New to Elementalist
Well, each attunement focuses on an area. That is what is different from other classes.
For example, Staff ele is very healing heavy with water, tank with earth, condi with fire and cc with air.
Now, changing quick between attunements depends on your build.
The Arcane trait line benefit eles that change attunement a lot. But Tempest benefits does that stay a little longer.
Still, the principle is the same. Change attunement for what you need and learn the damage skills in each attunement so you can link them.
Anyhow, gl on your journey!
Why not just, say, camp fire?
If you’re using a staff and trying to do as much dps as possible, you do camp fire, because the other attunements on staff have very bad dps.
Otherwise you swap attunements to make the best use of your cooldowns, or to access utility in other attunements. For instance, if I’m dual wielding daggers, air has the most dps on the autoattack, but fire has some hard-hitting skills with long cooldowns, and earth has one too. and water has a heal and a blast finisher*. So I might start in fire, use my 3 burst damage skills, then swap to earth, use that big damage skill, then swap to air and lightning whip until some cooldowns are ready.
There are also a lot of traits that work with attunement swaps. Like there’s an air trait that does damage to your target when you swap into air. And a trait that recharges air attunement swap cooldown when you land a critical hit while not in air. And a trait that grants you fury every time you swap attunements. And so on
*And if you don’t know about finishers, that’s one thing you should learn. Most notably for ele, blast finisher in fire field grants 3 stacks of might.
(edited by reikken.4961)
Elementalist is all about adapting to the situation.
Like someone said, if you play Staff DPS, you stick to Fire as much as you can and only switch for situational abilities like CC, healing, condition cleansing, reflecting, blinds, etc.
For example on a Staff DPS, you’ll swap to air to break a bar using Gust + Static Field, if you need more and know when the break bar is coming, you go earth, use Unsteady Ground + Shockwave + Overload Earth followed by the combo from air to break even more.
Once in air, you can overload or use Glyph of Storms. If you don’t need to break anything, stick to fire for pure DPS.
If you need extra healing or to clear condition, you swap to water for Geyser and Healing Rain or you can also Water Blast spam when there is nothing to attack to provide some healing to you and your group.
You can also quick swap to earth for Magnetic Aura when a foe is using projectiles against you.
If you go to earth, you can also drop Eruption, swap back to fire and drop a Lava Font on top of the Eruption to give an Area Might combo that grant 3 mights stacks for 20 seconds to anyone around the combo.
You can also use Eruption with Static Field for a 10 seconds Area Swiftness.
If you are running with Glyph of Storms, using it with Earth will provide a pulsing blind that can be devastating to enemies (Except if those enemies are Dredge, kek).
The amount of possibilities are staggering. It’s all about knowing what to use and when.
And this is only for staff, don’t get me started on what you can do with other weapons… oh boy! It always depends on your spec too. Some spec prefer air, some prefer fire, but usually, every spec can make use of all attunements for specifics situations.
I run scepter/dagger right now, dont go staff unless you want to be in fire attunement most of the time, I feel scetper/staff is far more versatile since I dont have tempest yet im running with arcane/air/then fire. Using flame of the legion runs and beserker gear for now using a glyph build, also I use both summon abilities for soloing and group content works out really great. Actually its worked out quite well in wvw to but I also like to switch out fire for earth for survivability.
(edited by Ryou.2398)