Guild Wars 2

Leveling up an elementalist on the side because I enjoy support play styles. I’ve been swapping between scept/dag, dag/dag, and staff to get a feel for the different weapon’s abilities.

At the moment the play style just seems so button “spammy”. Quickly cycle through fire or earth, couple air skills, swap to water, mash skills, back to fire. Of course trying to pull off might/healing combos and such.

Just not sure it’s going to get any better later levels. Is it something that just grows on you? At the moment, I’m enjoying the play style of my necro much more, but that class doesn’t offer near the group support I believe.

Did any of you feel that way about the class at first too, and grew to love it as more traits/abilities opened up?

Using skills quickly to achieve combos != spam

Oh, thanks K U T M. that must be it! Lol I play an engineer too, and though I’m swapping through my kits and abilities rather quickly at times….the class just doesn’t feel like I described above. Weird, huh?

Maybe it’s all in my head! Anyone seen my meds? xD

Kyotee.7851:

Oh, thanks K U T M. that must be it! Lol I play an engineer too, and though I’m swapping through my kits and abilities rather quickly at times….the class just doesn’t feel like I described above. Weird, huh?

Maybe it’s all in my head! Anyone seen my meds? xD

Might be you’re watching the Attunement cooldowns as well, making it seem like you’re using more skills than you actually are.

Traiting into Arcana reduces the cooldown of Attunement swapping, which might help a bit.

Probably just a matter of mind-set Kyotee. I main an engi so I know what kit cycling is like. But you know what each kit can do, and you swap to them as each moment dictates the skills needed. Likewise, each Ele attunement has its own specific roles.

Think of water attunement as your medkit, offering healing, cleansing, and some offensive utility.
Think of fire as your grenade/bomb kits, dishing out aoe damage and conditions.
Think of earth as your TK (sorta), giving you defense and control (and also bleeds).
Think of air as uh….single target, blinds, stun, swiftness….so FT maybe?

Anyway, you get the idea. Each attunement has its niche. The main difference is that Ele’s skills tend to have much longer CDs than Engi’s and the autoattacks are lackluster, so you’ll be swapping attunements more often than you’d swap kits for access to skills off CD, but of course attunements have cooldowns, unlike kits, so you can only swap so fast. Lol….now I feel like I’ve made it more confusing, not less.

example of D/D ele PVE opener (0/20/0/20/30):

Attune fire:

3-5-4
step forward
Roll back while doing so attune earth
earth 4-5
while charging earth 5 watch what’s happening

Either turn on your armor of earth or your arcane shield or arcane wave
Before channeling finish remember to switch to air and use 3 or water 4 if you need to recover HP.

Doesn t seem “spammy” to me….you have to be fast, position carefully (to avoid dying), react with your cantrip etc etc….

In WWW you have to plan your combos more carefully, chain CC and stuff.

Yes, even more so now that I’m playing glass fresh air.

I would not call it “spammy” you definitely throw out a LOT more spells than other profs though.

As someone said above, unlike engi we don’t have access to all our tools whenever we want them so we shift around a lot more.

Thanks everyone. K U T M opened my eyes Lol.

His comment made me think that if I like the engineer class so much, why not elementalist? So I’ve been on my Ele all morning, and well, it just seemed to click better.

Definitely the mindset I believe. Going to keep at it. So far been discovering my love for staff while following the Queensdale zerg around. Soloing I’ve been favoring D/D.

LordByron.8369:

example of D/D ele PVE opener (0/20/0/20/30):

Attune fire:

3-5-4
step forward
Roll back while doing so attune earth
earth 4-5
while charging earth 5 watch what’s happening

Either turn on your armor of earth or your arcane shield or arcane wave
Before channeling finish remember to switch to air and use 3 or water 4 if you need to recover HP.

Doesn t seem “spammy” to me….you have to be fast, position carefully (to avoid dying), react with your cantrip etc etc….

In WWW you have to plan your combos more carefully, chain CC and stuff.

That sounds very cool! I’ll have to go try that out now. Wow, thanks for sharing.

If you want brainless spammy look at other classes, Ele at least needs a set order to be most effective.

Razor.6392:

If you want brainless spammy look at other classes, Ele at least needs a set order to be most effective.

This is how I view “spamming” skills too. To me, it’s either just blowing all your skills (mindlessly) or sitting back in autoattack (mindlessly). If you do either of the aforementioned things with Ele, you will die quickly, having done nothing productive.

We all did that. When you get to higher lv it will improve don’t worry. And by improving I mean that you will learn which skill you should use and wich you shouldn’t and when.

Quick example: I use S/D at low lv I would often lead with RTL for everything until Veterans stared kick my kitten in Orr.

Like K U T M said is not spamming is combo chaining. Right combo, right time and well executed because unlike engineers you can’t swich back for at least 9sec if you have 30 points into arcana.

If you want the less “spam” I would suggest not spending any points in arcana and use a staff. 30 water for support. And the rest I have no idea.

Yeah that’s normal for Ele. Ele is the busy body class for people who need to constantly do things with pinpoint precision and timing. Failure to do so usually results in death.

Does it grow on you? Hell no. I re-rolled other characters because it was so annoying. I ended up making a “Lazy Ele” build — the DPS Fire Staff build, which isn’t anywhere near as busy, but still busier than most other profession builds.

And no it doesn’t get better at higher levels, it stays the same. You will get better at doing it, but it’s not something I grew to love as I went along. I still hate it to this day.

The Ele is definitely the spammy-class.

The mantra of the Ele is basically “Press all the buttons, so you can press more buttons.”

Depends on your definition of spammy because the skills all do something for a situation. You just learn what you need when you need it. As you get better you will spend more time in Air applying pressure so your skills will be off cd by time you need some of them.

Ring of fire/burning speed/fire grab do alot of damage but take getting use to. Ring of fire and burning speed = access to more damage from might stacking.

Drakes breath is awesome and self explanatory.

You got stunned? Swap to earth put up shocking aura if it was from melee or
You got stunned? Swap to Water for frost aura – 10% damage and chill them for 2s

You got immobilized and big damage is coming? Swap to air updraft for the built in evade

Lightning touch is W/E I mostly just use it against thieves thats about it.

Water auto attack is ok has decent range if you don’t have anything better up.

Cone of cold is awesome.

Those are examples that you will learn as you play though from a WvW/PvP perspective rule of thumb is to never stay in water long.

You get by with spamming at first against bad players it does seem “hard” at first but it slows down as you get use to it. Why I like ele cause it is fast paced doing stuff. There always feels like I have some attack for some situation that I can use.

Elementalist seems to be constantly pressing buttons to make an impact. An extremely frenetic playstyle that is similar to playing a fighting game with button mashing combos.

It wasn’t my cup of tea although I really wanted to like it :-)

@ OP

The reason is because auto attacks are weak and you have to cycle through your attunements and hit the damage skills on recharge in order to maintain solid dps that comes so easily to other professions.

Well being spammy is the cost for dealing tons of dmg take it or leave it.

I personally don’t have a problem with how the ele plays. I’m just highlighting that dealing optimal dps as an elementalist is much more challenging than any other profession.

Shockwave.1230:

I personally don’t have a problem with how the ele plays. I’m just highlighting that dealing optimal dps as an elementalist is much more challenging than any other profession.

But everytime you land that churning earth is worth it.

Ele’s mechanic is worse designed than engi’s, no doubt about it. Engi has access to all kits at any given time, so that you can actually use situational skills as the situation dictates. Ele on the other hand requires you to spam attunement swapping to get heals and boons, regardless of the situation. Hell, for d/d water attunement skills besides cleansing wave barely deserve to exist, since the whole point of water is to get in and out as quickly as possible to maximize your healing per second.

The things that keeps me playing ele are aesthetics, good sustain against non-burst (with one build), easy to land pbaoe, and versatility throughout game modes when playing solo. Our gimmicky mechanic without these things does not stand up well at all however.

Jabberwock.9014:

Ele’s mechanic is worse designed than engi’s, no doubt about it.

I doubt it. The design is right for me, giving me many options based on the order in which I use my skills. Can change it on the fly. The engineer on other hand, has to give up a utility skill slot and a few traits just to get a viable second set. For eles however, all our skills are decent from the getgo.

Neko.9021:

The Ele is definitely the spammy-class.

The mantra of the Ele is basically “Press all the buttons, so you can press more buttons.”

Warrior is not http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hundred_Blades

If you feel “spammy” while playing an Elementalist, you’re doing something wrong. The timing is the key here.

@Jabberwock.9014: If you use only the cleansing wave in water attunement, you’re really doing it wrong, no offense m8.

Imho eles feel spammy because you´ll need to leverage every skill with vaguely right effect to properly do anything.

Damage rotations always include less damaging skills that would usualy be worth using for their secondary effects, but ele needs to use for simple damage to even match any other classes damage burst.
Healing isn´t simple use of heal skill, even less so with signet, and thus you need to keep including water swaps and skills into everything.
To keep decent armor up you need to keep getting protection from earth/utilities, which again requires more buttons to press, and less desireable skills used just to keep damage up.
To setup any combos you´ll need to use certain skills or utilities etc.

So basicly you´ll need to use everything all the time, can´t just save attunements for certain situations.