Skill change suggestions 3/19/06

This thread is aimed at making existing skills usefull in all aspects of play: pve, random arena, team arena, hoh, and gvg through the alteration of the only variables on skills that anet seems willing to change.... cost, cast time, recharge time, and damage. This thread will mostly be earth ele skills. If you want to argue with any of my changes or ask why I thought a certain change was appropriate feel free to speak.

As a general statement for the earth ele many of the earth ele skills in their current forms are not very good due to the fact that many of them have a negative aspect built into the use of the spell. If a skill is flawed or very conditional then it should be very powerful in my opinion, unfortunatly, earth skills are not.

Suggestions-
Kinetic Armor: 5 energy cost, 30 second cooldown.

Ward against elements: 5 energy cost.

Stone daggers: 1/2th second cast time.

Obsidian flesh {e}: Lasts 45 seconds at 16 earth.

Earth attunement: Cooldown 30 seconds.

Stoning: 10 energy. Or a way to apply weakness to the enemy within the earth line.

Magnetic aura: Cooldown 30 seconds.

Crystal wave: 10 energy cost. 5 second cooldown.

Earthquake: 150 damage at 16 earth.

Thats all I have time for right now. Most of these will have to probably be buffed even further but I think this is a good start.

This would make machine gun mesmers (fast casting and stone daggers spammage) much more powerful and probably worth it.

However i don't agree with obsidian flesh, this would make this skill waaaay too powerful, you could have it running all the time, which would put other classes at a vast disadvantage.

Earth is powerful enough as it is, its just under-used.

Well stone dagger spamming even as it currently exists is super vulnerable to any sort of interrupt that disables a skill for a while. Also stone daggers are never a spike, they are always sustained damage, they can be dodged, and they require alot of energy to use, to keep up the spam you pretty much are required to use duel attunements.... with all these disadvantages I don't even know if increasing the sustained damage output of daggers by 100percent will be enough. Especialy considering that you would go through energy twice as fast.

Well if you note obsidian flesh has 2 MASSIVE disadvantages. Firstly you can only cast it on yourself which makes it a weak sauce spell breaker. Secondly it slows you by 50 PERCENT which makes you dog meat for any and all warriors and dam impossible to miss for a ranger. Sure you get +20 armor but your losing more health by not being able to kite than you are gaining from the armor buff. Considering that you have to sacrifice lots of defence against a major source of damage in the game, I think its only fair that obsidian should do a really good job at stoping the damage its supposed too. Remember this is an ELITE SKILL with 2 massive disadvantages. It should seriously own at what its supposed to do.

Also if I may point out, you can keep obsidian flesh up currently almost 100 percent of the time. Only with a 3-5 second downtime.... How often do you see it now? Yeah, exactly.

Lol, now thats a funny statement, you don't make a connection at all between the quality of the skills and the fact that its underused? The only skill in the entire earth line that kicks some but is obsidian flame. Aftershock is ok.

If you support buffing stone daggers, do you also support buffing flare and possibly ice spear?

Earth only needs minor tweaks IMO. It's mostly a utility line and the utility is pretty good. Fire needs the most attention, then air, then water, and finally earth.

Yes I would support buffing all of them slightly, Currently the only places you really see them are in pve and random/team arena. No one uses them in hoh unless its a gimick build and definitaly not in gvg. They all have the disadvantage of being a projectile, in the case of stone daggers 2 projectiles which is even worst. They also are all sustained damage at high energy cost.

The only utility in earth that is good is wards. Ward against melee and ward against foes... and very rarely ward against elements. If you think that haveing 2 decent skills makes it a "pretty good" utility line.... I guess we just think differently or something. I see a total of 4 or so skills used out of a skill line on a consistant basis and I see how bad the other skills are and I think "buff bad skills". You see the same thing and you think "good line, no reason to buff skills, not like this game would get better with MORE GOOD SKILLS or anything like that".

As far as your order of elementalist skill lines that need to be tweaked, that has nothing to do with this post at all. I never said which line I thought needed to be changed first, I just did some earth skills because thats what I felt like. If thats your reason for argueing you make baby Jesus cry :-(

I never said it doesn't need buffs. I said it only needed minor tweaking. The defensive enchants are fine, the wards are fine, even the elite is decent (though the speed reduction is too much ,it should be along the lines of Armor of Earth). The only thing earth is really lacking is damage, and you'd be better off attacking that by fixing earthquake, stoning and eruption rather than stone daggers.

If you want to fix stone daggers, increase the damage. A cast time decrease would make it even more inefficient energy wise than it already is.

I just found it odd that you'd mention earth and neglect all the other lines entirely, when they need way more attention.

Crystal Wave: Making the recharge 5 seconds would make it somewhat abusive with a fast cast mesmer and echo/arcane echo.

Earthquake: I'd say take out the exhaustion, considering it already costs 25 energy.

I'll agree with you on this, though I think we will find that your idea of "minor tweaking" is substantialy different than mine.

No they arn't, the defensive enchantments are a joke. Name one ele defensive enchant that is used in a serious gvg match or even regularily in hoh or teams. Kinetic armor? No way. Armor of earth? No. Obsidian flesh? Hell no. The fact of the matter is that the negative effects of these skills are not overcome by their advantages and the bonuses provided are not even close to comparable to monk skills. If you reread my first post the object of these suggestions is to TRY and make skills usefull in all forms of play, not just random arenas or pve. Do you actually have experience in gvg or hoh play out of curiosity?


We can at least agree that 2 wards are fine, I think that ward against elements is to expencive for what it does when you consider how only 1 class can actually output elemental damage unless its on a modded weapon (which can easily be switched out).

The elite isn't even close to being decent, compare it to other available elite options like ether prodigy or elemental attunement. Obsidian flesh falls short even in arena and pve, it will be a cold day in hell before its ever seen in a serious gvg match.

If you notice at the bottom of my post I said thats all I have time for. Not thats all the skills in the earth line that I think need to be buffed. It seems like your arguing because you think the order I list things in actually means something.

Actually a cast time decrease would leave the energy efficiency as it is... it would just up the dps. The same damage for the same amount of energy but in half the time.

Its not odd, its because I was playing an earth ele just before I got on the forums and felt like posting something. I think the other ele lines need work too. I just didn't know that order of importance was a required part of the posting process.....

Sure, let's just put everything we want and name it "Suggestion".
/sarcasm
Please consider about game balance before making suggestion purely for self interest.

Lol. Because changing the cooldowns, cost and cast time of vastly underused skills is just so off the wall and game breaking. I hope this was a joke post.

I'll have to say, I've seen a number of Mo/E Obsidian Flesh Monks around, before. Dunno now.

I've also seen a top guild run one, but when, don't ask me. I forget.

No, it wouldnt. Cast time on crystal wave is 3/4ths a second (I think) fast casting would have little effect on it. Flame burst has a 5 second recharge. Crystal wave currently is like a super ghetto flame burst or inferno. If you wanted to leave the cost and cooldown of crystal wave as it is then it would have to do 150+ damage to be usefull.

You could do that, or you could increase the effectivness of earthquake to match its cost. I'm more in favor of that since it pulls elementalists into the nuker category rather than the spell casting warrior category.

Its ok as it is i think.
Again, i see no reason to reduce its nrg cost
Thats twice the dmg per second? are you mad?
Again, far too good. The whole point is that it is down for some time
This could be improved, but why improve it over all the other attunements?
I agree woth both points here
No way, its already almost 20 seconds of blocking at 16 earth. Reduce cooldown to 30, and u have only a 10 second window. Reduce to 45 seconds maybe
Nope, cooldown needs to be reduced, to 10 maybe, but nrg cost stays the same. Its a AOE obsidian flame ffs, with no exhaustion.
Again, i see no reason to change it. If i was to change anything i would cut recharge or cast time. Its a AOE kd, thats worthy of 25 nrg and exhaustion.

Ok, I may be new to the Elementalist profession and certainly to Earth skills, but I don't understand what is wrong with Stone Daggers as-is. A little more damage would be nice, of course, but it has a low energy output and quick cast time. Hell, yesterday I did almost as much damage in Kryta and the Maguuma with the Daggers as I did with my usual lightening......if Mantra of Lightening was cast by the foe, I threw rocks at them and pounded them into submission !

Personally, I think that Enervating Charge and Stoning could use a bit of decrease in energy cost.....together they make a nice little package.

Because...like he mentioned, he's dealing with only earth spells. He didn't say that water magic didn't need buffs.
Can you really not make the connection that all the skills he listed are earth?