Guild Wars 2

Most of this information can be found here

Ele is just fine and is much more balance and diverse compared to older models for the profession. If you are trying to use d/d and fire, for the majority of the time, thinking fire is going to give you the best damage then you have totally thrown out what each ele attunement specializes in. If you are having issues playing as an ele, then try using different weapons and basing your set-up along with sigils, runes, and amulet according to your build. Something also important to remember is certain conditions like weakness have a higher value in PvP and WvW and have little to no impact in PvE, so emphasis your build according. Enjoy!

Understanding Fire Attunement:
Attune to fire, gaining heavy damage and burning abilities.
(How does fire attunement apply heavy damage? Through power and burning condition damage).

Understanding Water Attunement:
Attune to water, gaining superior support and healing abilities.
(How does water give support? Depending on how much support you plan to give, support can be increased based on acessories/amulets/armor with healing power traits).

Understanding Air Attunement:
Attune to air, gaining heavy damage and control abilities.
(How does air apply heavy damage? Through power damage along with blindness, vulnerability, and weakness).

Understanding Earth Attunement:
Attune to earth, gaining superior damage-over-time and defensive abilities.
(How does earth apply damage and defense? Depending on the weapon equipped earth focuses using condition damage such as bleeds along with cripple, immobilization, reflective auras and some area denial skills for defense.)

After understanding the different attunements its important to choose your unique traits, and utility skills. Depending on your attunement preference(s) will decide how much boon, condition, damage, defense, and recharge you will have.

What is Arcane:
focuses on general improvements, arcane utility skills, and the switching of attunements.

Arcane Traits – give increased attunement(s) recharge, boons, and critical chance. You have the choice of selecting traits that can increase your support skills, apply conditions on critical, give more damage per boon on you, and cast spells after dodging.
Arcane utilities – are great for causing critical damage.
Arcane Mastery - Arcane description describes it giving general improvements, making many think it is a less desired trait line. When you accompany Arcane trait line along with Arcane utilities is where it becomes quite strong on its own. Knowing how to blast combo finishers on friendly AoE fields or your own can give you additional conditions on enemies. Another more overlooked trait about Arcane is that it allows lingering attunement boons while swapping. If you have attunements more preferred to use, arcane will only add to the desired attunement while giving general improvements to other attunements when swapping to them.

What is Air:
focuses on use of air magic and additionally glyphs, movement speed, and spike damage.

Air Traits – give improvements to movement speed, vulnerability, and lightning attack upon attuning to air. You have the choice of selecting increased damage pass a certain thresh-hold, increased critical strike, attunement recharge, gaining boons through using glyphs, and shock aura when someone uses control skills on you.
Air utilities – are glyphs that apply conditions, group support, AoE (Area of Effect), and pet support through elementals.
Air Mastery - Air is probably the most not well understood trait line next to arcane. Using air is about burst damage, applying debuff conditions on enemies and control. When you apply weakness you have the chance limit the amount of damage by 50% (glancing blows), you will take from an attack while slowing down the recharge of endurance by 50%, stacking up to 5 max, giving you good spike control when needed. Blindness is also a great control skill that makes the next outgoing attack miss. Unlike weakness, blindness is best used in escaping a heavy blow, or to help you close the distance between you and a enemy. Applying vulnerability is used to increase the critical damage and normal damage an enemy takes. With glyph of storms it will increas by 2% and 1% from critical hits plus increase the condition damage to your enemy, stacking up to 25 max.

What is Water:
focuses on use of water magic and defensive tactics, as well as exploiting Vulnerability on foes.

Water Traits – gives you access to passive self-healing, ally healing, and attunement to water healing. You have the choice to select traits that increase damage, outgoing healing, endurance regeneration, ally aura support, and cantrip cool down reduction.
Water utilities – are your healing skills and cantrips. Despite most associating water with ice bow, healing skills can remove conditions, apply boons depending your current attunement, used as a blast finisher, passive healing, and healing your team. Cantrips can instantly cure controlling conditions as well as give boons, cure conditions, and teleport causing damage to enemies.
Water Mastery - Water can be misunderstood as primarily healing support for a team but it design is about defense. Mastering water on its own is about survival and keeping the enemy away long enough to stay alive, either until the needed attunement is available or team assistance arrives. Chilled not only slows your opponents movements down but it also slows down your enemies skill recharge rate by -66%. Water also calls for knowing when to use healing skills on yourself depending on how high or low your healing power is. Using your healing power at low health works well if your healing power is high but if your healing power is low it will do less healing, so knowing when to use it is important.

What is Earth:
focuses on use of bleeds, defense, and signets.

Earth Traits – grants increased toughness, damage and condition upon attuning to earth, and damage reduction. Your choices to choose from range from decreasing damage taken through boons, stability to avoid controlling conditions, increased condition damage, earth recharge speed, condition removal, and critical damage avoidance.
Earth utilities – are signets, that give passive abilities and active abilities. Fire signet emphasis on increased critical chance on passive, and burning damage on active. Water signet focuses on curing conditions every 10 seconds when passive and applying chilling when activated. Earth signet on passive improves toughness and when active causes bleeding damage while immobilizing. Air signet will give you increased movement speed while the signet is still passive and when activated will blind up to 5 targets around you.
Earth Mastery - Many understand earth as only defense, but earth attunement is using a spike defense for a certain amount of time while applying conditions. It can be used for team support just as well for solo. Earth excels at applying cripple condition to enemies to help with keeping enemies from escaping close range encounters or slowing them down so you can create distance. The next best thing earth does is applying bleeding damage. Using earth’s bleeding damage along with protection, stability, and its control conditions like cripple, blindness, and immobilize work great, allowing you to apply good condition damage and move away from your enemy.

What is Fire:
focuses on use of fire magic and conjured weapons.

Fire Traits – gives power increase, fire aura, direct damage when attuning to fire, and increased damage to burning foes. The choices available to you in fire can make critical hits cause burning damage, more access to fire auras, condition cleanse, increased condition damage, might, increased damage, skill recharge reduction, critical chance increase, and blindness.
Fire utilities – are your conjured weapons. Conjuring one of these utilities gives you the weapon and spawns another in the area you choose giving you an attribute bonus, also depending on the weapon type.
-Flame Axe will increase power and condition damage. The skills available will cause burning damage, direct damage, and give might.
-Frost Bow will increase condition duration, and healing. It’s skills can cause healing, vulnerability, chilled, and bleeding.
-Lightning Hammer will increase critical hit chance, and damage. It causes heavy direct damage, blindness, and stun.
-Earth Shield will increase vitality and toughness. The skills available once summoned causes bleeding, cripple, and gives protection.
-Fiery Greatsword will increase power and condition damage. Its skills will cause from direct damage, to burning damage, and cripple.
Fire Mastery - Despite what many will say on the state of elementalist, fire use to be the jack-of-all-trades, but now fire has its own very distinctive play style unique like all the others. Fire is not just about raw damage but also about condition damage too! Fire attunement is offensive but matters what weapon is equipped as your standard weapon(s) or conjured. Example is using staff is not ideal for being offensive at close range, compared to dagger as the main hand, and scepter is better suited for offense from what is between staff and dagger, the mid range areas. What’s great about fire is those using it as a primary do not need to spec into tempest to camp in fire, which is why many feel it is underwhelmed in this area. By simply summoning Fiery elite sword or the flame axe, you are able to safely attune into other elements while remaining in fire, continuing the damage and condition applying. Each conjured weapon also allows access to other types of condition damages, control conditions, boons, and special unique things that makes this weapon better at certain things. Understanding that is key to fire mastery. If conjure weapons is not your style you have so much versatility with fires good offense to use the skills that are on your dagger(s), focus, scepter, or staff, which mostly have fairly good cool-down times, allowing fire skills to be spammed much more frequent.

What is Tempest:
gain access to warhorns, a set of shout skills, and the ability to overload attunements for powerful effects.

Tempest Traits – gives singularity, allowing you to overload an attunement, swiftness when overloading an attunement, and protection while overloading an attunement. Your choices to select from in the traits concentrate on super-speed, endurance regeneration, auras when overloading, weakness, team might, health regeneration from auras, stability during overloads, boon duration, applied conditions on you 100% reduction, sand squall, and frost aura.
Tempest Utilities – are shouts that can only be accessed once the Tempest trait is slotted. Shouts apply 360 conditions to enemies or breaks stun to the tempest and surrounding allies.
“Feel the Burn” – applies 360 damage, with burning condition in 600 radius around you, and applies fire aura to you and your allies.
“Eye of the Storm” – applies 360 stun break, and super speed for you and allies, in a 600 radius.
“Aftershock” – applies 360 damage, with cripple, and immobilize in 600 radius on enemies around you, and also applies magnetic aura on you, plus allies.
“Flash-Freeze” – applies 360 damage, and chilled to enemies around you, in a 600 radius, while adding frost aura to you and your allies.
Tempest Mastery - Tempest is the most used and probably one of the less understood next to fire. Overloading is an important part of tempest, but what makes tempest stand apart is its ability to control enemies. It is also great to know how many controlling skills do you wish to have access to. Tempest can control enemies around them with their shouts, and overloads. Additional control can be found in elementalist weapons and how you play with tempest using certain skills. Tempest have the most control using warhorn, overloads and having access to their shouts. Without the warhorn you loose less control and removing shouts as well. Like fire it all depends what you are comfortable with and the type of tempest build you are going for. There are offensive tempest builds, defensive builds, spike damage builds, condition builds, and builds that focus on more than just one. Also with tempest it emphasis more on your sigils and runes depending on your build. For instance if you are looking to increase a specific condition damage or duration, it is important to use what is needed, based on how you play. A tempest that focuses primarily in air may use sigil's of peril (increasing vulnerability duration), sigil of paralyzation (increasing stun duration), sigil of debility (increasing weakness duration), sigil of air (causing lightning strike on critical), sigil of mischief (blinding enemies) would help your offensive abilities. Runes can work in a similar way, it is mainly all about finding the balance you desire.

Weapons:
Elementalist weapons work just like all others for other classes. Some are designed for long range, close range, mid range and defense. The best thing to do when selecting which weapon you like, choose what style of play you prefer and feels comfortable to you. below is a breakdown of what each elementalist weapon excels in.

Dagger – Emphasizes close range, heavy damage spells.
Focus (Off hand only) – Provides supportive spells in form of energy shields, disabling snares and defensive area effects.
Scepter – Casts various single and multiple target, medium range spells.
Staff – Can cast different area effect spells with direct or lasting effects.
Warhorn – (Off Hand Only Tempest Specialization Only) – Provides assistance to you in both supporting your allies and creating disruptive areas for enemies.

Interesting read.

Though, a fair deal of the information is misleading, and is going to mislead new players into thinking false informations.

-Applying vulnerability increases by 2% (it is 1%) the amount of normal damage and condition damage to your enemy, stacking up to 25 max.*

-When you apply weakness you limit the amount of damage by 50% (50% chance to reduce damage by 50%) you will take from an attack while slowing down the recharge of that skill recharge. (Does not do that)

-Fire utilities – are your conjured weapons. Conjuring one of these utilities gives you the weapon and spawns another in the area you choose giving you an attribute bonus, also depending on the weapon type. (Don’t go thining that you need fire if you plan on using Conjured Weapon; Conjurer trait is purely or extremely optional.)

-How does air apply heavy damage? Through power damage along with sigils that increase blindness, vulnerability, and weakness. (If you ever manage to have new players try Sigil of Peril, or Sigil of Debility to increase the duration of those condition, delete the thread right away. That’s one of the wost advice you can ever give to a new player.)

My best advice
To new players, do not limit yourself to the design lines and ideas around the attunements. For instance, Earth being a defensive attunement, or Air being an heavy damage attunement is a major overstatement: you will not magically become hard to kill because you’ve swapped to earth.

I will clear a few things about air and earth, but the rest I read from your post is preference. Thanks for the reply in pointing those few things out.

The Weakness description is still wrong. It’s a 50% chance to only take 50% damage, which can be argued as a 25% effective damage decrease, but not flat 50%. It also doesn’t apply to conditions, which could be vital information for new players too.

Then I don’t get the spoilers. I suppose they should give the post structure but it’s just additional clutter.

Overall the structure could use a little work. Bundling conjured weapons (which can be argued to be really weak overall bar their fire-and-forget capabilities) with Fire attunement has little sense except for that one trait; and it has been mentioned that the additional charges are optional at best.
Bundling the Signet Skill descriptions with Earth Attument seems more like filler and really just adds clutter – again – when it should be about the attunement itself.

Come to think of it, the attunement descriptions really don’t say that much because it heavily depends on the weapon you pick alongside it. Example would be Air in staff, in which case the skills neither to burst/spike damage nor grant you much blinds.

I’d suggest going over the weapons first and then giving a recommendation which weapon synergizes the most with the given attunement or your idea of the attunement’s role (i.e. Focus excels at defensive options in Air and Earth compared to other weapons).
And in another block you can discuss the skill types and what attunements synergize with them due to traits and such.

Make a proper split between base Elementalist and Tempest, especially new players will probably be quite confused about that.

Thanks Sourde for your feedback! I updated the clarification of weakness. Your points in the third paragraph I will omit because it is subjective. I like what you said from your fourth paragraph on down. The whole idea behind leaving those parts out from every attunement is to help players, new and old, to find their own way by giving them the necessary tools to come to an conclusion. In my next post(s) I plan to really pick apart weapons and attunements, and to give a few practical suggestions to help those to be able to customize builds on their own.

Sounds good.

Although I’d stand by the third paragraph. To me it makes it sound like certain skills are meant to be used in conjunction with certain traitlines / attunements, which is not a set rule or always the case (see Signet of Fire or Conjured Weapons). It could give the impression that you’re bound to use them in that combination when Elementalist really uses many things depending on the situation and the synergies between them.

Which is why I would suggest making a proper split between attunements in general, in synergies with certain weapons, and then looking at skillsets on their own and maybe pointing at synergies with attunements / traits (though for most the synergy will be that one trait that impacts them).

I see and understand your point. My reason behind associating the utilities based on the specific attunement in this specific post was based on how the Developers introduced them. I look at being able to mix fire signet, lesser glyph of storms, and armor of earth along with fire traits etc. subjective. I do not think or promote that these things are limited only to the attunements and trait lines. I would just simply like to cover those things in depth in other posts, gradually working towards tempest so that players by that time fully understanding what direction they want or what works more for them.

Tempest in my thoughts, is really all about being able to really combine multiple utilities, traits, and skills, so I wanted by the time the reader(s) get to that point they understand on their own what areas in other attunements have exception to the rules when used certain ways.

Well, yes, but then you’d eventually split them and not keep them on the attunement. Skills and in extension of that builds are surely somewhat subjective; my point here is that the guide that’s clearly aimed at people unfamiliar with the Elementalist suggest that those things work best in conjunction with the attunement or the trait line that has the traits that enhance them.
When, as you said it yourself, Ele is about combining the things and that breaks with such grouping.
Anyway, interested to see where this guide is going.