Guild Wars 2

So I’m pretty new to fractals and I tried out a water/air/tempest build that does aura sharing for boons/heals. For upper tier fractals is this generally considered a useful build or do people usually have other classes fill the role of sharing boons (PS warrior, etc.) and expect elementalists to focus on damage?

I mean, I know you can stack might with a straight damage build. So is having full uptime regen, vigor, fury, swiftness, and protection on top of the ability to stack 25 might (plus some heals) worthwhile? I hope so! It’s a lot of fun! But what do the more experienced fractal runners say?

Edit: Oh, I should probably add that right now my fractal level is only 39 and I’m running PUGs. So this may be the sort of thing where it seems useful now and will become less so as I get into more organized runs?

tbh doesn’t really matter apart from final bosses, go with whatever you enjoy and then on final boss bring in heal/condi removal/burst/aura depending on what suits.

if your group is mesmer ranger warrior, go straight damage
otherwise auramancer is fantastic for the harder fractals

I occasionally run this build in conjuction with magi stats.
I find it especially useful in Fractals with the “Afflicted” instability because you can make your team basically immune to conditions.
Otherwise it’s usually outclassed by a druid in terms of raw healing.

• Having nobody but the druid give Regeneration is actually benefitial, because he gains more astral force this way.
• Vigor can cut the damage of your warrior in undesired ways.
• Taking conditions off your Necro will cost him damage.
• And Swiftness it irrelevant for most encounters, because you stack in certain locations anyways.

So the only benefitial boons you can give with this build are Protection and Fury. Protection is dismissed by most groups, putting that weight on the druid and Fury is usually acquired either via a Revenant or the Persisting Flames Trait in fire, pushing the Ele back into the DPS role.

tl;dr:
The Support-Ele is situational at best and is usually better off dealing damage.

hornswroggle.8023:

I occasionally run this build in conjuction with magi stats.
I find it especially useful in Fractals with the “Afflicted” instability because you can make your team basically immune to conditions.
Otherwise it’s usually outclassed by a druid in terms of raw healing.

• Having nobody but the druid give Regeneration is actually benefitial, because he gains more astral force this way.
• Vigor can cut the damage of your warrior in undesired ways.
• Taking conditions off your Necro will cost him damage.
• And Swiftness it irrelevant for most encounters, because you stack in certain locations anyways.

So the only benefitial boons you can give with this build are Protection and Fury. Protection is dismissed by most groups, putting that weight on the druid and Fury is usually acquired either via a Revenant or the Persisting Flames Trait in fire, pushing the Ele back into the DPS role.

tl;dr:
The Support-Ele is situational at best and is usually better off dealing damage.

Fury is usually the domain of druid and mesmer now, most eles don’t run blasts anymore and with the number of fields flying around now it’s harder and harder to blast fire fields. You might stack fury at the beginning of a fight for the mesmer and then they just share it constantly with 96% boon duration from that point on.

Tiger pet can keep permanent fury up too if people are near and as mentioned a rev will dish out fury too. A group without any of these classes might need the ele to blast but we would be talking about a very random group at that point that just turn up on whatever. In which case 25 might and fury would probably be a struggle but a warrior can put on for great justice and a guardian feel my wrath for some fury.

Ahh, that’s disappointing. If I were going to be there only for damage I’d play another class. I kinda like the idea of throwing a bit of support, heals, and damage. But apparently at the high end defined class roles and players stepping on each other’s toes does occur in this game. That’s too bad.

Thanks for the info, guys!

you can throw heals and support in fractals they still have value. Some people mistake min maxing for great gameplay – do what you enjoy, as long as it doesn’t prevent victory all is good.

Honestly this would probably be a great build to start out with for fractals. As you work your way up to T4 fractals having a less punishing build will let you understand the mechanics.