Guild Wars 2

Iv always been turned off of the elementalist because its my understanding that the elementalist has to jump from element to element depending on what they need at the moment. So water is for healing, air for swiftness and the like, earth for some defence and fire for the damage.

I hate that concept mainly because I dislike fire magic so much. Lightning is my favorite element then ice in second place. Sadly both get caste as support skills. So I guess its not the elemental focus shift I dislike but having to relay on fire for my damage.

Is it possable to have your elementalist only use one or 2 elements thats NOT fire and still be able to kill things in PvE?

I tried elem once before only got to level 10 or so, I may not be a mystic, but I could see where it was going. Now with my birthday scroll to jump me to lvl 20 I thought I might give it a second try.

How dare you try to do something Anet didn’t intend. Reported.

Fresh air is the closest thing we have to a “single element” elementalist.
In fact you will still use all the elements but you will stay in air for the most part (air is also my favourite theme).
Take a look at my sig

Its not possible. That simple, you are FORCED into other attunements once your skills are used and on silly cool downs you would be left to auto attack. Which just isnt enough

Thats disapointing but truth be told I expected this answer when I asked.
Probably for the best, I could never find a weapon I liked.

These aetherpirates with all thier electric attacks been making me want to give it another try. So cruel they are.

Playing a class where you refuse to use 1/4 of your entire tool set probably isn’t the class for you.

Bluefox.9580:

Playing a class where you refuse to use 1/4 of your entire tool set probably isn’t the class for you.

The class has trait lines of Fire Magic, Air Magic, Earth Magic, Water Magic and Arcana.
How silly of me to think you might be able to focus into a specific element.

Elemental traits =/= elemental attunements.

Hey, I know very little about the elem, I created a post asking if I could focus into one element and still manage because I didnt know.

Maybe its because I main as an engineer, If I want to focus on grandes I spend most of my traits in the explosives trait line, If I use rifle I go into firearms trait line. So on and so forth.

Now, looking over the traits from the wiki page i notice quite a few say stuff like “when attuned to <element>”. Almost as if you have to be attuned to the element for the traits to take effect.

SO I say again, how silly of me to think you might beable to focus into a specific element.

Besides whats wrong with ignoreing your class mechanic? Warriors do it all the time and are better for it, same goes for phantom mesmers, and rangers are constantly asking to beable to not use there class mechanic.

Warriors abuse their class mechanic (played at max adrenaline for 15% crit chance and 15% damage).
My comment meant that it is not because our trait lines have the same name as our attunements that they are meant to be dedicated to those. Also you are right to complain about one thing: attunement specific traits are very weak (since lingering elements is bugged and requires traits).
But again: you can focus on one attunement: fresh air for air, pyromencer’s puissance for fire staff, though you will usually still have to use your other attunements to play to your full potential.
Good luck leveling your elem, it is the best class!

In PvE

I also hate Anet force Elementalist to become all around, none specific Ele in GW2. I miss the time in GW1 when you can choose to stick with one specific Element. I personally hate Fire magic, and I love Water scene… the Water spells aren’t all that amazing in GW2, but Ele really is my favorite class. (Mage or Ele or whatever they name it in most online game) So I felt I been forced to roll all the elements… the least I can do is fully traited myself into Water Line, stay in Water Elements as often as I could, have an Ice Elemental follow me all time for role play purposes.

I hope in the future, they can give us more option to play as an Ele! For example choose two elements, but be able to have extra skills to switch from. (Like two bars of Water skills and two bars of Air skills etc!)

Conjure weapons will get you close, 1 forced attunenment.

I was a water elementalist until level 70. I used scepter focus.

I felt that leveling was slightly slower than using attunement swapping. To manage cooldowns, I used the Frost Bow and Ice Elemental.

Honestly, I like that it is like this, although the traits could of course be improved…

To explain, usually in game design, the elemental caster either gets designed so that it excels at one element and the others are afterthoughts (usually fire prominent), or it becomes one where they use a smattering of each. The intent is often to make a sort of mix of this, but it always falls short and moves in either direction. And of those directions, I like it more if I have an excuse to use all elements (which you often don’t if they make one too strong for the role), because being funneled into one strong leads to boredom much quicker, and generally isn’t what I signed up for. I signed up for the elements, not 1 element.

In an ideal world, all choices would be a potent primary tool where you used the others for support, but honestly I don’t think I’ll ever see an elemental user where that actually works excactly as intended in practice.

Amethyst Lure.5624:

Honestly, I like that it is like this, although the traits could of course be improved…

To explain, usually in game design, the elemental caster either gets designed so that it excels at one element and the others are afterthoughts (usually fire prominent), or it becomes one where they use a smattering of each. The intent is often to make a sort of mix of this, but it always falls short and moves in either direction. And of those directions, I like it more if I have an excuse to use all elements (which you often don’t if they make one too strong for the role), because being funneled into one strong leads to boredom much quicker, and generally isn’t what I signed up for. I signed up for the elements, not 1 element.

In an ideal world, all choices would be a potent primary tool where you used the others for support, but honestly I don’t think I’ll ever see an elemental user where that actually works excactly as intended in practice.

The saying: Jack of all trades, Master of none.

Having access to them is nice on paper, in practice how ever it has been a failure. The sooner Anet sees that and takes action – that being a resign of the class it will NEVER be in a place where its balanced.

I mean the heals are PATHETIC and people still complain about them….

You could run S/D and specialize primarily in air and still do very good single-target damage. You can then swap to water for heals. If you take Fresh air you could get right back to air. If you combine this with lightning hammer you could do just fine in PvE playing how you want. If you get to harder material, you will really want to incorporate the other elements however as you will be too 1-dimensional otherwise.

Lately I’ve dusted off my staff and decided to be a conjurer who sits in water attunement all the time, with conjure lightning hammer for my main weapon swap (traited for 25 charges). (trait point spread is 20, 20, 0, 20, 10).

It’s suiting me just fine; the water magic is traited for cooldown and gives me ranged attacks and support, while the lightning hammer gives me beastly close combat ability. I’m using the healing glyph traited for double regen, which on top of soothing mist is… really nice healing. More combat options are opened up by switching in Conjure Ice Bow and Greatsword.

Other than the inflexibility of conjure recharge rates, it’s a nice change from the typical 30 arcana. It does a lot. Also if you fight underwater, water magic does everything – heavy damage with healing and cc. All it takes is a practice with the ice detonations to see big numbers (well, for an ele).

I suppose other single element specs should be possible. It’s certainly not right that the ele should be forced to rotate attunements: that should be one style of many, rather than one style to rule them all.

I say just bring up the other 3 elements to fires damage standard and give fire its own perk like waters healing, airs swiftness, and earths cripple.

Zelyhn.8069:

Elemental traits =/= elemental attunements.

No, but it completely defies how Ele was designed, you can’t have trait lines/traits that ONLY affect a single attunement when you’re completely balanced around using all 4 constantly.

I agree.
That’s why I have made a suggestion about lingering elements.
Check my signature, and if you agree please post to support.

I suppose you could do with air and water mainly. There is some synergy in those two attunements and with the use of conjures, there should be a way to produce some fine results and get a wee bit of diversity out of it. Air, water, earth and Lightning Hammer (air again).

The setup I was thinking of is using Weak Spot, which is vulnerability that you get from 25 air and the water trait Piercing Shards that allows you to do 20% more damage to vulnerable opponents when in water attunement. I played a Lightning Hammer focused build for a short while, something like 20/25/0/15/10 I think. It worked fine, although I was a bit squishy. Of course you can gear after your needs, which I never fully did for this build.

Answering your questions, OP. Yes, you can kill things with two elements only. And if you tire of staff, scepter or dagger air and water, you have an air and water conjure for diversity and special scenarios.

you can do pretty much anything you want in world pve at least :p

You can do whatever you want anywhere.
But if you want to do it well then you will have to think again

The closest thing will either be a Fire elementalist with Pyromancer’s Puissance or an Earth scepter bleedspam build.

It can be done, and it’ll probably work well enough for PvE. But PvP may be tough…

Knote.2904:

Zelyhn.8069:

Elemental traits =/= elemental attunements.

No, but it completely defies how Ele was designed, you can’t have trait lines/traits that ONLY affect a single attunement when you’re completely balanced around using all 4 constantly.

shhh now. we dont want the devs to realise how incredibly stupid they are.