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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rangda" data-source="post: 5844020" data-attributes="member: 86125">As someone whose played nothing but sorcerers for the past couple of years, my opinion is that the Elementalist is a significant power boost over the vanilla Sorcerer.Losing the blacks does hurt, but you get a lot back in return:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Useful reds.  Sorcerer reds taken as a whole 1-27 aren't all that hot.  My Sorcerers frequently end up spamming greens anyway.  Extra damage on the greens is a better use of reds as some of the below items will show.  And some of the rider effects make you a passable controller.  Blind is particularly gross, but fortunately you don't get it until the endgame. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Green spamming.  Spamming at-wills makes a whole slew of feats and items  a lot more useful.  White lotus feats become great investments as they work with 100% of your powers.  Arcane admixture + Resounding Thunder was great for even a vanilla sorcerer, for an Elementist it's possible for you to cover every area green to boost their size.  Pop a rust bark and a lightning whetstone and you become the ultimate minion sweeper.  Backlash tattoo is universally useful as every Elementalist has a basic attack.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Reagent spamming.  Thanks to the broken economy of 4e once you hit low-mid paragon you can buy near infinite reagents and you only ever need the baby ones as your powers will never be higher than L1.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Slight DPS bump.  Even straight up the Elementist has slightly better DPS than a Sorcerer.  The rider damage is higher and 3d10 @L17 is more damage than you'll get from any area red at that level.  The reduced power set makes energized superior implements more useful as you an get the bonus on most of your powers.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Focus Fire.  I think a lot of people here are missing the utility of Static Charge.  It wouldn't be my first or second at-will but it would probably be my third (maybe I'd take Burning Spray for a fire elementalist).  There's a lot of potential here to focus damage onto a single target, especially if you've got a partner that can push, pull, or slide to setup the bowling pins for you.  The biggest drawback is actually that it's enemies only; it prevents War Wizardry abuse (which is a good thing).  Even the bolt power for a fire elementist is pretty grim, 1d12 + 1d6 + CHA + CON, that's an average 18 damage per hit @L1 for an 18/18 sorcerer.  Add an incendiary dagger and that's 20 damage per hit @L1.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Stats.  Secondary stat of CON is just plain wrong.  One of the big drawbacks of Sorcerers has always been the fact that they are quite squishy, you have to buy two big stats and that leaves precious few points to dump into CON.  The Elementalist solves that problem by making CON the secondary stat.</li> </ol>There are some drawbacks, the loss of the blacks isn't so bad in heroic but will catch up to you in paragon.  All the burst 1 in 10 powers target fort which generally is the highest monster defense.  This is going to hurt DPS a bit.  The class could be a bit dull in play as you'll have precious few options (some other essential classes share this problem however).  There really isn't a good paragon path for the class (the one they wrote isn't that good, I'd probably go with either Blizzard Mage for the grossly overpowered L20 daily or Essence mage for the slight damage bump with multi-element attacks).  Although again you could say this for all Sorcerers.</blockquote>

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