TL;DR: Please Anet let us have an elite spec that allows to actually SPECIALIZE into something, and not be a jack of nothingburger. A good way to do so would be to throw away two elements of your choice (think Revenant Legends mechanics) and get a conjured weapon in return (think Holosmith F5 or the recent Warrior spec). The conjured weapon would either be a uniquely designed weapon, such as a midrange land trident for example, that gets infused by your current element to improve its capacities. Or a set of two slots for existing conjure weapons (longbow, axe, shield, hammer), without the infusion effect. This would let us SPECIALIZE into a build of our choices, and let us have access to both melee and ranged weapons without having to be kneecapped by two forced, unused elements.
----
Longer post here to highlight my thoughts on Elementalist problems, and why I think this proposed solution would help the class immensely:
The issue with core specs in Gw2 before the introduction of specialization was that every class could do a bit of everything, with a few classes being a tad better or worse at certain things (guardian for support, vs thief low support but high damage / mobility).
Core Elementalists were the highest offenders of that issue, being forced to have all 4 elements, thus kneecapping each element to justify swapping to another element to access things across 3 skills that another class would have all packed into 1 skill.
Specializations were supposed to let classes focus on a certain aspect more. Let's take Anet's favorite child for example:
Guardian's specialization such as support for Firebrand or condition damage, mobility for Willbender, raw and ranged damage for Dragonhunter.
For other classes, they do a good job at providing a unique fantasy as well too, while letting them specialize into something:
- Mesmer: Chrono for support and a bit of power burst, Mirage for condition and mobility, Virtuoso for raw DPS (strike or condi bleed). Also, virtuoso offers a replacement to clones for content where clones are not valued (burst content in PvE, large scale WvW fights).
- Ranger: Druid for condi or support, Soulbeast for damage and better control over your pet for content where pets are not important, Untamed for tankiness and a better focus on your pet.
Etc, I could go on for other classes.
Meanwhile Elel:
- Tempest being the worst gen 1 spec by far (Anet themselves admitted that it was last minute rushed and quite uninspired). It's a support spec that does nothing to specialize beyond some melee AoE thingy when you stay in the same element (does nothing to make up for the fact that 3/4 of your important spell effects are in other elements still).
- Weaver, albeit pretty cool conceptually, just goes FURTHER into the non specialization problem by forcing you to constantly swap between elements. There's also the major issue imo of losing instant access to important weapon #3 to #5 skills. You're in Fire / Air DD and you need to condi cleanse? Well you gotta first go to water, then wait 3 sec, then go to something else so you can get your Cleansing wave for a 2 condi cleanse. Only other cleanses you got is Ether Renewal (trash heal skill), and Cleansing Fire (somewhat decent skill after the recent buffs, but mostly good for condi specs). Meanwhile a thief has instant condi cleanse from any point with Hide in Shadow (much better heal), Signet of Precision, or even Shadow Return.
- Catalyst, I don't even want to talk about this abomination. Anything I said above for tempest stands for Catalyst too, and there's enough threads explaining why this spec is trash online already.
That's 3 (three, trois, tres, 三, ثلاثة, 삼, три) major chances they got to give us a way to SPECIALIZE and they fumbled at EVERY single one of them.
All Anet gotta do to give us an actual SPECIALIZATION is make one that lets you choose two elements, just like revenant can choose two Legends. This would work really well for ele since anyway you can only choose two spec trees besides your elite spec, and each tree besides arcane focuses on one element. So you could go for Arcane + Main element and choose 1 element as your main, with the secondary for utility like every other class. You could also choose to go dual element by forgoing Arcane and focusing on your element.
As a consequence of limiting you to two elements, the elite spec could either let you weapon swap (so you can have access to melee and ranged weapons, something EVERY class have besides Elementalists at this point), which would keep the same number of skills as current, but without two irrelevant elements for your build.
Or even better: Stick to 2 elements 1 weapon set, but change the rest to be a weapon conjure. This could either be choose two existing conjures as your F3 / F4 slots, or design a weapon like for the holosmith and make it your new F3 slot (with F4 either gone or some sort of ability that depends on your mainhand weapon + secondary element). A good potential conjure weapon would be a trident, considering that we already have a longbow conjure, and that an trident would fit the element fantasy (think poseidon for example), and work for either ranged or melee. The conjure weapon would be infused with your current element to improve its capacities. Like conjuring the trident while in air will give it more daze and improved mobility, or conjuring it while in fire would improve raw damage, earth for stronger CC / infuse hits with bleed, water for some area heal on hit / chills, etc.
This would still allow for elemental synergy (the backbone of this class), except with two elements instead of 4 (we already have weaver for complete synergy). That way we could have:
- Fire / Air build for strike damage and mobility (WvW group content / roaming / pvp). Elite spec first row of traits that focuses on strike damage / mobility.
- Fire / Earth build for condition damage and dps (PvE condition dps / WvW roaming / pvp). Elite spec second row of traits that focuses on condition damage.
- Air / Earth / Water (2 of the three) build for CC and utility (WvW group content / roaming / pvp) . Elite spec third row would focus on on-interrupt effects or improving your CC abilities.
Any attempt to specialize right now is heavily bottlenecked by the presence of the other elements.
Best example would be the going for a strike damage build (you know, the fantasy that most people expect to have in the MAGE class of a game), having NO good main-hand weapon, scepter being mostly a condition damage weapon, and yet somehow they decided to make pistol into a condi weapon as well, except it's somehow WORSE and blander than the scepter. And that build is extremely squishy / rigid compared to similar builds of other classes, because we're supposed to swap elements for utility (water for CC, earth for survivability). Except doing that nukes your damage because your damage elements are on cooldown (mitigated by Fresh Air, but scepter Air feels pretty bad). Water and Earth are useless for a strike damage build. Air is useless for a condi build.
You also either have mobility (Sw/D) or range (Sc/F), but not both, meanwhile every other strike damage build for WvW roaming have access to both (Dragonhunter, Rangers, Mesmers have some mobility and ranged damage, Thiefs, Revenant and Willbender are mostly melee with overwhelming mobility to make up for it).
In fact, I believe this is how core Ele should've been from the start. You choose two elements for your equipped weapons and either pick conjures that synergize with your choice (furthering the specialization, such as a Lighting Hammer for melee burst in a Sc/F Fresh Air build, or Fire Axe for ranged access in a Sw/D Fire DPS build), or even have conjures of different elements (for variety / utility, example: earth shield in a Fire / Air build for survivability, or Ice bow for strong CC), without overwhelming with too many 1-5 skills, since conjures would replace 2 elements, and free up important utility skills (one of the main reasons why conjures suck). It would also put conjures on 10s CD like a weapon swap, instead of being on super long 60s CD (the other reason why conjures are underused).
Please let me know what you think.
Bringing this back up, why do they still have two charges on a low CD evade that is also a dash and remove 3 (THREE) conditions per charge? It even heals them more than in PvE, how are you supposed to play any condi class against willbender? Or even power class for what it's worth too, they counter everything it seems
