Top 5 weapon skills that need help. PLEASE devs do something.

[Razor.6392]

No, Shatterstone is not on the list (actually hits like a truck now) so you can focus on some new ones now!

 

First, here's a list of skills that are so bad, ele players actually don't even bother using them since they either don't work at all, or work very poorly.

 

1. Glacial Drift **(Weaver Scepter Dual Air/Water)**. Impossible to hit a moving target (This isn't hyperbole). I'm fairly sure it's the slowest "projectile" in the game too.

2. Magnetic Grasp **(Core Dagger Earth #3)** This ability has no tracking, and the second part (Magnetic Leap) is slow and very clunky, sometimes not even working.

3. Eruption **(Core Staff Earth #2)** Is it 3 or 4 seconds until it detonates? It's barely even useful as a blast finisher due to how slow is the buildup. Never lands on people, low dmg.

4. Flamewall. **(Core Focus Fire #4)** This ability only has value as a combo field. That's it. Serves absolutely no other purpose. No utility, damage or defensive worth.

5. **Scepter autoattacks**. Only useful one is Air, and that's because it leads to easy Fresh Air resets. All the other ones either never hit, are too slow or do no damage, or all 3.

 

 

 

List of skills that need tweaks:

 

1. Freezing Gust **(Core Focus Water #4)**. A single target, 3 seconds chill on a 25 seconds cooldown. That is all.

2. Phoenix **(Core Scepter Fire #3)**. A very hard ability to get max value out of, with an archaic cooldown amount of 20 seconds (actually 2s higher than Plasma Beam).

3. Steam Surge **(Weaver Dagger Dual Fire/Water)**. Too long cooldown, water field duration is extremely limited.

4. Churning Earth **(Core Dagger Earth #5)**. Long channel where you are a sitting duck. If it at least gave 2s of prot or a small barrier...

5. Dragon's Tooth **(Core Scepter Fire #2)**. Extremely hard to land ability, with a gigantic interruption window and cast time. All for a small aoe burst cast that does *really* low damage for how hard it is to setup. There are countless abilities that do both higher and more reliable damage spread throughout every class in this game. Even Shatterstone does comparable damage, while being way easier and faster to land. Either bump the damage 2x, or let it land faster / shorten the cast time.

 

 

**Would ele really be broken if you fixed some of these? What's stopping you after literal YEARS?**

 

Please...

[Ganathar.4956]

Pretty good list, but you forgot to list every single aura skill. They have been outdated since HoT, when the devs realized that an aura is not enough for a proper skill and added sand squal to warhorn. Since then, auras have become even less useful. All the aura skills need to be looked at and turned into real skills, even if that means that a minor cast time has to be added to them.

[Razor.6392]

> @"Ganathar.4956" said:

> Pretty good list, but you forgot to list every single aura skill. They have been outdated since HoT, when the devs realized that an aura is not enough for a proper skill and added sand squal to warhorn. Since then, auras have become even less useful. All the aura skills need to be looked at and turned into real skills, even if that means that a minor cast time has to be added to them.

 

Funny you mention this. That was my #5 in the 2nd list before the edit, but in the end I decided to leave that for another post since it's a change of a much greater scope.

 

The skills above would actually be fixed with simple numerical fixes. From faster cast time to faster projectile travel times, or lower cooldowns / faster animations.

[Yannir.4132]

> @"Ganathar.4956" said:

> Pretty good list, but you forgot to list every single aura skill. They have been outdated since HoT, when the devs realized that an aura is not enough for a proper skill and added sand squal to warhorn. Since then, auras have become even less useful. All the aura skills need to be looked at and turned into real skills, even if that means that a minor cast time has to be added to them.

 

Agreed. Tempest made that pretty clear. Even their shouts are sometimes on the edge of underpowered.

[ThiBash.5634]

> @"Razor.6392" said:

> 3. Eruption **(Core Staff Earth #2)** Is it 3 or 4 seconds until it detonates? It's barely even useful as a blast finisher due to how slow is the buildup. Never lands on people, low dmg.

 

Respectfully disagree here. The delay is what makes it useful, because it allows for combos with your own fields. Because it has a longer delay than Ice Spike, you can even get 2 finishers from a single field (lava font->eruption->ice spike, or eruption->ice spike->lava font). Its damage is quite good (proven by the fact that its part of the [snowcrows dps rotation](https://snowcrows.com/raids/elementalist/weaver/staff/ "Snowcrows dps rotation")) so it has at least place in PvE.

 

However, I agree with you that it is hard to land its damage, so I propose the following change. Instead of having Eruption deal all its damage at the end of the cast, when the blast hits, it could deal some of its damage earlier. So instead of dealing 0%,0%,100% over 3 seconds, it could deal damage like 20%,20%,60%. The bleed stacks could be redistributed in a similar way. If the blast finisher is kept at the end of the cast as it is now, Eruption can be still used for comboing while making it easier to deal at least some damage with it on moving targets.

 

Ideally, I'd also make it cause 1s cripple on every pulse, but that may be too big a change all at once.

 

[Stand The Wall.6987]

pretty much all of eles aa's are bad, for every weapon. they either do no damage cuz of the supposed utility/support the weapon/offhand offers, are too slow, or building for damage would leave you at too much of a disadvantage.

[supreme.3602]

The things listed below are more than five, but need working on nonetheless.

 

Staff:

 

**Fire/Air 3** - Allow this skill to track the targeted person. At the moment, it's easy to avoid. The damage is nice, but usability is kinda poor.

**Fire/Water 3** - Make it faster.

**Fire/Earth 3** - You could also make this one faster, but increase the radius as well. The description of this skill says it will "devastate" an area. I don't think it can do that with its limited area of effect.

 

**Water/Earth 3** - Can't say much for this one. It's not within my rotation while zerging in WvW. I have no use for it.

**Water/Air 3** - ^^ same as the one above, but even worse.

 

**Air/Earth 3** - Let us move with it while casting the skill. I said it before in the other thread and I'll mention it again here. Gun Flame is a much better version of Pile Driver, yet we are stuck in the same spot when casting it, whereas a bloody rifle warrior can dart around in a fight and use it without a care in the world.

 

**Earth 2** - Eruption is too slow. We all know it. Even the developers must know it. The damage is nice. The bleeds are also nice, but the stupid skills takes a long time to "erupt". Decrease the time it takes to become active, because when we drop it during a fight, the enemies will laugh and run through it thinking it won't touch them. And they are right to think that.

 

**Fire 3** - Adding another 2 stacks of burning wouldn't hurt. It might give condi builds a small boost, but nothing that would make us go wow.

 

***

 

Focus:

 

**Water 4** - I think the skill is kinda boring and needs something else added to it.

**Fire 4**- ^^ same as the above.

[Rhyse.8179]

Disagree of Staff/Earth/2. The delay is it's entire point. You can easily combo that blast with any field you have. It's damage is weak anyway, but if you really want to land it, you can combo it with earth 5 or put it on your feet and stand on it. Honestly, staff in PVP is a royal pain to hit any target with any skill, so it's just part of the theme, and in PVE hitting is not an issue and the delay is extremely valuable there.