Guild Wars 2

my main character is staff elementalist
i run ascended cleric gear with knights trinkets basically.. sentinal staff with sigil of energy
i have an exotic zerk set for when i’m just grinding..

where did they go wrong with this class.. i know dagger elem can dance and bunker a point, and there’s a burst build on other weapons.. but staff is just a compilation of every disadvantage a character can have in this game.. its function is being redundant support for classes that do it better

and to be perfectly honest, it’s horrifically underwhelming on both extremes of the spectrum.. so how much more useless would i feel going celestial/hybrid

i’m sure there are some builds out there, but i’m sure there are more (were more) players who don’t want to be forced into certain traits and have to play “flight of the bumblebee” on their keyboard to be effective.. and also what is the strategy other than stay off the frontlines

- sincerely a useless and dead elementalist

What game mode? Sounds like WvW considering your “frontline” comment

Your damage is underwhelming because you are in knights/cleric gear – if you want damage go zerk yet you claim to having issues surviving so zerk won’t help

You should post a link to your full build

Am I the only one here who doesn’t like the OP’s clerics/knights gear combo?

The only thing I found cleric’s gear useful for was keeping my HP above 90% for running around Orr with Diamond Skin on. The extra healing doesn’t help you or others all that much and doesn’t compliment the added toughness well. With Knights gear you are adding more toughness when with cleric’s what you need is added vitality especially since vit compliments healing so well.

vit and healing power go well together
vit and toughness go well together
vit and traits and skills for Protection buff go well since Protection does what toughness does
toughness and healing power do not go well together

Also cleric’s has healing power as its primary attribute and healing power scales so poorly.

Between vitality and toughness vit is better for eles since we can make up for toughness with protection boon and vit protects against both condis and direct damage and compliments our healing, you don’t benefit from healing that goes past your max HP.

For healing situations I keep a staff with healing and vit and 2 healing related sigil’s on it. Switching to that is all I really need and healing is more about which skills you use and blasting in water fields than you healing power number because it scales so poorly. If I need more healing than that I have a set of exotic PVT armor from karma merchants with runes of dwayna on it.

The main problem with using knights with clerics is your doubling up on toughness when vit and toughness need to be combined for maximum effect. The second problem is it adds Precision when Ferocity prolly helps an ele’s damage more since we get Fury so easily and most eles trait into Air for damage instead of Fire.

staff ele isnt meant for skirmishing. its good in pvp for bunkering points or dealing lots of damage on points. It is a support weapon.

Unless things sit in all ticks of your Lava Font all the time, Staff can feel pretty underwhelming, for sure. The main thing about Staff is that it has a high amount of utility to it. Organized WvW guilds use it all the time for its Water fields, Static Field (which have no AoE limit), Line of Earthing, and Frozen Ground that still affects things with Stability. A well-placed Meteor Shower can be deadly to an ill-placed Zerg.

For sPvP, the set was popular for a bit right after Ele got buffed, and it definitely still seems pretty decent. It just took people a while (for whatever reason) to realize that the standard D/D Ele was that much better, hence why it completely dominates alongside Cele Engi. I think what’s important to understand is that Cele Staff is actually very strong in PvP, but the Ele’s other build – D/D Ele – is one of the two really highly dominating builds in the game right now.

I think in the end, Staff Ele is best for its group support (very strong in WvW and still good (though not meta) in sPvP), and for its incredibly high damage in places where things will sit in all your Lava Fonts (mainly dungeons and fractals since the open world has a lot of movement and sitting there waiting for Lava Font to tick on each mob can kinda slow you down). In other words, it’s a really good group-content weapon. I think this fact gives the set a very strong place in the game, hence why it hasn’t been changed to be more solo friendly.

If you want to play a Caster in PvP formats that sits at the back and does damage, have you considered Necro?

i agree with mostly everything you said x_x
and despite its virtues, it gets to the point where it feels redundant in most groups and also that i’m a walking lava-tomb when separated from the herd.. i think i’m just going to take a break for awhile, thanks for the info

I think you main problem is wanting the weapon set of your choice to be perfect in all game modes/situations + your stats are really atrocious. Ofc you feel useless, IPHIW is too strong in you.

cheshirefox.7026:

my main character is staff elementalist
i run ascended cleric gear with knights trinkets basically.. sentinal staff with sigil of energy
i have an exotic zerk set for when i’m just grinding..

where did they go wrong with this class.. i know dagger elem can dance and bunker a point, and there’s a burst build on other weapons.. but staff is just a compilation of every disadvantage a character can have in this game.. its function is being redundant support for classes that do it better

and to be perfectly honest, it’s horrifically underwhelming on both extremes of the spectrum.. so how much more useless would i feel going celestial/hybrid

i’m sure there are some builds out there, but i’m sure there are more (were more) players who don’t want to be forced into certain traits and have to play “flight of the bumblebee” on their keyboard to be effective.. and also what is the strategy other than stay off the frontlines

- sincerely a useless and dead elementalist

Well, if you don’t want to be reduced to defensive support only you might want to change the cleric/knight combo.

Staff is an awesome weapon but you have to play it’s strength: Range and AoE. If you play front line and want to duel it can be done but your life could be a lot easier with any other weapons. The staff is a superb team weapon. Even a team of just 2. If you want to solo staff anywhere it can be done but be prepared to invest time and stomach a lot of defeats.

Staff being a 1200 range weapon means you can more easily go for zerker since distance is an excellent defense in itself. You have the best selection and number of combo fields among all possible spec. Also, even your auto attack on staff will almost always have splash effect. Only earth is not so your AoE potential is at worst awesome. Finally, you have a lot of cc (hard and soft) which are fight changers and, specially if you do duel, life savers.

I view the staff mainly as a battleship offering support to the front line invading the shore. “Support” doesn’t mean defensive or weak firepower (quite the opposite). It just mean that, like a battleship, you will create zones that can be from a long range were your troops will feel your help. Either by being directly beneficial to them (ex. healing rain) or indirectly by causing massive retribution to any enemy fool enough to stand in that [dead] zone (Meteor shower). Of course, the [dead] zone of a zerker MS isn’t the same as the [dead] zone of a cleric/knight while the healing isn’t that different.

Usually, an intelligent enemy will want to sink your battleship because the support fire it provide your troop is hard to ignore… enters the submarine who will want to torpedoed you (thief) and the escort you should ideally always have (kinda).

The real question isn’t if staff is great so much as is it your cup of tea.

right, because watching other professions face-tank content, having a predefined role, and being easily countered.. is the same as someone “wanting to be perfect in all game modes and scenarios” ..give me a break
i’m also disconcerted about, not just the elementalists stats but the conditional traits which i know are a part of the game but are pointlessly useless unless attuned to potato

anyway, i’m going to try one of the posters advice.. and sacrifice about 200 toughness and shift it into other stats.. though, in the past i have conformed to talking points and it’s easier to say some stats are comparatively junk yet it doesn’t always hold up in practice

cheshirefox.7026:

i agree with mostly everything you said x_x
and despite its virtues, it gets to the point where it feels redundant in most groups and also that i’m a walking lava-tomb when separated from the herd.. i think i’m just going to take a break for awhile, thanks for the info

Instead of quitting Ele…try using a different weapon set. D/D is so much fun to play! Or you can go with a might stacking scepter LH. Staff is really only good with zerging and the wold boss train. Not sure if you posted what parts of the game you enjoy playing (IE PvP or WvW or PvE)

Different game modes call for different builds. Also, your equipment isn’t Ele suited! You need to get more damaged based stuff or you won’t be killing anything anytime soon. Berserker’s is the meta for a reason these days. Get more power/precision based gear and you will love this profession!

cheshirefox.7026:

..give me a break

You can feed that misery or you can have fun playing gw2. That’s only up to you.

Staff ele has a series of problems starting with the fact that to do damage on par with a necro (5.5k lifeblasts) you have to be a “1 hit to kill” target.

Then the casting time for most skills is too slow, the auto attacks are so useless and most of the best staff eles do not use them unless its for pressure.

increasing the casting time on skills like eruption and removing the lava font delay would certainly make the class more viable.

To the OP,

Why not try a different class if the Staff Ele in particular isn’t working out? I feel like you’d like the Necromancer based on what you’re looking for.

Staff ele is always welcome in group content let it be spvp, dungeon, wvw or outdoor bosses. Where it doesn’t shine is the solo content. In wvw a PVT-Zerk staff ele with Lightning Rod can be one of the best offensive support. A more heal oriented build with 00266 is a dream for defences.

Everybody likes a staff elementalist in their group.

Can you imagine what 2-3 coordinated staff ele with +12 stacks of might only from a guardian can do in wvw in LRod zerker build just in a few seconds?

Offensively: Static-Gust-UnsteadyGround-LavaFont-Meteor-FrozenGround-IceSpike…

Defensively: ShockWave-WindbornSpeed-Geyzer-HealingRain-Water#1-Dodge

Long story short: staff ele is all about the guys (please note the plural…) next to you and not about yourself. If you ever find yourself alone than you are wielding a wrong weapon or your group does not support you (they should… we always have one thief-warri-gua defending our staff eles…) or you are completely lost

if you want a skirmish staff build try lightning rod build. has very high burst and lock down

Maybe something like this:

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fFEQFAWhcMKc24wzBr0ANAGphg4CQAIGWOL0EmCA-TFDBABGpMIH1fmVJoSKRWSJkCmLA4BA0iOgi2fghLAwDm0QSpBZAyHDA-w

Add some might and bloodlust stack and you will see…

ah, thanks everyone for helpful feedback
i don’t think i would like that build at all..
but this is what i chiseled out, i can swap those stats simply by changing 1 or 2 pieces.. dropped tough to build up everything else, the ‘mix’ is actually the one i’m most comfortable with

okay well i dont see much damage in the offensive set. also it would help to see the traits. for the offensive, you only have 1.9k pow and 150% crit which is base and 16% crit chance. that build is more tanky then offensive. id take out a lot of toughness and put it in to maybe POW, PREC, HEAL POW, you already have innate heal power and health, so boosting the heal power more would be ideal while increasing power and your crit chance. this of course i am jsut basing off stats and the way it seems like yu want to play is a bit more tanky then normal.

If you want to feel useful in zergs id either go GC meteor… which is boring imo or you can go healer support which isnt as useful but still helps. only problem is yu dont have much damage.

Cheshirefox: trash all the builds you call everything but offensive… that’s the standard BUNKER. I don’t say it’s crap but it’s far-far from offensive. It’s actually the defensive build :P Your job is to stay alive and lay down fields…. And I’m telling you a staff ele in full soldier armour and a set of 50-50 knight-zerker does a great job here…

I sorta went amock with builds in pvp and I sorta beat people in 1v2’s and 1v3’s continuously…
So I can somewhat agree with the elementalist being broken though it requires alot of control and knowledge of your class. Knowing all the CD’s by heart helps alot.

I usually run with D/F but switch it up with D/D and Staff too. Just can’t get my head around scepter.

Staff works for skirmishes in pvp. Have had a warrior who said I was noob and that he was pro whom I beat 4/5. The 5th time I was running zerker staff build while shooting treb and he attacked me from behind then declared he was pro and blocked me after having ranted for over 10 minutes.

Staff works fine though. Lots of crowd control which when used right and placed right can give you quite a bit of control over the battlefield. Your bane however is and will always be thieves. But not the crappy thieves that only play it because its an op class but the ones who actually know the class and play it right.

Never played cleric/knights staff. Staff already has little dmg compared to the other weapon combos let alone with a cleric-knights build. Is my guess. There’s quite a bit of condition in the staff though. which is why I tend to run celestial while holding a staff.

As previously mentioned you need the extra vitality for staff users. You have less mobility and less dmg mitigation with staff. You just have more control and you need the vitality to use it or attleast be able to learn how to use it.

cheshirefox.7026:

ah, thanks everyone for helpful feedback
i don’t think i would like that build at all..
but this is what i chiseled out, i can swap those stats simply by changing 1 or 2 pieces.. dropped tough to build up everything else, the ‘mix’ is actually the one i’m most comfortable with

you just need some good mightstacking… sigil of battle + spellslinger should help with that. Sure ya can blast in firefields but those are quite situational.
Add might up to 25 and keep it there continuously that way your condi and dps will increase by leaps and bounds.