Haven’t played Ele in many months so I am really out of date. Does anyone have a high damage build that doesn’t involve lightning hammer and just the 1 key?
“We don’t need to make gear treadmills”
Colin Johanson on how arenanet measures success.
(Please no gear treadmills, Colin!)
Haven’t played Ele in many months so I am really out of date. Does anyone have a high damage build that doesn’t involve lightning hammer and just the 1 key?
Check the new patch notes. Conjures got buffs across the board.
Lava Axe now seems to have better options as does Ice Bow. I’m also curious how Earth Shield can function but hopes are low for it just by its nature.
Bad@Ele: Alaric Von Manstein
Bad@Thief: Kiera Gordon
Sea of Sorrows, a server never before so appropriately named.
From a PvE perspective, lightning hammer isn’t all that great unless you have fire fields to keep the might going and party members that will help keep you alive. I see it as a way to keep the dps up when a S/D rotation is all out of burst.
Thank you all for the links and tips. One more question. My only exotic armor for my Elementalist was all MF. I need to transmute it into something. I know some people say Ele is the only class where Celestial makes sense, but my instinct is to go zerker and live dangerously. Any thoughts on how good Celestial really is for Eles?
“We don’t need to make gear treadmills”
Colin Johanson on how arenanet measures success.
(Please no gear treadmills, Colin!)
If you can survive it, just go zerk + scholar’s runes or ruby orbs. The state of PvE would have to change dramatically for it to ever go out of style.
Celestial armor + zerk trinkets is alright because celestial armor has decent crit damage %‘s and you’ll get a touch of toughness, vitality, and healing power, but you’re giving up about 180 power and 100 precision (based on my very rough mental math), which you can’t really make up for. There’s probably a super efficient way to distribute celestial/zerk gear, but I haven’t crunched the numbers. While I was learning to survive (before celestial gear), I used knight’s armor + zerk trinkets and just worked my way to glassier setups from there. You could probably do the same with celestial + zerk if you are still learning content.
zerker is best and most awesome for PvE
I’d use celestial for PvP stuff only. or if I wanted to mess around soloing group events in Orr or something where the defense would actually be useful
Scepter/Dagger, very high damage output via Sigil of Battle might-stacking on swapping attunements, with 45% boon duration, vulnerability-stacking, permanent +10% critical damage, and the essential 35% perm movement speed between fights.
You certainly won’t just be pressing ‘1’. If Fire/Air/Earth attunes are available, you swap. Use all fire and air skills on attune, use blind and stomp in earth (with armor if in a precarious situation). Only swap to water when you need condition removal and heals.
Yes staff is a nice and friendly weapon to start with in PvE. I don’t talk about it much in my guide though. You have to be aware that the vast majority of the damage in staff comes from fire (lava font, fireball, meteor shower). Therefore you can boost its damage most by investing 30 points in the fire trait line and picking persisting flames.
I am not going to give a full build for staff for two reasons:
it is important to experiment when you are just starting the game, so re-trait often, try everything, don’t be stubborn.
I do not like the staff myself, so I any advice I would give wouldn’t be completely honest.
Gaunglai’s advised build is 30/20/10/10/0. This deals a lot of damage. I do not support his guide though.
My favourite weapon set-up is D/F and you can find everything I know about it in my guide
