Guild Wars 2

I’ve only had one day to mess around playing PVP non stop on my Elementalist. To put it short, I feel like I suck.

This is how I’ve developed my “rotation” inbewteen dodging/moving depending on who I’m fighting:

I use scepter/dagger combo currently (cause that’s what I like in PVE and am used too)/
I usually start in lightning to close distance then use knockdown, burn other two CDs

swap to fire drop Lava fant for field, spam my two fire finishers to get my might up,

swap to earth for third finisher+knockdown, use Arcane blast utility for 4th finisher for might stack/kite while using auto.

Most people I run into 1v1 I barely get down to half before I’m dead. As a general strategy what am I doing wrong ?

What about water attunement? This is a very important part of my rotation (heals, damage and CC, life saving in most cases).

And what’s your build? Try to experiment with those also. You can find some of the nice builds on the internet. Try few of them and report back.

I think the first problem is that you have a rigid rotation, and a very complicated one at that. In the length of time it takes you to cast all those spells you’ve probably missed a few critical adaptations to how the enemy is moving, defending, and what spells they’ve used. Casting sequences are often a good idea to keep in mind (a good cast sequence generally involves no more than 3-4 spells in quick succession). But beyond that, you want to adapt to your opponent, and that means not following a specific set of actions for every battle.

Rotations are also predictable. It’s a good chance your opponent dodges your high-damage spells because your rotation is, predictably, the same sequence that every scepter/dagger ele uses. Switch it up a bit. Throw out a spell you can waste to get them to burn some endurance, use auto attack for a bit, and then follow up with a high-damage sequence when they can no longer dodge. Rather than opening immediately with your knock back, save it for a little ways into the battle, then use it to set up a burst sequence while your opponent is incapacitated.

Speaking of auto-attack: use it. It may not be your highest damage ability, but it is a very reliable source of damage, unlike many of the other scepter/dagger spells which are quite easy to avoid. Cycling through all your attunements just to blow the cool downs often wastes most of the damage, because it doesn’t help you ensure that the damage lands. You don’t always deal the damage just because you press the buttons.

Finally, make sure you have the appropriate stat builds. First, you aren’t running a full power/precision build, are you? If you are, get some more vitality and/or toughness in there to balance it out. High damage output isn’t useful if you can’t survive long enough to make it happen. Second, are you shooting for up-front damage, or condition damage? Air attunement makes almost no use of conditions. Earth uses lots of bleeding. Fire creates a mix. Jumping between all three means you’re likely not playing to the best of your total stats. If you lean one way or the other, try to stick with the appropriate attunement for longer a longer duration.

Hope that helps.

You shouldn’t have to use 4 characters to be successful with one. Other classes don’t have to constantly switch weapons to be successful, neither should elementalists. Even if you consider that another class was switching weapons all the time, they’d still only have to do half the work. It doesn’t make sense. Their damage is mediocre, their conditions are mediocre, their defense is poor at best.

IMO no reason to bust your head against a wall when you can go play another class, and be stronger with less effort.

lightning to close distance …. there is the issue.

VgForce.6178:

lightning to close distance …. there is the issue.

Whats the problem with that? Lightning is a great gap closer, esspecially since he said hes going scepter dagger, RTL to Updraft is a very effective combo.

Elementalist has a high skill cap. Even so, they are still pretty inferior next to almost any class. Presumeably this will be fixed.

In short: Glasscannon minus cannon..

Just pick a warrior or thief and spam two buttons = win. Elementalists are extremely weak in SPVP/TPVP right now.

Currently, Elementalist damage is not very good except for D/D and many skills require you to expose yourself. Attunement hopping is absolutely needed to be somewhat effective as an Elementalist, to the point where you will just die if you try to stay in fire for max damage. After days of testing I finally found a build with decent damage, decent control, and most importantly decent survivability, but it requires nonstop attunement cycling and while I somewhat enjoy that, it’s also very stressful if you play for longer amounts of time.

The other option is to make a support build with staff where you basically play with yourself, since you almost never target opponents, just spam your millions of AoEs on the ground.

Xolo, would you mind sharing that build?

In this thread: a lot of people confuse high skill ceiling with underpowered.

I’ll give you the best advice out of everyone here.

Just practice. It’s all about getting the mechanics down til you’re smooth and memorizing all of your ability keybinds and cooldowns then you will naturally begin forming new combo’s on the spot.

That’s about it. Pve is EXCELLENT for practicing mechanics lol.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, give in to your inner curiosity and explore every single class in the mist, maybe even pve if you can (pve gives you much different perspective on things), so you know the in’s and out’s of each class, equally as important as knowing your class. Though this is really just pvp 101.

Pinder.5261:

In this thread: a lot of people confuse high skill ceiling with underpowered.

Well it can in a sense. If you have to do alot more to be 10% better than other classes, in for example a high ranking tourny game where everyone is nearly flawless, there would be alot more opportunities for an Elementalist to screw up.

Ele could use some help in a few areas though, definately.

What people don’t understand is that Elementalist is NOT 1v1 profession. At this point it is really hard to say if Elementalists are truly underpowered, but I have seen very few good ones.

Other classes don’t have to constantly switch weapons to be successful, neither should elementalists.

What did I just read. The only profession that can be successful without constantly switching weapons is thief and only because their resource is initiative and not cooldowns.

LOL at people saying “Elementalist have a high skill cap”.

Ive played mages from EQ → DAOC → WoW → WAR →Rift

in GW2 they suck. People say you can be awesome if you are REALLY good at them. Not one single good elementalist vid out there (pwning good players – not BAD players). Pro teams avoid them for a reason.

The Mage class has always been a proactive class in MMO history. get in there, DD and CC when you think they are gonna jump you. In GW2, they are the most reactive class available. A lot of their AE has to be timed and they have to lead there targets. Ridiculous when dodge is inbuilt in to every class. Furthermore Anet is trying to avoid the holy trinity, so everyone else has the same burst/DD/CC yet the Elementalist in GW2 has the holy trinity cloth and HP.

This is the first time im not playing ranged in an MMO because i was so disappointed with the mage implementation in GW2.

How to fix them? How can you pretend to ignore Holy Trinity classes in a game when you enforce Holy Trinity Statistics and gear? I doubt Elementalists could be effective even if you increased damage by 25% across the board.

short: F1-(1,2,3,4,5)F2-(1,2,3,4,5)F3-(1,2,3,4,5)F4-(1,2,3,4,5) USE THEM ALL.