Guild Wars 2

Hi guys,

I’m new to guild wars 2, started playing about a week ago, and I was wondering if you could help me with an updated leveling guide for elementalists, or just some tips regarding weapons and traits leveling priority.

Sorry to bother you but it just seems that every guide I stumble upon has several posts indicating that it is outdated.

Any other tips are welcome as well.
Much appreciated! =)

Leveling is fast and easy in GW2 so don’t worry about it. Resetting traits is easy and cheap so trait however you want and try new things whenever you feel like it. Not experimenting with traits would be a big mistake.

When your new to the game getting defensive gear and traits does help with survivability. In every game passive skills are easier to use because they are … passive. So load up on passive skills and traits like signet of restoration for healing and signet of water for condi clearing and Earth’s Embrace and Final Shielding trait skills for passive defense. But if your not having trouble surviving you can ignore that advice.

No reason to marry one weapon set learn them all. If you don’t like having a large number of skills to learn than you won’t enjoy ele anyway. Part of the attraction of the class is having the highest learning curve and thus skill cap in the game.

Even if you load up on defense ele still has enough offense and if you aren’t dying a lot you can become a dps machine instead.

I wouldn’t gear for healing power all that much it doesn’t really help you that much in the game. I keep a staff with healing stats and a Superior Sigil of Life on it in my inventory for anytime I need to heal. After killing 25 trash mobs it gives me 250 extra healing power and thats enough to do some decent healing. You can also use the Frost Bow conjured wep for healing.

Mist Form is a life saver hard to get by without it. Glyph of elementals will keep agro off you for 60 seconds and thats great for soloing hard things.

Things to remember about GW2 that are different from other games:

mobs/bosses do more damage to toons in melee range. Toons do more damage to mobs/bosses in melee range. Distance attacks are systematically weaker in this game.

agro is not about who has done the most damage. Toons with high toughness draw more agro. Toons in melee range draw more agro. You don’t want agro. Your squishy.

Overall just have fun and either enjoy the long learning cure of learning the class with the most or at least second most skills because thats the fun of the class.

edit: you mentioned that many of the guides are said to be out of date. A lot of that is in reference to PVP which the game makers keep trying to rebalance. So its not relevant for leveling. In every game I play the forums are dominated by PVPers an that always gives an unbalanced view of things.

My first advice would be to unlock the skill Glyph of Lesser Elementals. The earth variant is a nice little tank that makes survival a lot easier. You can reduce it’s recharge with the 10 point Air Magic trait Quick Glyphs (which reduces your first healing skills’s recharge as well). By the time you get ready for an elite, you can get Glyph of Elementals for an elite earth elemental that can tank pretty much anything in the game.

This should allow you to get past the tougher stuff while you learn how the profession works. Enjoy!

I’ve levelled my second lvl 80 recently so here are some tips both mechanical and economic-wise for smooth levelling:

Gear:
- Stay up to date with your gear every 10 levels, purchasable from the Trading Post
- If short on cash, you can sPvP since it now gives you more silvers, which is also significantly larger than you get from starter content. Also would let you get familiar with
- Gear with power should be prioritised. However, they are also Power/Precision gear are very popular though so they are generally more expensive unfortunately.

Weapons:
- Daggers and Staff are expensive, if you want to save some coin scepter/focus is much cheaper.
- Conjured weapons scale with your level so you can safely opt to ignore buying weapons altogether once you have the Conjurer trait and unlocked some Conjure skills.

Traits:
- 10 Earth with Stone Splinter is the most efficient starting option, giving both toughness and extra damage, you probably won’t. 10 Fire for Conjurer if opting for saving cash and using Conjure Lava Axe and Lightning Hammer exclusively.
- Experiment how you want, if you want to excel in speed clearing dungeons though you should trait and familiarise yourself with being a squishy glass cannon, otherwise it doesn’t matter.

Skills:
- Your starter heal, Glyph of Elemental Harmony is incredibly better than the others at low levels when used in Water Attunement for extra regen due to how the heal skills scale.
- Conjure Frost Bow’s number 4 skill, Ice Storm is one of the hallmarks of eles and deals a ton of damage.
- Conjure Lightning Hammer is your best source of DPS through it’s autoattack that obliterates mob with built in Blast finisher and AoE blind until you have enough trait points to make Lava Font and Fire Attunement Staff sitting or Dagger mainhand’s 100% access to Lightning Whip via Fresh Air equal/superior. Number 2 skill also provides some mobility for moving around.

Short guide to the weapons:
- Staff: Aoe Weapon, great damage in Fire Attunement, little damage elsewhere. Must make use of comboes especially Blast finishers in Lava Font, Geyser and Healing Rain to be effective. Support aspect only shines in organized groups (ironically at the extreme organized groups don’t need this support in PvE and it’s better if you sat in Fire all day). Can feel very mind-numbing with all the ground targeting with extended use.

- Scepter: Burst damage, poor sustained damage since all of the auto-attacks are poor. Stacks might very well via Blasts in fire fields from either off-hand. Main damage skills: Dragon’s Tooth, Phoenix, Air auto-attack.

- Dagger Mainhand: Great sustained damage with some burst. Limited to 300-600 range. (Avoid melee hits by kiting and hitting from max range and chill/cripple through Frozen Burst and Ring of Earth). Lightning Whip and Burning Speed are your main damage dealers. NB: All auto-attacks apart from Lightning Whip extremely weak.

- Focus: Defensive weapon with great condition remove and for trivializing ranged encounters. Weapon defining skills: Swirling Wind, Magnetic Wave, Obsidian Flesh, Comet.

- Dagger Offhand: Multi-purpose in mobility, damage with a heal. NB: Churning Earth only worth using for might stacking/while melee mobs are walking towards you especially if using dagger main hand since Lightning Whip deals better DPS.

The ultimate utility skill for any levelling needs, glyph of storms in earth attunement.

Just try it….oh, and stay away from the dredge, those blind kittens ruin everyhting.

Dungeon Speed runs can wait. For now just learn the class. It takes a long time to get good at Ele.

The best heal is Ether Renewal. Heals a lot, fast cooldown, cleanses conditions. It does everything.

Figure out which of the weapons you want to go with. Generally, I find Staff is the easiest as it’s the least complicated to play. Scepter takes the most work especially if you are stacking, lots of combos to button press, Dagger riskiest due to close proximity needed and needs a lot of defensive play to thrive.

Ele is a terrible starter class. While it can dish out a lot of damage when you know what you are doing, it can be unforgiving and frustrating when you don’t. In order to play elementalist “the way its meant to be played” you need a lot more actions per minute (i.e. pressing keys and such) than other classes. While this is part of the fun for players like me, it is too much of a challenge for many others. You also need to use your active defenses well because you have the lowest health and armor in the game.