Guild Wars 2

To Awesome Players of GWs:

My elementalist is currently level 15 but I haven’t spent any utility and trait skills for the moment. I’ve been reading various different forums and other website guides for info about how to best have an effective elementalist for PWE and WvW. I’m currently considering a build that goes for offense and healing abilities.

What do you guys think? XD

As an ele I mostly play as a support with staff. Very helpful for both large PvE events and WvW.

Utility skills: personally I love cantrips, they’re very useful for survivability, and arcane wave I love for being a blast finisher for my own combo fields.
You get quite a lot of skill points though, by lvl 47 I got all the skills I want and I’ve just been spending all my skill points to unlock all the rest. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

As for traits: don’t be afraid to experiment either. Every time you get a new trait tier/book your traits are reset and you can re-assign. Also, trainers provide trait respeccing for hardly any cash. I think a friend of mine said it was 2 silver when he was lvl 70.
Arcane is a very useful trait tree imo, giving and extending boons, Water and Earth are very useful for survivability too, and I especially like the first minor trait in water which gives passive healing when in water attunement to you and all nearby allies. With one of the arcane minor traits it also lasts some time after you switch out of water again.

Thank you El Nazgir, for your wise advice, I was afraid that when I apply points to my traits it would be irreversible, is that the same thing for the utility skills? Can you reset utility skills as well?

Also, currently, my main weapon is a staff as I see I do quite a lot of damage during PvE events. But as we can expect, the staff weaponry slows down your casting time and longer recharge time. So I always have to run and heal since I get hit with a large sum of damage.

You can’t reset your skill points, but you will earn A LOT more than you need by the time you hit 80, so nothing will truly be wasted.

In general, I use a scepter and dagger when fighting on my own or in small groups, and a staff when doing events with lots of people. The scepter is faster casting and lets you be more mobile. The staff is great when you have the luxury of others holding aggro while you stand back and let loose with slow but powerful artillery strikes.

For utility skills, the first one I chose was Glyph of Elemental Power since it enhances all your skills. Arcane Wave/Blast/Power are great when you need to spike an opponent quickly. And as El Nazgir said, if you pick a utility skill that’s a blast finisher you can use it to create your own combos off your AoE fields (Lava Font, Static Field, Frozen Ground, etc).

For traits, remember that you have separate trait builds for PvE and PvP, and you can freely change your PvP build as often as you like. For PvP, I focus on Air, Earth and Arcane; in PvE I focus on Fire, Water and Arcane.

Thank you for your input, Maximus Delion, I did confirm with one of my guild mates that, even if your capped at level 80, you will still earn utility skill points and eventually you’ll be able to use numerous utility skills as you are able.

My second choice was the scepter, I tried it once and as you said it is very mobile, I use the staff because of the high damage…but as my level increases and monsters are harder to kill, strategy and logic dictates, that I should switch to scepter weaponry and use the Glyph of Elemental Power, and the dagger route. XD

For traits I used arcane blast/wave whichever the Aoe one is, and I personally really enjoyed signet of earth I think it’s called, passive is increased toughness and you can activate it for a stun, this is great in pvp as toughness and suns are always helpful.

I really like Lightning Flash as my WvW stunbreaker, using a staff there. In PvE I often run dual daggers so I like the Frost Bow there for times I really shouldn’t be in melee. It’s also great for controlling group event mobs with long-duration chill if fired point blank.

Arcane Wave pretty much never leaves my bar because of its blast finisher status.

maru.7268:

Thank you for your input, Maximus Delion, I did confirm with one of my guild mates that, even if your capped at level 80, you will still earn utility skill points and eventually you’ll be able to use numerous utility skills as you are able.

My second choice was the scepter, I tried it once and as you said it is very mobile, I use the staff because of the high damage…but as my level increases and monsters are harder to kill, strategy and logic dictates, that I should switch to scepter weaponry and use the Glyph of Elemental Power, and the dagger route. XD

How exactly is a scepter good for levelling? Take fire for example…Dragon’s Tooth is a good ability provided your target doesn’t move which is hardly ever the case for soloing. Same goes for Phoenix…other Scepter abilities just have lower damage.

I really dont see the appeal of scepter at all.