Guild Wars 2

I’m not exactly the most highly skilled ele in the world and rarely venture into WvW and only PvP on a handful of occasions. I’m perfectly content to roam around Tyria doing random stuff (working on word completion at the moment) and have only recently started doing fractals. I love playing mage in any RPG. I think it’s due to my affection for AOE type stuff.

Anyway, long story short, I know all the advice is to create a berserker build (damage over defense, basically) and I get that, but I it doesn’t fit my style because I’m not that good at dodging and staying alive (I’m at level 80). I currently have all my points in vitality, power, and toughness, but that leaves my critical hit chance somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%. What I really want is a balanced build that gives me decent health, maybe somewhere around 18k, and at the same time decent dps. I know I could use the calculator thing but at the risk of sounding lazy I’m hoping someone could give me an example of a good all round balanced build (armor, amulets, etc).

Also, should I bother stacking might? I’m almost always playing solo and I wonder if it’s worth it to just stack might for myself. Appreciate any and all advice!

I think what you’re looking for is the pure cele build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XC9MgNNAmNA0RgFBALIAUAOAup2ZbuV4SGCSBA-TxBBAB2pDom9HC4CAgn6POqE0MlfA8AAAA-e

Bare minimum, (i.e. exotic weapon + armor + ascended trinkets) you’d get near 1.95k power, 50% crit, 17.8k hp. Since you said that you have difficulty maintaining >90% hp, scholar runes won’t be beneficial for you that much, so strength runes are your best bet in terms of sustained dps modifiers. Stacking might is a must for this build in order deal as much dps as an unbuffed full zerk build, so you can replace some weapons for a d/f build.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XC9MgNNAmNA0RgFBALIAUAOAup2ZbuV4SGCSBA-TxBBABmp8zO9A1s/gjKBD4EAAwDAAP1fAA-e

If you don’t have tempest already, then just replace tempest with water for that sustain from the water attunement, earth for the 10% damage reduction, or arcane for the evasive arcana and boon duration for the might stacking. I’d really suggest full zerk in the long run to train some dodging skills, but play however you like.

Thanks for the response and advice! That’s exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I went to the TP to check on prices (not really into crafting) and it doesn’t list celestial gear. If that isn’t an option, is there anything else that might be close to that build that you could recommend?

Chris.8206:

Thanks for the response and advice! That’s exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I went to the TP to check on prices (not really into crafting) and it doesn’t list celestial gear. If that isn’t an option, is there anything else that might be close to that build that you could recommend?

Celestial gear can only be crafted using Quartz Crystals and the right recipes. Everything is accountbound. It’s also time gated to one charged crystal per day (or you get lucky harvesting a crystal node in a home instance or Dry Top).

Ele is actually worse off when you stack defense abilities, that’s the truth of it. You can bunker as an Ele, but that revolves around a lot of keyboard wizardry and if you want a ‘casual’ build I’d say just go for Marauders/Berserkers Staff with both Glyph of Elementals on your bar. That way you should be able to summon an Earth Elemental most of the time, which can tank like no tomorrow and hold mobs in place for your staff AoEs. I think that’s as casual as it gets for Ele.

Here is something that I use for wvw and general open world content.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XClNgdOA+XCcYiFBALIAUAOACXyLQKwt1K3C-TxBBwAnVCC4BAkXHQO1fCcBAwt/AWlfAA-e

It has plenty of survivability and ok damage for what it is. The only thing you really have to be mindful of is keeping burning on targets. With 15k hp (orrian steak fritters) you have a decent health pool and some armor.

For good damage without being made of glass, use Marauder gear. Damage is comparable to berserker’s but with much more health, which is mostly where ele lacks. If you want some armor as well, swap out a few pieces for your choice of crusader’s (recommend this one if your traits include any healing), knight’s, cavalier’s, or celestial. I can’t recommend running primarily celestial if you want to have good damage, as it has low power (power is the most important damage stat by a good margin). Celestial is used because it has higher total stats than other gear, but marauder’s (and crusader’s) has a much better stat distribution for the same stat totals, minus condition damage.

An alternative is running a burning focused build. Burning duration is easy to cap out at 100% with balthazar runes, sigil of smoldering, fire trait, and a 2-3 silver consumable. From there you need only one stat to do good damage, so the rest can be defensive. If you want to do burning damage, try some combination of dire, carrion, or apothecary’s. This is what I generally run for anything that puts a lot of pressure on survival. You can be very tanky while putting out good damage.

Not going to try to convince you to stay glass cannon build. I would be more than happy to show you how to do pve flawlessly as a glass cannon in game if you’re on the same time I am. (regular mobs and such)
As a dungeon I run different builds but my favorite is fire, air, and water. Others are fire air and tempest.

Although I’m pretty sure you might already know all this about the traits and such.
Air offers 40% damage increase (20% through stunned/dazed mobs + 20% when health below 50%)
Water offers 10% damage increase when health is above 90% (20% increase for only water abilities)
Fire offers 10% damage increase for only fire abilities
Tempest offers 10% damage increase for only 5 seconds, but also more dps through overload
Scholar runes offers 10% damage when health above 90%

30% damage increase (when runnin fire, 20% if not running fire) if left untouched until mob gets 50% health, then 50% damage increase, not to mention if players are stunning/dazing the mob then 70% damage increase
So overall you get a bonus of 70% damage increase if skills are done correctly…and that isn’t a joke. While some players do 2-4k on mobs…you’d be doing 8-17k.

As dungeon, I always run Fire/Air/Water. Tempest always takes too long and mobs would already be dead (depending on the party’s dps) If dps isn’t that great, I’d run tempest for that extra dps.

Reasons I run glass cannon because the mobs never get a chance to touch me due to the stuns or just pure damage when executed correctly. Even if they get to me…they don’t survive very long. I may not be a pro at ele…but I can survive just fine as a glass cannon w/o having to dodge all the time.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XC9MgNNAmNA0RgFBAT4SGCSBup2ZbuNIAUAOAA-TxCBABvpCSQqIYmSPtUGIkaABcCAqVJIRqEUz+jeAAeAA6oKBA-e
A replacement to the pure cele build, but has -slightly- less survivability than pure cele.
You can also do some defensive traits as well if you want to run full zerk, like water/earth/tempest or something if you want full damage.

You basically get the same results if you run a mix of soldiers and zerker or knights/valkyrie/zerker as you would if you spent all the money and time on full celestial, but with less useless stats.

Healing power doesn’t scale worth a kitten and condi damage only matters if you are going like burn burst.

You shouldn’t confuse the glorification of the old celestial amulet in PvP with endorsement of celestial gear in PvE or WvW. You can’t min/max individual pieces in PvP and the pool of options on what you can take is very limited.

If I was going to recommend a casual PvE build, it would be this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XC9XiVYCWPA0RgFJAT4OGASAE9gdQNwNxGZzsA-ThRBABPcBBMTJYlq/gnOir2fU+BwDCgMA6jB-e

It’s what I used to run when I was tagging up for HoT meta maps, because it has like everything you need for any situation.

A solid mixture of toughness and vitality balanced out with plenty of offensive stats, powerful AoE healing, lots of AoE condi cleanse, movement speed increase when traveling in air, an AoE stunbreaker, enough CC to contribute to break bars with gust of wind and frost bow, an earth elemental to tank for you, a reflect and competitive DPS.

The only edits I ever make is Lightning Flash for Ice Bow for more mobility and AfterShock for Ice Bow for a group reflect. Zephyr’s Boon for Ferocious Winds when I want to spam shouts to stack more swiftness when traveling.

MadRabbit.3179:

Healing power doesn’t scale worth a kitten

only for your healing skill. ie the 6th skill on the bar

For most other sources of healing, like from traits and weapon skills, healing power scales about as well as power. Indeed, it would take about 6000 healing power to double the heal from your healing skill, but it takes only 800 to double the heal on soothing mist, or 1300 to double the heal on regeneration, healing ripple, or cleansing wave

MadRabbit.3179:

You basically get the same results if you run a mix of soldiers and zerker or knights/valkyrie/zerker as you would if you spent all the money and time on full celestial, but with less useless stats.

I disagree with this. Celestial stats give you the most stat numbers in the game, and no class utilizes celestial better than ele/tempest. HP scales well with all our off heals (Aura heals soothing mist ect..), Ele’s can use condi damage since d/f has a ton of burn/bleed access. Power/precision/tough/vit/ferocity are self explanatory. will it do alot of damage in PvE/WvW compared to staff? not really. But you’ll rarely die to anything short of 1 shot mechanics in PvE and a blob focusing you down in WvW.

TLDR: Celestial is a viable option for casual play in pve, And an optimal one if you prefer d/f aurashare in WvW. otherwise with a staff: maurader gear will serve you well.

kornfanxxx.9143:

MadRabbit.3179:

You basically get the same results if you run a mix of soldiers and zerker or knights/valkyrie/zerker as you would if you spent all the money and time on full celestial, but with less useless stats.

I disagree with this. Celestial stats give you the most stat numbers in the game, and no class utilizes celestial better than ele/tempest. HP scales well with all our off heals (Aura heals soothing mist ect..), Ele’s can use condi damage since d/f has a ton of burn/bleed access. Power/precision/tough/vit/ferocity are self explanatory. will it do alot of damage in PvE/WvW compared to staff? not really. But you’ll rarely die to anything short of 1 shot mechanics in PvE and a blob focusing you down in WvW.

TLDR: Celestial is a viable option for casual play in pve, And an optimal one if you prefer d/f aurashare in WvW. otherwise with a staff: maurader gear will serve you well.

You get only 600 healing power in celestials. Just because it scales well with select skills doesn’t mean you get bang for your buck in comparison to power/precision/ferocity which pretty much improves all your weapon skills or toughness/vitality which provides value independent of any particular build.

Same issue with condi damage in staff. You can maintain like a total of one bleeding stack and 3 burning stacks with just weapon skills. D/F maintains more burning, but like you gotta build specifically for a burn build to get real value out of it; you don’t have to do that with power.

So basically, you compare the setup I have to the setup of all celestials. You trade 750 power from 350 more toughness and vitality, 600 condi damage and 600 healing power.

750 power is a huge DPS hit, you don’t need that additional 350 toughness and vitality to complete anything in HoT and you get very little practical value from 600 condi and 600 healing power in PvE, more so with staff.

Anything is viable in casual PvE, but you are gimping yourself for no practical reason.

WvW is a seperate story. Roaming, maybe, but when I ran backline in Zerg, we all still built for power/precision/ferocity/toughness/vitality even when our role was healing. Sustain in a zerg comes from blasting water fields, not specific abilities due to the 5 player limit on AoE abilities.

Edited To Add: The only thing I consider to be potentially more optimal is Maruaders, but you have to put in a lot of work to get just a full set of all Maruaders exotic. You get optimal stat value, but it’s still very little actual difference compared to a Soldier/Zerkers setup you can get in a day due to how easily accessible both of those prefixes are.

Wow! Thanks everyone for the contributions to this topic. It’s fascinating reading and I love hearing different perspectives on the optimal build for me. I’d like to hear opinions on something I stumbled upon last night while researching. I never knew this rune existed. It’s the superior rune of exuberance. Vitality being converted to precision, healing power, and power (7% of total vitality to power). I currently have soldier armor and am happy with it so I am intrigued as to what this rune would do with the high vitality build I currently have. Thoughts?

Chris.8206:

Wow! Thanks everyone for the contributions to this topic. It’s fascinating reading and I love hearing different perspectives on the optimal build for me. I’d like to hear opinions on something I stumbled upon last night while researching. I never knew this rune existed. It’s the superior rune of exuberance. Vitality being converted to precision, healing power, and power (7% of total vitality to power). I currently have soldier armor and am happy with it so I am intrigued as to what this rune would do with the high vitality build I currently have. Thoughts?

With just soldier’s armor and the rune, you would get 104 additional power and 74 precision.

Runes like runes of the scholar and runes of strength that give you 175 flat power increase and then multipliers that get applied to your damage after it’s calculated with power, give you a lot more value. They are very expensive, but even a cheaper alternative like rune of the pack would give you 175 flat power and 125 flat precision bonuses with more useful secondary bonuses.

Superior rune of exuberance is already pretty insane price for what little it does due to it using watchwork sprockets to make.

MadRabbit.3179:

kornfanxxx.9143:

MadRabbit.3179:

You basically get the same results if you run a mix of soldiers and zerker or knights/valkyrie/zerker as you would if you spent all the money and time on full celestial, but with less useless stats.

I disagree with this. Celestial stats give you the most stat numbers in the game, and no class utilizes celestial better than ele/tempest. HP scales well with all our off heals (Aura heals soothing mist ect..), Ele’s can use condi damage since d/f has a ton of burn/bleed access. Power/precision/tough/vit/ferocity are self explanatory. will it do alot of damage in PvE/WvW compared to staff? not really. But you’ll rarely die to anything short of 1 shot mechanics in PvE and a blob focusing you down in WvW.

TLDR: Celestial is a viable option for casual play in pve, And an optimal one if you prefer d/f aurashare in WvW. otherwise with a staff: maurader gear will serve you well.

You get only 600 healing power in celestials. Just because it scales well with select skills doesn’t mean you get bang for your buck in comparison to power/precision/ferocity which pretty much improves all your weapon skills or toughness/vitality which provides value independent of any particular build.

Same issue with condi damage in staff. You can maintain like a total of one bleeding stack and 3 burning stacks with just weapon skills. D/F maintains more burning, but like you gotta build specifically for a burn build to get real value out of it; you don’t have to do that with power.

So basically, you compare the setup I have to the setup of all celestials. You trade 750 power from 350 more toughness and vitality, 600 condi damage and 600 healing power.

750 power is a huge DPS hit, you don’t need that additional 350 toughness and vitality to complete anything in HoT and you get very little practical value from 600 condi and 600 healing power in PvE, more so with staff.

Anything is viable in casual PvE, but you are gimping yourself for no practical reason.

WvW is a seperate story. Roaming, maybe, but when I ran backline in Zerg, we all still built for power/precision/ferocity/toughness/vitality even when our role was healing. Sustain in a zerg comes from blasting water fields, not specific abilities due to the 5 player limit on AoE abilities.

Edited To Add: The only thing I consider to be potentially more optimal is Maruaders, but you have to put in a lot of work to get just a full set of all Maruaders exotic. You get optimal stat value, but it’s still very little actual difference compared to a Soldier/Zerkers setup you can get in a day due to how easily accessible both of those prefixes are.

A good arguement and i completely agree with your edit, marauder’s prefix armor is amazing stuff super glad they put it in pve land, I use it for my S/F fresh air builds alot.

Otherwise, I’m not arguing celestial is optimal for damage by any means, It’s just an effective prefix for the class if you want survivability and damage in a casual scenario.

in response to your wvw comments: I also agree back line ele’s are still invaluable with a staff and water fields are a super efficient way to heal(In an organized zerg setting) Unfortunately there’s so many different arguments that could be had and argued about which is optimal in what scenario (Pugmanding vs GvGs or organized guild raids ect..) regarding the new D/F auramancer heal bot vs old back line zerk staff ele, both in my eyes have a valid place in any sort of team fight with distinct advantages. For some reason though the community likes to pigeon-hole classes into specific roles when they could indeed fulfill other ones(Such as when evade tank thieves in spirit vale became a thing). the same holds true for zerker staff eles.

To the OP: there’s a lot of ways you can build an elementalist with tons of different play styles, I’ve seen burn builds with over 21k DPS, fresh air builds that burst down people in the blink of an eye, Celestial auramancer bunkers that could tank 3 people with some keyboard gymnastics. Point here is despite what the “meta” or other people say, the class is capable of doing different things.

But enough thread Hijacking haha, OP i hope you got the answers you needed here. Alot of viable choices out there, few optimal.

I feel ya. If you value those stats, then Celestial’s provides them, but speaking from experience, you won’t find much practical value from them. Even in HoT, the only adjustment you really need is enough toughness and vitality to survive a one-shot from a scaled Champion and that’s it. Mob AI is still as simple as it was before and if you can survive a one-shot, you just have to disengage and the champion will switch targets to someone else, leaving you alone probably for the rest of the fight.

I enjoy soloing and duoing champions though. There’s no disengage and not get targeted in that situation. ditto for high level fractals. But some extra health from marauder’s and then some defense/sustain from traits (tempest heal and regen on aura, and then either water, earth, or arcane) can be all you need

Absolutely, but completely seperate topic beyond the scope of talking about what’s best just for a casual PvE build. Even in that topic, you still don’t gear full defensive, because your tactical knowledge of the AI mechanics is what’s ultimately important. It’s been awhile since I have challenged myself to hunt champs with my elementalist, but on my thief, only defense I get from gear is Marauders and that’s to avoid a one shot if I slip up. The rest is just a pair of pistols, a staff and knowing the fights.

Since no one has posted a link to anything similar, here is my personal casual build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJBIhdSfJU0A2fJY2AQHBWEAMiuQSoK42ajt52gAQB4AA-TRiAABJqHAm9Hg+EAcqaAA8AAIV1hGVC2pKMlp8jQAKWDA-e

(The tuning crystal is actually Tuning Icicle, which is the same thing except MUCH cheaper. enough that I spam them constantly. also spam the pizzas constantly as well)

Lets me face tank like a boss with all the passive sustain. Not counting Rebound, I can get up to 4 aura heals (1382, and also clear conditions) and near constant regen (276/s) without leaving fire attunement or using my heal skill. Then water attunement is there for massive heals, and earth and air also provide auras. Leaving fire is of course a dps loss, but Dust Storm and Overload Earth are pretty good, so it’s not too bad. The protection and stability on overload earth is awesome anyway. lets you eat almost any attack and not even care. Then swapping back to fire cures a condition as well.

and the damage isn’t too bad either. can maintain 7k-10k burn ticks solo on large stationary targets (the kind most susceptible to Burning Speed) like veteran bristlebacks. Less on smaller more mobile targets, but still pretty good imo. Groups of mobs burning for 4k is pretty typical.

(Also I really should swap a little more of the apothecary’s to shaman’s or dire for more burst resist (aka health). the sustain is plenty good enough)

reikken.4961:

Since no one has posted a link to anything similar, here is my personal casual build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJBIhdSfJU0A2fJY2AQHBWEAMiuQSoK42ajt52gAQB4AA-TRiAABJqHAm9Hg+EAcqaAA8AAIV1hGVC2pKMlp8jQAKWDA-e

(The tuning crystal is actually Tuning Icicle, which is the same thing except MUCH cheaper. enough that I spam them constantly. also spam the pizzas constantly as well)

Lets me face tank like a boss with all the passive sustain. Not counting Rebound, I can get up to 4 aura heals (1382, and also clear conditions) and near constant regen (276/s) without leaving fire attunement or using my heal skill. Then water attunement is there for massive heals, and earth and air also provide auras. Leaving fire is of course a dps loss, but Dust Storm and Overload Earth are pretty good, so it’s not too bad. The protection and stability on overload earth is awesome anyway. lets you eat almost any attack and not even care. Then swapping back to fire cures a condition as well.

and the damage isn’t too bad either. can maintain 7k-10k burn ticks solo on large stationary targets (the kind most susceptible to Burning Speed) like veteran bristlebacks. Less on smaller more mobile targets, but still pretty good imo. Groups of mobs burning for 4k is pretty typical.

(Also I really should swap a little more of the apothecary’s to shaman’s or dire for more burst resist (aka health). the sustain is plenty good enough)

I’m gonna try this build out. Although that one guy said something about arcane trait…I’m gonna see how it goes with yours. I did try a condition build…noticed it was really fast at burst dps (killing mobs stupidly fast) but it also had it’s weakness. But thank you for posting this, good sir.

ibravitzk.8324:

You shud take more pieces with precision to have a better synergy with your Traits. Also GoS over the shout or signet.
Personally i think arcane over water is better sinve you have another heal on dodge in water and a shield popping at 25% and on top you get burning on dodge and even more burn on crit

Perhaps you are looking for this build?

Arcane trait line I do take in place of water on my dps focused condi build, as it offers a burn on dodge in fire, but it doesn’t offer nearly as much sustain as water. Arcane gives a heal and condi clear on dodge in water, but water gives that same heal and condi clear on merely swapping into water, in addition to a regen that stacks with my perma regen, and more passive sustain: “when crit, heal, clear two conditions, and take less damage for a few seconds”. And it makes all my auras also clear a condition.

As for the utility skills, Signet of Fire is more for single target, or for ranged damage, which I otherwise don’t have. I often do swap it out, but rather than Glyph of Storms, I take Cleansing Fire. Why? Well, GoS ramps up to 4 burn stacks over 4 seconds, lasts 11 seconds, and has a cast time. and a 60s cooldown. CF gives 3 burn stacks instantly with no cast time, for 8 seconds. 40s/32s cooldown. And of course clears 3 conditions. So I take CF over GoS because it’s much faster, has a shorter cooldown, and gives almost as much burning. and has defensive utility. Additionally, things can move out of the firestorm AoE and thus take less damage. One of GoS’s main advantages is that it does power damage, which is pretty negligible in this build.

And I almost never remove the shout as it has a very short cooldown, applies an aura and all the healing that comes with that (immobilized while overloading fire? Feel the Burn! and immob is gone), and supports allies.

As for precision, the burn on crit from burning precision isn’t worth building for. With just base crit chance and fury I’ll eventually trigger the burning, and it has a cooldown, making a higher proc rate of limited use. However, with no fury, it procs almost never with just base crit chance, so I did (just now, by plugging it into my spreadsheet) consider the effects of adding precision to increase crit to, say, 10%. This is when the precision is at its highest value per point, but even here the extra precision is still weaker than adding an equal amount of extra power as far as average damage contribution. (and adding power is, in turn, much weaker (nearly a factor of 3) than adding extra condition damage.) So I just ignore precision for this build. It isn’t worth my stats.