Guild Wars 2

Welcome. I spent a lot of time toying with possible armors and and jewelry sets for my Ele. I have finally decided on them, but before I fully commit (already got some), I wanted to see what everyone thought. I will first list sets with the total stats they give, then I will list the combinations in a spoiler box since it is quite large.

Armor:
Berserker Armor with Ruby Orb (Stats-315+120 Power, 224+84 Precision, 16%+12% Critical Damage)
Soldier Armor with Crest of the Soldier (Stats-315+120 Power, 224+84 Toughness, 224+84 Vitality)
Carrion Armor with Rune of Divinity (Stats-375 Condition Damage, 284 Power, 284 Vitality, 12% Critical Damage, 60 Healing Power, 60 Precision, 60 Toughness)
Jewelry:
Ruby/Berserker Jewelry (Stats-463 Power, 315 Precision, 32% Critical Damage)
Emerald/Knight Jewelry (Stats-411 Toughness, 365 Precision, 315 Power)
Invader/Soldier Jewelry (Stats-436 Power, 310 Toughness, 310 Vitality)[Note: this has lower stats since it does not have a matching jewel and needs Crest of the Soldier instead]

I currently have Full Berserker Armor, Body and Legs of Soldier, and Ruby and Emerald Jewelry Sets. While I do want the Invader/Soldier Jewelry set, it is very hard to get and I doubt I will have it for a long time (Emerald Pendant and WvW Jewelry are only ones with stats currently).
The Carrion was the latest addition, mainly because I felt it would be good to have a set with Rune of Divinity and Condition Damage was only thing I didn’t focus on (Berserker is Crit and Soldier is Tank). No big rush on this one either, but it is more meant for Dagger and Scepter builds if I ever get hang of it. All my weapons have stats relating to their skill sets (staff is Berserker, etc), so I won’t list them all.

Also, I may be changing the upgrades to runes later. For the moment, I like Orbs and Crests for the raw stats and because they are cheap. My Berserker set actually has 4 runes of the balefire and 2 ruby orbs. Also, I don’t like to mix and match sets, aka soldier body/legs and berserker gloves/boots/helm/shoulders. I prefer to just swap all my jewelry or all my armor (both if I really need to change it up).

To wrap this up, below is the full list of combinations, in order of my preference. I included my personal notes and calculated critical chance. All stats exclude weapon(s) and back slot items. So now I want to hear your comments. Think I have too many armor sets? Think I should consider a different one, possible even replace one? I would prefer not hear suggestions for Runes though, I already got a lot of notes on ones to consider =P

Edit: I had to split post. My favored 2 combinations are in this spoiler tag while the rest are in the next.

You haven’t mentioned what the build is for.

Sorry. I did briefly mention Staff and how I still haven’t learn Scepter/Daggers. Really, it is for all builds though. My primary is a 20/20/10/10/10 Staff build. I don’t plan to change traits often, since that build should work well with daggers, even Aura Daggers. The Carrion set was added with Daggers and Scepter in mind though, since those are far more condition focused than Staff, at least damage wise.
So it is more about the Gear itself though than my weapon/traits, since the gear is meant to support all my builds.

Let me be more precise:
You haven’t mentioned what format of the game the build is for. You need different things for open-world PvE, explorable dungeons, W3 and sPvP, although the first three can be somewhat mixed up.

All but sPvP, since I can easily change gears there. Like I said, these gears are meant to be used for everything (where I can take my real gear). I don’t PvE around world as much since I got map completion, but I probably will be karma farming at some point. I do plan to get back into dungeons and I have been heading to WvW a good bit (although I lag in big mobs so soldier or berserker, it really doesn’t make a huge difference). As I said before, these combinations are pretty much meant to try and cover all weapon/trait builds in any situation (dungeon, wvw, etc) I take them to. There may be better one for a certain thing, but I am trying to not have too many sets of gear.

Power/toughness/vitality is everything you need then, maybe except for full berserker for raining death in W3 from behind your allied zerg.

Good to know. Would you even bother with a Carrion set for Dagger/Dagger or Scepter/Dagger builds? Or would you suggest to just use Soldier for those builds instead?

You have only a few bleed/burn-inducing skills, and if you want to keep your target bleeding, you are bound to spam 1-2 skills all the time, which is not viable on an elementalist. This, by default, defies any condition damage builds on ele.

Going for precision requires speccing some crit dmg and using crit-related sigils and/or traits, otherwise you have no use of 70% crit chance.
We have kitten poor major traits that proc on crits. Most crit-based sigils are condition-inducing.
More so, going for both precision and crit dmg requires a really heavy stat investment, making you give up too much on survivability – and we really need extra vit and tough as we have the lowest hp/armor pools.

I’ve ditched precision and all crit-related stuff completely, went full pow/tough/vit armor, pow/tough/vit weapons and sapphire/cleric jewelry, along with dolyak’s runes – extra passive hp regen is awesome on 900 healing and stacks with the water’s passive regen.

0/0/10/30/30 traits, though the 10 in earth is movable, but only to air for a neat major trait if you feel like it (bolt, glyphs or one with air).

Yah, I planned armors so I could swap one to buff my critical build without losing too much of chance. Like soldiers gear with ruby jewelry or berserker gear with emerald. So I take it your saying that we only stack bleed/burn if we spam 1 skill on scepter which is a bad idea so condition focus isn’t worth getting a Carrion set for? On Dagger they are a bit more frequent, at least on fire, but I find the damage is still high enough to crit without a huge concern.
Personally, I go for 30-40% critical chance in most builds. If it goes under 25% I consider it too rare. I run Sigil of Fire on my staff since it is a nuking weapon mainly. I like to cast a bunch of AoE so criticals go off pretty often, even at 30% =P
I am not a big fan of the whole “All of defence” trait set up, but I don’t mind soldier armor due to power. I plan to keep 20/20/10/10/10 for a while since it gives me what I need. I could do 30/30/0/0/10, but I don’t find the grandmaster traits worth it and it never hurts to have a little def.

How much crit dmg have you got, what on-crit effects are you running?

I think your best options for staff going off your listed builds are (not neccessarily in this order) are Power Mix, Full Soldier, and Power Tank. From my experience power is the best damage stat on a staff build. Since all your abilities are aoe I do not like relying on crits since each ability either only hits once or enemies can just move out of the aoe to only take one or two hits. Like you said in your last post, I agree that 30-35% crit chance is a good place to sit around for scepter and dagger/ (because you can attunement swap for fury on hard hitters), but for staff crit isn’t completely necessary it seems like. My favorite from those three builds is Power Tank. Because of all of your self-healing, toughness is a more valuable stat that vitality in most cases for an elementalist.

You might also consider cleric armor with knight jewels for staff, with some kind of tanky crest/rune. It makes you very survivable and tanky while doing decent damage and also being a good support build. That is my favorite staff armor.

Like drkn suggested, 30 water and arcana with 10 in earth or air is also a great trait spec (I prefer 10 air because it works better with scepter and dagger/ imo, which I use most of the time). Elementalist traits are very player dependent though, so use what you think works with your playstyle.

I do not like carrion armor or condition damage builds at all on elementalist because it forces you into using only earth or fire to deal any respectable amount of damage, and even then it is still just not as good as an engineer, mesmer, necro or ranger condition damage build.

I also do not like full berserker armor and jewelry on elementalist at all because we are already the squishiest class in the game. I would not even recommend using even your armor or jewelry as all berserker unless you have at least 10 or 20 points in earth and/or water.

Currently I am pretty much full berserker gear (staff, all armor, all jewelry) with 20 in Air Traits. I can’t get ingame atm to check exact numbers, but I think I was around 50% chance with over 50% more damage, I think my critical hit closer to 2.2x but I may be mistaken.
The only on critical effect I have is my Superior Sigil of Fire. However I could pick up Burning Precision (30% chance to cause burning for 1 second on a critical hit) and get air to 25/30 for Weak Spot (60% chance to cause 1 stack vulnerability for 5 seconds on critical hits). Although I do like having 10 earth and 10 water, so I am not eager to do either but would be willing to try. Personally, I don’t see either being to useful due to short durations.

Edit: forgot to mention one thing. Reason I don’t have Power Tank higher up on list is because it loses 100+ power to give me toughness. Although I doubt I will get full soldier anytime soon because of how rare jewelry is so Power Tank will be my most defensive build until then.
Also, I do like crit on staff. I mostly fight npcs in dungeons and such and they tend to stay in mobs. So a meteor shower and lava font can tear them apart with criticals. In WvW, nukes are more to keep people away than to hurt them, but a meteor spiking 3k is always nice to see. Also, Lava Font is great on downed players.
I have considered a healing power set but I’ve always been against it. I guess I should stop being so anti-healing though. I planned for my guardian to do the whole healing power/team support build since I think he can actually pull it off. I know ele can too, I just didn’t want to go in that direction. I like ele for killing, not healing. And I prefer to team support with fields than directly to healing. Still, I will give more consideration to a Healing Power armor set with boon duration runes for a healing/might stacking build.
Personally, I dislike water line. I never can find any traits I like to use and I don’t feel like wasting traits for the attribute boosts alone. I know Arcana is a great line, I just never got hang of the grandmaster dodge trait. Also, I found blasting staff to be unnecessary and preferred 20 air over 20 aracana. Still, Arcana is one I’d look more into if I did go for support builds.
Thanks for advice here. I think I will drop carrion armor from my wishlist. Soldier seems better for scepter/dagger or dagger/dagger.
What can I say? I like being squishy I guess XD In PvE I may get downed, but as long as they still die (from nukes I left) before I die, I rally and all is good. In dungeons I got teams to distract foes and I like playing as guy way in back dropping nukes =P In WvW…well, 1v1 with or without defense I’ll probably get owned. Either I got a huge team with me and no one notices the weakittentle ele (at least before I slink away and heal up) or we get swarmed and all killed. When fighting mobs of players I don’t see an extra 700 toughness being the life saving faction considering how outnumbered and laggy I can get. Although I do like 10 earth and 10 water in traits =P