Guild Wars 2

Hello, I dont make many posts on these forums, so forgive me if I’m doing something wrong.

TL;DR: Is it possible to make a lightning elementalist/tempest work well (without building around the lightning hammer)?

I have always loved lightning magic in games, and GW2 is no different. I’ve tried several times to level up an elementalist with air attunement, time and time again, but I’ve given up due to how low-damage+low-surviability I’ve had, sticking stubbornly to air attunement. When I came back to GW2 after a 3-4 year break, I got HoT and used my lvl 80 boost on an elementalist (since I couldn’t bring myself through the painful leveling). I’ve gone and acquired gear of the ele, but I still find my lightning attunement to do little to no significant damage, while dying faster than you can say “Logan Thackaray is a kittenbag”. I’ll start collecting hero points in order to unlock the tempest mastery, in hopes of maybe making a lightnign-build more viable.

I’m aware that optimal elementalist playstyle is by switching between several of the attunements, using aspects of all in your plays. But I sincerely wish that you could play elementalist mainly sticking to one attunement (I know fire is the best one for crits+power, not lightning). I’ve been checking out some guides online, and it seems like almost all the lightning builds are focused on utilizing them Lightning Hammer spell, which I do not want to use. So can you play elementalist (tempest), not using the lightning-hammer, and still have good damage output (and I mean like a average dmg output for DPS classes/builds)? I really want to make this work. Thank you for any replies/help!

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Tempest_-_Fresh_Air_DPS_

You swap to fire just to use burning speed and warhorn 4/5 for make air overload charge again

lucadiro.4519:

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Tempest_-_Fresh_Air_DPS_

You swap to fire just to use burning speed and warhorn 4/5 for make air overload charge again

Woah! Thank you for the reply! I’ll check this out.

Air attunement is not really a damage attunement. However, once you unlock tempest the air overload is very high damage, strikes quickly, and deals damage over a large area.

With the fresh air trait you can overload, swap attunements, and the first critical you land will instantly reset your air attunement cooldown so you can swap back. However, you will still need to wait out the 5 second cooldown before overloading the attunement again.

Having said that, I wouldn’t recommend locking yourself into trying to over-utilize air. The overload and auto attack (dagger) are high damage, but it’s mostly for CC and utility and with fresh air there is no reason to camp air attunement as you can easily swap back as needed.

Use the full range of your abilities. That’s what’s great about elementalist and especially the fresh air builds! You will always be able to fall back to air attunement no matter how fast you’re swapping.

Thank you for your honest and informative response.

While I wish for a GW2 where you can play exactly the way you want, and make it work well, it’s understandable that’s not possible. I guess Elementalist is the hardest class to play, cooldown-management, keeping track of your skills, buffs etc. Its probably an image that has stuck with me from other MMO’s that you usually go one element as a mage.

If I follow that guide that was linked above, it’s supposed to work for small-scale fights, and as I’m not a fan of PvP, and I don’t have a guild, I guess it works for doing normal world PvE stuff. I guess what I need to do the most is to spend time on the elementalist, getting to know the different abilites, swapping between them etc, as it’s always been overwhelming to me. It seems that if you’re going ele, you have to go in fully concentrated and focused.

Again, thanks for your informative post, I’ll keep it in mind as I git gud.