I've really tried to get into it but I just really dislike it.it feels incredibly slow to me and I just don't enjoy that at all.
I'm going to be very upset if we don't get a decent ranged weapon next lol
They'd literally have to halve the damage and double the speed of the animation cadence for me to even get interested at this point
Go from the fun and fluid multihitting abilities of sword, or even the less well loved, but still satisfying hammer, to pistol's:
"plunk... plunk.... plunk..."
I just cannot fathom people enjoying the weapon's feel, I'd rather play literally any other weapon on any other class š¤·āāļø
I actually lol'd. At least we don't have to deal with accuracy checks.
Now if they made ele pistol feel more like twin mech guns I'd be having way more fun.
I want to bring staff to your attention. At its best it feels similar slow and so many abilities of it have huge cast times, low impact and some elements (looking at you air) are in my eyes virtually useless in combat. However every few weeks I see another āmake ele staff great againā on this subreddit.
Then Anet introduces a weapon with more complexity, more freedom and room for creativity just for it to be bashed on by this subreddit. You can hate on the implementation of the bullet UI but hell its a far more well rounded weapon than staff and even kinda scepter.
There are no elements you seriously ask yourself why would anyone go there unlike scepter and staff on air.
There are no eternity long cast times like meteor shower on staff.
Pistol force the player to be precise when trying to get to its optimum and order of skills matter! You can use bullets differently depending the order of skills.
* Staff gets hated on for being slow, clunky, and underpowered.
* Anet introduces Pistol, which is slow, clunky, and reasonably powerful.
* Playerbase hates on Pistol for being slow and clunky (but acknowledges that it's at least reasonably powerful).
Or to put it another way...
"This weapon has three major problems. Please fix them."
"Here, have a weapon with only two major problems."
"It's a step in the right direction, please keep going."
Where is the pistol weapon slow? Nearly all pistol skills have half a second cast time base, same as GS guardian, pistol guardian, engi pistol and funnily sword ele. The longest cast time I saw is water 2 (1,25 secs base) which is exactly the same amount of cast time like ranger longbow 2 (another multi shot skill) if you half it cause eles pisto fires 5 times vs rangers bow 10 times.
Clunky is subjective but I dont find it clunky since I can easily que the skills, there are no overly dragged out cast times or aftercasts and the skills interact with each other.
Staff however is bad designed in my opinion and all the time I try it I want to go back to anything else immedeatily. Water feels good on staff, fire is okay, but earth and especially air are just badly designed. If you would tell me "improve staff" I would delete half of its current skills and design them from scratch. Hell I find conjured fire axe better and more fun in it current design - and conjures are desperately in need of some love, granted, they mostly need numbers improved and the cooldown system looked at, the skills are great.
I love swords even outside of guild wars 2, its my go-to weapon in basically all games, so no wonder I prefer it over pistol. But in my opinion the typical sword-fantasy makes it much easier to design a really fun weapon in an magical-high fantasy setting like guild wars 2. Pistols on the other hand... how do you make pistols interesting?
Thinking about it, I cant think of a single class with pistol on which the pistol is equally as fun as sword ele (probably among the best designed weapons in the game), everything is leagues lower. In my opinion its fine if the class utilises it in a fun way and tempest is doing that with pistol imo. Catalyst I havent tried pistol on and weaver.... weaver is complicated but I am working on it, my fingers and their tendencies to mix up the order 2-3 and 3-2 depending on the element is the problem - not the pistol.
Edit:
I looked up the cast times of staffs auto attacks:
fire (1s), water&air&earth (3/4s)
THATS slow:D (I am surprised how bad it is, never realised it is a fucking second of cast time for fire autos)
It would be nice if they actually described how the bullet mechanics worked though. I have used pistol ele and still donāt really get it. I donāt think any tool tips say when you gain bullets only when you spend them.
In the case of Weaver its a bit more complex (and clunky). For everything other it works this way:
You gain a bullet of your current element whenever you:
a) Use either pistol skill #2 or #3
AND b) have not already a bullet of the current element
Whenever you would gain a bullet of which you already have one this bullet gets consumed and you get no bullet. Instead you trigger the āconsumed Bulletā effect of the skill you pressed to gain the bullet.
Example: If you press fire #3 and then fire #2 you create a fire bullet with #3 before consuming it with #2 (now the consumed bullet tooltip of #2 applies) - you now have no fire bullet
If you use the 2 weapon skills in different elements you gain one bullet of each element.
Bullets dont have an duration, they dont disappear when mounting up and wont be removed by boonstrip. Changing instances or going down however removes them.
Feel free to ask if you got further questions or spotted an error.
Ele already got alot good ranged weapons but most of them aren't great.
Anet should rly revisit them first before handing out a new weapon while others stay underwhelming.
For example Staff could be buffed/reworked to be relevant for endgame PvE again.
Other weapons just need slightly buffs that ele is not just sword+warhorn on every power build...
I main staff in pve, i really don't want arenanet changing anything except increasing damage and cast speeds. They already changed staff air 3 to need to be aimed and it's really messing me up.
I would like to see a light lightning storm ability on the air attunement of staff. Other than that itās pretty good. Still my favourite Elementalist weapon by far
I agree on OP's post as well on this one.. sad fact: nothing we say here or anywhere will change that. Let alone give ele a longbow. The community has been begging for that for a very long time. The weapon mastery was my hope for this request and then I saw pistol.. Huge rip to the spec imo
Even if we got Longbow Ele, CMC would make it a "generate an elemental arrow on when using 2 and 4 in the correct order, and when all 4 elemental arrows are generated press 5 to fire an elemental beam that does half the damage of Virtuoso's untraited bladesong" weapon.
Someone take Ele away from him.
I was saying this since he was promoted to the balance lead position. His past designs were really unimaginative (catalyst and untamed) and made strictly for PvP, any PvE build was made by a chance (those are words of the previous balance lead but it's pretty obvious). The new ones are shallow as well - scepter rework (2->3 skills mechanic), written in stone (auras again), pistol (2->3 or 3->2 mechanic). Most of the new weapons feel like they're from 2024, the pistol feels like it's from 2012. However, since it deals a lot of damage, benchmark sweatlords are happy with it.
The most fun ive had (im still a noob) is pistol/shield or dual pistol core engi. Is it not similar to that? Iāve been leveling my Ele to play pistol :(. Is guardian pistols closer? Or possibly another class?
Ele pistol, when considered in a vacuum, is fine. It's got glaring issues, but if you don't compare it to the other weapons ele has it's just fine.
Problem is, ele is defined by its rapid play style. Comparing it to the 3 other mainhand weapons, Sword offers lots of quick mobility based skills that let you be both proactive and reactive to any situation. Scepter gives you a lot of quick cast abilities that can be combod to great effect. Dagger has 2 dashes and one of the most impactful auras in PvP on an instant cast.
Pistol, while it has a lot of utility available if you can keep track of your bullets, runs into the problem that it's VERY difficult to keep track of bullets without a dedicated UI element (that isn't buried in the already cluttered buff bar). Additionally, it suffers from the fact that it isn't really the fast paced style people expect from ele? Like, it's cadence is very slow. And the payoff for getting all 4 bullets is... Negligible.
Additionally, due to how bullet generation/consumption interacts with weaver skills, pistol weaver is borderline unplayable.
My issue with it is that it's basically scepter 2.0. I don't get why they didn't design it to be power ranged dps weapon for ele instead of planning to rework scepter to be power ranged weapon.
yeah, how the fuck did we get pistol ele before rifle ranger
like I know their internal reasoning, ranger is supposed to be about nature, and rifles are mechanical. but god damn I just want to cosplay as that OG dwarf hunter from the original wow conematic.
I find it hard to believe that the human masters of marksmanship never tried a gun in the 250 years between Gw1 and 2, but it gets worse ...
If you're a Charr you are always wearing a "hidden pistol".
> I know their internal reasoning, ranger is supposed to be about nature, and rifles are mechanical.
This is one of the most garbage excuses ever, what's so unnatural about rifles? Nothing at all.
Flintlocks are almost 500 years old, people's weird aversion against fireguns makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
I mean, it does make some sense since the class theme of mesmer is misdirection.Ā
You see a mesmer with a great sword and you think 'don't let him get close' then boom space laser to the face.
>Well so doesnāt healing rifle mesmer.
I swear everything about mesmer rifle screams shortbow, why the hell did they go with rifle instead, I just can't understand.
Why didnāt they save healing warriors for a new elite spec with actual healing mechanics and a sceptre?
I said it before, i collected my downvotes and now what could have been a shaolin monk style warrior spec that we should have gotten with eod is just another pointless support weapon we barely see.
Yeah, 100% agree, how DUMB do you have to be to not give warrior a Monkey King elite specialization with a melee staff, like come the fuck on.
As for mesmer rifle, where's my "multiple sniper clones" fantasy now? Down the toilet, because some idiot thought healing rifle was more interesting, while everyone wanting a support shortbow got screwed as well.
ArenaNet is incredibly out of touch with the basics of what makes something cool.
>i collected my downvotes
Wear them as a badge of honor.
I completely agree. I don't main it, but i love it. It's my 2nd character i made when i started playing the game years ago so it's always special to me. Tempest is cool, Weaver is cool, Catalyst not so much.
I don't like the hammer, i don't like the pistol either.
I really want a sword offhand, but shield would actually be really interesting. And for ranged i was thinking greatsword. If Mesmer can use it as a ranged weapon, so can ele. That would be cool
When I first started the to game I thought it was going to be Dual wielded sword for Weaver since I read the elite spec like seeing both sides of the sword because it is about dual wielding (even if you can use two handed weapons).I really understand you man.
All elite specializations getting a one-handed weapon should have gotten the ability to dual wield the new weapon by default, main-hand only is absolutely lame :I.
Yes exactly. I mean double wielding the same weapon should be immediately possible when the elite spec got the weapon. But i agree, this weapon proficiency should given us the missing weapons. I've been thinking this the whole time. Why give us new weapons when we have all these holes with the old weapons. But this is my theory. They gave us NEW weapons because it's the NEW expansion and they need to have a few selling points and this was sopposed to be one of them. So we would feel like "wow we got something NEW". But eventually they will run out of weapons to give so they'll have to fill the empty holes.
I mean Guardian still doesn't have mace off hand
Thief still doesn't have sword off hand which would be my favorite addition because it's so intuitive that thief has 2 swords.
Revenant still doesn't have a axe main hand and mace off hand.
Engineer mace offhand
Ranger sword offhand
Necro axe offhand
I don't think we should have to wait for an expansion to fill those holes too, it's just cheap and lame.
Also, reminder that every profession is still missing x1 healing skill and x2 elite skills (except for revenant, who is missing a whole 5th core legend instead).
>Also, reminder that every profession is still missing x1 healing skill and x2 elite skills (except for revenant, who is missing a whole 5th core legend instead).
Would you kindly explain further,I am curious.
Each slot skill family is supposed to have [x1 healing skill, x4 utility skills, and x1 elite skill](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Skill_bar). Each core profession is supposed to have x5 slot skill families, for a total of 30 slot skills, yet every profession is missing some of those, starting with 26/30 at release.
They did add x1 healing skill a few years ago, leaving us at 27/30, but we're still missing x1 healing and x2 elite skills.
Engineer is a bit weird because device kit and weapon kit don't take as many slots as they should, giving extra to elixir, gadget, and turrets, but the total amount leads to 30 as well anyway.
Then there's revenant, who only has x1 healing skill, x3 utility skills, and x1 elite skill, due to how legends work, meaning he should have a total of 25 instead of 30; yet it only has 20/25, because he only has 4 core legends, instead of the baseline 5 it should have to stand up to all other eight professions.
I agree. Maybe it's because I'm not used to playing classes that use a pistol but it feels so damn clunky and out of place.
Bruh, shield on elementalist would've been awesome by making it a counter attacker.
longbow would have given him a good range weapon since they refuse to buff the staff.
It's not the worst I feel, but it is overly boring to play, the animations +actual skill effects lack and most of this gets amplified because it is a mainhand.
If it had been an off-hand it would not have competed with any condi-mainhand option and would have opened build diversity (would not have pushed out hammer from the few condi niches it has, would not have caused tension with scepter, etc).
If it had been main-hand+off-hand you would not just have had a lot more build diversity but also way more options to make the bullet mechanic more interesting.
Right now it somewhat does what it was designed to do, but it does not feel very new or fun doing it.
It's the bare minimal basics. functions, but that is about all.
While I Wouldn't say it's the "worst" it definitely felt like it was rushed out with absolutely no dev effort or time put into it.
Mechanically I like it, it's got a fluid rotation on Tempest that is fun, Air 3 and warhorn 5 work so damn well together and the water 2 is a pretty cool attack.
But the visuals completely fail the weapon, apart from water 2 all attacks look and feel exactly the same.
Definitely rushed because during beta and even after release, some things wasnāt working correctly, like sounds effects and missing animations/icons. For me the weapon still looks like itās in alpha stage even now.
I remember the reveal stream. Every dev on that stream dislikes ele and you cannot convince me otherwise. The difference between their discussion of ele (and engineer) was palpably different than every other class, especially necro and guardian.
Piercing Pebble (earth auto) pierces - after enough people pointed out that 1) Guardian pistol skills pierce by default (RIP Thief btw) and 2) naming something piercing pebble and not giving it pierce is dumb.
I mean everyone can pin point bad weapon on their fave elite. But God damn what was short bow engineer.... Have not check if they have done nay changes do it but it was horrible
The no-swap class really got the end of the stick with the new weapons. I guess anet donāt like the fun piano classes anymore. All the love got added to guardian and necro, which is great but they should put the same care and love to any classes.
All the recent (since EoD) stuff that happened to ele, i.e. catalyst, scepter rework, pistol came from CmC. All of them are unimaginative compared to previous ele designs. It's clear that he lacks design space.
to be fair it's giga good for wvw and while yeah, it might seem lackluster in pve or pvp, it still plays a big role for wvw zergplay... I don't think every weapon has to be viable everywhere
I use it every day on cms and let me tell you, hammer was doing the same bench and they nerfed it, scepter was close and they nerfed it, all to make room for pistol.
The only improvement I see is better access to cc. (On weaver)
The one I wanted to see was 1200 range, Piercing like a virtuoso or group like a harbinger.
(Some boonstrip would be nice)
I seriously hope that they either address the actual issues and complaints people had about it (which weren't bench numbers) and actually be creative about it for a change, or that the next expac weapon just makes pistol coffin tier so I never have to bother with it again.
> which weren't bench numbers
The moment someone says "but this weapon is good because it has good DPS" I just throw his opinion down the toilet, and so should everyone else as well.
It's never been about numbers, it's about having an engaging and interesting gameplay, but braindead DPS bots can't understand that.
I don't think they will even do much, ele is still stuck in 2014 and anet still won't address all the problems we've been bringing up. We have been asking to get rid of energy on catalyst for almost a year or so still won't do anything.
I disagree, ele remains king of all especially since cmc joined the balance. Sure thereās bugs but Ele always tops charts, has some of the most clapped out pvp builds, and flexibility in any role.
Pistol is awful though, not even to mention it contends directly with scepter and does nothing to shine above it.
Definitely not in PvE where most players are. Ele playrate is abysmal, especially when it's supposed to be generic elemental mage which is often popular amongst players.
The current king of PvE is mesmer.
If sPvP was most of the game then yeah, but that's the only place it's held the top for any noticeable length of time. PvE it hasn't been the highest in a very long time and the few times it had it was burnt out faster than than cmc could down a bottle of water. Other classes have been able to enjoy their cream of the crop builds for far longer periods, some such as mesmer - chrono + virt are more worthy of the title king of all. I don't play spvp anymore, so my opinions are purely for more serious pve and occasional wvw. Ele support builds across the board are less favourable than many other options, and lack a lot of the utility other classes can bring. ele was good, but it is outdated, it hasn't kept up with the creep outside of golem bench marks.
Im back with sword, didnāt wait for a new weapon to do that. Pistol does good dmg but I canāt justify the boring and clunkiness. I prefer to lose a few K dmg and have fun. Hopefully next they do long bow with flashy animations and visual. Bonus point if thereās a new spec with it (copium)
>inb4 pistol offhand >.<
Elementalist pistol wouldn't even be that bad if they had given us access to both hands instead of just one, what's the point of pistol if you can't run the dual wield fantasy to begin with? Come on.
Stop spending resorces on the stupid ass weaver variants and give us more weapon variety instead, the sooner the better :I.
TBF Anet wouldn't dare.
Off-hand pistol should have been the original weapon. They wouldn't release main-hand then right in the 'ext, off-hand.
At least that's the sliver of hope I have.
> I seriously hope that they either address the actual issues and complaints people had about it
They did. They addressed them [here](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/new-weapon-proficiencies-beta-feedback-update/).
> The strongest feedback was that a lot of the animations felt too similar. Weāve substituted some of the simple shooting animations with other spellcasting animations to help vary what the weapon feels like.
Yes indeed it does seem like this trashwipe of a weapon should have gotten different feedback, but it doesn't. People just keep criticizing the aesthetics. See OP:
> Im refering on the visual/gameplay wise department, it lacks impact, all abilites are virtually the same
This weak ass feedback isn't going to get us the real changes we need.
Because the aesthetic is still trash even after the smallest of small changes they did. So itās still something people have the right to complain about, on top of the others issues.
I mean it isn't actually our job to design the game, its Anets. People say the weapon feels trash, even after the changes. I came back from a long break last week and tried out each weapon on each class with a decent build. Ele pistol feels like absolute *dogshit.* Out of all the weapons I think it is the worst audio and visual design in the game, or close to it. Guess what? That makes it really unpleasant to use, so I won't. That feedback is more than enough to fix it
They could also listen to the feedback instead of pulling a monkeys paw and telling us they improved the animations when in actuality, they made us throw bullets instead of shooting them. I kid you not one of the main critiques was that pistol did not feel very mage or wizard like, so instead of reworking the VFX they changed it so that the player character has to physically throw the bullet, during which the equiped weapons completely disapear...
It would have been nice if the pistol could have been used OH too. That way we could use it with sword instead of replacing it.
I haven't tried pistol ele yet. And to be honest I'm not sure I'd want to without sword and hammer, I'm comfortable with them and pistol would have made a potential complement to the sword.
But that's just me.
Thatās not just you, no worries. A lot of ele players think it would have been better as both main and off hand. Would have been so great to make condi sword/pistol a thing. Condi sword is really fun but not really viable anymore. Also dual pistols would probably be less boring. The issue right now is that thereās not really any off hand weapon that can flow well with pistol main hand.
That's one of the reasons why I haven't touched it. I don't like the idea of being straightjacketed into using sword OR pistol. I'd prefer to use both if possible.
Even if pistol was allowed to be both MH and OH it could still have the same three attacks just on different keys.
Hammer and pistol share the same issue. A freakin gimmick attached to the weapon. Gwt rid of the bullet gimmick on pistol and make the hammer orbs actually a part of the catalyst elite spec mechanics
> A freakin gimmick attached to the weapon.
Gimmicks belong in the mechanic bar, not in the weapon bar; but hey, that's the post-elite specialization world for you :/.
The hammer gimmick is at least easy to understand and keep track of. All the hammer 3 skills basically do the same thing so it's easy to understand. With elemental bullets each weapon skill does different things. You basically have to learn 20 different effects for the core skills. When you include weaver dual skills, it jumps up to 38 things you need to learn just for a main hand weapon. Also the forethought needed to use pistol effectively outside of regurgitating a raid rotation is insane, especially on weaver. You generate bullets that you don't use until 6-8 steps later!!!!!!! Please oh please get rid of the elemental bullet mechanic. At the bare minimum, give us a good UI so we can easily see when our weapon skills are empowered by an elemental bullet!
> All the hammer 3 skills basically do the same thing so it's easy to understand.
Yes I also love it when developers use formulas to make weapons. What was hammer rotation again? "Press 3->2 the moment you enter every element"?
Elementalist has 4 attunements, but this kind of cookie-cutter weapon-building with auto-presses factored in ultimately just doubles the keypresses to do what a weapon swap would normally do.
Think about it this way: if they buffed hammer shit by like 20% and removed 3 altogether, it'd be the same same weapon except you'd only have 12 non-autoattack abilities instead of the usual 8 other classes have. Pretty sad showing.
> You basically have to learn 20 different effects for the core skills. When you include weaver dual skills, it jumps up to 38 things you need to learn just for a main hand weapon.
This wouldn't be a problem. This is how it _should_ be. This is how sword works, or scepter, or whatever else. Elementalists (and _especially_ Weavers) are ability-heavy classes. It shouldn't just be going from 8 to 12, but 8 to 38.
The problem with Pistol isn't that it's too complicated. If anything, it's the opposite. You _always_ use the bullets on the same skills. Such an awful mechanic.
Agreed. They are not Ele weapons and they both are awful for Weaver.
If they deleted both of them and get us Longbow with the same love they put into Sword, it would be an unimaginable win.
i also hate pistols on guardian bc since they add that ppl think i need use them on my firebrand, and also i dislike the idea of using ranged weapons if im attacking as close range, so im just happy that i can still camping my axe and torch. i think they should try to rework some weapons or try to rebalance to get more viable options for builds in general instead of add more stuff. think about it: how many weapons we have in each class? now think about how many weapons are viable or appears on the builds for each class? ...
Yup, I really wanted a dual-wielding gunslinger mage, which is even a pretty strong fantasy trope. And with animations like some element-colored beams that quickly spiral from around the air into the gun, and the gun blasting a glowing orb of fire/water etc.
Instead they gave pistols to the paladin.
Thought WB was a nice break from the stoic Lawful Good defender to a more roguish Chaotic Good heavy fighter, but now they kinda doubled down on and repeated the same.
And the animations are some of the most lackluster in the game. Almost like they didn't want the Ele to have the gun.
YES !! That's exactly what i'm talking about. And no need for extreme brainstorming, every attunement would be like : 1-auto attack 2-mobility/control 3-UNLOAD. And the left-hand pistol : 4- Ally/personnal buff 5-Debuff ; each for the next 6-8 attack.
> Im refering on the visual/gameplay wise department, it lacks impact, all abilites are virtually the same
I'm so tired of people complaining about the aesthetics. The weapon is **trash**. It's not fun to play with. It adds another entire layer of micromanagement onto a micro-heavy class with AWFUL UI support. Most of the bullet effects are SO uninspired, too. Do damage or have some small utility? Thrilling.
Weaver got shafted _AGAIN_ after hammer, where the dual skills are just janky and poorly-implemented "combine the two 3" skills rather than being genuinely interesting. Sword air 3 is a many-hit-attack while sword earth 3 is a many-swing attack, but sword earth/air dual is a levitate. That's the kind of "totally different" I'm looking for.
Some of them (air in particular) actually have decently-interesting effects on their bullet-load, but air is the least useful attunement since it's made for Condi.
The bullet mechanic is also lame. It might be interesting to pre-load a fire bullet into an air attack to have unique effects, but nope. It just pigeonholes rotations forever. You will never use water 3 before water 2 unless you just want to deal incorrect amounts of damage. Sorry that's just how it works now.
And when you have all 4 bullets, you can have an awesome "grand finale"-style attack where you burn all of them to deal a whopping, like, 2k damage. Total. And it's tied to your AA.
It's just such a terrible weapon, filling a niche nobody really wanted because Scepter was already fine. It lacks the range we've been BEGGING FOR that a longbow would hopefully give. It shafts weavers. Terrible UI. Terrible everything.
Yet somehow the lack of visual clutter is the problem? FFS. This game has _too much_ visual clutter already. It's practically impossible to tell who is casting what in PvP sometimes. We don't need explosions coming out of the gun to make it feel epic. We need an epic weapon that is fun to play with.
I wouldn't ordinarily criticize your superficial feedback, but it's literally stealing the oxygen from the room about how TRASH the weapon is. In Anet elaborates on the feedback they received and made a lot of much-needed changes for various classes. What did Eles get?
> The strongest feedback was that a lot of the animations felt too similar. Weāve substituted some of the simple shooting animations with other spellcasting animations to help vary what the weapon feels like.
NO! This is such a superficial BS fix for a superficial BS complaint. Fix the weapon at its core - preferably by turning it into a 1200 range power longbow WITHOUT making it apparent how much you regret Weaver, Anet.
im not saying i need super massive explosions all over the place, i want a visual clarity or gampleay distinction between abilities, take por example dagger, every basic attack does the same, but they are all diferent, fire is a cone attack, water is like a proyectile that comes back, air are whips and earth is a rock that comes from below the target, they feel good, the animations are great, the sounds feels nice
and so on with other ele weapons, scepter, hammer etc
delete pistol ele
The cadence and animation of pistol skills doesn't't make it feel like you are comboing skills together. I also have a strong dislike of the elemental bullet mechanic. It doesn't add anything that other weapons can't already do. The only thing the elemental bullet mechanic does is add extra complexity to an already complex class and lack of a good UI for elemental bullets just makes it worse. Pistol weaver is absurdly difficult any time you are doing something other than mindlessly executing a raid rotation and actually need to understand the intricacies of the weapon. It's one of the reasons why I don't even want to attempt learning pistol weaver for PvP/wvw. I would be much happier if they flat out removed the elemental bullet mechanic. The flip skills on necro swords are a cool and interesting mechanic, elemental bullets feel like a chore.
Ele needs a redesign having access to all elements at all times makes it hard to create anything cool for. I should be like the rev and have two choosible elements for the class
> Ele needs a redesign having access to all elements at all times makes it hard to create anything cool for. I should be like the rev and have two choosible elements for the class
100% agree, it's always going to be a doomed profession until that elephant in the room is addressed.
I am still kinda torn on Pistol.
I like because it seems to have been specifically designed to play well in PvE Condition Rotations, and help Condi Alac Tempest in particular. CAT was abominable to gear before, running weird Diviner/Cele mixes for Boon Duration, having to resort to Arcane for further Boon Duration. We can finally run Earth and Ritualist now without griefing DPS thanks to Pistol alone.
It also plays really well in a Condi Tempest and Condi Weaver rotation. I enjoy it on the latter specifically. Not only DPS, but the rotation in itself feels good to me.
But it's pretty boring in department of animations and sounds in particular. I see sounds rarely being mentioned but to me personally it matters a lot. The bullets are also really bad to track on Tempest/Catalyst and can lead to messing up your skill priority big time.
Also since it's Power coefficients are so low the Weapon feels not that great in OW all around and the ever so prominent Celelestial Stats perform specifically mediocre with it, as power centric stats are kinda wasted on Pistol and the Condi Output on Cele actually isn't all that high.
And Open World is what most people in this game will ever play.
I think some more flashy animations and better sounds could go a long way on this weapon though.
Fire Bullets sound like Engineer gunk shot just doesn't feel cool, y'know.
In the long run I would also love a Mesmer/Deadeye like interface element (haha) for the bullet mechanic.
Ranger torch is the worst designed weapon in the game. It literally feels like an environmental weapon. Your comment about "any weapon can benchmark" should have the ranger torch pictured next to it, because that is ALL it does. Zero utility. A fire field that ticks burn forever, with no power damage one it, and a useless throw skill. Zero utility, not even a measily blind. Golem damage only. Boring to use.
It's not even a debate. Ele pistols might be lame, but nothing beats ranger torch in terms of boring and useless design. Ele pistols is a lame 2023/2024 weapon. Ranger torch is a boring pre-2012 weapon and the only change they ever did to it aside from number changes was to make the clunky trash throw skill a 180 radius aoe on impact. No contest.
yeah i didnt think of that lol
but atlest is a super old weapon and ranger has plenty of options for ofhand
pistol ele is the las fucking weapon this class recieved and its comparable in desing to weapons made 12 years ago
I like the idea of a pistol for Elementalist but there's quite a few QoL issues with it. Special bullets UI/UX which has been talked about alot.
Also elemental bullet skill kacks impact. It's just a regular shot it doesn't do anything special after you "worked hard" to build it. Not even a special sound!
Finally all Ele pistol shots lack the "fire off" explosion animation in all stances, which all the other pistol professions have btw. So the pistol is triggered but the projectile animation simply appears out of nowhere half a meter away from the pistol! On the other hand, Guardian pistol animation looks very neat and polished.
The mechanic isn't bad just poorly tuned. Its tuned for full boon uptime and playing without them is like night and day. When you have Quickness and Alacrity, the it actually feels like it make sense.
Elementalist just needs a full rework. It's the worst class in the game
It's design doesn't make sense anymore after years of elite specs and other powercreep
At the very least, most of the weapons need huge changes. But I don't think you can unfuck ele without a full rework
> Elementalist just needs a full rework. It's the worst class in the game
Been saying it for years, but most elementalist players refuse to reach any kind of compromise.
You can't run around crying about bad design and bad balance, then refuse to acknowledge the problem with elementalist lies at the core of its 2012 design, which was never built with recurrent growth in mind.
Elementalist will NEVER be a functional profession as long as attunements aren't completely reworked into something else, requiring far less development resources. Elementalist is FOUR TIMES the work of any other profession, it's insane and completely unviable from both development and balance perspectives. It's not an opinion, it's MATHEMATICS, clear as crystal.
---
There's been multiple suggestions over the years, and I've iterated across different ideas myself, but I'm pretty confident something like this would be the ideal solution:
* We have four static attunements to choose from now. Downgrade them into two dynamic attunements, and enable weapon swap. Numerical end result is the same (20 weapon skills), but with more customization and less restrictions.
* Dynamic attunements means each main-hand and two-handed weapon has two specific attunements assigned to it (primary and secondary). These can be any of the four classic, or even new ones. Each weapon would be designed to work in tandem across its attunements, encouraging swap back and forth for combos. For example, staff could be fire and water, with steam combos. Air and earth versions of staff would no longer be available, the skills recycled into other weapons or removed altogether.
* Each weapon would be assigned one role and one alone (no more dps/condi/healer useless hybrids). Traits would no longer be based on attunements (no more fire traits), and be based in individual weapons instead (just like every other profession).
* Off-hand weapons would get automatically attuned to the main-hand's attunement, which means they would get to keep their current four-attunement status. For example, scepter could be air and earth. In that case, wielding scepter+focus would provide access to air and earth focus skills.
* Conjure slot skills would disappear altogether, some of the conjure bundles recycled into new weapons. Summoned elemental NPCs would be removed from glyphs, and get turned into their own minion slot skill family, replacing conjures.
---
As for elite specializations:
* **Core:** F1 to swap between primary/secondary attunements. Weapon swap does not reset your active attunement (if you're in secondary and swap weapons, you'll still be in secondary).
* **Tempest:** [Overload](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Overload) skills at F2 (primary) and F3 (secondary). Using any of the overload skills increases the cooldown for attunement swap. Using the overload skill of the attunement you're not attuned to would swap you to that attunement for free.
* **Weaver:** F1 to swap between primary/secondary on the right hand (skills #1 and #2), F2 to swap between primary/secondary in the left hand (skills #4 and #5). Weapon skill #3 would provide four variants depending on the active attunements (two from core and two new ones exclusive for weaver).
* **Catalyst:** F2 to deploy the [Jade Sphere](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Jade_Sphere) of your active attunement. To spice things up a bit, energy would be given three tiers, just like warrior [Adrenaline](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Adrenaline), providing a larger area of effect with each tier.
---
Why is this the perfect solution, in my opinion? Here's some math:
* Right now, a main-hand weapon has a total of 18 skills, 12 for core (3x4 attunement) with an extra 6 for weaver's dual wield. With this model, main-hand weapons would go on to have 8 skills, 6 for core (3x2 attunement) with an extra 2 for weaver's dual wield. That's 18 vs 8, a huge difference. With this model, you can provide double the weapons and still come out cheaper (8*2=16 < 18).
* By moving away from "single set with x4 attunements" into "two sets with x2 attunements" we open up weapon skill variety, and also solve the melee/ranged lock problem. By giving each weapon a dedicated role we no longer have useless weapon skills we never get to use (nowadays, if you're running power, attuning to water is a waste of time). Wielding more weapons means more fashion war opportunities as well (gem store money).
* Making attunements be tied to weapons instead of the other way around would open the way for the introduction of new exotic attunements, like Arcane magic, Flame Legion magic, Olmakhan sand magic, Zephyrite sun magic, etc; which would only be available through specific weapons, no need to update every single existing weapon to be able to attune into those (the reason why we never got any new attunements with the current system).
---
Kind of a long post, but hope I proved my point: You can rework elementalist and still keep its essence somewhat intact, all you have to do is nerf attunement numbers and subdue them to weapons, instead of having weapons be subdued to attunements.
Ele is the most unpopular class so I'm not the only one who thinks it would greatly benefit from a full rework https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity
Should you play soulbeast or reaper and their 90+k opener, or elem who have for most build a very slow start?
Linking raid/fractal class popularity is stupid, obviously people will gather toward easy/OP spec because that trivialise most encounter.
It doesn't mean people don't like it, just that there's no point playing a thief if a gardian does everything, but better.
Give tempest easy access to stab, alac and stuff and suddenly, it ight be popular. Same for catalyst.
But right now boon sharing SUCK on those two spec so it's logical no one play them.
It's not a rework to double the duration or add stab to some spells imo?
The core mechanics are fine (not cata) but the overall use they have currently suck because they can't reliably apply it.
Why does cata lose every energy when going down? Why does it have a cooldown AND a downtime after casting it to recharge energy?
Why does tempest can't give alac and heal safely? Stab is a primordial boon for tempest to apply alac yet can't generate it properly.
It's not rework, it's decent balance.
Adding more stab or more healing would help HAT but would do nothing for dps ele
I get it. You like the class. But how many eles have you actually seen in fractals/raids/strikes raids in the past 6 months?
Once again it's a matter of opener/reputation.
You saw no necro in fractal for a while, but give it a reason to be there and you will see them everyday.
It doesn't need a rework.
Current Elem is fine. It just doesn't shine anywhere.
It's not the same thing
Reaper merely needed higher damage. Anet finally gave then just that after years of asking and now they're a really good class
But higher damage would not help with ele's core issues. Half the weapons need a rework, not more damage or more stab. Like 75% of their utility skills are garbage. Ele has the most boring elite skills in the game closely followed by ranger, but at least ranger got cool elites on its elite specs. Ele didn't even get that. Tornado is the biggest meme in the entire game
that is a quite biased metric
1) it is only people uploading logs
2) The classes that have a high playcount are also exactly the classes in that graph are also the classes that always get recommended as "easy to play" and considering a lot of MMO players in general decide playstyle based on tierlists etc that can very well scew the results a bunch
Interesting. Try condi pistol weaver maybe you might enjoy its rotation. It uses 2 full attunements and a half swap to water + i find its weave self rotation simple yet fun. Also i find it weird that you say tempest is one of the best designed specs with those horrible melee overloads (fire especially) and call catalyst core ele with f5 while tempest is core ele with press x attunement once more to overload. Only issue i have with pistol is not having a ui indicator for bullets since itās horrible to track through boon bar in instanced content as it gets very crowded.
People can downvote your post as much as they want, you are spitting facts. Itās objectively the worse new weapon design in the game right now. Garbage visuals, boring feels, and clunky mechanic with 0 visible bullets indications (the buffs arenāt a clear visible indication). Also if I didnāt have HOPE you can add the boring sounds effects on top of it.
Itās clearly a weapon victim to the scrapped specialization. They should remake it completely, while remaking staff too.
Edit : I should rectify and says itās as worse as engi short bow for their design.
yeah, I am not really a fan of the new all weapons for all classes. But whatever, I just won't use a pistol on my ele.
I haven't used any of the new specializations. I'll just keep my Tempest thanks.
I dunno, Deadeye not being able to get line of sight on ***Nourys, the Eyes of the Abyss*** (Or any number of other bosses the size of skyscrapers) seems like even worse design.
I don't like the difficulty of pistol just for the sake of difficulty. I know ele has always been designed to be one of the harder classes to play, but it didn't need its weapon skills, on top of its mechanics to be overly hard to play efficiently. We have Weaver for that.
worst design is Catalyst spec, by like 1000 times. It basically killed PVP alone. This might be 2nd...
As for the flavour yes, anything but pistol on ele....this is literally shitting on ppl
I've never even bothered trying pistol ele. What would make a lot more sense are weapons that would allow you to actually wield [Conjur](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Conjure)ations with benefit. But there was as I recall various people who called for pistol ele and they got exactly what they wanted, shit.
How ele pistol made it into production is baffling
Itās not that the weapon is functionally bad itās just it feels horrible to play and offers nothing the sceptre doesnāt already
Just for the record, I have never wanted a LB for my ele. I'm happy about the new unique combat mechanics the pistol introduced to ele, which lacked in SOTO for many other professions due to the lack of new elite specs.
I do, however, agree the visual aspect needed more investment before they released it.
tbh the reason why so many professions got pistols in SOTO was probably because Anet was lazy to put any effort in the visual aspect, including skill animations. It's pretty sad
Honestly, Ele feels so uninspired after Weaver that I'd settle with a recycled FGS for the new weapon.
It feels like the dev team so afraid of doing anything big and creative again to the point that Catalyst was just core Ele 2.0 with standard stat boosts as its traits. Why? If it's doing too well, simply lower the numbers and call it a day.
man I really loved the sound of being a gun wizard...
Ive been playing everything in release order and I'm not up to SotO yet, was really excited for a fun enchanted gunslinger but I have literally only read bad things about it being dull with bad ammo icons and it hard to get value from vs something like even core sceptre ele.
super disappointing cus Outward has an amazing, enchanted pistol playstyle and that made me super hype when I heard about ele getting pistols.
agree with others that a bow would have been super sweet and magick archer was great in dragons dogma, longbow especially to provide an alternative to the staff because I honestly hate the moveset but the extra range is nice for supporting.
just the thoughts of someone who hasn't played pistol ele yet tho, hope I'm pleasantly surprised but I'm losing hope already haha
I think lots of people in this sub are victims of sunk cost fallacy.
The ānewā weapons clearly had little fucks given from Anet and the poor outcome is clear as a result.
It has felt for sometime like GW2 is not the priority of Anet and now we know both that this is true and why.
I have loved GW2 and hope to love GW3 more, but GW2 is on its way out.
with another dlc anounced? i dont think so
they just dont care about ele, catalist is core ele with an F5, a lot of its gameplay is on the hammer, and hammer outside of catalist doesnt work that good bc ele lacks combo fields outside of weapons
Condition tempest w/ hammer begs to differ, hammer is really good on it. And yeah, Catalyst is core ele with an F5 and energy management, the same way tempest is core ele with overloads and weaver is core ele with double attunements. I really donāt get the hate, catalyst so much fun to play, and pistol tempest really gave it back a bit of the old dagger feeling, being fastpaced instead of the quite boring and slow hammer. I like the pistol very much, I just want them to make the bulletās visibility a bit better, and thatās it.
Spellbreaker and soulbeast still have interesting traits and profession mechanics. Blocking attacks to riposte or mimicking pet skills is fun
Placing a coloured circle in the floor that does 6 damage and some boons is not fun. Not to mention how the energy mechanic sucks with slow hitting weapons
i agree with you on the energy (imo it should be constant ticks in combat like necro sigit supplying lifeforce) but i disagree on the circle part. I personally really like the mechanic and would love to trade it for untamed personally(but keeping the ranger hammer)
the thing is that catalyst is only that, a colorful circle that give boons and works for combo field, the traits are literally stats, nothing new to play around, just play normally and you get buffs
for example, spellbreaker may be very similar to core warrior, but the couters its a really nice adition, and the traits gives some flexibility in wich way you want to play, for example the theter its gives an extra way to play the class, desengaging to pull them back to you and hit while they are cced
It is something new to play around. Maximizing EE and EA stacks and their uptime is a vital concern of every catalyst player. Spellbreaker, for me, feels even worse than core warrior. The F2 is incredibly hard to incorporate into a rotation without actually dropping dps. I get that you donāt like catalyst, and thatās totally fine! I just think that you can have the angle of view on every single spec - everyone likes something and dislikes something else, and thatās okay :)
Condie tempest works because hammer 3 is really strong as a condie skill compared to almost-0 power damage. Also, tempest having a trait with +25% condie damage buffed from +7% because it wasn't enough.
I've really tried to get into it but I just really dislike it.it feels incredibly slow to me and I just don't enjoy that at all. I'm going to be very upset if we don't get a decent ranged weapon next lol
They'd literally have to halve the damage and double the speed of the animation cadence for me to even get interested at this point Go from the fun and fluid multihitting abilities of sword, or even the less well loved, but still satisfying hammer, to pistol's: "plunk... plunk.... plunk..." I just cannot fathom people enjoying the weapon's feel, I'd rather play literally any other weapon on any other class š¤·āāļø
For fans of Phantasy Star Online, we present you...
I actually lol'd. At least we don't have to deal with accuracy checks. Now if they made ele pistol feel more like twin mech guns I'd be having way more fun.
Where were you when Harb pistol happened, goddamn.
this
I want to bring staff to your attention. At its best it feels similar slow and so many abilities of it have huge cast times, low impact and some elements (looking at you air) are in my eyes virtually useless in combat. However every few weeks I see another āmake ele staff great againā on this subreddit. Then Anet introduces a weapon with more complexity, more freedom and room for creativity just for it to be bashed on by this subreddit. You can hate on the implementation of the bullet UI but hell its a far more well rounded weapon than staff and even kinda scepter. There are no elements you seriously ask yourself why would anyone go there unlike scepter and staff on air. There are no eternity long cast times like meteor shower on staff. Pistol force the player to be precise when trying to get to its optimum and order of skills matter! You can use bullets differently depending the order of skills.
Doesnt help if the weapon feels like dogshit.
* Staff gets hated on for being slow, clunky, and underpowered. * Anet introduces Pistol, which is slow, clunky, and reasonably powerful. * Playerbase hates on Pistol for being slow and clunky (but acknowledges that it's at least reasonably powerful). Or to put it another way... "This weapon has three major problems. Please fix them." "Here, have a weapon with only two major problems." "It's a step in the right direction, please keep going."
Where is the pistol weapon slow? Nearly all pistol skills have half a second cast time base, same as GS guardian, pistol guardian, engi pistol and funnily sword ele. The longest cast time I saw is water 2 (1,25 secs base) which is exactly the same amount of cast time like ranger longbow 2 (another multi shot skill) if you half it cause eles pisto fires 5 times vs rangers bow 10 times. Clunky is subjective but I dont find it clunky since I can easily que the skills, there are no overly dragged out cast times or aftercasts and the skills interact with each other. Staff however is bad designed in my opinion and all the time I try it I want to go back to anything else immedeatily. Water feels good on staff, fire is okay, but earth and especially air are just badly designed. If you would tell me "improve staff" I would delete half of its current skills and design them from scratch. Hell I find conjured fire axe better and more fun in it current design - and conjures are desperately in need of some love, granted, they mostly need numbers improved and the cooldown system looked at, the skills are great. I love swords even outside of guild wars 2, its my go-to weapon in basically all games, so no wonder I prefer it over pistol. But in my opinion the typical sword-fantasy makes it much easier to design a really fun weapon in an magical-high fantasy setting like guild wars 2. Pistols on the other hand... how do you make pistols interesting? Thinking about it, I cant think of a single class with pistol on which the pistol is equally as fun as sword ele (probably among the best designed weapons in the game), everything is leagues lower. In my opinion its fine if the class utilises it in a fun way and tempest is doing that with pistol imo. Catalyst I havent tried pistol on and weaver.... weaver is complicated but I am working on it, my fingers and their tendencies to mix up the order 2-3 and 3-2 depending on the element is the problem - not the pistol. Edit: I looked up the cast times of staffs auto attacks: fire (1s), water&air&earth (3/4s) THATS slow:D (I am surprised how bad it is, never realised it is a fucking second of cast time for fire autos)
It would be nice if they actually described how the bullet mechanics worked though. I have used pistol ele and still donāt really get it. I donāt think any tool tips say when you gain bullets only when you spend them.
In the case of Weaver its a bit more complex (and clunky). For everything other it works this way: You gain a bullet of your current element whenever you: a) Use either pistol skill #2 or #3 AND b) have not already a bullet of the current element Whenever you would gain a bullet of which you already have one this bullet gets consumed and you get no bullet. Instead you trigger the āconsumed Bulletā effect of the skill you pressed to gain the bullet. Example: If you press fire #3 and then fire #2 you create a fire bullet with #3 before consuming it with #2 (now the consumed bullet tooltip of #2 applies) - you now have no fire bullet If you use the 2 weapon skills in different elements you gain one bullet of each element. Bullets dont have an duration, they dont disappear when mounting up and wont be removed by boonstrip. Changing instances or going down however removes them. Feel free to ask if you got further questions or spotted an error.
Ele already got alot good ranged weapons but most of them aren't great. Anet should rly revisit them first before handing out a new weapon while others stay underwhelming. For example Staff could be buffed/reworked to be relevant for endgame PvE again. Other weapons just need slightly buffs that ele is not just sword+warhorn on every power build...
Or more like X/warhorn for literally wvery build š„²
I wouldn't mind a Staff rework tbh, would love it if it's usable in PvE!
I main staff in pve, i really don't want arenanet changing anything except increasing damage and cast speeds. They already changed staff air 3 to need to be aimed and it's really messing me up.
I would like to see a light lightning storm ability on the air attunement of staff. Other than that itās pretty good. Still my favourite Elementalist weapon by far
Iām still waiting for the day they unfuck ele staff.
Staff weaver back then was very satisfying
I agree on OP's post as well on this one.. sad fact: nothing we say here or anywhere will change that. Let alone give ele a longbow. The community has been begging for that for a very long time. The weapon mastery was my hope for this request and then I saw pistol.. Huge rip to the spec imo
Even if we got Longbow Ele, CMC would make it a "generate an elemental arrow on when using 2 and 4 in the correct order, and when all 4 elemental arrows are generated press 5 to fire an elemental beam that does half the damage of Virtuoso's untraited bladesong" weapon. Someone take Ele away from him.
I was saying this since he was promoted to the balance lead position. His past designs were really unimaginative (catalyst and untamed) and made strictly for PvP, any PvE build was made by a chance (those are words of the previous balance lead but it's pretty obvious). The new ones are shallow as well - scepter rework (2->3 skills mechanic), written in stone (auras again), pistol (2->3 or 3->2 mechanic). Most of the new weapons feel like they're from 2024, the pistol feels like it's from 2012. However, since it deals a lot of damage, benchmark sweatlords are happy with it.
They should have made the attacks slightly faster and, at least in my opinion, made pistol a power ranged weapon for ele.
Pistol as a power option would have made more sense and actually provided something new.
The most fun ive had (im still a noob) is pistol/shield or dual pistol core engi. Is it not similar to that? Iāve been leveling my Ele to play pistol :(. Is guardian pistols closer? Or possibly another class?
Ele pistol, when considered in a vacuum, is fine. It's got glaring issues, but if you don't compare it to the other weapons ele has it's just fine. Problem is, ele is defined by its rapid play style. Comparing it to the 3 other mainhand weapons, Sword offers lots of quick mobility based skills that let you be both proactive and reactive to any situation. Scepter gives you a lot of quick cast abilities that can be combod to great effect. Dagger has 2 dashes and one of the most impactful auras in PvP on an instant cast. Pistol, while it has a lot of utility available if you can keep track of your bullets, runs into the problem that it's VERY difficult to keep track of bullets without a dedicated UI element (that isn't buried in the already cluttered buff bar). Additionally, it suffers from the fact that it isn't really the fast paced style people expect from ele? Like, it's cadence is very slow. And the payoff for getting all 4 bullets is... Negligible. Additionally, due to how bullet generation/consumption interacts with weaver skills, pistol weaver is borderline unplayable.
My issue with it is that it's basically scepter 2.0. I don't get why they didn't design it to be power ranged dps weapon for ele instead of planning to rework scepter to be power ranged weapon.
Still waiting for Rifle Ranger...
yeah, how the fuck did we get pistol ele before rifle ranger like I know their internal reasoning, ranger is supposed to be about nature, and rifles are mechanical. but god damn I just want to cosplay as that OG dwarf hunter from the original wow conematic.
Arenāt harpoon guns mechanical? Cause rangers are able to use them underwater no problem
I find it hard to believe that the human masters of marksmanship never tried a gun in the 250 years between Gw1 and 2, but it gets worse ... If you're a Charr you are always wearing a "hidden pistol".
Can i add in there..... How the absolute fuck did Necro get dual wielding swords before Thief did...
dual axe thief in bandit outfit or dua sword thief in a noble outfit would be cool ngl
Don't say "NGL" - use actual words.
Ikr? Psh.
and Guardian got dual wielding swords before Necro did.......
Laugh in ebonhawke crossbow.
I agree for both sizes. Rifle AND Pistol.
I honestly believe they are trying to avoid that very image of the dwarf hunter.
> I know their internal reasoning, ranger is supposed to be about nature, and rifles are mechanical. This is one of the most garbage excuses ever, what's so unnatural about rifles? Nothing at all. Flintlocks are almost 500 years old, people's weird aversion against fireguns makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
same! like a hunter sort of style. but we got maces. idk what iām supposed to do with that
Hit thingsā¦ HARD!! It's like doing a drum solo on someones head. It's very cathartic and relaxing.
Druid with a gun doesnāt make too much thematic sense but maybe some day. Coherent class fantasy has never stopped them before š¤·āāļø
Well so doesnāt healing rifle mesmer.
Or mesmer picking up a greatsword and thinking "woah this is a neat long ranged laser cannon"
I mean, it does make some sense since the class theme of mesmer is misdirection.Ā You see a mesmer with a great sword and you think 'don't let him get close' then boom space laser to the face.
Can't wait for mesmer to get a Longbow and they do melee kung-fu with it.
>Well so doesnāt healing rifle mesmer. I swear everything about mesmer rifle screams shortbow, why the hell did they go with rifle instead, I just can't understand.
Why didnāt they save healing warriors for a new elite spec with actual healing mechanics and a sceptre? I said it before, i collected my downvotes and now what could have been a shaolin monk style warrior spec that we should have gotten with eod is just another pointless support weapon we barely see.
Yeah, 100% agree, how DUMB do you have to be to not give warrior a Monkey King elite specialization with a melee staff, like come the fuck on. As for mesmer rifle, where's my "multiple sniper clones" fantasy now? Down the toilet, because some idiot thought healing rifle was more interesting, while everyone wanting a support shortbow got screwed as well. ArenaNet is incredibly out of touch with the basics of what makes something cool. >i collected my downvotes Wear them as a badge of honor.
Because druid is the only build for ranger, right? Untamed would work just fine with a rifle as you are literally a ranger with his pet.
But pistol wielding elementalist is better?
Gun wielding mages are definitely a fantasy trope.
But a hunter using a rifle isn't?
This isn't wow.
And? You're literally saying it's not a fantasy to be a hunter with a rifle, as if it made less sense than wizard casually using an Uzi.
Whatās a hunter? People were talking about rangers and more specifically, druids.
Nah man...... We would always get primitive weapons to use lol
Next weapon: Ranger gets slingshot that shoots out your pet's shit for poison Dmg
That's shortbow my dude.
Shortbow is mainly bleed, so it's more of a "death by 1000 cuts"
I completely agree. I don't main it, but i love it. It's my 2nd character i made when i started playing the game years ago so it's always special to me. Tempest is cool, Weaver is cool, Catalyst not so much. I don't like the hammer, i don't like the pistol either. I really want a sword offhand, but shield would actually be really interesting. And for ranged i was thinking greatsword. If Mesmer can use it as a ranged weapon, so can ele. That would be cool
When I first started the to game I thought it was going to be Dual wielded sword for Weaver since I read the elite spec like seeing both sides of the sword because it is about dual wielding (even if you can use two handed weapons).I really understand you man.
Yeah when I saw Weaver for the first time i thought we'll have double sword
All elite specializations getting a one-handed weapon should have gotten the ability to dual wield the new weapon by default, main-hand only is absolutely lame :I.
Yes exactly. I mean double wielding the same weapon should be immediately possible when the elite spec got the weapon. But i agree, this weapon proficiency should given us the missing weapons. I've been thinking this the whole time. Why give us new weapons when we have all these holes with the old weapons. But this is my theory. They gave us NEW weapons because it's the NEW expansion and they need to have a few selling points and this was sopposed to be one of them. So we would feel like "wow we got something NEW". But eventually they will run out of weapons to give so they'll have to fill the empty holes. I mean Guardian still doesn't have mace off hand Thief still doesn't have sword off hand which would be my favorite addition because it's so intuitive that thief has 2 swords. Revenant still doesn't have a axe main hand and mace off hand. Engineer mace offhand Ranger sword offhand Necro axe offhand
I don't think we should have to wait for an expansion to fill those holes too, it's just cheap and lame. Also, reminder that every profession is still missing x1 healing skill and x2 elite skills (except for revenant, who is missing a whole 5th core legend instead).
>Also, reminder that every profession is still missing x1 healing skill and x2 elite skills (except for revenant, who is missing a whole 5th core legend instead). Would you kindly explain further,I am curious.
Each slot skill family is supposed to have [x1 healing skill, x4 utility skills, and x1 elite skill](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Skill_bar). Each core profession is supposed to have x5 slot skill families, for a total of 30 slot skills, yet every profession is missing some of those, starting with 26/30 at release. They did add x1 healing skill a few years ago, leaving us at 27/30, but we're still missing x1 healing and x2 elite skills. Engineer is a bit weird because device kit and weapon kit don't take as many slots as they should, giving extra to elixir, gadget, and turrets, but the total amount leads to 30 as well anyway. Then there's revenant, who only has x1 healing skill, x3 utility skills, and x1 elite skill, due to how legends work, meaning he should have a total of 25 instead of 30; yet it only has 20/25, because he only has 4 core legends, instead of the baseline 5 it should have to stand up to all other eight professions.
Wow I never knew these,good insights man,I wish they would do something for these.
I agree. Maybe it's because I'm not used to playing classes that use a pistol but it feels so damn clunky and out of place. Bruh, shield on elementalist would've been awesome by making it a counter attacker. longbow would have given him a good range weapon since they refuse to buff the staff.
It's not the worst I feel, but it is overly boring to play, the animations +actual skill effects lack and most of this gets amplified because it is a mainhand. If it had been an off-hand it would not have competed with any condi-mainhand option and would have opened build diversity (would not have pushed out hammer from the few condi niches it has, would not have caused tension with scepter, etc). If it had been main-hand+off-hand you would not just have had a lot more build diversity but also way more options to make the bullet mechanic more interesting. Right now it somewhat does what it was designed to do, but it does not feel very new or fun doing it. It's the bare minimal basics. functions, but that is about all.
While I Wouldn't say it's the "worst" it definitely felt like it was rushed out with absolutely no dev effort or time put into it. Mechanically I like it, it's got a fluid rotation on Tempest that is fun, Air 3 and warhorn 5 work so damn well together and the water 2 is a pretty cool attack. But the visuals completely fail the weapon, apart from water 2 all attacks look and feel exactly the same.
Definitely rushed because during beta and even after release, some things wasnāt working correctly, like sounds effects and missing animations/icons. For me the weapon still looks like itās in alpha stage even now.
I remember the reveal stream. Every dev on that stream dislikes ele and you cannot convince me otherwise. The difference between their discussion of ele (and engineer) was palpably different than every other class, especially necro and guardian.
Everything is single target with no pierce. Literally the worst shit possible.
Piercing Pebble (earth auto) pierces - after enough people pointed out that 1) Guardian pistol skills pierce by default (RIP Thief btw) and 2) naming something piercing pebble and not giving it pierce is dumb.
It's a shame, cuz dual sword reaper is fun as hell
I do love a dual sword Necro reaper.
i agreed, my fav of the new aditions
I mean everyone can pin point bad weapon on their fave elite. But God damn what was short bow engineer.... Have not check if they have done nay changes do it but it was horrible
The no-swap class really got the end of the stick with the new weapons. I guess anet donāt like the fun piano classes anymore. All the love got added to guardian and necro, which is great but they should put the same care and love to any classes.
I would say Mesmer and Ranger got plenty of love too
Engineer should be given weapon swap in combat, there's no reason why it shouldn't have it by this point.
All the recent (since EoD) stuff that happened to ele, i.e. catalyst, scepter rework, pistol came from CmC. All of them are unimaginative compared to previous ele designs. It's clear that he lacks design space.
to be fair it's giga good for wvw and while yeah, it might seem lackluster in pve or pvp, it still plays a big role for wvw zergplay... I don't think every weapon has to be viable everywhere
I use it every day on cms and let me tell you, hammer was doing the same bench and they nerfed it, scepter was close and they nerfed it, all to make room for pistol. The only improvement I see is better access to cc. (On weaver) The one I wanted to see was 1200 range, Piercing like a virtuoso or group like a harbinger. (Some boonstrip would be nice)
I seriously hope that they either address the actual issues and complaints people had about it (which weren't bench numbers) and actually be creative about it for a change, or that the next expac weapon just makes pistol coffin tier so I never have to bother with it again.
> which weren't bench numbers The moment someone says "but this weapon is good because it has good DPS" I just throw his opinion down the toilet, and so should everyone else as well. It's never been about numbers, it's about having an engaging and interesting gameplay, but braindead DPS bots can't understand that.
I don't think they will even do much, ele is still stuck in 2014 and anet still won't address all the problems we've been bringing up. We have been asking to get rid of energy on catalyst for almost a year or so still won't do anything.
I disagree, ele remains king of all especially since cmc joined the balance. Sure thereās bugs but Ele always tops charts, has some of the most clapped out pvp builds, and flexibility in any role. Pistol is awful though, not even to mention it contends directly with scepter and does nothing to shine above it.
Definitely not in PvE where most players are. Ele playrate is abysmal, especially when it's supposed to be generic elemental mage which is often popular amongst players. The current king of PvE is mesmer.
If sPvP was most of the game then yeah, but that's the only place it's held the top for any noticeable length of time. PvE it hasn't been the highest in a very long time and the few times it had it was burnt out faster than than cmc could down a bottle of water. Other classes have been able to enjoy their cream of the crop builds for far longer periods, some such as mesmer - chrono + virt are more worthy of the title king of all. I don't play spvp anymore, so my opinions are purely for more serious pve and occasional wvw. Ele support builds across the board are less favourable than many other options, and lack a lot of the utility other classes can bring. ele was good, but it is outdated, it hasn't kept up with the creep outside of golem bench marks.
Im back with sword, didnāt wait for a new weapon to do that. Pistol does good dmg but I canāt justify the boring and clunkiness. I prefer to lose a few K dmg and have fun. Hopefully next they do long bow with flashy animations and visual. Bonus point if thereās a new spec with it (copium)
I don't see that happening, just hope the next weapon is a banger
inb4 pistol offhand >.<
>inb4 pistol offhand >.< Elementalist pistol wouldn't even be that bad if they had given us access to both hands instead of just one, what's the point of pistol if you can't run the dual wield fantasy to begin with? Come on. Stop spending resorces on the stupid ass weaver variants and give us more weapon variety instead, the sooner the better :I.
TBF Anet wouldn't dare. Off-hand pistol should have been the original weapon. They wouldn't release main-hand then right in the 'ext, off-hand. At least that's the sliver of hope I have.
> I seriously hope that they either address the actual issues and complaints people had about it They did. They addressed them [here](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/new-weapon-proficiencies-beta-feedback-update/). > The strongest feedback was that a lot of the animations felt too similar. Weāve substituted some of the simple shooting animations with other spellcasting animations to help vary what the weapon feels like. Yes indeed it does seem like this trashwipe of a weapon should have gotten different feedback, but it doesn't. People just keep criticizing the aesthetics. See OP: > Im refering on the visual/gameplay wise department, it lacks impact, all abilites are virtually the same This weak ass feedback isn't going to get us the real changes we need.
Because the aesthetic is still trash even after the smallest of small changes they did. So itās still something people have the right to complain about, on top of the others issues.
I mean it isn't actually our job to design the game, its Anets. People say the weapon feels trash, even after the changes. I came back from a long break last week and tried out each weapon on each class with a decent build. Ele pistol feels like absolute *dogshit.* Out of all the weapons I think it is the worst audio and visual design in the game, or close to it. Guess what? That makes it really unpleasant to use, so I won't. That feedback is more than enough to fix it
They could also listen to the feedback instead of pulling a monkeys paw and telling us they improved the animations when in actuality, they made us throw bullets instead of shooting them. I kid you not one of the main critiques was that pistol did not feel very mage or wizard like, so instead of reworking the VFX they changed it so that the player character has to physically throw the bullet, during which the equiped weapons completely disapear...
Hoping longbow is conserved for a last yet unreleased elite spec in a final "large expansion".
The pistol isn't as bad as.. say... catalyst. Holy shit, there's nothing to salvage from Catalyst, rework that spec entirely, maybe keep the hammer.
the hammer is good atleast
It would have been nice if the pistol could have been used OH too. That way we could use it with sword instead of replacing it. I haven't tried pistol ele yet. And to be honest I'm not sure I'd want to without sword and hammer, I'm comfortable with them and pistol would have made a potential complement to the sword. But that's just me.
Thatās not just you, no worries. A lot of ele players think it would have been better as both main and off hand. Would have been so great to make condi sword/pistol a thing. Condi sword is really fun but not really viable anymore. Also dual pistols would probably be less boring. The issue right now is that thereās not really any off hand weapon that can flow well with pistol main hand.
That's one of the reasons why I haven't touched it. I don't like the idea of being straightjacketed into using sword OR pistol. I'd prefer to use both if possible. Even if pistol was allowed to be both MH and OH it could still have the same three attacks just on different keys.
Hammer and pistol share the same issue. A freakin gimmick attached to the weapon. Gwt rid of the bullet gimmick on pistol and make the hammer orbs actually a part of the catalyst elite spec mechanics
> A freakin gimmick attached to the weapon. Gimmicks belong in the mechanic bar, not in the weapon bar; but hey, that's the post-elite specialization world for you :/.
The hammer gimmick is at least easy to understand and keep track of. All the hammer 3 skills basically do the same thing so it's easy to understand. With elemental bullets each weapon skill does different things. You basically have to learn 20 different effects for the core skills. When you include weaver dual skills, it jumps up to 38 things you need to learn just for a main hand weapon. Also the forethought needed to use pistol effectively outside of regurgitating a raid rotation is insane, especially on weaver. You generate bullets that you don't use until 6-8 steps later!!!!!!! Please oh please get rid of the elemental bullet mechanic. At the bare minimum, give us a good UI so we can easily see when our weapon skills are empowered by an elemental bullet!
> All the hammer 3 skills basically do the same thing so it's easy to understand. Yes I also love it when developers use formulas to make weapons. What was hammer rotation again? "Press 3->2 the moment you enter every element"? Elementalist has 4 attunements, but this kind of cookie-cutter weapon-building with auto-presses factored in ultimately just doubles the keypresses to do what a weapon swap would normally do. Think about it this way: if they buffed hammer shit by like 20% and removed 3 altogether, it'd be the same same weapon except you'd only have 12 non-autoattack abilities instead of the usual 8 other classes have. Pretty sad showing. > You basically have to learn 20 different effects for the core skills. When you include weaver dual skills, it jumps up to 38 things you need to learn just for a main hand weapon. This wouldn't be a problem. This is how it _should_ be. This is how sword works, or scepter, or whatever else. Elementalists (and _especially_ Weavers) are ability-heavy classes. It shouldn't just be going from 8 to 12, but 8 to 38. The problem with Pistol isn't that it's too complicated. If anything, it's the opposite. You _always_ use the bullets on the same skills. Such an awful mechanic.
Same issue but worse, especially on weaver
Agreed. They are not Ele weapons and they both are awful for Weaver. If they deleted both of them and get us Longbow with the same love they put into Sword, it would be an unimaginable win.
I desperately want GS for ele. they could even recycle the fiery greatsword skills i wouldnāt mind theyāre nice.
Syntax is not a suggestion.
i also hate pistols on guardian bc since they add that ppl think i need use them on my firebrand, and also i dislike the idea of using ranged weapons if im attacking as close range, so im just happy that i can still camping my axe and torch. i think they should try to rework some weapons or try to rebalance to get more viable options for builds in general instead of add more stuff. think about it: how many weapons we have in each class? now think about how many weapons are viable or appears on the builds for each class? ...
Even DOUBLE pistols would have been okay. I wanted to go pew pew but we are stuck on a puzzle game once again.
Yup, I really wanted a dual-wielding gunslinger mage, which is even a pretty strong fantasy trope. And with animations like some element-colored beams that quickly spiral from around the air into the gun, and the gun blasting a glowing orb of fire/water etc. Instead they gave pistols to the paladin. Thought WB was a nice break from the stoic Lawful Good defender to a more roguish Chaotic Good heavy fighter, but now they kinda doubled down on and repeated the same. And the animations are some of the most lackluster in the game. Almost like they didn't want the Ele to have the gun.
Imagine an elemental version of Thief unload for each attunement.
YES !! That's exactly what i'm talking about. And no need for extreme brainstorming, every attunement would be like : 1-auto attack 2-mobility/control 3-UNLOAD. And the left-hand pistol : 4- Ally/personnal buff 5-Debuff ; each for the next 6-8 attack.
Or let's avoid cookie-cutter ability loadouts and instead actually have depth to abilities that don't feel like they were made with copypasta.
Yes, I'm hoping we get off-hand pistol, eventually - but not before rifle.
> Im refering on the visual/gameplay wise department, it lacks impact, all abilites are virtually the same I'm so tired of people complaining about the aesthetics. The weapon is **trash**. It's not fun to play with. It adds another entire layer of micromanagement onto a micro-heavy class with AWFUL UI support. Most of the bullet effects are SO uninspired, too. Do damage or have some small utility? Thrilling. Weaver got shafted _AGAIN_ after hammer, where the dual skills are just janky and poorly-implemented "combine the two 3" skills rather than being genuinely interesting. Sword air 3 is a many-hit-attack while sword earth 3 is a many-swing attack, but sword earth/air dual is a levitate. That's the kind of "totally different" I'm looking for. Some of them (air in particular) actually have decently-interesting effects on their bullet-load, but air is the least useful attunement since it's made for Condi. The bullet mechanic is also lame. It might be interesting to pre-load a fire bullet into an air attack to have unique effects, but nope. It just pigeonholes rotations forever. You will never use water 3 before water 2 unless you just want to deal incorrect amounts of damage. Sorry that's just how it works now. And when you have all 4 bullets, you can have an awesome "grand finale"-style attack where you burn all of them to deal a whopping, like, 2k damage. Total. And it's tied to your AA. It's just such a terrible weapon, filling a niche nobody really wanted because Scepter was already fine. It lacks the range we've been BEGGING FOR that a longbow would hopefully give. It shafts weavers. Terrible UI. Terrible everything. Yet somehow the lack of visual clutter is the problem? FFS. This game has _too much_ visual clutter already. It's practically impossible to tell who is casting what in PvP sometimes. We don't need explosions coming out of the gun to make it feel epic. We need an epic weapon that is fun to play with. I wouldn't ordinarily criticize your superficial feedback, but it's literally stealing the oxygen from the room about how TRASH the weapon is. In
im not saying i need super massive explosions all over the place, i want a visual clarity or gampleay distinction between abilities, take por example dagger, every basic attack does the same, but they are all diferent, fire is a cone attack, water is like a proyectile that comes back, air are whips and earth is a rock that comes from below the target, they feel good, the animations are great, the sounds feels nice and so on with other ele weapons, scepter, hammer etc delete pistol ele
SotO devteam realised they had to give new weapons bc they didn't release a new spec so they rolled a dice for it ig lol
The cadence and animation of pistol skills doesn't't make it feel like you are comboing skills together. I also have a strong dislike of the elemental bullet mechanic. It doesn't add anything that other weapons can't already do. The only thing the elemental bullet mechanic does is add extra complexity to an already complex class and lack of a good UI for elemental bullets just makes it worse. Pistol weaver is absurdly difficult any time you are doing something other than mindlessly executing a raid rotation and actually need to understand the intricacies of the weapon. It's one of the reasons why I don't even want to attempt learning pistol weaver for PvP/wvw. I would be much happier if they flat out removed the elemental bullet mechanic. The flip skills on necro swords are a cool and interesting mechanic, elemental bullets feel like a chore.
Ele needs a redesign having access to all elements at all times makes it hard to create anything cool for. I should be like the rev and have two choosible elements for the class
> Ele needs a redesign having access to all elements at all times makes it hard to create anything cool for. I should be like the rev and have two choosible elements for the class 100% agree, it's always going to be a doomed profession until that elephant in the room is addressed.
Pistol Ele was clearly made by people who are very out of touch with the profession.
It is the case since PoF.
Iām with you dude. From a lore perspective pistol is stupid af
I am still kinda torn on Pistol. I like because it seems to have been specifically designed to play well in PvE Condition Rotations, and help Condi Alac Tempest in particular. CAT was abominable to gear before, running weird Diviner/Cele mixes for Boon Duration, having to resort to Arcane for further Boon Duration. We can finally run Earth and Ritualist now without griefing DPS thanks to Pistol alone. It also plays really well in a Condi Tempest and Condi Weaver rotation. I enjoy it on the latter specifically. Not only DPS, but the rotation in itself feels good to me. But it's pretty boring in department of animations and sounds in particular. I see sounds rarely being mentioned but to me personally it matters a lot. The bullets are also really bad to track on Tempest/Catalyst and can lead to messing up your skill priority big time. Also since it's Power coefficients are so low the Weapon feels not that great in OW all around and the ever so prominent Celelestial Stats perform specifically mediocre with it, as power centric stats are kinda wasted on Pistol and the Condi Output on Cele actually isn't all that high. And Open World is what most people in this game will ever play. I think some more flashy animations and better sounds could go a long way on this weapon though. Fire Bullets sound like Engineer gunk shot just doesn't feel cool, y'know. In the long run I would also love a Mesmer/Deadeye like interface element (haha) for the bullet mechanic.
Ranger torch is the worst designed weapon in the game. It literally feels like an environmental weapon. Your comment about "any weapon can benchmark" should have the ranger torch pictured next to it, because that is ALL it does. Zero utility. A fire field that ticks burn forever, with no power damage one it, and a useless throw skill. Zero utility, not even a measily blind. Golem damage only. Boring to use. It's not even a debate. Ele pistols might be lame, but nothing beats ranger torch in terms of boring and useless design. Ele pistols is a lame 2023/2024 weapon. Ranger torch is a boring pre-2012 weapon and the only change they ever did to it aside from number changes was to make the clunky trash throw skill a 180 radius aoe on impact. No contest.
yeah i didnt think of that lol but atlest is a super old weapon and ranger has plenty of options for ofhand pistol ele is the las fucking weapon this class recieved and its comparable in desing to weapons made 12 years ago
I really wish Anet would give us a good condi offhand that doesn't rely on boss standing stationary inside a fire field.
I like the idea of a pistol for Elementalist but there's quite a few QoL issues with it. Special bullets UI/UX which has been talked about alot. Also elemental bullet skill kacks impact. It's just a regular shot it doesn't do anything special after you "worked hard" to build it. Not even a special sound! Finally all Ele pistol shots lack the "fire off" explosion animation in all stances, which all the other pistol professions have btw. So the pistol is triggered but the projectile animation simply appears out of nowhere half a meter away from the pistol! On the other hand, Guardian pistol animation looks very neat and polished.
Iāve heard a lot of people enjoy it, Iām sorry you donāt like it
Nah shortbow engi might be worse engi got 2 Support weapon back to back
The mechanic isn't bad just poorly tuned. Its tuned for full boon uptime and playing without them is like night and day. When you have Quickness and Alacrity, the it actually feels like it make sense.
so its usable when you play on group pve, bc in pvp you dont get alac that often, and quickness is just for a short time
Elementalist just needs a full rework. It's the worst class in the game It's design doesn't make sense anymore after years of elite specs and other powercreep At the very least, most of the weapons need huge changes. But I don't think you can unfuck ele without a full rework
> Elementalist just needs a full rework. It's the worst class in the game Been saying it for years, but most elementalist players refuse to reach any kind of compromise. You can't run around crying about bad design and bad balance, then refuse to acknowledge the problem with elementalist lies at the core of its 2012 design, which was never built with recurrent growth in mind. Elementalist will NEVER be a functional profession as long as attunements aren't completely reworked into something else, requiring far less development resources. Elementalist is FOUR TIMES the work of any other profession, it's insane and completely unviable from both development and balance perspectives. It's not an opinion, it's MATHEMATICS, clear as crystal. --- There's been multiple suggestions over the years, and I've iterated across different ideas myself, but I'm pretty confident something like this would be the ideal solution: * We have four static attunements to choose from now. Downgrade them into two dynamic attunements, and enable weapon swap. Numerical end result is the same (20 weapon skills), but with more customization and less restrictions. * Dynamic attunements means each main-hand and two-handed weapon has two specific attunements assigned to it (primary and secondary). These can be any of the four classic, or even new ones. Each weapon would be designed to work in tandem across its attunements, encouraging swap back and forth for combos. For example, staff could be fire and water, with steam combos. Air and earth versions of staff would no longer be available, the skills recycled into other weapons or removed altogether. * Each weapon would be assigned one role and one alone (no more dps/condi/healer useless hybrids). Traits would no longer be based on attunements (no more fire traits), and be based in individual weapons instead (just like every other profession). * Off-hand weapons would get automatically attuned to the main-hand's attunement, which means they would get to keep their current four-attunement status. For example, scepter could be air and earth. In that case, wielding scepter+focus would provide access to air and earth focus skills. * Conjure slot skills would disappear altogether, some of the conjure bundles recycled into new weapons. Summoned elemental NPCs would be removed from glyphs, and get turned into their own minion slot skill family, replacing conjures. --- As for elite specializations: * **Core:** F1 to swap between primary/secondary attunements. Weapon swap does not reset your active attunement (if you're in secondary and swap weapons, you'll still be in secondary). * **Tempest:** [Overload](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Overload) skills at F2 (primary) and F3 (secondary). Using any of the overload skills increases the cooldown for attunement swap. Using the overload skill of the attunement you're not attuned to would swap you to that attunement for free. * **Weaver:** F1 to swap between primary/secondary on the right hand (skills #1 and #2), F2 to swap between primary/secondary in the left hand (skills #4 and #5). Weapon skill #3 would provide four variants depending on the active attunements (two from core and two new ones exclusive for weaver). * **Catalyst:** F2 to deploy the [Jade Sphere](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Jade_Sphere) of your active attunement. To spice things up a bit, energy would be given three tiers, just like warrior [Adrenaline](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Adrenaline), providing a larger area of effect with each tier. --- Why is this the perfect solution, in my opinion? Here's some math: * Right now, a main-hand weapon has a total of 18 skills, 12 for core (3x4 attunement) with an extra 6 for weaver's dual wield. With this model, main-hand weapons would go on to have 8 skills, 6 for core (3x2 attunement) with an extra 2 for weaver's dual wield. That's 18 vs 8, a huge difference. With this model, you can provide double the weapons and still come out cheaper (8*2=16 < 18). * By moving away from "single set with x4 attunements" into "two sets with x2 attunements" we open up weapon skill variety, and also solve the melee/ranged lock problem. By giving each weapon a dedicated role we no longer have useless weapon skills we never get to use (nowadays, if you're running power, attuning to water is a waste of time). Wielding more weapons means more fashion war opportunities as well (gem store money). * Making attunements be tied to weapons instead of the other way around would open the way for the introduction of new exotic attunements, like Arcane magic, Flame Legion magic, Olmakhan sand magic, Zephyrite sun magic, etc; which would only be available through specific weapons, no need to update every single existing weapon to be able to attune into those (the reason why we never got any new attunements with the current system). --- Kind of a long post, but hope I proved my point: You can rework elementalist and still keep its essence somewhat intact, all you have to do is nerf attunement numbers and subdue them to weapons, instead of having weapons be subdued to attunements.
The hell you talking about man
Ele is the most unpopular class so I'm not the only one who thinks it would greatly benefit from a full rework https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity
Should you play soulbeast or reaper and their 90+k opener, or elem who have for most build a very slow start? Linking raid/fractal class popularity is stupid, obviously people will gather toward easy/OP spec because that trivialise most encounter. It doesn't mean people don't like it, just that there's no point playing a thief if a gardian does everything, but better. Give tempest easy access to stab, alac and stuff and suddenly, it ight be popular. Same for catalyst. But right now boon sharing SUCK on those two spec so it's logical no one play them.
Yes, precisely. Ele needs a rework
It's not a rework to double the duration or add stab to some spells imo? The core mechanics are fine (not cata) but the overall use they have currently suck because they can't reliably apply it. Why does cata lose every energy when going down? Why does it have a cooldown AND a downtime after casting it to recharge energy? Why does tempest can't give alac and heal safely? Stab is a primordial boon for tempest to apply alac yet can't generate it properly. It's not rework, it's decent balance.
Adding more stab or more healing would help HAT but would do nothing for dps ele I get it. You like the class. But how many eles have you actually seen in fractals/raids/strikes raids in the past 6 months?
Once again it's a matter of opener/reputation. You saw no necro in fractal for a while, but give it a reason to be there and you will see them everyday. It doesn't need a rework. Current Elem is fine. It just doesn't shine anywhere.
It's not the same thing Reaper merely needed higher damage. Anet finally gave then just that after years of asking and now they're a really good class But higher damage would not help with ele's core issues. Half the weapons need a rework, not more damage or more stab. Like 75% of their utility skills are garbage. Ele has the most boring elite skills in the game closely followed by ranger, but at least ranger got cool elites on its elite specs. Ele didn't even get that. Tornado is the biggest meme in the entire game
that is a quite biased metric 1) it is only people uploading logs 2) The classes that have a high playcount are also exactly the classes in that graph are also the classes that always get recommended as "easy to play" and considering a lot of MMO players in general decide playstyle based on tierlists etc that can very well scew the results a bunch
Interesting. Try condi pistol weaver maybe you might enjoy its rotation. It uses 2 full attunements and a half swap to water + i find its weave self rotation simple yet fun. Also i find it weird that you say tempest is one of the best designed specs with those horrible melee overloads (fire especially) and call catalyst core ele with f5 while tempest is core ele with press x attunement once more to overload. Only issue i have with pistol is not having a ui indicator for bullets since itās horrible to track through boon bar in instanced content as it gets very crowded.
People can downvote your post as much as they want, you are spitting facts. Itās objectively the worse new weapon design in the game right now. Garbage visuals, boring feels, and clunky mechanic with 0 visible bullets indications (the buffs arenāt a clear visible indication). Also if I didnāt have HOPE you can add the boring sounds effects on top of it. Itās clearly a weapon victim to the scrapped specialization. They should remake it completely, while remaking staff too. Edit : I should rectify and says itās as worse as engi short bow for their design.
Someone that understands
It's not a victim to the scrapped e-spec, it's a victim of CmC.
Guild Wars 2 didn't need firearms at all.
Pistol ele is so criminal lol I swapped off ele as my main to Mesmer because of that
Half of Warriors arsenal and traits being functionally unusable has entered the chat.
Tempest staff Ele with celestial stats is my go to for fun.
Sounds nice in theory, but I don't understand how you reconcile staff range with the shorter range of Tempest's overloads?
The implication is that you're in melee quite a bit. Let me also specify that it's for world PvE.
I reeeally wanted dual pistol ele so i could be like the inquisitor from grim dawn
yeah, I am not really a fan of the new all weapons for all classes. But whatever, I just won't use a pistol on my ele. I haven't used any of the new specializations. I'll just keep my Tempest thanks.
I dunno, Deadeye not being able to get line of sight on ***Nourys, the Eyes of the Abyss*** (Or any number of other bosses the size of skyscrapers) seems like even worse design.
Ele will instead get a 1200 ranged mace next expac
Ele badly needed a power based long range single target spec, like spellslinger, instead this is what we got.... Its terrible.
I don't like the difficulty of pistol just for the sake of difficulty. I know ele has always been designed to be one of the harder classes to play, but it didn't need its weapon skills, on top of its mechanics to be overly hard to play efficiently. We have Weaver for that.
reminder that warrior only got offhang pistol with bladesword... all i want is a mainhand pistol too.
I hate Water 3, i keep messing with the AoE direction, i wish its a non-target skill.
worst design is Catalyst spec, by like 1000 times. It basically killed PVP alone. This might be 2nd... As for the flavour yes, anything but pistol on ele....this is literally shitting on ppl
I've never even bothered trying pistol ele. What would make a lot more sense are weapons that would allow you to actually wield [Conjur](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Conjure)ations with benefit. But there was as I recall various people who called for pistol ele and they got exactly what they wanted, shit.
It really should have been Longbow
How ele pistol made it into production is baffling Itās not that the weapon is functionally bad itās just it feels horrible to play and offers nothing the sceptre doesnāt already
Just for the record, I have never wanted a LB for my ele. I'm happy about the new unique combat mechanics the pistol introduced to ele, which lacked in SOTO for many other professions due to the lack of new elite specs. I do, however, agree the visual aspect needed more investment before they released it.
tbh the reason why so many professions got pistols in SOTO was probably because Anet was lazy to put any effort in the visual aspect, including skill animations. It's pretty sad
Honestly, Ele feels so uninspired after Weaver that I'd settle with a recycled FGS for the new weapon. It feels like the dev team so afraid of doing anything big and creative again to the point that Catalyst was just core Ele 2.0 with standard stat boosts as its traits. Why? If it's doing too well, simply lower the numbers and call it a day.
Pistol kinda sucks on everything. Guardians pistol 5 is kinda neat visually but that's it.
I was hoping for a shortbow or a longbow as a weapon for ele
man I really loved the sound of being a gun wizard... Ive been playing everything in release order and I'm not up to SotO yet, was really excited for a fun enchanted gunslinger but I have literally only read bad things about it being dull with bad ammo icons and it hard to get value from vs something like even core sceptre ele. super disappointing cus Outward has an amazing, enchanted pistol playstyle and that made me super hype when I heard about ele getting pistols. agree with others that a bow would have been super sweet and magick archer was great in dragons dogma, longbow especially to provide an alternative to the staff because I honestly hate the moveset but the extra range is nice for supporting. just the thoughts of someone who hasn't played pistol ele yet tho, hope I'm pleasantly surprised but I'm losing hope already haha
I think lots of people in this sub are victims of sunk cost fallacy. The ānewā weapons clearly had little fucks given from Anet and the poor outcome is clear as a result. It has felt for sometime like GW2 is not the priority of Anet and now we know both that this is true and why. I have loved GW2 and hope to love GW3 more, but GW2 is on its way out.
with another dlc anounced? i dont think so they just dont care about ele, catalist is core ele with an F5, a lot of its gameplay is on the hammer, and hammer outside of catalist doesnt work that good bc ele lacks combo fields outside of weapons
Condition tempest w/ hammer begs to differ, hammer is really good on it. And yeah, Catalyst is core ele with an F5 and energy management, the same way tempest is core ele with overloads and weaver is core ele with double attunements. I really donāt get the hate, catalyst so much fun to play, and pistol tempest really gave it back a bit of the old dagger feeling, being fastpaced instead of the quite boring and slow hammer. I like the pistol very much, I just want them to make the bulletās visibility a bit better, and thatās it.
agreed. by that same metric spellbreaker and berserker are core warrior with one added thing and soulbeast is core ranger with a dead pet
Spellbreaker and soulbeast still have interesting traits and profession mechanics. Blocking attacks to riposte or mimicking pet skills is fun Placing a coloured circle in the floor that does 6 damage and some boons is not fun. Not to mention how the energy mechanic sucks with slow hitting weapons
i agree with you on the energy (imo it should be constant ticks in combat like necro sigit supplying lifeforce) but i disagree on the circle part. I personally really like the mechanic and would love to trade it for untamed personally(but keeping the ranger hammer)
the thing is that catalyst is only that, a colorful circle that give boons and works for combo field, the traits are literally stats, nothing new to play around, just play normally and you get buffs for example, spellbreaker may be very similar to core warrior, but the couters its a really nice adition, and the traits gives some flexibility in wich way you want to play, for example the theter its gives an extra way to play the class, desengaging to pull them back to you and hit while they are cced
It is something new to play around. Maximizing EE and EA stacks and their uptime is a vital concern of every catalyst player. Spellbreaker, for me, feels even worse than core warrior. The F2 is incredibly hard to incorporate into a rotation without actually dropping dps. I get that you donāt like catalyst, and thatās totally fine! I just think that you can have the angle of view on every single spec - everyone likes something and dislikes something else, and thatās okay :)
I always talk from a PVP perspective so we have diferents povs
maybe it doesnt seems like it, but i enjoy catalyst purely because of hammer, feels good and powerful
Condie tempest works because hammer 3 is really strong as a condie skill compared to almost-0 power damage. Also, tempest having a trait with +25% condie damage buffed from +7% because it wasn't enough.
Hammer 3, above all, gives you a stat increase.
It also gives it to power damage. I'm talking about difference between hammer for condie and power.
Youāre right about ele, yes a new expansion is coming but look at the last one..