New Elementalist Looking For Some Advice
You’ll only make money by doing group events. AoE all monsters in a group and run like a scared dog with the tail between your legs until all the bad guys are dead. The elementalist is severely weak both in damage and defense.
It is what works for me and I’m thinking of going Necro or a Guardian class until this one is fixed.
get a staff as soon as you can their extremely useful compared to the other weapon in my opinion anyways, and learn to move and cast faster Aoe spells when soloing melee guys and play ring around the rosies in the Aoe or you can just tank it and most of the time you’ll out damage them with just the fire stacks of damage.
but the most important thing is to learn to move, or let someone else attack first. they excel when you don’t have to worry about dieing and can easily heal someone and go back to doing a lot of damage
Dual daggers.
Earth/Water/Air.
1. do NOT facetank. DODGE!
2. Dont use fire.
3. Dont use a staff.
4. Swap elements. Water has some healing, its not much but it may save your life.
5. Take (and USE) DEFENSIVE skills.
6. OMG Toughness !
7. OMG Vitality!
8. Learn mobs agro range. IF you get downed #3 when it comes up may let you move far enough that you can move out of the agro range. You can then 4 yourself back up.
So you want to dps…thats great. Yeah, power for more dps is great. Yeah precesion for more critical damage is great. Dead DPS do 0 dps.
FAR FAR FAR too many run around with their staff casting fireballs at everything. They don’t move, they don’t dodge, take only DPS skills and then wonder why they die so much. Just run around for a few minutes and you will pick them out.
1. Daggers are fine if you’re use to dodging as you would under a thief that’s dagger based as well.
2. Keep a staff handy for group events since your AOEs are generally on lower cool downs than dagger attacks offhand or mainhand.
3. If you want old reliable DPS then fire is your main goto element, otherwise you have three elements with different looks/feels. Air for critical hits (oddly this one can mix with fire to produce quite good results imo) and some CC in the form of blindness and knockback. Water for heals and freezes (equivalent to cripple in effect). Earth for DOTs and some cripples or knockdowns (weapon dependent as with all the elements).
4. Don’t be too scared to stack for vitality early on over power or precision. The fact is that early on the return on stacking a single stat like power is fairly low. But if you’re interested in a good mix of surivibility and punch, go with this general order: vitality, power/condition, toughness and precision until later levels (around 40 imo). Play with the order to see how it best fits your play style.
5. Look to utility spells to round off any deficiencies in offense, defense, or CC. This is one area where I think Elementalists get a good bag of tricks if they want to utilize them. Specifically, LEARN what each glyph and signet does since some are attunement based (glyph of storms comes to mind).
6. In PVP expect to learn to juggle elements for the situation you’re in. If you need to heal yourself drop into water when it’s feasible. If you need to burst down an enemy drop into fire or air.
7. HAVE FUN playing with traits until you find a play style in the class that fits you best (some love to juggle elements and use arcane utility spells, some love to switch between two elements (me), or whatever).
Anyways, I was just looking for any beginners advice people have. What stats should I build for, what early skills are good, what professions are good, hints tips and the like. I was kind of thinking going Water/Earth(I like support and buffs/debuffs and stuff), but I’m not sure what’s good.
Beginner advice: eles in GW2 are not the same eles of GW1.
You really really need to have some incredible masochism to roll an elementalist now. You’d better finishing levelling up the mesmer then check if ANet did something to save elementalists from the current path of disgrace.
If you still want to make one, you sort of have to spec all defensive just to survive 2 hits (1 in case of thief).
Damage? Forget it, for some reason elementalists are not meant to deal damage, but to stay on the backlines and spam some unskillful AoE.
I just got GW2 yesterday, and I played as a mesmer for awhile. I liked the class, but I thought I’d go for something a little more direct, and since I liked the Elementalist in GW1, I thought why not.
From a pure PvE viewpoint:
The GW2 Ele has basically the same strength and weaknesses as the GW1 Ele: Low survivability, low damage but great support. However in GW2 you’ll often run around alone and for that having great support isn’t that useful; overall this makes the Ele slightly less powerful/easy than some other professions in solo PvE.
Scepter+Dagger is a good weapon choice for beginners.
Start in Earth and use skill #2, at lower levels it will increase your survivability immensely. Later if you’re more comfortable you can swap your attunement more to create combos, e.g. Air #1, #3, #2, wait for the first attack to miss, #4, #5, Fire #4, #2, #3, Earth #4 (supposedly you’re able to cast the fire skills in a different order for the same/even better result but I’ve never managed to pull that off).
As others have said have a Staff in your inventory to be able to switch to it during an event or dungeon.
10 points in Earth and Water are a good starting point, you gain Vitality, Toughness and Condition Damage which is all very useful to the above mentioned playstyle, and Healing doesn’t hurt.
At level 40 you might want to take a look at Conjure Lighting Hammer:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/65884-the-ultimate-40-elementalist-levelingfarming-build-cantriphammer-build-highest-dps-innate-survivability/