Guild Wars 2

Hi,

after hitting about level 70 I started to have serious trouble surviving with my elementalist. This is especially true in character story instances.

This is a typical scenario: I usually have some NPC help. We get attacked. I can either try to single target kill enemies but if I try that my NPC allies die before I can kill enough enemies and I am facing 4+ mobs. If I do AoE enemis go after me and fight becomes a survival run for me with many mobs pounding me, allies not really helping and me trying to outmaneuver several mobs. They are usually doing huge damage – it’s normal that mobs eat 1/3 of my life with one hit easily. Some more extreme go as far as 70-80 percent per hit. Almost every mistake means me being downed. It’s becoming common that I have to reset the fight by running away, often using the vapor form while being downed to get away enough.

Can someone who actually played elementalist give me advice what weapon they use at 70+ and what traits? I have not had any real issues until level 70 and I was using dual daggers.

I played 2x daggers with water + earth. Then I switched to 2x daggers with fire + air. Then I tried variants with scepter + dagger, scepter + focus, dagger + focus.

I see a problem in low damage and the fact that mobility is not helping me anymore. While I have somewhat outdated gear it shouldn’t be tragic. I consider myself a skilled player.

Here is what I see as major problems:

2x dagger: Really nice to play but Risen just follow me and pound me no matter what cc I throw at them. Maneuvring does not help anymore – I am getting damaged all the time no matter what I do.
Dagger + focus: Focus does not increase defense enough to justify the decrease in modility and dps.
Scepter: Useless. You either jump around batlefield, cc enemy and shoot them from afar which I can’t do with scepter since cc don’t work, I have to face enemies and the damage I am able to put out during the few seconds while my ccs are in place is ridiculously lowm or you just stand there and take it from enemy hoping to kill them before they kill you (you can’t do this with elementalist).
Staff: Seemsed to work for some time but when I am faced witha mix of meelee and ranged enemies I am dead.

I find my healing abilities extremly weak. It’s almost not worth switching to water attunement for healing. The only reason why I switch there is for elemental harmony regeneration bonus and chill effect.

I usually use 2 arcane skills, Elemental as elite – I use it while in water to get water elemental. For healing I use elemental harmony.

I appriciate constructive answers.

I know linking a video isn’t terribly helpful, but I can’t really offer any advice of my own, as I’ve only reached lvl 34 on my Ele. But here it is:

Skip to 11min-something for the build. It basically revolves around having various boons on at all times acquired by using cantrips and auras and the traits that give you boons when using them. The guy is using D/D. I don’t know how well it’d improve your survivability, but it seemed liked an interesting idea to me so I tried something similar to this in PvP and it seemed to work well.

Thank you, I’ll try that build.

I play dual daggers Elementalist, and I’m doing fairly well at 80 I think.
My traits:
-10 Fire (30% burning on critical)
-20 Air (+movement while in Air // 5% precision to healing)
-10 Earth (create Earth shield at 50%HP)
-30 Arcane (Gain boon on attunement swap // Gain Arcane Power at 75% // Elemental Spell on dodge)
The point of the build is to constantly swap elements for the boons. Charge in with lightning. Damage with fire. Knockdown + AoE with earth. Chill and heal with ice.

This is the thing with the elementalist I have noticed. The damage is mediocre and you are in light armor… AOE capability is good with staff but damage suffers, and duel daggers has good mobility but being a frontline fighter with light armor is rough.

Ele in light armor doing decent damage … While warriors in HEAVY armor putting out insane dps. Idk just things I have noticed. Eles need a lil work I feel.

But for questing I use the staff Offers range to help, but like you said when you have 4+ mobs and 2 of them are ranged good luck. All it takes is a few hits and eles are dead, couple that with multiple ranged opponents equals a frustrating time. I threw points into toughness and vitality to help with that but lost a lot of damage so enemies weren’t dying as quick.

Right now ele are probably the weakest class in terms of dmg output/survivability. I have faith in anet though

Imo a huge key to eles’ survivability is boon management, though I’m not quite 70+ yet (still in my 60s), prefer double daggers though practicing more with staff because I want to be better with it for WvW.

I love Elemental Attunement (protection is hands down the strongest boon in the game, keep it up as much as possible), Evasive Arcana (you can add burns, bleeds, blinds or condi removal on dodge, which if used correctly — and I’ve still not mastered it — is huge), and Cleansing Wave (remove condition on attuning to water … you get the bonus of extra regen while in water attunement).

When I have enough points I plan on taking Inscriptions again, which is another great source of protection if used while in earth attunement.

I’m going to assume you slot a stun break, but if not, you absolutely should. Also don’t neglect food buffs … they don’t seem like much at low levels but as soon as level 50ish you can get +50 to one stat and +40 to another on the same food, which really starts to add up.

Hope this was remotely helpful.

Thank you all for your help. I tried dual daggers again but it was somewhat better but ulitmately the same story all over again.
Today has been a nightmare. Constantly downed/killed by hordes of enemies.
In my last fight I got stuck in a helicopter, downed 3 or 4 times and when some people miraculously showed up and started reviving me (thank you :-) ), the game froze. I am not enjoying GW2 anymore. I’ll return to it later.

Yeah, playing glass cannon style with D/D (or Sceptre/Dagger), fully offensive stat stacking, 30/30/0/0/0, running Arcane Bolt and Arcane Blast etc. worked up until around the level 70 areas – then I had to actually buy better equipment and transition to a more sensible build.

Overall I’ve found that stance-dancing (attunement hopping or w/e we call it) is vital to survival, gaining the boons playstyle from Arcane also makes you a lot more survivable and perhaps more efficient rather than the kind of blitz playstyle I was using.

I do feel slightly inadequate when a Warrior breezes by barely losing 1/15th of his health – looks kind of boring though.