Nightfall Skills

Now i'm sure many people have seen the new skills for ele from the preview. If not tough luck. Now my question is what skills are everyone looking forward to using in combo with current skills. To get things moving i'll start.

Stone Striker
Stoneflesh Aura
Mantra of Earth (Not an ele skill I know. But still part of my planned combo.)

mantra of earth, stoneflesh aura, armor of earth, stone striker... there goes 4 skill slots but your not invincible and gaining 2 energy every time you get hit.

Not invincible but it is a good combo for reducing damage. Makes your monks job easier aswell.

Searing flames looks like it will be the new standard for designated nukers in places like FoW and the Deep.

Blinding surge seems like a nice spell for blindbots and shutdown eles in general. As a bonus, it's usable in PvE because of the AoE too.

Freezing gust seems like the best water snare yet.

Ether Prism=unlimted energy if used right. Its equivalent to 11.4 pips of regen, and cant be stripped. to prevent interuption, just use glyph of concentration. Its only 10 sec recharge too!

I still remain slightly underwhelmed by ether prism, though the ones I do like all have individual threads so far, except for sandstorm (which hopefully stays as is) and the aforementioned searing flames, which I have yet to try. I heard it doesn't match the description though, so I'll have to wait and see.

I like the look of Icy Shackles. Brilliant for stoping characters who rely on enchantments. Even your standard wammo won't be able to escape as you pounce on them.

Elite snares are ftl, unless it's "You're All Alone!" which was disguisting. Elementalist elites are set in stone, i.e. Ether prodigy, or maybe second wind, or maybe ether prism if they buff it into playability. In the meantime, I'll take ice spikes and be perfectly content.

Mind freeze still doesn't get play for a reason.

I like Blinding Surge, Mind Blast, Liquid Flame, Freezing Gust, and Stoneflesh Aura.

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I see the potential of fitting flame djin haste into Star burst -> flame djin -> flame burst combo... but I have to see the cast delay first.

Blinding surge might be able to be use outside of its purpose with its cast time.

I am having some hope for master of magic, as I am currently making up a build that need something like this.

I wonder about glyph of restoration... I really liked how aura of restoration was acting as my cover enchant, am I willing to give that up for a little heal? Doubt it.

Icy shackle as cover enchant + anti enchant snare? Going to need a good GvG/HoH/TA hex build to abuse this one.

Steam... why not blurred vision? AoE 50% 16-20 sec seems better. Hex is also harder to be taken down compared to condition. The damage is not enough to matter as the target you are going to hit is either warrior/ranger/assassin/dervish/paragon and all of them has decent armor. (then again, maybe we can use this onto caster target and use new mes skills to spread the condition onto the attackers...? nah... too complicated, it would only fail)

Liquid flame is like another fireball that is bigger size, slower recharge, faster casting and conditional AoE. I suppose it require more skill to use than fireball, so I wonder if there will be anyone that can pin point his/her opponent's soft target and produce the AoE effect more than 90% of the time.

Glowing gaze is interesting, it shows that they are allowing fire line to be able to regen energy more than ever, which will allow pyromancer to stand fully by him/herself with pure fire bar. Same principle to mind blast. These skills going to compete with master of magic, we will see how well these energy management goes.

Elemental flame... I wish there are more skills like this that allow cross element energy increase. With this and glowing flame, maybe mind blast etc (for earth + air, glowstone etc), cross element can go easy on the energy storage to increase their elemental attribute. Perhaps the day we see hybrid element without energy storage will come soon. (I hope we have worthy skills too, if you can have enough energy but those spell all sux, then it would be pointless; need some hard hitting spell that also recover energy after crossing element)

Freezing gust = nightfall version of shard storm

Lightning bolt would help in quite a few situations that I wasn't able to finish off a running opponent after I strike him/her with lightning strike. Very possible for lightning strike to run out of job after this.

I still don't really see any of these skills changing the effectiveness of an ele at all which I find rather sad. As I see it Eles will still be stuck as Renewal/Echo Nukers in PvE or Prodigy Healers in PvP if they want to be effective. Anything else is still too enchant reliant or doesn't do enough damage to merit it's use.

Quite frankly I'm sad they still haven't buffed Earth Magic enough to make it a legitamate element for PvE. The new skills they gave it will be nice, but I see them as more useful for defense on a Me/E than as anything reliable for a E/Me. The simple reason for this is that one area with a few enchant strippers will leave an ele with no enchants and half a skill bar of recharging spells.

The only skill that might be worth taking is Ether Prism, but I'm still not convinced it will be enough to make much of a difference on Eles.