Guild Wars 2

This is a looooong way down the road as I just rolled an ele a couple days ago. But, I’m having a lot of fun with her, it’s very rewarding to see the damage output after I hit the correct sequence of skills and I’m liking the fluidity of the game play… I’ll defn lvl her to 80 unless I hit a brick wall at some point (I hope not). Currently I’m trying to learn both the d/d ele and the staff ele (as I plan to do mainly PvE/dungeons/fractals and maybe just dabble in WvW once I reach the end game with all my gear).

So, naturally, I was curious about the endgame gear.

The “classic” 0/10/0/30/30 ele builds that I saw seem to take knight’s armor with boon duration runes and zerker trinkets (oddly thats how I built my AH guard — except she has emerald orbs rather than boon duration runes). And that’s fine but sounds a little boring.

I was wondering what people think about an all stat ele with knight’s gear, i.e. knight’s armor with divinity runes, all stat ascended amulet, lunaria and solaria ascended rings (both all stat) and all stat accessories?

My thinking is, a lot of ele skills are direct damage/crit damage based, while others are bleeds/burning based (and also there is other not offense oriented condi like chilled and weaknesses). Further, ele’s have built in heal skills, and in general of all the classes it seems like eles, guards, and perhaps engi are the ones who can most benefit from all stat gear, since they basically use everything. Knight’s gear because of the +crit %, a lot of ele skills like vigor on crit and certain foods trigger on crit, and ofc toughness for survivability. The divinity runes has the added +crit damage in addition to the all stat.

A more aggressive variant would be perhaps all rampager gear with ruby orbs and all stat trinkets. But that feels extremely GC-ish — and I really dislike GC’s.

EDIT: I forgot to mention how much of a pain in the kitten it is to get knight’s gear unless you craft it — which looks ehhh, Sorrow’s Embrace armor looks horrendous in my opinion and the other dungeon option is Arah… trying to farm Arah isn’t a pleasant thought. So I’m hoping there is a really good offensive/defensive set out there that fits the ele better than Knight’s

I run knights, i´m looking to have few parts of berserker now and then, and cavaliers trinkets.
Guildies swears by knights gear and celestial trinkets.
More bunkery approach would be somtehing like full soldiers gear.
Clerics has some arguments for it, though personaly i think it loses to other sets.

Never be afraid of tinkering with individual parts, just try throwing in few parts of something different now and then and see how it affects your gameplay.

Since you have stated you plan to mainly play PvE such as through dungeons and fractals, I suggest you take a look at my guide:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Neko-s-Guide-to-the-D-D-Ele-in-Dungeons

Knight gear is not enough…it will trigger crit stuff but damage is lacking

I have a knight set too but i had to get a zerker armor set.

on both i use runes of the pack (+pow + precision etc)
Weapon zerkers
Backpack/amulet and 1 earring PvT
The other is celestial
i switch rings between celestial (all stats) and zerker.

I change armor only in few situations like svanir except boss where i take zerker again.
Or lava shaman if dps in party is enough.

But there i also switch to scepter/focus.

P.S. nowaday exotics are really cheap…and since Yesterday they will be even cheaper due to the boos in T6 mats in southsun cove.
You can after buy trasmutation crystals.

Or you can farm arah 3 that is reasonable…with an experienced party.
I got my zerker set from there and a couple path 2 run….

cleric-zerker-soldier combination works well for me. Some apothecary trinkets for a tiny bit of condition damage. I don’t like relying solely on stats. Wouldn’t have chosen to play as elementalist if having good stats was all I cared for :p.

I don’t think Knight’s is wholly optimal for an ele – the only real crit bonuses we can get are burning on crit (in the Fire trait line, and needs condi damage to be useful), vuln on crit (requires 25 in air) and vigor on crit – for the latter, if we build with boon duration runes we get up to 70% extra duration, which gives a 3.5 second window to crit after the internal cooldown of Renewing Stamina. So you can get by with the crit increases from, say, master maintenance oil, having 10 points in air, fury and maybe a food buff.

Without any extra crit damage on gear, Soldier’s ends up better than Knight’s for survivability -and- damage. It is, however, somewhat harder to get, and you need some precision from food to ensure uptime on Vigor.

As for cleric’s, the only way for an ele to have lower damage is to be stupid and go with Magi or an MF set with no damage stats; however the combo of healing power and toughness goes extremely far for survivability on an ele.

Except for Rampager’s, condi damage gear more or less locks an ele into Earth attunement. This can be built around, but the issue with it is that the moment you exit earth attunement you give up 9-15 seconds worth of reapplying bleeds and damage drops off severely (however, with condition duration gear/food/runes, it’s possible to get 100% uptime on 25 bleed stacks while in earth for any weapon set…)

Condition builds really give up too much by being forced into staying in one attunement though. Rampager’s gear means a build doesn’t fail once it leaves Earth, but it still has no defensive stats.