Guild Wars 2

Hamartia’s S/D Elementalist Build, June 25th update

June 25th buffed this build by an insane amount.

In the interest of streamlining things, I am only going to recommend the two most optimal versions of this build. The most recent patch has opened up a TON of options which I will discuss further down in the post.

Build website is not updated to show that Arcane Lightning grants 10% critical damage, now stacks with banner of discipline.

Credit to JNeko for pointing out to me the synergy between this build and Lightning Hammer. Thanks!

With Lightning Hammer, best damage: 30/20/0/20/0

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJArYlw1iMWZQABOyAARBKpEecADFIUYBEA-jAyAYLhQCCIZJIJPl1sngYxtIas6aMlLRUNA-e

Without Lightning Hammer: 30/20/0/10/10

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJArYlw1iMWZwzAOCBApAKhHEwQBCFWARpQMA-jAyAYLhQCCIZJIJPl1sngYxtIas6aMlLRUN

What This Build Brings:

25 stacks of might, roughly 35% damage boost to party.

100% fury uptime, 10-20% DPS boost to party.

Great damage, great AoE.

Lightning hammer.

Rotation With Lightning Hammer:

Take a deep breath.

The gist of this is to pop all of your combo finishers inside of Ring of Fire (fire 4) to stack AOE might and some additional burning.

Start in fire, use 2, Dragon’s Tooth. Use 4 to throw down your fire field under Dragon’s Tooth and at your target. Use Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. Use Fire 3 inside of your fire field. Use Fire 5 from melee range, use Fire 2 again.

Swap to Earth. Use 4. Begin cast 5, swap to air, 3, 2. When Churning Earth finishes casting, use RTL, and then use air 2 again. Stay in air until fire cool down resets.

Back to fire. 2, 4, 3 (should be at 25 might)—

Create Lightning Hammer, swap to water. Spam Lightning Hammer 1, 3rd attack in chain is a blast finisher that stacks some additional might/fury. Always stay in water attunement when using lightning hammer for 20% additional damage.

Then basically repeat this loop as best as you can, depending on how your cool downs line up. The ideal scenario is this: you have used Scepter to buff your group with 25 might and 100% fury uptime—and then you’re using the Lightning Hammer as much as possible for maximum damage.

Rotation Without Lightning Hammer:

Rotation video with 30 Arcane, no hammer (update pending):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qdmUz_WE7g&feature=youtu.be

Maybe you hate Lightning Hammer. That is all right with me!

This version does a bit less damage, but allows you to pick up your choice of Arcane traits and opens up one of your utilities for Arcane Shield.

The gist of this is to pop all of your combo finishers inside of Ring of Fire (fire 4) to stack AOE might and some additional burning.

Swap to Fire and before reaching target, use 2, Dragon’s Tooth. Use 4 to throw down your fire field under Dragon’s Tooth and at your target. Use Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. Use Fire 3 inside of your fire field. Use Fire 5 from melee range, use Fire 2 again.

Swap to Earth. Use 4. (Use Arcane Shield if its your utility choice) Begin cast 5, swap to air, 3, 2. Churning Earth finishes casting. Stay in air until you can use RTL.

Swap to water, spam 1 for a few seconds, back to fire.

Mostly stay in Fire until your Earth cooldowns are available and then repeat. Use Arcane Blast and Wave on Cooldown unless you need them available to stack more might, in which case wait until you can pop them in a fire field.

If you are able to run with Arcane Power, you want to pop it before Fire Grab (Fire 5) so that it crits Fire Grab, Fire 2, Earth 4, Earth 5, Air 2.

During “downtime”— when all but your fire moves are on cool down, feel free to use Earth 2, and water heals and evasive arcana for a minimal DPS loss. Whenever a long cast is going, swap to air for 3 and 2, which are off the GCD.

Possible Tweaks, no Lightning Hammer

30/25/0/15/0

Adds 8 stacks of vulnerability and heals when swapping to water. If group isn’t at 25 vulnerability, this is best non-LH damage.

30/20/0/0/20

Sacrifices 10% damage in order to grab a second arcane trait. Once you add Elemental Attunement, you can consider adding boon duration runes instead of scholar runes.

30/0/0/10/30

Maximum support with Evasive Arcana, Elemental Attunement with Perma vigor, and shorter attunement cooldowns.

Alternative Gearing Options

Standard is nearly full berserker; PVT in 3 slots to make it easier to spend a lot of time in close range and get off your churning Earths. Perhaps a better player than me could pull off full zerker. Theoretically, chest or legs with knight armor, rest zerker might be an even better balance than PVT in 3 slots. I like some vitality on Eles due to powerful heals and to reduce chance of taking aggro.

Balanced Gearing Options

Zerker hands, feet, shoulders, weapons. PVT helm, legs, chest. Celestial trinkets.
I’ve tried this one out personally and it feels infinitely survivable with great damage.
Why Celestial? Scepter benefits from the condition damage, time spent in melee range will make your 3, 5, and dodge heals a bit more in demand.

Obviously lower damage than going pure Zerker, but this feels like a balance that I am happy with in casual play.

Leveling Build

This also happens to be the most fun and powerful leveling build I’ve tried across several classes. You can change the order you grab the talents to suit your own needs. I usually just ran with 3 signet to be lazier—air for movement speed, earth for toughness, fire for critical chance. Swap in the level 80 utilities for fun, practice, or when they start to feel effective. Arcane Blast/Wave and Signet of Air is probably a healthy balance. This follows the same rotation as the level 80 build.

Level 10—Start investing in points to get 10 Arcane.

Level 20—10 Arcane for Elemental Attunement—the burst of protection before casting churning Earth helps a lot along with the CD reduction on attunement swap.

Level 30—10 fire for 10% damage in fire and the Power stats.

Level 40—20 Fire for Cooldown Reduction, 10 Arcane.

Level 50—10 Water.

Level 60—30 Fire for Persisting Flames, 10 Arcane, 10 Water.

Level 70—30 Fire, 20 Arcane, 10 Water.

Level 80—30 fire, 30 Arcane, 10 Water.

Other Scepter Notes:

-Rock Barrier provides 250 Toughness. Using it as a damaging move provides 5 projectile finishers—great for extra burning, regen, or condition removal in a light field.

-Frost Aura, Lightning Strike, and Blinding Flash can be cast off the GCD while another move is channeling. This also applies to Arcane Wave, Shield, Blast, and Power.

-Phoenix provides vigor and condition removal.

On Elementals:

A much more viable choice after recent buffs.

Fire Elemental does the best damage, and great AoE. However, it only has 9300 health.

Air elemental has 14,500 health, deals less damage, and does no AoE, but it attacks from range and provides swiftness—the better choice for heavy AoE fights where Fire elemental will get downed. The damage difference between air and Fire is not that huge in single-target situations, and it will stay alive far more often.

Ice and Earth both have 21300 health and attack in melee. Earth Elemental does less damage than Fire and Ice, but is very hard to kill and provides a small amount of AoE Protection. Great choice if party starts wiping and your heavies start going down and you need a quick tank.

Ice Elemental does meh damage, but chills enemies and, on a 25 second cooldown, can cast cleansing wave for a 6570 heal.

On Condition Damage

This build provides:

1.) 100% burning uptime on pretty much an unlimited amount of targets.

2.) 33% uptime on 8 bleeds from Churning Earth, AOE. (1 more bleed for 20 seconds added if you use evasive Arcana.)

Using the balanced gearing option and self-buffed 25 might:

The fire damage is worth 631 damage per second, and the Churning Earth is worth 91×8, to 728, for the time its up. That averages out to 212 bleed damage per second— higher on fights with lower uptime on boss that allows your Churning Earth time to reset.

That means an average of 873 damage per second is occurring from conditions with this build. Sadly, I’m not sure investing in Celestial accessories or Divinity Runes is worth it simply because condition damage doesn’t scale very well with the condition damage stat (although fire damage scales pretty well). However, more testing is necessary— this build benefits more from Celestial than any that I know of. I’m interested in trying full zerker, celestial trinkets, divinity runes for an efficient survivability option or full zerker + divinity runes.

100 condition damage adds +25 damage per second to burning, and +5 damage per second to each bleed, so +13 damage per second to bleeds per 100 condition damage with this build (8 × 5 divided by 3).

100 condition damage will net you +38 damage per second. So, when considering Celestial trinkets or runes, count the DPS effect of the condition damage accordingly to see if its worth it for you.

Thanks for Reading/Critique away please!

GW2Guru Thread:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/83561-hamartias-sd-elementalist-build-dps-might-stacking/

Reddit Thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1h96vf/hamartias_sd_elementalist_build_june_25th_update/

Hmm I will have to try this with the lightning hammer…I also began to use ether renewal for my heals since there is only one condition removal move in water (5) and it has a long CD. You just have to be smart and know when to run out to heal/remove conditions.

How are you getting your vulnerability for Piercing Shards to be effective? You need to rely on the group since the air 25 perk is gone now.

Also when you are using the hammer are you just using hammer (1) or the other moves in it? I’m assuming it is spam (1) and use (5) for control.

If your teammates don’t stack full vulnerability I would rather do 30/30/0/10/0. For grandmaster air trait take air training and use lightning hammer in air attunement. You get vulnerability stacking, +10% damage in air, +10% crit damage (almost as good as +10% damage with high crit) and 100 precision for even better crit rate. You’ll be doing more damage when not using lightning hammer and almost the same damage when you are.

Jabberwock.9014:

If your teammates don’t stack full vulnerability I would rather do 30/30/0/10/0. For grandmaster air trait take air training and use lightning hammer in air attunement. You get vulnerability stacking, +10% damage in air, +10% crit damage (almost as good as +10% damage with high crit) and 100 precision for even better crit rate. You’ll be doing more damage when not using lightning hammer and almost the same damage when you are.

Yeah I will probably swap to this however I’ll keep Renewing Stamina because if your using the hammer you need all the dodges you can get. I would rather be alive doing a little less DPS then hugging the ground half the fight…

Jabberwock.9014:

If your teammates don’t stack full vulnerability I would rather do 30/30/0/10/0. For grandmaster air trait take air training and use lightning hammer in air attunement. You get vulnerability stacking, +10% damage in air, +10% crit damage (almost as good as +10% damage with high crit) and 100 precision for even better crit rate. You’ll be doing more damage when not using lightning hammer and almost the same damage when you are.

Hm, taking a moment to think about it… I’d have to look at the math, but I think you’re right, if only because the points in water do nothing when outside of water attunement. Thanks for the suggestion!

Jabberwock.9014:

If your teammates don’t stack full vulnerability I would rather do 30/30/0/10/0. For grandmaster air trait take air training and use lightning hammer in air attunement. You get vulnerability stacking, +10% damage in air, +10% crit damage (almost as good as +10% damage with high crit) and 100 precision for even better crit rate. You’ll be doing more damage when not using lightning hammer and almost the same damage when you are.

You should still fight in Water attunement, for the 20% more damage to vulnerable targets.

Except you won’t have that trait with only 10 in water.

Jabberwock.9014:

Except you won’t have that trait with only 10 in water.

Yes you will…

Nevermind. I see what you mean. I was looking at it only from a Lightning Hammer perspective. I love staying in water for that.

I also feel like burning precision might be better than ember’s might since otherwise you don’t get much burning outside of fire (and without burning you won’t get anything from ember’s might OR burning rage).

XcmGT.3847:

Jabberwock.9014:

If your teammates don’t stack full vulnerability I would rather do 30/30/0/10/0. For grandmaster air trait take air training and use lightning hammer in air attunement. You get vulnerability stacking, +10% damage in air, +10% crit damage (almost as good as +10% damage with high crit) and 100 precision for even better crit rate. You’ll be doing more damage when not using lightning hammer and almost the same damage when you are.

Yeah I will probably swap to this however I’ll keep Renewing Stamina because if your using the hammer you need all the dodges you can get. I would rather be alive doing a little less DPS then hugging the ground half the fight…

Lightning Hammer spams AoE blind.

So I have been trying this build out with the hammer and I have to be honest it feels clunky. Might stacks are an issue without boon duration/might duration, my stacks drop fairly fast by the time I finish the first hammer. In addition, I prefer to be at range instead of right up on the mob especially since we are light armor. I really enjoyed fresh air because of the mobility it gave as well as the damage while kiting. This also enabled you to DPS if you had to swap to heal and needed to wait for fire to get back from CD…

You have 20 seconds on the might stacks and 25 seconds if your full down the arcane line (this is all w/o boon duration runes). Even if might gets refreshed while you have the hammer it won’t be near 15-25 stacks since the duration of the boon is independent from reapplications of it.

If anyone has the math I would like to see how long the might stacks would be with full boon duration as opposed to scholar runes.

Any opinions on staff builds, traits, gear etc?

XcmGT.3847:

So I have been trying this build out with the hammer and I have to be honest it feels clunky. Might stacks are an issue without boon duration/might duration, my stacks drop fairly fast by the time I finish the first hammer. In addition, I prefer to be at range instead of right up on the mob especially since we are light armor. I really enjoyed fresh air because of the mobility it gave as well as the damage while kiting. This also enabled you to DPS if you had to swap to heal and needed to wait for fire to get back from CD…

You have 20 seconds on the might stacks and 25 seconds if your full down the arcane line (this is all w/o boon duration runes). Even if might gets refreshed while you have the hammer it won’t be near 15-25 stacks since the duration of the boon is independent from reapplications of it.

If anyone has the math I would like to see how long the might stacks would be with full boon duration as opposed to scholar runes.

You’re absolutely right on all counts. I updated the other versions of this thread to point out that I lost some might-stacking— this version gets less attention so I haven’t updated it yet.

With full boon duration runes, it appears I was able to MOSTLY maintain 25 might stacks throughout lightning hammer rotations. On swapping to Scholar runes I found it much harder to maintain might.

So basically, compared to older versions of this build, this build is better with better groups where other people are doing their job and bringing some might.

The old version with 30 arcane, 2x might duration runes, evasive arcana/elemental attunement… that can solo maintain 25 might very easily. But as soon as you get into a more organized group, you’re throwing away a TON of potential damage that Lightning Hammer brings. Fully buffed, it does maybe 75% more damage than S/D.

Most groups that run Lightning Hammer bring a Guardian to lay down Purging Flames, which allows the LH to stack 6 more might per use.

I followed you all the way from Reddit to GW2Guru and now here. Elementalists have always attracted though I never mustered the patience to play one.

Having to play in melee annoys me since I much prefer being ranged. I played a mesmer for a long time until it has begun feeling stale after nine months and now I’m playing an Rifle/SD engineer. I can’t fault the damage, I like it, I just don’t feel… useful.

The might stacking and fury stacking of an elementalist seem a lot of fun and useful, but again, their playstyle appears to be focused on melee (needing to be inside the Ring of Fire which means going right close to a boss).

Very nice guide

I cannot help but notice that the focus would be a very interesting choice for your off-hand rather than the dagger, for might and fury stacking purposes, as well as group utility. The cd on the blast finishers of the focus also synergyze better with the LH rotation.

Zelyhn.8069:

Very nice guide

I cannot help but notice that the focus would be a very interesting choice for your off-hand rather than the dagger, for might and fury stacking purposes, as well as group utility. The cd on the blast finishers of the focus also synergyze better with the LH rotation.

Whenever I run Scepter, I actually personally always run Focus. When I give advice and write my guides, however, I usually say to use Dagger. The main problem is that even though, in my opinion, Focus is probably the better choice, it’s really hard to use with Scepter. Flamewall is an abomination of a skill and if you screw up your might stacking rotation you’ve basically screwed up the only good reason to bring an Ele over another Warrior or Guardian in a group.

Given that, yeah, I actually think Focus is the better choice. It actually works better for your rotation. Dragon’s Tooth->Flamewall->Phoenix->Earth Attunement lets you use both Magnetic Wave and Obsidian Flesh for a blast finisher and 4 seconds of Invuln. The Invuln is super nice because it gives you this time to set up your Lightning Hammer without getting interrupted. Ideally, you swap to Water Attunement, drop Comet for another Blast Finisher in the Fire Field, then conjure your Lightning Hammer, all while protected by Obsidian Flesh. In fact, if you think about it, it’s actually better for Might Stacking, since Churning Earth leaves you incredibly vulnerable as you channel, while Dragon’s Tooth→Flamewall→Phoenix→Earth Attunement→Obsidian Flesh→Magnetic Wave→Water Attunement→Comet→Lightning Hammer is a much safer rotation than Dragon’s Tooth→Ring of Fire→Phoenix→Earth Attunement→Earthquake→Churning Earth→Water Attunement→Lightning Hammer, because Obsidian Flesh keeps you safe and you don’t need to root yourself with Churning Earth.

But I still wouldn’t suggest it, generally. Mainly because it all relies on landing everything in Flamewall and it’s just much easier to land things in the quick and easy Ring of Fire on Offhand Dagger. But I still like to keep my Focus instead of Dagger when paired with Scepter.

Exactly
Also flamewall lasts longer, and well, swirling winds !!

Or roll a thief wait for a fire field and then spam #2 on the shortbow. Now wasn’t that easy :P

No fury
15 char

Alright,hopefully I can get a reply by this weekend when my friends and I start doing min/maxing during Fractals but do fire fields and area might stack?

example: Guardian sets fire field, elementalist sets fire field, and ranger sets a fire field: 3 fire fields are placed in total. If the elementalist uses a blast finisher does that mean 3 combos of area of might leading to 9 stacks of might or, if they don’t stack, just 1 combo of area might leading to only 3 stacks of might?

Also, does one area might combo give 3 stacks of might? This is just me being unsure of the fact, I think it does, but just want to be sure.

*I would prefer it if you would clearly state your answer so I won’t have to make another post * Thanks for the help!

p.s. Hamartia, I love all of your guides, especially the min/maxing one!!!
p.s.s. I am sorry if bumping this is not what I am suppose to do, but I am kind of new to this forums thing

3 stacks of might per area-might combo
1 combo per blast, regardless how many fields