Shaman.2034

It hasn't changed even once in the game's history. The range is still 5,000 units for players outside of your party, and infinite range for players in your party. The 5,000 unit draw distance is a hard-coded limit for dynamic entities such as players, with players in your party allowed to render out further as an exception (but they stop being entities you can interact with after 5,000 range). You could construct an argument that 5,000 units feels like a shorter distance these days with the introduction of mounts, both in PvE and in WvW; but the actual draw distance has never changed, it's a fundamental component of the game engine.

Not sure what you mean, buying Gift of Research from Lyhr still costs the 500 thermocatalytic reagents, plus the 10 ectos. All of it is one giant noob trap because if you try to avoid crafting by paying the ecto tax on everything, you need an extra 6,000 ectos, or 2,000g. But leveling all 3 armor crafting disciplines to 500 only costs a total of 130g if you do it the lazy expensive way.

Spamming Electric Discharge for ranged poke damage, and bursting someone 100-0 were two completely separate use cases. When bursting 100-0, Electric Discharge was applied exactly once, in combination with a lot of other skills cast in a very short time, too short to leave Air and return for two or more Electric Discharge procs. It was always just a minor supplementary packet of damage, whether it was used for poking or bursting. And it's worth noting that bursty Fresh Air elementalist was never an S-tier build in competitive modes anyway, it was always a gimmick you'd use to take new people by surprise, and otherwise get your own character immediately deleted as fast as possible. Electric Discharge's damage was nerfed exactly once in PvP and WvW, in 2018, by 28%. Now it's been completely reworked into a burst enabler by stacking Vulnerability instead, which is arguably stronger. It was never OP for having Fresh Air to work with it.

I don't think the spell-when-swapping traits (i.e. Sunspot) would need any major changes. Think about it: Air already has its own Sunspot: Electric Discharge. It does more damage to a single target than Sunspot, provided that it crits, which it will if you're running Fresh Air. You can already do "Electric Discharge go brrrr" and it's not OP Flashing all your other attunements only to immediately return to your main attunement has several disadvantages inherent to the class's design that it completely negates any benefit you'd get from the relatively weak trait skills such as Sunspot. This is why Electric Discharge isn't OP even with Fresh Air I agree that pretty much all elementalist builds would feel better to use if they had an established "home base" you could always return to at any time. This makes it easier to recover or restart a rotation, and elevates your baseline performance without elevating your maximum potential very much, if at all. With a change like this, any build would still want to spend significant amounts of time in other attunements. All that really changes is what kind of filler you're using, because you return to your home attunement for its most relevant filler skills, usually the one that has the strongest autoattack for your build. This is why Fresh Air feels good, because you get to return to your best autoattacks after you spend everything else, instead of being stuck on lame autoattacks for several seconds. This is primarily why conjures are used as filler in PvE too, to minimize time spent on lame autoattacks. As one proposal, I think Persisting Flames could be replaced with "Flash Fire: Recharge Fire Attunement when striking a Burning foe. Fire fields created by weapon skills are larger and last longer." This removes 10% damage off the top to compensate for Fire-based weapons getting better filler, and it can be added back in later if ele needs more damage after this change. On the other hand, ele healing builds could use a straight buff, so Soothing Power could be made baseline and replaced with "Flood Water: Recharge Water Attunement when healing or applying barrier to an ally. Soothing Mist grants its healing as barrier to targets at full health."

Personally, I want a legendary aquabreather because, even though you rarely ever need any aquabreather, when you do need one it replaces your helmet's stats, and that messes with things like crit capping. Also you can't get exotic ones that hold legendary runes (because leggy runes require level 80 equipment instead of superior runes requiring only level 60), and only a select few core stats in rare level 80 ones. So you're essentially forced to get an ascended aquabreather to maintain build coherence when you step in a pond for a second. However, the tedious acquisition methods (pick berries until your eyes bleed) and crafting/stat changing inconsistencies (can't stat swap ascended breathers to Diviner's stats???) make ascended aquabreathers a huge inconvenience too. Rarely needed, but a massive hassle when you do need them, that's why I desperately want a legendary one. I don't care at all about having full purple in all slots, I just use Blood Ruby rings and backpacks as pseudo-legendaries and would use something similar as an aquabreather if it existed

Isn't that what legendaries already do? Provide access to things that other players don't have access to unless they go and do that specific content? See: Leadership and dungeon runes being on legendary runes; Living World and expansion stats like Diviner's and Ritualist's; rings and backpacks with full infusion slots without having to do fractals to infuse them; and so on. I don't get how legendary fishing rods, infusions and enrichments would be any different.

You can also use a myriad of third-party scripting tools (web search something like "how to remap a keyboard" to explore for one that suits your system and needs) to rebind your Escape key into something non-disruptive, for instance rebinding it to F1 since you accidentally hit it when hitting the original F1 key

As far as heal alac tempest goes, staff is much stronger in open world PvE than warhorn. Warhorn with either dagger or sword allows you to be precise and efficient with your boon and heal applications. Staff allows you to cover a large range and area, which is much more valuable outside of raids and fractals, especially traiting Geyser to be a big AoE revive from 1200 range. Open world bosses are designed to stunlock you to death or knock you across the map, and staff comes with easy AoE stability to ignore it. It's easier to combo staff blast finishers with water fields in between overloads for more AoE heals. Staff makes the build better if, like you said, you aren't doing raids and fractals.

You usually want to provide Alacrity anyway to justify yourself being a dedicated healer, and getting the self-Alacrity in turn makes you a more effective healer by lowering your healing source cooldowns. I can't imagine any context at least in PvE where you would want to take a healer that provides neither Quickness nor Alacrity When I play a healer in open world PvE, I normally leave the squad after joining their map, so that my buffs affect everyone near me with only the range as the priority. With a large excess of Regeneration uptime as a side effect of building for Alacrity uptime, it's very easy to distribute 100% Regeneration uptime across a dozen players or more. If I did use Elemental Bastion, I would certainly always leave the squad. You can simulate this in raids and strikes, or in any squad, by having your own subgroup. Then, you need to constantly reposition yourself so that your aura-granting AoEs hit different players. There is no easy automatic solution to get the heals to overflow, this is the best we can do

Sources of direct AoE healing don't consider players that are at full HP. That is, if you cast the elementalist staff skill Geyser, which is an AoE that provides direct healing, and your subgroup is at full HP, Geyser will begin to heal players outside of your subgroup. "Wash the Pain Away!" also works like this, as do the staff and sword autoattacks, and so on. This does not apply to healing from boons and buffs (Regeneration, Soothing Mist) because the system for distributing buffs always prioritizes your subgroup even if they would gain no further benefits. Since auras are just buffs, they can only be applied to your subgroup (unless part of your subgroup is out of range), so Elemental Bastion healing cannot leave your subgroup in the same way that direct AoE healing can.

I agree that this is the reason they've done it, and that it makes the weapon stronger. A bit stronger in some cases. It works out to 50% more strikes per time spent casting the autoattack, but it's still quite a low number of hits compared to almost all other weapons. If it wants to proc all the revenant things that favor rapid hits, this needs to be increased a lot more. So, not only does the change betray the weapon's fantasy, it's also just not that effective at addressing the motivating issue. There exist better ways to do this that preserve hammer's fantasy, and even enhance it and revenant as a whole. And they're not difficult to implement either, because they've already done it before. One such change would be to increase the cast time, and all targets struck by the primary bolt suffer a secondary strike after a delay. The same strike that occurs at the end of the sword autoattack chain. The skill description would probably read like this: "Hurl your weapon at enemies, creating a rift on them that explodes for additional damage after a short delay." I'll even do the balancing, just to demonstrate that this change can achieve the exact same goals as simply decreasing the cast time. Let's look at the numbers to establish what the change actually changed, and use that to construct how a delayed explosion version would look: Hammer Bolt (old): about 1.2s cast time, 1.35 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 0.83 hits per second Hammer Bolt (new): about 0.8s cast time, 0.9 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 1.25 hits per second Elementalist's Fireball has a cast time of about 1.4s. It is the slowest-casting single projectile autoattack in the game, so I'm going to use this cast time as the maximum length that players are generally willing to put up with for the sake of weapon fantasy. Increasing Hammer Bolt from a 1.2s cast time to 1.4s would certainly be noticeable, but not egregiously slow. I'd keep the original 1.35 power coefficient to leave room for the rift damage at a 0.225 power coefficient, preserving the 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting. It stacks up like this: Hammer Bolt (old): about 1.2s cast time, 1.35 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 0.83 hits per second Hammer Bolt (new): about 0.8s cast time, 0.9 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 1.25 hits per second Hammer Bolt (mine): about 1.4s cast time, 1.35+0.225 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 1.43 hits per second Not only would this be a more effective change to address the issue; it would also feel a lot better to use and would look great with the existing animation.

What I liked the most about revenant hammer is that all the animations felt like they had a lot of weight behind them. They were slow and deliberate, like the hammer I'm wielding is actually heavy and will hurt a lot when it eventually comes to a stop against something. The very long cast times that resulted in large single packets of damage is what made it unique, and helped it achieve the fantasy of being a hammer, as opposed to some other thing you can wave around to achieve the same functions. Hammer Bolt had its total cast time reduced by about a third, and its power coefficient also reduced by a third, so its total DPS remains the same, but strikes more often. This has very minor benefits, in that it can trigger Impossible Odds slightly more often, and proc more projectile combo finishers. But it doesn't apply any conditions or Might or anything that could stack up higher with this speed increase, so it's very minor gains overall. But the downside is that hammer is now a rapid fire projectile weapon. It no longer feels heavy and impactful, it strikes quickly for moderate damage instead of slowly for big damage. It may as well be a longbow. This is part of an extended trend where high cast time, high damage skills are reworked into low cast time, low damage skills. Whether the total DPS remains the same or not, this is turning everything in the game into a fast-paced spam frenzy. I worry that they're coming for elementalist staff next, to push faster cast times as the "fix" that it needs. How about some high risk, high reward fantasies? Commit to a long cast time, and be rewarded for finishing it? Why are all of those gradually being patched out? The original Hammer Bolt animation looks really silly when it's this sped up. I don't expect my words to have any impact on balance decisions whatsoever, but it at least deserves a new animation that fits a more rapid activation. I think it would look better if, instead of swinging the hammer in a full circle, your character swings it left, then right, left, right, stopping in a half circle to release the projectile. And please ArenaNet, consider more carefully what the impact is to the RPG side of the game when changing how weapons feel to play for the sake of balance. You know from the new weapons feedback that the feel of the weapon usually matters more to players than its numbers.

I don't think favoring multihits deserves to be a mechanic in any case, it just serves to make already strong weapons stronger. Particularly hammer and sword. I'd like a version of Catalyst that's playable with staff without any extra penalties besides taking staff (lol)

You just need more boon duration. If you're using Celestial gear, you must be using a condi framework, so take Firebrand runes. I play power quickness catalyst at over 80% boon duration, where only 3 spheres altogether provide 22 seconds of quickness and is sufficient to allow plenty of freedom within the rotation. You don't need to force yourself to perform tight 4-sphere rotations to be effective, and you want to build extra resilience (i.e. boon duration) into the build anyway to account for dynamic situations. Given that you're using celestial gear, I imagine you're not optimizing the build for raid speedrunning, so don't make yourself play that way

Cosmetic infusions that change a character's skin will also change the hair on sylvari and charr characters. The screenshots lower down on the wiki page demonstrate an example of this behavior. It may well be a bug, but this behavior is consistent across all cosmetic infusions that change a character's skin.