Guild Wars 2

There seems to be a bias on this forum that all elementalists in every build should “swap attunements frequently or you are bad.”

I’m making this post to inform people that, in fact, there are at least a minimum of three Elementalist builds that I personally switch between that are increadibly effective, in fact they are among our most potent non-support builds for PvE / WvW.

To start off, yes, swapping attunements at the proper time for the proper purpose is exceptionally important and unique to our class, but the key is all in the timing and what goal you are currently trying to achieve.

That is the point many players seem to not quite focus on when discussing builds. While a Staff elementalists, for example, has a load of control options, you do not need them all blown at once and not all fights require them, and very often it is simply better for your team for you to keep tossing out the damage in Fire or maintaining Weakness and your Bleed stacks in Earth (if condition build).

In fact, as a condition build Staff elementalist, unless you are fighting structures, you should never be in Fire attunement unless you need either multi-target Burning, or a free Evade with Burning Retreat (I’ve used this a lot when my Endurance has run out, swap fire and Burning Retreat prododge!).

In dagger dagger specifically, there are plenty of offensive benefits for swapping attunents to gain access to your bigger recharge skills on the separate attunements, but this is not really as true of the Staff or Scepter or Focus. For the other weapons, attunement swapping should be surgical, with purpose, to access specific control/support/defensive utilities.

With all that being said, here are three build ideas that work exceptionally well spending well over 80% of the time in a single attunement.

(see post bellow)

Build 1: Krakatoa: Earth-Staff 3 “Eruption” Bleed Stack Condition Build

Simply put, you sit in Earth attunement, enjoying the free toughness, while constantly providing Blast finishers and stacking Bleeding on up to 5 foes in a generous AoE, dropping Glyph of Storms: Earth to Blind grouped foes, and maybe switching out your Conjure Frost bow and using its third and fourth skills to aoe Chill and AoE damage and Bleed your foes for a significant amount.

Additionally, only while you have your bow out you can use Signet of Fire (you use this WHILE using the frost bow to get an additional 20% condition duration in order to hit 100% duration, which is still maintained even when you unequip the frostbow!.)

This gives you a strong up time on Chill, a permanent Burn single target, and 25 Bleed stack or nearly maintaining potential on up to 5 targets, while able to Immobilize and Cripple, and reflect projectiles at self. Though I havent used this in Fractals, this is likely one of our safest and most reliable fractal builds I could imagine, possibly swapping out staff for Focus when projectile defense is super important.

Importantly, this build still has plenty of POWER, but no crit or crit damage, so its ideal for demolishing STRUCTURES that cannot be crit but still take increased damage from power. This is the only time you should swap to fire to benefit from 10% damage bonus while in Fire, drop meteor shower + ice bow’s 4 skill to demolish anything that is immune to conditions.

Air is useless outside of swiftness or for some minor CC as you fly through it dropping Static Field or Gust while moving back into Earth. Water is useful for condition removal, Chill from Frozen Ground, and Ice Spike Vulnerability stacking if that would help your team more during that moment if you cant get back into earth yet.

Build 2: Ouch My Everything: Conjured Lightning Hammer maximum potential DPS Build for Coordinated Dungeon Groups

Just going to link this forum post for this one, but ironically the (until someone proves me otherwise) highest potential dps build in the entire game is an elementalist sitting in water attunement in melee range with a conjured weapon. Weird, isn’t it? Really throws it into the faces of the “conjures suck” and “elementalists do no damage” and “never sit in one attunement” crowd

Build 3: Hotfoot – Ranged Staff Raw DPS Build

30/30/0/10/0 taking VI, VII, and XI traits in fire, VI, VII, and XII in Air (last one being optional completely ), and Vital Strikes. Same rune and armor build as the lightning hammer build listed above, with more capability to go full berserker with no toughness in accessories due to range.

I haven’t made a formal build for this but this is what I ran in dungeons for a long while before creating Ouch My Everything. Its a simple concept of taking 30 points in Fire, taking the 33% extended duration on Fire Fields, and spamming Lava Font + Fireball for an easy to sustain 4 to 8k dps from range without any or few might stacks.

You basically sit in fire attunement and use Arcane utilities on cooldown, only deviating from it when you absolutely need the control skills or healing from water attunement if the heal from Ether Renewal isnt sufficient to top you off.

Knowing how to use Burning Retreat as a pro-dodge for free is crucial to making this build work, as its such a good free dodge on low recharge, the rest is simply taking advantage of stationary targets with Lava Font to reach maximum damage potential.

For maximum efficiency, NEVER interrupt a mid-cast Fireball to use Flame Burst or Lava Font, but time it for in between. Cast meteor even on single targets, using arcane power at this time to maximize MS’s damage potential. Jury is out still on weather or not using Flame Burst to keep some burning going actually improves damage over lobbing a fireball, otherwise always maintain lava font at all times, even if it causes you to wait 1 or 2 seconds before casting meteor shower.

I hope you guys who like playing single-elements for what ever themed reason enjoy these builds. There are other builds that work well for single attunements, but I think this is a good start to a potential compilation if people can contribute their own builds.

Which dungeons do you run? These builds just seem god awful. I can’t imagine them being any more effective than a moa in WvW. Have you ever been in a 1v1 fight?

Rather harsh, but I have run all three builds in explorable Arah and to a lesser extent in fractals (not high level as I’m not too interested in running them with my guildies yet). So havent going beyond level 15 in fractals on my ele yet.

Not to sound like an egotist, but I do have over 600 hours on my elementalist, and I mainly play with coordinated groups, PvE, or tourny PvP (which none of the listed builds were, are, or should be designed for!).

In WvW, the condition build is absolutely devistatingly effective, the Hotfoot build does result in the strongest Meteor Showers we can dish out, as well as our ranged burst potential, but the Lightning Hammer build is only good in small skirmishes, and even then only with at least one coordinated person with you (especially if you are running the dungeon pve version which does not supply its own burning or vulnerability, thus sees more than a 35% drop of in effectiveness if you dont adjust the traits).

So, honestly its not my builds, but there appropriate use in the proper content they were designed for, in the context of working with other people (gasp!!!) in a coordinated group environment. If you want your self-stacking 25 might Warrior builds, look else where (my Lightning Hammer leaves those soundly in the dust!).

Good post. Really good post. I’m tired of all those 30 in Arkane Staff Elementarists who swap attunements on CD and use every AoE and Combofield just because they can, while im dying with my poor Thief because I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING.

And while your Lightnung Hammer Build is awesome,

The problem with sticking to one attunement is preventing you to use a weapon set to its fullest potential. It’s not wrong, but it’s not very optimal and there has yet to be a good argument to WHY you only should use one attunement. Other than it’s an easier gameplay, I cannot come up with any real good argument.

For example when I use staff, if I just need to nuke, and lets ignore all the CC and healing skills for a moment, I still rotate through all attunements for Water #2, Air #2 and Earth #2, spending rest of the time in fire.

Staff does also benefit more from direct damage than condition damage since you have very little condition based skills on it. Most comes from Earth, hence you’ll be mostly stuck in this attunement and thus gimping yourself.

Even if we ignore all this, using condition damage in dungeons is only effective to a certain point. (I’m not 100% sure but I’ve read that condition duration is lowered in dungeons). The issue arrives when you have several condition based players inside a dungeon. You’ll be competing with each about those bleed stack. And since you only can have 25 stacks of bleed, some of the DPS will be lost. And weakness from auto attack in Earth isn’t really much useful in PvE.

If you really want to play a condition build on Ele, I’d suggest going Scepter. To me it’s the only viable condition weapon set for Eles.

Nobody said anything about sticking to one attunement. Its about using the most effective the most of the time. Why you need water when there is no need for heal? Why use Earth/Air when there is no need for cc?

Just because you have 20 Skills doesn’t mean you have to use them, when Fire 1 is more usefull.

Molch.2078:

Nobody said anything about sticking to one attunement. Its about using the most effective the most of the time. Why you need water when there is no need for heal? Why use Earth/Air when there is no need for cc?

Just because you have 20 Skills doesn’t mean you have to use them, when Fire 1 is more usefull.

How is fire 1 most useful? (I admit I didn’t read the 2nd build but I believe it was a hammer build, not a Fire build).

The OP never even said Fire was most useful, he/she posted an Earth attunement condition based build, where he wrote “spending 80% of the time” in one attuenment.

You don’t seem to have understood what I meant. If you play condition build with staff, then yes, you’ll be spending most of your time in Earth since thats where most of your condition damage comes from. But that makes about 3/4 of the staff and thus you will not use it to it’s full potential. Therefore I feel that a power based build works better with staff.

Earth, Water and Air is not only CC, heal and bleed, since they also have strong power based attacks. That is why you’d want to rotate through the other attunements, even if you just going to deal damage. I really don’t know where you get that Fire 1 is most useful.

Here’s a fire build posted by Darothm on a different forum:

“30/30/0/10/0 – Fire VI VII XII, Air III VI VIII, Water VI
Healing: Glyph of Elemental Harmony
Utilities: Glyph of Storms/Mist Form/I usually switch between Frostbow, Arcane Shield, or the Fire Signet
Gear: Full Berserkers with 6/6 Scholars and Fire Sigil’d Staff
Sit in Fire and spam 2/3 off cooldown while autoattacking, only switching to other attunements when a Mobs/Boss needs to be CC’d.
You should only be getting downed by agony attacks since staff is so safe. I’ve gotten up to Fractal 40 so far with this build.”

There are two reasons you stay in fire. First, fire 2 is the main DPS and you can’t get back into fire after switching by the time fire 2 is off CD. Second, water/air 2 may be better than fire 1, but you are going to be stuck with water/air 1 for a while which is much worse than fire 1. Once you decide that attunement switching isn’t the main focus, then not putting trait points in arcane also means more damage.

paleeshi.1924:

Molch.2078:

Nobody said anything about sticking to one attunement. Its about using the most effective the most of the time. Why you need water when there is no need for heal? Why use Earth/Air when there is no need for cc?

Just because you have 20 Skills doesn’t mean you have to use them, when Fire 1 is more usefull.

How is fire 1 most useful? (I admit I didn’t read the 2nd build but I believe it was a hammer build, not a Fire build). I said more usefull then eg. water 5, when no condition remove is necesscary.

The OP never even said Fire was most useful, he/she posted an Earth attunement condition based build, where he wrote “spending 80% of the time” in one attuenment.

You don’t seem to have understood what I meant. If you play condition build with staff, then yes, you’ll be spending most of your time in Earth since thats where most of your condition damage comes from. But that makes about 3/4 of the staff and thus you will not use it to it’s full potential. Therefore I feel that a power based build works better with staff. Yes. I agree.

Earth, Water and Air is not only CC, heal and bleed, since they also have strong power based attacks. For example? Ice Spike, thats all. That is why you’d want to rotate through the other attunements, even if you just going to deal damage. I really don’t know where you get that Fire 1 is most useful. never said most usefull in general.

paleeshi.1924:

The problem with sticking to one attunement is preventing you to use a weapon set to its fullest potential. It’s not wrong, but it’s not very optimal and there has yet to be a good argument to WHY you only should use one attunement. Other than it’s an easier gameplay, I cannot come up with any real good argument.

I can make an argument. By constantly cycling attunements you are putting potentially useful skills on cooldown, not to mentioned the attunements themselves. There’s an argument in PVP situations for cycling attunements proactively to keep targets under control, but in a PVE situation the primary concern is going to be maintaining high DPS, which for most builds is going to involve keeping in fire attunement as much as possible.

Stillwell.7308:

paleeshi.1924:

The problem with sticking to one attunement is preventing you to use a weapon set to its fullest potential. It’s not wrong, but it’s not very optimal and there has yet to be a good argument to WHY you only should use one attunement. Other than it’s an easier gameplay, I cannot come up with any real good argument.

I can make an argument. By constantly cycling attunements you are putting potentially useful skills on cooldown, not to mentioned the attunements themselves. There’s an argument in PVP situations for cycling attunements proactively to keep targets under control, but in a PVE situation the primary concern is going to be maintaining high DPS, which for most builds is going to involve keeping in fire attunement as much as possible.

This is crucial. If you DONT need to use a skill at a particular point in time, you want to have it, and the attuement it’s in, available. If you have already cycled through earth mindlessly tossing your skills around, and suddenly you need to Reflect, well you are SoL