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

I can throw backfire or diversion on an elementalist or one of the many other shutdown skills. See I can play the counters game to!

Water and Earth at the moment has the most utility in PvP atm, with Fire coming in third and air bringing up the rear. Fire aoe can really turn the tide when the situation is right, but other times its just wasted mana. Air damage is all spike which is worthless since its worse than both ranger and warrior spike, and suffers nearly as many or maybe even more counters. I feel like I'm repeating myself too much =p.

A lot of the stuff you said, I either already knew or just agreed with anyhow.
But if your the opinion that, no offensive spell should take over 3 seconds to cast, we just see things differently.
I dont believe that there is no way possable to merit 25 energy with 3+ cast time on a skill. And anyhow, there are maybe only 4 spells that take longer than 3 seconds in the whole elemental line.
Though with the current standing these type of skills may seem impractical, the solution wouldnt be reduce thier price, but instead; to clear up its potentual and then make the skills clearly practical for the situations they where intended.
The idea for elementist is to have high cost spells, a primary attribute that caters to this and nukes that time to wind up.
A nuke with these attrubites shouldnt be instakill powerful unless is coming from more than one source. To my knowledge, this is already the case.

If elementalist could get buffed to be better than smitters and smitters get nerfed to no longer win against the damage of elementist, that would be 100% ok in my book too.

Well if your build is based upon spamming flare you're going to have either elemental attunement or renewal, so energy isn't going to be a real concern. I take your point that rodgort is removable. To compensate how about halving the burn time to 1-2 seconds?

I love my e/mo
Iv never tried PvP, but i can take on all the griffons at once. And kill em fast.
Fire is so cool......

In having a discussion with Ensign and bringing up the issue of reaction time, 2s is pushing it for raw damage. The reference was spike timeframes, but it applies to any skill that the refresh time dictates that it must be used in that manner. Even 3s is harsh, unless it has important and lasting utility that comes along with it. For the sake of comparison though, since i dont think we are arguing here, necros have 11 skills at the 3s mark (7 of which are death magic and the majority are corpse exploitation), Mesmers have 5, monks have 2 outside of the resurect skills, elementalists have 12 at 3s or more, 6 of which are fire and only kinetic armor did not have an aoe component. Given the static nature of aoe spells, upping the time till arrival is not really justified and the effect delivered in most cases is done faster/cheaper/more often/sustianed in the smiting realm and not have exhaustion.
The idea of exhaustion combined with the idea of a larger pool contradict each other, as one largely negates the effectiveness of the other over time. The large costs in general are very prohibitive which also reduce overal perfomance of the primary attribute without being supported by other active skills. Also, it creates a similar number of uses as other professions over time negating the energy storage ability as well. Expertise trumps others in virtually every situation for a passive skill that creates sustainability.

You can really look at the situation one of two ways. Either the ele skills are mostly fine and all the rest are slightly out of line (~+1-2s, ~+5-10e, ~+5-10s reuse), or ele skills are mostly broken and all the other skills are fine.

Not necessarily. In PvP, "intelligence" comes into play when the team knows how to spread out to isolate the person being AOEd (we're talking about if it's homing here). As for a homing meteor shower, well, it could be possible to give it an aiming mechanism similar to projectiles. (slightly delayed targeting with motion prediction). That way someone being hit by meteors can zig-zag whilst moving and dodge them all, exciting :P

Besides, if meteor shower was homing, then you could make all the meteors "real" meteors, and just make them fall in a random position near the target. Think the meteor shower in the GW intro movie that Cynn uses.

Necros can take advantage of life sacrificing in various ways. Monks take advantage of additional maintained enchants in various ways (well, maybe just blessed signet). Giving elems a way to benefit from exhaustion wouldnt be totally inconsistent. Maybe a passive effect is too much. Perhaps a glyph or enchant that has the same effect?

Heheh, "changes too much" does not exist in my dictionary :P I would be perfectly happy if ANet turns everything upside down if they're changes that i like. :P We're talking about anything technically difficult here. (rebalancing wouldnt be trivial though.) What can I say? I get bored easily.

Im not too swift on the number crunching. I still dont completely understand aftercast times. If its really a hinderance, why even have it?
Would it hurt not to have it?
If its part of the game, why isnt it in the skill discription?

If Gale and Obsidian Flame didnt have exhaust, they would be way to strong.
I dont like exhaust either, but I just know how I would abuse the skills.
Maybe other skills, like Maelstorm would be better without it.

AoEs however have the problem of players being smart enough how to notice them and get away, thus neglagating there worth in cost/cast/etc.
And when compared to Balthazars Aura, an AoE thats been used mostly to follow targets and be worth that cost of its cast, nothing in elemental AoEs really compare in effencancy.
Ive always thought of this as a problem, and one that Ive been having trouble getting around. (not balthazars, but the effectivness of stationary AoEs)

As far as expertise being the sh**, I agree.
Monks may have the benift of being the sole class thats self seficant.
But rangers have the benift of having the best crutch to thier primary attrubute.
Some have complain "I have to invest in expertise to be a good ranger and I dont like that" but really, its the best idea.
I think all classes should more or less be forced into there primary to make the most out of thier other attributes.
Not to completely hinder the usefulness of secondary skills, but to insure that elementist are not better smitters than monks. (or that warriors arent better beastmasters than rangers )

I think the anwer is somewhere in the middle. All classes could be put under a microscope and fine tuned here and there. Elementist could use a buff, and some of the other classes (*cough* smitting) could use a nerf.

Most of what really gets me down with elemenist is, I dont know what thier ranges are.
I dont know when to time a nuke.
And I cant stop anyone from moving out of the "small" range (it feels small) of my high cost spells.
If I could control all of that more, then I would be like, "ok, this skill isnt worth its price for what it can do"
Maybe my lack of experance really doesnt help to support anything other than, all of my suggestions have been to open up the understanding of what these skills do.
So thats been my beef.
Nerf, buff elementist or whatever, until I know with certainty what they hell is going on as I use them, Its pretty much...single target lighting strikes, warding and smitting with my elementist.

A few things are in the game but not accurate or described within it. Aftercast times are just a control mechanism, which in effect, simulates what normal weapon refresh times do in order to create a pause between differnt skill uses. I dont know why it was implemented, one of the beta testers could probably answer though.

Offhand only bane signet, signet of judgement and whirlwind cause the knockdown effect without inflicting exhaustion. Whirlwind is a potential warrior slowdown, but gale's effect is ranged and longer knockdown duration and causes no damage. Due to effect stacking gale could be abused without the exhaustion even if it cost more energy. Obsidian flame is a little different as it is just raw damage. At 16 earth skill you are looking at 118 damage that ignores armor level delivered after 2s have passed. With zealots fire at 12 skill you are looking at 111 fire damage at 2.25s with no exhaustion. Balthazar's aura will have dealt 132 damage before obsidian flame recycled to be used again. Even against lightning orb, it doesnt look that good, as lightning orb does 106 damage at 16 skill and has 25% penetration, which has its benefits and weaknesses and no exhaustion(you lose out damage against ranger targets, while everything else is close to the listing or better). Aside from base cost, there really is no justification for the exhaustion on obsidian flame as skills like crystal wave exist within the elementalist realm and does not cause exhaustion.

Hence the topic as to why elementalist feel kind of lacking.

Basically if a player doesnt need to be somewhere, they wont stay in one spot. Even the projectile aoes and point blank aoes are rather tiny and can be avoided. Roughly 2 steps can avoid the aftershock of a hammer warrior or earthquake ele. The only thing that can be done, is to try to time it durrning a period where the target needs to be stationary(read casting activly or in melee). Beyond that the skills run themselves.

Wow, 4 pages, thanks for the response guys.

I guess I was onto something sorta. The problem is I can't really picture anet doing anything about this, since the majority of the population still believes that eles are the king of damage (w/ fire and air) and verstility (w/ earth and water).

The big thing I have against this is that warriors and rangers can decrease their "refresh time" with attack speed buffs, and rangers can completely ignore it using interrupts. While elementalist are stuck with adding 1 second to every spell they cast because of casting sequence + afercast.

i hate you.
that post actually made me laugh, and i have a terribly soar throat.
...ow.

funny as hell though.

The damage from zealots fire is assuming you spam a skill every second? Both of the smiting skills must have an enemy next to you to work.

How can you avoid an aftershock is you are on the ground? You are saying to run before he casts earthquake or knockdowns, its hard to guess when he will be casting or using a kd skill.

Zealots hits aoe around the target you cast at, not just yourself.


Its not that hard to see an ele run right up next to you. Actually, its not that hard to get enough space from a hammer warrior to make the after shock they have unusable.

if obsidian flame's exhaustion was removed the next fotm would definetley be obsidian flame spiking ftw