Guild Wars 2

My first character was an elementalist. I took him to lvl 20 or so before becoming frustrated with the low health and long CDs.

I have always played casters, but subsequently decided to give the engineer a try. I was surprised to find that the engineer had everything I was looking for and leveled my engineer to the mid-50’s using a GC grenade/elixir build before embarking on a number of trips this month.

Needless to say, I was highly disappointed to see the massive nerf to grenades on 12/14. GC grenade/elixir was one of only a few functional builds available to engineers. I do not believe sigils or the trivial buff to HGH compensate for the nerf to G1 and do not feel like spamming even more keys to do the same damage I was doing before.

Given the slow implementation of profession changes in this game, and the buffs received by elementalists in the last two updates, I am thinking of revisiting my elementalist. Previously, I was running D/D. I have read daphoenix’s guide on D/D but am uncomfortable putting so many points into water and, to a lesser degree, arcane. For PVE (solo, dungeons), can anyone suggest a D/D or S/D build that traits mainly for damage? I used to see people trait Fire/Earth/Arcane (e.g., 30/20/20) for D/D. Is this still viable, especially with the buff to Pyromancer’s Puissance? Am I wrong in thinking that it may be easiest to spec GC as staff (assuming I group)?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

“do not feel like spamming even more keys to do the same damage”

Stay as far away from ele as humanely possible if you don´t want to spam more buttons than necessary.

GC staff is viable, but support staff is far better.
You´ll propably be looking for a s/d build if you want damage, i don´t have one but you could do a search here for few.

Thanks for the prompt response. Engineer grenade builds do (did…) most of their damage by punching auto attack and grenage barage when up. The nerf to G1 (auto attack) was compensated to a small degree by spreading damage to other grenades. However, most of the damage still comes from G1. At least elementalists can claim to have some semblance of a rotation.

S/D or D/D are my preferred weapon sets due to greater mobility and shorter CDs than staff. However, if the best way to trait for damage is currently staff, then I would buy it.

Your uncomfortableness is understandable but you should know that you will not really get that much more damage by traiting into it if you are comboing properly off of yourself. Speccing 20 into fire magic while on d/d for example is pretty redundant with you can mantain 15+ stacks of might. Fire magic needs a huge rework to be comparably viable next to water magic/arcana. It makes more sense to spec into survival/boon duration and get loads of might than to trait damage and get a negligible increase in comparison. I would highly recommend going 30 into arcana for sheer efficacy, but you can afford to go only 20 in water and not feel that much of a difference if you are traited properly. If you really don’t feel like you want to use evasive arcana at 30 arcana, go 20 water/20 arcana and put those extra 30 points into whatever you want. You will keep the bulk of the survivability that daphoenix has with his build but a little more freedom to spec into damage dealing lines/traits. I would highly recommend Cleansing Wave/Cantrip mastery in water magic and Elemental Attunement/Renewing Stamina in arcana.

Evasive Arcana added a lot of offensive capability to my d/d build. Until 60 however, you can expect to just gear and trait for tankiness and try to do aoe pulls to kill faster.