Guild Wars 2

Hey, level 56 ele here.
I know there has been a lot of posts saying ele is weak and I did agree when I was a low level and didn’t know how to play but only attacked them with fire attunement.

I came here to complain and saw ppl saying change ur element don’t use only one element and that solved the problem until now.

Now, I’m dying constantly from ranged attack. 3 ranged monsters attack me and I die less than 20 sec. My armors are all level 47 rare. I don’t get a huge bump from buying a new armor set.

Is there anything I could do to survive little bit longer from ranged attack?

What’s your set?

D/D – Rush into them and kill
D/F – Earth reflect, run into them, Air 4 and kill
S/F – Earth reflect, nuke them, Air 4, nuke some more
S/D – Run in, nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke
S – Nuke, Earth reflect, nuke more

Kirbyprime.2645:

What’s your set?

D/D – Rush into them and kill
D/F – Earth reflect, run into them, Air 4 and kill
S/F – Earth reflect, nuke them, Air 4, nuke some more
S/D – Run in, nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke
S – Nuke, Earth reflect, nuke more

D/D is what I’m using right now

It’s a perfect time to learn a new weapon set. D/D is less than ideal against ranged mobs.

Also, upgrade your gear. Don’t bother with rares, the cost difference is better saved for endgame gear unless you are rich. Just upgrading to at level masterwork quality gear looks like it would give you about a 15%ish increase in base defense. Get some defensive stats on your trinkets if you can, that’s a good place to stack some extra vit and toughness.

You didn’t mention your traits. If you aren’t already, run at least 15 in water for the self-heal on water swap, and 10 in arcane for the boon on attunement trait (protection and regeneration being keys to survival).

Don’t bother with condition damage gear, it comes at the cost of direct damage or survival stats and doesn’t synergize well with elementalists (it can work, but it’s not good against ranged groups of mobs, which you will encounter a lot from now on). That could be much of the problem, the level 47 rare set is condition/precision, which has terrible synergy for elementalists, takes a long time to kill as your damage is largely back-end and your crits may be more frequent but with no power it’s basically like multiplying nothing.

Learn cooking or buy some cheap foods to buff your vit/toughness or give you regeneration.

D/D is a good roaming set in WvW, and that’s where the common build really shines and the source of much of it’s popularity. In PvE, other sets are better or almost required for some things, the developers intended every class to use different weapons for different things.

Thrashbarg.9820:

It’s a perfect time to learn a new weapon set. D/D is less than ideal against ranged mobs.

Also, upgrade your gear. Don’t bother with rares, the cost difference is better saved for endgame gear unless you are rich. Just upgrading to at level masterwork quality gear looks like it would give you about a 15%ish increase in base defense. Get some defensive stats on your trinkets if you can, that’s a good place to stack some extra vit and toughness.

You didn’t mention your traits. If you aren’t already, run at least 15 in water for the self-heal on water swap, and 10 in arcane for the boon on attunement trait (protection and regeneration being keys to survival).

Don’t bother with condition damage gear, it comes at the cost of direct damage or survival stats and doesn’t synergize well with elementalists (it can work, but it’s not good against ranged groups of mobs, which you will encounter a lot from now on). That could be much of the problem, the level 47 rare set is condition/precision, which has terrible synergy for elementalists, takes a long time to kill as your damage is largely back-end and your crits may be more frequent but with no power it’s basically like multiplying nothing.

Learn cooking or buy some cheap foods to buff your vit/toughness or give you regeneration.

D/D is a good roaming set in WvW, and that’s where the common build really shines and the source of much of it’s popularity. In PvE, other sets are better or almost required for some things, the developers intended every class to use different weapons for different things.

Thank you so much for detailed info.
I’ll definitely check it out. Thank you again

1. Stack Vitality and Healing power, the Vitality to let you survive burst, the Healing Power to let you get back to full. This generally means going into Water (which has great healing traits anyway) and getting some Vitality in your equipment.

2. I go S/D for PvE most of the time. It has a better mix of damage and defense than D/D, IMO, especially against mobs who’ll just stand under your Dragon’s Tooth. The added range is also extremely helpful when kiting.

3. Glyph of Lesser Elementals and Glyph of Elementals. Learn to love them. It’s not hard since they’ll tank everything for you. Even Champions can have some difficulty taking down an Elite Earth Elemental. You can heal your summons, also, which lets them last even longer.

4. Kite like crazy.

Bunker up. Eles are so squishy you need to take the approach of accepting you will take damage and out-healing it. Try to dodge major attacks and stay on the move, but you will need to be healing often.

Get Evasive Arcana (Arcane Grandmaster Trait) and max out your water (Water Trait V for condition removal and Water level 15 heal on swap). You should switch to water frequently when you take on damage and dodge-roll to get cleansing wave, then pop a healing spell when necessary. If you don’t want to die a lot, your fights are going to take a while.

Finally, use ether renewal. You can pop it more frequently, and the condition-cleanse is a god-send when you get to even higher-level areas (orr) where everything likes to chill, immobilize, or cripple you.

The one solution for anything pve related, glyph of storms (earth). Glass cannon ele with blue/green sub lvl 80 gear can facetank up to 6 mobs in cursed shores with that.

I can only agree with using GoS (Glyph of Storms)! In earth it allows you to blind your targets almost constantly and if that is not enough try to run S/F. You can nuke with dragons and phoenix at the same time. Get an arcabe blast off and use earth 5 if necessary. That should be enough to deal with every PvE situation you’ll encounter (not GL :P )

For any class, as I level I always use tanky trinkets and weapons/armor as much as possible.

Strang.8170:

The one solution for anything pve related, glyph of storms (earth). Glass cannon ele with blue/green sub lvl 80 gear can facetank up to 6 mobs in cursed shores with that.

And if that’s not enough blind, run the hammer conjure, lots of extra aoe blinds from the auto attack there.

I use a full berserker set of armor with berserker trinkets and a staff. I surround myself with aoes and laugh at the monsters as they come at me and get destroyed in my aoe’s while attacking me. The monsters die before they have a chance to get my health down to half.

Chemy.1462:

Kirbyprime.2645:

What’s your set?

D/D – Rush into them and kill
D/F – Earth reflect, run into them, Air 4 and kill
S/F – Earth reflect, nuke them, Air 4, nuke some more
S/D – Run in, nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke nuke
S – Nuke, Earth reflect, nuke more

D/D is what I’m using right now

Yeap. I think your issue is more related to your tactics than anything else. Throughout this game there are ranged mobs and bosses whose weakness is melee range.

Also, whatever weapon set you are using, the chills, stuns, blinds, condition removals, immobilize etc. coupled with dodges will reduce and avoid alot of the damage. Better to use those skills than the auto attacks when your other dps is on cooldown.

I haven’t played much since the November update, but I think my old strategies would work pretty well.

1. Use S/D as your main PvE weapon set (dungeons perhaps aside).

2. Focus on Power and survivability stats (Toughness, Healing, and/or Vitality). Let crit chance/crit damage/condition stats/magic find go.

3. Buy new green armor whenever you hit a level where the more useful stats are available. Buy new weapons at least as often.

4. Focus on might stacking and blasts for your preferred rotation. This requires being in melee range, as you need to set of blasts within your Ring of Fire. RtL when it’s available; Ring of Fire, then Dragon’s Tooth and Phoenix in some order. Switching to Earth after that is optional.

5. I often ran 20 Fire for the general fire DPS buff and Pyromancer’s Alacrity. That’s probably the most controversial part of my approach.

6. Glyphs and more glyphs — healing, both elementals, and Storms. So Quick Glyphs is very appealing as a trait.

7. I used Arcane Wave to add to the blasting fun. Yes, that means that I had little in the way of defense in my utility slots, past Glyph of Storms.

All that said, while S/D was my main weapon set, against particularly annoying ranged damage I did switch at times to S/F. Staff could also be OK if you need to blow up a lot of stationary objects, but after soloing too much with staff at lower levels I used it mainly for dynamic events (and even started downplaying it in those at the end).

Thrashbarg.9820:

the developers intended every class to use different weapons for different things.

yup, then they trolled us disabling weapon swap xD