Guild Wars 2

never did gw1, but whats the difrence?

In GW1, you couldn’t switch attunements on the fly, so most builds focused on one element (Air/Fire/Earth/Water). Most people went for Fire in PvE, because of the AoE damage.
They were rather easy to play in low-level PvP, but they were easy to cripple as well (interrupts, attunement removal disrupting their energy flow), where most eles specialized in either Air (blind spam, single-target spike damage) and Fire (Mind Blast comes to mind, mostly single target pressure and burns). Earth also became rather popular during the later years of the game, when a couple of Earth skill recieved huge buffs.

They played numerous roles in high-level PvP though, by either running flags in GvG, assisting spikes in balanced teams, or crippling enemy melee with Earth and Water. It was all about timing your skills well and being in sync with the rest of the team.

All in all, the difference is quite huge, it’s kinda hard to compare, GW1 and GW2 mechanically being entirely different games & all.

In GW1 Eles did awful damage but had good support and energy management (GW1 had a classic mana system where skills both had an energy cost and a recharge time), so they were usually used as the team’s toolbox: A high-damaging skill here to assist the melees during a spike, a blind there to hamper the enemy’s spike, an expensive skill from the second profession (GW1 had a dual-class system), and so on.

While in GW1’s PvE the rule “damage > all” was also prevalent support was more complex and rewarding; an Earth Ele with Assassin’s Promise (second-class skill from the Assassin) only did around 1/3 the damage of a Warrior/Assassin/Dervish/melee Ranger (which is still far more than most Ele build can dish out) almost permanent AoE blind and knockdown greatly increased the error margin for your team.
Outside of some highly specialized tank’n’spank spike builds Eles were never used as damage dealers, at least not by players that knew what they are doing.

At some point ANet introduced a skill-split between PvE and PvP, and the result was an extreme power creep. Eles, like all other casters, didn’t got much extra damage out of this, but Eles got insane energy management and self heal, and with the ER Ele/Monks turned into the best healers/protectors in PvE.

GW1 ele were gods

GW2 ele are demi-gods

During gw1 lame duck years, the elementalist was revamp that is all you need to know.

In Gw1 pvp, ele was probably the easiest thing to play (at least after revamp and buff to things like aura of restoration/reducing attunement cast time, etc). Alot of the gameplay for ele (at the most basic level) involved simply spamming tab/spacebar/target and spamming damage rotation. For years it was common to see teams of 3-4 eles (in 4 person pvp) or 6-8 eles (in 8 person pvp) just abusing some spammable damage or “1…2…3…spike” build. Ele is a lot more challenging here, though not as hard as people make it seem.

but whas an ele a good profecian to play and to do pve/pvp? i’m gone buy me gw1 to play it. wanne know how it is and cause i love ele in gw2 i wanne play one in gw1 to. but a friend of me says that ist veryy boring and bad..

We cannot tell you if you would playing Ele is fun. Outside of the mentioned E/Mo healing/protection build and some tank’n’spank spike builds in specific regions Eles are not top-tiers, though.

Taking an Ele instead of a melee is somewhat comparable to taking a Cleric Hammer Guardian instead of another Berserker; the run will be slower, some fights are harder but overall you can play more relaxed because you can do more errors without dying.

Elementalist in GW1 was vastly different from what it is now. Especially because GW1 had a “secondary profession” system so you could even use skills of other classes and make entirely differnent builds. Another main difference is, that eles had a lot of AoE spells while most other classes only had very few or almost no AoE spells at all and most damage was only single target.

Elementalists were not really in a good standing in PvE and PvP. In PvE they suffered from dealing almost exclusively armor-dependent damage => that means the damage was reduced by the enemies armor. In GW1 there were some classes (mesmer, necro or ritualist) that had a lot of spells that dealt armor ignoring damage. This was a big deal because GW1 had a “hard mode” setting. If you wanted big loot you had to play hard mode, which meant enemies had a higher level and much more armor. This, of course, brought Elementalists in a very bad spot compared to the other classes with armor ignoring damage.

In competitive missions (Fort Aspenwood and Jade Quarry) Elemetalists were really good, because the enemies had “normal” (i.e. not hard mode) armor levels and there were tight packed NPC groups where the AoE spells were really useful. I really liked those missions and played them very often with my ele.

In PvP (team arena, random arena, GvG) Elementalists were average. They could bring some good ranged damge, but they were easily countered as well. Especially after the dervish buffs a lot of competitive guild used triple or even quint dervishes anyway….

That being said, for a long time there were hardly any really good skills for elementalists. Almost 90% of eles used “searing flames” or “savannah heat” as elite skill (both were introduced by the nightfall expansion if i remember right), because those were the only skills that really stood out from all the others – so much about build diversity in GW1, lol.

The key thing to understand here is that every character in GW1 had 2 professions simultaneously, ie: Ele/* as well as */Ele, so the range of potential builds and playstyles was orders of magnitude more diverse than GW2.

Prior to buffs… gw1 eles we’re hardly used unless they were a specific (and actually great build)
Searing Flames and Savannah Heat went out of meta (even for PvE since SF was energy intensive).
HM foes had increased elemental armor up until the HM ele overhaul where eles were made a lot more viable.
Sandstorm had been nerfed, although there was shockwave and Stone Sheath for a while
Air does make good “blind bots” though

The main difference is that the GW1 Ele functioned as the “mage” archetype at its core unless you had a different build in mind. They only used (MOST of the time) one main element although there are exceptions like Master of Magic and Elemental Attunement now.
Air was the single target spike damage.
Fire was the AoE damage
Earth was tanky/disruption type (think unsteady ground, the elite) with some AoE
Water was the snaring, sometimes spikey, damage and used mainly to hinder enemies like Blurred Vision and Freezing Gust.

Now in GW2 Eles “stance dance” to several attunements (unless you like to spam lava font + fireball) and the elements are a but different now…
Fire is still mainly AoE damage but can now do extreme spike damage

Air is still mainly single target, but can also control now like Swirling Winds, Updraft, static field (air was 99% lightning in gw1, gw2 is now like 85% lighting 15% wind)

Earth now deals more condition damage while still being able to knock back.

Water can now heal… which was the strangest twist for eles

PvP eles mainly focused on Water and Air because of blind spam or snare spam with the occasional pressure maker from Mind Blast eles. BUT since an important class (aka the bane of every class) went through an extreme change (Mesmers), there is less to worry.

Mesmers could totally shut down an ele (or any class) if given the opportunity because interrupts (caused energy to be wasted and skills to go on full CD… I’m looking at you gw1 meteor shower)… punish spell casting… and a lot more sinister things

TLDR;
Ganeplay has changed and with it, most of the Gw1 elementalist mechanics. For better or worse

I think the core of the difference between the Elementalists in both games is how the build system works for each, and how the traits/skills synchronize with the system. In the original GW the build system was based around 5 attributes, similar in theory to the GW2 traitlines, and as other posters stated the GW Ele would specialize in one or two attunements.

Another key difference is that GW2 is entirely based around skill/attunement cooldowns, and in GW it was energy (mana) management.

A very annoying thing about elementalists in GW1, is that you were always stuck with one-two energy-management enchantments, sometimes even with a third energy skill (the glyph).

This made most ele builds effectively revolve around 5-6 free slots instead of 8.

Think of it like our current situation with arcana traitline. All our builds revolve around it.

The exception is, at least our arcana traitline has fun traits and contributes positively to make our playstyle more interesting. In GW1, being stuck with two nearly-passive skills pretty much meant you only had 6-ish fun skills to cast normally.

In GW1 Eles weren’t very good at dealing damage in Hard Mode (High-end PVE) so most people prefered other professions due to armor-ignoring damage. After a few years (6 if I’m not mistaken) Anet decided to make a HUGE Ele patch. It fixed loads of issues and buffed loads of skills, while also they reduced mob armor but increased their hit points, making Eles a lot more viable in high-end PVE.

Key here, is that it took them 6 years to actually “fix” the PVE Ele, they are rather slow at that.

I believe the only similarities between the two Eles are the name, and the fact that Anet takes their sweet time in “fixing” them

Speaking from a core design standpoint, I think all eight of GW2’s professions are shackled by a drastically reduced vibrance in build strategy and variety when compared to GW.

No dual profession options, severely reduced number of available skills, and other unnecessary alterations to GW2’s system have made it much less fun than the old system.

Not to say that GW2 isn’t fun or a good game, but it’s a shame that it lost so much of what gave GW its identity.

Ele was actually my least favorite class to play in GW1 because it felt so slow. Sure, it hit hard, but the wind-up for everything was interminably long and that meant standing still and getting interrupted. Instant casts were the only way to go for me. If I had to play Ele, I actually preferred the playstyle of me/e for the faster casting.

On the other hand, in GW2 Ele is a very active and dynamic play type, which makes me like it a lot.

During the first 2.5 years of GW1, the Ele was pretty kitten squishy. I don’t know what happened after those years, I left the game. The only means to be able to 1v1 or 1vX the melee was to go with an earth build that was low on damage but great on survival and sustained (not strong) DPS.

Talking from a PvP perspective. PvE everyone just went Fire and that was that.

eles in gw1 pretty much just blew stuff up with meteors ( I used 2 of them in my hero team and with the right skill combinations the aoe damage is big)