User:AngelicLoki

There has been a lot of meme'ing and outcry over the last balance patch because, well, it didn't balance much. Overall, classes that benefit from torment saw a buff, mirage received a buff, and other than that not much changes. This page is meant to act as a non-specific (I.e., I'm not going to try to get the numbers exactly correct) view into what a balance update should look like in order to actually make the game feel fresh for folks.

Overall, there are a couple of key principles I'll be adhering too while building out this list -

1. Each weapon should have an identity. There are a significant number of weapons that are underutilized right now because they have poor identity. Each weapon should have a defined identity, and skills should be balanced accordingly. This means that a weapon with a power identity should have less in the way of control skills than a weapon with a control identity.
2. Damage and Defense should rarely be combined into the same skill without a sacrifice. Power creep largely comes with "Skill Condensing", which was seen in GW1 as well. A skill that could fulfill multiple roles is a very powerful skill when the number of skills you have are limited. This is a large reason why Firebrand, Scourge, and Mirage are so powerful - they contribute significant defense capability with limited sacrifice in terms of damage.

Each change will be accompanied by a set of notes explaining the rationale behind the changes, and the goal is to change the actual skills as little as possible, but some change will be necessary in order to achieve principle #1 from above.

Let's start with the large 3:

Elementalist

Elementalist is meant to be a highly evasive class. With low armor and low health, they are meant to be a high skill ceiling class that focuses on evading most damage through skills and dodges. This means they are a high risk, high reward class. This means that ele has to be balanced very carefully around group based play where either support classes make the "glass" in glass cannon irrelevant when facing few enemies, and impossible to keep alive when facing many enemies. Ele also suffers the most from the weapon identity issues, since each weapon is trying to fulfill multiple roles; each weapon sort of has an identity per attunement, but does so rather poorly.

First, let's set some core principles and note a "problem statement" for ele and their elite specs first:

1. Elementalist defense should come from active mitigation such as dodging and skill use. *Core* elementalist should therefore provide tools around this, and around improving attunements in general as their core mechanic. The Arcane line is significantly underutilized for this, which causes it to see almost no play in modes other than in conquest, where it's used solely for the ability on dodge.
2. Tempest is clearly the support spec for the elementalist, but it suffers from not really bringing anything unique to the party. It isn't sub-par is healing, but healers are often chosen for what they can bring to compress the team as opposed to how much they heal, and Tempest suffers from this as they bring nothing to the party as a whole.
3. Weaver is a high damage spec focused on being in the thick of battle. Oddly, a significant portion of Weaver's traits revolve around Swiftness, which has little synergy with other areas of the elementalist's kit. Similarly, the defensive kit if heavily focused on barrier, which is a sub-par defensive mechanism given how much life an elementalist loses when they're hit.

Second, let's look at weapons:

1. Staff is clearly an area denial weapon. Note that it's not an area _damage_ weapon, but an area _denial_ weapon. It's meant to force opponents to move out of an area or get punished. Damage is one way to punish an enemy, but not the only way. Some of the skills don't punish this very well (think   Ice Spike), which is why they're only used as filler. Some skills just don't match this theme at all (such as   Lightning Surge) and thus are almost never used.
2. Scepter is a ranged condition damage and utility weapon. It sees essentially no use, as it has a major identity crisis. Fire is condi damage, earth is condi defense, water is a joke (literally, see   Shatterstone memes), and air is power damage. The weapon saw some use before sword and dagger became higher damage. Scepter will likely need to be the subject of a significant re-balance.
3. Dagger is a melee point-blank AoE evasion weapon, providing good damage with some defense in each kit. Fire and earth both provide reasonable AoE with dodges, water a self-heal and PbAOE chill, and air a melee stun with PbAOE detonation. Dagger is in a pretty good place.
4. Warhorn (Tempest) - Warhorn is a support weapon which is in a reasonable position. While the fire and air attunements both have 1 skill each which doesn't provide any support capabilities, it's close enough that with minor changes it'll be a great support weapon.
5. Sword (Weaver) - The weapon of choice for most builds right now, due to the fact that it clearly understands it's a melee focused damage weapon. Even water provides a dis-engage which assumes that the caster is in melee range. This weapon needs very little love to continue being a good weapon.

This means that primary focus areas for balancing ele should be:

1. Improve Arcana and how it interacts with elementalists main mechanic
2. Improve Tempest's team support capabilities to ensure it provides compression to the team.
3. Improve Weaver's capability as a glass damage dealer to make it worth the glass.

Let's get started: