Guild Wars 2

I’m a huge fan of staff Ele, I play as a support character for my guild Nocturnal’s WvW team. This is my take on the support Staff Ele. It is aimed at the newer player to Elementalists with all info from gear, traits, runes, sigils, spells, spell combinations and then a real battle example. Hope you like it!

Link to gw2skills editor build: http://goo.gl/ccDJo

Video tutorial link: http://y2u.be/zPx5Yd1uDtM

EDIT: The real beauty of this build is that you can use Dagger/Dagger with it too and just change around a few trait choices.

Very interesting build. It has all the key components I wanted and great synergy. Thanks for sharing.

You are most welcome, I know a fairly basic video like this is kind of late, but there are still new players coming into the game. Hopefully it will help someone!

While it is true all experienced staff elementalists know this stuff, the video is very well made and shows all the basic stuff to how staff eles work, making it invaluable to anyone toying with the idea of playing a staff ele.

I salute you for making this video and hope all budding elementalists watch it and take notes.

Well done!

EDIT: I just had a thought. This is the exact sort of thing which should be stickied, along with daphoenix’s d/d guide. Isn’t that what stickies are for?

I would like to point out that your analysis of the water EA effect is wrong. It removes a condition inherently due to the spell not because of triggering cleansing water. You also don’t really go into utilizing EA strategically (e.g. blast finisher on earth).

Thanks for the feedback. I will check into the EA stuff and fix where necessary. I added that part as quite a few people don’t believe EA is very useful but I disagree.

That video wasn’t really to show much strategy, that will come with the next one where more advanced info will be shown. I couldn’t fit all that into a video and make it short enough to fit

welp ninja edited

First, let me congratulate you on a well-done video. While I think (I don’t read these sections much) this kind of build has been used for quite some time by staff elementalists, the video you have put together clearly explains the reasoning behind the trait choices and how the spells can be used to grant boons, apply conditions, etc. I really liked that, even if I didn’t see anything new for myself in it.

I also liked the WvW portion of the video wherein you show what you are doing and how your spells are benefiting the fight / working with others (e.g. might stacking for the zerg with lava font, water fields for the hammer-wielding commander). I think anyone new to ele can benefit from knowing how not only they can generate their own combos but how others might as well. I am sure I use mine inefficiently more than I’d like to admit.

It is my opinion, the very little that it matters, that the video alone makes the post worth a sticky in this section.

What I am wary of is the emphasis on cleric’s accessories and healing power runes. I used to run similar -- cleric’s accessories and this spec; armor was not PvT but Knight’s with beryl orbs -- but moved to berserker accessories instead. I was motivated by a) my understanding that healing power scales terribly for HoTs (check out some of the math for Healing Power in water skills) and doesn’t matter for when others use my water fields to blast-heal (i.e. it uses theirs) and b) the damage being awful.

In the video, your damage is quite low. I can gain the same field effects for my allies and provide similar healing (of course it’s not going to be quite as high) while also managing to dance around through the other elements and down or finish enemies. For example, there are even crits at times in the video that top out between 100 and 400 damage, a mere fraction of what they could be. Mind you, that’s what I noticed - I may be missing other numbers?

What are your thoughts with using it? Do you find that you are mostly sticking in water to capitalize on your stat focus? Have you played with other gear choices and found that you just weren’t able to keep an ally up like you can with the HP focus of this setup?

My goal here is a discussion, though I am critiquing the build. GW2 combat seems to benefit more from fitting in damage alongside other roles.

Thank you again for great feedback.

Truthfully, I do switch between Berserker and Cleric accessories (always keep P/V/T armor though) depending on our group size. If we are in a larger group I tend to go with Clerics, but with smaller group I use Berserker.

You’re right, the damage is terrible, but I tend to focus more on enabling my guild mates to do damage than do it myself. Its just a playstyle choice really. I’m very defensive minded and am often commanding so doing damage isn’t something I concentrate on that much. Over the course of a night, the +healing on my regen and healing bursts can be quite significant even if the numbers appear low individually. I believe the math is +8 healing = +1 healing per second regen. For 800 healing power that’s 100hp per second on regen. Not insignificant I don’t think when you are spreading Regeneration around so liberally amongst 25-40 people.

I do really hope that Anet improves the scaling on healing for Elementalists and I’m fully expecting they will as Healing on a few classes is almost completely useless right now (Engi, Ele, Necro?). I think Ele had traditionally been ignored for healing as D/D was so powerful but now they’re nerfed I think its time to have another look.

Actually one thing I didn’t mention in the video is that you can easily swap your weapons to Dagger/Dagger and switch Traits around and have a completely viable build. This was a major drawcard for me with this build as sometimes I just love to throw on some different armor/weapons and play a whole other game.

Yeah, I swap to D/D with a few trait swaps when wandering around in open world PvE or playing missions with friends, etc. I like not having to go back home, so to say, to do that.

Going to put the details of this in the common build post sticky.

What gear/traits would you recommend for d/d with this build?