Guild Wars 2

I’ve recently started exploring the WvW content, and I’m really enjoying it. I play an elementalist and prefer to act more as a support than a front-line fighter. I’m not MMO-pro, so most of my experience is coming from the PvE side, where I hold my own via kiteing (sp?) and just running away!

I noticed in the big WvW battles, I seem to do die pretty quickly. However, during a revive, a player mentioned “you have so much health!.” Leads me to believe I’m not built right for how I want to play, or I’m missing some basic tactic in these battles.

Any tips for building a stronger support elementalist for WvW battles? Or playing tips to help me stay out of the way?

Thanks!

Positioning is key when you’re an ele. Eles are often targets to anything that likes to focus on squishy backlines. You need to keep moving constantly and don’t get too far from your zerg. Positioning is more important than gear, because if your positioning is bad, it won’t matter if you’re full zerk or PVT.

Always carry Mist Form and Lightning Flash.

Save Mist Form for when you get caught out (ganked, or enemy zerg is on top of you), then reposition behind your allies/zerg (Safe again).

Save Lightning Flash for when you need to reposition as well, but Mist Form is your “oh #$%!” button.

In general, stay behind your allies, or circle around the fight, at max range.

Orbit your melee comrades, keep them between you and the enemy blob at all times, so as mentioned, you have to constantly move. Stay out of whatever red circles are being bombed on the melee but close enough to dodge/cantrip through your group if you get focused(and you will be ). If they notice they can’t kill you, they’ll most likely find another target(even though they really should pressure Eles) and you’re free to keep casting!

I switch between a cleric and zerk set, stacking healing power or power, depending on my mood or whatever is needed. Even when switching to damage oriented traits, I still have a few points in water.

Yep, positioning is important no doubt. And that can be learned.

Not sure what build you’re running but if you’re coming from PvE its likely a zerker build. That’s not the best to run in WvW when first starting out.

People will come on here and tell you zerker is fine. And it is, if you’re experienced and if you want to be a damage dealer. But you said support. And its your first foray into WvW.

I play staff Ele and I started out with the standard full PVT armor and build of 0/0/10/30/30. You can get cheap PVT from the WvW vendors.

Take Earths Embrace for the Armor of Earth – that’ll save ya more than a few times.

Later, I added more Zerk gear. And now I’m changing again to Celestial. Eles can benefit from all stats so take advantage of that.

(And since you can change Traits for free now, I’m experimenting with 0/0/30/10/30 for the new Earth Trait where you can’t be hit for a crit when in Earth. I love it because its basically a big middle finger to Theives lol).

Check out websites intothemists.com they have some good suggestions. But feel free to play around with builds. Mist Form and Armor of Earth I run. But most people suggest Lightning Flash but I don’t run it because I don’t like it and it ends up getting me killed sometimes.

There are a number of possible builds. Just start by Google searching “GW2 Elementalist WvW Build” and you’ll find a ton of forum posts, rated builds on build tools sites, etc. Be mindful of the date of posts, as things have (often) changed in the course of mechanics since release. But here are a few observations from my experience and learning from others.

T(oughness) > V(itality). Obviously you need both, but if you’re getting mowed down fast, you should be putting more into toughness. It’s pretty useless to buff your Vitality pool if people can eat through it really fast.

I run a Celestial Armor build. When I first started trying to not suck at WvW Ele, I read a ton about builds, and there’s has been quite a bit of controversy about the benefits of Celestial (jack of all trades). I’ve tried PVT builds (as well as full zerker builds) and Celestial has worked out well for me. It’s hella expensive and will take you a month to craft. If you don’t want to do that, switch out some (or all) of your pieces to PVT (Power/Vitality/Toughness, known as Soldiers) and see how that works. If you have a ton of Karma, you can get most of what you need from NPC vendors.

Then run zerker items to balance it out. Some of the more hardcore players will mix armor sets to get a “perfect balance” that feels right to them. I’m don’t have that much patience. A good rule of thumb is: try to keep your Toughess >= 1600. If you’re really trying to play support (short of a full-healer build), everything else is secondary to this stat.

Assuming your build is not gimping you, then you need to look at your play style in battles. There’s so much that I’ve learned in the last six months, I wouldn’t know where to start. To some extent, you’re going to have to learn by doing (and dying). Here are a few things I learned.

1. Stay on the tag. Sounds weird, a guy in a dress running around with Warriors in armor? Well, it turns out, you’re much less likely to die that way, especially if you’re in a group with others that can help buff you. Even if you aren’t, and I very often follow commanders while not in a group, you tend to benefit from buffs/heals anyway, but most importantly, you benefit from damage mitigation (most AOE damage only affects up to 5 members, except, importantly, siege weapons). Also, if you’re running on the outside, it will be much more likely someone will target you when they’re spamming for targets. Once they find a nice, squishy Ele, expect to die (until you learn all your escape tactics).

If you can learn how to stay with the tag (not easy, trust me, but you will get to that “aha!” moment), you’re going to find yourself much more effective and much more durable in big fights.

2. Don’t bring Daggers to a Staff fight. This doesn’t mean Staff > DD, in fact the opposite is true if you’re roaming solo (or trying to get to the zerg). But the Staff skills are designed to support large scale combat. Without them, you’re can’t really be a support Ele.

3. Don’t bring a Staff to a Dagger fight. One on one, you may as well /sit if someone attacks you and you’re holding a staff. Freaking uplevels can kill you. So, make sure you have daggers with you at all times, and equip them if you’re roaming. At least you’ll have a fighting chance. If you don’t have D/D experience, either just run around and die a lot until you learn, or jump into PvP. It’s basically the same tactics as WvW roaming, so it’s a really good place to practice. D/D is completely different than Staff when it comes to combat. You’ll need practice in both, but D/D (I found) is harder, but much more fun, to master.

4. For utilities, I use:
- Arcane Shield: Useful for that 3-shot invuln if you’re trying to run into a keep or just to avoid the annoying slow-down when running by guards. (Use this, then Earth 3 when it runs our for a little more protection from projectiles.)
- Arcane Wave: This is your blast finisher. Use this with Waters (3/5) for the Area Regen effect. Waters are your uber support skill. This, above all things, is your reason for being in WvW as a support build.
- Armor of Earth: This provides you 33% less damage, breaks stun, and provides stability. Stability is very important in WvW. If you’re in a group, try to use it sparingly if you can get stability from another member of your party. Keep it as a last defense. If you get snared, crippled, etc., remember that air 4 (the speed spell) will break these.

5. In most cases, you should be able to get into a tower/keep past a zerg right though the front door. (I’d say I can do it 98% of the time, depending on scouts/sight-lines.) Usually I just run up until I see the first guy run toward me (or try a ranged attack), then I hit Arcane Shield, wait 2 seconds, then double-dodge, then hit stability. If you get downed before you’re in, use 2 (Mist Form) to get in the gate if you’re close enough, then get back up when you’re out of combat. If you think you’re going to get attacked really far from the door, switch out Arcane Blast for Mist Form. That will give you more invulnerability to get closer, then the above to get in. Don’t forget to switch back to Arcane Wave when you’re in after the cool down.

6. Arcane Brilliance is the only healing spell to consider in WvW. It will hit up to 5 enemies around you with Arcane damage, and heal you more for each enemy hit. It’s an “ok” heal when you’re alone, but if you’re in the middle of a crowd, hitting full heal from hitting 5 enemies should give you about a 60-70%, plus you’re doing damage to them. And it’s really fun to pull it on someone who’s really low and drops as soon as you heal.

7. Don’t stay in the red rings. While this is not strictly an Ele thing, light classes need to pay attention to this much more than others. In very few cases, when you really need to stay in the rings, blast a water field where you need to be and hit Armor of Earth to mitigate the damage. Save your heal until you really need it. Most player spells (save glass-cannon meteornado) won’t really kill you that fast, but focused AC fire can take you down really fast.

8. CC is your secondary reason for living. This might be debatable (versus Meteornado), but while you’re on tag, when the commander calls for CC, use Static (Air 5) to ring enemies so they can’t move, Frozen Ground (Water 4) to slow the enemy or Unsteady Ground (Earth 4) to cut off charges or retreats. This is what commanders mean when they call for “rings” and “lines”.

9. Got bags? Support Eles are supposed to do just that. So your primary focus should be Heal/CC. But don’t underestimate the bag-delivery potential of the Staff Ele AoE damage spells. Even the weak ones will tag your enemies so you get credit when they die. So while you’re on cool down, you can spam through them trying to land them on groups of enemies as you can. Or even Tab (or whatever you have Next Enemy bound to) and 1 all day long, and you’ll find tons of bags at your feet when the battle is over. As you get better at playing Ele, you’ll still even be standing!

10. Meteor-NAY-DOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH So as a support Ele, you’re not going be pulling the 8k crits that glass cannon Eles do with Meteronado. But, then again, you’re not going to be a rally-bot scrub either.

Meteornado is Meteor Storm (Fire 5), followed by the Elite Tornado skill just after the channel finishes. The way it works is that after you channel the full Meteor Storm, it continues to do damage for something like 5-6 seconds after the spell is complete. Tornado, in addition to giving you stability and increasing your toughness, increases your power as well. So, once it’s activated, the remaining period of Meteor Shower hits at this higher power calculation, significantly increasing the damage. It’s also hella fun to watch people flying all over the place if they don’t have stability.

I would say, be careful about using it, mostly so you don’t get distracted and fail to drop water when the commander needs it. But it can be a lot of fun, and very effective if you have the time to use it.

My favorite YOLO move:
1. Static Field on mass of reds
2. Meteor Shower
3. Pop Arcane Shield while channeling so you don’t get interrupted.
4. Pop Armor of Earth right before channel ends.
5. Nado and bulldoze right through them.
6. Be ready to end Nado prematurely if you’re taking too much damage and heal up. You’re likely to hit 5 guys around you and get a good heal off.

Awesome tips/instruction! Thanks everyone. I know where/what to research now…This game is pretty deep!

for ele —focus + mistform very good defense

Ele’s aren’t just healers or cc-bots, you’re also a primary dps. Positioning is key, somewhere in the middle is usually the best, and you should always be moving. You need to be close enough to your melee train to drop waters and cc’s when they push, but far enough to react to the enemy blob. (If you’re too far, you’ll attract the thieves prowling the backline.)

Gear-wise, wear as much ptv as you’re comfortable with, but you should shoot for phasing it out entirely for berserker. (Staff.)

The cantrips are all the survivability you need; armor of earth for on-demand stability and protection, mist form as your “oh kitten” button (use it and go directly through your melee train), and lightning flash to quickly re-position. (Fiery greatsword is also great for re-positioning or getting away, if you’re not running tornado for the disruption.)