Guild Wars 2

^ Title.

I recently started an Asura Elementalist. Gotten to level 23, learned every weapon skill, crafting my gear as I go along to level my crafting skills.

However, it’s a lot harder to play than my previous character (Warrior, levelled using a S/S + Rifle bleed build) and I’m not sure how to trait it during the levelling process. It also feels like a lot of my weapon options just aren’t as useful at low-level PvE – I feel like I’m being forced into Staff, as a large number of dynamic events have large mobs and S/D and D/D don’t fare as well in AoE skills.

So I’m looking for advice on things like effective trait builds at low levels, what gear stats I should aim at, and which healing/utility/elite skills to pick. There are plenty of guides for how I can set up my character at level 80, I’m just looking for help on the way there.

Thanks in advance, everyone.

Well from my screenshots of my levelling, I can see that I used arcane blast, wave and signet of fire, with the staff. I didn’t even know about combo fields/finishers then, but I seemed to do alright.

And d/d has great AoE, it just isn’t ground targeted, and is quite short range, but if you use, say drake’s breath or cone of cold on mobs that are close together in range, then you’ll hit more than 1.

This will be long, but I advise you read it all.

I leveled my ele to 80 using staff only. I would recommend you do the same. The reason for that is to learn superb evasive skills. Once learned on ele who has lowest health of all professions, you will be able to apply that knowledge to any other profession you role and get benefit from it.
A side from that, staff has great range and once you unlock all your staff abilities, fun just begins.

I leveled without any tutorials by investing everything in Air and Fire, but now with this knowledge, I would do otherwise. So for leveling, I would recommend this build

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcsc9cz0mbmTMMbmToxG9MGokbMoVR

The key is to rotate your elements and this is the key rotation in my opinion to master as it will be extremely handy in dungeons (unless announced nerf become severe).

Start in water:
WATER:

1. Frozen Ground to slow them – ranged players apply extra Freeze conditions
2. predict movement of enemy and cast Ice Spike to weaken enemy (low damage)
   - swap -
   AIR:
3. Static Field if enemy moves – put in front to walk trough, otherwise place it around enemy so ranged unis apply more weakness
4. channel Lightning Surge but do know you can move while channeling (HIGH DAMAGE)
   - swap -
   EARTH (if Static field is still up your own earth basic attack has chance to apply woulnerability, bows, pistols and rifles always apply)
5. Unsteady Ground to slow enemy and apply small damage (cripple)
6. Eruption channel spell (can move while channel) does nice direct damage and huge condition bleeding
   (OPTIONAL) #5 Shockwave if enemy avoid Eruption, cast to immobilize and apply condition (even if enemy is immune to immobilize – make condition damage)
   - swap -
   FIRE
7. Flame Burst – does AoE Damage around target and leave condition burning
8. Lava Font – good damage if enemy stay on it, ranged players apply extra burning
9. Meteor Shower – massive damage can hit 1-5 times one target. MUST REMAIN STILL WHILE CHANNELING THIS!
10. Fireball – cast few of those until #3 and #2 are off cooldown
    (optional) #4 Burning Retreat – if enemy comes too close to you or even turn back to him and then cast to make him follow you all the way trough this AoE
    - swap -
    WATER
11. Geyser – if you or one party member need it but in DPS build is low heal
12. Healing Rain – large AoE same usage as #3
    - repeat rotation from start.

Don’t let this scare you. Most of the time you won’t be able to finish rotation and mobs will be dead. More often, they will be dead in just mere seconds, al you have to do is to be creative and combine what you have. But keep always in your mind – ele is weak and often must evade and use tricks to escape. Example of escaping from bunch of mobs that can one hit kill you:

Run away from them and in front of you cast these
Static Field -> Windborne Speed -> Unsteady Ground -> Frozen Ground

Conditions are by far your worst nightmare with this build and that is why I recommend Cleansing Flame and Ether Renewal.
If you got conditions on you – cast Cleansing Fire (removes 3 + AoE burn). If you got conditions and less than 70% health – Ether Renewal (you can runaway while healing yourself!).

Direct hits can be always avoided – and I mean ALWAYS. At first use mentioned ruining away technique if you got room, or Dodge or use Burning Retreat (you are invulnerable while dodging and BR is also 1 extra dodging). If all fails – Mist Form (it makes you invulnerable + breaks stun) that can help you even to rez player (start rezing and when mob approach go mist form and rezing continues). If you channel let say Meteor Shower and mob approaches – pop Arcane Shield (it does’t interrupt channeling and can pop it always).

What about other utilities? Why sacrifice for some defensive stuff? You are squishy and you make lots of damage with it. Numbers are not the biggest you will see (scepter has bigger on fire #2 but it is hard for beginners) but they are often. You quickly swap into another element and unload everything you got and swap, unload, swap, unload… You will enjoy to manipulate mobs at distance or kite them in lava font for more damage – your choice.

@ Inkubus: I don\t play Ele, wanted to but after what you wrote I’m like WHAT DA, all that to kill one flipping mob!!!!

Cempa.5619:

@ Inkubus: I don\t play Ele, wanted to but after what you wrote I’m like WHAT DA, all that to kill one flipping mob!!!!

No, this is fun play for annihilating mobs in dungeons. For one mob you stay in fire.

There is also boring play that I tested and decided this weekend I will go with it if they nerf AoE badly. I call this build Mighty Berserker and unlike previous post, you stay only in fire.

Key with this build is to constantly cast fire spells avoiding Meteor Shower. While doing that, you will stack might because of fire Trait XII. All you have to do is get your berserker armor and some earrings and amulet (all exotic). Armor is easy – you can find it from CoF dungeon or CoE dungeon tokens. But the key is in runes.
I updated build link, click on Equipement when you open the link and look at the runes
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcsc9cz0mbmTMMbmToxG9MGokbMoVR8070V7kGI70z7kGD70z7kGo70z

They will give you extra 60% might duration and Arcana another 20%. This will make you stack 15+ might on just constantly casting first 3 fire spells from staff! It makes HUGE damage.

NOTE: Max might stack is 25 but I haven’t achieved it yet. My record is 19 in CoF Explorable. I was dealing up to 3K on Fireball on regular mobs. 25 stacks of might give 875 Power!
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Might

Downside of this is – this build is boring as hell. You stay only in one element :-/
Good side is : you hit real hard. The more you cast fire spells, the harder you hit.

Berserker gear should give you 60% crit chance, Rampager staff included. Even more with Red ring of Death from FotM. But do know, even though more crit chance is good, your main goal is to stack more might.

@Inkubus: Thanks for all the advice. I’ll see if I can put it to good use, though I might not fully commit to learning the rotation until I see what changes, if any, the update will have for Elementalists.

To whoever sent me a particularly eloquent mail in-game: For whatever reason, when I try to reply, I get an error message stating that the mail system is “Unable to find recipient.” PM me, perhaps?

Dingle.2743:

@Inkubus: Thanks for all the advice. I’ll see if I can put it to good use, though I might not fully commit to learning the rotation until I see what changes, if any, the update will have for Elementalists.

To whoever sent me a particularly eloquent mail in-game: For whatever reason, when I try to reply, I get an error message stating that the mail system is “Unable to find recipient.” PM me, perhaps?

Regarding upcoming update, that is the reason I made so hasty my “mighty berserker build” when stacking might. I expect they won’t mess with fireball and as such when stacking might I will have huge damage per one target. If they don’t remove splash effect from Fireball, it would be good to hit close surrounding targets as well.

As for the mail, if it is from the gold seller, ANet probably removed their account. I was receiving those in game in the beginning quite often. I was surprised I received recently here as well. Just report them and ignore them.

The update doesn’t seem to have caused any major changes to elementalists, so I’m going to see about learning to play my Ele in the way you suggested.

As for the mail, it wasn’t anything related to goldselling, as far as I could tell – in short, a guy that saw this thread was asking if I’d like a direct in-game lesson on playing my ele. Not sure why he’d be banned so suddenly, seemed like he was more a roleplayer than anything else – suitable name for his race, referenced the lore in the way he wrote the mail, etc. Simply put, not the kind of account/character somebody would waste on goldselling/botting. If he’s banned, he’s probably banned from the forum as well, which may be why I haven’t heard from him at all.

That aside, I’ve played with your builds a little today, though I specced 10 points into water instead of air – a little survivability seems to go a long way in PvE and story quests especially; I got invited into an AC run and managed to help out, which is more than I expected at level 35.

This was my experience:

1-20: Pretty much pure misery. Couldn’t figure out spec, build or weapons to use. I died incessantly and it was pretty off putting all around. I even made a Guardian just to relieve some frustration (my initial intent was to create a support guy and Guardian could do that too).

20-40: After being EXTREMELY bored with the Guardian in PvE I read a post on the GW2 Guru Forums about the Lightning Hammer build that starts around 40. This inspired me to look around and I found others said there was success with S/D rotating blinds and knock downs while kiting. This worked well for me too and motivated me to get to around 40.

40-80: I was all Conjure Lightning Hammer on a Conjure/Cantrip build (20/0/0/10/0). The power of Conjure Lightning Hammer is that it inflicts an AOE blind every 1.5 seconds. This means you can basically go to town on medium size groups of mobs and take almost no damage. Once in a great while something will break out of the cycle but you have the Cantrips there for a huge source of regen. Add in Soothing Mist and you’re doing just fine. Eventually you end up on a 20/20/10/20/0 build or something of that nature. The recent buffs to Conjures will just make this build much more stronger for leveling. The only annoying aspect is people will steal your Hammer and Greatswords. Kinda just gotta get used to it unfortunately but doing S/D for a bit while waiting for a few seconds (if someone steals your hammer) ain’t bad. I still go back to this spec (since I am mostly 20/0/0/30/20) when I have a challenging solo PvE encounter.

What would help survivability for levels 20 – 40? I’m at level 23 now, and mobs are able to 1 – 2 hit my poor ele. My armor is all at or near my level. At the moment, I have 10 in fire, and the rest in arcane. Should I switch 10 points into something else (water)?

At levels 20-40, I put all my trait points in Earth (toughness) and Fire (power), and I used scepter/dagger. For additional toughness, I equipped Signet of Earth for its passive effect, and I played mostly in earth attunement to benefit from the 5-point minor trait for even more toughness.
Another utility skill I used was Arcane Shield to use in emergencies (which I mostly used pre-emptively while charging Churning Earth).
My third utility skill was offensive. Signet of Fire, if I recall correctly, but I’m not sure if I would do that again if I were to restart playing an elementalist.
I used Glyph of Elements as my elite at level 30, until I could afford to buy Tornado.

My tactic was to max out my toughness, to be able to take hits better, while I was learning how to avoid getting hit. What is important is never to stand still, and to dodge the enemies’ most powerful attacks.

I don’t really enjoy scepter/dagger combo, up until now I’ve been using staff. For the most part, mobs would either stand in the fire (ranged) or run up to me to stand in the fire. But my ele could take the odd hit or two and keep moving. I could do the attunement dance on the odd veteran or champion without dying usually.

Now, even one hit is enough for my ele to say structural integrity weakened.

I can’t recall if I have arcane shield, but I do have the signet of earth, air, fire and water.

And I know I have to practice dodging more.

I was trying dagger/dagger last night after the patch. Maybe I’ll look into scepter again.

After level 40, I switched to dagger/dagger. The advantage of daggers is that you deal more damage and have better healing skills, but the disadvantage is that you have to allow enemies to come into melee range.
Dagger/dagger is feasible, but risky if you can’t dodge very well. (When I decided to switch to it, i had gotten good enough at dodging and using the evasion and gap-closing skills of the daggers to actually enjoy it.)

Staff never worked for me when playing solo, mostly because it is a relatively slow weapon with few ways to keep enemies away from you, and little defense. I use it in groups, like dungeons or fractals, and I only really got into it at level 80. I know some people like this playstyle solo, but I am not one of them.

Scepter/dagger is a versatile combination. Scepter works at medium range, while dagger off-hand works at close range. Earth 2, Earth 3 and Water 4 are decent defensive skills, and Water 3 & 5 provide healing. Fire 4 is a decent combo field, while Fire 2, Fire 3, Earth 4, and Earth 5 are all blast finishers. Earth 1 is one of the best auto-attack skills the elementalist has access to (and it’s a combo finisher as well).
While the scepter skills are somewhat lacking in raw damage (or in the case of Fire 2 & 5, accuracy) compared to staff or mainhand dagger, it is quite easy to stack might on yourself, and bleeding/burning on foes. The effectiveness of this weapon set increases with high condition damage (which the Earth Magic traitline provided for me).
All in all, Scepter/Dagger is in my opinion the most balanced option, because it provides you with offense, defense, medium range and close range. You don’t excel at any one of those things, but you don’t limit yourself to only one playstyle either (like how dagger/dagger limits you to close range, or how staff limits you to area attacks).

Remember, these are just my personal experiences and preferences. Feel free to disagree.

A small tip here, in case someone doesn’t know. Put strafe left/right to A/D respectively. It helps a lot more while running around in tight circles and dodging.

Personally I started off S/D, moved to staff and now I’m knee deep in daggers. After greatly detailed answers from another thread about the elementalist in general, I feel that the daggers work for me best while leveling. On one hand, going up close and personal with the elementalist is not the best course of action but the cookie-cutter build (as I like to call it) gives you great utility in terms of boon/healing/condition removal. Trust me it helps a lot.

While using staff you can kill things from a distance (yes abuse that 1.2k range), the S/D can kill anything really fast (especially in fire and that is if you hit all of your abilities) but the D/D gives the most sustainability of the lot. Now I can easily pull 3-5 mobs at my level and dance around for some time without ever really dropping low in health.

Signet of Air is quite useful. Both passive and active, learn to love it (while leveling at least). Signet of Fire gives you the sustained damage while you dance around. And the Flash Teleport thing gives you an easy way out (or in depending your playstyle) which combined with air4 in D/D is some really nice mobility.

I took staff til about mid 40s and didn’t do much attune swapping with just a high fire build and using fire. I eventually burned out of the class because I wasn’t playing it as it was meant to be played.

I came back a week or two ago and read daphoenix’s D/D guide and specced accordingly and just blasted through the rest of the levels. I’m having tons of fun hopping around attunes and using the various abilities/combos available. Highly recommend this playstyle, once you get used to it it’s extremely powerful.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-Mastering-the-D-D-ele-12-20-12/first

I’ve been reading the various guides posted, but there’s not a whole lot of suggestions for surviving at the midlow to mid levels. I’m wondering what people did at low levels to not die. Levelling with other people is easier, but often I find myself the lone wolf.

In theory we all did the same. Running around, dodging as much as possible and when it matters (sometime it’s better to get a hit, so you have enough energy to dodge a big hit later on).

Leveling with a friend is obviously easier since it’s an on-line game and that is better for a number of reasons.

However if you came here straight after WoW, like I did, you will have to die a couple of times, again like I did, to get a solid idea of how this game works. Then you will be able to survive much longer, and sometimes in a much cooler fashion

Other than that, I doubt you will ever find a guide as to what to do. Not something specific at least.

Levelling in this game is pretty simplistic, since you get xp for just about everything. So get out there and explore, do events, craft some, etc.

If you want to get better specifically in combat, those guides can help with that. But none of them are going to hold your hand and tell you exactly how to level – that’s up to you.

pdboddy.4162:

I’ve been reading the various guides posted, but there’s not a whole lot of suggestions for surviving at the midlow to mid levels. I’m wondering what people did at low levels to not die. Levelling with other people is easier, but often I find myself the lone wolf.

The main way you do it with S/D is kiting and primarily rotating earth/air. I mean no what spec you play you can’t ever really stop moving. Even melee with D/D you want to be circling your target. By staying mobile it puts you in a better position to avoid attacks.

Air has a blind (3) and a knockback (5). Earth has a blind (3) and a knockdown (4). Basically what you need to do is kite mobs (use Signet of Air to boost passive runspeed to help kiting) using your evades and keep the blind on reserve. If your evades are down, then use a blind. If it’s still dangerous, use Ride the Lightning then knockback and swap to Earth. From here you can throw on bit more armor (2) and repeat with the same over all method of using evades and if you get caught without an Evade throw out your Blind or Knockdown and swap back to Air. The hardest mobs you will face in this scenario are ranged mobs and Dredge who are immune to blind. Remember you can avoid projectiles if you keep kiting!

Fire is your power aura in the sense you can use it to do massive damage all at once. Drop Ring of Fire → Dragon’s Tooth → Phoenix → Fire Grab after they all land and you’ll pretty much gib anything not a Veteran.

Water is your heal aura basically you swap in to throw down your Glyph Heal (which will add Regen) plus (5) and (4) then swap back out. Trident (3) isn’t really worth it for healing amount.

I can’t honestly see you getting 1 shot unless you’re facing stuff much up above your level. Personally I always like to be a bit above my content regardless of character type and tend to rotate areas. Like I recently told my friend who just started he should do a 1-15 area till 5, then swap areas to another 1-15 area till 10, then swap back and forth like that until he was 100% in both. Repeat each zone level range. Long as you stay within a couple of levels of your actual level for content you’ll always get full XP and it can be a bit easier to take on things a level or two below you.

That also said spec can help. I’ve always had 10 in water as an Ele and it was my first choice. Soothing Mist + Regen on Glyph Heal are a very powerful combo to regenerate hitpoints fast. In addition I use Cantrips a lot so the Regen and Vigor on Cantrip really helps as well since I’m usually using Lightning Flash or Cleansing Flame anyways. Also 21+ you should start gaining access to Power/Vitality gear which should help earlier on as well with hit points to avoid getting 1 shot. However, I really can’t stress the need to constantly stay moving at all times.

Well, some things to consider. Thank you all for the suggestions and to the OP for their initial questions.

its Hard to give advice on a Build in your lvl Range. A Lot of stuff is just tough as ele in low levels. So here are some pointers on Utility skills

Solo Target Utilities
Signet of Fire: activate as an opener. Counts for almost all damage over Time.

Glyph of Storm:
Activate while in Earth for multiple blinds

Arcane Wave: Great damage and a blast finisher

pdboddy.4162:

What would help survivability for levels 20 – 40? I’m at level 23 now, and mobs are able to 1 – 2 hit my poor ele. My armor is all at or near my level. At the moment, I have 10 in fire, and the rest in arcane. Should I switch 10 points into something else (water)?

Dodge and dodge a lot. Tricks also help a lot but it is hard to master them.
Use Cripple from earth, stun from Air and Freeze from Water – yes this means you have to rotate your elements often.

Asmodal.6489:

its Hard to give advice on a Build in your lvl Range. A Lot of stuff is just tough as ele in low levels. So here are some pointers on Utility skills

Solo Target Utilities
Signet of Fire: activate as an opener. Counts for almost all damage over Time.

Glyph of Storm:
Activate while in Earth for multiple blinds

Arcane Wave: Great damage and a blast finisher

AoE-ing helps a lot. Kitind mob in Lava Font, immobilizing and setting eruption also eradicate mobs quickly.

This still works: (notice they are 4 lvls stronger than my ele)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V90Z1XhA8zA