Guild Wars 2

Focus is OP: Ele condi guide (hotjoin)

Looking for a fun hotjoin build? Tired of playing bunker x/dagger builds? Why not play scepter+focus condition build!

Currently I see two builds being played by elementalists: many variations on 0/../../30/30 and berserker staff, with most people playing the former. It can be difficult to survive hotjoin, especially as a new player, without tons of mobility and an oh-kitten buttons, so, if you’re new to elementalist, proceed at the risk of frustration.

While this build might be viable in tournaments, I haven’t had a chance to try it, so tell me how it works out. Also, while you will have fun with this build, it’s not easy glory – not immediately at least. If you’re like me, you stopped caring about farming awhile ago.

Alas, I won’t be posting a commentary guide on youtube, because my computer can’t handle the game and recording at the same time.

The build:
10/0/30/0/30 (traits in parenthesis are recommended)
10 fire > Burning Precision
30 earth > (Geomancer’s Freedom, Obsidian Focus) Rock Solid
30 arcane > Elemental Atunement, Arcane Mastery, Elemental Surge

Scepter – Minor Precision
Focus – Superior Geomancer
Elemental Harmony
Arcane Wave, Arcane Blast, Lightning Flash
Rabid Amulet n’ Jewel
Runes of the Centaur

You read that right. Full earth, and a fire trait!? Madness. Unfortunately for your opponenets, this is Sparta.

This build is so much fun because of the variety of strategies at your disposal. This variety is mostly thanks to offhand focus and Elemental Surge. There’s too much to write here, so I’ve treid to isolated strategies that you can mix and match.

Offense
Your damage comes from a very small set of abilities:

• arcane wave and blast in fire
• fire & earth 1, periodically earth 2
• superior geomancer’s sigil every 9 seconds
• a crit from any ability can cause burning

(The huge footnote to offense is the 3 second reflect with Magnetic Wave.)

While you can apply a huge amount of burning at once, you shouldn’t. Wait for and bait your opponent’s cleanses.

You want dance into melee to land Sigil of Geomancy as often as possible, so try to get a sense for 9 seconds. With full arcane your attunement cooldown is 10 seconds, which helps a lot if you lose track. Earth 15 minor trait and Rock Solid mean that you are crippling foes and giving stability to team mates when you swoop in.

Harass with fire and earth 1 and arcane blast (in fire). This allows you to keep your distance and get a sense of how trigger happy they are with cleanses and dodges. It also allows you to eat through aegis.

If your target is not being smart about cleansing, i.e. if they’re tunneling, call target when they reach 50% and get ready to shift into air for focus 5 and water for focus 4 and 5. Assuming your team members train the target, you will force cooldowns even if you don’t get the kill.

Unless you are being ignored and are free to turret, the majority of your animation time will be dedicated to defense and utility. Because bleeding and burning are applied easily, you are freed to watch and react to your opponents, peel for your teammates, res, stomp, etc.

General Defense and Utility

Positioning matters a lot more here than in x/dagger full water builds. Don’t let the kitten-ton of toughness deceive you. You are brittle.

This means you need to work on your situational awareness, and move the camera around like the director of the blair witch project on speed.

Teleport early when getting trained. Making distance with Lightning Flash can often discourage chasers in big fights. Then just turn around, cleanse with phoenix and start turreting.

If you are on the back foot against someone who wants to get in your face, kite with freezing: water attunement focus 4, arcane blast and wave. Don’t stack it. Wait for the cleanse or gap closer, then and then apply another. Shifting into earth while they’re in melee range simultaneously slows them, and prevents them from applying hard control for 2 seconds.

Unless it’s ripped off, you should have nearly 100% swiftness uptime. This does a lot to make up for lack of dagger mobility. If you’re not in combat, heal in air and stack swiftness. It doesn’t matter if your health is full. Your swiftness is ever increasing, since the duration of the applied swiftness is always more than the Elemental Harmony cooldown. In combination with Elemental Attunement, the Runes of the Centaur give a generous amount of swiftness to nearby team memebers as well.

If you’re not healing in air, you are in combat, you are healing in earth, and you are healing early. With this build, it’s more important to time protection before enemy burst than it is to be fastidious about overhealing. If getting trained, guard your heal with stability by shifting into earth right after you begin the heal.

In addition to high base toughness, you should always have Rock Barrier up. I take Obsidian Focus, which means that spamming Stone Shards in earth gives tons of toughness, though I supspect most of you will take Earth’s Embrace, which isn’t a bad choice. Scepter lightning 1 will also give you the extra toughness with Obsidian Focus.

Cleansing
You have two cleanses (condi removal). They are phoenix and magnetic wave. USE THEM WISELY. Don’t cleanse on one stack of confusion. Try to cleanse right before you heal if poisoned. You aren’t running full water anymore.

Both cleanses are conveniently located in earth and fire, the attunements in which you apply conditions. So, if you’re facing a necro try to bait early condition swaps, and then cleanse it immediately.

Phoenix: In bursty builds, phoenix is a great skill shot because it can hit three times. For this build, you will want to save it to cleanse. As a perk, you get some vigor and, if the timing is right, a blast combo.

Magnetic Wave: Unfortunately, you can’t think of this ability as only a cleanse. An entire post could be written about this ability alone. Suffice it to say, timing this with your opponents projectile burst in combination with burning and bleeds will lead to incredibly fast gimps. It’s also an excellent running ability, as you reflect range snares while clearing conditions.

Getting blown up
So, brass tacks. How do you deal with decent dagger thieves. Well, honestly, this is one reason that this build might be a liability in high-level tournament play, though I don’t think we should be resigned to that fate.

At full health, you’ll usually have at least a half-second warning before you’re dead to mug/backstab/whatever, even if they have haste. Shifting into earth and pressing 5 needs to become like breathing to you. If your invulnerability, Obsidian Flesh, is up, and you play your cards right, you can be confident going into a 1v1. Now if you’re at 50% health in a team fight and you don’t know the thief is coming, that’s a different story. In a tourny, my only answer is, you should have known it was coming.

Once you can handle un-telegraphed thief burst, you can easily handle telegraphed Warrior or Mesmer burst. Reflect kill shot, and quickness/haste spamming ranged opponents for quick gimps.

Good Guardians and Necromancers put out heavy, consistent damage, so be careful about timing your condition removal, and jump out of the fight for a moment if you have to.

Chasing
Use water attunement, not earth, plus elemental blast to chase. Use earth + arcane to aid your melee teammates in sticking to a target. Throw in a knockdown to seal their fate.

Alternatively, chase with a lightning flash into earth attunement for the cripple. Then freeze if you have to.

Stomping
Swirling winds is a free stomp against Warriors and Engineers, and that’s arguably overkill as Blinding Flash or an arcane ability in lightning attunement can block the knock-down/pull.

Shifting to earth at the right time also helps your team stomp Guardians and Rangers, Warriors, and Engineers.

Magnetic Wave, in addition to working against Warriors and Engineers, can be used to stomp Necros. If for some reason you couldn’t blind, just cleanse the fear immediately.

Obviously, absolute invulnerability with Obsidian Flesh allows you to troll res and stomp – like with their entire team on you.

Ugh, everyone knows Light Flash stomp against thieves, and to a lesser extent mesmers, right?

General pointers

You cannot use the same “rotation” for each class. Know the class you’re facing, particularly necros and guardians.

For god sakes, stop tunneling and swap targets.

Stop turreting into retaliation.
… with 7 stacks of confusion

As a footnote, with this build, try arcane power and Fiery Greatsword while attuned to fire or water. Hilarious.

…phoenix doesnt cleanse conditions anymore…

DXIEdge.2789:

…phoenix doesnt cleanse conditions anymore…

Yes it does. The tooltip says so, and after testing, it is not bugged – it still cleanses conditions.

hm. go figure…

my mistake continue :p

things i don’t like:
- condition build with minimal condition duration…
- no healing power and…
- lack of heals on focus
- lack of mobility on focus
- on-crit effects with low crit chance

i’d like to like focus but the lack of mobility, heals and crappy fire skills kill it.

@mj. I agree it’s not incredible. I was just getting sick of the same builds and this works decently. Even 100% uptime on swiftness is nothing close to RtL.
Crit chance is 50% with fury, which again isn’t that great. The condition duration can be quite long. It’s around 20 seconds of burning if you hit both wave and blast, but then you’re waiting for 25 seconds or so before you can apply it again easily. I don’t think the problem is heals, so long as your not doing the rambo.

Anyways it’s fun in hotjoin, not tournaments.

I’ve been using a similar build in WvW and PvE.

I run 0/10/10/20/30 in trait points

Traits are:
Air: Zephyr’s focus
Earth: Obsidian Focus
Water: Cleansing Wave, Cantrip Master
Arcana: Elemental Attunement, Renewing Samina, Evasive Arcana

Utility: Glyph of Elemental Power, Mist Form, Lightning Flash

Stats: Carrion/Rabid

Glyph of Elemental Power is nutters for stacking useful conditions with scepter. It’s far more efficient than elemental surge, IMO.

mjharrison.3209:

i’d like to like focus but the lack of mobility, heals and crappy fire skills kill it.

True..

1. Loss of mobility in favor of defensive traits. A fair tradeoff normally I believe.

2. The lack of healing is really painful, but I like the CC water has. Not that it makes up for it, though.

3. Fire skills on focus are terrible, yes. Wall of Fire does not warrant using and Fire Shield is only there to trigger Zephyr’s, as the shield itself is beyond crummy and can be triggered in fire attunement, and with signets anyway. Seems like they ran out of ideas. It should be made into a better defensive aura, imo.

However, I am currently playing a D/F build as well, as I am growing tired of my D/D 0/30/0/30/10 build (glyphs/cantrips/with the same runes and necklace/gem as the below build). Good fun as it might be, overuse leads to boredom in my case.

My D/F build is this. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJAodhMmIblx5gjDAEFpYi4xDW0QRRMzA;ToAA0CnoqxUjoGbNuak1MwYSA (copy link and paste in browser for it to work).

Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave is a must with focus in my oppinion, as you BARELY have any damage skills at your disposal, beyond the auto attacks. And you know how frustrating they can be, especially Lightning Whip with its constant misses. You can use cantrips with this build of course, but hey, damage needs to come from somewhere.

Kudos to OP for putting focus on the focus.

Finally another elem’ playing focus conditions ! By the way I prefer 30/10/30/0/0 aura/signets.
I’ve created a post :
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/PVP-Conditions-and-anti-conditions-support/first#post1270383

Thanks for the thoughts! I’ve been considering building a condition ele using Elemental Surge. I wasn’t sure what weapon combo to use, but focus definitely seems like a contender. Unfortunately, I’m interested in getting +100% condition duration, and I think that’s only accessible in PvE/WvW while eating Pizza. Even then, it seems like the best we could do is 97%, unless we’re wielding a Frost Bow (which should bump me up to +117% condition duration).