Guild Wars 2

Hey all, I have never played an Ele past say, level fifteen, due to me being used to playing easier more beefy toons, ect.

But as I’ve played this game since launch, taking breaks here and there, I was wondering, if I should give this class a go, and if anyone could offer me any advice as far as a build to get used to, that’s slightly more forgiving than most?

I do plan on using this toon as my new main, once I have it worked out and become accustomed to using it properly.

I enjoy PvE content mostly, but do tend to participate a fair bit in sPvP, and WvW too with friends and guildies.

Thanks for your time, and replies.

P.S. – Advice on wether to make this toon a Human or Sylvari, as I would prefer a race that light armor and ele weapons would look good on, thanks!

sylvari for sure

base ele is somewhat challenging, and tempest is very easy

How difficult Elementalist is to play depends on exactly what you are doing.

If you are mostly doing casual open world stuff like world bosses and hot metas then ele is probably one of the easier classes. You can run around spamming fire staff skills and deal decent damage, or you can run D/X and tear kitten up at close range. Elementalist deals a lot of damage very easily, and has decent mobility and some fun utility skills too. Probably the most fun I’ve had doing solo content was playing D/D ele through the story mode on my ele.

However, once you get towards higher difficulty content (raids, high scale fotm) elementalist becomes one of the hardest classes to play well. You are the absolute bottom in terms of survivability with the lowest HP pool and light armor, and if you do not have good positioning and game knowledge you will go down a lot and be detrimental to your group. In raids specifically, elementalist also has “extra” jobs against gorseval (clearing orbs) and sabetha (killing cannons) which, while not particularly difficult on their own, make it more difficult to learn the mechanics of the fight since you have one more thing to worry about.

No matter what you do, the dps rotations aren’t particularly difficult, though depending on your skill keybinds you may need to have fast hands to play fresh air well. Another nice thing is that you don’t need to buy that many weapons because you have no weapon swap woohooooo!

So I would be using a Staff to level up this toon, because I want to learn it from the ground up, and not use Tomes to insta-80 him.

I did plan on going a Power based build, something that has a spot in most Fractal/Raid groups, ect.

Thanks for your help!

If you wanna play a power build then my personal favourite would be Zerker staff and armor with assassins/Zerker rings and trinkets. I use wash the pain away, mist form, feel the burn and signet of fire (must have fire signet) then you can choose your 0 skill based on what you’re doing. FGS is fairly decent overall and I really find Reaper of Grenth fun but I think you’ll usually find yourself going for (glyph of elemental is the name I think) for tanking, healing etc. Whatever element you spawn. Pvp I use Rebound.

This build only leaves you with around 12k hp. I’m pretty sure Celestial armor is still okay but I really haven’t been playing the game long enough to know.

Once again I really haven’t been playing too long but it seems a lot of people agree ele is difficult because of hot keys + glass cannon.

If you can bind F1-F4 to your mouse somehow then swapping the attunements isnt that difficult anymore.

Playing zerker staff ele in PvE open world content is more difficult due to your super low health and low armor but in it’s own weird way it’s a bit easier than other classes I have played with because it can burn down enemies that much faster so the fights don’t last that long. For an example, I often use the following rotation where I start in air since air gives you faster movement speed so its a good attunement to be in when out of combat anyway.
Glyph of storms → Overload Air → Attune to fire → Lava font → Meteor Shower → Overload Fire
That puts out a good amount of AOE damage so you can burn down your opponents rather quick. Also, if you have the trait then the air overload gives you shocking aura which protects you a bit. And furthermore, if you have the fire trait then if you do happen to go down after the fire overload (thats when your burst ends) its still fine because you will drop another lava font so your enemy will potentially be standing in 3+ fire fields.

On the assassin’s trinkets, they are useful but super hard to get if you dont have them already. You need to complete the Arah and CM collection to get both and dungeons being dead for now doesnt help in that at all (you could also do sPvP tracks if you’re into that).

What I did when playing my elementalist was:
Level 1-~60 use staff and just stay with fire, using this build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWnMIClNgNNAuMA0RABBALCAFgDgcJDBpAA
And just get used to things like:
Using blasts on your utilities for healing, swiftness or might+fury.
Switching between attunements for the most useful abilities.

After that (you can also just do it whenever you want, just have fresh air on the air specialisation tree unlocked for a lot of power) you should try out d/d in open world, with a build like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYnMIClNgNNAeOA0RggGATqABgPIA
Using D/D at level 60 I was just amazed at what more the Ele has to offer, while it lacks the dps and the range of the staff it trades it with more sustain, blast finishers on other skills, close combat and more things like that.

This is pretty much what I did when started to play ele, and I love my elementalist now.
(Oh, at 80 I also decided to hold a scepter for the first time, still no idea what the heck the potentials are for that weapon, so much blast)

Scepter is a combination of burst and sustained condi damage at 900 range. This is a bit weired and the weak auto attacks let it fall behind dagger. You burst and then are in kitten because if traited for burst you can´t use the condi auto from earth to a useful extent and the other autos are also weak. If traited for condi you get a weak condi spec because you now have a large number of power skills but are speced for condi …. So if you go scepter there are two options for me : fresh air zerker/maurauder or a hybrid damage build. I like the hybrid and am one of the rarer eles often using sage in PvP. For PvE a burn build with scepter should also work.

Wolfric.9380:

Scepter is a combination of burst and sustained condi damage at 900 range. This is a bit weired and the weak auto attacks let it fall behind dagger. You burst and then are in kitten because if traited for burst you can´t use the condi auto from earth to a useful extent and the other autos are also weak. If traited for condi you get a weak condi spec because you now have a large number of power skills but are speced for condi …. So if you go scepter there are two options for me : fresh air zerker/maurauder or a hybrid damage build. I like the hybrid and am one of the rarer eles often using sage in PvP. For PvE a burn build with scepter should also work.

pve burn build is quite good vs single target enemies and since it’s only burn that needs any duration, it’s fairly easy to get 100% (45% runes, 20% smoldering sigil, 20% fire trait, 16% food) without viper but wouldn’t use it outside HoT maps/few special bosses like abdo or CoE 2 husk.