The Problem with Cantrips Elementalists (Analysis) – Non Elementalist Opinion

The cantrip elementalist build is very potent, not for its ability to fight but for its ability to nonchalantly kite you while dealing mediocre damage, while sustaining itself. A common misconception is that an elementalist can tank your damage, however this isn’t entirely true, an elementalist avoids damage through dodging, vigor, regen uptime and negating the rest through protection and condition removal.

The most prominenet two weapon sets for the class are Scepter/Dagger and Dagger/Dagger

Listing through the skills, I’ll give an idea of its potency in such a spec.

Spec here – http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJArYhMmkbzR4gjDAkHnYCLjChUeMTO2A;ToAgzCvoqxUjoGbNuak1M+Y2A

Heals can be switched (Signet of Renewal for Ether Renewal)

Note: When I say weak to retal, I mean the damage output is often negated by the retaliation damage you do to yourself casting this ability. This is pure based on the damage in the above spec.

THIS WILL BE MAINLY ABOUT SCEPTER/DAGGER, I’LL JUST LIST DAGGER ABILITIES TO SHOW YOU THEY AREN’T VERY DIFFERENT IN THE SAME SPEC. D/D SEEMS LESS CONDI REMOVAL MORE AURA SHARE.

So the main weapon set skills for Scepter are –

Air

Arc Lightning

Weak to retal, however makes proccing vigor from critical hits easy.

Lightning Strike

Great for proccing vigor from crit, also great for signet heal since this isn’t on the GCD. Short CD, spammable while using air #1.

Blinding Flash

Similar to above, just a ST blind and great for proccing the signet heal proc

Earth

Stone Shards

Good for proccing the vigor on crit, weak to retal

Rock Barrier/Hurl

Great ability for elementalists, increased armor into an attack that procs the signet heal multiple times.

Dust Devil

Just an addon ability I suppose, unreliable aoe blind.

Fire

Flamestrike

Pretty slow autoattack that doesn’t do much direct damage, however causes burning the highest base damaging condition in the game.

Dragons Tooth

If it lands, great. Does damage, has blast finisher. Applies burning if hits.

Phoenix

Generally high damage in such a low damage spec, not too hard to land plus removes a condition and gives vigor. Strong ability (Generally the most reliable damage from fire in a damage orientated build).

Water

Ice Shards

Nice ability for trying to proc vigor, weak to retal.

Shatterstone

Not a great ability, too long cast time, nobody ever really uses it.

Water Trident

Strong small aoe heal on a 20 second cooldown, usable every 2 attunement swaps essentially after using it. Half second cast time, not too much counterplay. ~Heals for 2.6k

Conclusion

Ok so generally after looking over the scepter abilities, they’re not entirely too strong(maybe other than water 3), some off gcd and just spammable #1s. Some conditions but nothing overall too strong just on the weapon skills.

Now a look at dagger main hand abilities.

Air

Lightning Whip

Spammable #1 ability, generally weak to retal. Good for vigor on crit.

Lightning touch

Weakness to further reduce damage/endurance potential of opponent, only 5s so nothing major.

Shocking Aura

Great ability since d/d is melee range, prevents people from attacking you without stability.

Earth

Impale

Spammable #1 ability, stacks bleed in 300 range.

Ring of Earth

Small aoe ability on short cd, does mediocre damage.

Magnetic Grasp/Leap

Offers control with immobilize, leap part can be a little buggy.

Fire

Dragon’s Claw

Weak to retal pretty okay damage. Good for vigor on crit.

Dragon’s Breath

Very strong ability, upto 12 seconds of burning(highest base damage condition in game)

Burning Speed

Fairly strong damage, nothing too major. Adds burning too.

Water

Vapor Blade

Little aoe, small damage stacks vulnerability.

Cone of Cold

The dagger’s version of water trident, more damage with less healing. More susceptible to interrupts/longer cast time might have to break the channel.

Frozen Burst

Good small area control ability, aoe chill.

Conclusion

Dagger has a lot less range than scepter, providing a little less kitability however makes up for this in more control. Dagger is generally more dangerous to use and has less sustain due to the water abilities having different heal values.

Dagger Offhand

Air

Ride The Lightning

Great mobility tool for elementalist was nerfed to 20 seconds cooldown which is fine, can be interrupted in this state by ranged non projectile cc and immobilizes.

Updraft

Huge cooldown for great cc, maybe a removal of the swiftness since the ability is really strong due to being able to cc downed players.

Earth

Earthquake

Great CC utility that offers aoe knockdown on a very long cooldown.

Churning Earth

Risk/Reward damage, can be comboed with lightning flash. Balanced ability.

Fire

Ring of Fire

Fire field which combos very well with scepter mainhand due to the 2 blast finishers. Could potentially see this being moved to a 20-25 second cooldown due to its potential to apply burning and combo abilities. This is what makes sustain elementalists so strong, their ability to stack might and gain such a strong offensive power while maintaining high healing power and defense.

Fire Grab

Strong ability when it hits, needs to be more reliable.

Water

Frost Aura

This ability recently got a change where you can no longer stack chill however you receive 10% less damage. With protection this is 43% less damage while you have frost aura up. This, in my opinion, needs changing to 5% if not removing the damage reduction component entirely.

Cleansing Wave

Very strong heal, heals in an aoe for around 2.5-2.6k

Conclusion

Overall, dagger offhand is pretty strong but it’s mainly for utility, could use some tweaks but most abilities are fine.

Now let’s look at the traits, I’ll move onto utilities after this, since the utilities benefit a lot from the traits.

Arcana Traits

Minor Traits

Arcane Fury

Gives fury, enhanced duration from the boon duration of arcana.

Lingering Elements

Synergizes with Soothing Water (, keep these for longer than the usual time. Will go more into detail with this when I look at soothing mist trait. – Stone Flesh however requires a bug fix to allow the toughness gained from the trait carry with the lingering mist.

Arcane Precision

Kinda ‘meh’, but it isn’t the main focus of the traitline, just an added benefit I suppose. Small proc to chance burning/weakness/vuln/bleeding.

Major Traits

Elemental Attunement

Amazingly strong trait, especially with water/earth/air. Gives you 6 seconds of protection/swiftness/regeneration (20s might). With a 9 second cooldown on your attunement recharges you have a potential of 66% uptime of these strong boons just from attunement swapping.

Renewing Stamina

You need to achieve 14-15 autoattacks every 5 seconds to keep this trait up with a 7% crit rate(further increased by the 20% you gain from Arcane Fury). Although this isn’t the most reliable measure, I find it interesting to show mathematically(although not too accurately, my math is terrible!) the vigor uptime on eles.

This looks generally balanced on a class with low critical chance, however if you consider Arc Lightning does 10 attacks over 3.5 seconds, Air 2 is off the GCD and the rest of the autoattacks (other than fire), fire multiple projectiles.

With Air, you can achieve 22 attacks over 7 seconds, with a 7% crit chance. You can easily achieve a critical hit to proc the vigor during these 7 seconds.

With Earth, using autoattacks you can achieve around 15 attacks In 7.5 seconds.

With Water, using autoattacks you can achieve around 21 attacks in 5.25 seconds.

With Fire, you can only achieve 4 autoattacks per 5 seconds.

This is not to say you can keep it up permanently, it’s to show that the elementalist doesn’t have a hard time, especially with Arcane fury, of being able to keep the vigor from renewing stamina up fairly consistently if they want.

Evasive Arcana

This trait is amazingly strong, it procs a mini spell from your arsenal whenever you dodge, water being the strongest offering a heal. You can start a dodge from a different attunement and switch to water mid-dodge for an extra burst in healing. The fact that this trait synergizes so well with signet of renewal, you proc an extra heal on spell generation of evasive arcana whenever you dodge, two for earth. Meaning I can potentially heal myself for ~1000 just by dodging in earth attunement because the signet procs 3 times, 660 in other attunements. I’ll go over this more later. The trait is very powerful however and is generally picked up for the cleansing wave on dodge. ICD of the trait is 10 seconds, however is not attunement bound. Water Attunement dodge is also an aoe heal.

Conclusion

Overall the arcana tree is very strong because of these traits. Not to mention the elemental recharge rate which is 60%, lowering the cooldown of your attunement swaps by 6 seconds, meaning you can take advantage of evasive arcana more, arcane fury and elemental attunement. The boon duration just tops it off especially with the traits that offer boons, this tree is generally mandatory for those few reasons.

Water

Minor Traits

Soothing Mist

Very strong, stacks with regeneration boon and heals for 144. Lingers into other attunements too for a minimum of 6-7 seconds. With Lingering attunements minor trait this can reapply itself to 9 seconds when in another attunement offering a potential 14-16 seconds of lingering mist while not even in water attunement.

Healing Ripple

Another strong minor trait which will heal you for 1.9k just for switching to the water attunement. This is only a minor trait which heals for such a drastic amount. A 1.9k heal potentially every 9 seconds.

Bountiful Power

Strong minor damage increase due to the uptime nature on a lot of boons elementalists have, adds a little damage to a spec that doesn’t generally focus on it, with all attunement swaps and vigor, 5 boons, this can be a 10% damage increase just from switching attunements and autoattacking.

Major Traits

Soothing Disruption

Very strong trait which synergizes very well with the XI trait and Cantrips, giving you 7 seconds of regeneration and vigor. Since you’re running 4 cantrips (with the earth trait) this is a potential of 28 seconds of regeneration and vigor.

Cleansing Wave

Not as strong as other traits, but also synergizes very well since with the elemental attunement trait and cleansing water trait you’ll be removing 2 conditions aoe whenever you switch to the water attunement (one for this trait, one for the regeneration).

Cleansing Wave

This trait ties in very nicely with the synergy, it removes a condition every time you use a cantrip and every time you switch to water. Not to mention this trait will also remove conditions from allies whenever you grant them regeneration, allowing for runes of the dwayna to be very successful while also using the ether renewal heal.

Conclusion

The water attunement is a sustain orientated traitline, also benefiting allies from most traits. With the vitality and healing stats this traitline offers, it gives the elementalist a lot of survivability combined with sustainability. This traitline offers the elementalist a passive 139 heal tick/second from soothing mist, huge amounts of condition removal, regeneration from cantrips, vigor from cantrips and a 1.9k heal to top it all off. This trait line offers a lot.

Earth

Minor

Stone Flesh

Nice minor trait buffing the elementalist’s survivability a little, 80 toughness for a 5 point trait isn’t too bad, it’s not the greatest either, it’s generally a balanced minor trait.

Major

Earth’s Embrace

This trait is the icing on the cake for elementalists due to its synergy with other trait lines. You have a proc at 50% health which offers you 4 boons for 7 seconds(thanks to the boon duration from arcana). Vigor, Regen, Protection and Stability for 10 points. This also removes a condition. So you hit 50% health and you lose a condition, and gain 4 amazing boons that boost your survivability by a huge amount.

Conclusion

10 Points in earth offers too much.

Healing Skill, Utilities and Elite skill.

Signet of Renewal

Heal for 330 whenever you cast a spell, bugged with evasive arcana, works on dodges and attunement swaps. If you could only trigger 20 abilities during 20 seconds that’d equate to 6600 healing, which is fairly balanced. Due to elementalist nature of triggering a huge amount of abilities this just offers too much. I’ll highlight this now:

Basic rotation of spells for a scepter dagger elementalist –

Earth #2 – 1

Earth #2 Hurl – 3

Air Attunement – 1

Air #4 – 1

Air #2/3 – 2

Air #5 – 1

Fire Attunement – 1

Fire #2/3/4 – 3

Fire #5 – 1

Water Attunement – 1

I can do all of this in around ~7 seconds for 14 procs of the signet of restoration. This is an ideal situation however this is enough for 4620 healing, this also doesn’t include dodges. Optimally this is 660 healing per second. Although it doesn’t work out like this all the time, it’s still a very strong healing component the elementalist has.

Ether Renewal

Ether Renewal heals for 817/tick and is generally unaffected by poison due to its condition removal. This is a very strong heal against classes that use condition damage, you can ideally get off 3 safely with 2 armor of earths and a mist form without being interrupted and because of its short cooldown you’re never short of condition removal. Strong heal and needs to be toned down slightly although it is easily interruptable. This does offer 8 single condition removal though, very strong.

Mist Form

Invulnerability for 3 seconds which I feel the elementalist needs if focussed hard (especially in other elementalist specs). Grants regen and vigor with trait and removes a condition which is very strong. Could use a change on being able to use main healing skill during mist form. Also a stun breaker.

Lightning Flash

A repositioning tool and kitability tool, this means you can get out of situations you don’t want to be in while also granting you a stun breaker, regen, vigor and removes a condition. The ability by itself isn’t too strong, however when traited becomes a very strong tool just because of the added effects, plus it’s only on a 40 second cooldown. If this ability wasn’t a cantrip it’d be perfectly fine however the added benefits just mean it’s stupidly strong for repositioning yourself and kiting enemies.

Armor of Earth

One of the strongest utilities the elementalist has due to the fact you can have 2 (one traited). Meaning you can have 14 seconds of stability every 90 seconds optimally aswell as 14 seconds of protection, regen and vigor. This ability is also a stun breaker and condition removal once again going back to the traits which synergize too well. Grants too much for one utility skill.

Elite

Glyph of Elementals

While this isn’t a great elite, it’s a very strong 1v1 tool sheerly because of the damage output that the fire elemental offers, if you need more survivability the ice elemental offers a heal, a knockback and a chill field. The air elemental offers an rng stun and the earth elemental is just useless in pvp. Being able to 1v1 anybody through the use of this ability is a strong tool. This is partly because of the dodge the fire elemental can use while dealing damage which is frustrating. Although these elementals are squishy they do offer the elementalist some great tools for small scale fights. Plus you can buff these elementals with your passive boons, combo fields and heals. The elite is generally fairly balanced due to the squishy nature of the elementals however they do offer good utility to the elementalist especially small scale.

Conclusion

The biggest problem other classes have with the elementalist is it’s just too sustainable, it combines condition removal with amazing sustain. Combine this with the damage avoidance of the vigor on cantrips and you’ve got yourself a ridiculously strong sustainable class that can avoid a lot of damage and tank a little burst through the use of stun breakers and protection.

Weapon Sigil

Sigil of Energy

The sigil is in all honesty too strong, you’ve got a free damage avoidance tool every 9 seconds and because you’re an elementalist you’re going to be switching attunements often and a lot. This also synergizes very well with the evasive arcana trait and signet of restoration.

Elementalist Overall

The Healing

So, elementalist has many small components that all add up to make a monster of sustain. The biggest problem however is you cannot simply ignore an elementalist due to the fact it’s such a great support class, the healing it receives it also benefits allies with, aswell as the boons and the condition removal. If we look at the healing an elementalist has outside of its main healing skill we’ll see that it’s simply too much.

This is just an elementalist achieving the maximum burst of healing:

Water Switch – 1.9k – 1 Signet Proc – AOE

Dodge During Switch – 1.9k – 2 Signet Procs – AOE

Water Trident – 2.6k – 1 Signet Proc – AOE

Cleansing Wave – 2.5k – 1 Signet Proc – AOE

Signet Procs – 1.6k

The time it takes to do this is around 3 seconds, if we factor in soothing mist and regeneration onto the that healing –

Soothing Mist – 432 – AOE

Regeneration Boon – 871 – AOE

Adding all of these together we find the elementalist healing itself for around 12000. This adds up to around the elementalist’s full health bar, in 3 seconds. Area of effect wise this can heal for near enough 10-11k to nearby allies. More than their own healing skills, while hard to pull off for your allies this amount of healing to yourself is ridiculous. If the elementalist could be affected by poison (meaning it had no great condition removal during this) then the healing would come to around 7900, a little more balanced especially due to the fact this kind of healing isn’t available all the time, plus you’re giving up your main healing skill for more consistent sustain. Plus looking at the condition removal during this, you have 4 condition removals during this whole combination of abilities.

However even if we just look at the healing it can achieve with no cooldowns every 9-10 seconds potentially, you’ll see this healing is sheerly too much.

Water Switch – 1.9k – 1 Signet Proc – AOE

Dodge During Switch – 1.9k – 2 Signet Procs – AOE

Signet Procs – 1k

This healing alone allows for 3800 area of effect healing, plus another 1000 for yourself. On such a small health bar with near permanent protection uptime this means you can sustain 33% of your health every 10 seconds potentially (not factoring in the burst healing from the #3 and #5 skills).

The Boon, Uptime & Mitigating Damage

So with the elementalist you can near enough keep boons up 66% of the time just from the elemental attunement trait, adding in the cantrips, with the vigor on critical strike chance trait you’ve pretty much got permanent vigor and regeneration. This means you’re regenerating 290 health per second with the regeneration and 10 endurance per second with the vigor.

Let’s calculate the amount of dodges you can achieve with vigor and a sigil of energy over 20 seconds –

Combat Starts – 2 Dodges

200 Endurance from Vigor – 4 Dodges

2 Sigil of Energy Procs – 2 Dodges

Now, you’ve got 8 dodges to use over the period of 20 seconds, you can’t chain these but you have the potential to dodge this many times. If we can potentially dodge that many times, that’s theoretically 8 seconds we’re mitigating damage. You’ve also got to factor in you can proc sigil of energy more than other classes generally (maybe with the exception of guardian who swaps for energy sigil whenever they can and engineer who has kits) sheerly because of the fact you want to be in all of your attunements, other classes have different weaponsets which they don’t swap because they need a certain weapon swap for a certain situation, elementalist attunements generally fill most situations and you can freely swap between them more often due to the fact you have 4 of them.

So you’re pretty much getting the maximum benefit from the sigil of energy, more so than most other classes in the game.

Back to the point of if you’re dodging 8 times every 20 seconds, that means you’ve got 12 seconds in which you need to kite somebody and sustain. With the immense sustain an elementalist has this is a fairly easy task to do.

Now we factor in protection uptime, you’ve already got the potential to dodge 40% of the time, if you can have protection for other situations in where you may need to take damage (66% uptime potentially) plus you’ve got the invulnerability from mist form, repositioning tool from lightning flash, extra on demand protection from armor of earth and a safety net with the 10 point trait in earth’s embrace. You can generally fight when you want to and disengage when you want to. Sure if you’re in a 3v1, 4v1 against high burst potential classes you’re gonna go down like a sack of potatoes, as does any class. But you can still kite these people, reposition yourself from your mistakes and sustain/mitigate damage when you need to. You can delay people and force 2 or 3 people to actually fight you to kill you. Because you have all of this sustain.

Theoretically you can fight a 2/3/4v1, run in, do a little damage, then ride the lightning/lightning flash out, resustain when you get low and continue to taunt these people on their points because if they leave you’re eventually going to kill somebody 1v1 on their node because of your elite, sustainable damage especially with might stacking and superior sustain. If people come back to kill you, you just run away because you have the tools to do so. The utilities just offer safety nets for when you make mistakes from the already forgiving spec.

How do we fix eles/Conclusion

When fixing the elementalist we need to be careful due to the fact you don’t want to nerf other specs the elementalist has available, making the elementalist unviable overall. Things I’d like to see are:

Higher Base Healing, Drastically reduced healing coefficients . – This makes it less inviting for somebody to use such a healing power orientated spec, but it means other elementalists won’t be nerfed or buffed. You keep their sustain as it already is and remove the powerful sustain that cantrips eles have.

Change around traits, rework some – Water – This goes specifically to the cantrip traits, perhaps add an internal cooldown for XI water trait. Make cantrips only give regen or vigor. Definitely a change to the earth’s embrace trait, it needs moving higher up into the traitlines. You could potentially make healing ripple a major trait and replace the minor trait. Make Soothing mist not affect you if you’re not in water.

Arcana – Change elemental recharge rate to 30% and reduce the base cooldown, lower the boon uptime of elemental attunement to 3 seconds base?

Other Specs Need Buffing – Other specs are awful without arcana, new utilities and traitlines need to be viable for the elementalist. Conjure weapons, glyphs and signets need a serious look at.

Look at staff and focus, the reason dagger offhand is taken is because of superior mobility and more reliable crowd control (in my opinion). Staff is just too slow and doesn’t offer as much defensive utility in my honest opinion.

Limit condition removal – Add internal cooldowns to some of these and maybe change how they work a little.

Don’t remove the aoe effect on healing – This is the best support in the game with guardian we have. We want to tone it down so it isn’t a 1v1 monster, I still want this class to be perfectly viable as support, as it’s a very niche role in this game at the moment. Maybe a trait to make your heals effect areas could be an idea, I’m not entirely sure.

Second spell to RTL to explode it, so you don’t screw yourself over in immobilize/into a wall.

Thanks for taking the time to read this anyhow,

Symbolic of Team Paradigm