Guild Wars 2

Hello! I’m a new level 80 staff ele, and I am trying to figure out which stats I should focus on. Just starting to run some dungeons, but I still spend more than half the time exploring/farming out in the world. I go into wvwvw maybe once or twice a week, but I don’t intend to focus on gear for it until my PVE gear is taken care of.

I mostly use fire for damage, some earth. I find air 1 a little touchy with the jumping to the next mob and often pull more than intended, so I tend to avoid it. Staff water damage seems to be really low in comparison to fire or earth, so I mostly use it to heal/regen. I can’t remember my build off the top of my head, but I know I have 30 in fire.

So, here are my questions:
Should I focus on Power or Condition damage or both? How valuable is precision? Which spells are actually capable of critting? Vitality vs. Toughness? How much does healing power really affect our heals? Which runes/sigils do most eles go with?

Is there a post anywhere that gives a number as a goal for any of these stats? For example, I’m not sure how much power an elementalist should ideally get before buffing up survivability, healing, or * gasp * magic find.

Any help is appreciated!

A friend in game told me about this guide, and it looks very helpful in answering some of the questions I had about gear. Hopefully it will also help others:
http://www.noxxic.com/gw2/elementalist/damage/pve/stat-priority

There are two ways (more than two but in my opinion) to build a staff elementalist. You can either go the big DPS route with critical damage or support elementalist with moderate damage.

For critical damage, you will become more or less a glass cannon, by stacking power/precision/crit damage %. You can get up to 6k per tick on firestorm and your auto attacks will do about 2k+ on auto attack. Gear wise, I just used berserker armor (pow/prec/crit dmg) with 6 ruby orbs + full ruby jewelry.

For support elementalist, you equip yourself with full clerics armor (for healing and toughness mostly) with 6x runes of dwayna and use sapphire jewelry. This you will spend a lot of time shifting to water to spam AOE heal and to remove conditions for your party.

Condition damage is ok, but it is not really viable using a staff. If you want condition damage you are better off with a scepter + offhand.

I have 2 sets of armor and 2 sets of jewelry for my Staff Ele (my main character). I love the staff and I’ve found that staff ele is my fav character to play in dungeons. I usually run full berserker (berserker armor, ruby jewelry). I like dealing high damage and in dungeons I usually have a team to help keep mobs away. As long as you can stay in the background and nuke, you should do well, even if you are a glass cannon. In fact, in my glass cannon gear, I have been only one to survive an encounter gone back in dungeons before, usually because I am further away from monster and can back away slowly. Although I have held off mobs before too.

Cleric is an option, but I personally don’t use it. I have considered it, but I like to support by fields and such more than healing and boons (cleric with boon/regen durations runes is usually how it is done). My other set is Soldiers armor and Emerald Jewelry. With both on I am much more tanky with still enough precision to land criticals for bonuses there.

I did look into a condition damage set (meant for dagger/dagger or scepter/dagger swaps) but I decided that Solider’s is good enough for those weapons.

So it really comes down to play style. If you like being a healer, cleric and the whole healing support theme may be for you. If you like to tank or just want a nice all around strong but survivable set of gear that works well with all weapons, Soldiers is a great choice. If you want to go all out in damage, Berserker is the way to go. If you want some middle ground between all out criticals and tank, maybe Knights?

For PvE power or condition both works fine I think. I have both full berserker and rampager gear and don’t really find difference. Either way I found sigil of battle is really good one for elementalist for dps build.

You should switch attunements constantly and for that elemental attunement trait and sigil of battle is perfect match! And this leads to having might duration bonus helps to keep more mights. I use 3 fire runes and 3 hoelbrak to get 40%. I can keep 9 to 13 all the time without caring. If I do make sure I get most might from combos it can get me up to 16 or more for little while.

As for support role, I posted some stats I figure out.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Vital-vs-Toughess-for-healing-gear/first#post825016
For runes, I use 2 major water, 2 sup water and 2 monks to get 40% boon duration and this works pretty good with again elemental attunement trait. 40% duration do affect your parties as well.

I use 10/10/10/20/20 and I found it pretty good for playing any role. Normally I just change my gear to be dps or support.

Personally, I tend to go for a mix of all stats, because that’s really what the staff does: everything.

We’re not good focussing on conditions, but we still cause them.
We’re not good focusing on heals but we still heal more than most professions.
We’re not useful if we go all bunkery, but we still need some defense.
Our attacks may not deal that much base damage, but we still got a few nice procs that justify getting more crit.
And power, of course, is always useful.

The main benefit of this is that it lowers the effect of diminishing returns. An example:

Say you deal 100 damage with a particular attack. Say that adding 10 power adds 10 damage. You now deal 110 damage, or 10% more. Now, you add another 10 power. You now add 120 damage. Another 10% more? Well, not really, because you were already doing 110 damage. So the next 10 power adds (120/110)*100%=+9.1%. This gets progressively worse the more you focus on a single statistic. The first bit you add is always the strongest, relatively speaking.

As an added bonus, it allows me to pretty much swap builds without needing to change gear.

Thanks for the replies! I definitely have a lot of good info to think about now.

Just out of curiosity, how much power do you have on your staff ele (number)? What crit %? Any other specific numbers would also be helpful so I know when I’m in the ballpark of an average lvl 80.

Not entirely sure, but to be honest, my build isn’t exactly standard. I really like the Rune of the Golemancer (because of the golem), but that kinda locked me into a crit based build. At the moment, I think I have around 1700 Power, 33% crit, 48 critical damage and then 1500 or so toughness. My health is around 16k.

With my 10/10/10/20/20 staff ele
Berserker base gear: 2150 / 41% / 66 (power/precision/crit. dmg)
Rampager base gear: 1700 / 55% / 850 (power/precision/cond. dmg)

My staff ele is 10/30/0/10/20
With full Berserker gear but not with full Ruby accessories:
1900ish (I think)/ 43% / 75 (power/precision/critdmg)