Guild Wars 2

Hello all thank you for having me. Basically say I’m new to the game on an old account. I bought the game on release day but never played it much. Now decided I want to give it a full try.

I made a elementals today. Just hit level 10 so long ways to go for sure. Just wanted some tips and advice really on early stages.

I noticed my spells change with whatever weapon i have. I like the dagger so far because the spells seem fast. The scepter wasn’t for me least for now. Is there a good or bad one or just whatever too?

’Evening and welcome back.

It’s all a matter of preference, on ele most weapon sets are viable!

Your first 5 skills and therefore your style of play will change based:

- on the weapon you have at hand(s)
– the attunement you’re in (the 4 elements icons on the top left of your skill bar – hotkey F1 through F4 by default)

The idea is to 1/ pick up the weapons that suits you playstyle and 2/ once in combat switch attunements to access the skills you need.

As for playstyle:

- Staff = range with spells that affect large area. Quite static but very powerful
– Scepter = medium range; very useful against single targets.
– Dagger = melee = very dynamic.

Then it all depends on what you like!

Watching your spells wreak havoc from a distance? Go staff

Getting in the heat of battle, casting spells and swapping between attunements like crazy while dodging and rolling around? Go dagger

Hope you’ll enjoy ele. Don’t hesitate to try different builds to see what playstyle you like the best. The class can get quite complex but to get things started it doesn’t require too much to have fun

I suggest carrying somewhat level appropriate power-based dagger/dagger and staff. That should get you through pretty much everything the game throws at you.

Some rapid-fire advice, in no particular order:

1. Dagger/Dagger is our strongest weapon set, though Staff is better in some circumstances, and some people prefer other weapons sets for whatever reason. I happen to prefer the flexibility of Scepter/Dagger, but I’ll acknowledge that D/D outperforms it in sheer power.

2. Cantrips are our best utilities. You’ll probably want at least 2 or 3 stapled to your skill bar at all times. (Again, the others have situational usefulness, and you’ll always find some people who like different ones.)

3. Water and Arcana are our most-important trait lines. You can go either Fire or Air for your third trait line, but make sure you get Water and Arcane first, as both of those are necessary to patch over our poor base survivability.

4. Speaking of which, Elementalists have the lowest base defensive stats in the game (lowest Health and lowest Toughness), so it’s important to be able to heal up quickly and often. It’s also extremely important to dodge away from big damage and CC attacks, so rebind your dodge key to something easy to hit, if you haven’t already.

5 Celestial (or mixed-stat) gear is generally our strongest endgame set. While leveling up, you should probably focus on some combination of Power, Vitality, Toughness, and Healing Power. Don’t go straight damage unless you really want to challenge yourself.

6. Summon Lesser Elemental and Summon Elemental are fantastic for dealing with mobs. They attract aggro and give you some room to breathe.

7. In general, you want to constantly switch attunements. Elementalists have twice as many weapon skills as other professions so you’re doing yourself a disservice if you just sit in one attunement. It’s much better to rotate around dropping as many cooldowns on your foes as quickly as possible. Many of our traits only trigger when you swap into an attunement as well. (Bonus tip: Weapon sigils that trigger on weapon swap also trigger on attunement swap, though they have a 9-second cooldown so you can’t trigger them any quicker than anyone else.)

Despite his signature, Blaine Tog’s advice is good if you are doing PvP or WvW content, but bullet numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 are not at all true for PvE. Follow his advice if you are doing PvP, otherwise see these revisions:

1. Staff is the highest damage output weapon eles have. Dagger/Dagger puts out great burst, mobility, and survivability (which is why it is excellent in PvP) but over a longer period of time (such as when fighting a boss) staff will do significantly more damage. However, remember that staff’s dps comes almost entirely from Lava Font, which requires the enemy to stay in one place for a long period of time.

That being said, staff gameplay is ridiculously boring. If you are looking for something more interesting I would suggest dagger/focus (for more survivability and only a small reduction in overall damage) or dagger/dagger (for more burst but a bigger loss in overall damage). Using melee weapons will also force you to become a better player.

2. Cantrips have significantly less use in PvE than PvP. Lightning Flash is always a great skill for mobility or quickly getting out of red circles, but other than that you will generally want to avoid cantrips. Mist Form or Armor of Earth can be used if you need more survivability, but honestly despite ele’s low HP and armor, they have incredibly high active survivability when played right, so you should never really need MF or AoE.

So your utilities depend on whether you are doing open world PvE or dungeons. For open world, you should generally run Lightning Flash, Signet of Fire, and a choice of Glyph of Storms, Arcane Wave, or Glyph of Elemental Power. For dungeons you should run Signet of Fire, Glyph of Storms, and Conjure Frost Bow.

3. Water/Arcane is amazing in PvP, but for PvE you should only take one of them. Water is better for dungeons while Arcane is better for soloing. In PvE you should be running Fire/Air/x. Contrary to Blaine Tog’s comment, eles actually have extremely high survivability. The only issue is players need to be skilled to bring out the elementalist’s full potential.

5. Celestial is the meta in PvP (for good reason) but it is generally bad to use in PvE. Even Power/Vitality/Toughness is not really optimal. You should be focusing on Power/Precision/Ferocity gear and using your own skill to survive instead of relying on your gear as a crutch. If you find yourself dieing a lot, try to learn from your deaths before getting Vitality/Toughness gear. Of course, if you’re getting frustrated then definitely swap out for sturdier gear until you get better, but you really should try to learn your dodges and defensive skills first.

Two extra notes: Summoning elementals is, as Blaine Tog said, an amazing tool. Just remember that only the earth elemental is excellent at getting aggro on mobs. The fire ele just does damage, the air ele does a bit of damage and stuns, and the ice ele does a bit of damage and heals. But if you want to get mobs off you, go with the earth ele.

Also, while you absolutely should be swapping attunements often, don’t just faceroll your keyboard and use every ability off cooldown. Bringing out the true power and survivability of the elementalist requires using abilities from different attunements in the proper order so that they synergize together.

tl;dr
Follow Blaine Tog’s advice for PvP/WvW, but for PvE check out the following guides:
Dagger/Focus: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_D/F
Staff: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_Staff
These two guides are designed around level 80 dungeons, but their builds, gear, and skill usage are generally unchanged for open world PvE leveling.

Also just a closing note, whenever I say “you should” in my post, I’m not trying to be elitist. These responses are simply the most efficient way of leveling. If you do not like the weapons/armor listed, or the build listed, or the utilities used, then by all means, don’t use them. The bottom line is this a game, so do what makes you the happiest!

Prism.5649:

Despite his signature, Blaine Tog’s advice is good if you are doing PvP or WvW content, but bullet numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 are not at all true for PvE.

Well, I’d argue they’re true fora new player just sauntering around the open world while learning the game. As I said at the top of my post, I was just trying to give some quick suggestions for a beginner Ele, not detailed instructions for every kind of content.

Prism.5649:

1. Staff is the highest damage output weapon eles have. Dagger/Dagger puts out great burst, mobility, and survivability (which is why it is excellent in PvP) but over a longer period of time (such as when fighting a boss) staff will do significantly more damage. However, remember that staff’s dps comes almost entirely from Lava Font, which requires the enemy to stay in one place for a long period of time.

I agree with this. When fighting a boss, you generally want to switch to Staff. It’s harder to take out smaller numbers of opponents with a staff, though, which is why I recommended D/D. You also don’t need all that much practice with a staff for fighting bosses. Just stay in fire, autoattack at range, and pop 2, 3, and 5 on cooldown and you’ll be doing pretty good (and then can experiment with mixing the other attunements in if you get bored and want to wring that last 10-15% efficiency out).

Prism.5649:

2. Cantrips have significantly less use in PvE than PvP. Lightning Flash is always a great skill for mobility or quickly getting out of red circles, but other than that you will generally want to avoid cantrips. Mist Form or Armor of Earth can be used if you need more survivability, but honestly despite ele’s low HP and armor, they have incredibly high active survivability when played right, so you should never really need MF or AoE.

So your utilities depend on whether you are doing open world PvE or dungeons. For open world, you should generally run Lightning Flash, Signet of Fire, and a choice of Glyph of Storms, Arcane Wave, or Glyph of Elemental Power. For dungeons you should run Signet of Fire, Glyph of Storms, and Conjure Frost Bow.

I dunno, I still prefer running multiple cantrips in PvE most of the time. I find them really flexible, and the added survivability lets me get away with sillier things (and will help a newer player if they accidentally bite off more than they can chew). Glyphs and Arcane skills are quite fun to play around with and I’ll sometimes run them if I feel like messing around.

Prism.5649:

3. Water/Arcane is amazing in PvP, but for PvE you should only take one of them. Water is better for dungeons while Arcane is better for soloing. In PvE you should be running Fire/Air/x. Contrary to Blaine Tog’s comment, eles actually have extremely high survivability. The only issue is players need to be skilled to bring out the elementalist’s full potential.

As I specified, we have poor base survivability. Our defenses are entirely active, which is why I like Water+Arcane for newer players. It’s more forgiving. You can always tune up your damage later on, but jumping right in with a damage spec is going to leave the new Ele on the ground and frustrated.

Prism.5649:

5. Celestial is the meta in PvP (for good reason) but it is generally bad to use in PvE. Even Power/Vitality/Toughness is not really optimal. You should be focusing on Power/Precision/Ferocity gear and using your own skill to survive instead of relying on your gear as a crutch. If you find yourself dieing a lot, try to learn from your deaths before getting Vitality/Toughness gear. Of course, if you’re getting frustrated then definitely swap out for sturdier gear until you get better, but you really should try to learn your dodges and defensive skills first.

For a new player, I would argue that we should suggest starting with the more forgiving set of armor, particularly while leveling up as armor is cheap and easy to replace then. Better to get the basics down and then worry about speeding up kills than to die repeatedly while figuring out core rotations.

Prism.5649:

Two extra notes: Summoning elementals is, as Blaine Tog said, an amazing tool. Just remember that only the earth elemental is excellent at getting aggro on mobs. The fire ele just does damage, the air ele does a bit of damage and stuns, and the ice ele does a bit of damage and heals. But if you want to get mobs off you, go with the earth ele.

Yep, the Earth ele is one tough mother. It can tank whole groups of mobs without breaking a sweat, and can do it even better if you splash it with some healing every so often. Fire is amazing for fighting bosses since it’s some extra damage you don’t have to think too much about and its range should keep it alive through most of the fight just fine.

Prism.5649:

Also, while you absolutely should be swapping attunements often, don’t just faceroll your keyboard and use every ability off cooldown. Bringing out the true power and survivability of the elementalist requires using abilities from different attunements in the proper order so that they synergize together.

Agreed. My intention was to keep the OP from adopting the bad habit of sitting in Fire all the time, but I probably should’ve take a bit more care to specify how to cycle around.

Welcome back. One thing I wish someone had told me – stock up on minor sigils of bloodlust. After 25 kills they will give you +125 power, which is crazy OP at lower levels.