Guild Wars 2

I’m returning to the game after quite a long hiatus and want to level up an elementalist. I remember scepter/dagger with staff as backup for world events and such. Is this still a good way to level? Also, what would be a good trait build? I know there’s a few builds/guides floating around here and elsewhere. I just don’t know which is considered up-to-date and whatnot.

With leveling your weapon choice comes down to preference, can’t really go wrong.

Staff is the “safest” and the most reliable sustained damage so I used it all the way through to lvl 80. You get the best spammable Ele nuke (fireball), best fire field (lava font), best water field (geyser + healing rain)….staff basically does everything.
Drop 10 points into Arcana for Blasting Staff, 10 points into Water for Vital Striking, all remaining points into Fire+Air….enjoy huge AoE’s that will destroy everything! You can also circle-kite mobs with fireball you’re low on health.

Never found any real reason to use S/D. Dragon’s tooth + phoenix + fire grab and might stacking is nice if you want to quickly explode 1 mob, but the cooldowns become too much when constantly dealing with incoming foes. Scepter autoattacks are terrible and Dragon’s Tooth can’t hit moving targets. Use it if it you want but I find it unreliable.

Ele is “bad” in the sense that they are absolutely terrible for PvP right now. I can’t speak much more on Ele PvP because I gave up a long time ago, it just was not fun getting repeatedly wrecked. Switched to Engineer for PvP and never looked back.

In PvE you will die the most out of all classes due to having the least room for error. Lowest health, lowest armor and no awesome survival tools like stealth or clones. But it’s somewhat compensated by the ability to do some INCREDIBLE damage, especially AoE – kill your enemy before they kill you, that’s the Ele life

well , people who manage ele r having extremely fun, in pvp and wvw

those who just bash random buttons aint gonna get far, for ele (unlike some other classes) u nearly always gotta combine specific skills to actually deal some decent dmg /or even hit them.

example : chunnin earth wont hit anyone unless used w lightning flash, the probability that it hits without r extremely loow since everyone goes out of red circles

another example: scepter fire 2 and 3 combo will never hit together unless u use either dagger 5 air or focus 5 air, and if it hits, ur enemy is as good as dead(i dont mean he will die right away, but if u r a decent ele and land those 3 hits, u surely gonna win the fight in fair terms (1v1)

I leveled dagger/dagger, was lots of fun, using mostly scepter/focus/conjure atm (spend a lot of time ressing/CC in the big world events)

Just carry everything and switch if you aren’t having fun :p

Thanks for the tips. I’ll just have to play around with things.