Guild Wars 2

Ok, I have hit a little bit of a wall with my build. From level probably 5 to level 65, I was using Dagger/Dagger with a ton of condition damage. I cannot remember off the top of my head what my traits were but I am pretty sure it went something like 0/0/20/20/10 ( I have not bought my book yet)

What I am wanting to do is build my ele to do damage in PvE. Everybody that I have talked to in the game, including my guild, and some elitist elementalists tell me to go Staff for PvE, But I cannot seem to make any progress when I use staff.

I am just kinda looking for opinions on how to build this ele to use a staff in PvE and be good at it. This includes traits, what kind of gear, and the rotation of my skills. I am just kinda learning to play the ele so I am not too sure even what the combos are and how to use them.

I am a total Ele n00b, please forgive me.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-DPS-Elementalist-Builds-for-PvE

I never got into staff, I think if you want to do damage go scepter/dagger. You have decent mobility, some nice combos and .. a good amount of damage with some healing.

I run full celestial bunker staff ele and I highly recommend it for PvE and WvW. Traits are 0/X/X/30/30 with cantrip mastery, aquamancer’s alacrity, cleansing water, arcane mastery, blasting staff, and elemental attunement (no I don’t use evasive arcana, I don’t PvP). Utilities are arcane wave and cantrips.

My standard combo against monsters is, in rapid succession: Air 2, Earth 2, Water 2 and 4, Fire 2 and 3 and arcane wave. Add meteor shower at the end if necessary. This combo will waste anything that’s not a vet in typically one rotation. It takes some setup but everything goes off at once and the monsters just melt. Unless you want to trait for the boring Lava-Font-All-Day dps build, running staff effectively requires a fair bit of attunement dancing.

Your primary combos focus around Earth 2 paired with either Water 4 or Fire 2. Eruption is a blast finisher (and a very powerful one) so you’ll make area frost aura or area might with those respectively. Arcane wave can be used to blast any field you want; very useful to pop off more healing with water 3 and 5. Remember that when things get tough, you have many many methods of keeping enemies at bay: Fire 4, Water 4, Air 3 and 5, Earth 4 and 5. Those latter two are my favorites and you’ve got time after dropping eruption to hit one of them before you finish the blast with lava font etc. Alternately if you run glyphs you can drop glyph of storms after eruption.

Note that your auto-attacks are more or less useless. Your #2 skills are going to be your primary damage dealers. Water and Earth 2 in particular hit very hard and have low cooldowns.

Let me know if you need any more help! Good luck.

Staff is by no means the best PvE weapon choice, however some people prefer it for lvling mainly to kite mobs for whatever reason, fire attunement skills offer good offensive support and water attunement is probably best for heals if you’re in a tight spot (water 3/5 mostly). Probably another good reason is its the only weapon set for ele that offers lightning field with air attunement (#5). If you blast into this field it is possible to achieve perma-swiftness which is especially useful if you have map exploration in mind. Pairing staff Air #4 and #5 together, whilst blasting said field with skills such as Arcane Brilliance/Wave greatly helps to serve this purpose.

My recommendation is to experiment with different weapon sets, mainly scepter and focus. Not together per se, though S/F isn’t a bad choice either—though its mainly used in dungeons and groups, for its might stacking purposes. However my point is that dual daggers is not very useful for PvE, it has its uses more in WvW. For lvling I myself used D/D till most of my lvls, started to incorporate scepter only very late. Now as a lv80 trying for map completion I will rely on staff more and more simply because it gives swiftness and heals, both very useful when running around. Though I would say in cases when you are actually fighting mobs, u should try a combo like dagger/focus. Dagger main-hand has better sustained dps than scepter main-hand, at least from what I’ve observed so far.

I play a staff ele. Solo can be a bit hard, but if you bring earth elementals soloing in PvE is really easy (even the lesser earth golem will work well). I am running carrion, and I essentially just bleed everything to death with eruption/ burn with signet of fire (keep in mind that 1200 range is outside of agro and they do not react until they are hit, not when you put it under their feet).

keep in mind that eruption has a delay, so you need to be in earth first then switch to the field you want to combo.

also if you are going condition consider bringing the frost bow, freezing (5) then ice storm (4) will pretty much bleed most creatures to death.

If I had to think of the biggest difference between staff and dagger it would be the staff gambles on a few big hitting spells, while the DD is spamming hard hit spells out. the general pace should slow down.