Guild Wars 2

Filthy casual checking in. Because I don’t play enough anymore to keep track of the current dungeon meta and hardly ever wvw/pvp, lately, I mostly wander around Tyria or do LS. Coming from a guardian, ele’s have always seemed a much, much harder class. I heal less, die to all ranged attacks, do less damage, etc. Clearly, I’m doing something fundamentally wrong.

All the builds I see are tailored for either WvW, PvP, Dungeons, or Fractals. Basically, the hard content. No one bothers to give builds for casual PVE content (that I can find), because it’s deemed to be so easy that any optimization is unnecessary. However, I find myself quickly running out of dodges, taking ages to kill mobs, and having insufficient healing to sustain myself over the lengthy fight. A recent example being groups of ranged mobs in Dry Top.

I mostly run d/d because I find it the most fun. However, my options seem to be either:
(A) Run a x/x/x/6/6 build so I can survive ranged attacks/conditions after my dodges run out. Unfortunately, my damage output is so low that tedium sets in and I find myself running past most mobs.
(B) Run something like 6/6/2/0/0, do more damage. And die to everything.

I’m wearing a mix of exotic PVT & beserker gear (to help with survivability) with ruby orbs, and ascended amulets & dagger.

I was wondering if you kind folks knew of a more middle-of-the-road approach for a casual PVE roaming ele, preferably D/D (without a heavy reliance on LH). Appreciate it!

EDIT: Oh well, just noticed the “without heavy reliance on LH”

I find myself comfortable with
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJArYhUMKZW2wACrEBDACxmLDFYUNxn2UC-TFCBwAGV+JRJI29Hwp+DgHAQK9AJM/p/EAQGg8JA-w

It’s meant for SOLO pve where you are all alone. Since I’m often in a hurry, I don’t have the time to stack might/fury at every fight and so I try to pump out the most I can from passive buffs. It’s based on camping water attunement with LH. You get:
10% dmg from vital striking trait
10% dmg from scholar runes
20% dmg from piercing shards which gets activated when the target is vulnerable. Since LH doesn’t have access to vuln, I went for weak spot trait so that you apply vuln on crit
10% dmg from stone splinters
20% dmg from bolt to the heart when target is under 33% hp.

I gave up on:
10% dmg from burning rage which is triggered only when the target is burning and the only way to apply burn is with burning precision which only has a chance to apply 1s burn.
x % dmg from bountiful power which is triggered only when you have boons. I rarely have any at all
20% crit chance from fury. I have 83% crit chance at all times anyways, so whatever

I’m using glyph for healing skill because of the reduced CD and the 10s regen that comes from water attunement.
I took arcane blast instead of wave for the reduced CD which allows me to have a 75% uptime on arcane lightning which grants me 10% crit dmg.

I run Scepter/dagger for the burst damage when I run out of LH charges. You could go for d/d but you miss the burst that comes from switching to lightning attunement and lightning strike. Doesn’t really matter much since you camp LH all the time.

Quite self sufficient build that provides you the buffs and debuffs you need to trigger your damage modifiers when you are all alone and that grants you some more hp and regen for survivability.

Thanks for the reply. My aversion to LH isn’kittens (edit: really, Anet?) effectiveness, just that its auto-attack heavy playstyle goes against what I think makes eles fun. But perhaps I should revisit it again.

I agree with you though that the essence of my problem is that 99% of ele builds focus on stacking might/fury for a small group, yet this doesn’t seem efficient when solo roaming.

I don’t really do it anymore since I’ve been level 80 and done with world completion for a long time, but I can help ya.

For solo roaming in open world, this is what my ele has: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoYnMISLDW3AmNAfEGQAwCHAKAHgR3AxpgMQNE-TRCBABV8AAqZ/hKV/5MlgYp8DgDEQe6BSRDRAnQAyAovFA-e

Explanation of the traits:

While it is true that you’ll primarily be camping air attunement, you’ll still be blasting yourself might by rotation through fire (burning speed/ring of fire) > water (frozen burst) > earth (earthquake), and because there’s nothing really relevant here, you may as well increase the damage that your fire fields do as it’s better than nothing.

You won’t really be needing Conjurer because FGS is literally useless for any purpose other than mobility. Pyromancer’s Alacrity would be fine as well and probably equally as useful as Internal Fire is. All the other options in fire are pretty bad.

The rest of the traits should be fairly obvious; the remaining choices are simply damage modifiers with conditions that will pretty much always be met (thanks to the Fresh Air trait).

As for your concern about stacking might, keep in mind that you’ll be getting a lot of that from your MH dagger with strength sigil, and you will not be blasting nearly as much with this setup (literally 4 blasts total, sometimes fewer). Strength runes will be helping quite a lot for might retention.

I occasionally swap weapons/utilities depending on the circumstance (which everyone should be doing lol).

For example, swapping to glyph heal and using it for swiftness (air) and swapping air signet to lightning flash for more mobility? Not a bad idea at all.

Swapping internal fire trait (VI) for conjurer (II) whenever you wanna/need to use LH/Ice Bow? Sure, though I can’t imagine it mattering much in open world PvE lol.

Swapping to staff temporarily (and hopefully swapping traits for it) to do an open world boss that happened to spawn in the map you’re in? Good call.

Swapping to focus temporarily if you feel like soloing a champ? Good idea, because dagger offhand is pretty awful for that kind of stuff and is only good in PvE for mobility and killing trivial trash mobs.

I personally use truffle steak because money isn’t of much concern for me (but sharpening stones I very infrequently use and I’ll usually override it with a slayer potion anyways, so I just use the welfare ones), however a perfectly fine alternative would be minotaur steaks. Those are a lower tiered version of the same type of nourishment (power + precision). Elementalists benefit the most from this type of food!

Let me know if you have any further questions.

For food, what about using bowl of truffle sautee to further help with solo might stacking? IDK how much this costs, but it could be worth it.

Hmm, nah I still think minotaur/truffle steaks would be a better call. Check the condition for the might— you have to kill something for it and if the OP is struggling as it is to stay alive, getting downed would mean he’d have to start over.

It’s a solid idea but I wouldn’t recommend it for people unfamiliar/uncomfortable with the class.

For solo open PvE I usually play with a Staff:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQFA2gMMaZY3QABgQMZxwBiMQUpSvB-ThRBwAUuAAX3fU+dT9HU6AA8AAMrEEA-e

The AI is pretty dumb, so you should have much of an issue to keep them inside your AoEs, e.g.
Earth #2, Earth #5, Fire #2 for burst damage
Air #3 to push foes back into Fire #2
Fire #2 at the corners of Air #5 so foes are stunned while standing in it
Fire #4 towards the foes so they have to run back through Fire #2 (and Fire #4)
Water #4 to make them move slower through Fire #2
Earth #4 to keep them from leaving Fire #2

Water Magic 3 and Water #3 can serves as an great emergency heal. Aside from Water Magic 3 the build focuses on damage traits.

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A Fresh Air MH Dagger Ele is properly better for solo open PvE, I just like the laid-back playstyle of my Staff build more.