Guild Wars 2

I have tried a few times to level an elementalist and they are always deleted fairly quickly. I am determined this time but I am really lost on attunements. How often should I be switching through them? Do they ever feel easier to know when you should be going to a new attunement and which one? Or am I just destined to not get the elementalist

Any helpful tips appreciated!

change your keybinds. Alot of it is muscle memory

Frowny is right.

To add to it, attunements should be changed very frequently as most ele autoattacks are absolutely terrible. For the most part, there is almost always something better you could be doing with your time then using an auto-attack. The lone exception (in actual combat) it lightning whip (air dagger auto), and maybe fireball if you are nuking from range with staff and want to be lazy. You will learn more as you use the abilities.

It does take a long time to really be comfortable with every available skill and use, so that you can know when they are useful (what gives you burst dps, what helps your defense, what helps you heal, what gives you breathing room through movement/cc, etc.).

However, with time/experience, watching some other people on youtube/twitch, and thinking about what you could have done different/better right after you die (I always check the combat log to see what I should have dodged, or what happened exactly), you will get ahold of it. Even more, b/c it can be challenging, you might really enjoy it!

What makes this tougher is that, not only are you weaker due to the lack of very important survivability traits at lower levels, but you also can’t swap as frequently so “rotations” are more awkward. After getting some experience you will get a good “rotation” down, and then after getting better you will learn to scrap the rotation and use skills situationally.

Well I have my keybindings set up for my mesmer… they are pretty comfortable for switching around between the 4 it just seems like I am never sure if I should just stay in 1 attunement and auto attack or be switching constantly.

Edit- also should I focus on 1 weapon set as I level or try to learn them all as I go? I really like the focus but not sure on the dagger or scepter to go with it.

I use shift+1-4 for attunement swaps. Works really well since you’re already pressing those keys for the skills.

I have two level 80 Eles and a third at level 62. I remember that leveling the first one was very challenging but somewhere around level 50 things started to “click”. I’m really not sure if it was the traits or gear or just the repetition of using the skills but things started to feel right.

The biggest challenge in regard to playing an Ele is the sheer number of factors that must be considered before any and all attunement swaps. More than just how many and what type of enemies you are facing but also things like placement of enemies/allies. What other professions are nearby (if any) and what can they provide in this encounter? What does the terrain look like and how can I use it to gain an advantage in the coming battle? What utilities will provide an advantage in a given situation? What sort of trait bonuses do I have and how can I use that to my advantage?

It’s all about stacking your advantages. Eles don’t shine at any one particular thing but they do everything pretty well – all at once. My point is that no matter what situation you find yourself in there should be something that you can do better than your opponent.

My advice would be to start with one weapon set and focus on one attunement at a time. Once you are intimately familiar with one attunment then switch to the next and so on. Keep in mind that certain attunements are easier to sit in than others (Fire tends to be more effective on its own than Water for example). Pretty soon you will understand what a given attunement provides and which attunement is most helpful for the current situation. Once you are comfortable with all of the abilities at your disposal give yourself a challenge. Here’s an example that I like to use when running with a Staff. Find a Veteran (or Champion) that doesn’t have any ranged attacks and see how long you can kite it by cycling through all of your CC abilities. The objective is to learn not just which ability to use in which order but how to get the most out of each ability.

As far as whether to bring a Scepter or a Dagger alongside your Focus, why not bring both? Play around with one for a bit then try the other and see if you can determine which you prefer. They both have upsides and downsides. Scepter provides decent range but once you use the big hitting attacks you are stuck auto-attacking while waiting for other abilities to finish their cooldowns. Main hand Dagger has some nice damage and a few neat tricks to boot. Burning Speed (Fire 3) is one of my favorite abilities in the game (try using it when your enemies is up against a wall to stack the entire “tail” in the same spot and watch as the enemy just melts). The real decision boils down to what you’d rather have: Burst damage (Scepter) or sustained damage (Dagger). What’s odd about this is Scepter, having longer range, is easier to survive with than Dagger.

Wow that turned into quite the wall of text.

TL:DR – Start with one weapon set and one attunement. Stick with it until you really know how to use each ability to maximum effect – remember to position yourself and your enemies to force as many as possible into the line of fire! Also, stick to low level zones until you are ready for a greater challenge.

Hope that helps!

If you are looking for “easy mode” Ele my recommendation is go staff, DPS build, and sit in Fire attunemeant mostly. This is a relatively easy to play build that has you sitting in Fire mostly the time, swapping only to earth and air in certain situations.

It’s an effective, powerful build, start early but gets stronger once you get more traits to Up your damage. It plays pretty much the same from level 1 to level 80 and the traits don’t really change your style (aside from blasting staff) so you can get used to this from the start up until you reach 80.

Playing scepter or dagger is much more complicated and requires a lot do attune,net swapping; you’ll pick it up as you go along.

I posted this in a different thread (in a different subforum), but it also applies here, I think.

Regarding weapon choice for leveling an elementalist, I can give the following recommendations:

- Avoid main-hand dagger between level 15 (when monsters start fighting back in earnest) and level 60 (when you start acquiring three-stat equipment and unlock the last tier of traits). Due to the requirement to be close to your enemies to use dagger skills, you may have trouble staying alive, since an undergeared elementalist tends to be fragile.

- Off-hand dagger can be very useful at all levels, as many of its skills are area effects centered on you, and the Fire 4 skill is a fire field that can easily be used to create combos.

- Avoid the focus off-hand while leveling. The weapon has many niche uses, but it tends to support a strategy of outlasting enemies. This is something elementalists only really develop on the later levels (mostly due to low armor values in combination with low health).

- Staff can be decent for leveling, and some people swear by it. It requires fighting at a distance, and some skills actually support this strategy by creating distance between you and enemies. Be warned, it is the slowest of the elementalist weapons, and it relies heavily on AoE skills that require you to keep the enemy in the area for maximum effect.

- Scepter is my personal favorite while leveling. It has distance, and it deals mostly decent damage. However, many of its best skills are single-target, and you can easily be overwhelmed if you face multiple foes. (Combining with off-hand dagger somewhat compensates for this, but not completely.)

Finally, consider equipping at least one defensive utility skill (e.g. Arcane Shield, Mist Form, Signet of Earth, Armor of Earth), especially while you are still learning all your weapon skills and how they can interact. This will allow you to escape situations that threaten to overwhelm you.

I’ll also follow up with some attunement advice.

It will go easier if you pick one or two attunements as your “default set-up”, meaning that you want to start fights in that attunement. That way, you can familiarize yourself with a sub-set of skills to start a fight with, and can then expand to the other attunements as you go.

Typically, each attunement has certain things it is good at. Learn those, and learn to use them.

For example:
- Water attunement has skills that provide healing. Typically, I will switch to water and fire a few of these skills to heal up before considering my actual heal skill. (I will also hastily swap out of water again, to ensure that I can get back in as soon as possible, in case I need healing again.)
- Fire attunement always has at least one combo field. Earth attunement always has at least one combo finisher. When I am in fire attunement, I often tend to switch to earth after putting down a combo field.
- Air attunement is usually quite good on its own, with decent damage and some damage-preventing conditions. It can also provide the Swiftness boon on some weapons.

As an elementalist, you can also deal out a great deal of conditions. However, each of these conditions is usually tied to a certain attunement:
- Fire Attunement is the only one that deals out burning (but it does that in spades) (with good damage).
- Water Attunement provides Chilled and Vulnerability. (Its damage is sub-par, though)
- Air Attunement can prevent damage, by dealing out Blind and Weakness, and by knocking back enemies (while also dealing decent damage).
- Earth Attunement speciallizes in Bleeding, Crippled and Immobilize. (Its damage is decent-to-good if you include the bleeding, but it’s not effective against enemies that often remove conditions.)

The trick is to learn to quickly figure out what you need, and to change attunements accordingly. It’s okay to make mistakes, though. A mistake means that you’ve locked yourself out of an attunement that you actually wanted to use, and you will need to wait for the cooldown to switch back. It is a valuable learning experience to make do with the skills in your other attunements, though, as you get to know those better that way.

I too was overwhelmed the first time I tried Ele and quickly deleted it. That happened twice now that I think about it.

The key to understanding attunement swapping is to know what you want to achieve. That was a poorly constructed sentence, but what I mean is that each attunement focuses on a few specific jobs.

Fire – aoe damage, burns
Air – (mostly) single target damage, blinds, stuns, speed
Water – heals, cleanses, chills
Earth – condition damage, defense

Understand this and you’ll know when to swap attunements. Also, it’s important to memorize what every skill does so there’s no waffling. So for instance…

Attacking in fire, crap here comes an attack, swap to earth and boost defense, swap to water and heal, chill foe, swap to air and gain some swiftness to open up some distance, swap to fire to continue attacking.

See how each attunement can be used to fulfill specific roles?

Also, memorize the fields & finishers on each skill. You can very easily drop a fire or water field and pop multiple blast finishers across a couple attunements for might or heals.

Thanks so much. I will most certainly stay in one attunement to get a feel for it. I keep going between staff, scepter/focus and dagger/focus. I just cannot decide which feels better and more fun.

I personally recommend scepter/dagger for levelling, and I advise against mainhand dagger under level 50 or so (due to extreme squishiness at lower levels).

Other than that, my advice was to pick one attunement to start a fight in. So don’t be afraid to swap attunements during that fight. With only one attunement, you will run out of options quickly due to skill cooldown.

So start out with one attunement to start out in, and another to swap to. When you are familiar with the skills there, add a third attunement to the mix. (If you want to challenge yourself, try not using one of the first two attunements until you have familiarized yourself with the new one.) Then do the same thing with the 4th attunement.

Definitely experiment with the weapon options jazz, but I agree with Jorno that S/D is your best bet for leveling. Dagger forces melee range and staff is more of a support or aoe weapon, which is less useful for soloing. Scepter also has some decent burst, which will let you drop baddies fast before they can even reach you.

With S/D, I like to start a fight swapping into fire (for the fury with Arcane 5 trait) and then opening up with a salvo. If they’re still alive, I swap to air for more fury, the blind and spike. Still alive? Into earth for more fury, another blind, increased defense (since they’re on top of you for sure now), and an aoe knockdown blast. Nothing in open world is alive now. Rather than waiting for weapon cooldowns, just swap into the next hardest hitting attunement and continue attacking.

Yeah I used to be like just sit in air attunement because I thought it looked cool and going to f1, f2, f3, f4 was a pain. I recomend you to first of all change your keybinds form Anet default if you still have them.

To know when to really change an attunement you must practice with the weapon first whatever is s/d staff d/d d/f s/f. Practice until you brain gives you the attunement you need without thinking.

For me the right moment to change is pretty much when I can combo skills. Or when I need to escape would be air or when I need to heal would be water.

For s/d that I use would be the famous might stacking combo. Or when you are channeling dagger 5 and you want it to hit a bit harder you attune to air. You can also do that for scepter earth 2.

These are the ones I use. Just swap slot skills with profession skills in that chart or you can use the shift+ as some people do.

You should switch to attunements every few seconds for that fury/swiftness boon if you have 10 points in Air trait for Zephyr’s boon.
When I see an ele that stays on fire or air ONLY, I tend to get a little ansty & want to get on my ele & show them how its done. (I use staff for dungeons & WvW & s/d for anything else)

my rotation always begins on Earth, so I can stack might by switching to fire & using lava font; then I switch to air for static field – & switch to water for support & so on

The point with ele is you’re supposed to use all of those attunements; as long as you know what they’re for & how to use them effectively

That’s how I feel anyways.

It’s tricky yes, and it starts to get even more complex when you start combining various skills on different attunements. It’s not something you can really learn from the forums, my advice is to just stick with the ele for a while. Practice makes perfect, and you’ll have to develop your own style.

The key thing is to combine stuff though. Wheter it’s combo fields and finishers, swapping for boons or just skills that work well together. You gotta use it all if you want to win.

Chasind.3128:

You should switch to attunements every few seconds for that fury/swiftness boon if you have 10 points in Air trait for Zephyr’s boon.
When I see an ele that stays on fire or air ONLY, I tend to get a little ansty & want to get on my ele & show them how its done. (I use staff for dungeons & WvW & s/d for anything else)

my rotation always begins on Earth, so I can stack might by switching to fire & using lava font; then I switch to air for static field – & switch to water for support & so on

The point with ele is you’re supposed to use all of those attunements; as long as you know what they’re for & how to use them effectively

That’s how I feel anyways.

Totally disagree. That’s fine if that’s what you’re trying to accomplish with your build: be a kitten all trades.

As a staff ele I want to maximize my damage. So I stay in fire all the time: the free seconds of quickness and fury you gain are not made up for by being locked out off fire arrangement for 10 or more seconds. Sadly, the other elements suck at dealing damage compared to fire.

If you want to deal damage, start in fire. If you want to pop a shot, then do something else, then by all means do your rotation. But it’s not the most effective way to deal damage, unless your using a lightning hammer fresh air build and are just using one weapon with lightning bolts shooting out every now and then.

@Mochann:
Who says the OP only cares about dealing damage?

The elementalist is incredibly versatile. It has single-target damage, AoE damage, many different condition, defense (3 invulnerability skills!), mobility, healing, condition removal, combo fields AND combo finishers.

Arguably, using nothing but the fire attunement skills on staff is like playing a warrior with only the greatsword, and ignoring the adrenal burst skill AND weapon swap. Or like playing a ranger, and using only the longbow and a single bear pet (without using weapon swap, pet swap or pet commands). You are ignoring 75% of what the profession has to offer.
That may be a valid choice, but at least make it an informed choice. Meaning that you should at least try everything before settling on such a tiny niche.

Personally, I mostly run dagger/dagger by default, but I swap it around depending on circumstances. In dungeons, or while defending a tower in WvW, I’ll use staff. Against champions (in open world or dungeons), I’ll use scepter/dagger. In the Uncategorized fractal or the Solid Ocean fractal, I’ll use scepter/focus. Dagger/focus is the only combination I don’t actually use.

I did a quick DPS comparison of Elementalist Auto attack DPS before

• The staff DPS is terrible with Fireball auto attack being medicore.
• The Scepter DPS was terrible at raw damage, but earth and Fire were one of the best when adding in conditions (assuming they go their full duration).
• The dagger DPS was very good at raw damage with (even the water auto attack beat out Fireball).

Just keep that in mind.

If you like the staff I suggest balancing condition damage with raw power.

• I tend to start fights off in earth to stick eruption under foes, then switch to fire for Lava font. (You will learn to live by blast finishers soon enough)
• If I am a lazy Elementalist, I will just stick to eruptions on my target and let them bleed to death while I run around looking for more victims (1 or 2 will kill most mobs eventually).

Also at lower levels, you may want to pick up the glyphs early on

1. Glyph of lesser elementals will let you summon a golem. You pretty much only want the earth one, but it tanks very well when you need it too.
2. Glyph of storms if very powerful. Fire is great for damage, but I almost always use earth for 10 seconds of constant blindness.
3. Glyph of attunement will give you a long buff to Proc a condition based on alignment (so that your auto attack is useful). The two best are Fire to set things on fire (when not using the scepter) and earth to Proc cripple so enemies have to endure eruption.

You know what I find funny I can’t stand other classes that make me swap weapons but I feel so comfortable changing between 4 attunes XD.