Guild Wars 2

I’ve shelved my ele for awhile to work on my guardian, and its time to dust him off. I always wanted a scepter/focus bleed signet build. Shaman gear has vit/heals/con dam, which all seem helpful, compared to the coupling my condition damage with power or precision, which both seem rather useless in a bleed focused build. The other real contender being Carrion, which has the advantage of having more condition damage inherently . So is it worth it to trade my “useless” power and higher cond dam, for higher vit and higher heals, or am i shooting myself in the foot?

That would depend somewhat on the rest of your build and your main game mode(s).

What traits will you be using? Do you mostly do open world/solo pve, dungeons or WvW?

I’d tend to suggest carrion over shaman’s gear just based on reading your post. Using a focus changes your defense from healing to more active mitigation since focus doesn’t have a heal (unless you have someone else laying water fields, in which case, healing power doesn’t scale well with blast finishers, so still….). Power will add more damage to your basic attacks, nothing wrong with power. The real question is will the healing power give you a significant boost in survivability? Focus is already tanky as hell…..

For a bleed build, though, focus is an odd choice. I used to run a power/cond s/d build with bleed duration runes that could maintain 12+ stacks of bleed and stack over 20 at some points which was fun. Two things made me change to precision/crit-dmg eventually: condition removal spam in WvW and mob leashing in PvE. It’s hard to kite enough in PvE to let the bleeds work to full effect, and staying in earth a lot to maximize stacks minimizes cover conditions so it makes cleansing easy for human players.

Not trying to discourage you, but you mentioned not wanting to shoot yourself in the foot. Overall, I just found bleed build to be a sort of self-foot-shooting for elementalists. Necros, engineers, thieves, and probably some I forgot can do pretty brutal things with a condition heavy build, but the attunement switching mechanic sort of locks us into applying only one condition at a time. The signets will give you a few more, but it’s not a steady output. Maybe a weird build with rabid or rampager gear and 25 points in air for vulnerability on crits could provide some type of cover conditions….. hmmmmm, maybe I’ll try that……

Thanks for the reply, i should have added a bit more info. This would mainly be for pve dungeons. Build is:

20 in fire for fire auras
30 in fire for written in stone/protection on auras
last 20 open for debate, currently in arcane for boon duration

I end up with nearly permanent protection, on top of steady passive heals with my healing signet. I ran a few dungeons today to refresh my memory, and i feel pretty tanky, so i feel i could switch to dagger offhand and lose nothing. Still kinda on the fence between Shaman and Carrion though.

When I run this bleed build I feel that the increase in condition damage from going Carrion over Shaman’s is 100% necessary.

Full Carrion gear, including trinkets.
Runes: 2x Afflicted, 2x Centaur, 2x Krait
Sigils: 1x Corruption, 1x Agony (I like this better than 2x Corruption, but choice is yours)

30/0/30/10/0
Fire II, III, IX
Earth II, VIII, XII
Water II

Signet of Restoration

Utility:
Signet of Fire
Signet of Water (Signet of Air for PvE, passive speed is nice)
Signet of Earth

Glyph of Elementals

With gear and traits, you can stack 19 bleeds at ~110 per tick. You apply Signet of Fire as well for a ~7.1k burn that you can keep up permanently.

You need to use Focus for it’s defensive abilities in earth. You have to be very careful about when you use these abilities.

You can sleep through most mobs in PvE, but I even run this spec in sPvP. In sPvP you can tag every opponent in a group fight with bleeds to score a lot of points. You can 1v1 reasonably well and very easily against players who aren’t good at removing conditions. You can be the deciding force in your team’s group fights because of the amazing bleed pressure. I find that players generally don’t notice your DoT until you have a large stack and either it’s too late or they have to move to remove conditions and this distracts them from defending against your team.

Along with using your defensive skills wisely, always keep rock barrier up and never hurl it. It’s not necessary in PvE, but in sPvP you should be able to keep this up permanently. Another thing I find important is don’t forget to apply bleeds. In a 1v1 situation it’s easy to get tied up in watching for dodge timings/popping signets to apply burn/chill/immobilize.

You will have so much bleed duration that the more frequently you apply them, either the higher your stack will go or the more condition removals you opponent will blow. Never stop applying, I even bleed them out when they’re downed.

Sorry, I didn’t mean for this to turn into a wall of text but this build interests me and I never see anyone else running it. That’s because you never leave Earth attunement. This is something that nearly the entire Elementalist community considers bad. I don’t imagine one could bring down a D/D of equal skill with this spec but let me tell you, this build is so easy to play in PvE and quite fun in sPvP. Enjoy!

Thanks xbaunx, glad to hear something like this is viable. What you described in spvp is pretty much what i was looking for, cant stand doing cookie cutter. Any thoughts on taking earth V over earth II, for nearly constant protection?

I think you could swap out earth II for earth V if you are confident in your ability to land your bleeds.

Bleeds have a 1 1/2 second channel, but you get 3 shots per channel. It’s really easy to only land 1 of 3 bleeds or 2 of 3 bleeds (players dodge, run out range, go behind obstructions, etc.) This is a problem because Stone Shards is a pretty slow skill compared to what you are usually facing. If you only land 1 bleed per channel, then you are stacking 3 bleeds per 4 1/2 seconds rather than landing all of them for a 3 bleed stack in 1 1/2 seconds. Essentially, if you miss bleeds, your DoT is 4 times slower. I miss bleeds, so I need frequent burns to back them up.

As far as losing earth II, One of the trickiest things about running this spec in sPvP is line-of-sight. It’s really easy to miss your Signets by getting them obstructed, this is due to the cast time. It takes 3/4 second to channel each signet apart from Signet of Restoration (which is a 1 second channel). Sometimes you’ll discover that your opponent moves behind an obstruction before the channel finishes.

You can make earth V work, but it’s going to slow down your signets and demand an even more mistake-free performance on your part. I don’t use it because too many of my 1v1s are coming down to the very last second, I can’t add time to my signet cooldown, especially if I’m going to engage another player right after a battle.

Condition damage is all about lasting long enough to put DoT on your opponent, but I feel that -33% incoming damage doesn’t buy me enough time to justify the loss of burn-time from Signet of Fire. Also, I couldn’t seem to achieve “nearly constant protection”, protection stacks duration but even when I blow all 4 signets in a row (which you should never do) I still only get ~5-6 seconds vs the 20-30 second cooldown times on signets.

Thanks again. As far as the protection, i was sitting on about +30% boon duration, and yes, cycling between all signets as fast as possible. If memory serves it was around 85% / 66% up time, with and without serrated stones. What are your thoughts on givers weapons? Worth a slot?

I was able to put together a build that achieved high protection up-time and while retaining most of your condition damage.

20/0/20/0/30
Fire II, IX
Earth V, VIII
Arcana V, VII, XI

Skills/Utilities are the same

The key is you have to use at least a Fancy Veggie Pizza foodbuff (you can go up to rare but they are expensive) to keep your condition duration.

Even still, I’ve always looked at Arcana is the “attunement switching trait line”, meaning that if you plan on attunement dancing quickly than you need to spec deep into this line.

The problem is that under this build if you leave earth at any point in time you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. Unless you want to play a build that uses burst as its primary offense with condition damage as a supplement. If that were the case, then I could understand adding some Giver’s armor (I think it’s +toughness, +healing power and +boon duration if I’m not mistaken.)

The reason I don’t do this is because if you go far enough over to the boon duration/power based build then you are going to be better off using the 0/10/0/30/30 (or at least building off of that core.)

The problem we Elementalists have when we want a condition build is that we have far more cooldowns that benefit from a power/boon duration based build. In my experience, this leads to having to spec full-out condition or nothing.