Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing this game for over a year now and my main is an ele. However, I can’t get to grips with how combo finishers and combo fields work. I use a staff on my ele if that helps. Can anyone give me some tips?

Check this table from the wiki page : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo#Combo_effects

Every combo field have a specific effect for each combo finisher, read that table and see what effect you want and then check your skill descriptions to see which one produces the field and finisher you want.

Like your staff #2 on fire produce fire field, and your staff #2 on earth produce blast, so with that you get AoE might

This like shows specifically the combos you can do as ele: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Table_of_elementalist_combo_skills

Ninja’d, but the following might interest you.

One issue with Ele staff is that it is light on finishers. Staff Eles are more reliant on others to provide the finisher than, say, a Scepter/Dagger Ele. This is primarily an issue in solo play, or in groups that aren’t coordinating. Staff Ele Combos are very useful in WvW herd play, where the finishers can be applied to apply might, swiftness, chill and healing.

Fields and finishers are basically a two-step process.

First, a field is laid down using a skill. There are several kinds of combo fields which will depend on the field used – fire, water and light fields are the most common, but there’s also smoke, chaos, poison and dark fields (and maybe a couple others I can’t think of right now). They are AoE, and a small indicator is that the borders of the AoE circles will have little puzzle piece shapes rising from them. It will also be indicated in the tooltip of your skills.

Now, a combo field on its own won’t do a thing other than what the skill does. This is where combo finishers come in.

A lot of different skills are combo finishers, divided in different types: projectile, whirl, leap and blast finishers are the ones I can think of right now and should cover the majority. This will also be indicated in the tooltip. If a combo finisher is used in a combo field, it will cause a special effect depending on both the type of field and the type of finisher.

A concrete example: as a staff elementalist, your second skill on fire attunement (Lava Font) is a fire field. If you were to switch to earth attunement and cast skill 1 (which is a projectile finisher) over the still-active lava font, your attack would cause burning. If you instead used earth 2 or Arcane Wave (which are blast finishers), you would instead give everyone in proximity 3 stacks of might.

Similarly, you could go in water and use skill 5 to create a water field, which would give regen when crossed by a projectile or an area heal if blasted.

The best way, in my opinion, to learn about combos is to pick just one and practice it. It doesn’t have to be meta or that powerful — the goal is to get used to the idea of chaining particular skills for the combo.

Once you’ve nailed one combination, you can branch out to more complicated rotations, such as throwing down several finishers on the same field or teaming up with party members. Once you can do that , the various guides and wiki articles covering combos will make sense. (Just about every profession subforum here has a sticky that includes combos and all the guides at dulfy, gw2dungeons, etc also have the details you want for “advanced combos”.)

For staff elementalist, I recommend starting with these two easy ones:

• In fire, Lava Font (staff-2) + Arcane Wave, for fire field + blast finisher = AoE might.
• In water, Healing Rain (staff-5) _or+ Geyser (staff-3) + Arcane Wave, for water field + blast finisher = AoE heal.

Once you feel comfortable with those, you can make things more interesting:

• Start your field (in fire or water)
• Swap to Earth and use Eruption (staff-2).

That’s an extra blast that can be applied on top of the field for an extra burst.

Obviously, there are many other combos that you can (and should) use regularly. I picked those because they seem to be easy for folks to add to their skill rotations, even for those who aren’t comfortable with GW2 combat.

Once you learn those (or any other combo), you can review guides and start developing your own rotation or imitating the meta effectively.

Good luck.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

SMOKE: (enigineer/thief)
smoke+ blast = invis
smoke+ projectile = blind?? (not sure)

WATER: (engineer, elementalist,ranger)
water + blast = aoe heal
water + projectile = healing bolt

FIRE (warrior, guardian, elementalist, ranger, engineer)
fire + blast = might
fire+ prjectile = burning projectile
fire+ leap = fire aura

LIGHTNING (Elementalist, ?)
lightning + blast = swiftness

DARK (Necro, Thief)
dark fields + blast = weakness

LIGHT (Necro, Guardian)
light fields + blast = retaliation
light+ projectile = condi cleansing
light+ leap = retaliation

CHAOS (Mesmer)
chaos+ blast = AoE chaos armor
chaos+ leap = chaos armor (tend to be usefull on condi warriors)
chaos + projectile = confusion

Which are the main ones I know…

I really hate the light one though with blast, as it is used often Guard Staff #3 in combination with static fields (ligthning)… and you want the statics to be blasted for swiftness.

Oh and I know about whirls but I tend to ignore them….

I got this from the general thread, all i have to say is it took me year and a half with S/F to learn all the classes fields and when and how to blast and what to blast. Staff is aoe weapon, you basiclly create aoe for others to blast, ele has some other nice weapon combos to be better at more efficient at blasting than staff.

For Staff Ele there are four fields that can be generated by the weapon

Fire – Used for stacking might when blasted into
Water – Creates healing effects with all finisher types
Ice – Creates Frost Auras on leaps and blasts.
Static – Grant swiftness when blasting into it.

Earth 2, Arcane Brilliance, and Arcane Wave are an easy 3 blasts to set up with your fields.

Every other weapon set has more finishers though so for the most part as a staff ele your job is to generate fields. In organised groups it also helps to call out your fields so that your team mates appropriately respond (looking at you hammer Guardian).