Guild Wars 2

It seems that a combat system based on stances (attunements, weapon kits, conjures, etc) naturally approaches the act of stance swapping from one of two directions: restricted or unrestricted. A full set of toolkit utility skills as an engineer, for example, showcases great unrestricted stance combat. Equipping or discarding a kit creates no global cool downs; the timing feels more chaotic, dancing in and out of each stance as this or that skill becomes useful; the necessity to linger in each stance diminishes beyond use of that particular skill; each kit may not, on its own, fulfill the needs of the moment, and it benefits the player to equip more stances as that allows for greater situational adaptation.

I expected the Elementalist to outline the counterpart: restricted stance combat. Global attunement cooldowns would mean each stance should feel more robust and independently functional. Rather than constant stance popping merely for this or that skill, you’d swap less frequently to adapt to more general situations (vs group, vs single target, vs heavy conditions, vs incoming control, etc), but with largely similar efficiency across the board. Except this is not the case. By and large I have no reason to leave Fire attunement, except to hamstring my damage output for some single effect with a prohibitively large cool down. Yet I feel compelled to swap stances, because they exist, and because sometimes, very rarely, it behooves me to heal or debuff. Unfortunately the swap often leaves me wondering why I bothered to attune for Water to heal, when simply killing the mob(s) more quickly would have kept me alive just as easily, if not more easily.

Granted, I’m doing something wrong here. I must be. I’m not certain what, exactly, I do wrong, but enough of you are content and proficient with Elementalist that the current design cannot be wholly problematic in the way that I see it. So what is the deal with attunement swapping? Do you all stay in fire, barring necessary circumstance? Or do you pingpong between two of your favorite elements and somehow magically bring the non-fire ones up to par in terms of damage?

I love my Ele, but (tl:dr) I just can’t get this attunement gig to work for me.

Your posts read like you’re new with elementalist, so I’m going to assume you are.

Yes, at lower levels fire is all you will need to kill the mobs. Once you start getting higher, and the events match you against a greater number or mobs(and even an elite or two at that) Attunement swap becomes a must. As you trait up on the arcane tree(Which you should, at least until you learn to really play the ele), atunement swapping will give you boons, and if you do it fast enough, and use your combo fields right, you can get high amounts of might, among other boons that will really help out.

Tl;dr: Yea, now you can kill it with fire. But the time will come that poping up every spell on fire wont kill the mob, especially if there are more than one, and you will need to change.

I’m kind of confused by the top post. Looking for “restricted stance combat” — if you want to stay in fire and wait on your cooldowns, that’s fine. As you pointed out, you don’t particularly feel benefitted from leaving fire. So don’t. Just cuz the game permits you to bounce around, you needn’t feel obliged. Just like there’s engis who use the flamethrower all the time. You can even optimize your traits and utilities not to rely on attunement changes, if you like.

There’s more than one way to play an ele. Personally, I like the swaps. My fiance just goes between fire and water most of the time.

Your character level/traits/weapons will help us a lot in helping you. But as a generic help I will say that you are thinking incorrectly on the attunement swapping.

First and foremost fire is your most upfront damage period. You are correct about that, no other attunement will give you more upfront DPS than fire will with every weapon.

However Air and earth often have the best burst which is also often a combo finisher which will make your fire that much stronger for swapping their attacks often deal significantly more damage than fire’s in a short time span being useful to swap to for the burst and combos then head back to fire. there are also times where with certain weapons Air is actually more damage than fire. though those are few and far in between, identifying them and reacting can really up your DPS.

If you are low level then healing is not a big deal yet but it will be. Other than healing and some very minor CC, water isn’t terribly useful so don’t expect to really get into that until after 40. Best thing I would say to do is learn your combos and learn your skill synergy to fully utilize your attunement swapping. I had a guide somewhere on this forum but it seems to have gotten lost somewhere.

I just use them all like I believe most do. When changing attunements my allies are granted a buff so why not? Traited for that I believe. Why not cycle through water and toss down a heal which also removes a condition for your allies. Why not put up a fire combo field then switch to earth and give area effect might to your allies? Air #2 doesnt that prevent the monster from critting? Forget but it makes the monster less effective so why not. I only play dd so cant comment on other weapons.

I think at lower levels, with a higher arcane cooldown it’s not as practical. I am pretty new, but I usually sit on air and RTL to a mob(s) and switch to fire and finish.

In group events it’s more intuitive because your cooldowns are longer and switching to water to buff/heal others is a good way to wait the in-between.

Pinder.5261:

By and large I have no reason to leave Fire attunement, except to hamstring my damage output for some single effect with a prohibitively large cool down.

Do you all stay in fire, barring necessary circumstance? Or do you pingpong between two of your favorite elements and somehow magically bring the non-fire ones up to par in terms of damage?

Elementalists are a bit different than other professions. Because of our lack of weapon swap, we are basically locked into one effective range. This is especially true for D/D eles.

So one factor in swapping attunements a lot is using your gap closers as necessary. An example: I start the fight with Ride the Lightning → Updraft. Now I’m sitting away from my target, he’s doing to get up and backpedal. Swap fire and use Burning Speed, now you’re in range. Oh target is now running away? Swap Earth → Magnetic Grasp → Earthquake. Not anymore!

Another factor would be swapping between damage, defense, heals, and control. There’s no good way to explain this, I think it comes with experience. You’ll have to learn how to swap to which attunement as necessary in general when the situation calls for it, based on what skills you NEED to use, not to just spam. Like you said, sometimes you swap but you don’t feel the need to. When you’re fighting either a tough boss, or in PvP, you’ll find that when you’re getting hit with a lot of various attacks, it’ll pop into your mind, “Oh, he’s healing! I can use RTL → Updraft to interrupt him, then he’ll try to kite me, so I’ll root him in earth, then swap water and chill to keep him close..” etc. Eles excel at controlling enemy movement and their own movement, if you don’t swap attunements, you aren’t putting enough pressure on enemies.

Two more things:

1. Ele’s get a lot of great boons from attunement swapping, as well as secondary effects like heals and condition removal when traited.

2. Ele’s tend not to hit as hard as other professions with less skill usage. This is compounded by the fact that we have some pretty insane cooldowns on most of our skills. By swapping and using more skills, you are throwing more damage and control out over time, and helping to avert the CD problem by using what’s available in a timely manner.

I think you will find OP that when the mobs you encounter do more damage and take longer to defeat you will discover the uses of the rest of the skills. Currently you do not need heals, stuns, chills, invulnerability, bleeds, knockbacks, knockdowns, etc. Someday you will.

First of all, thank you everyone for the responses. Helpful stuff.

Lokki.1092:

Your character level/traits/weapons will help us a lot in helping you.

35. D/F for PvE stuffs, Staff for WvW sieges and sPvP. Traits aren’t set in stone. In sPvP I’ve enjoyed 30fire/20earth/20arcana, and 20air/10earth/30water/10arcana But things change, and I haven’t Ele’d in sPvP for a while now so I have no real commitment to those builds.

Jericho.4521:

Another factor would be swapping between damage, defense, heals, and control. There’s no good way to explain this, I think it comes with experience. You’ll have to learn how to swap to which attunement as necessary in general when the situation calls for it, based on what skills you NEED to use, not to just spam.

This is, probably, the part where my tactics fall apart. As an Engie I’m well accustomed to swapping skill sets based on the needs of the situation. If anything, I feel overwhelmingly adapted to this act. So much so that, as an Ele, when I swap to Water for one moment, then attune to something else, it frustrates me that I cannot immediately return to water again, and my control of the situation simply begins to fail.

Pinder.5261:

First of all, thank you everyone for the responses. Helpful stuff.

Lokki.1092:

Your character level/traits/weapons will help us a lot in helping you.

35. D/F for PvE stuffs, Staff for WvW sieges and sPvP. Traits aren’t set in stone. In sPvP I’ve enjoyed 30fire/20earth/20arcana, and 20air/10earth/30water/10arcana But things change, and I haven’t Ele’d in sPvP for a while now so I have no real commitment to those builds.

Jericho.4521:

Another factor would be swapping between damage, defense, heals, and control. There’s no good way to explain this, I think it comes with experience. You’ll have to learn how to swap to which attunement as necessary in general when the situation calls for it, based on what skills you NEED to use, not to just spam.

This is, probably, the part where my tactics fall apart. As an Engie I’m well accustomed to swapping skill sets based on the needs of the situation. If anything, I feel overwhelmingly adapted to this act. So much so that, as an Ele, when I swap to Water for one moment, then attune to something else, it frustrates me that I cannot immediately return to water again, and my control of the situation simply begins to fail.

This is pretty much the whole reason why we Elementalists have cantrips. If you haven’t bought any with skillpoints yet, I’d highly recommend buying Armor of Earth, Lightning Flash, and Mist Form when you can. They give you amazing defensive abilities + stunbreak for those moments where you panic or your finger slips and you accidentally hit F2 instead of 2 or something of the sort.

mulch.2586:

There’s more than one way to play an ele. Personally, I like the swaps. My fiance just goes between fire and water most of the time.

Not really, at least from where I stand.

There may be more than one build, but that doesn’t mean much when every single build plays exactly the same. The stance dance is a single playstyle, the only viable one in PvP and high level PvE, and it’s barely affected by any build choces except your weapon, which we only have four of. It’s not supposed to be that way, the traits pretty much make it clear that the designers intended for mono or dual attunement builds to work. But the designers completely screwed up on our class mechanic and didn’t even realize it until beta. At which point they nerfed it in to the ground, and yet people can still find uses for the Ele so long as they abuse the stance dance.

And if it gets buffed? We may now have viable single or dual-attunement builds, but the stance dance style will just become more powerful. They’ve created exactly what they were trying to eliminate by simplifying GW1s deck swapping system, a single superior ‘run’ through the skill-bar which applies to almost every situation, commonly known as a crack build, we have a crack class. And no matter what they nerf or drop or change, it’ll be there unless they change the mechanics behind it.

Pinder.5261:

35. D/F for PvE stuffs, Staff for WvW sieges and sPvP. Traits aren’t set in stone. In sPvP I’ve enjoyed 30fire/20earth/20arcana, and 20air/10earth/30water/10arcana But things change, and I haven’t Ele’d in sPvP for a while now so I have no real commitment to those builds.

…

This is, probably, the part where my tactics fall apart. As an Engie I’m well accustomed to swapping skill sets based on the needs of the situation. If anything, I feel overwhelmingly adapted to this act. So much so that, as an Ele, when I swap to Water for one moment, then attune to something else, it frustrates me that I cannot immediately return to water again, and my control of the situation simply begins to fail.

Elementalist cannot swap nearly as often as an engineer can and I can definitely see some frustration in that. However you have to leave the mindset of swapping to use individual skills. And get into the mindset of combining skills into a chain. This means that you don’t go into water from fire to just heal, but instead you 4 -> F2 -> 5 ->2 -> 3 -> 4 -> F3 This puts you in air attunement having healed up and your opponent having done little or little damage to you thanks to dazes and chills. It also gives you 3 stacks of might (55 extra power/condition damage at your level). Also everything in water has been used and is on cooldown anyways. there is no reason to head back there for at least 10 seconds. making the need to swap back gone thanks to the impossibility of using any skills.

This would also be a great time to point out that your Air #1 deals more damage than anything in fire with the exception of drakes breath’s burning effect. This means that while you are missing a some damage you are still going to be dealing a lot of damage. and when you get back to fire you will be even stronger for the swap.

As someone else said Cantrips and Arcane utilities fill in our gaps great and can be used in any attunement to the same effect. This means for a moment you can still dish out great damage in Water, or have condition removal or great survivability in fire. Arcane Wave is definitely one of the best and used in the above combo it will up your might stacks to 6, not to mention deal a lot of damage. Cleansing fire and arcane shield can round out your build at this point nicely giving you good damage outside of fire, but great survivability while in fire with little need to swap for small fights.

So far it looks like you’ve gotten it down that you pretty much need to have 20+ in Arcane. I recommend 30 even with the EA nerf. Sadly some of your problems could be coming from the fact that you use a focus offhand. While I will in no way say it is bad. It doesn’t really shine till very late game or sPvP since it is preventative damage defense, and being defensive against early game mobs is just not necessary, not to mention you don’t have the bunker stats that are required to use it to it’s full potential yet. This is why for Mh/Oh builds, Oh dagger is pretty much hands down the best option. It doesn’t mean you cannot get through with a Oh focus but you may want to check out d/d it gives a lot more options and leaving fire will no longer be negative damage for you.

OP only really has a point if you want to swap between only two attunements and if you only want to fire off an auto-attack and maybe one other. Then the attunement-swapping cooldown inteferes. If you move between three attunements, with throwing in a fourth once in a while, and use several abilities in each, the swapping cooldown doesn’t matter.

Someone else mentioned that it looks like the traits were intended to let you stick in a particular attunement, and I’d agree that’s what it looks like. However, if it actually worked that way, how OP Elementalists would be! Using only 1/4 of your weapon skills and still doing fine? Yeah, that’d be OP for anyone who could be bothered to actually swap attunements. (It might be a different matter if traits not only strengthened an attunement but also weakened the other three, but that’s obviously not the case.)