Guild Wars 2

What armor/accessories are people rolling with now, after a long absence I am pretty clueless haha

What game mode?

I mainly play PVE, but I don’t want to feel useless in wvw or pvp when I play

Kinda everything works on PvE, most common thing is to have it damage oriented (power or condi (mixed)) or celestial (Recomended) for a more balanced build. If you plan on raiding, you’ll need very specific ascended prefferably builds … in short berserk + some viper trinkets.

As an ele isn’t toughness and vitality stats important as well?

Depends on how experienced you are, can easily run a full zerk ele through almost all pve content if you know your dodge timings and such. HoT maps are a little tougher, you might wanna through on a bit of defensive stats, since most everything can 1shot a zerk ele

Dungeons/Fractals/Raids are all about knowing the fights, once you do, you can run glass relatively easily.

PvP: has a different set of “gear” so you don’t needa worry here, just test out different amulets (these give you all your stats).
Not sure if anyone has figured out a solid choice of amulet for this yet, since our go to (Celestial) was removed. I’ve tried Paladin which works well, but not great.

Standard for PvE:
Almost full zerker, Assassin Earrings or weapon.
Seaweed salad food item
Superior Sharpening stone utility.

Small bit of variation on food. I prefer seaweed salad.

I prefer Marauder , because elementalists have low health pools.

If you wore full marauder armor, marauder amulet , marauder staff , zerker trinkets: 2434 power, 15.6K HP , 55.52% crit chance , 200% crits

compared to :
If you wore full berserker armor, amulet, staff, trinkets: 2557 power, 11.6k HP, 49.71% crit chance, 214% critical hit

For WvW however, you want to have more armor than that, preferably 2300-2500. Depending on whether your build makes use of crits (i.e. Sigil of Air , rather than crit damage) you can swap 2-4 trinkets from zerker to Captain’s or Cavalier’s. The pre-HOT standard was Soldier’s armor with full Berserker’s everything else (~ 2300 armor , ~ 15K HP).

Infusion.7149:

I prefer Marauder , because elementalists have low health pools.

If you wore full marauder armor, marauder amulet , marauder staff , zerker trinkets: 2434 power, 15.6K HP , 55.52% crit chance , 200% crits

compared to :
If you wore full berserker armor, amulet, staff, trinkets: 2557 power, 11.6k HP, 49.71% crit chance, 214% critical hit

For WvW however, you want to have more armor than that, preferably 2300-2500. Depending on whether your build makes use of crits (i.e. Sigil of Air , rather than crit damage) you can swap 2-4 trinkets from zerker to Captain’s or Cavalier’s. The pre-HOT standard was Soldier’s armor with full Berserker’s everything else (~ 2300 armor , ~ 15K HP).

The problem with Marauder in PvE is that you essentially have straight up less ferocity and Power for some health that honestly is negligible if you learn to dodge. It also plays into some of the top DPS setups in the game.

Scholar runes of course.

A big reason why full zerk or Full zerk with assassin trinkets is the “best” is because due to dodging and team play it is actually the build with the highest Power and Ferocity while still having 100 or near 100% crit.

While yes, you can get 100% crit in Marauder (and notably without the use of accuracy sigil or using the fresh air dagger warhorn variant) your damage ultimately suffers by about 106 power and 14% crit damage and crit damage is very important for max dps considering dodge and good play solves pretty much everything else.

WvW is a different story and I really don’t have any issue with taking some tanky gear there because it is needed.