Guild Wars 2

I have around ~400 hours on my Elementalist. Started out as S/D, but moved to D/D and haven’t looked back. I really enjoyed the 20-10-30-x-x Signet/Aura build for a long time, but once I started doing dungeons, I moved to 20-10-0-30-0 because my healing and health weren’t up to par.

However, most dungeon builds I see (and even non dungeon) are 0-10-0-30-30. I would expect that our usefulness arises from the fact that we can give permanent fire aura/fury/swiftness to everyone, so why would this be desirable to the 20 in fire, which gives everyone an aura when you cast a signet? Does anyone still run 20/10/x/30/x or are all builds centered around 30 in arcane?

I don’t know much about dungeons, only done a few here and there, so take any “advice” here as speculation mostly.

It seems like fury/swiftness are of limited use, most classes can get those themselves or a couple warriors can keep them up for the party easily. If I was going with a signet aura build I’d go 20-0-10-30-10 with the protection on aura trait in earth and boon duration runes (that’s actually my ele build atm, but not using it much since I mostly WvW and having no stunbreakers is a death sentence there). 100% protection uptime seems better than fury and swiftness for the amount of damage that dungeon mobs can put out. You’d have aura sharing, boons on attunement swap for extra regen/swift/might/protection, good heals from the water line and decent damage (depending on gear). If you really miss the ability to give fury, get a set of Altruism runes and use Ether Renewal as your heal.

0-10-0-30-30 ; 3 cantrip ; soldier/cleric is just the facerolling build, it’s the easiest to learn and most forgiving. It’s damage is mediocre at best, and the team utility isn’t great. It’s a semi-selfish build since none of the utilities benefit anyone besides the caster (although being alive is a benefit, so if you’re having trouble, it’s a good fall back build).

I’m a pretty casual dungeoneer as well, but when I run dungeons with my Ele I like to use the Staff and run 0/20/0/20/30, or some variant thereof. I really like providing both DPS and support and that setup lets me choose what I want to do as the situation requires, and the Arcana just makes everything flow so much better.

My own D/D Ele build (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Neko-s-Guide-to-the-D-D-Ele-in-Dungeons-1) generally provides the following:
-Moderate DPS (Full Berserker)
-Strong Party Fury uptime (Auras)
-Very Strong Party Might duration (12 stacks for 20+ seconds is very valuable)
-Very Strong Condition Cleansing (Cleansing Wave and Evasive Arcana Water Dodge Roll)
-Strong Party Burst Heals (Water Attunement)
-Moderate Protection Uptime (Earth Attunement)
-Access to snares (immobilize on Earth 3, chill on Water 3) and CC (blowout on Air 5, stun on Air 3, Knockdown on Earth 4)

The Ele is a jack of all trades. They are able to fill out a party no matter the composition. While the Mesmer may be more utilitous, good luck trying to get Focus Pull to be useful in your average PUG. I consider the Ele a suboptimal class in Organized Mes/War/Guard groups, but a pretty strong choice in random PUG groups.

0/20/0/30/20 for sharing auras or removing conditions on giving regen. Get S/D or S/F or D/D or Staff or D/F depending on the upcoming fight.

Use glyphs when you know its gonna be a lot of long ranged fights and you use staff or S/F. Otherwise use cantrips.
Arcane spells could also be used but I would only use them if you’re doing a speedrun.

I’ve used this set-up in all the dungeons and it works pretty well. S/F-cantrip with 0/20/0/30/20 is one of the tankiest builds you can get (full cleric armor and trinkets)

Am now experimenting with a hybrid armor of soldiers, clerics and knights.

By swapping to a warrior or guardian. Unless it’s AC, then they’ll want ice bow.

I can’t see no reason to play anything but 0/10/0/30/30. The last 10 points in water are far superior to the extra 10 points in air (2% dmg/ boon is usually at least 10% in dungeons) and 30 points in arcana for the boon duration, faster attunement swap, boons on attunement, vigor on crits and evasive arcana (additional blast finisher and heal!) is also more or less a must have. I do also think that the faster attunement swap is very useful

The problem with the fire aura build: you don’t actually need that much fury. As Thrashbarg mentioned above, other classes (like warrior) will also grant fury to the party so you can get about 100% fury uptime without using the flame aura stuff.

About our usefulness: I do only run dungeons with my guild and we do usually have a guardian, 2 warriors and a mesmer in our group and we do about 95% of all fights in melee. In my opinion the D/D ele is very helpful in this group, because he can provide a lot of protection (very high uptime together with the guardian), regeneration, burst heal, condition remove and cc for the defense as well as plenty of might (12-15 stacks) and fury for dmg support.

For dungeons, you are best with 0/0/10/30/30, choosing earth V (protection on aura) if you are going aura-share, or earth III (earth’s embrace for auto-armor of earth) if you are going with a party-cleansing build. I personally think sharing protection through your auras has a little more use for your party than the swiftness/fury (which is much easier to access). However, the 0/10/0/30/30 still brings some good party support just from Elemental Attunement and party buffing while doing some decent damage, just the value of the boons your provide depends on what the party composition already has access to.

I also really like to bring Water I (water skills recharge 20% faster) to improve party support in dungeon’s when necessary. If the dungeon has a lot of ranged stuff, 0/0/20/20/30 also works well for allowing you to apply more reflections to your allies.

Well this is my Dungeon Build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhImgbzx4gjEAkHmciLhCKIK8QRxM5A-jAxAlzioxqXwUnER1+jioVDA-e

10/10/0/30/20
Focusing on Cantrips, Surviveability, some group support through attunement swaps ( unfortunately no aura share) and some dmg.
You can easily build up a lot of might and perma fury.
Due to the Knight Gear and the awesome Heal/regeneration of “Glyph of elemental Harmony” i’m hardly ever going into downstate.
The Vampirism Rune on the other hand is my passive “Oh snap” button. The automatic mist form saved my life quite often, and the heal is a nice bonus.