Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing elementalist for a while and have considered a lot of it’s flaws. One that sticks out to me is the earth attunement. In fire, I can nuke and spike well. Air has a mix of single tartget, aoe, spike, and control to it. IMO, air feels a bit off too, but it may just be my play style of it. Water gives a lot of healing and chill. But earth seems like it missed a little.

Now, I mostly play with a staff, so this may not apply to all weapon choices. But I feel that earth is meant to be our defensive element, yet it has so little defensive skills. On the staff, 3 of the 5 water skills serve as heals. But for earth, I’d say 0 really help with defense. The only true defensive skill is the third that reflect projectiles, but while it is useful, it doesn’t help at all if foes aren’t using projectiles. The immobilize can be defensive, but if you get mobbed it isn’t much help.

I get that earth is focused on more than just defense though. It always seems to deal a lot of bleed and has several slowing effects, like cripple or immobilize. I know that the scepter has a good defensive skill (2). But overall, I just feel that earth is lacking compared to others. Even with the 80 toughness while attuned to earth, I don’t feel that much safer on earth. For me, it is just a weaker fire (although fire is my main and I do like bleeds on earth).

Personally, I feel all attunements should give effects without traits. Like if earth gave more armor/toughness just for attuning to it and the trait made it stronger. I’d like to see earth be a bit more like water at times, where the skill may be aggressive but it also gives some buff to defensive. For example, Magnetic Aura could also give you 5 seconds of protection. So it would reflect projectiles and give protections for the non-projectile attackers.
Other skill could give you defensive buffs as well like protection, aegis, or maybe even retaliation. Or maybe elementals could get their own unique earth buff that improved armor somehow. After all, there are no Earth Fields at the moment, so combos with an earth field (unsteady ground and eruption for example) could give protection or a new elementalist unique defensive boon.

So do you agree with me? Do you feel earth should give more buffs to defenses with its skills and passive? Or do you only think staff has this problem? Or do you think it is just me? Also, do you think we should get earth field combos?

Earth is more offensive with Staff where as water is more healing, this is the opposite with other weapon builds, particularly Scepter and focus, where water goes more offensive condition wise and earth becomes mixed (Essentally,, Dagger Dagger earth and staff are the most offensive in earth attune)

They likely did this so that different weapon users would work around different defensive attunes.

I forgot to add that another reason could be that they do not want earth or water to be a single type, so each weapon build either focuses on one, the other or both.

fore example, Dagger Focus makes Water a complete vunrability and CC powerhouse, argueable scepter aswell.

Earth is condition damage and defensive; also, I would say Immobilze and Cripple are defensive.

Stoning causes weakness, which will lower the damage you get as well. The thing with Earth however, is that it’s not strictly a defensive attribute: it combines offense and defense (and not in a token-damage kind of way like water does).

scepter earth attack 1 with high condition damage is deadly.
Likely the best or one of the best attacks the ele has DPS wise.
stacked up its well over 1k dps sustained.
its also a projectile finisher for each of the 3 shots it does.

On Staff, it’s more or less Offensive Defensive skills for Earth. It also mainly depends on how you rotate Attunements. When I used to run staff, I would start off in Earth, mainly to start off with Eruption>Fire>LF. Quick and easy combo, sets up Area Might, stacks bleed a quick DoT. Or if you were trying to CC or help an ally out, Gust>Earth>Shockwave>Unsteady Ground right on target. Unsteady Ground really requires it to be on a target for the duration for it to be effective.

Don’t forget, Shockwave can pass through multiple targets and adds a stack of bleed. The only really good Defensive skill in Staff Earth is Shockwave. The rest can be used in cojuction with other spells.

Just like you should only be in Staff Water for Healing+Condition Removal/Vul/CC, you should only be in Earth to CC/Bleed/Combo Finisher. For me, it would usually be 2 eruptions>shockwave>unsteady ground>eruption>fire>LF and DPS in Fire.

It’s a little different when using Earth playing Staff but it’s utility is still there. Just requires you to adjust your play style.

Honestly, when I first read ur question, I thought u were crazy, cuz honestly, I think that earth is awesome… immobilizes + bleeds… the most important aspect of earth is keeping bleeds on…

But after reading what u said about earth symbolizing protection, I do see your point. Nevertheless, to be a hundred percent honest with you, I think that the most important thing about elementalist, and perhaps, every single class, is how u control them.

While earth might not have protective skills, it does excellent bleeding DoT + immobilizes opponent, and the most important thing is that u have to learn to combine those moves with the other elements.

If you need to escape, cuz u r at a disadvantage and u r attuned to earth, slow down your enemy, then put the bleed on them, u can then switch to water heal urself a bit, slow down ur opponent with chill, and then attune to air, and gain speed movement and escape… also remember to use ur utility skills.

Most games i’ve played, mages have usually been the DPS class, and they have hardly had any defensive skills, or none that make quite the difference. So i think that u have to keep that in mind, elementalists are still mage class… but depending on ur playstyle + how you gear ur character u can have a pretty solid mage either for damage, defense, or a balance of both

Thanks for all the comments. I did forgot Weakness is somewhat defensive. I am more focused on Earth Staff than other weapons since that is what I’ve been using for most the game. It does have a lot of things that help defensive, but I still feel that it lacks direct defensive abilities. It does have great offense with conditions, and I have no problem with that. Still…

Well, I did do a bit of Earth Builds in GW1 before GW2 came out. A GW1 Earth Ele focused on Defense isn’t even comparable to the GW2 Ele on Earth at all IMO. I did a Sliver Armor build that not only made me immune to all damage as long as I kept buffs on, but it also quickly killed mobs in melee range (Nolani Academy Build).

With that being said, you can see why Earth in GW2 is a little disappointing. It can still whip out a ton of condition damage, but it cannot come close to GW1 Defensive builds. I am not saying that elementals should be able to be situational immortal in Earth again, but I just wish there was a certain weapon type that heavily focused on defense in earth (Maybe Scepter and Focus can pull it off…) and that all weapon types had more defense to the in earth.

However, I will say that after reading some comments I do see how Earth on Staff can be a bit more defensive if used right. It is more of keeping meleers away then reflecting ranged projectiles. Although that works, it still feels a bit situational, mainly because it won’t help much if you are being nuked (let’s say by a dungeon boss that throw down uber strong fields). So I still wouldn’t mind the Protection Boon being added to the staff, preferably with Magnetic Aura. [Side note: yes, I know the Aura traits have one that gives protection on Aura, but staff only has 1 Aura so it doesn’t seem worth traiting it.]

I think staff earth is quite nicely defensive. Anti projectile shield, cripple ( learn to place this well), the immobilse is great. What does for example sceptre/focus get.. 1 thing that gives a slight toughness boost.. And an immune shield for 4 seconds with quite some cooldown… And sceptre/dagger does not have the immune stuff, instead they get a lousy knockdown. Atm staff earth is yust made for keeping people on distance, not to disable them.

Earth seems great to me with Staff. Eruption is delicious (though I play strictly PvE, I can see how it’d be lackluster in PvP because its probably easy to dodge), auto-attack is solid, Shockwave is very nice. The only one that isn’t great is the cripple wall, and thats only because it hardly works on enemies stepping through it, only enemies that actually stand on it for a long time. If it worked right I think it’d be quite good.

Seems pretty decent in Scepter as well. Auto attack is again pretty nice with good DoT damage, rock shield is cool, magnetic shield is amazing.

Earth has one of the better Focus sets. Semi-AoE blind is nice and damage immunity is delightful.

When running Dagger / Dagger (which is what I usually run) I don’t find Earth very impressive at all, though. Well, namely mainhand Earth. Auto-attack seems very lackluster (bad range, almost no up-front damage which is much more of a problem at close range where you don’t have the luxury of waiting around for DoT’s to tick), the spike circle is just kind of there, and Magnetic Grasp is slow and overall meh compared to RtL or Flame Dash. I mostly find myself attuning to Earth, unleashing Earthquake / Churning Earth ASAP (often after Ring of Fire) and getting out of Earth immedietly.

The thing Earth really seems to have going for it is combo finishers. Other than utility skills, I believe Earth attunement is the only source of finishers in the class.

Electro.4173:

The thing Earth really seems to have going for it is combo finishers. Other than utility skills, I believe Earth attunement is the only source of finishers in the class.

Good insight. The combo finisher part of the Earth skills are indeed an often overlooked part of the skill. Yet they can make a difference, especially with the large amount of fields that the other staff attunements have.

There are a few other finishers though, Arcane Wave and Arcane Blast being the main ones.

With D/D, earth is basically pure offense. I mean you have…

1: DoT
2: AoE DoT
3: Pull yourself to enemy and immobilize him
4: PBAoE knockdown and damage
5: PBAoE massive damage, DoT, and cripple

All offense. The only thing really defensive is that you get protection for attuning to earth if you have elemental attunement.

The condition damage and defensive oriented effects of earth make sense to me. We have to survive a little longer for the conditons to build up and give us the time till the mob goes down.

The fire and ice skills give nice burst damage until its time to refresh the bleeds in earth or in situations when others are keeping the bleeds topped off. I don’t know the math though. It’s just the sense I get from watching mobs’ health bars.

Earth is one of our best (damaging) elements IMHO.

Yah, I have no problem with the power of its offence, nor is that what I am questioning. But it is suppose to be our defensive element yet it seems to give far more offence than defense. I see earth as being our shield. I’m all for a shield being able to bash someone in the face, but I’d expect it to be used more for blocking. With earth, it seems it has 4 bashes and 1 block, which is disappointing. However I wouldn’t want to make it 4 blocks and 1 bash so it ends up being horrible damage like water, but I think it could have a better blend of kill and defend.

If you are interested in condition damage with staff, earth does the job well. Fire can max out in stacking duration, at which time you would want to start stacking some bleeds and perhaps throw in a bit of cc. The bleeds are not weak of you are built for condition damage, and they are a short-range AoE as well if I’m not mistaken. By switching between earth and fire you can do some very good AoE condition damage, and still have an impressive array of healing abilities through water. Air would be less useful with such a build, but its nice to have some defensive control on hand.

Also, try placing #2 just before you switch away from earth and then placing a field at the same spot (fire, water, or air). You can switch attunement even during the cast, and it will explode after you have set down the field for a good burst combo that you can do all by yourself.

Earth should have more defensive skills that have some offensive value in them to help you tank some situations more effectively but not render you completely useless as you would be retaliating in some way. Much like how magnetic aura works.

My ele plays staff exclusively so far (level 50). Because I use staff, I try to get as much range as possible and kite. Earth helps me do this very well.