Guild Wars 2

Am going to make and level my next character and I finally decided to do a Ele. I have stayed clear from it so far because of being dubious about the element swapping mechanic, is it really that hard.
Also I love the look of the lightning hammer does it get used much? in dungeons I always see frost bow skill 4.
Also suggestions on race please, normally i would go charr but am not sure with a ele.

thanks for your time

I won’t say hard as much as complex. You can, for example, effectively camp fire in staff and produce high dps with a simple rotation like other classes, but elementalists can bring a lot more to the table than that. And what you are capable of bringing to the table will be determined by your knowledge of what skills in different attunements to use together to create different effects.

For example, you can use magnetic grasp in a dagger/dagger setup to close distance to an enemy, but if you do it after laying down ring of fire in fire attunement, the combo fire field plus magnetic grasp’s pull finisher will give you a fire aura that will dmg anything that hits you. So now, you have not only closed distance, but given yourself a buff as well.

Another example is you can use Staff 4 in air to give your party swiftness, but you can also use Staff 5 in air with blast finishers like Arcane Wave, Arcane Brilliance and Earth 2 to grant area swiftness and essentially give them 100% swiftness uptime if done over and over again.

So where I am going with this is what you get out of an elementalist is directly related to your skill and knowledge level which takes a time investment to accumulate.

Lighting hammer does get used in scepter builds to make up for scepter’s weak auto attacks.

Race doesn’t really matter.

I made a charr elementalist, it looks cool, but can be kind of hard to play as a charr with the huge body covering your screen xP. But it’s fun and I enjoy and am glad I made the choice, but that’s my opinion! Elementalist is a good class to learn and can be VERY much worth your time. AOEs, team support, burst, what else could you ask for? (Besides a nerf. -.-)