Guild Wars 2

My friend recently joined SPvP and he wants to know how to build his Ele, but since i’ve never played ele, I have no clue how to help him. He wants something that’s Dueling>Conquest for starters before trying Conquest builds. Any good Eles in these forums want to share a decent dueling build and explain how it works? Difficulty does not matter as he is willing to play 1k+ games just to learn a great dueling build.

I personally learned how to play Elementalist way back when with the cookie-cutter D/D Cantrip build.

This build’s been nerfed to hell (particularly the healing and disengage) since the beginning of the year as it now particularly melts under focused team fire (and mist form now does diddly squat), but it’s still not bad for dueling, and most importantly, the skills in this build are quite straightforward and it will get your friend in the habit of swapping attunements a lot (very important) and dodging aggressively with evasive arcana (and utilizing the blast finisher in earth’s evasive arcana dodge). You could try a more defensive variant as well.

After he’s gotten the hang of the class down, he can swap to more utility-based or gimmicky weapons and utilities. Focus offers immense personal defense and survivability at the expense of the damage offhand dagger offers. Conjures are still a little meh, but conjure ice bow 5 is probably the one skill in the game that would be an instant fight win if it lands (5 second stun that can’t be stunbroken, only teleported out of), as you can follow it up with Ice Bow 4 for ridiculous damage. Scepter is used almost exclusively in fresh air builds as scepter autoattack damage is among the lowest in the game.

As an example, scepter is usually run in fresh air builds (the fresh air builds vary a lot in utility skills/runes/sigils taken and other trait point distributions, I’ll just give an example here).

The whole premise behind fresh air builds is simple though— the majority of damage comes from Air 2 and Air Attunement (Fire 2/3 also hit hard, but the damage is unreliable). The idea is to always swap into air and unload air 2 (and maybe 3) for the double instant damage spike and immediately swap out to another attunement if you don’t need to use air 4/5. Since scepter autoattack damage is low, you’ll be relying on these 5k-ish damage spikes every 5 seconds to do the majority of your damage while staying alive in other attunements to try to disable, heal, and crit to bring up fresh air again.

Either way, I don’t believe Elementalist will be as easy to pick up as other classes in the game, and there is always the elephant in the room of other problematic builds certain classes have access to overshadowing the elementalist’s capabilities, but it is an extremely fun class to play. Since you’ll be playing sPvP, it’s unlikely you’ll get a large number of duels, as sPvP tends to be a bit more zergy and disorganized than tPvP. Regardless, best of luck to your friend.

Please….don’t discuss ele builds on the forums. It has only gotten us nerfed to hell in the past….if you want some help with ele you can pm me in game. And shhhh about the frost bow you gonna get our one bit of fun nerfed.

Hello, I consider my self and am considered to be a very good elementalist so I might be able to help.
As elementalist you will always be the underdog. In duells, conquest, wherever. We were nerfed very hard in the past.
Good thing is: Elementalist is the profession which as far my knowledge goes scales best with player skill.
If you reach a certain skill level you will begin to have better chances against players at equal skill. But this skill level is very high, until then even way worse players with dueling builds will most likely snack you most of the time.

That being said, heres what I´m playing at the moment.

0
30 VI X XII (dunno if it was XII or XI, its called fresh air.)
10 VI
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30 V VI XI

Berserk amulet, scholar runes, sigil of energy and the +5% dmg sigil
Arcane blast, Arcane shield, Lightningflash
Weapons are scepter focus, sometimes dagger for the focus.

You will try to pressure your enemy in every atunement, switching as needed (water for when youre low, earth for protections and fire for when you think you can risk a more aggressive shot.) After each switch try going to air for the lightningstrike as air will nearly instantly be ready again due to your high critchance.
When you think your enemie has no more stunbreakers available or when you want to try and end the fight quickly you start from earth or air. Starting from earth you will use hurl (followup of 2) pop invulnerability if available and you find it necessary and switch to air. Now you use 2 3 and 5. While casting 5 switch to fire an use 2 and 3 while your opponent is knocked down. If you manage to hit it all its mostly game over, if not just go back to air which will be back up due to fresh air trait and finish him of.

This spec is very fragile, but you will learn to dodge and time your CDs good enough to keep the sustain you need. Not going berserk on elementalist is rarely a good idea as your damage will rarely be sufficient to kill enemies effectively.
If you want to have some sustain anyhow you can try valkyrie or knights amulets instead of berserk.
You can also try dagger offhand, but then you will really have to 100 > 0 your target or at least apply huge pressure to survive as you wont have any sustain what so ever.
Rotation on S/D would be:
Earth 2 → Earth 2 → Earth 4 → lightningflash → switch to air and cast arcane blast as fast as your fingers can go. If target is still alive go to fire and use 3. Basically kamikaze.

If you are not sure if you can pull it all of skip fire 2 and just use 3.
Problem is elementalist is very instinctive. There is too much going on to give an exact explernation of how to rotate. If you have a stuck rotation you are predictable. Basically practise as much as possible and see how you do best.

Thanks for the share guys.

Take Lava Tomb (Fire 10-point trait), you’ll be spending a lot of time in downed state with air+berserker builds. A glass-cannon Thief/Mesmer/Engineer can basically kill you in 2 seconds flat if you’re not careful.
Oh and avoid 1v1 situations against Necros, Hammer/Longbow Warriors and Spirit Rangers. Those are top-tier classes right now.

You’ll want to stick with your team as much as possible unless you’re VERY confident in perfectly timing all your abilities, attunements and dodges.

Oh and I hope you don’t lag or anything. Playing Ele while living in far-away countries (e.g. Oceania) with delays = don’t bother.

Wintel.4873:

Take Lava Tomb (Fire 10-point trait), you’ll be spending a lot of time in downed state with air+berserker builds. A glass-cannon Thief/Mesmer/Engineer can basically kill you in 2 seconds flat if you’re not careful.
Oh and avoid 1v1 situations against Necros, Hammer/Longbow Warriors and Spirit Rangers. Those are top-tier classes right now.

You’ll want to stick with your team as much as possible unless you’re VERY confident in perfectly timing all your abilities, attunements and dodges.

Oh and I hope you don’t lag or anything. Playing Ele while living in far-away countries (e.g. Oceania) with delays = don’t bother.

As we are talking dueling at the moment I think when you need lava tomb you have basically failed. With enough practise stuff works, but its a long way to go. Two seconds is an amazingly long time for an elementalist who is used to react and act quickly.

Edit: If you see a glasscannon engineer just slap on focus and stay in earth/keep earth off cooldown and use 4 when he starts bursting (white lightning arcs potruding out of his gun) He will most likely oneshot himself, if not invul and burst whats left of him

Hambow Warriors are doable (if they don´t have that ugly signet), use your blinds wisely. But if you are not a lot better then they are they will roll you with no effort. If you have beaten a good hambow you know you learned a lot and are now a excellent elementalist.