Guild Wars 2

I’m thinking of returning back to GW2 and have been reading about the Elementalist and was curious what the popular PVE build would be for world exploration, future leveling of thorns, and dungeon groups?

I heard that in the PVP side, it doesn’t sound good at all. Pretty much that Elementalists are pretty much going to die in a 1v1 situation. Is that basically the truth of it or is there a preferred build that would make it effective?

Thanks for the help.

Humble.5627:

I heard that in the PVP side, it doesn’t sound good at all. Pretty much that Elementalists are pretty much going to die in a 1v1 situation. Is that basically the truth of it or is there a preferred build that would make it effective?

What? Elementalist sustain in PvP is among the best in the game, and their elite specialization potentially pushes that surviability further. Most specs in the game on other classes can’t kill an elementalist 1v1 unless he makes lots of mistakes, the only ones that really can are necromancers and mesmers if they get lucky with boon removal RNG.

Well, I stand corrected then. Thanks for the update.

I’m in the same boat as you about returning to gw2. When I stopped playing ele’s were considered “useless” in the zerker meta where people just brought a mesmer and all warriors or something ridiculous of that nature.

Then somehow ele’s became part of the zerker meta with their ice bow and their fire fields which allowed people to spam blast finishers and stack might. That is to say, staff elementalists in the current state of the game is in a fairly good place to my understanding.

Come heart of thorns though and in particular raids, that seems to be very much up in the air. From what I am reading people are theorizing that the most powerful builds will be that of necromancers with reaper specializations or the revenant with their elite specs. The ele elite specs people don’t seem to be that excited about from what I’ve read.

For PvE Dungeons you’re looking at either Staff or D/F build. The first build offers a lot of combo field generation and a fairly relaxed, yet hard hitting, play style. The latter build focuses around survivability and is generally reserved for high end content where the classes squishiness may be more apparent. The D/F build doesn’t hit nearly as hard as the Staff build and has a bit of a momentum requirement in its rotation.

For Heart of Thorns? Hard to say right now. The Devs are adamantly proclaiming the berserker meta will be a more difficult play style so we may potentially be shying away from our current builds. Core Elementalist offers a lot of great recovery and support options through Water and Arcana. Tempest further extends the support portion of the class through aura sharing and boon distribution. As of right now though, there’s too much that is unknown to supply a solid answer.

Elementalists in PvP? We’re pretty awesome there. Our Burning got toned down a bit in the last patch, but a dedicated Burn Ele can still roast unsuspecting players hilariously fast. The glorified D/D Cele Ele is a very forgiving build as well. Personally, I’m pretty terrible in PvP, but the D/D build lets me sustain very easily and play the “Designated Decoy” by kiting around a handful of players while backup arrives. 1v1 situations are fine unless I get caught in a hard burst, but being able to dance around in a 1v2 or even 1v3 is fairly common.