Guild Wars 2

After kitten ing around for some 30 hrs or so in this class (aka I’m a noob when it comes to this class) I found two things:
1. If I have people tanking for me my lvl 60 staff ele can pretty much put out almost as much DPS as anyone on the same level as me and often times as much as a non glass lvl 80. Which is impressive but doing the DPS is the easy part. The hard part is…
2. If enemies happen to jump on me, I’m dead. Like utterly dead. I have one heal which doesn’t heal for much (the signet) then swapping to water for a little more heal which seems minuscule. I’m sure I’m playing this incorrectly hence my post seeking advice from
Experienced vets.

Now I’m not a stranger to fragile glass characters (I played a lot of thief) but Ele doesn’t have the disengage tools thieves do and they certainly can’t CC/tank like my necro and guard can (my other “mains” that I’m working on). So to all you ele vets: how do you survive if you happen to draw a lot of aggro? How do you survive if you get hit and are at very low health?

What weapon are you using?

If you want to solo sustain, staff is not the right choice, staff healing comes from other people blasting your water fields (you can blast your self but staff has a low amount of blasts).

If you want to solo survive in PVE, go with D/D it has the most action per second for Signet of Restoration and never use the active heal of the SoR.

Staff fire 4, dodge and arcane shield help a lot. Always move if it´s a tough fight.
I play staff only ocasionaly but especially fire4 saved me a lot.
Second take some soldiers equipment till you can play ele fine enough. I prefer valk armor and captains trinkets + zerker staff). If you need the armor to survive take knights staff.
My personal favorite is traited arcane utility setup. It has good damage and blasts.

Suggestet PvE 80 setup. Small changes like tempest defence and replacing glyphs is possible but the glyph of storms is very good in PvE. If this goes to WvW use lemmongrass food. Also tempest defence, lighning flash and FSG instead of glyphs.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWnMIC9MgtMAONA0RgBCALKABgFgMJDBlgaNkGGDA-TFyDwAKuAAQV+BwE0hHAgHdAIUCKb/hXq/EAABgduzjuzjmMA6bB-w

I’m using staff I enjoy the range and the DPS. I tried d/d but it didn’t feel as solid, very short range and it feels like I have to work a lot harder to ultimately achieve less DPS than I would with staff.

I use scepter/focus and the staff is only as backup if needed. 900 range is still OK and scepter hits stationary targets very hard.

Honestly it just means you don’t play the class good enough. I’m guessing you are kinda new to this game. Back when the game launched people always complained about Ele’s supposed low survivability and frankly people still do. It’s them though, not the class. That said, Staff particularly isn’t very good for solo’ing because all it’s damaging spells require the target to be standing in place. Targets in Open World don’t do this as they tend to want to kill you if you start blasting them with fire. In that sense, Staff is more of an expert level weapon for Solo play. If you master Ele gameplay well enough you can make it work and ultimately it’s the highest sustained DPS weapon. I’d say D/D or D/F are more entry level weapon setups for Solo play and Scepter builds are somewhere in the middle. D/D works well because it offers alot of CC and maybe burst spells. Which means you can kill a small pack of monsters really fast but then your DPS plummets until your burst skills are off cooldown. D/F is similar but it trades mobility and great cc for a little less great cc but more defensive skills. The gameplay also changes to relying on Fresh Air procs to constantly swap back to Air Attunement for it’s strong Auto Attack and the Lightning Bolts that trigger from an Air minor trait. Another thing you can do well with these builds as opposed to staff is stack very high might on your own and if you combine this with Runes of Strength in your armor you can get far more power in a Solo enviroment than you can with Staff. This means that while your base DPS might be lower with Dagger builds, the power can boost it beyond the 9-might Staff. Add that Daggers can be used to kill targets that are on the move and you’ve got yourself a much easier to play spec. Regardless though, whichever spec you choose to play, realize that Elementalist is one of the harder classes to play. Playing Staff is easy as it’s the only weapon that allows you to camp in just one attunement to get good results (Fire attunement). All others require you to constantly switch attunement and play more of a skill rotation. Various hotkeys that need to be pressed in rapid succession and be kept up throughout the fight. Ele’s have double the number of active skills most other classes have and they need to use nearly all of them with Dagger and Scepter builds. If you can’t keep up with that, can’t manage to learn or just don’t like it than the class is just not for you. As for survivability, every weapon set has various skills and Ele’s have various traits that are all focused on survivability whilst maintaining high DPS. You can also slot defensive utility skills. Other than that it’s just experience. I will say, if you’ve played Ele for quite a while and still don’t get the hang of it you’ll probably never get it. At that point it might be better to just switch to an easier class because if there is one thing to be said about Ele is that while it can provide some of the highest DPS seen in the game, Ele’s need to put in alot more effort, press alot more buttons, to make this happen than other classes need to. Compare to a Thief where you just stealth and press Auto Attack until it’s low enough to spam Heartseeker and you get pretty much the same results on single target enemies as you get with Ele.

I absolutely didn’t make this thread to complain about the class or class mechanics — that is not my intent at all I apologize if anything I said made it sound that way. I’m just trying to learn the class and figured I could get some hints/advice/ideas from the forum about what I’m struggling with, often times I miss something really simple or a slight adjustment that makes things a lot more effective.

It’s certainly not an easy class to play but I’m attracted to the hard to master classes (provided that I can do some pretty neat things once I master the class and do some high end dungeons and fractals — I’m not in a big guild and soooooo far from end game gear that raids aren’t even on my radar currently).

Sounds like you guys are recommending I try different weapons to see if that makes my life easier (thinking scepter focus, really not a fan of the short range dagger main hand). I’ll give it a shot. I’ll probably go back to staff once I hit 80 and get some exotic gear with high damage, if I can kill everything before it can kill me, well problem solved!

Is your tuffness atleast 2.6k / healing at 500 / 22k hitpoints and u use Signet of restoration? If yes, it may be a play issue

Staff is hard to kill other players fast, because they move out of your area attacks. You have to pin them or loose. Staff is better in a team setup. On the other side fireball is a superior autoatack.
I only loose against a staff ele playing stupid like last time when i doged out of the WvW camp just before fliping it and the ele was in it the second he went down … The gurard spawn killed me …
Its a mater or taste. I started with staff, because i like range and healing support. But it did´t feel good enough and i got a bit bored. Switched to scepter soon and try to master it since then. Also i don´t regret taking ele as first character and stick to it.
I dislike being forced into meele so i don´t use dagger, but i have a good number of point blank attacks. Fights are more close combat then range.

Greetings

Wolf

Ele relies heavily on active defense.. moving and dodging a lot. If you want do zerk solo with staff you need to blast your water fields (water 3 and 5). The easiest way is arcane brilliance(heal) and/or arcane wave. I carry both an have no issues with soloing staff. If everything is on cool down remember that water 1 does do healing(not much but healing is healing) and if your going to use arcane brilliance try to be close to multiple enemies as it will make the heal larger. My skill bar lately in pve is arcane wave, armor of earth and signet of fire (but this one changes based on what i am doing).

You have lots of aoe so i use control options as often as i can.. air 3 to push them into my fields, and air 5 to hold them in my fields. Water 4 is the only control option in water but will slow them from getting out of your fields and in earth you have earth 4 and 5.

A good combo is earth 4, earth 2, switch to fire and fire 2. If they run into the wall created my earth 4 then they should be stunned long enough for the earth 2 and fire 2 to blast for some good damage… if they look like they might walk out of the fire field before earth blows use the arcane wave to get the blast.

I have also found if your in fire and the enemy has a cone attack run through them and after they attack use fire 4 to roll back through them and blast it with arcane wave. Their attack should miss and you should get a nice chunk of his bar.

Basically, with staff you have to know your blast finishers to really get damage off because waiting for meteor shower just isn’t going to work. I usually start with meteor shower if the enemy hasn’t noticed me and then run into the aoe field it creates. If enemies don’t want to be in your fields kite them any way you can back into them.

I was actually trying really hard to figure out how to self blast my own water fields but besides earth 2 on staff and a few utility skills there aren’t a lot of blast skills. So when my health gets low I swap to water cast 5 and 3 and then use the arcane utility skill blast finisher then swap back to DPS mode. Problem is once I blow through that combo it’s on a pretty loooong cooldown.

arcane brilliance is great ;-). You focus on damage, not fighting over a minute. Test scepter a bit and think about the build i posted. It´s not the easiest build to handle but its also not the pure zerker and a fun allrounder.

I suggest you start with celestial trinkets and all cantrips. Then as you get more experienced replace a celestial trinket by a zerk one until it feel comfortable enough to remove one more etc. Celestial staff is almost unkillable (you will kill no none though) but zerk staff is quite hard when you fight alone.

You need to always be on the move. A non-moving zerk ele is a dead ele. Learn your combos, exploit your own aoe as relative safe zones for you and try to anticipate where your enemies will go if you can’t pin them down so your aoe tick when they enter the zone.

I have 1967 armor and a tad over 13k life and I do very decently even when alone flipping camps and towers as well as winning significant 1 vs 1. You will loose to other prof of equal skill level but really shine the moment you are with even just one partner and be a god in big fights. Practice will get you there.

I suggest using Glyph of Elementals. That sucker does an excellent job of drawing aggro, and in its Earth form it will very rarely die before the timer runs out.

Glyph of Storms in Earth mode is also really good for survivability. It lasts a good long while and pulses Blinds, allowing you to stand your ground.

Other than those two, I would suggest specing for a bit more Vitality and getting used to dodging a lot. Try equipping a Major Sigil of Energy for some extra Endurance; Attunement swapping counts as a weapon swap, so you’ll get an extra half-dodge every 9 seconds. I also generally find Scepter/Dagger to be a better set than Staff in solo PvE, but you can keep leveling with Staff if you really want to make it work.

Tiggers.3890:

I absolutely didn’t make this thread to complain about the class or class mechanics — that is not my intent at all I apologize if anything I said made it sound that way.

I don’t think it’s being taken that way. Thayt’s Why I asked what weapon you were using. I’ve spent many hours duo-ing with a staff Elementalist and the damage they can lay down when they have a meatshield is ASTOUNDING.

But playing solo you have to give up some of that damage for survivability. If they were tough while doing that much damage they’d obsolete all the other classes .

Sounds like you guys are recommending I try different weapons to see if that makes my life easier (thinking scepter focus, really not a fan of the short range dagger main hand). I’ll give it a shot. I’ll probably go back to staff once I hit 80 and get some exotic gear with high damage, if I can kill everything before it can kill me, well problem solved!

Do try out the other weapons — even if you don’t stick with them it’ll improve your play on the staff.

Good hunting!

Staff has all the tools you need to survive, I sugges you learn the proper way to use it.

For example:

If you are on fire attunement and wish to go defensive you should not switch to water, you should switch to earth instead, ideally after putting some distance with Burning Retreat (Fire 4) Then you do Eruption (Earth 2) to blast the burning retreat fire field, and gain might. This puts you out of harms way via the long distance dodge, in earth you have Unsteady Ground (Earth 4) which is a wall that won’t let the mobs pass, and you also have Magnetic Aura (Earth 3) to counter projectiles. Those 2 skills will instantly save your kitten from any situation. After you saved your kitten , cast eruption again and switch to water, here you can blast the upcoming eruption with a water field or an ice field, blasting it on the ice field gives you frost armor (-20% incoming dmg, chill attackers) and the chill from the field itself further slows down mobs. Spam water 2 now, as it is great dps, and once you are done defending yourself you can switch to air for more fast CC if you need it or go back to fire for the dps. This is all very basic you will learn the fancy stuff with time, good luck!a

EDIT: I sugges you use Glyph of Storms, its air skill has brutal dps, especially vs large targets. The earth skill blinds foes every second for 10 seconds in a big aoe, which is amazing for defense.

Other people have already highlighted that you need to know your weapons and use active defense, so I’ll add two things which I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned yet.

Never underestimate the usefulness of Mist Form. It gets you out of a tough situation so you can heal and try again. It also lets you unlock a chest or res somebody uninterrupted if you start unlocking/ressing before you use Mist Form. I often use it when ressing someone at Teq and a shockwave it about to hit me. It also breaks some stuns.

Also, if you’re downed and your enemy is low on health, consider attacking them instead of healing yourself. If they die first, you will rally. I had a beautiful moment with this when an abomination in Vexa’s lab downed the entire team, including me, and was just charging me. I was trying to heal (but wouldn’t have made it) when I realised he was on very little health. I blasted him instead and we won.

Yep. You can easily use staff solo and do a lot of content. Your armor class and health are glassy, but your skills give you more ways to survive than, frankly, a lot of the other professions. You just need to quit camping in only water and fire and things will get easier.

If you like the damage of staff and disliked melee range then you may get some use out of Scepter/Dagger. The only melee skills it has are fairly bursty, and it’s got a good chunk of survivability and nimbleness also.

As was also mentioned, Mist Form is a great survival skill that most Eles I know tend to keep on their bars. It has a long recharge, but it’s very helpful.

You also might want to run with glyphs solo. Glyphs of storms, lesser elementals, and greater elementals give you a lot of options in combat, but the most common is is to use glyph of storms in air attunement for high DPS and greater elementals in earth attunement for a personal pocket tank. I personally like calling up both elementals in water attunement, where they both will heal and deal damage.

Mercurias.1826:

I personally like calling up both elementals in water attunement, where they both will heal and deal damage.

Couldn’t agree more. Many a time I’ve summoned the two elementals to distract trash mobs that I just want to get past without breaking my stride. Summon the boys, hit a mob, then keep running while they take care of business.