Guild Wars 2

I’m relatively new to the game, I bought it 5 days ago and I’m having a lot of fun in it with friends. I’m currently a level 50 Elementalist and I’m just now learning about combos.

I use a staff and the utilities I have are Glyph of Storms, Arcane Wave, Arcane Blast, and Glyph of Elemental.

A combo I’ve been trying to do:
Eruption > Lava Font > Arcane Wave > Roll into Lava Font > Burning Retreat > Roll forward

This is something I found in a post from 2 years ago. I’m guessing something may have changed since then, because the most stacks of Might I get is 6. Supposedly I’m to get 13. Am I missing something?

Also, I would love to see a list of good combos.

Thanks in advance!

Combos are very important part of the Elementalist class, so yeah, you have to learn them sooner or later.

The might you are getting is probably from eruption/arcane blast+ lava font.

To combine combos, you have to use a “Blast Finisher” on a “Combo Field”.

So look up every skill description on the weapons you are using, then see if you can combo something with something, keep in mind that Combo Fields don’t last forever, so you need to manage to squeeze all your stuff into those timers.

Eruption is the only Combo Finisher Blast type available to the staff weapon, as far as i remember.
And only Fire Fields are able to produce Might stacks, other fields will produce different effects.

In total there are 3 types of finishers that you can execute on Fields, to get special combos and those are: Blast Finishers , Projectile Finishers and Leap finishers.

Blast finishers on fire, produce might stacks.

With a staff, eruption + lava font, will produce 3 might stacks, IF you are standing near the lava font when it erupts.

Then out of our arcan spells, Arcan Blast has a blast finisher aswell, which you can pop ontop of eruption, so that makes it 6 stacks.

Then the thing that you missed, is probably that Dodge rolls don’t do anything, unless you have the Evasive Arcana trait, which requires 6 in Arcane.
With that trait, when you dodge roll, you get a different effect depending what attunement you are in.

When you are in earth, you would get a blast finisher on the place your dodge ended, thats why the dodge roll to blast fields is mentioned in some builds.

So what you would have to do is, Burning Retreat >Eruption > Dodge Foward > Arcane Wave > Arcane Brilliance.

Arcane brilliance is also a heal, that has a blast finisher, which you can pop might with too, but you can replace that with Elemental healing, which if used in fire, also gives might anyways.

So that’s it for staff might stacking, i mean you can poke and prod and get better results if you time your might stacking with staff, but i wouldn’t bother too much with it until 80.

The ones you mentioned are staff combos, still the same. However, if you wanna learn some Scepter/Dagger DPS or might stacking combos, have a look at this video:

I hope it helps

I have recently been studying the intricacies of ele staff combos and I know how you got the idea that you should get more.

It used to be that ALL rolls were blast finishers if you had taken Evasive Arcana in your grandmaster Arcane trait. There was, however, a cool down. This would have made one of your rolls into a third blast finisher.

In 2012 that was changed by a patch so that only the earth roll is able to act as a blast finisher. Your rolls while attuned to fire aren’t triggering squat.

You could, however, take a risk at the start of a fight by evading backwards with Burning Retreat, hitting Arcane Blast just as it finishes, buring a heal with Arcane Wave while popping over to Earth Attunement at the same time and then dodge rolling back into the fire while in Earth. You’ll need to be FAST to pull it off and I can’t remember if attuning to earth will interrupt the heal cast. You may need to play with the sequence of finishers to get it to work.

Another option is to try a similar set of moves with Burning Retreat first for some finishers and then use Lava Font to use the rest of your finishers. That will allow you to stack all the might without having to sprain your fingers by trying to move so fast.

If you’re running PvE you could also try adding even more combo possibilities with Fire Axe, which gives two more fire fields, another blast finisher plus gives you a leap finisher for fire aura. I was going to run it in PvP but I spoke to one of the best Elementalists in the International Tourney scene and he thinks that the utility slots provide too much needed defense to sacrifice one of them for more offensive capability.

He did say that running Fire Axe for more combo possibility is a lot of fun though. Considering that PvE mobs aren’t nearly as dangerous as a skilled PvP player, you could probably get away with it out in the world and it would teach you a lot about making obscenely complex combo chains with multiple fields and finishers.

PS:
Try getting together with another ele to see what you can make happen. I’ve yet to see if one blast finisher can trigger a field from each ele but I’ll be testing that tonight.

PPS:
Don’t waste a trait or utility spot in order to be able to move faster. Just attune to earth and start Eruption (2), pop into air (gives swiftness since you should be traited for boons on attument swats), lay a Lighting field (5), Arcane Wave, Arcane Blast and then pop Air (4). The combo gives about 50 seconds of swiftness and you can reapply it at the 30 second mark, allowing you to build up swiftness faster than you use it.

There does, however, seem to be a cap somewhere around a minute and fifty seconds. I’ve tried and tried but I can’t get any more duration than that. Since I still can refresh every 30 seconds, it doesn’t bother me any.

Also, you could skip erruption, pop into air, hit (4) right away, lay the lightning field, use the 2 arcane skills, pop into earth and dodge roll for the third finisher.