User:Quizzical/Ytterbium

It is well-known that elementalists have four elements to choose from: fire, water, earth, and air. That elementalists should normally pick exactly one to put a maximum attribute point investment into follows from attribute point restrictions. Try to max two and you have only six attribute points left over, which provides very little for energy storage or a secondary profession. Elementalists need energy, so that approach usually isn't viable.

Suppose that you have two skills, neither of which have any recharge time. You can make skills A and B each do 50 damage, or you can make one (of your choice) do 60 damage and the other do 30. The latter is nearly always the better option, as you can simply spam the 60 damage skill and ignore the 30, instead of being stuck doing only 50 damage with each attack. An elementalist who tries to divide between two (or more) elements without maxing either is effectively choosing the former option, and unable to use any element to its full effectiveness.

So let's examine the options. Water magic gives you an array of +armor enchantments, slowing hexes, knockdowns, miss chance, blind, anti-signet, a quite powerful anti-fire ward, and, of course, damage. That is a lot of ways to limit the damage output of a lot of different types of mobs.

Earth has quite an array of wards, as well as other blocking skills, blinding skills, knockdowns, slowing hexes, weakness, anti-crit, and, of course, damage. Wards can harass not just a single mob, but all mobs in an area, and a number of the non-ward earth skills do this, too.

Air has quite a lot of blinding skills and knockdowns, as well as weakness and an interrupt. A lot of air skills not merely do damage, but have armor penetration. Some air stuff is more situational, but there are a number of cases where it is highly useful, most notably when you need to keep something perpetually blinded.

And that leaves fire, which has damage skills, more damage skills, damage by burning, area damage, area damage over time, and just for variety, even more damage skills. More to the point, fire doesn't have much else. There are a couple knockdown skills, both of which cause exhaustion and have very long cast times, so at best you knock down a few mobs at somewhat random times.

So instead of bringing useful skills that keep the party alive, the fire elementalist seeks to stand there trading hits with mobs. He must rely on the rest of the party to do all of the work to keep the party alive, without contributing much himself. In easy mode, mobs aren't terribly strong, so you can perhaps get away with this. In hard mode, if you just try to trade hits with mobs, the mobs will often win. A pure fire nuker can't do anything to avoid this.

In water, earth, and air, elementalists have three elements that can be incredibly useful in helping a party get through a wide variety of tricky spots. Fire is not one of the three. And not coincidentally, fire seems to be by far the most heavily used element.

Sure, you can go fire to nuke things when you want to just cruise through something easy. But for such easy things, you'd probably be able to get through just fine with a completely empty skill bar. In many missions, winning as fire mainly serves to prove that a group could beat the mission shorthanded.

An elementalist who always goes fire and never learns to use the other elements hasn't learned to play his own class in a useful manner. This is how to get stuck begging for runs through areas that aren't really all that hard.