Guild Wars 2

While I’m just starting to level my elementalist alt, I decided to come up with a build to work towards at 80. Thought I’d give it a post here to ask for feedback and revisions.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJArYhImQbzR3gjEAUBxDCIUUBFlHzkjNA-jEDBYMCh0CJk6AI5RZN7RQsuNsVXRr8KIqaCy6aY6So6WICBkbMA-w

The basic concept of the build is to proc as many bonus effects as often as possible to supplement both survivability and damage output. I think I like the overall look of the results, though obviously I haven’t had a chance to play it in full yet (I’m expecting to hit level 30 tonight…!)

I play a Boonway guardian that focuses on throwing long-duration boons around like candy, so naturally I tried to see if the same effect was possible on an elementalist. Imagine my surprise when I found out I could not only have access to a variety of boons, but also an array of conditions (guardians aren’t so great at those).

My impression of the build’s strengths:

Procs on attunement swap:

• 3.5s fury
• Might/regen/swiftness/protection based on attunement
• Deal AoE damage attuning to fire, 20% chance to burn melee attackers while attuned
• Deal targeted damage attuning to air, move 10% faster while attuned
• Regenerate health after attuning to water
• Next attack after attunement swap causes 5.75s poison (probably a 9s cooldown, though I can’t find data on the cooldown—9s is fairly consistent among other on-swap sigils)

Procs on glyph cast:

• Grant might/regeneration/swiftness/protection based on attunement

Procs on hit/crit:

• 25% chance to cause 3.5s burn, 2.25s chill, 6.75s weakness, or 5.75s cripple on hit
• 30% chance to cause 1.25s burn on crit
• 10% chance to cause 1.25s burn, 10.25s vulnerability, 3.5s weakness, 5.75s bleeding on crit
• 8.5s vigor on crit (5s cooldown)

Offensive potential should be high, both in the direct and condition damage realms. Stacking 12-15 stacks of might shouldn’t be unreasonable—there are 5 potential blast finishers available through scepter/dagger, using the dagger’s fire field to blast finish. Combined with 25 Corruption stacks, the celestial trinkets, nasty bleed stacking via earth, automatic poison on attunement swap, and easy/constant access to burning via the glyphs, proc effects, and fire skills, the condition damage of the build should be unignorable, if not quite as lethal as a full condition build.

For direct damage, we have just over 50% crit damage, a fairly consistent 55% crit chance thanks to fury on attunement swap, and high power. Attunement swapping provides a litany of bonus effects, and with the 60% cooldown reduction on it we can afford to rotate quickly. There’s also a few nasty combos inherent to scepter/dagger; the whole RtL->air 2-3/fire 4-2-3-5 (7 might stacks)/earth 4 (hopefully ensuring fire 2/3 land)-dodge-5-lightning flash finisher seems like a devastating combo. Even leading with earth 5->lightning flash into a distracted group of enemies seems very powerful given the large initial damage burst and high bleed stacks resulting from it.

Defensively, it has the 10% damage reduction from water, a couple heals in addition to our main heal, health regen in water, permanent protection assuming a swap to earth every now and then, an extra 250 toughness nearly permanently from earth 2 (I don’t see much of a reason to use this offensively), and a ton of debilitating conditions from proc effects depending on current attunement.

Anyway, I’ve spent plenty of time explaining where I’m going with the current build. What I’d like to ask for is recommendations: what improvements should I make? I’d really love to get 15 points in water for Cleansing Wave and Healing Ripple (for better ways of dealing with conditions and an extra heal), but that would mean dropping Sunspot and Evasive Arcana. Is it worth it? I’m also not entirely sold on the Sigil of Doom, but poison is a lethal condition in WvW. Having a way to apply it consistently and automatically is great, especially on an elementalist where no one’s expecting it—but am I giving up too much by throwing away a more popular sigil choice?

I think the thing you’ll discover as you level up is that Elementalist condition damage just pales in comparison to other professions. Especially in a PvP situation where your main source of condition damage is easily avoidable/slow, it’s not a consistent form of pressure or damage.

I definitely like the way you’re looking at the build though, even just starting the profession. Currently though, I feel like you’d just get destroyed by incoming conditions. If I were you, I’d take the 15 points you have in Fire and move them to water. There are a ton of good traits there to choose from — at that point, I’d even move 5 from air into water as Bountiful Power, the 25 point in water trait, adds a massive amount of damage.

But yeah, I would suggest playing around in the mists with this, trying it out with condition amulets and then switching to valkyrie or berserker amulets. I think you’ll find that the direct damage far outweighs the condition (though Celestial most certainly won’t be bad). Most Elementalist conditions are really there for control purposes, anyway. Feel free to keep your glyphs though – Glyph of Elemental Power does a great job providing utility.

Good luck!

I’d swap 5 points from fire to air so you can proc vulnerability on crits. This’ll increase over all damage and proccing one extra condition will prevent burning and such from being removed too quickly.

Just so you know, the procs from glyph of elemental power have an internal cd of 5 seconds.

Right off the bat, ditch Signet of Air. You’ll have 100%+ uptime of Swiftness just by casting Glyph of Renewal and swapping around attunements so you really don’t need the passive, and the active is pretty weak compared to other things you could slot there. Mist Form is a really versatile choice, but you could also go with Glyph of Storms if you wanted to keep the Glyph thing going. Casting it in Earth gives multiple AoE blinds so it’s great for that reason alone. I usually use Glyph of Lesser Elementals in that spot in open-world PvE, just to give me another little guy to tank for me.