Elementalists [Hard Mode]: Ideas on how to Buff them.

Dmg of eles based on purlely elemental skills sucks in HM at least in majority of places ... everyone who had a chance to test it should have no doubts ... that is my personal broad experience and I am sure that many elementalist can confirm it ... I am not going to convince anybody ...for me it is a fact ... Of course elementalists have many excellent wards, say some ''controlling spells'' like metor shower etc and can be used as very efficient healers or protectors but ... ele nuker is not nuker at all in HM ... necros, mesmers, mele charrs do much more dmg ...
on topic ... generally it is too late to do sth with that now when the game is 6 years old but assume that it is worth anyway so:
why don't put some armour penetration to fire skills or add (or change initial desctription of existing ones) some skills reducing high elemental ressistance of enemies in HM ( maybe glyph or sth)

If something like that were to happen, it should definitely be linked to the Energy Storage attribute, because otherwise you'll just see N/E nukers because of their superior Soul Reaping etcetera etcetera ..

Still, I think people should try out more than just the fire line of Elementalists. There is so much utility that can be used to great effect in HM. I think the only big element that cripples Eles in HM is scatter, because many powerful skills Elementalists have are AoE skills.

Perhaps people should realize that in Hard Mode, you really fight different than in Normal Mode..

I've done both air and earth in hard mode. Now, I play as a spirit spamming elementalist, because I find it more effective.

Sad truth.

Well... my personal experience with elementalists in HM is like this:
- Water: You bring Ward Against harm when enemies are going to bring fire damage, and maelstrom to interrupt. And that's all. Enemies in HM lose hexes and move superfast, so water hexes that snare do little to them.
- Fire: All you can do is keep burning on enemies, and apply AoE attacks in spots so they scatter and stop attacking or casting spells in our party. The direct damage is minimal. You can't hardly deal more than 50 damage with a single skill in HM, excepting against enemies weak vs fire. When you have a spell that is supposed to make 33 damage per hit, and you get just 11 against an enemy that is not particularly strong vs fire, that's rather discouraging.
- Earth: Let's see... we have three armor ignoring spells... one exhausts, and the other two remove conditions and just must be adjacent to the enemy... so they become rather useless too. There's AoE and multi-hit AoE, and even Knockdowns, but they cast to slow, or recharge too slow, or deal next to no damage or something like that. Wards are not used much, either, since they force you to stay within the ward, they are rather unpractical, they should follow the caster, like some kind of aura. And the rest are just to protect the caster, you can't cast them in other allies or something like that. And who the hell wants a party member that just defends himself? That's the reason no one like wammos, they just keep themselves alive a little and do not really do anything.
- Air: This is the only thing with some use in HM. You can apply cracked armor to lower their armor, then spread blindness and weakness to take care of the martial weapons, and even dazing to take care of the casters. But it has no AoE at all, just a couple of skills that hit on or two nearby enemies. You must kill enemies one by one and very slowly.
- Bonders: This is an aberration. I'd rather make it so you can't use more than 3 skill from a secondary profession than having THAT being used around the place. If you want an elementalist that heals, ask for some healing into water magic or something like that.


So this is all that's left for elementalists in HM:
- Spreading blindness, weakness and cracked armor all over the place to take care of martial weapons while the party gets rid of casters. I do enjoy using this. Specially against Destroyers. The poor things can't remove conditions, and their main source of damage are the physical professions, so they just stand there, useless, while the party kills them.
- Protecting vs fire in all those spots with lots of fire damage, like Kathandrax, or Hell's Precipice. Stand in spot, cast the ward, cast 3 spells, and wait for recharge. That's all you can do. The only non-elite spell you could cast while waiting has half range, and you don't bring half range spells in HM, or you'll get too close to the enemy, so you sit there and wait for the spells to recharge, doing nothing until maelstrom and Ward against Harm recharge.
- Fire damage in places filled with ice elemental enemies, like Sepulchre of Dragrimmar

And, of course, not using their own skills, like when they prostitute themselves as bonders, exchanging their elementalist dignity for a slot in a party. Yeah. I don't like when a profession has to bring 5..6 skills from a different profession to be accepted in teams. When I wanted to make a monk, I made a monk. But hey, even a monk can nuke better than elementalists in HM. Heh. Welcome to upside down town.

That got me confused as well.


I really don't understand why you are assuming that everyone thinks that elemental damage should be increased (in PvE). Appearently, you feel like elementalist do too little damage.
I do not see this problem as all. While elementalist do relatively little damage in HM, so does every other profession. It's called Hard Mode for a reason.

For any HM ele build what you need is 3 pve skills + glyph of lesser energy. That's 4 skills before you add attunement and a res. So you have 2 slots basically. You can either slot Assassin's Promise + Lightning Orb, or Unsteady ground + Churning Earth...or b-surge + Orb if you want to be utility.

Guys, you should try energy blast with Assassin's promise. You only need 8 energy storage (2 damage per energy starts at 8) and 75 energy before using it. Use a high energy set (+15/-1 regen wand + focus) and you pretty much get a solid 100+ damage, since a high set gives you +42 energy on top of the base 30, before any energy storage. My problem with the skill is it just does damage. It's better than Magnetic Surge pretty much always though.

12+1+1 Energy storage --> 114 energy with high set
12 Deadly arts

AP
EBVAS
"YMLAD!"
"FH!"
GOLE
Energy Blast
Signet of Deadly Corruption, Mark of Death,Glyph of Restoration, or other
Res

Well ER is ridiculous with a stack of enchantments. Elementalists don't have partywide/target ally enchantments save for Windborne Speed. Even way back in 2005, Eles ran /Mo for ether Prodigy + Heal Party, or aegis when not running Heal party for GvG so it's nothing new. When Factions came around we got Protective was Kaolai, weapon of Warding so Eles could use that for flagging. However, most of the resulting flaggers were Rt/E...

Assassins Promise + Meteor Shower + By urals hammer.

That is the problem we are talking about right there. 2 of the skills you are mentioning are not Elementalist skills. While there is nothing wrong with that and most Ele's have resorted to such measures to get into parties it shouldn't be this way. I roll with an Earthbind Rit to compliment my Elementalist arsenal, but I have to bring other classes to do the "nuking"(raw damage) when the Elementalist was originally intended in GW1 to be the raw damage dealer or "nuker". Mesmers, Necroes, and Rits are the raw nukers now because they have a litany of skills that have one of, if not the following three things:
1.)armor ignoring damage
2.)faster casting
3.)better recharge

Couple this with the fact that most Elementalist skills cause more scatter than other class's damage because of AoE over time and that the devs designed many Ele skills to cause scatter back when we were the main damage dealers. Now that it isn't the case, not only do they still have the scatter, but the damage isn't as good as the other profession's damage in the game.

With all that being said, I still don't think Ele's damage should be increased, because other classes damage is already so high that it will make the game easier than it is now. The only way Elementalist damage should see a boon is if they decrease other classes damage. It really is a no win situation at this point. Why? Because all you need in this game anymore is raw damage. Why play mind games in HM when you can just go for raw, armor ignoring DPS?

umm why do eles need buffs? I wouldnt mind but they arent that underpowered. Their energy reserves allow a vast amount of high energy skills/spam.

My typical ele bar for HM:

-Elite depends on the area
-Optional
-Pain Inverter
-"You Move Like A Dwarf!"
-Ebon sin support
-Liquid Flame
-Meteor
-Breath Of Fire

I could always swap out pve skills for Intensity/BuH if i want more Nuking damage, but ive Vanquished all of Cantha, 90% of Elona and 85% of Tyria so far with that basic build.

Like i said earlier, i wouldnt mind a damage increase but using Cracked Armor + Intensity deals enough damage. For those high armor bosses, Pain Inverter ftw?

Elementalists are the best at snaring. See the Symbolic and Graphical Investigation of the Efficiency of Water Magic Snares or this post (note that crippled is also 50%) if you have any doubts.

Snaring is a lot more beneficial than you'd think and can be used beyond just Aurora Glade, Moddok Crevice (and that one Norn race outside of Umbral Grotto). By using snaring in PvE, you can:

• Control agro (snaring the enemy group before argoing causes them to default target to your melee/minions, so the enemy melee would go straight to the minions, ignoring your party (and thus leaving you damage-free))
• Keep enemies in AoE
• Prevent them from chasing your healers (so your healers can do their job)
• Prevent the enemy short-range melee from reaching your party (if it takes them three times as long to reach you, you have three times as long to kill them before they can do any damage to you)
• Prevent a party-wipe (if there's a snare in place, it's easy to escape from the foes if your party is overwhelmed/over-agroed)
• Prevent foes from kiting/dodging as well
• As you mentioned above, preventing enemies from escaping so that you can easily complete the bonus/mission
• Plus more!

Foes in HM don't lose hexes super fast; it's actually harder to lose hexes than conditions (another reason why water snares > crippled). Some foes don't have any hex removal at all and even if they do, it's easy to cover-hex (either intentionally with a water hex like Rust, or unintentionally by bringing another character that can hex). The only thing that affects hexes that you can't do anything about is Natual Resistance, which only affects select bosses and foes in Prophecies.

Enemies moving superfast in HM is only a warrant to use snaring - why would you want short-range melee enemies moving that fast chasing your monks around or bypassing your minions and reaching your party to do damage even faster? Even if an enemy has a 50% speed buff in HM, using a water snare (66%) will cause the foe to be moving at 50% of your speed. The faster an enemy moves, the more it's affect by a snare (ex. an enemy moving at 300% when snared (66%) will only move at 100%).

EDIT: Added "prevents kiting" to the list of snare uses.

I know.I was talking about CONDITIONS, not snares(tought cripple condition is a form of snares, but it doesn't matter now...). And at spread/control conditions eles aren't the best at all...well they weren't intended to do it originally i think.


Yes these are all way of use snares...but i wouldn't run a whole skillbar(neither me or an hero) for snares. And water it's everything but the way to deal damage. The only snare i would run in general pve(so out of place like moddok and so on) could be Deep Freeze, because tought the high e-cost(auspicios incantation would resolve it) its the most powerful area-snare(66% right?) WITHOUT any point in water. But only this, when running a heavy aoe team(any kind of aoe..from roj to unsteady ground, this is stil useful).

Gotcha, I though you meant support in general since you only said "support" in that other post.

Deep Freeze is the most powerful AoE snare in the game (66%, nearby range, non-elite, and don't need spec in water magic) and I wouldn't fill up an entire build with snares either. Using just Deep Freeze + Ice Spikes (both AoE 66% snares) makes it so that the foes are snared for ~94% of the time, so I'd go for just those two (assuming you're willing to put spec in water magic). Beyond them, any additional snares become redundant, especially since there aren't any other AoE water snares.

Water snares might not produce the greatest damage or DPS, but the nice thing is the snares still do some damage and that you only need one or two snares on your bar, allowing you to fill the rest up with damage skills.

Also, what's nice about water snares is that they let you run heavy AoE, but beyond that, the snares are still useful even when not running it (see the list of uses I made).

I'd take soul reaping over energy storage any day of the year, unless it's PVP (since you can't count on things dying!).

Energy storage is just a bigger pool. A bigger pool doesn't mean more energy can be used, skills like Ether renewal and Glyph of Lesser energy are what allow eles to use expensive skills. However, with the number of 15+ energy skills (that aren't elementalist) that there are, you might as well just use it on an elementalist secondary.

Also, Breath of Fire is probably the worst fire skill you can run, since it is adjacent aoe, when you can run Snow storm which is 1 second cast, 10 recharge and doesn't require fire magic.

EDIT: energy storage is also a buffer for exhaustion, but it's the only class with exhaustion, so it doesn't matter as much.

Why did everyone decide to ignore me earlier? I really do not see why you act like it is an implicit truth that elementalist do too little damage. I do not see this problem, even if you use elemtalist skills. Not to mention that a E/A with a lot of PvE skills and assassin's promise will deal a shitload of damage.

Assuming its near the endgame of the campaign or an elite area, HM foes are around level 26-30, which translates to around 78-90 armor for casters (even more for warriors, paras and rangers). This translates to doing at most 70% of the listed damage (and as low as 35% to rangers) to hard mode foes with elemental spells.

In the absence of cracked armor and armor penetration from air spells, this is comparatively worse than for armor ignoring damage.

All other professions have access to armor ignoring damage, while elementalist skills basically all do armor sensitive damage (magnetic surge, obsidian flame and energy blast being the exceptions). Thus comparatively elementalists do less damage in hard mode, all other things being equal (physicals get AoHM and Asuran Scan which pushes their dps up, all classes can use BuH and EBSoH).

Warriors, Assassins, Dervishes, Ritaulists and Necromancers all have the capability to do a lot of damage.

Intensity
E:5, C:1/4, R: 20 (special)
Enchantment Spell. (10 seconds.) Your spells deal +15...25% damage. Your elementalist spells have +1.5% armor penetration for each rank in Energy Storage. This spell is disabled if you have equipped any non-elementalist spell (45 seconds).

That should do fine enough to fix the problem, so you can pierce some armor in HM, can't echo it, and to make sure that Assassin's Promise doesn't work with it. Something to make elementalists better, when they ARE elementalists.

They'd still be crap.

While I like your idea, that still doesn't bring Ele's in-line with Mesmer damage. I would say to rework one of the ES Elites to do this and to only affect Elementalist skills, but NOT make the bar Elementalist only. That way, if an ele uses Intensity, and "By Ural's Hammer!" they can deal almost the armor ignoring damage of a Mesmer in HM.

Me too but i think that the duration could be linked to e-storage(like critical agility for sins) and the damage/ap buff to the title...or viceversa, but making it ALMOST(or someone would say "it's too much OP!!") maintenaible(only for eles with high rank and high e-storage obviously).

Anyways instead:
i'd say: "This spell ends prematurely if you cast a non elementalist spell". Your version of Intesity would cut off any sinergy between different professions skill on the same bar imo.

P.S:i'm thinking that we were going a little bit offtopic(propose for buff eles)....so i'd like to see any ideas about other skill reworks too, we have another thread only for Intensity.