2012-08-13, 10:58 AM
Derosis Wrote:I didn't play Mesmer, but I played Ele. Did they change wholesale? Or is it just a minor playstyle change?
Elementalists are pretty different. Your skills available are a combination of two things: Your Weapon and your Affinity. You can change either at will, however you don't get an extra weapon slot like most classes so changing weapons mid-fight can be cumbersome (Might be impossible actually now that I think of it, I can't remember if it lets you go through your inventory mid combat but I don't see why you wouldn't be able to). The Affinities are the same as they were in the past: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. They have essentially the same types of damage, but the difference between GW1 and 2 is that you can switch whenever you want, by pressing F1-4. This allows a lot more battle diversity in my opinion, because anytime you feel like switching up your moveset you have three others to go to, and then more with different weapons.
You have several weapon choices available to you, and each one seems to fit a theme of combat. For example, Staves are mostly Long-Range, High Damage nuking. Wands + Focuses are more of a Mid-Range with some DOT skills, and Daggers are short range. I don't know much about Dagger play with Eles, because I found it absolutely awful (Damage was low as hell and you're too squishy to play close range with low damage). I felt that Daggers definitely needed a buff, you should be more of a Glass Cannon in my opinion with them. I couldn't even kill a single regular mob my level by myself with Dual Daggers at about Lv.10, it was insane. I think you can do Dagger+Focus as well, and I might have missed one. I mostly went Staff, Wand and Focus during the Beta last month.
Since there's no Energy anymore, it's all cooldowns. This makes Eles a lot more powerful in my opinion, because there's no issues where you might spend too much Energy and therefore a good combo situation would be impossible, which I found happening to me a lot in GW1. Never had enough Energy when I needed it.
One of the cool things I found that they did was that some of the favorite skills, like Firestorm, are purchasable 6-8 skill slot skills. They also work with any affinity, and change based on which one you are when you use the spell. I thought that was a cool change.
Anyway, Ele is definitely way different, but I think it's a hell of a lot more fun this way.