Emberheart.8426

Arcane wave is way better in PvE now btw. Why? Because ele is trash at breakbars. Of course don't get me wrong. I really want ranged staff ele to be more of a thing, but arcane wave doesn't matter at all for this. The actual issues that should be discussed is how staff still needs lots of improvements and how there is barely any ranged focus in all the ele elite specs. The latter especially is incredibly important, since it doesn't matter if you have all the ranged weapons and utilities in the world, if your elite spec forces you into melee or simply doesn't work with them.

And here I thought that spec difficulty was irrelevant. At least it seems like it when comparing ele to any other profession.

And it still won't be good on those specs. They could have just nerfed some pistol skills and buffed dual skills to compensate weaver. There, done. But what about catalyst you may ask? The weapon simply does not work with the spec so it's just an irrelevant consideration. And if we are being realistic catalyst has needed a rework since day 1. Who cares really?

Yes, events for new players that encourage newbies to throw all their fractal progression away with the steep pristine fractal relic costs on the vendor. New players need the infinite potions, so that makes the event vendor useless with these costs, while vets already have all these items. Who is this for? I remember when the old fractal rush allowed you to use the medallions as the currency instead of automatically converting them into karma. Way more new player friendly. Also, why is the ascended trinket not stat selectable? So many questions for an event that is supposedly for new players.

You kinda need a bit of both nerfs for condi utilities and buffs/reworks for others. If you buff other utility skills that is great because ele can finally get utility in its kit that is equivalent to other professions. However, if you keep condi utility damage to overtuned levels then the opportunity cost to use other utilities will be higher than other professions, which would still lose less damage by swapping them out.

Arcane makes no sense for support skills. If you want that ask for a conjure rework, the skill type that was originally designed to be support oriented and was a complete failure in that regard. With the arcane changes we at least finally get a CC utility that is not a complete pain to use, with a decent cooldown, charges, and even some mobility.

And let's not forget that conjures are among the most clunky skills of the game. Nobody wants to pick up conjures and people avoid them like the plague, constantly asking for a rework. Ele's severe lack of utility options for its dps build is a well known fact and it's one of the many reasons for the abysmal play rates.

You are ignoring damage modifiers and exponential scaling. For example a pure power dps weaver gets at least +50% in damage modifiers at any given time, and even more in some moments of a fight. This means that the effectiveness of all berserker gear stats get 50% more value at the very least. To top of this ferocity is nearly useless without lots of power and precision, so it's a wasted non-stat in cele gear. You need the three stats in large quantities as they empower each other. But yes, having higher numbers in your stat sheet obviously matters more because you said so. The stats are higher so that the power budget is similar due to how traits work. If it had a similar stat total it would be a completely worthless set.

Yes, beating an easy boss without dying is now a grind apparently. There are almost no relic achievements that are even close to being a grind. I guess the word has lost all of its meaning for some people and they just throw it around for anything they don't like. Somehow I got the vast majority of SotO relics the first time I went through the story and then had to backtrack a little to get a few with non-grindy activities. What a travesty to have to do some content at some point.

If you make them the same amount of stats then almost everyone will run 3 stat gear and gear with more stats types will be pointless. It is a known fact that stacking more of the same stats is superior due to how traits and other multipliers work, leading to exponential gains. Investing into additional stat types almost always makes your build worse, except for a very few niche cases. This is why 4 stat gear has a higher stat total. If this wasn't true nobody would ever use 3 stat gear, and yet it's used fairly often.

I agree with many of the suggestions here, but I would like to add a bit to this. Meteor Shower: Overall a good suggestion but an alternative way to change it would be to increase the cast time to 4 seconds and make all the meteors fall within the cast. Just burstier but riskier to use than your suggestion. Eruption: I'd prefer a smaller delay rather than getting rid of the cast. This thing is just impossible to not walk out of even with the cripple. Static Field: Rename it to lightning burst. A large lightning burst strikes the ground, doing decent damage, 5 stacks of vulnerability and stunning enemies for 2 seconds (daze instead in PvP), then the static field appears in that area. Burning Retreat: Reduce PvE damage to the point where it's not worth using in a rotation. Should be used for evading and positioning first and foremost instead of cheesing dps golems. Unsteady Ground: Useless CC against most bosses. I feel that this and guardian's line of warding should get some work done for this purpose. Haven't thought of what exactly as of now. Shock Wave: The way this skill functions is very clunky. Elevation can completely negate the skill much more than any other projectile skill because it's underground. Also being negated by reflects and projectile destruction is very unintuitive for an underground attack and adds yet another weakness to it. Definitely shouldn't be both an underground attack and a projectile. I'd prefer if it was just a proper projectile so we don't get negated by elevation. One thing that I'd like to point out is that the current design of conjures is very likely holding staff changes back big time. Staff has always been the kind of weapon where you had a small amount of really strong damage skills and everything else sucked. What made it work is that conjures covered the gaps. These days it's not as pronounced because there have been nerfs to staff and conjures. However, I think Anet may be afraid of the possibility that staff ele gets too much damage while spitting out utility from oher attunements. In a vacuum increasing the damage of non-fire attunements is completely reasonable since the damage is usually far too low even if you consider the utility, especially with the power creep that other builds/professions have received. Still, if they overshot they could potentially have a monster of a build with good utility, range, AoE and damage that is never has to be traded even if using the utility, especially now that non-CC staff utility has seen buffs. Perhaps we should get the long overdue conjure rework before getting the work that staff needs. That way you won't have conjures closing those damage gaps in non-fire attunements and then damage buffs can be given to their skills. I should probably revisit the conjure design yet again and suggest a rework idea. Thinking of opening a thread.

An f5 isn't needed. Just make reattuning into a single element not subject to the global attunement cooldown. You are still slowing down your overall rotation with that a bit because a global cooldown would be reapplied anyway so it probably wouldn't be OP.

It should also be noted that tempest carries a lot of risk and opportunity cost when overloading. That should be taken into account as well. The main reason why elementalist should be more rewarding than it is now is actually risk vs reward rather than something like APM. Ele simply has a lot of aspects to it that are either risky or have the potential for huge failure.

I agree with this. It really wouldn't overlap at all with any offhand that ele has. Ele has no pure condi offhand, or even a real ranged one for that matter. Focus is ranged but barely has any attacks on it, with one of them being melee anyway. Warhorn has some very weird hybrid ranges, with some melee, mid-range and ranged moves. Dagger is melee. Let's just get what we lack, especially if the implementation is easier than a mainland that has autos and 6 dual skills.

You do have a point, but it should be noted that boons still happen while you are attacking with many other skills. Examples include using a skill that is automatically pulsing them at all times or if you are using something like a mantra or a shout with no cast time. In addition, overloads happen to be some of the largest opportunity cost skills in the game. 4 seconds cast time plus putting your attunement on 20 seconds cooldown in a world where Anet wanted to remove tradeoffs from specs. It's such a hefty cost that overload water barely ever gets use even in heal builds, just because of the massive tradeoffs. You can at least get stability if you sacrifice things that other supports don't have to sacrifice, but then again bladesworn gets a bigger area on their dragon trigger and they get stability plus aegis for free. Not to say that they are directly comparable, but it does show that it is reasonable to give high risk skills some form of protection. Also support tempest has no room for more traits. You can't even take your heal and alac traits at the same time. Any support radius increase would have to be baseline, even if they have to make it separate to the damage, which I am really not convinced should be as tiny as 180 anyway.