Arcosa.9123

Yeah, a few people have mentioned this. But, have you tried using it against a wall? Because it moves so fast, it's possible to completely go through keep walls or the ground around a keep lord to solo cap bases from within the terrain.

A flip-over skill would suffice. The game can already detect when you have all four bullets to flip over the Pistol-1. So, it wouldn't be ridiculous to ask that they turn all the pistol skills into flip skills with different icons that detect their respective bullets. There's legitimately no reason why the bullet mechanic exists as is when an existing game feature is clearer.

This is actually such a funny point that I didn’t consider. Yeah, the Air-3 just doesn’t work with the other skills in the same attunement.

Actually, yeah, maybe. Or maybe it could actually do something.

Overall Performance Feels okay, but some issues addressed below in subsections. Optimal rotation is unclear yet, but it seems damage numbers are very undertuned, according to many reports. Etching skills Crucial: The visuals on Etching skills need to be dialed down. Duration of Etching skills is very short and punishing to fit skills into. If possible, I would like to see the duration of the initial Etching to be extended, OR have the charged-up version of the Etching extend the window to give a buffer for the time to use it. The current duration makes the build more reliant on Quickness than necessary. Odd behavior for swapping Attunements with an active Etching, detailed above by another user. Etching skill tooltips for all modes should be visible when the skills is on Etch mode. For QOL, Etching skills need a short delay before being able to execute the un-empowered spell. It is easy to accidentally trigger the Etching immediately. Trait integration Persisting Flames -- Spear does not provide damaging Fire fields, so it does not synergize with this trait. There aren't good alternatives to it, with Pyromancer's Puissance consuming Might stacks and the Water trait line being irrelevant for DPS on the final columns. Native Elite Spec mechanics are not enough to keep this buff up. It might be necessary to add Fire field damage to Meteor, the initial Etching, or Volcano (although, we would need to pre-stack before Volcano anyway). edit Apparently Volcano does give stacks? Pyromancer's Training -- Spear could use additional sources of Burning to keep up this grandmaster trait. Typically, Elementalist Fire auto-attacks burn, but Spear does not for some reason? Burning Precision (major adept trait) has some additional burning, but the ICD is too long to keep it up on its own. Sidenote: Can we finally get rid of the Conjurer major adept trait? Few builds use conjured weapons, no one picks up other players' weapons, and self-applied fire aura is useless. Attunement swapping traits -- Swapping Attunements with certain traits (e.g. Sunspot, Healing Ripple) seems to erroneously count as a positive spell cast for Etchings. If this is intentional, it seems like a strange decision. Tempest Opinion: Overload skills are at odds with the ranged component of the weapon. Although this is an issue with any ranged weapon on Tempest, it feels particularly bad on this one. Catalyst Elemental Celerity -- Elemental Celerity is not working with empowered Etching skills. Energy generation is poor for Spear due to lack of multihit skills. Fulgor (Air-2) does not generate energy. Weaver Opinion: Spear-3 for Dual Attacks feel pointless. They grant little, useless utilities that last extremely short durations and only affect the caster (apart from the Air/Earth one. These effects are typically ones that you want to use at specific times, but Weaver is inflexible with creating Dual Attacks due to them requiring two Attunements to reach. For example, if you need Stability, it may be a while before you can get to the correct combination--then, when you cast it, it only lasts 3 sec. Opinion: Spear-3 Dual Attacks could affect allies and still be relatively unimpactful. Rotational choices are a bit complex, so I can't provide further judgment yet. Superior Elements -- Dual Attacks do not deal damage, so cannot trigger this trait. General abilities Fulgor (Air-2) -- Fulgor seems to be implemented strangely. It acts as a condition that deals strike damage, but cannot crit. The way it stacks duration (and not intensity) is strange. Its duration is significantly longer than its cooldown, but casting it subsequent times will not increase your DPS output. Opinion: Undertow (Water-4) should have a pull effect on the full radius. The pull is laughably small right now and could offer Elementalist an additional group utility. Opinion: Center-hit skills on 4 do not need the center-hit feature in PvE. It does not add anything to the skill but unnecessarily handicaps the AoE radius. Spear-3 abilities Crucial: Currently, all Spear-3 effects are consumed by auto-attacks, causing them to be wasted. Energize (Air-3) grants 100% Crit Rate on the next attack, but PvE builds run 100% CR already. This skill may be somewhat relevant for PvP/WvW, but feels extremely low impact. To make matters worse, on the same Attunement Fulgor (Air-2) cannot crit and Twister (Air-4) does low damage. Ripple (Water-3)'s forced movement is not conducive to the Etching playstyle. Using it to charge up the Etching / get the bonus effect is problematic when we are confined to the radius of the Etching. Some possible solutions are to make it a stationary evade or a ground-targeted leap / blink effect. Ripple (Water-3) interacts with Swiftness / Superspeed and causes your character to move farther than normal. Due to the fast movement speed, some players are also having issues of it launching you into terrain (through walls).

The Thief spear 2 and 3 are both chain skills with 3 flips, and if you use either, the other flips along with it. I would believe it more if they said there is a restriction with when you store bullets and swap attunements. But, I can’t really abide them keeping it the way it is without alluding that they’re looking into a solution. Also, the 1 skill automatically flips over when you have all four bullets, so I don’t see why they can’t just code it so that if it detects one bullet, it flips two skills, coded individually.

I know not many people like pistol on Elementalist and it has some issues outside of this, but can I get a +1 for people who think it should get a better indicator than what we have now? Right now, it shows up as orbs floating behind you or on the buff bar, but those areas are sometimes hard to identify in combat. Why can't there be an icon above the Attunement, or some indication that the bullet skill has changed (i.e. flip-over skill)? For example, on the new Thief spear, it's possible for two abilities to be linked to the same flipper function. This could be the same for Elementalist pistol.