Guild Wars 2

I must admit, Ele is the only class that I know very little about. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Looking for the following in a 1vx build:

-sustain
-dmg
-mobility

Any help would be greatly appreciated. The weapon set does not matter. Ty.

We kind of need the standard D/D build stickied along with all these max dps speedrunning builds…

D/D is the best roaming set due to mobility and aoe cc to aid you in 1vx.

Use anything that uses at least 20 points in water, 30 in arcana and 10 in air.
Use cavalier/berserker/berserkervalk in trinkets because of excellent crit damage ratios.
Use Knight’s/soldiers/celestial armor and weapons. Mix and match until you get a good amount of precision, toughness and vitality.
Use a sigil of battle and a sigil of force (after stacking bloodlust preferrably). Boon duration runes are optimal.

I can link you a build or two, but you might have more fun trying for yourself.

Ele is interesting in that you can really run almost anything just because of how varied the skillsets are. D/D is the traditional roaming build, but S/D works perfectly fine as well. Fiery great sword was made castable on the move last patch and that opened up more options for lower mobility builds.

The basic breakdown is S/D if you want to run a very high damage build with lots of burst but mediocre survivability. D/D builds do less damage, but have much higher survivability.

For D/D (since that’s what I’m familiar with), your options are extremely open. Basically 0-30 air, 0-30 earth, 0-30 water, 0-30 arcane. None in fire. Full tank gear to full zerk gear. Generally for D/D, it’s better to go for tankier trait lines and get your damage from trait modifiers and gear. The damage lines generally don’t offer as much and are only for if you just really want to hit hard.

Here are some builds that I switch between:

20 air, 20 earth, 30 arcane
25 earth, 15 water, 30 arcane
20 earth, 20 water, 30 arcane
20 air, 20 water, 30 arcane
30 earth, 10 water, 30 arcane

The only constant for me is 30 arcane. I wouldn’t say it’s a necessity, but perma vigor, elemental attunement, evasive arcana, and low attunement recharge just make the class feel right. But there are plenty of people running low arcane and doing fine.

Gear is very open as well. Generally speaking, you start out fairly tanky and swap in higher dps pieces as you improve.

For a tankier setup, my favorite build is 25 earth, 15 water, 30 arcane. Earth juices up your burst a lot but you still have a ton of survivability through having both heals and stability for ether renewal. I usually run a setup with ~3k attack, ~50% crit damage and ~50% crit chance with fury when I run that build. Strong survivability but still nice spike damage.

For damage, I’m currently running 20 air, 20 earth, 30 arcane. About 3k attack, 60% crit chance, 80% crit damage. Survivability is decent for a burst build but can still put out some serious damage.

For utilities, you’re going to be mostly running cantrips. Sadly the class struggles without them. If you’re going full zerk burst you run arcane blast, arcane wave, flash. If you’re going mid range you run mist form, arcane wave, flash. If you’re tanky you run mist form, armor of earth, flash. Grab cantrip mastery if you run any water.

I know this may not seem helpful if you’re looking for a specific build to try out, but ele is a class that is really personal. Part of why it doesn’t do as well in spvp is because you can’t tweak it to fit your playstyle as well.

Your best bet is to just pick a middle ground starting build, and then see if you prefer more damage or more tank and go from there.

This will probably get me laughed right out of the forums, but hey, that’s fine by me.

0-30-30-0-10 Valk/cavalier/celestial gears. Screw all that healing/sustain/cond clearing crap and just blow them up before they know what’s happening. Use protection boon from auras and stability from rock solid to tank long enough to win or run. Diamond skin to auto-counter cheesy condi bunkers, or geomancer’s freedom +melandru runes + lemongrass food.

The standard (beginner) d/d build is 0-10-0-30-30 or 0-10-10-20-30 with soldier’s/knight’s/cleric/s gear. Most roamers are used to this build and know how to counter it though. It hits like a limp noodle without might stacks. Tricks based sword thieves and corrupt boon necros will eat this build for lunch.

Anything that can remove your boons or apply consistent poison will eat any ele for lunch since we’re very reliable on boons and healing/protection/regen when our damage is on cooldown.