Guild Wars 2

I’d like to level my ele and I’ve gotten all of my weapon skills unlocked, as well as a feel for what abilities I have at my disposal with the combinations. However, I honestly have no idea what is going on with the traits. I just hit Lvl 10 and looking over the trees I’m lost. Is there a guide or list of suggestions somewhere that I could look over? If not, are there any must get traits or utilities that a non-elementalist wouldn’t necessarily pick from face value? I’d appreciate any direction or help.

I found from 0-20 that I was best off leveling with S/D using Power gear. From 20-40 I used Power/Vitality gear still with S/D. Traits put into Water tree for the Vitality it gives which will help out early on. Usually something along the lines:

10-20: 0/0/0/10/0
20-30: 0/10/0/10/0
30-39: 10/10/0/10/0

The standard “power” combo in PvE is: Dragon’s Tooth -> Ring of Fire -> Phoenix -> Fire Grab. That will gib most things around your level and under and take a huge chunk off Veterans. It’s very effective AOE, but you have to be cautious about your survivability as well early on.

Otherwise normally you will mostly use Air / Earth. Air’s auto is solid damage and it lets you rotate the blinds while kiting around. Most kiting is done via back + strafe in a direction (mostly strafing) and use of dodge. The idea is to get a good rotation of avoiding their hit by blinding a mob, then using dodge, then blinding again. If Blind is down in Air, switch to Earth and continue and use it’s blind and Knockdown as needed switching back to Air when you can.

Water is mostly kept as a defensive attunement to heal/cleanse conditions and Frost Aura then swap back to another.

Arcane Wave will let you stack more AOE Might in Fire and do more AOE damage. Otherwise I like Cleansing Fire because it cures a lot of conditions that can be applied to you as well as Armor of Earth (which can give you Stability while channeling Churning Earth if you got mobs that knockdown).

At 40+ you can spec into the Lightning Hammer builds (20/0/0/10/0) which are amazingly easy for leveling. Just sit in Water with 2 Cantrips (Cleasning, Armor of Earth) and just auto attack your way to victory. The Auto on Lightning Hammer is ridiculously powerful and the 10 extra charges you get from Conjurer in Fire allow you to keep going with it permanently. You can level like this all the way to 80 with minimal effort and ease. The most difficult opponents will be Dredge, which you can fall back on the S/D Fire combos for (or Conjure Firey Axe?).

That’s how I leveled up multiple Elementalists. Was very easy.

I did pretty much the same as Kodiak, survivability is going to be a little tough early on so just get used to kiting and paying attention to your surroundings and CDs.

Thanks for the replies, I will try your suggestions and see how it goes.

Kylun.2935:

Thanks for the replies, I will try your suggestions and see how it goes.

Yeap and from there you usually end up going:

50 – 20/0/0/20/0
60 – 20/0/0/30/0
70 – 20/10/0/30/0
80 – 20/20/0/30/0 (or respec to another spec)

Big advantage of Water is it powers up your Cantrips while sitting in Water Attunement. When you gain 3 stacks of Might, Vigor, Regen (which will cleanse a condition at 60) and the fact you’re blinding everything AOE every 1.5 seconds (which is why Dredge suck cause they’re immune to Blind) and have the passive Soothing Mist regen ticking on it’s all pretty defensive while kicking out massive damage with Lightning Hammer.

Around 50+ I think it was I started using Knight (Tough/Power/Prec) gear. Also remember Sigils still build with Conjures so use a Major Sigil of Bloodlust while leveling too.

By far the biggest thing that will hold you back is other players because people see a Lightning Hammer and go “OOO SHINY” and come steal it and doubly so with Fiery Greatsword. Around other players you have to “tactically” place your Conjures so they aren’t readily visible for people to take. Worse case scenario you fall back on S/D which you should have learned how to use from 1-40.

I used S/D for leveling as well (and I still use it most of the time, actually). For Traits, though, I cannot recommend Arcana highly enough. It’s not so important if you’re going the Conjure route but the attunement cooldown reduction makes all the difference in the world for virtually every other type of Ele. I will occasionally try playing with less than 20 in Arcana and the profession just feels so much clunkier.

Water is definitely the most immediately important, though. That health and healing power makes PvE so much easier.

For utilities, I swear by Glyph of Lesser Elementals and Glyph of Elementals (as your Elite when you hit 30). Having the summonable creature to distract mobs and tank them for you is great, especially with S/D. The breathing room makes leveling noticeably easier.

Could you tell me if this build is still good for leveling? I’ve recently gotten back into GW2 and I’m leveling an elementalist. Most of the time I’m leveling with friends (usually at least 3 of us in a group at a time) and I’m trying to find a good build. I’m not sure if I should be using staff or S/D. I’ve been using S/D for the most part, but I keep a staff on me just in case. If this build is still good to use, which traits./skills do you recommend I take?

I’m leveling an Ele as well, and I personally prefer D/D or Staff over S/D. S/D’s damage outside of that one mentioned fire combo is unimpressive, and that combo has a longer cooldown than I like for leveling.

D/D you can use the standard spvp build just fine, x/x/x/30/30 with armor of earth, lightning flash, and a third optional utility (I use the arcane blast finisher for extra might stacks or Signet of Air).

Staff, I’ve just been using the same thing, switching out armor of earth for another offensive utility like Lightning Hammer or Signet of Air for perma speed.

Because of the heavily defensive trait build, everything else is really personal preference. However, in your situation, I might recommend a D/D Aurashare build, using the grand master water trait and all aura providing traits to be a huge support benefit as well as putting out decent damage.

Matt.1938:

Could you tell me if this build is still good for leveling? I’ve recently gotten back into GW2 and I’m leveling an elementalist. Most of the time I’m leveling with friends (usually at least 3 of us in a group at a time) and I’m trying to find a good build. I’m not sure if I should be using staff or S/D. I’ve been using S/D for the most part, but I keep a staff on me just in case. If this build is still good to use, which traits./skills do you recommend I take?

Sounds like you’re working on a necro instead… but that’s another discussion >.>

Really, you can play with whatever weapon set you want in open world PvE. I wrote up some stuff at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Best-elementalist-LEVELING-build-guide/3816598 that was going to be added to my PvE ele guide – but then I decided to hold off on finishing and adding it because of the feature patch. And I wasn’t that thread’s creator.

I recently leveled my ele (first char) to 80 and Lightning hammer is by far the easiest. As soon as you get enough skill points to pick up this conjure, respec into Conjurer and you’re set.

For melee mob groups, gather up a bunch while strafing, hitting two autoattacks. As soon as your third autoattack (the one that blinds) is ready, step into the center of the group and blind them all. Now you can afk until they’re all dead. For ranged, either run to the ranged mob or LOS around a tree/object.

The real benefit is that as a conjure it scales in damage to your level, so you don’t need to waste time/money keeping your weapon up to date every 5-10 levels.

Second option to this is to run the two glyph of elementals with the glyph CD traited. Alternate summoning them and you should have a pretty high uptime tank.