Guild Wars 2

opinions on this with regards to WvW & PvP?

fire is without doubt the strongest attunement for dealing with PvE, even if you fully spec into air fire still does more in PvE, bit wierd but ok.

in WvW i tend to use air more, its “supposed” to be high dmg single target attunement although personally i find the air attunement for single target dmg to be quite subpar dmg wise in comparison to the fire one.
it still feels like fire does more dmg even when theres no a single trait specced into it.

whats everyones feeling on those 2 attunements for dmg in WvW.

please keep the discussion on the 2 attunements vs constant switching, in fights i do switch attunements quite regularly but if you had a “main” line, whats the results using fire vs air. thanks.

air gives greater crit chance and crit damage.

Use Scepter/dagger for air, you’ll find the single target damage output shines against mobs or people who don’t stand completely still (which means Scepter Fire is out of the question unless you can stun/immobolise them without them cleansing)

It totally depends on the weapon, I suppose. Broadly, WvW or otherwise, when using daggers fire does better damage to single targets and groups, and can benefit more from either crit or pure damage builds. This is primarily because air has no real damage mover with daggers, and does fewer hits over time than fire. In fact, I’d even say fire might be better for mobility because a lot of its damage happens passively, because Burning Speed is more reliable than Ride the Lightning, and because the best source of damage with dagger air (Lightning Whip) is pretty inconsistent, so despite doing more damage than Dragon’s Claw it really isn’t as favorable.

At least, that’s my experience. I might be totally wrong. Most of my experience with the elementalist has been with daggers, and besides having strong initiation and being a great stance for travel, there’s little incentive to return to air after a fight has begun, even for the purposes of mobility and damage mitigation, which is a huge shame because it’s my favorite attunement.

ive tried the other weapons but so far im enjoying staff more.

im aware the crit rate is higher on lightning, but heres the thing, i specced for fire and then for air, and tbh i got higher dmg and very close crit rates on fire compared to air, i dont feel that speccing for air gives that much of a advantage in terms of dmg or crit rate, which it supposedly is supposed to do.

fire atm tends crit just as often as air and its base dmg and crit dmg range from same dmg as air to more dmg, not sure if its just broken or whats the issue, im trying to figure it out.

@ loic. yeah its my fave attument as well and i would love for it to be viable and maybe that my problem, im looking for ways to justify using it, i was happy when they said it was single target high dmg but it really isnt, atm it feels very lacking.
im hoping it gets a buff or retweaked or something.
but if thats not the case, thought id just ask some players in case i was missing something.

im enjoying staff more too and …. I was really looking forward to playing single target dps mage – so from the start I was going for Air Att and what happend?? Its make no sanse for me at all. At PvE (50lvl) 20 pnt in Air and 20 in Arcane and Fire (with burning) does more damage to single target than Air.
Really sucks. I know when to switch into Water and Earth but Air isnt make any sanse for me – short stun and pushback (doesnt work on elites) isnt enough and only 1 damage spell (beside first one).
So im switching into Fire build … but sadly I really want to play Air Staff Ele.
Sry for my english.

I use staff and air is good in WvW.
Good for knocking enemy players off brides.
Good for stopping runaways.
Good for interrupting finishing moves being attempted on allies.
Good for group swiftness buffs. Windborne and Static Field + Blast.
Good for hitting multiple targets in zerg in ways they can’t predict or evade easily (auto attack).

It’s good for so much.

fire hits a larger group and does more dmg then the chain effect from auto attacks as well as a high chance to cast burning, so fire it better for groups.

runaways are stopped better by other attunements, earth, water. or fire just kills them quicker. there are no slows in air, only 1 stun which has to be lined up correctly and which may require you to push them into the field edge to trigger which pushes them closer to their team and further from you.

interrupts are better on other attunements as well, the only stun air has is not a guaranteed one, you need to combo for it, since you are not stunned inside the lightning field, only if you try pass through the edges which means you need to use your knock away skill, which also gives them a chance to escape since you will mostly be pushing them away from you.

Maybe I’m missing something here. Are people confused as to what your traits do? They aren’t “I speced into fire so I’m a fire ele, end of story!” No matter your traits or weapons, an elementalist is supposed to make the most out of ALL their attunements, not just the one you put 30 points into

Let me see if I can break this down:
Fire: Adds power (raw damage numbers) and condition duration per point spent
Air: Adds precision (crit chance) and crit damage
Earth: Adds toughness (armor) and condition damage
Water: Adds vitality (health) and healing power
Arcane: Adds Boon duration and Attunement Recharge Rate

If you’re going to trait for the most damage, putting 30 into both fire and lightning will give you the biggest bang for your buck, regardless of what attunement you want to use your skills in.

For WvW, I’d say a fire works well since AoE damage and suppression is important – probably more important than single target damage since you rarely go up 1v1. You can use arcane skills to improve your crit rate and get the best of both worlds.

You could always spec into both air and fire lines pretty easily. It’d give you increased crit chance for your fire aoe spells along the way!

OK but we are talking about spells from fire and air.
Whatever my traits goes like: 30fire/30air or 30fire/30arcane or 30air/30arcane still fire deals more dps on single target than air and for reminder those are quotes from
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/professions/elementalist/ :
" Fire
Elementalists can inflict scorching damage on multiple enemies by turning the ground to fire, raining down molten rock from the skies, and more."
and
“Air
By harnessing wind and lightning, elementalists can target specific foes with focused, high-damage attacks”.

Tarragon.6813:

Maybe I’m missing something here. Are people confused as to what your traits do? They aren’t “I speced into fire so I’m a fire ele, end of story!” No matter your traits or weapons, an elementalist is supposed to make the most out of ALL their attunements, not just the one you put 30 points into

Let me see if I can break this down:
Fire: Adds power (raw damage numbers) and condition duration per point spent
Air: Adds precision (crit chance) and crit damage
Earth: Adds toughness (armor) and condition damage
Water: Adds vitality (health) and healing power
Arcane: Adds Boon duration and Attunement Recharge Rate

If you’re going to trait for the most damage, putting 30 into both fire and lightning will give you the biggest bang for your buck, regardless of what attunement you want to use your skills in.

its the crit dmg though, if i put all my traits into air, which basically means im getting higher crit chance and dmg, why is the dmg from the crit the same as the base dmg on the fire? should the crit dmg not be higher then the base dmg?

another thing i noticed was say i put all into fire, il crit maybe 60% of the time, if i put all my points into air, ill crit about 61% of the time, basically it feels like there isnt much of a improvement in the air traits.

After reading the thread so far I get this out of it:
Air does not seem to be the single target DPS it was advertised as. Fire does more.
Discounting entirely how you skilled up your points.
I am not sure where I stand.
With staff, I agree fire does more damage than air.
With dagger, Theoretically air should do more, but it seems pretty situational at the moment. Ride the lightning and lightning whip both seem to need some debugging.
With scepter, I feel it’s a toss-up. Aside from the fact that I dislike both fire and air #1 skill animations.
Elementalist needs some work. all the classes need some more polishing. I think elementalist just may be the most difficult to balance. Personal skill can bring soooo much to the table with this one.

I do next to no damage using air. In what way is your critical chance higher just by using air spells?

2-3-1 spell cast on fire atunement with staff will outdamage pretty much whatever you can do with Air. 1st air spell is stupid with the bouncing, it gets you in more trouble that it gets you out of. 2nd has waaaaay to long cast time so it’s pretty much useless. 3rd, the knockdown, is good but nothing to be proud of. 4th is good to speed up allies and NPCs in escort quests and 5th is a decent but very time limited cc that will get you in a ton of trouble specially in story quests.
Water pretty much sucks unless you want to play the healer role the whole time, but hey, you’re elementalist, you’re suppose to wreck havoc with your spells…every time I find myself attacking with 1st skill on water I smile dissapointed.
Earth is…well, very good on paper. Not so good when you try to avoid being 2 shot by a random world mob.
I’m talking here only about staff elementalist.

Am I the only one who switches atunement based on conditions? If I see a hunter gunning for me I switch to earth and use staff’s shield to waste his big attack. If I am being chased I switch to air and control my enemy. If it’s a group effort, I stand next to someone and drop aoe heals then switch to fire to dps. I hear people talking about bang for a buck and what not, however frankly speaking even if you have 10% more damage in one atunement than other, so what? All that means is that I’ll have to cast 11 regular attacks and not 10, but the same time I gain comfort in controlling the situation and know that if I need to I can always escape. Frankly that’s more important, at least to me.

it might look like that , but it’s not really.
I change attunements all the time depending on sittuation, and if the problem would be only 10% I could live with.
But it’s one thing to do 400 dmg with auto attk on fire and 130 with the water one. Or I get 3 bounces of ~200 dmg with 1st on air aggroing mobs I can’t handle, cause the stupid thing hits neutrals too.
Problem with the elementalist it’s not its versatility, it’s the fact that you’re trading too much for it and usually need to hit 10 keys and switch 3 atunements to do the job any other class does faster with a maximum of 3 key taps.

Air is utility right now, not DPS. It doesn’t have solid DPS on any weapon. Fire always wins no matter what choices you make, in every situation, by a significant margin.

Air is currently not designed as a primary attunement but something you switch into periodically for the utility.

I typically use it and water as switch-through elements. Fire and earth are without a doubt more effective as your primary elements, on basically every possible weapon combo.

Yukishiro.8792:

Air is utility right now, not DPS. It doesn’t have solid DPS on any weapon. Fire always wins no matter what choices you make, in every situation, by a significant margin.

Air is currently not designed as a primary attunement but something you switch into periodically for the utility.

I agree with Yukishiro. If you look at the move-set for air you really only have 1 attack. The 2 attack is horrible, takes forever to discharge and does less damage to less targets the 1 attack could have done during the same amount of time

Air has always been my favorite attunement. I use S/D and my build used to have 25pts into Air, but even so the higher level I get, the more disappointed I am with the attunement. While many of the skills are useful, the dps of Lightning Strike and Arc Lightning is absolutely pathetic. Even with a crit build the crits do less than the base damage of Fire. 30 seconds of slowly ticking away health or 2 seconds with a Dragon Tooth – Fire Touch – Arcane Blast spike.

The thing is, in BWE1 I had great fun with S/D air, after the Ele nerf I do most my damage in Fire or Earth and only switch to Air for the off chance need to blind, which isn’t often since Scepter earth has a 10 second multi-hit blind with only a slightly longer cooldown. That or for RtL/Updraft. Half the time I only use Air attunement to get around more quickly. It’s rather disappointing.

I love the Ele but Air is night and day compared to how it was during the first beta weekend.

Depends on the weapons you are using but across all weapons fire has the most dps spells.

I think if you made your gear Power/Condition then you’d be going between Fire/Earth. You would be using Staff or D/D because those two weapons sets have a large portion of their damage abilities being Condition based.

But if you went straight Power/Crit then Scepter/Dagger would be the way to go and Fire/Air will be your main DPS attunements.

Traits != damage. Going up into 30 fire is the most inefficient way to do more damage, you will do more damage if your Traits work together and generate combos via arcane wave.