Guild Wars 2 Open Beta - Elementalist Fire Attunement

Fire Attunement

  The fire attunement used with a staff gives a lot of AoE that makes leveling a breeze.  You can take out pretty much anything with AoE.  The NPC's aren't that smart so you can basically kite them in a small circle without too much trouble, throwing AoE down for them to stupidly walk through.  They walk right through your path of fire when you use burning retreat also.  With Meteor Shower and Lava Font and Burning Retreat you can clear 5-6+ NPCs solo without much trouble (taking damage only from ranged archers and casters).

  Using scepter/dagger was just as effective with Dragon's Tooth (targeted delayed aoe), Phoenix (linear aoe + burst), and Fire Grab (frontal cone aoe).  The only real difference is that when you're using a staff you can be farther away, which I prefer only because of the "oh shit" situations where things don't go as planned.  Scepter/Dagger and Dagger/Dagger or Dagger/Focus or Scepter/Focus don't give you the elbow room in some situations.

  The main mechanic in the Fire Attunement is a condition called burning.  Burning isn't quite as good as Bleeding because Bleeding can stack on top of itself.  Burning stacks in duration.  This makes sustain important in a PvP situation where you're utilizing burning as a source of damage because you have to be able to outlast while your opponent slowly dies.  This is much more effective of a condition to rely on for Guardians than for the Elementalist.

  Balancing this is going to be tricky because as is, fire isn't bursty enough in my opinion.  The attunement with the most burst potential is Air/Arcane with Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave in your 678 slots.  If fire is going to represent the "consistent sustained damage" attunement it needs some kind of utility, preferably a stun of some kind.  If fire is going to represent the "own your face with an explosion" attunement it needs its damaged buffed.

  Abilities like Fire Shield should mitigate some damage, or at least return as much damage as the caster takes to add some survivability.  Taking 300 burning damage when you have 20k hp isn't a sufficient deterrent to stop those melee rangers from smacking you in the face for 6k.  (Rangers wielding two handed melee weapons were extremely overpowered in the open beta).

Staff = Ground targeted AoE, no real nukes aside from Meteor Shower (which isn't guaranteed hits)
Dagger/Dagger = Close quarters frontal cone aoe, no stuns, very vulnerable, leap, Dragon's Claw does not apply burning.
Dagger/Focus = Close quarters frontal cone aoe, hard to place flamewall (easy to avoid), fire shield that does very little damage and adds no EHP.
Scepter/Dagger = Contradiction between distance casting (scepter) and close quarters burst (Fire Grab).  It's easy to apply burning, but to take advantage of the burst in Fire Grab you've got to put yourself in a bad position.
Scepter/Focus = Again, Flamewall and Fire shield are junk, but the first three abilities from Scepter are good.