Guild Wars 2

Salutations,
I have started a character, my first, who is an elementalist. I am having a rather difficult time choosing which weapon or weapons to utilise. It is my hope that somebody with more experience than I might aid me in resolving this conundrum. I do understand that in some scenarios, such as this large world combat thingamabob I may have to change my weapon. Below are some notes about the manner in which I enjoy playing.

~ I do not wish to use a focus as I find them rather aesthetically unappealing
~ I vastly prefer ranged combat to close ranged combat
~ I very much like controling (I thinks its sometimes called crowd controlling) abilities and damaging abilities
~ I have no idea which traits (I think that is what they are called) I shall utilise

Additionally I would like to ask how important weapon selection is, it seems rather important but if it is not I could just go by aesthetics, Darger and Dagger or Staff < Scepter and Dagger.

Exceeding thanks upon you for your assistance!

Edit: I would also like a mix of Area of Effect and Single Target Damage if possible.

I use Dagger Dagger for general PvE and Staff for WvW or Party PvE. I will do dungeons with staff as well and PvP.. well I don’t know.

I think Dagger Dagger or Dagger scepter have good abilities that I find really cool.
With Dagger Dagger you can use:
Earth – 4 (throws enemy to ground)
Switch to Air
Air – 5 (throws enemy to ground, take distance)
Air – 4 (get near enemy while attacking)
Switch to Fire
Dodge back (get distance)
Fire – 3 (jump through inflicting burning)

However this requires you to be near the enemy which is bad for your health so I advice staff when fighting stronger enemies or bosses if you have no one to steal your aggro.

The type of weapon you have in your hands determines how you channel the elements and what effect they have. That isnt really correct it is just how I chose to make sense of it role playing wise. So no you cannot hold any old weapon type in your hands and use whatever group of spells that you want. If yoy want to use a spell that comes from a focus you are forced to use a focus even though they are a bit ugly.

Go to your character screen and follow the options on the left till you get to the one which will show your traits (you get your first trait point at level 11) your slot skill (number 6-0 hotkeys) and the third choice which shows what each weapon does.

I believe that you want to use staff in order to get the long range and cc that you want. Dont forget to use all of the elements. So staff fire spells has one called flaming retreat which causes you to move backwards a distace very quickly. Good for escaping. Staff earth had a bubble which reflects projectiles. Lightening has a spell that will push an enemy away from you. Water can put a heal over time spell on you and drop a patch of ice which slows enemies. To mention a few. Lots are ground targeting spells so you need to be able to continue moving while also placing the spell where you want. Good luck.

Also try out the combos that you can do solo. Example casf earth #2 spell (which is a combo finishet with a delay) then cast fire #2 right on top of it. When the earth #2 goes off it will put the boon “might” on you and anyone else who is nearby.

Staff is the king of CC. As slither said, you have a host of snares, knockbacks, stuns, etc. and a modest damage output. Scepter/dagger is a bit more close-range (900 range vs 1200), but offers many defensive abilities. Both of these are great for leveling. Dagger/dagger is pretty much the meta/endgame most people go with. High damage output at in-your-face range.

In case it sheds some light, I leveled with a staff from 1-65ish, and then swapped to scepter/dagger for the added mobility and damage (in PvE, I don’t PvP outside WvW), which helped tremendously in Orr. I only picked up dagger/dagger after 80 once I had my exotic gear set so I’d have just a little more room for error as I learned to use it.

For traits, most elementalists will go with 30 in water and 30 in arcana as a staple for fast attunement swapping and added vitality (plus the trait choices that are the most useful are in those two segments). For offense, people usually go with the 10 remaining points in air, for defense in earth.

Thank You all for your help!
Will the game become very difficult if I use weapon choices that are not optimum for what I am doing?

If you are still leveling, you will probably be happiest with either staff or scepter/dagger or scepter/focus. Those kill slower than dagger/dagger but are better when you are still learning. Dagger/dagger has an in your face style of fighting that is better off with full traits and exotics. The others let you fight from further away and are more forgiving.

In big DE’s and WvW zergs I use staff. It has the best AoE orientated damage resulting in the best change of hitting all enemy’s and getting more drops.

For every else I personally use scepter dagger. Though dagger dagger is good as well.

staff: awesome AoE-damage, limited protection cause you have to kill them all at once (10 foes with 1/4th health left deal as much damage as 10 foes with full health, so AoE limits the pressure on you).

Scepter/foucs: highly orientated on protection

Dagger/dagger: This is still ranged by the way. Highly focussed on dealing damage

Scepter/dagger: hybrid, a very good damage output, but with more then enough control ability’s to keep yourself alive. The reason I use this most of the time.

I came to this through trial and error, as mentioned, I was using staff all the time and even though i was 3 levels above I couldnt do my level 23 story-line. Then I switched to scepter/dagger and was amazed. Cause I could take out my enemy’s one by one I had much more control. So if you use the weapon thats not optimum the difficulty level of the game rises.

mercury ranique.2170:

In big DE’s and WvW zergs I use staff. It has the best AoE orientated damage resulting in the best change of hitting all enemy’s and getting more drops.

For every else I personally use scepter dagger. Though dagger dagger is good as well.

staff: awesome AoE-damage, limited protection cause you have to kill them all at once (10 foes with 1/4th health left deal as much damage as 10 foes with full health, so AoE limits the pressure on you).

Scepter/foucs: highly orientated on protection

Dagger/dagger: This is still ranged by the way. Highly focussed on dealing damage

Scepter/dagger: hybrid, a very good damage output, but with more then enough control ability’s to keep yourself alive. The reason I use this most of the time.

I came to this through trial and error, as mentioned, I was using staff all the time and even though i was 3 levels above I couldnt do my level 23 story-line. Then I switched to scepter/dagger and was amazed. Cause I could take out my enemy’s one by one I had much more control. So if you use the weapon thats not optimum the difficulty level of the game rises.

The weapons do make a difference. I had a guildie complaining in chat about killing things on his ele. I asked him what he was using and he said staff. I recommended dagger/dagger since he was high level already. He came back on chat later and told me about how much faster things were dying since he switched.

I use dagger/dagger now but switch to staff for the world bosses.

So a staff is not really viable for solo PvE?

Laicamir.8617:

So a staff is not really viable for solo PvE?

Well lesser viable.

A staff is good at dealing damage to a lot of foes at the same time. Like I said earlier, 10 foes with full health deal the same amount of damage then 10 foes with 25% health. So killing all foes at once isn’t the best way to prevent being killed yourself. In situations where you can hide in a group like big events, that isnt a big issue and it helps everyone doing the event, but when fighting solo you likely find it easier to kill your foes one by one to reduce the amount of damage you recieve in total. There are however ele’s who played the game through to the end with a staff and it is totally possible.

Staff is good in PvE if you end up fighting the champions that usually draw several other players to the fight. With light armor I have found it safer to stand at a distance for the fight and use some of the skills that CC as well as do more damage while the others are on cool down, basically fire attunement 1 in my case. I generally use caution in these situations and don’t use meteor shower if there are passive mobs in the area because all this will do is add fuel to the fire, no pun intended. You can swap to water to provide a few heals to others in the fight. Earth for shock wave and to bleed immobilize and unsteady ground to cripple.

So in my opinion the staff is more of a AOE support and CC weapon that works best in groups. I’ve done a lot of solo PvE with a staff as well but that requires a little more speed with the keys and attention related to swapping attunements so you can CC first and then in my case swap to fire for direct damage.

For each of the 3 professions that use staff, it tends to be more useful in groups and against either groups or the more dangerous mobs that you don’t want to get close to. Each one leans more toward control and damage against groups of targets rather than large amount of damage to single targets. You can use the staff against single targets and kill with it, it’s just not what it’s truly designed for.

Alright, thank you all very much!
I’m awful at choosing things….

Laicamir.8617:

Alright, thank you all very much!
I’m awful at choosing things….

I usually keep a staff in my bags so I can swap it out for group events or other situations where I might find it more useful.