Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone. This is a guide for the Ember Elementalist, my take on a signet elementalist build for PvP/WvW. I’ve been playing several meta and home-brewed Elementalist builds for the past 2 years, but I constantly find myself going back to this build when I really need to win. I believe for the majority of situations you’ll find yourself in, it is as effective as the meta triple cantrip D/D elementalist.

Click here for the video guide.

Click here for a link to the PvP build.

Comparison to D/D Triple Cantrip Elementalist

This is going to be the decisive factor in whether a build is picked up or not, so it is at the top. Is this build as strong as or better than the meta D/D triple cantrip elementalist build right now? Depending on the role you seek to accomplish on your team, I firmly believe so.

Defense/Armor (damage reduction against direct damage)

• Heavily in favor of Ember Elementalist
  • This build packs an innate 2730-2850 armor (depending on Earth attunement or not) at all times compared to the D/D Cantrip’s 2350 armor. On top of that, this build has permanent protection uptime that comes in 3-second bursts (hard to steal), compared to D/D Cantrip’s 6.5 second protection on 9+ second cooldown.
    Offensive Pressure (ability to damage opponents quickly and prevent them from escaping) | In favor of Ember Elementalist | Because this build goes 6 in fire and earth traits, there is a large power/condition damage difference over D/D cantrip in base stats alone (~120 power and ~100 condition damage assuming the D/D Cantrip is running power runes of some sort). On top of that, the Ember build has permanent rapidly-reapplying burning pressure regardless of attunement, near permanent-chill pressure, and massive poison uptime due to the +30% condition duration from 6 in the fire trait line.

Boon Utility (ability to augment combat effectiveness with boons)

• In favor of Ember Elementalist
  • Ember elementalist has permanent fury/swiftness/protection in rapid reapplication. This was touched on earlier, but the rapid reapplication is a strength that can’t be emphasized enough. Because each application of these boons happens every 3-5 seconds, even if they were to be stripped/corrupted, you can place them back on almost immediately.

Defensive Utility (defensive ability outside of just the toughness/vitality stat)

• Very slight favor of D/D Cantrip Elementalist
  • This one is debatable. D/D Cantrips has a monstrous number of single condition cleanses and insane amounts of healing. Ember Elementalist carries 2 triple-condition clear bursts on medium cooldowns and 1 condition clear/10 seconds passive. However, whereas D/D cantrips relies on vigor for more dodge and lightning flash for mobility, Ember Elementalist utilizes the focus for more defensive options. Earth 2/4 and Air 4 combine to absorb/reflect projectiles for over 10 seconds while Earth 5 is literally a mist form that you can use all your skills from on a shorter cooldown. Because of the low cooldown and consistent cleansing from D/D cantrips, longer fights go heavily in their favor. This one is very close and swings with opinion though!

Team Utility

• Slight favor for D/D Cantrip Elementalist
  • One of the key strengths of the D/D Cantrips is the ability to stack large amounts of might. The Ember Elementalist build and rotation allow for 3 easy fire field blasts every 25 seconds for 9X AoE might. On top of this, it has a permanent fire field, which gives you 1X 10 second might stack every time you’re hit by anything. Even then, it cannot match the duration of D/D cantrip’s blasted might, as D/D cantrip goes 6 in arcana for +30% boon duration and often use +might duration runes as well. In the long term fights, the massive might/protection/regeneration/soothing mist applications that D/D cantrips provides will be more deciding. Ember Elementalist can lock down targets at 900-1200 range for much longer than D/D Cantrips can (and require melee range) with Air 5 (3 seconds)/Signet of Earth (4 second immobilize). On top of that, many team fights can be determined in the initial clash. Ember Elementalist brings Swirling Winds, which can lock out many classes from participating in the opening trades of a team fight and heavily swing momentum.

Mobility (for escaping)

• Heavily in favor of D/D Cantrip Elementalist
  • The ember elementalist build lacks Ride the Lightning or Lightning Flash to get away. Catching others is fine with 1200 range chills and immobilizes, but you need to watch the map to be very aware of how many enemies are in an area at a time and pick fights you can win or survive long enough for back-up to arrive (remember, you have ~20 seconds of total ranged damage mitigation from Water 5, Air 4/5, Earth 2/4/5 to buy time for others to arrive).

Self-Healing

• Heavily in favor of D/D Cantrip Elementalist
  • This is among the major differences between D/D cantrips and Ember Elementalist. Both builds share the passive of signet of restoration, but while D/D cantrips packs in a 10 second cleansing wave, 40 second cleansing wave, as well as near permanent regeneration and soothing mist, Ember Elementalist only has the active of signet of restoration for a paltry 3.5k heal every 20 seconds. While Ember Elementalist can mitigate far more damage than D/D cantrips can through stats and actives, D/D cantrips has the ability to heal back up from low health quite rapidly, something Ember Elementalist cannot.

Gameplay Style

• Player’s Preference
  • Some of the elementalist’s focus skills are notoriously viewed as bad. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but they are insanely situational. That being said, this build provides the tools to set up those situations to make use of the weaker fire/water focus skills consistently and reliably. The downside is that they rely on other skills to use in combo, which means you don’t toss them out on their own— they must be used in rotation to maximize their effect. Not exactly a downside, but opponents who escape the set-up lower the value of some skills.

Overview

• My mindset when designing a build is as follows: It must be able to survive to do what the build is meant to do, it must have a win condition, and in short, it must do something decisively unfair. For the D/D triple cantrip elementalist, it is packing immense amounts of self healing, reliable DPS, lots of personal defensive boons, along with massive amounts of AoE boon support to the team. This is the golden standard to which all future elementalist builds have to compete against. If an elementalist build can not out-do the survivability or support of the D/D cantrip build, then it has to be stronger in another area to compensate. The Ember Elementalist build is arguably comparable in survivability and team support while packing in much higher amounts of damage.

• This build revolves around 3 things— the trait Written in Stone, which allows the passive effects of signets to still be in effect even when they are on cooldown, the trait Fire’s Embrace, which gives a 3 second Fire Aura every time you use a signet, and the trait Ember’s Might and Balthazar runes for 100% burning duration without using sigil slots, which doubles the burn you inflict on enemies from Fire Aura from 1 to 2 seconds.

• On their own, the elementalist signet skills are a little lackluster. The passive effects are okay, and the active effects are debatably quite good. However, with a slew of traits capable of boosting them up, each individual signet becomes a ridiculously utility-packed skill on short cooldown.

Rune/Trait Explanations & Alternatives

Rune of Balthazar/Ember’s Might (Fire III): This is a package deal and a mandatory part for this build to function. 6 points in the fire traitline (30% condition duration) + Ember’s Might (25% burning duration) + Rune of Balthazar (+45% burning duration) give you the elusive 100% burning duration.

Burning Fire (Fire VIII): One of the largest weaknesses this build has compared to D/D cantrips is the lack of ability to deal with conditions. This trait is a godsend in that regard, as it shores up the major weakness of the build. Some prefer it not to be automatic, but I love it— it is incredibly useful. You may not notice it as much because it passively goes off, but the instant you remove it from your build, it’s absence is felt.

Why not Blinding Ashes (Fire XIII)?: This seems like an obvious choice, right? You have permanent burning all the time, so why not get that free blind every 5 seconds on an opponent? This WOULD be a great skill if the cooldown on it was unique for each attacking source. However, it is not. Because you can’t control the order enemies attack into your flame shield with, this trait is only useful in 1v1’s against opponents without summons or multiple-hit attacks. You see how the situations this is useful in are very limited then? The blind will go off all the time on mesmer clones, ranger pets, in the middle of rapid fires, or on any passing breeze and set off the 5 second cooldown. It’s a fantastic idea for a trait, but needs to be a bit stronger to consider using over the excellent Burning Fire trait.

Zephyr’s Boon (Air I): This is just a really obvious choice. With permanent fire aura, this is an adept trait giving you permanent fury (20% crit) and swiftness (33% swiftness). If you told me an adept trait did that on any build in the game, I’d call it broken.

Elemental Shielding (Earth V): Also an obvious choice. With permanent repeatable fire auras, this gives us nearly permanent protection uptime as well. This and Zephyr’s Boon also work when you use Earth 3’s leap finisher through combo fields that give you auras!

Signet Mastery (Earth II): This is the most (perhaps only) replaceable trait in this build. I like having my options on lower cooldowns. This applys doubly so when a single cooldown trait can affect the heal/stunbreaker/“CC” at once. This is a personal preference choice though, and there are lots of other options you can choose here.

Written in Stone (Earth XIII): This is what the entire build revolves around! This allows you to keep the effects of your signets even when you use the active effects. Think of it this way— it is a grandmaster trait that gives you 1 condition clear/10 seconds, 180 toughness, 25% movement speed, and 250 HP heal every time you do anything. You know you would choose that trait if it were available on any other class.

I don’t want Signet Mastery (Earth II)! What else can I put in that spot?: I’m personally extremely fond of Earth’s Embrace (Earth III), which is even more protection and stability as well, which mitigates one of the problems this build has against stuns (only 1 stunbreaker, 20 second CD). Geomancer’s Alacrity is an often really undervalued trait. All of the skills in the earth line are monsters for D/F (exception of 3. It’s just “good”), and you gain a lot from having those all on shorter cooldowns as well. I vary often to this trait too.

Skill/Sigil Explanations & Alternatives

Signet of Restoration: This is actually a fairly easy personal decision to make, as this healing skill is incredibly good with Written in Stone. You might consider running Ether Renewal in its place, which also helps mitigate the condition management of the build. However, I really loathe Ether Renewal for being both a mediocre heal amount for 1 use every 20 seconds (you have to count the cast-delay and channeling time) and how it takes pressure off of your opponent for 4 seconds while you cast it. Keeping pressure on your opponent and forcing them to use their skills unoptimally for defense rather than offense is one of the main win conditions of the Ember Elementalist, and it is taken away when you use Ether Renewal. Signet heals for more as well. Nough’ said.

Signet of Water: This is the only utility skill that really warrants an explanation. Signet of Fire seems like the obvious one to take here. 1200 range 18 second burn on a 16 second cooldown? Along with a permanent 180 precision bonus (8.6% crit chance)? Why would you not take that?! I initially ran with the signet of fire as well, but the longer I used it, the more I thought about how I was using it. I noticed that without needing to pop it, the opponents were always burning regardless. It rarely got use out of the 18 seconds as it would be cleansed off, and I had 2-6 second burns applying literally every second anyway. I also noticed that my worse match-ups were against condition based classes. While signet of water’s condition cleanse is not amazing, it still helps shore up a weakness of the build. I also found myself much happier to use signet of water’s active, as while I have permanent burning going, I have only so-so sources of chill. this skill allows me to stack up to 13 seconds of chill on a ~20 second cooldown.

That being said, if there were any skill in this build that was replaceable, this is the one right here.

Signet of Air: This is a stunbreaker on a 20 second cooldown and permanent 25% movement speed bonus. One of the key things about this skill is that it is instant and also applies an AoE blind on your target. This makes it extremely good for stomping classes who have targeted CC abilities. The versatility of this skill and the short cooldown make it non-replaceable in my eyes. No debate.

Signet of Earth: For almost every signet in the game, I can look at it and think, “Wow. That’s a really meh active effect. I get why they put that together with the passive bonus.” This does not apply for Signet of Earth. On top of having easily one of the most useful passive effects (+180 toughness), the active effect is fantastic for both personal combo setup and for chain-CC on an opponent during a teamfight to burst them down. It is, at base, a 1200 range fast-casting non-projectile 3 second immobilize with a hefty bleed stacked on top at 25 second cooldown giving 180 toughness when not in use. This is before we count in the +30% condition duration and flame shield bonuses that the Ember Elementalist build stacks on top of this skill. It’s a monster, and I would never think of replacing it.

Glyph of Elementals: When this elite was changed (again) with an instant cast time for the elemental, it is now by far the best combat PvP option for Elementalists— that is to say, if you really need to win a fight, this will guarantee it. More accurately, the Fire Elemental will guarantee it. Always use this skill in the fire attunement (rare exceptions for Water with its 6k AoE burst heal + 1 condition cleanse. Never use earth/air unless desperate for summon and locked out of water/fire attunement). The fire elemental’s skill set allows it to do absolutely bonkers damage. On top of that, because the cooldown starts immediately as you press the elemental’s skill button, you can in theory queue it to do 2 of its special attacks back to back in quick succession by pressing the skill, entering the fight ~10-15 seconds later, and then pressing the elite skill right after your elemental uses its special attack once. Also, pressing the 15 second elite active skill gives a proc of Signet of Restoration. This was an all-around buff to the Glyph of Elementals so long as you remember to use the active every time it comes off cooldown.

Shore up your weakness by taking Conjure Fiery Greatsword as an elite instead: Yes! You actually have a choice for your elite. While I always, always prefer Glyph of Elementals, I did mention earlier that one of the weaknesses with this build compared to D/D cantrips was the inability to escape from a bad situation. Conjure Fiery Greatsword gives you that option. Without a doubt, unless you have massive conditions loaded on you which would kill you anyway, once you drop the FGS, nobody will catch you with its massive mobility options on 3 and 4 on super short cooldowns. Cooldown of 3 minutes though, so you can’t enter bad fights willy-nilly and expect it to be up in every single one! Note— if you want to fight while using FGS, be sure to sit in the Earth attunement for 120 extra toughness!

Gameplay

Click here to watch from 11:52 to 14:55, which reviews the key strength of the build.

Summary: In short, what this build does is take the usually lack-luster signet skills and tailors every single rune/trait around them so that you have 4 incredibly powerful skills in your utility bar. With this build, your signets’ passives will always be on, and each time you use them, on top of their base effect, you get 3 seconds fire shield (+1X 10 second might when hit, return 2 seconds burn when hit), 3 second protection, 5 second fury, and 5 second swiftness. You even get a 6-second AoE burn on using the heal!

For example, what was—

• Signet of Restoration
  • Passive: Heal 246 per cast. Active: Heal 3,500 and lose the passive healing, 25 second cooldown.

Becomes—

• Signet of Restoration
  • Passive: Heal 246 per cast. Always on! Active: Heal 3,500, gain a fire shield (1X 10 second might when hit, return 2 seconds burn [1.1k damage] when hit), gain 3 seconds of protection, 5 seconds of fury, 5 seconds of might, and inflict 6 seconds of burning (3.3k+ damage) to all enemies around you. 20 second cooldown.

And it goes on and on just like that for all of your signet abilities! Between 100% burn duration and powerful signets, I really implore you to give this build a shot. Maybe you won’t find it superior to the triple cantrip elementalist, but I guarantee you, you’ll have a great time while playing it.

Thanks for reading. See you in the mists.

Great build man and good video, personally I think it’s way more interesting than the meta build, but it requires good players to run it.

I’m going to try this!

I’m totally trying this build when duoQ with friends :>

Thank you for posting this. I’m glad to see there are others willing to theorycraft and experiment with different builds, rather than stick to the old and very powerful (and plain boring at this point) dd meta build.
I have in fact been playing d/f myself for a while now, and also with a very similar build 6/0/6/0/2 however my build was more focused on the power aspect of it, while yours seems to be more on the condition side (burning). That’s to say i’m definitely going to take it for a spin in wvw roaming.

I’d suggest to use a leech sigil over geomancy, reason being you don’t stack that much bleeding with ele, at most you’ll see 4-5 stacks when using ring of earth.

Additionally the sigil is 240 radius, sometimes it may miss, something which doesn’t not happen with leech sigil

The dmg from geomancy at 1200 ( assuming you stach few might) is still less than leech sigil ( 987 heal to yourself and dmg to foe)

I suspect the reason why he uses geomancy is actually to add carpet condis so that the burn is not easy to cleanse.

Supreme.3164:

I’d suggest to use a leech sigil over geomancy, reason being you don’t stack that much bleeding with ele, at most you’ll see 4-5 stacks when using ring of earth.

Additionally the sigil is 240 radius, sometimes it may miss, something which doesn’t not happen with leech sigil

The dmg from geomancy at 1200 ( assuming you stach few might) is still less than leech sigil ( 987 heal to yourself and dmg to foe)

Geomancy is 3 stacks of bleed for 13 seconds (10 base + 30% condition duration).

In other words, ~4000 damage each time it connects, far superior to the leech sigil. I would run leech in place of doom if you really needed the sustain, but this build does not aim to sustain like the D/D cantrip build does. It is far more offensive focused and depends on ending fights before they can drag on too long.

Holy molly, this build is super fun! I’m still light years away from mastering it. But from what I have experienced, it’s a bit weak against condi/cc pressure. I had a close match 1v1 against engi, we were both down but his crate and down skills just killed me. Same goes for S/D thief, their stun and evade is annoying. In a team fight, I have to behave like a thief; standing on point among people spamming skills would get me down very quickly. It’s also not good if enemy team stacks immobilization. But for plus 1 a small team fight, it’s devastating.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

I suspect the reason why he uses geomancy is actually to add carpet condis so that the burn is not easy to cleanse.

Well, bleeding is really strong in this build. I think Doom acts more as carpeting condis. I’m also positive that this build has an edge over the d/d cantrip one. The big downfall is the escape ability and cleanse management.

I try that build several times, its problems lies in low HP numbers, when you condi bombed or focused you have nearly no chance to recover.

That it is the reason I can never really gave up from D/D cantrip, are you in trouble RTL+LF heal to full go back into fight, or FGS runaway heal to full return to fight.

You build can work perfectly at 1vs1 but if people focus fire you, you are doomed.

Only change that build need to shine a change to the mechanics of the blinding ashes, at the moment it ICD works like, if you burn 3 people at the same, they are all blinded, but if you burn one first and other 2 0.25s later they are not blinded and ICD will not let them blind for next 5s.

They have to really change the ICD to pro target.

To make that more sustainable I tried that water runes (extra heal and condi cleanse) and blood and leach (for health steals) but it is nowhere enough.

I wish written in stone would not be a grand master trait then it would be awesome build.

posthumecaver.6473:

To make that more sustainable I tried that water runes (extra heal and condi cleanse) and blood and leach (for health steals) but it is nowhere enough.

Defender runes are better IMO if you want more sustain, effectively adding 4k to the signet active heal if you time it well. Also condi removal sigils help, such as generosity or cleansing.

But then again this is for WvW/PvE that Im suggesting for.

ok guys try using this build with Runes of the Krait and switch to fiery greatsword .

stacking cond’s is already pretty strong in this build but with greatsword out ur dps goes through the rough. Only problematic builds I have fought are certain tanky engi’s and rangers

What a nice build, lots of cc, defensive stuff and you can throw a huge amount of damage using the signets correctly.

there are many fun ele builds out there and many of them are very strong in 1v1 but that’s about it.

this build has decent pressure but gets overshadowed by the low hp and vulnerability to conditions. even the -20% condi duration wont save you here (especially in wvw with the food) and in pvp this build is maybe ok as a side node contester but not ideal for yourself and your teammates; pvp is not a 1v1 game mode.

the reason why d/d is meta is because it can self sustain and support allies, not because it kills and in fact has the lowest dps of the celestial builds. your build can kill slowly but your self sustain is lackluster, especially when focused, and you dont support allies at all.

nothing wrong with using it as a wvw roam build though.

Thanks for the responses! Jekkt, I’m going to quote your responses as a “blanket response” to the most common criticisms I’ve seen about the build so far since you’ve touched upon most of them!

Jekkt.6045:

this build has decent pressure but gets overshadowed by the low hp and vulnerability to conditions. even the -20% condi duration wont save you here (especially in wvw with the food)

The -20% condition duration on fire auras doesn’t work. qq. The build would be vastly stronger the instant that bug is fixed. Conditions become a problem in longer fights. I also thought that conditions would be a big problem when I made this rendition of the build initially, but between 3X Burning Fire, 3X Magnetic Earth, and 1X/10sec signet of water, it ended up being enough for the majority of fights I went into.

I think the main reason for both of these is because Air 4/Earth 2/Earth 4/Earth 5 just end up nullifying tons of these attacks that would cause the problem in the first place.

Jekkt.6045:

and in pvp this build is maybe ok as a side node contester but not ideal for yourself and your teammates; pvp is not a 1v1 game mode.

the reason why d/d is meta is because it can self sustain and support allies, not because it kills and in fact has the lowest dps of the celestial builds. your build can kill slowly but your self sustain is lackluster, especially when focused, and you dont support allies at all.

I actually disagree with a few portions of this criticism here. To the criticism that this build lacks the boonshare and sustain of elementalist— the main thing that I didn’t do a great job of is getting the point across that the build really doesn’t serve the same role as D/D cantrips in teams. I would say it serves a similar role to the one Meditation Guardian (the hammer variant) runs in teams. Lock a person down reliably (signet of earth/Air 5 = 7 seconds targeted non-projectile CC, one condition, one hard CC, and signet of earth has a very short cooldown—extremely useful for the team to focus a target) and do massive damage to remove them from a fight while still being hard to kill itself.

And it is fairly massive damage. I really disagree with the assessment that it kills slowly. The direct damage this build can put out is greatly overlooked (6 points in fire line is 300 additional power. This build rocks around 2000 power with might stacks with permanent 50% crit chance from fury). Both the direct and condition damage are extremely high, and the CC is easy to land to set up reliable ways to hit with the big damage skills.

For the point of team utility, Basically, it’s Swirling Winds vs. D/D cantrips’ ability to 2x condition cleanse + ~4.5k (soothing mist, regeneration, water arcane evasion, water attunement) heal every 10 seconds and AoE protection on Earth Attunement. I really value just not getting hit/CC at all in the first place. A swirling winds placed in the middle of a point when a fight breaks out can often decide a team fight far more heavily than the cleanse+protections. Even with my bias to Swirling Winds, I still gave the favor to D/D cantrip, because…yeah. AoE healing and protection is ridiculously high number-wise on the D/D cantrip build, but to say it doesn’t support allies at all is a bit of hyperbole. There’s a section in the write-up that talks exclusively about the team support this build offers compared to D/D cantrips.

But I really need to emphasize, the build does not serve the same role as D/D cantrips. It is not primarily a team-support attrition build— if you have damage and CC in your team composition already, a D/D cantrip build will bring more to the table. If not though, this build is a high-uptime targeted CC/high damage build with a massive amount of survivability in the initial ~30 seconds of an engagement where it seeks to close out the fight that just happens to provide AoE might stacks and swirling winds to the team.

Build looks great, i’ll try it later when i’m in the mood to play some GW2, but as far as i’m concerned, is just the healing it provides, but since i run zerker builds most of the time in sPvP, the lack of healing shouldn’t be much of a problem.

But i’m really glad we are able to have a decent signet build too, wasn’t following signet changes much but seems like they are worth giving a try at this point.

Once you have three shout heal wars in your team (lol) then this build is a beast. But if you have three zerker thieves/or rangers or mesmer, then d/d ele is your way to go. While the signet build has more safe stomp (swirling wind, obsidian focus, signet of air), it has less useful cc to prevent res and stomping and is generally weaker in courtyard. But against the turret engi plague, signet build has an upper hand and it’s less squishy than any zerker build.

Heck, I am sold the moment i see my lightning whip crits nicely. I love me a healthy amount of fury. Now is thry can fix the -20% Condi duration, it would be the extra cherry on top.

Lawful.5314:

Build looks great, i’ll try it later when i’m in the mood to play some GW2, but as far as i’m concerned, is just the healing it provides, but since i run zerker builds most of the time in sPvP, the lack of healing shouldn’t be much of a problem.

But i’m really glad we are able to have a decent signet build too, wasn’t following signet changes much but seems like they are worth giving a try at this point.

One thing that’s really, really important is to use the heal the instant you’re missing 3.5k health to start the CD on the signet.

But yeah, you’re correct. The healing isn’t the best since there’s no great adept water line trait to take that’s more advantageous than permanent fury. Because of this, the build has neither soothing mists nor regeneration. If there were an adept trait equivalent to Zephyr’s Boon that cleansed conditions and/or gave regeneration when applying an aura, that would be the dream for this build. I would drop Zephyr’s Boon in a heartbeat for it.

For now though, attrition fights are slightly unfavored match-ups for the build.

One thing i forgot to ask: what do you think of the burning precision trait?

Iris Ng.9845:

One thing i forgot to ask: what do you think of the burning precision trait?

You don’t have room for it. Ember’s Might (+25% burning duration) is a key component of the build. 100% burning duration is a necessity to really push the strength of the fire shield from signets over the top.

At 175% burning duration, each time you’re hit with a fire shield, you apply 1.75 seconds of burning. The cooldown goes for 1 second, and then your opponent must hit you again within the 0.75 second window that the burn is still on them to gain an extra tick. If they don’t, and that’s quite likely, then 75% burning duration might as well be 0%. You’ll only be getting 1 tick of burning. The 100% burning duration is really one of the cornerstones of this build. It guaranteed adds an additional 500 damage “reflected” back to your attacker every time you’re hit, far more than the 1 tick of burning (75% condition duration, 1.75=1 tick) on 30% chance per crit with 2 second cooldown that burning precision will give.

This doesn’t apply to you , but I think it bears mentioning as well— There’ve been a couple of posts I’ve seen that are along the lines of, “Ah yeah. I played signet elementalist as well! It was okay, but had X weaknesses.” and proceed to post a build with a different trait setup, different sigils/runes, etc. that don’t have the 100% burning duration. Some have been more direct damage focused. Some are more condition damage focused. Just because the same weapons and utility skill types are used do not make it the same build (for example, a metabattle mod came in and started criticizing signet builds, talking about the weaknesses of a 00446 settler’s amulet condition signet build without even looking at the trait/sigil/rune/amulet setup).

100% burning duration is one of the key strengths of this build. It changes fire shield from 1 tick of burning (just meh. Barely stronger than retaliation) to 2 (pretty OP), which all of sudden makes the fire’s embrace trait ridiculously strong.

I played around with it last night and its definitely potent in general unorganized rank games. I was wrecking people left and right. I think a lot of it just came down to people not expecting it. A lot of people I played against seemed like they were expecting a D/D ele trying to sustain for the win and weren’t prepared at all for the damage.

Really feels like you have to be aggressive when playing it. Without the sustain and condi cleanse of D/D, I felt like I had to go balls to wall since the longer a fight lasted the worse it went for me.

I actually fought against someone using this build last night on my burst-condi p/d thief. He appeared to be doing very well at holding points and was doing some serious damage against our “power” based team members. What I noticed though is after my opening combo which stacks confusion, bleeds, poison, etc, he dropped fairly quickly.

It was funny to see what he could do against a LB ranger though.

What are your thoughts on using rune of the Flame Legion? You would lose some condi damage in favor of more direct damage as well as 15% burn duration, but the constant/ near constant +7% damage vs. burning foes could be threatening.

Totbot.4583:

I played around with it last night and its definitely potent in general unorganized rank games. I was wrecking people left and right. I think a lot of it just came down to people not expecting it. A lot of people I played against seemed like they were expecting a D/D ele trying to sustain for the win and weren’t prepared at all for the damage.

Really feels like you have to be aggressive when playing it. Without the sustain and condi cleanse of D/D, I felt like I had to go balls to wall since the longer a fight lasted the worse it went for me.

Absolutely. That’s the mindset you need to adopt with this build. To quote from earlier— “But I really need to emphasize, the build does not serve the same role as D/D cantrips. It is not primarily a team-support attrition build— if you have damage and CC in your team composition already, a D/D cantrip build will bring more to the table. If not though, this build is a high-uptime targeted CC/high damage build with a massive amount of survivability in the initial ~30 seconds of an engagement where it seeks to close out the fight that just happens to provide AoE might stacks and swirling winds to the team.”

FinalPatriot.8034:

I actually fought against someone using this build last night on my burst-condi p/d thief. He appeared to be doing very well at holding points and was doing some serious damage against our “power” based team members. What I noticed though is after my opening combo which stacks confusion, bleeds, poison, etc, he dropped fairly quickly.

It was funny to see what he could do against a LB ranger though.

P/D thieves (and other condition-based builds) really become a match based on experience. It’s really important to throw the idea of the rotation out of the window when playing against P/D thieves and play a bit more like a standard D/D (I.E. go into the attunement you need the most when you need it). Magnetic earth absolutely wrecks the stealth attack and is a great safety skill as well. Swirling winds is also very effective. Outside of that though, the key to the fight will be dodging cloak&dagger. Every time the Elementalist misses a dodge on that skill, the P/D thief gains a higher chance of winning the fight.

As always, having a Fire Elemental out from the elite heavily swings the fight in the Elementalist’s favor. That things absolutely destroys thieves.

tboneking.2531:

What are your thoughts on using rune of the Flame Legion? You would lose some condi damage in favor of more direct damage as well as 15% burn duration, but the constant/ near constant +7% damage vs. burning foes could be threatening.

The core of this build really is on the 100% burning duration. On their own, signets (with the one exception of signet of earth) are pretty crap utilities, even with the passive effect from written in stone. However, almost every trait/rune decision of the build goes to amplify the strength of the signets by giving them reduced cooldown, huge useful boon uptimes, and flame shield, turning each one into a short cooldown offensive/defensive suite.
The 100% burning duration is important because of the way Flame Shield works. After it ticks once, it goes on cooldown for 1 second. Then, whatever remaining time remains of your condition on them, they must hit you again for the extra burning stack to count. For example, let’s say you have 70% burning duration. If you are hit with fire shield on, you put 1.7 seconds of burning on your opponent. Now you must wait 1 second for the fire shield to work on them again. When that 1 second passes, your opponent must hit you in that remaining 0.7 seconds for the additional burn tick to matter. Otherwise, 70% burning duration is literally as useful as 0% burning duration. It’s a huge amount of wasted stats. That’s why one of the first things I say when going over the build is that Ember’s Might + Balthazar runes are the backbone of this build. The 100% burning duration changes flame shield from a crappy retaliation to a 1k+ damage returned every second you’re hit.

The guaranteed extra tick (500 damage each) of burning on your permanent fire shield is worth far more than the 7% extra direct damage. On top of that, runes of balthazar give you a 6-second AoE burn attack when you use your heal, which is a lot of damage loaded onto the already super-stacked effects on Signet of Restoration.

My mains are mesmer and necro but I tested this out on my uplevel ele in hotjoin. I used firey greatsword to escape when things got hairy and I tried it with celestial and rabid. Its a lot of fun and quite easy. I have to work really hard to make my mesmer feel easy and fun.

Thanks for the build but since im new to ele please explain why you chose celestial? Without water fields to blast and cleanse what is the point of that healing power?

0.1 ratio on the passive and 0.5 ratio on the active is 40 more health recovered for every button you press and an additional 215 health on the active heal. You’re right in that the build doesn’t make the greatest use out of the celestial stats, but celestial amulet is just ridiculously overstated because of the even distribution at a total of 3000 stats compared to the ~2300 of all of the other amulets.

Using an amulet with toughness is overkill on the direct damage reduction since we already have 2800 armor before counting the protection. You’d also be sitting at an abysmal ~10k HP.

Using an amulet with vitality though makes for too much a drop in toughness down to 2300, and it’s not like we have such great healing that we can make use of the large health pool.

We want high condition damage because of good access to burning/poison/bleed.

We also want high power/crit chance/crit damage though because we have access to permanent fury and it’d be a waste to run that on a low power build.

Celestial amulet solves all of these problems at once while giving 33% more stat total than any other amulet does, making up for the Elementalists’ somewhat crappier base health/armor stats.

I love the build and your very objective, rational way of you, clearly and informatively explain the build, rotation and pros & cons.
Thank you for that and keep up the good work!

I played a few games with it after I saw your post on reddit, it’s a really fun build!

I don’’t doubt its a good build, but it won’t be meta changing. People are looking for builds that can fill roles in pvp. This build doesnt fill a bunker role, it isnt burst and it probably won’t knock the meta build out of being played.

Tried this build last night…it was a fun build to play. Things i liked were the damage output, the fact that most people ignore your opening burst until they have half a dozen condis on them and they are half dead, and the success rate of most 1v1 situations i had last night. There wasn’t anything about the build that was bad, but whenever i was focused by 2 ppl i could really feel it. That and condi bombs with movement impending conditions ripped me a new one. might just come to practice with the build tho.

Thank for the fun build and video Doctoris!!!

You need to play like a thief without blink :> That is a tall task.

I made a video of a 2×1 today.

As I mentioned I played this build before, it is fun but it has one big weakness condi bombs, I think you can do better instead of Geomancy sigil with a Generosity one.

You get one condi off you every 10s and you still cover your burnings for cleanse with the conditions that you transferred, you have nearly %50 critical so the thing probably trigger on its ICD and I have a feeling with nearly %100 protection up time Celestial is overkill .

I played it with Berserker and I got 500 burning ticks without really investing any stat to cond damage and lost in healing is bearable considering this build does not have that much sustain but I have really nice boost to my direct damage.

The hard counter of this build isn’t condi bomb. I play necro and I know my condi transfer and front loading can be dodged/blocked/interrupted. The enemy is the people who know hows to interrupt every single time you activate your signets (Tarcis, 5G), or even 100-0 you before you have a chance (Caed, AK). Against these people with high skill level than you, d/d cele is a safer bet because at least, you may have a chance to run away

At mid level, it’s a fun roaming build with Blinding Ash. I had a lot of fun telling enemy “hit me! hit me!” when my fire shield is on.

I enjoyed the build but feel that rock solid for Earth II is better then move the 20% signet reduction into Earth 1

I mean rock solid IMO is top 3 traits we got but going into earth is always a problem. But since build already does it why not??

Sing Along

Thanks for posting this build, I’ve been enjoying it a lot as a D/D ele (even though its meant more for D/F).

I love this build, been playing it for a few days in spvp. Very good and kills D/D eles no problem!

Hey really nice guide/build. Tried it out yesterday on my old ele and it was a blast. My only problem is (… and that might have something to do with me not playing my ele for almost half a year) that I dont know what to do when im not cycling through my combos. It feels like this build only works if you are attuned to fire and at least 2 other attunments are off cooldown.

It plays a little bit like a thief without stealth, you wait on the outside of a teamfight for a chance to burst an enemy down. The problem is that it takes way more skill to do it properly without stealth ^^. When it works it works great though but I dunno if it has something to do with people not expecting you to burst them down in 3 seconds.

Mayama.1854:

Hey really nice guide/build. Tried it out yesterday on my old ele and it was a blast. My only problem is (… and that might have something to do with me not playing my ele for almost half a year) that I dont know what to do when im not cycling through my combos. It feels like this build only works if you are attuned to fire and at least 2 other attunments are off cooldown.

It plays a little bit like a thief without stealth, you wait on the outside of a teamfight for a chance to burst an enemy down. The problem is that it takes way more skill to do it properly without stealth ^^. When it works it works great though but I dunno if it has something to do with people not expecting you to burst them down in 3 seconds.

From my experience, either

1. Camp in Air when facing against zerker thief/ranger to get a good uptime of weakness and shocking Aura (which gives you fury – meaning more damage for Lightning Whip \o/) or

2. Camp in Earth (on point) to stack those bleed onto your opponents and force them to cleanse it. Do not forget that Magnetic Grasp is an unblockable projectile immobilization. It’s really good against classes like guardian/engi/ranger that try to disengage.

My favorite part of this build is the incredible control it has. You can pretty much string together multiple Dazes, Chill, Knockdown and Immobilize. Killed A LOT of engineers in the past couple weeks with this build. Good build for good times.