitline (and getting little out of it) to apply some protection. It just doesn't work. Druid can put out tons of boons. Chrono can put tons of boons. Ele has to choose between a couple common boons? The context of gear must be made. If you are trying to apply boons you are going to be running boon duration, of which there are no good dps+concentration sets (like seekers in pvp). So this idea of a boon-dps tempest is kinda moot. The GM tempest traits are bad. Lucid singularity is terrible. The issue is being cc-ed during an overload, not getting crippled. Tempest NEEDS more stability for its class mechanic to work. Period. The traits just don't work together and have too much anti synergy. Not really your fault, its how ele was designed and why ele traits suck. I.e. look at air/fire. The minors are all dps focused and you have a selection of a few support traits. There are potentially 1.5ish major support traits (if I'm getting 1-2 might per aura then this line is useless) and 0 minor support traits in the fire line. Why bother? Its just not cohesive. Yet there are no other might generating traits. I think the issue is that a lot of the damage modifiers simply need to go with that damage added to weapon/utility skills. This low base damage + tons of modifiers creates a potential monster in PvE leading to ele not having any damage in PvP when it can't run the modifiers. You just have more and more modifers and extra stats which will make this effect worse. Not trying to shoot you down. I do like a lot of your changes (the air traitline is quite nice). I will post my thoughts on traits later.

You have obviously put a lot of work into this but your changes to support elementalist do little to nothing to improve its viability and are muddled and confused. In particular looking at the water and tempest trait changes while I see many improvements there are some things that just don't work and actively hurt tempest in its support capacity. You haven't looked at weapon skills or utilities so it is difficult to comment on exactly how your trait changes would play out. A general comment would be that your traits are FAR TOO FOCUSED on their attunement instead of general changes to playstyle. This is the whole issue with elementalist traits is that they pigeonhole you into attunements when the class was designed to swap attunements.Your competing traits generally are poorly balanced. If a trait requires your whole setup to be build around it you will always or never pick that trait. Furthermore traits that compete with one another yet have insane synergy with one another will always feel like trash to pick. You see this poor design in the tempest traits.Major Master: Tempestuous Aria - Allies affected by your shouts gain a boom and Enemies are affected by a condition based on shout. Shouts have reduced CD.Major Master: Elemental Bastion - Auras you apply heal allies. Tempest shouts virtually do nothing except apply an aura. "Feel the Burn". 1 stack of burn and a paltry packet of damage besides the fire aura. So why is the most fundamental trait about auras (heal on aura) in competition with something that reduces the cooldown of skills that do almost nothing but apply auras? The aura from shouts isn't meaningful if it doesn't do anything. (I assume the boon and condition is the same old might/swiftness/regen/protection thing). These two should not be in opposition [buff allies by sharing auras, improving shouts] as they are more or less the same thing. The minor traits in tempest are still unneeded trash. You don't need more swiftness. So many ele skills and traits give swiftness that this minor trait is useless. Fix: Have the minor traits apply to five people or change the swiftness into a second or two of quickness (upon completion). Instead of protection have overloads give stability baseline (to nearby allies as well because ele has 0 stability outside of Earth attunement) because getting off an overload in competitive environments is virtually impossible. This is part of the reason why tempest sucks and part of the required fixes. The Tempest GM traits likewise have 0 focus and are too specific to make any sort of sense. Lets say I am not using a support build but trying to be more damage oriented as you say. Then I get to choose between a benefit that I only get with a warhorn and a sand squall every 30 seconds, movement condi removal on overload, and aurashare on a build with minimal aura generation and benefits. These GM traits are complete trash and literally do nothing in this case. You could not run a GM tempest trait on dps tempest and not notice anything. Currently the GM traits are bad for dps tempest but at least I can get a little heal and some frost aura. The water traits are a complete mess. Please don't put vitality only when attuned to water to avoid health yo-yo (the attunement bonuses should be permanent or 1 bonus is permanent and the other temporary. i.e. always receive the vitality and get the healing power only when attuned to water). Elementalist has soothing mist because its main heals are locked behind water attunement and a support/healer that doesn't always have its 'oh crap' button available needs something to mitigate this. Which is why ele has soothing mist. It looks bad to have a GM trait that absolutely requires a prerequisite Masters trait (does Soothing Power do anything if you don't take Aquamancer's training?) in order to get anything out of it.There are just too many tradeoffs in water for these traits to work, especially in 5 man content where these changes are severe nerfs. Soothing mist is needed as a baseline to help viability of non staff support/heal builds which have low healing output, especially if you are not camping water attunement. There is no meaningful condi clear in the traits outside of water. Competitive builds in PvP are still forced into the water traitline. Currently support tempest in PvP can give weak soothing mist and still clear some condis. Now it can clear condis or have soothing mist (on others). None of these changes help tempest in PvP and are in fact a severe nerf. Likewise a nerf to weaver sustain. None of these changes address the core issues with ele. Traitlines are still to hyper focused on attunements. No meaningful condi cleanse trait outside of water. Aura benefits scattered in multiple traitlines with boons from auras locked in traitlines. You simply can't make a cohesive support build with protection and stabilty solely available in earth, regen and vigor only available in water, fury and quickness only available in air when other classes don't need 4 traitlines to make it happen (compare to druid and firebrand). Too many tradeoffs.

Breaking this down into sections. Mainly do PvE with a little WvW. Mostly the support role in raids (druid, tempest, maybe chrono). Like many have said the issue with elementalist is that is just doesn't get value for its money. The game as founded in 2012 had a completely different design perspective than what is seen today and elementalist just hasn't kept up. This of course was masked by its high damage in organized PvE and the removal of that damage has highlighted everything wrong with the class today. The issue is that the class is really in a bad spot and the moment and needs nothing short or a major rework to fix. Elementalist get nothing for free. Unlike mesmer or warrior or guardian or ranger the class mechanic of the elementalist (attunement swap) has real opportunity cost. Sure you get attunements and more skills but it costs something to change attunement. If you are swapping from fire to water you aren't going to be doing much damage. if you swap from water to fire you aren't going to be doing any healing. Other classes don't have this tradeoff. Rangers can equip pets but the pets don't affect the weapon skills and what they are doing at the moment. Case in point; a druid can freely weapon and pet swap in an raid and if things go south can instantly drop into celestial avatar and heal the group. They have absolute freedom and an 'oh crap' heal button. Tempest doesn't; if you attune to earth you have to wait 9 seconds to go back to water (which is why changing attunements feels bad as a support tempest). You simply aren't free - you are constrained by the attunement system. Firebrand likewise can use its weapon skills freely and can at any moment use a tome - 0 opportunity costs or tradeoffs with regards to weapon skills. There is nothing for free in the attunement system (no effects or boons baseline) and it as a class mechanic actively constrains the gameplay of the elementalist. There needs to be some buff here, some change. A possible suggestion would be to make something like elemental attunement baseline (does not affect allies). The raison d'etre for the elementalist, indeed what all the tradeoffs inherent in the class revolved around was BIG DAMAGE. That simply doesn't exist anymore. Thus the core design goals of the class have been invalidated. And even if the elementalist did marginally more damage than other classes under perfect conditions (it doesn't) the tradeoffs inherent in its design wouldn't make it worth it in competitive environments such as PvP with it has about half the effective HP of other classes. This is why ele sucks in PvP and is very mediocre in WvW. Raids have pushed the balance in this game towards normalizing damage - this would imply that its time to normalize sustain and health to some degree. As many have said, the trait system is just too confining for the elementalist. Elementalist has 4 attunements and traitlines for each attunement. The elementalist can specialize deeply in traits but the traits when viewed from a global perspective are weak as they only affect 1 of the four attunements to any significant degree. Look at the fire traitline; 2 of the minor traits are completely useless (empowering flame and sunspot) when not in fire attunement and one is situationally useless (burning rage). Grandmaster traits are similar, 2 are completely useless outside fire attunement (Blinding ashes and pyromancer's puissance) and one is only very situationally useful (lava font on downed). Other traitlines are similar. With an elite specialization you can at most buff two attunements leaving two attunements rather terrible (and which you really don't want to swap to). Traitlines need to be made more thematic and less attunement focused. Fire is the raw damage traitline not just the fire traitline. Air affects crits outside of air attunement. Etc. Thus the elementalist would not be so pigeonholed and could make more use of attunement swap. Some traits such as Piercing Shards simply are bad and antithematical - there simply isn't a lot of damage in water attunement. Weapon skills are the same way. Just unfocused. Many skills just feel weak and useless. Look at focus fire 4 and 5 skills. What is the point of these skills? A firewall which does so little damage and is ultimately inconsequential. Enemies don't care if they cross it because it does nothing to them. Focus 5: gives you fire aura. Again, skill 5 (supposed to be one of the stronger weapon skills) just gives you an aura. I will talk more about just how bad auras are but it needs to be said for itself how weak this weapon skills is. Other skills such as dagger 5 air have hugely unrealistic cooldowns for what they do. This of course goes back to the original conception of elementalist; lots of low impact skills that you are going to juggle between. But this conception is dead. All skills have a cast time - you can only ever be casting (not counting instant casts) one skill at a time. And with this in mind fewer high impact stacked skills are going to be far superior to many low impact skills cast one after another especially when you pad downtime with stronger autoattacks. A mesmer can load their shatters and scourge f abilities do so many things at once. Elementalist, with skills that just do one thing (i.e. Freezing Gust: 3s chill, 1/2s cast time, 25s cooldown) cannot compete loaded skills such as Winter's Bite (4s chill, bleeds (2x 8 sec), 3x direct damage, pet gives 10s weakness, 1/2s cast time 10s cooldown. This skill can also be traited to be AOE). Winter's bite has been buffed according to the wiki 8 times (0 nerfs) since release (original was similar to Freezing Gust but with 10s cooldown). Freezing Gust has been buffed once (aftercast reduced). There is no comparison between these skills. Other classes have vastly more impactfull individual skills than the elementalist but they also in general have significantly stronger auto attacks A LOT of elementalist weapon skills need to be tweaked and strongly buffed to compensate for the power creep applied to other classes. This isn't a exaggeration; look at the power different in this example and you can see the amount of buffing (its a LOT) that is going to be required for weapons sets such as focus to really be viable. Weapons such as dagger, scepter and focus simply don't have the damage, conditions, boons, or other effects on them to make them viable despite the elementalist operating at such a stat deficiency compared to its opponents. Weapons also lack purpose and need to be reworked along those lines (i.e. staff fire 3 is pointless because staff is never run with condition gear, its power or support and this skill simply doesn't fit either of those builds). There are more suggestions on weapons skills (i.e. Healing rain 10 target cap, eruption animation sped up, no bleeds) and others have already posted examples. Sustain is something that just isn't there. The lack of blocks and/or ways of mitigating damage without huge trait and utility investment is absent. The sustain for the elementalist was initially envisioned as Healing power and raw heals. Which simply doesn't work with a tiny little health pool, the continued nerfs to raw healing output (specifically in PvP), the attunement system and its lockout of simultaneous damage and sustain, and the damage and power creep of the last two expansions. There are a couple issues here but heals as a sustain tool doesn't work too well with a low healthpool and high damage. Raw healing doesn't prevent 1 and 2 shots or being CCd to death. On a small health pool with high damage you want to be topped up but topping yourself up frequently involves overhealing and thus wasted heals. Raw healing has also been reduced (riptide nerf). Long story short sustain through healing doesn't work anymore. Here I will offer my thoughts on the elite specializations and some specific improvements. Tempest This specialization lacks identity. The damage is lackingand elementalist already has a dps spec so it would be good if it was given the purity of purpose treatment and make it a proper support specialization. Given the name and theme there should be more of an offensive focus (also to break the druid chrono dominance in PvE and the Firebrand dominance in PvP/WvW. Buffs to other support professions are also needed though to a significantly smaller degree). Honestly give tempest more boons and for thematical reasons give it access to quickness. (Note that the other elementalist traitlines need work because nothing in them outside of water screams support in any conhesive way. For instance the GM earth traits have nothing in a support capacity. "One with Fire" for instance needs the might per aura doubled to be meaningful.)The name brings to mind the raw unbrindled power of a storm but to quote Macbeth the best description of the specialization is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The traits are just not that great.Speedy Conduit: Gain swiftness on overload.Hardy Conduit: Gain protection on overload, protection has increased effectiveness.Both these traits suck. Ele has tons of swiftness it doesn't need more. The protection effectiveness is only on yourself and is going to be less effective than a simple flat 5% damage reduction (because you only get the bonus if you have the boon, 6.6% with protection). Both these minor traits only apply to yourself making them even worse. Make Hardy Conduit apply protection as well to allies. Change Speedy Conduit to the heal on aura from elemental bastion.Latent Stamina: Terrible, needs buffs. Maybe reduce the ICD.Gale Song: FineUnstable Conduit: Aura's become superior auras.Tempestuous Aria: Weak, have this also reduce shout cooldown by 20%. Shouts are extremely extremely weak with their only value coming from their synergy with auras.Invigorating Torrents: Kinda OKHarmonious conduit: Stability to allies when beginning an overload.Imbued Melodies: Fine. Actually quite good if there was any reason to use a warhorn.Lucid Singularity: Now removes a condition on start of overload and an additional condition on completion to allies.Elemental Bastion: Overloads cause an attunement to have a reduced recharge (20s -> 15s). WarhornAll skills have far too long of a cooldown; 10-25% reduction in cooldowns.Heat Sync: Grants 10s of fury as well.Watery Globe and Tidal Surge: The healing on these skills is quite weak. Reduce the cooldowns significantly and increase healing by at least 50%. They have 35s cooldowns and maybe 2-3k base healing each.Cyclone: Pull is 360 radius, 5 targets.Lightening Orb: Targets allies, reduced number of orbs, grants small amount of quickness.Sand Squall: 4 second boon increase and this is affected by boon duration. UtilitiesOther the proc an aura, these skills don't do much. Reduce the cooldown by about 5 seconds on each shout (not the healing one or elite).Rebound: Needs a rework because its bad. It is very hard to predict when people will die. You don't want them to die. So you heal them. So they don't die. So your elite skill just because useless. Even if they would go into down state they still have at most ~5k health so you still need to heal them. Or they die to conditions which rebound doesn't cleanse and so they die 2 seconds later. Rebound needs to cleanse all conditions when it revives someone. Rebound needs to be instant. The healing needs to take place when the effect times out regardless (so it actually does something even if nobody dies). Have this skill grant 5s of quickness when the effect is applied. Overloads Overload Air should grant allies swiftness during overload. Auras Now stack in duration. This is 100% necessary for them to be actually useful (the auras themselves are just plain bad). Getting hit to proc a beneficial effect is not a good strategy for anyone, especially the low health elementalist. Auras should not be affected by boon duration for balance reasons.Superior Fire Aura: Burns when you hit an enemy (1-2s). 1-2s ICD. Gain might when you hit an enemy (6s, 1s ICD).Superior Frost Aura: Incoming damage reduced by 15%. Small heal on hit (ICD 1s) and chills foes on hit.Superior Magnetic Aura: Reflect projectiles with magnetic energy, if the reflected projectile hits steal a boon and/or transfer a condition.Superior Shocking Aura: Stuns foes you attack. Same conditions as Shocking Aura but you don't need to get hit. Buffs may seem extreme but yes tempest is that bad. No real flat dps buffs but significantly better boons. Still only 5 man (should be able to maintain 25 might, fury, regen, vigor, swiftness, protection and a smattering of quickness and other boons to others). Healing will be significantly reduced compared to current staff tempest (dagger/warhorn heals way less and you can't take the improved soothing mist if you want aurashare) to compensate. Weaver Weaver is in a far better place than tempest. Barrier output needs at minimum a 50% increase.Double attuning needs to trigger all attunement traits (it sucks, the only thing you gain from double attuning is the skill 3 which is not good enough).Sword auto attack chain needs to go. It has no place with elementalist/weaver mechanics.Sword needs the range of all skills increased from 130 to 180 (the issue isn't just the damage but the consistency of the damage). Weaver just gets kited.Stances need reduced cooldowns.Weaver elite can be used while moving (this should also grant some boons).Perhaps to fix the issue of dual attunment the ability to fully attune should be on a shorter cooldown than to change primary attunements. Maybe 2.5 seconds to fully attune and 4 seconds to swap attunements. Other Comments What Ele doesn't need: (Much) more damage in organized PvE. It needs to be near/at the top and it needs to do so without caveats (i.e. a huge portion of its damage coming from utilities in PvE leaving it damage deficient in PvP/WvW where it can't use those utilities) but it absolutely shouldn't be top of the line like it was at PoF release. Taken together all of these changes would/could be excessive. TLDR: Ele needs a lot of work. Probably the most in need of a complete rework in the game at the moment. If damage across classes is to remain relatively similar for raid balancing reasons then elementalist needs a lot of sustain and support added back in to help neutralize its glaring deficits. Thanks for the consideration.