Guild Wars 2

A vast majority of eles seem to prefer spending their remaining ten points in air as opposed to fire, but I’ve always thought fire has more to offer. Here’s why.

Fire’s minor adept trait grants a passive chance to burn foes. Air’s minor adept trait boosts your movement speed by 10%. The way I see it, a little damage is better than no damage at all. And with fire, you’re 20% more likely to be dealing damage at moments when you otherwise would not.

Fire improves power and condition duration. Air increases precision and critical damage. Po/V/T gear seems fairly standard for most eles, so by default precision is lacking. To me, the extra precision isn’t enough to compensate, which makes the crit damage redundant. I’d much rather have a constant power bonus, and the extended condition duration complements my minor trait too.

The major adept traits are a lot more balanced. Both Bolt to the Heart and Spell singer can hold their own, but I think Zephyr’s Boon is a staple for D/D builds. Fortunately, I swap between a staff and S/D, so an extra 105 power every time I pop a cantrip adds up nicely.

Where do you stand? Am I missing something? Because I feel like I must be.

Like you said, Zephyr’s boon is just really important for d/x builds since it allows perma fury for a nice damage boost and some extra mobility, so it’s much better for dagger users. Bolt to the heart and quick glyphs are also decent traits for when you want to run something besides daggers, so 10 in air is also more flexible.

You also forgot 0/0/10/30/30, which is probably more common than 10/0/0/30/30 as well. It’s a nice bit of extra bulkiness and a decent minor trait. If they fix stone splinters, the extra 10% melee damage is great for d/x, and it also has armor of earth at 50% hp as an option, which is pretty nice.

The way I see it, might from cantrips isn’t really worthwhile because might stacking is already really easy for eles, especially if you use sigil of battle.

(Builds in this game are dependent on mode, and since there’s no mention of PvE/sPvP/WvW, I’ll just give my rambling take on WvW elementalists, since that’s mostly what I do)

Well, there’s a few reasons many prefer air to fire.

Both precision and critical damage increase you damage output. On the surface, power and condition duration appear to serve the same function. The problem with condition duration is without stacking more of it on gear and food buffs, there will be no tangible increase in damage. A 3sec burn or bleed will receive a 0.3sec increase from plus-10% condition duration, which will not result in an additional “tick” of damage. Unless you can reliably stack 10sec-plus burns already, 10% condition duration will do nothing for your dps, but if you could do that, you wouldn’t need plus-duration anyway.

Fury (and to a lesser extent, swiftness) is a very powerful boon, especially with aura-sharing. People tend to forget frost-aura from blasting frozen ground also shares any boons you trait for, so it’s not only D/D that benefits from this trait. If you slot arcane wave and evasive arcana you can blast 3 times in a row for a very long lasting chill aura that reduces damage by 10% and gives fury to 5 players. Fury also helps proc renewing stamina (vigor on crit) for more dodges (more blasts/heals with EA).

I find the 30 water/arcane build to have a limp noodle arm with S/D, but it works well for staff and D/D, especially in medium-large scale combat. For S/D, fresh air rules, and a 30 air build can be adapted to staff (tempest defense + bolt to the heart = a bunch of dead zerglings in a lava>meteor>static combo).

I like air as opposed to fire simply because crit damage is the hardest stat to stack. Other than upgrades to trinkets, traits have the best point-for-point stat tradeoff for crit damage. Air also comes with built in synergy between precision and crit damage (warriors, engineers, etc, don’t get this built in synergy, they get precision+condition damage).

Done with my lunch now, rambling off…..

edited because forum made every “+” symbol into an underlined section.

Spell Slinger is a terrible trait. Eles have so many ways to stack Might (Sigil of Battle and blasting in Fire Fields) already that they don’t need to waste a cantrip to do it.

Most offensive Eles I see use Knights or Valkyire stats with some Berserkers, or even all Berserkers. Defensive Eles use Clerics gear. Soldier (Power/Vitality/Toughness) is decent and I do personally use it for WvW but it’s generally regarded as suboptimal compared to other more fine-tuned choices.

Also, Fury is incredibly strong. Even on a character with low crit chance, +20% is huge. Bolt to the Heart is also an incredibly strong trait.

Honestly, the Fire tree is really bad for Eles. The only good traits are Persisting Flames, Conjurer, and the Fire CDR trait. The +5% damage vs Burning foes is also good in a dungeon group able to keep burning up.

I agree with the other posters. Fire is so bad a tree that even it’s passive bonuses suck and do nothing at all until you have enough of them for another tick of burn (and even then crit and crit damage are better).

Triple ‘especially’ when running s/d because you have a fire field and 4 blast finishers (5 finishers and an auto-AoE-crit if you include Arcane Wave in your build).

Keep in mind that burning doesn’t stack in strength, just in duration, so that extra burning proc will do very little… And nothing whatsoever if someone with stronger condition damage uses it. Plus, it ONLY procs in fire attunement 20% of the time IF someone is in melee range. The main weakness of the fire line in general is that you have to sit in fire constantly to make it worthwhile.

In the meantime, one of the elementalist’s strongest traits is procced by crits, so the passive stats of the air line are more than just DPS… They’re a constant source of vigor. If you’re traited deep into Air for Fresh Air, they’re also constant burst and mobility. All of Air’s I-VI traits are beneficial for multiple situations and builds, with VI adding great burst kill abilities. I would agree that Zephyr’s Boon isn’t the best for s/d, but Bolt to the Heart is a great dps burst to most builds.

I can also see an argument for 10 in Earth, as condition damage is more important than condition duration and toughness is harder to get than power. Stone Splinters (in theory), should be incredibly effective for both d/d and s/d since most fights are spent in melee. Or, for a tankier spec, especially in a place like WvW, Earth’s Embrace is amazing.

Overall, the appeal of Air traits is that they have more flexibility for playstyle.

Bolt to Heart too strong.

Kodiak.3281:

Bolt to Heart too strong.

It legitimately is. Until you realize Ele base DPS is so bad. That’s why Eles get such good damage multiplier traits.

It’s also depend where and what u used as well.
There is also 0/0/20/20/30 which u dump 20 into earth to get rocksolid which give u and allies stability. Stability really help you and your team esp u run with boon duration runes so that whenever you swap to earth ur 5 ppl get 4sec stability every 8sec which is soo awesome. I do think 0/0/20/20/30 now is the tread for WvW zerg train meta.

It’s also depend on how u play ur character in WvW. Do u stack closely to cmd and run as a blob? Do u tend to stand away and fire stuff from a far? U gear all powprecrit or powvittough or a mixture? Many things need to be right mix for both trait and gear and playstyle. You get what i mean.

When are you going to learn it is 0,25,0,15,30… and that the class is dead so there is no point build crafting anymore.

ARM.3912:

0,25,0,15,30

ARM.3912:

the class is dead

I think I see a connection here.

Terra Dactyl.2047:

ARM.3912:

0,25,0,15,30

ARM.3912:

the class is dead

I think I see a connection here.

Haha, yeah.

I’m of the opinion that the class still needs work, and some of the work already done should be slightly undone (RtL CD restored, please). The whole “sky is falling! omawgawd class is deaaaadddd!” rhetoric is not a good way to get any positive changes made and it’s an extreme exaggeration.

Original Build I ran (while still using D/D)
0 15 0 25 30

Eventually going to try
0 20 0 20 30 (for solo)
Or
0 20 0 30 20 (for aura share group)