Guild Wars 2

I have a level 42 ele and so far I have used her purely as a fire mage. From the guides and suggestions I have seen around the forums to be effective I should be switching between talents during my battles.

Does anyone know of a youtube video that would be a good demonstration of this, preferably with comments?

So far I have done fine just soloing but would always like to be better, particularly if I group her up.

Thanks for any suggestions

I don’t have a video, but here’s some advice just to get your feet wet:

Basically, use up all/most of your skills in a given element, then swap to another, drop all those skills, swap to another…

As you get more experienced, you’ll memorize which skills are in which elements, and go from just spamming everything you have to playing more strategically, but the key is understanding that each spell has its own cooldown; I can drop [Fire 5] and immediately switch to [Water 5] if that’s what I need. By swapping elements, you can fill dead space between, say, fire spells with a more useful combination of other elements, instead of just depending on auto-attack. Once you get very good, you’ll have an awareness of “Is Meteor Shower up yet? If I swap to Water and drop Frozen Ground, then should I swap back to fire?”

Options, man, options. Flexibility is what an ele is good at, and you have more situational spells at your disposal in combat than most characters. Best thing you can do to start is familiarize yourself with all of your spells by using them, so that you can learn when to use them.

I hope that helps!

This isn’t so much a guide as a demonstration, and the videos aren’t as good as they could be. But hopefully this helps a bit:

Level 12 ele soloing a level 16 veteran
Level 80 ele soloing a champion

Essentially, keep in mind that elementalist is a kiting class. Every weapon you have (with the exception of the Lightning Hammer conjure) is ranged, even daggers. While you’ll still be stacking in dungeon speedruns and min/max settings, you’ll usually want to be just out of reach of your enemy in other situations.

Every attunement on elementalist has at least one skill that will either a) put distance between yourself and your enemy, and/or b) slow your enemy down so you can stay several steps ahead of them. There will also be a few skills that deal straight damage, and other skills that cripple the enemy’s attacking power if they do get the chance to attack you. You will be switching attunements to get access to skills that will help you most in the current situation- if an enemy gets to close, you cycle some skills to slow them down and get distance, or if they’re about to hit you, you counter with Obsidian Flesh or Shocking Aura.

That’s a very surface description of attunement swapping- there’s more to it than that, but hopefully what I’ve said so far makes sense.

An additional note on kiting. Kite in circles not straight lines! This allows you to kite while keeping the enemy in AoEs.

Sometimes you should be swapping constantly (especially if you have the Elemental Attunement trait), other times you might sit in one, yet other times you will be swapping things change. That will depend on whether you are going for a more reactionary play style or preemptive and the weapon set you are using.

I find this to be a decent description of playing an elementalist.

The key to mastering these techniques is to comprehend them and not simply rigidly memorising them. Once the essence of the swordplay is grasped, the swordsman can use it in endless forms and variations, hence the swordplay is said to take no fixed sequence or pattern. During combat, the less the swordsman remembers, the less restricted he is by the original stances. He is thus able to use his own custom form of the swordplay.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugu_Qiubai

Thanks for the pointers all! It gives me a better idea on how to play the class properly.