Water Trident

[Gorani]

The next skill in the series of Skills of Interest features a weapon skill from the Water Magic line, which was changed quite a bit before we even got the release of GW2: Water Trident.

Water Trident

Current GW2wiki description (24th June, 2012) : Cast a water trident that damages foes and heals allies. Damage: 1x Healing: 12x of damage Radius: 180 Range: 900

Weapon	Attune.	Icon	Skill		Traits affecting the skill
Scepter	Water		Water Trident	18	Aquamancer's Alacrity - All your water weapon skills recharge 20% faster. Soothing Winds - 5% of your Precision is converted to Healing. Other traits that effect all Water Magic weapon skills.

Change-log (since March 2012)

• Was introduced as staff weapon skill with knock down ability with the profession reveal of the Elementalist 2010.
• Switched to become a Scepter skill and lost its knock down ability. A healing ability was added instead. This happened around the 2011 demo events in July & August.
• There was a trait during development of the skill, which added the small area effect of the healing, which is now a permanent addition to the skill.
• The latest revision for the 2nd BWE increased the healing from a marginal number (about of a fifth of the damage value to the current twelve times as much the damage. The damage value was almost halved during that iteration.
• During August 2012 stress tests, the recharge was reduced from 20 to 18 seconds.

Skill assessment

• Water Trident offers a better heal than before, although the healing blast still only heals about 10% of an Elementalist's health globe (it is hard to assess different levels with the limited info out there).
• It provides no self heal, unless it is used on an enemy within melee range of the caster.
• The damage it deals is almost negligible compared to other offensive skills from the scepter, but can be used more efficiently, when the foes has been softened up by e.g. Shatterstone (which is doing several stacks of Vulnerability)
• To take full effect of the "heal allies", they have to stand very close to the target, which probably does not happen a lot except on very stationary melee professions (or their weapon selection)
• In comparison to the other 3rd weapon slot skills of the scepter (Phoenix, Blinding Flash and Dust Devil), Water Trident drew the shortest stick. Phoenix does great damage + a good boon while having the same recharge time; Blinding Flash has half the recharge and a long lasting blind condition and Dust Devil can cause a very long lasting blind effect on several foes, if timed well.

The original Water Trident teaser video (begins at 01:00 min)

[Gorani]

People over at Guru are discussing whether Water Trident should be nerfed again (in conjunction with S/D burst builds). I haven't played during the last stress test to see a balancing problem.

Did you ?