Does any one else feel that Elementalist skills are kind of... lacking?

Well, I play a hydromancer. The one thing I've noticed is that as soon as I'm targeted by nearly anyone, there's nothing I can do about it. A ranger will interrupt me. A mesmer will interrupt me, Backfire me, or drain me. A warrior will just tear me to pieces-- although with snares and Trident, I can at least keep the warrior away from me. (Not that I can deal any lasting damage to him.)

Deep Freeze does 90 damage at 16 Water, by the way. Ice Spikes does 84. I don't use Shard Storm because it's a projectile, and I hate dealing with line of sight/dodging crap.

Anyway, the problem with hydromancy at least, and probably other lines, is that elementalists have no good way of healing themselves or protecting themselves, plus huge cast and recharge times mean that you can easily be interrupted and have a useless skill slot for 15, 30, even 60 seconds. My secondary is necro, which doesn't help me too much anyway, but even if it wasn't most elementalists take 16 [element] Magic and 13 Energy Storage, leaving 6 attribute points left over, so our element spells have the maximum effect.

Another thing is that frankly, I don't deal all that much damage. Rangers may as well be immune to anything I cast with their freaking 120+ elemental armor (correct me if I'm wrong). Monks can outheal it. Warriors can outlast it long enough to get to me and pound me into submission. Air and fire ele's can outdamage it. Mesmers can interrupt or prevent it. I can usually take down necros, but that's just because they have many of the same problems I do.

Water has four elites. Ward Against Harm is pretty good-- makes fire magic laughable, for instance. Water Trident is solid, although I recently switched to Ward for my standard elite slot. Mist Form is okay, but the 2-second cast time makes it impractical when you're actually under attack, plus you can still suffer all the various effects of physical damage that screw you over (interruption, knockdown, etc.). Mind Freeze is complete crap, nobody ever uses Mind Freeze.

However, water does shine in PvE. Preventing virtually all casting in a decent area for 10 seconds is hugely beneficial. Maelstrom + Ice Spikes + Deep Freeze = a ton of damage, in an area, plus the interruption (which is really more important, otherwise you'd just use fire). Also, I think just because water is so versatile, it can fit into some complex team strategies better than the others. Air is really just spiking damage, and screwing up warriors a little (although Blurred Vision, which is AoE and you can keep up as long as you have the energy, is way better than Blinding Flash). Fire is nothing but AoE damage, not that useful in PvP. Earth... well, okay. I'll grant that earth is as good as or better than water in most respects, but water may have a more reliable damage output.

I just can't believe that in a game like this with so many possibilities, such a versatile line as Water could be useless. Overpriced? Mostly, yes. Unwieldy? Definitely. Useless? I don't think so. If I played in an active PvP guild, I'm positive I could come up with a lot of solid builds utilizing the hydromancer. If anyone can support/refute this, I'd be glad to hear it.

You may be right But it would have to be a specific build or guild build. What im saying is
#1. Water doesn't do much dmg(I know not everything is about dmg).
#2. Maelstrom is nice other than that I personally dislike about every water skill not WvE or Water trident
#3. Ele elites in general are weak
#4. Basically water is the most defensive elite. But The fact is hexes can be removed. and people can walk out of maelstrom.
#5. Why use water when earth does it just as good if not better in most situations.
ex. Ward against foes. not as slow as Deep freeze but wards can't be removed. Quick cast time not much energy. Same with the other wards. Wards are the *best* ele* skills in the game in my opinion.

1) Does more damage than Earth in PvP, and very high damage + interruption in PvE.
2) Right. Uh, why don't you look at the water line first? There are several good skills. Armor of Mist is excellent. Blurred Vision is good, both it and Rust are pretty good in Competition Arenas. Ice Prison is an excellent snare. Armor of Frost is solid vs. physical, gives the hydromancer 100 armor, which I believe is the same as what most warriors have vs. physical. Two of the four elites are very good, and another is decent. Ice Spikes and Deep Freeze are great in PvE. Even Frozen Burst isn't bad for getting away from warriors.
3) Uh... k.
4) I would say Earth is more defensive. Okay, hexes can be removed... they sure can. And people can walk out of Maelstrom, but especially if you're close to them, have an Ice Prison or Deep Freeze on them, and are hitting them with Water Trident whenever they move, it'll at least take them a while. And since you'd generally cast it on casters, which have little armor, the damage while they're running away adds up. The whole thing perfectly complements, say, fire nukers or knockdown warriors, even if it's not all that amazing in PvP by itself... but it is still good. Besides, while the caster's leaving the Maelstrom, he's not casting.
5) Well, they're just different. If you want earth in a specific build, take earth. Otherwise, water might be better.

Well, Ward Against Foes is better in, say, a chokepoint, but Deep Freeze deals relatively high AoE damage as well (90, like I said). And, Ward might not do you as much good in an open field battle as Deep Freeze, although in a more contained one it ceratinly would.

I dunno. I'm not entirely convinced myself that Water is worthwhile, but I've been using it ever since the Ring of Fire and it's worked out.

We are mainly concerning ourselves about the PvP-worthiness of these skills, just about anything works in PvE.

what exactly is wrong with water? cast it on a healer and a single interupt in most situations is enough to do lasting dmg to the enemy team. deep freeze them and they need to spend quite a while (in PvP time) getting out before they can heal again.

the wards are useful. no stripping of them.

i have been told that maneuverability is the winning factor in a PvP battle. i have read the same here. and now you say that massive reductions in maneuverability are useless?
remove hex? deep freeze is on all of the people near the target. thats a lot of energy and time you could be healing. i wouldn't take them most water hexes off. nor would you people, because eles are useless.

why are eles so popular? why are they needed in teams?
answer: because they appear (god forbid) to be useful.

a lot of ele spells are indeed lacking. they are very highly conditional. every class has their share of these skills. eles do however have more than enough spells in every element to fill a skill bar. and be useful.

8vs8 pvp I was meaning. Deep freeze is 70 cold dmg at 12 water magic. I'm not sure what it is at 16 but nevertheless are u kidding me? Armor of earth lasts longer than its recharge unlike armor of mist and armor of frost. The only penalty is speed. Great blurred vision. I said About every water spell. AoF and AoM is not worth 2 skill slots. Or even one for that matter. Armor totally screws water since i've tried it before even with a pretty high lvl deep freeze. I believe i did 70dmg... Earth's crystal wave is 100+ I believe armor ignoring dmg. Obsidian flame is an awesome spell. Where are you getting your facts that water does more dmg than earth. Earth requires a lot of energy to run but its the same with water. I seriously doubt that all 3 of the monks will be stuck in 1 maelstrom... Earthquake+aftershock is 35 energy with exhaustion but massive dmg around you and knockdown.

It really pisses me off that I have to use the monk's smiting line to do damage as an elementalist. The whole reason why I chose elementalist in the first place is because I love doing damage. I used to use air exclusively and I really enjoyed it, but after a while, I became frustrated when I would nuke someone down to 15% of their life and then watch their health bar shoot back up to full before I could finish them off. Then, spike teams became the flavor-of-the-month and I was in heaven. Then, everyone figured out how to counter spike teams, so I was effectively neutered.

I began to experiment with the other three elements as well as smiting. Fire is fantastic in PvE, but there is no way in hell that I'd seriously use it in PvP. The casting times are just way too long. I thought water absolutly sucked. As someone above posted, anything water can do, another element can do better. As for earth, when all I did was drop wards, it really helped the team, but I found it to be really boring and I felt like a crappy protection monk. At first I was trying to ward and do damage, but the damage was terrible. People look at the numbers that elementalist spells can do, but they don't subtract the armor reduction from them. They think they're going to earthquake/aftershock people for 225 damage, but in reality it's nowhere close to that. First off, you're not earthquaking anyone. Secondly, if someone does manage to get knocked down right next to you and you get aftershock off, you don't do 140 damage. You do 85 damage that gets reduced to 50 and you do 56 damage that gets reduced to 35. I think a major problem with elementalists is that our damage is reduced so drasticly by armor, but the damage from the other caster classes is not. Perhaps, if armor reduced the damage of holy, death, chaos, ect. it would put elementalists back at the top of the damage dealers.

As far as energy costs go, I think they're so high because we have energy storage so it balances out. The problem is, that's our special attribute, so if it's balanced out then that makes it redundant. It's only really good if you're using spells and skills for another class. Personally, I have no qualms about the energy costs, it's the high cast and recharge times that get me. There's so many skills and even an entire class designed to interrupt and screw with casters and elementalists are the easiest to screw over because our spells take so long to cast. Rangers and mesmers can easily completly lock down an elementalist and make them useless. My guildmates said that it's almost impossible to interrupt a monk, yet intterupting an elementalist trying to cast even a two second spell is nothing. I even interrupt myself sometimes when I try to move away from the warrior ripping me a new one and I hadn't quite finished casting that spell. Of course, it still cost me energy and sometimes even exhaustion to hear that horrible "click" sound and see the sparks fly just before I die. I can live with the energy costs if they'd just lower the cast times a lot and the recharge times by just a little bit.

But, my biggest gripe is that we're outdamaged by most classes, including monks! Why do the healers do more damage than us? In my opinion, the whole smiting line needs to be removed and replaced with something else, perhaps a martial arts self-defense line to help keep the monk alive or something. Then, they can take some of the smiting spells and rework them and give them to elementalists. Maybe change Balthazar's Aura into Lightning Aura or Fire Aura or something. It'd also be nice if we had an enchantment that boosted our spell damage while it was up.

Sorry for the length of the post, but once I start it's hard to stop. My main suggestion is to make it so armor reduces all damage, not just physical and elemental. I used to love playing an ele, and I still do when I PvE, but in PvP I do feel like I'm not making much diffrence.

I wish Ele's had more field control skills - for example, Blurred Vision, various Wards, Knockdowns. Throwing down continuous earthquakes with knockdowns in a certain area, or raising up walls of spikes, or pools of water or something. You know, defensive/offensive obstacles for the other team to get annoyed about.

I personally always felt that smiting elementist was just wrong.
Not because the of the combo itself, but becuase the combo is often better than elemental elementist.
Hell, protection elementist are often better than protection monks.

I like how the rangers primary ties into his other attrubutes so well.
I kind of wish all monk attributes (besides mostly healing) tied into divine favor better.

As far as interrupting goes. Its in debate now that rangers are sort of off the hook with thier new buffs. Maybe that will be reajusted.
But in the meantime, Glyh of Concentration shouldnt be slept on.
Its cheap, quick casting and recharges faster than most spells.
I noticed a PvE enemy that would pull this one out after I dazed him.
Then, I could no longer interpt his loooong casting spell.
He just keep it up, and I just keep plucking useless interrupts.
Bring in Earthquake and Aftershock at 100% efficancy again with this skill.

Elementalists can do good damage, it's just that they're limited to a few small subsets of skills to do it.

I also think it's really lame that a level 12 zealot's fire matches the dps of a level 16 lava font, fire storm, or searing heat.

I agree that pure elems need some work. So whats the soluton?

Do we think that most of the elem spells need to reworked? Or is there some simple mechanic that can be introduced that will fix it all in one go?

Here's some ideas - not necessarily good ones, and not necessarily all at the same time, but...

- Make casting time something you can choose. And then damage scales up as the casting time increases. (Eg - press skill once to start casting, press skill again to fire off the spell. The longer you cast, the more powerful the spell becomes, up to a certain limit) This can be a unique feature of elem spells.

- AOEs that come "from the sky" or similar, (Firestorm, Meteor Shower, Rotgort's Invocation) FOLLOW their target. AOE Spells that make graphical sense to "stay in place" (maelstrom, searing heat, earthquake, lava font etc) have TRIPLE the aoe radius. (Yes, TRIPLE!!!!!! :P )

- Nerf Ether Renewal. And then give all elem spells very low recharge times. Oh, and reduce energy costs across the board. (25->15, 15->10, 10->10 5->5) Elems then have to control their casting to avoid running out of energy. But they can spam away a full energy bar in a short amount of time when they need to.

- introduce a "combo" mechanic. If a target is hit by several different spells from the same element in quick succession, the damage scales up. (Thus giving some use to carrying different spells other than the "optimal" ones.) (and also giving a good alternative to single spell spikes such as orb / obs flame / etc)

- Give some more glyphs that only apply to Elem spells, but ARE REALLY REALLY GOOD. (And spammable - essentially castable before every spell.)

- Elem self-enchants should either: Have long recharge times, but longer durations. Or shorter durations, but shorter recharge times. It makes no sense that monk enchantments can not only be cast on other people, but are often instant recharge (or very fast) and have longer durations too.

- Damage scales up when you are more exhausted

- Incidentally, I hate meteor shower. There's no excuse to have useless "cosmetic" meteors there. Either make them all do (reduced) damage, and make every third one knock down, or make them all do damage + knockdown, but the previously "cosmetic" ones now fall randomly nearby, missing the target (but possibly hitting something else.)


Any thoughts?

How about the following:

For every point above 12 in a related attribute you get some sort of special effect. This gives people an incentive to play primary elementalists. For fire let it add 1-4 seconds of burning to every fire skill (skills that already add burn damage should have burn lengths increased by the same amount). Mark of Rodgort should now add 1-6 fire damage every time it triggers as well as the burning effect.

For air let it add 2.5% armor penetration per point (also air needs a small boost in base damage). For water let all water spells that inflict slow also inflict a 5% attack speed drop per point. For earth give all damage spells a 5% chance per point of inflicting knockdown.

Rework the ele damage elites to make them worthwhile. In particular mind freeze and mind shock are really bad. Lightning surge should be fixed to work on bosses and have the standard armor penetration.

If you want to see a good use of fire ele, take a look at [Rift]'s variation of the [Ki] Fire ele.

Seen here
http://files.filefront.com/rifts_Ar...9025;;/fileinfo

Sadly no one thought to interupt the fire ele which is a huge mistake. I do agree with most people. Water is lacking the most.

I said it before and Ill say it again.

"If i could know with certainty what the AoE is of the skills I use, Id be happy.
Its not that you cant "figure" it. But Id with you could just SEE maybe and indicator on your minimap where your AoEs hit."

Glyph of Concentration and Glyph of Sacrifice both help with interrupting fools. (Concentration is 10x better for lack of penality) So casting time isnt really a problem imo.

I do think if any AoE should follow its target it would be firestorm. Not fast enough to keep a foe in the firestorm, but fast enough to keep the target moving if he doesnt want to be caught in it.

Metero Shower and Maelstorm, maybe, should get an increased AoE.
Metero Shower isnt that bad if you got more than one eley carrying it though.
If you know there is a spot thats going to get attention, have 2 peope cast it with anyone else finishing the job. You just have to make it count or its a hugh waste. But when you do make it count....it counts big.

Maybe a skill that combos nicely with Maelstorm (like earthquake, aftershock) that snares foes keeping them in the location of the storm. There is Deep Freeze, but thats dang expensive for a combo. There is Ice Prison, but that only works with one target. There is Frozen Burst, but "foes adjacent to you" doesnt sound like your going to hit more than one person.

I really cant say much because I dont play with an ele often. But from my little experance these are the types of improvements that would have helped me.
So maybe more improvements can be made.
The only attribute line I think should be touched for cost/cast/recast is Water.
Some built in skills that add defences against hexes for the future would be a big plus too.

But mostly, first and formost...clear AoE damage and discriptions would be a huuuugh bonus.
Next, before buffing elementist, Id nerf secondary smiters. (while maybe buffing primary smiters)
Then, Id work on the skills themselves, scaling thier properties until they feel properly potent.

Air needs a boost in spiking power, at the moment they are moot since you can have an axe warrior or dps ranger stand head and shoulders above air dps.

Fire needs a decrease in casting time and something to improve aoes slightly. There should be a reason why you would want to bring more than 3 fire spells.

Earth is doing ok atm, it currently is the most balanced. Some of the spells could use a little improvement.

Water needs both price and cast time decreased.

Fire-Fine-Find big groups and use sexy dual nukage
Earth-Fine-Find big groups and use sexy kd/as
Air-Fine-Chain in 3 2 1
Water-Needs to be improved-Slow downs ftw!1

Fire - Not fine - Expensive, slow, interrupt bait
Earth - Is ok - If you think KD/AS is any good in high level competetive pvp however, well... it aint

Air - Not fine - Chain in 3 2 1 - opps we didnt kill the target, damage gets healed and you are back to square one. And you just devoted 4-5 slots solely on one class. GG hard counters. Whats this warriors and rangers outdps air anyway ? opps .

Water- Agreed- Needs improvement.

Umm 2 words. Earth spiking...

Just in case you didnt read anything Ive posted about it, Glyph of Concentration makes your "cast times" negotable.
You can cast Metero Shower while dazed, through 15 interrupts with it.
It cost 5 energy, cast in 1 second, and recast in 2. You can use it in front of all of your 2 second plus cast skills without skipping a beat.
Its been ignored all this time, but with the new ranger interrupt spikes, its time to dust this skill off and make it common in our eley builds.
Its well worth it.

Fire is awesome for PVE, considering that enemies like staying in one place. Strengthening it would make PVE too easy, so Anet has to work the other skills to be more balanced pvp/pve-wise.