Guild Wars 2

The Elementalist Mindset (Advanced)

The Introduction

I’m not here to talk about builds, traits, gears and all that good stuff. If you haven’t read dapheonix’ guide, well, you should. His Elementalist build and the variations are the basis of this guide, because let’s face it, water and arcane trees are simply better. All the information about builds, traits, gears, skills, etc are covered in his guide. This guide is actually about playing the D/D Elementalist to the next level, what the Elementalist is capable of, and how you can use attributes that are unique to this class to succeed. I personally don’t like talking about builds, because really, that’s the easy part, I can switch whenever I want. Playing better means more. If you’re just starting as an Elementalist then this guide probably won’t help so much, but will hopefully give you an idea of what this class is like.

Some stuff that you should already know:
DPS: damage per second
EA: Evasive Arcana (Arcane trait 11: casting a skill based on attunement when you dodge)
WvW: world vs world
PvP: player vs player
ASAP: as soon as possible
CD: cooldown
CC: crowd control
Weaving: dapheonix talked about this, and it’s common in many MMORPGs, basically running in and out of your opponent’s avatar to screw with him.
Fury: 20% crit chance
Vigor: double endurance regeneration, basically lets you dodge more
Swiftness: 33% faster movement speed
Protection: 33% reduced incoming damage
Regeneration: heal over time

I see a lot of people still think that Elementalists fail, and well, just this once, it’s really a L2P issue. Playing this class WELL is going to take a bit of APM, which by the way,

APM: action per minute.

The Summary
Attunements: DON’T STAY IN WATER OR EARTH
Sustain: WE HEAL A LOT, LIKE, ALOOOOT, SO BUY TIME
Range: ABUSE HAVINGMORE RANGE THAN MELEE

WARNING: WALL OF TEXT INCOMING

The Attunements

Probably everyone that’s played an Elementalist had their feelings change about these attunements over time. When you first make the character, changing attunement felt awkward and SLOW, often you’d have to swap, then read your weapon skills, swap back, read them again, only to forget two minutes later. Pretty soon you start to realize you don’t HAVE to swap very often, since it didn’t really help you kill stuff faster, and in fact, it made it SLOWER most of the time. But you forced yourself to swap elements anyway just because it’s too boring to stay in one element all the time, and that it just felt like a such waste of your MASSIVE POTENTIAL. And then you get to the point where you know where every skill is, and you change attunement whenever the need to use a particular skill came along, like switching to water to heal and cure conditions, switch to air for mobility. Feeling adventurous, you go into WvW or PvP, and in panic you had no freakin’ idea which element is which and died like a newb. Then after hours and hours of practice, you start switching more and more often, it felt a lot better to switch attunements, it became more fluent, second nature in a sense. You can easily keep track of them in combat and spends most of your attentions on what your opponents are doing. You probably had your rotations that you liked, and your traits made swapping often more and more rewarding. Then EVENTUALLY you get to the point where it seems like they are always on cooldown, ALL THE TIME. In fact you reach the point where you don’t even have to LOOK to know which attunement is going to be off cooldown next! Well that’s when you really have to start thinking about it, HOW DO YOU IMPROVE FROM THERE?

First of all, as many of us Elementalist have wondered, is it really beneficial to ALWAYS be swapping elements? The answer is: YES! Let’s take a look at just what we can get for swapping all the time:

1. Perma-Fury from traits (Arcane Adept + Air Trait 1): you get 12 seconds from using your air 3 aura, then ikitteneep swapping for a 2.6 seconds fury every 3 seconds, your fury will NEVER run out, which leads to the next point.

2. Perma-Vigor (Arcane 6): this is only possible because you have fury all the time to help proc vigor from this trait, which synergizes well with evasive arcana and help survivability.

3. Perma-Swiftness: same idea as perma-fury, between your air3 and air5 skills, and the swap, you will ALWAYS have swiftness up.

4. THREE short CD gap-closers to help you maintain optimal distance: fire 3, earth 3, air 4, with these 3 skills, you can catch pretty much anything unless they stealth, or use them to keep yourself from being kited. Or create distance when you need it. Since they have all cooldowns of 15 seconds or under, the only way you can utilize all of them effectively is to KEEP SWAPPING.

5. Protection half the time (Arcane 5): Protection is probably THE best boon you can get you’re your attunement swapping, reducing incoming damage by 33% is pretty overpowered to be honest, and you can keep it up half of your time in combat just by switching to earth everytime it’s off cooldown, there’s absolutely no reason NOT to.

6. SEVEN to TEN stacks of might nonstop: Sigil of Battle is probably best utilized by the Elementalist class and should be on one of your daggers ALL THE TIME. Any other class wanting to utilize this sigil to its fullest potential would need one for each weapon set AND swap whenever they can, the Elementalist, however, can keep 7 to 10 stacks of might off of this sigil by simply switching attunement all day. (6 to 9 stacks of might from sigil + boon duration, 1 from fire attunement swap)

7. TEN percent damage from all these boons with Water Master Trait-Bountiful Power: 2% damage for each boon and you can easily keep 5 at all times from the above list.

8. EIGHT different conditions: burning (fire), vulnerability, chilled (water), weakness, blindness-EA, (air), crippled, bleed, immobilized (earth). If you are applying all of them, when your opponent uses a condition removal, he probably doesn’t even know WHICH condition he removed! And all these condition-applying skills have short cooldowns, so use them!

9. Massive Sustain by swapping to water: to be discussed in a later section.

Note: The buffs from swap also applies to your allies, so more reasons to swap often.

So now that we can conclude YES we should always be swapping, the question then becomes HOW DO I MAXIMIZE my effectiveness with the attunements? WHEN should we swap? Swap to WHAT? And WHY?

To answer that, it is important to note that CONCEPTUALLY, you should divided the four elements into TWO CATEGORIES, the elements that you want to STAY in, and the elements that you want to get OUT of ASAP.
The elements you want to STAY IN are fire and air, and the elements you want to GET OUT of are water and earth, and here are the reasons WHY.

1. Earth and Water: The way you can think about attunements is that they are actually skills, however, they don’t start cooling UNTIL YOU SWAP OUT. So if you STAY in earth or water, your earth and water attunement WON’T START COOLING. In OTHER words, you’re LENGTHENING your own skills cooldown, thus lowering your efficiency. Since we WANT the protection and regeneration provided by the water swap and earth swap themselves, we want them to cool as soon as possible. In fact if you don’t need to use earth moves but just want the protection, there’s nothing wrong with swapping into earth then out immediately. There’s another thing I want to point out here, it is that STAYING in water attunement does NOT help you heal, in fact it hinders it by delaying when you can swap into water again. Your Cone of Cold has a cooldown of 10 seconds, and the EA proc also has a cooldown of 10 seconds, which means if you swap out of water and then back into water when it’s readied again, these two skills will cool JUST IN TIME to be used again. Since Cone of Cold has a channeling time, you should always use it AFTER water 3 and 4 if you are going to use them, because you can then swap out of water right after cone of cold starts casting to minimize the time you spend in water attunement. Thus increasing your sustain power. The same applies to channeling churning earth, don’t stay in earth while channeling. Also, if you want the water and earth roll effect from EA, you can start the roll in another attunement then switch attunement halfway to reduce time spent in these elements even more.

2. Fire and Air: Interestingly, the two attunements that you want to STAY IN actually have the better autos, so you DO MORE DAMAGE simply by staying in them. The air auto is the strongest auto you have; in fact, in terms of DPS it is HIGHER than most of the Elementalist’s other skills, if you look at the DPS chart for all the auto-attacks of every class, it is just SLIGHTLY weaker than thief’s auto with daggers. The same chart also lists Earth auto as being strong, but that’s due to bleeding, which as your power scales higher and crit chance/damage gets higher, becomes MUCH weaker in comparison. Air is also the attunement that we stay in for traveling long distances because of Ride the Lightning, Updraft and Zephyr’s Boon, so you definitely want to spend most of your time in this attunement. If you’re not really taking damage, there’s actually no real good reason to swap from air at all, just auto to your heart’s content. Fire auto is weaker than air, but stronger than water and earth, however it’s only good in melee range, The reason you’d want to stay in Fire is the 2 skill. Fire 2, Drake’s Breath, has a cooldown of only 5 seconds, has a ~1.0 DPS ratio with your power and does respectable damage with burning, especially since 7 stacks of might also gives 200 or so condition damage. So hanging around in fire attunement so you can do another Drake’s Breath is definitely not a bad idea. And the 1 stack of might from the attunement is more or less negligible so you don’t have to worry about not swapping into fire again for a while. Fire 3 and 4 have 15 seconds cooldown, which is just slightly higher than the attunement cooldown, meaning you can afford to stay in fire just slightly longer.

3. Exceptions: In boss fights, water’s auto attack has the longest range, keeping you safe, while also applying two stacks of vulnerability per hit, which increases the damage output of the whole party, making it actually ideal to stay in water. Earth auto is very accurate and gives bleeding, which damage supply camp boss when he has the buff on, as he can only be hurt by condition damage. There are definitely other exceptions to the rule, and I’m not going to list them all here, but you get the idea.

I cannot teach you how to swap attunements, because every situation is different, fights don’t always go as planned, but I’m sharing how to THINK about them. The MINDSET.

Conclusion: To those Elementalist players who are already comfortable with attunement swaps, but are spending maybe a little too much time in Water and Earth attunement, just keep in mind, do not rush to swap into Water and Earth and also swap out of them ASAP will help with your sustain, tank, AND damage output. By swapping attunement intelligently, you can bring your Elementalist’s game-play to an even higher level.

The Sustain

It is important to REALLY understand how much damage you can take and how to MAXIMIZE your sustain. If you are playing dapheonix build, you probably already noticed that you’re pretty tank and it takes a lot to kill you, but really, HOW TANK ARE YOU? Well, let’s break it down. Unlike other classes, our sustain does not come in the form of a one second cast and then a burst heal, so when you first start you’ll feel like you’re just NOT HEALING at all! Well, the truth is we probably have the best sustain out of any class in the game. Our source of healing actually comes in SEVEN different parts.

1. Water Attunement Swap (Water Master)
a. Amount: 1302 + 1.0 Healing Ratio
2. Soothing Mist (Water Adept)
a. Amount: 80 + 0.05 Healing Ratio per second
3. Regeneration (Arcane 5)
a. Amount: 130 + 0.125 Healing Ratio per second
4. Water Dodge (Arcane 11)
a. Amount: 1302 + 1.0 Healing Ratio
5. Cleansing Wave
a. Amount: 1302 + 1.0 Healing Ratio
6. Cone of Cold
a. Amount:740 + 0.32 Healing Ratio
7. Signet of Restoration
a. Amount: 202 + 0.1 Healing Ratio per cast

As you can see, the numbers are all small, but there sure is a LOT of them, but how do they all add up? It depends on how well you can utilize all of them, but let’s just assume you attune to water every time it’s off cooldown, do a dodge roll to proc EA, do your water 3 and 4, then water 2 and immediately swap out of water to put it on cooldown again, then proceed to use skills nonstop until water attunement is ready again, (for the sake of simplicity, 12 casts in 12 seconds sounds reasonable) then rinse and repeat, this is how much healing you’re getting EVERY TWELVE SECONDS ( I use 12 seconds because that’s about how long it takes to swap to water, roll, 3, 4, 2, swap out, then back in again):

1302(from swap) + 720 (from 9 seconds of soothing mist) + 780 ( from 6 seconds of regeneration due to having boon duration) + 1302 (from water EA) + 740 (cone of cold) + 2424 (signet of restoration +[ 1.0 + 0.05*9 + 0.125*6 + 1.0 + 0.32 + 1.2] Healing ratio.

Simplified: 7268 + 4.72*Healing Power
with just 300 healing power from 30 in water trait, that would be:

8684 EVERY 12 SECONDS.

Also keep in mind this is NOT counting: water 5-cleasing wave, regeneration from cantrips, and the fact that we can probably cast more than 12 times in 12 seconds because most of our abilities have less than one second cast time. So in reality, our sustain is OVER 9000!! Every 12 seconds. NONSTOP.

And what else is unique about healing as an elementalist? Since you don’t have a cast time for your heal, you don’t have to waste that one second not doing anything, you can just be going through your rotation and the heal JUST COMES WITH IT! And other classes have to worry about getting interrupted while casting their heal because if it does get cancelled, well they just lost 5k hp. We don’t have to worry about that, even if we do get interrupted on our cone of cold or cleansing wave, it’s not gonna make an impact, we’ll only lose a SMALL fraction of our sustain.

If your opponent is doing less than 800 dps, he will never kill you, EVER. Just imagine fighting against someone that heals 800 every second, removes three conditions every 12 seconds, with protection half the time, doesn’t sound fair now does it?

By now you’ve probably know this, but in order to MAXIMIZE your sustain, all you have to do is:
1. Swap out of water ASAP
2. Always roll after attuning to water
3. Swap out of earth ASAP to maximize protection
4. Always be casting something for your signet of restoration

Conclusion: So what can you do with this knowledge? Well, if you have BETTER sustain, then it logically leads to the fact that LONGER FIGHTS are better for you. Abuse line of sight, run around corners, use CCs, anything that buys time and draws the fight out is going to put you at an advantage over your opponent in a 1v1 situation. Do NOT tunnel vision on your opponent’s hp bar, fight intelligently, KNOW that you can out-sustain your opponent and eventually chase him down, do not sacrifice your own life just to down someone. And in small skirmishes, you should be taking damage for your team because YOU have the ability to escape AND heal backup without even leaving combat.

The Mid-Ranged Skill Set

This is actually something TRULY UNIQUE to the D/D Elementalist. All other professions’ weapon skill sets can be classified as either “melee” or “ranged” with ~130 range and 900/1200 range respectively. A thief with melee weapons will just want to get as close as possible to his opponent, while the ranger will do whatever he can to keep distance. The D/D Elementalist however, has a skill set that averages 300 range on all of their moves. So what does this mean? It means you can “kite” melee classes, “stick” to ranged classes, and you have to constantly play a “push pull” game with your opponents, in other words, keeping the distance between you and your target at just beyond melee ranges. If he’s running away, you chase, but if he heads towards you, you run. It also means you will need a totally different style of movement against different targets, or even the same target kitten he swaps weapon.

For example, you’re fighting a warrior, he has his greatsword on, you should probably keep your distances because if you just try to facetank him, you will probably get DESTROYED. However, after he’s used all his mobility moves and realizes he’s sort of getting kited, he switches to rifle and starts to pew pew. You can then immediately go up to him and start “weaving,” because now he’s going to try to kite you instead, and he has channeling skills. You COULD try to weave against the warrior when he has greatsword on as well, but why would you? Kiting would be so much safer in comparison. Superior mobility combined with mid-range skills makes the D/D Elementalist very tricky to fight against.

In small skirmishes, you can think of a bubble with 150 range radius always around you. You don’t want ANYONE inside that bubble, because then they can melee you, and melees hurt in this game. However, you want to be close enough to people that your autos can still connect. Sometimes, you will have to “mirror” you opponents movements, if he dodges in a direction, you can just do the same thing and keep exactly the same distance from him as before.

When kiting in close quarters, do NOT move in a predictable manner, you might think you’re kiting just by running around your opponent in a circle with superior movement speed, but he will hit you with his next CC. Change directions often, and if you have movement speed superiority, MAKE him turn his camera more than he wants to, and he will be hesitant as to when to use those CCs in fears that he might miss and waste the CD.

reserved for stuff later

more reservations just cuz

I absolutely love this guide. I think most of the more skilled elementalists will already do this kind of stuff without thinking about it.

But the fact that you explained everything so in depth is just great

I really enjoyed reading, thanks.

great guide. to bad you are only talking about pvp and d/d. yeas in pvp d/d is probably the best choice for alot of people and is the main thing atm, because nither staff or sceper can offer the same amounts of “safe” burst/dmg (you can dodge ranged quite easy) and having a lot of mobility, cc and as you said weird range.

however in pve it’s somewhat diffrent, u don’t always want to change attunements because of the importance of having the attunements ready when the event/skill you are looking for are happening. the last boss in the grawl fractal is a great example of this, usually eles just AA / lavafront throughout his hp untill he shields , then we start attunement swaping like crazy.also it’s easier to pay attention to his animation if you only AA.

show some love for pve/staffs aswell ( as staff is by far the best pve weapon imo anyway)

Very very informative! I never really thought about this kind of stuff, I usually just do my rotations and spam kitten but thank you very much! I hope I can improve my gameplay with this!

Excellent info. Thanks!

Riften thanks for putting this together and posting. Your guide came along at just the right time in my Ele career:)

My 1st 80 was a mes which I still love to play but its hard to put down my D/D Ele it,s just so much fun.

I bit the bullet and laid out the gold for the Signet of battle it was well worth it. I have a Blooodlust sigil in my offhand which is nice to.

Again great post I learned a lot about the class.

Thanks for putting this together. I just started this game a week ago, and seem like all the guide/builds on this board is more for advance players.

I wouldn’t say for more advanced players, but more geared towards players who have played the elementalist for a bit. There is nothing more teaching than actually going out and PLAYING the class. Reading about it can only help so much.

Go play the class, get a feel for it, learn what the abilities look like and so on. What this guide said at the beginning is also a good idea, go read dapheonix’s guide as he breaks quite a few of the “tips and tricks” of the class that you might not be able to pick up by just playing if your not really into exploring the class and trying to push it to its limits.

Great guide, way to break it down. Someone at ANet had it right when they put as much thought into the elementalist as they did. You can tell by it’s extreme depth that this was a pet project for someone, and I’m so glad it was. There’s nothing like playing an elementalist, and playing it well. Other classes feel one-note to me since I learned to play the game on an ele.

The mindset is key. Some classes are hack-and-slashers, some are distractors, some are stealth users(/abusers? ;D), but the ele mindset is all of this and more. How can I get in and get out doing as much damage and providing as many boons to myself and others while still keeping myself alive? It’s a brilliant setup and a blast to play. And though arguably limited, the weapon choice for certain situations is extremely varied. If you are in the right mindset to play ele, you get it all.

Excellent guide, thanks very much, I am pretty new to ele but still found it really useful and this guide is especially great as an addition to Daphoenix’s guide. I would recommend both to any new or experienced ele, and feel that my PvE and PvP play has improved a lot as a result.

Riften.9247:

Sigil of Battle (…) the Elementalist, however, can keep 7 to 10 stacks of might off of this sigil by simply switching attunement all day. (6 to 9 stacks of might from sigil + boon duration, 1 from fire attunement swap)

Tested this today and it is not working, with Superior Sigil of Battle on the dagger, changed attunements several times, but I’m just getting 1 might stack from fire attunement swap, not 3 stacks of might for 20 secs from the Sigil. Please confirm if this is not working for you either. Ty

o.O dat bug gonna go take a look at this

Just tested this on a drake in wvw it still works if you have another sigil that is proc or weapons swap on one of your other daggers then that could be messing with it activating as they share a ICD.

Great info.

great guide! just like to add some points:

regarding evasive arcana (EA), eles should dodge with a purpose whenever possible –
e.g. weave in water3+earth EA = dodge attack + counter attack + proc combo heal

EA is 10s cd for each attunement. means you can cast at least 2 EA in quick succession, 3 with sigil of energy (gives 1 free dodge per attunement swap). hence – during this short ‘bullet time’ – you can dance in mesmer shatters, thief black powder, warriors hundred blades while healing and poking back at them.

arcane 6 – havent seen anyone use that for vigor – quite a waste for trait choice (since you can only choose 3).

perma fury – another key reason why this works is 30% boon duration increase with 30 pts in arcane and runes.

actually, you may realize effective attunement/ combos after hours of gameplay – but watching videos taught me a great deal of things i never tried and brings the game to the next level. it is easiest to find ideas in tpvp or daphoenix videos – many ideas helpful even in pve, such as exploiting corners, ‘look backwards’ key, use of tornado, racial elites, etc, etc.