Guild Wars 2

Hi there,

I am a lvl 40 elementalist, and as such, I do not have much vitality and I cannot wear high protection armour. When buying gear, am I advised to look into getting vitality attributes, or focus on my power?

Thanks in advance

Power is a purely offensive stat, increasing the damage your skills do.

Vitality is primarily responsible for the amount of life you have.

Toughness is the stat that increases the armor protection, reducing the damage you take from direct attacks (not conditions).

Whether to focus on offensive stats (power, precision, ferocity) or defensive ones (vitality, toughness, or even healing power if you use a lot of healing skills) depends on your prefered style of play.

Ultimately elementalists tend to be a bit on the squishy side in this game, and even full defensive stats will only help you so far if you don’t know when/how to dodge, crowd control enemies and so on.

Personally, I wouldn’t concentrate on either of the attributes but try to find the sweet spot inbetween that gives you enough defense to get around while having as much offensive power as possible, to get rid of enemies quicker. Once you are getting better at using your defensive abilities (dodge, positioning, …), you will be able to replace defensive stats on your gear with offensive ones step by step.

I would personally always focus on power. The more damage you deal the less damage the enemy can deal Vitality or Toughness will never able to compensate the damageloss in PvE. It might be difficult at first but you will get used to it and it will make you a better player in the long run because you focus more on dodging attacks and especially dodging the right attacks.

Vitality/toughness are ace if you’re not that experienced at the game yet. Honestly, if you’re starting out with elementalist, the most squishy class of them all, and you’re having a difficult time staying alive, then add some vitality and toughness.

Yes, the fights will last longer, but it gives you more space to slip up and more time to learn. If you start noticing that you aren’t taking much damage, swap your stats out for power, precision and ferocity. That should be your goal for PvE.

Many people will say it’s offensive sets or go home. Do not let yourself be pushed into this before you are ready or it’s going to be a very frustrating experience and you will likely lose enjoyment.

I put a lot of power on the armor and weapons but then started balancing it out by adding defensive stats on my traits and trinkets.

You will always need the power so I think gear, which is permanent, is best for that. If you put the defensive stats on your traits, you can shift them around for free as needed.

Elementalists have very high active defenses (blinds, projectile nulls, invulnerability, blocks) so adding high vitality is relatively unnecessary unless you’re running very high level fractals. At the same time they already have the ability to AoEbuff 25 might permanently, so adding power has somewhat diminishing returns at very high buff rates.

Elementalists and engineers are the only classes that properly benefit from Celestial at high level fractal content, but for easier content it’s usually more efficient for an ele to stack precision-ferocity-power and use might the rest of the way to complete the damage.

Hayashi.3416:

Elementalists have very high active defenses (blinds, projectile nulls, invulnerability, blocks) so adding high vitality is relatively unnecessary unless you’re running very high level fractals. At the same time they already have the ability to AoEbuff 25 might permanently, so adding power has somewhat diminishing returns at very high buff rates.

Elementalists and engineers are the only classes that properly benefit from Celestial at high level fractal content, but for easier content it’s usually more efficient for an ele to stack precision-ferocity-power and use might the rest of the way to complete the damage.

That’s obviously spoken from an experienced point of view, but not very helpful for new players. (granted I don’t know how experienced the topic creator is, but I doubt he’s running high level fractals at level 40)

New players probably won’t understand half of your first paragraph.

Here are some general tips about the stats that might help the new player:

POWER: Increases your direct damage from weapons and skills.
CONDITION DAMAGE: Increases the damage caused by conditions and damage over time (DOT) from specific conditions.

The above 2 are usually an either/or type of selections for the general damage type of build you want to use. Condition Damage has some specific drawbacks in terms of how it works in group combat (many players trying to apply conditions does NOT work well).

VITALITY: Determines your health pool. This is best against DOT condition damage (that drains your health over time and ignores your armor).
TOUGHNESS: Determines your armor rating. Best against direct / physical damage from enemies. Reduces direct damage but has diminishing returns at higher values.

These 2 are usually balanced and/or chosen by what game mode you are playing and what foes you will be facing. Whether or not high VITALITY is needed is also dependent on the condition removal available to you and the ability of enemies to apply conditions to you (how often). Note that neither of these are going to protect you indefinitely from very hard hitting and powerful enemies. You cannot raise them high enough to be a “tank” and continually shrug off damage to be a “damage sponge” for the rest of your party.

PRECISION: Increases your chance to land a CRITICAL hit. 0 Precision at LVL 80 gives a 4% chance for a Critical hit. Capped at 100%.
FEROCITY: Increases your CRITICAL hit damage. With 0 Ferocity at LVL 80, you have 1.5x damage when you land a critical hit. Every 15 Ferocity adds 1% to Crit damage.

These are needed together to increase overall direct damage (along with POWER) but there are many Traits and weapon upgrades that trigger on critical hits, so it is not uncommon for builds to focus on high critical hit chance rather than maximizing the damage output. Note that there ARE enemies in the game that cannot be hit for a critical and against these foes, these stats are rendered useless. For this reason, POWER is often considered a priority over these stats (that CAN potentially greatly out damage a pure power build).

HEALING POWER: Scaling factor on all your healing output. Since the game has no dedicated healers and each charcter is expected to maintain their own, this stat semi-important. Keep in mind that in a general sense, a dead enemy cannot harm you or anyone else in your party, so out damaging an enemy is much more efficient than trying to out heal the damage they apply. Largely considered the LAST stat you put any points in.