Guild Wars 2

For a very long time I’ve been looking for a staff Elementalist build, which is easier said than done.

From what I’ve seen most people use d/d, s/d, or even s/f over staff.

so for the community I have 2 questions:

1. How come the staff seems so weak in the gw2 community eyes?

the other question, is I have a staff build that I’ve been messing around with and wanted other peoples opinions.

So for Armour I have:

Valkyrie power/vit/crit damage

Rings/amulets/accessory I have:

power/toughness/ crit damage

for runes( not sure which to use):

superior Runes of Strength

or

superior runes of scholar

so what I’m mainly going for is might,crit damge and survivability(mainly for fractals)

Traits is 30, 0, 0, 20, 20, for might and healing (again subject to chance as I’m using a lot of crit damage I think putting 10/20 into air instead.)

I am sorry for any spelling mistakes, but hopeful I can get some reasonable feedback which can help me further improve my staff build

also sorry for bad formatting

Thanks for your time

Staff is a good weapon, but only in a group. When i started with GW i used it even for running solo, something i would no longer do today. A lot of people wont recommend it because its bad per se but rather because it is:

1. Not really good for solo running
2. Lacks single target damage compared to s/d
3. Not really good for small scale PvP content
4. Generally considered boring, mainly because you have tons of combo fields but almost no combo finishers, so you just lay everything down and watch all the funny things everyone else is doing from a distance.

I had a build with 30 Fire myself when i started. I would generally NOT recommend this to anyone. You are much better off getting the 300 power of that trait from your gear and use the standard 0-10-0-30-30 bunker build, because the traits from water or arcane are much better. I usually always switch between weapon sets (staff, s/d, d/d) and this can be done easily with that build. Anyway, other builds also work fine, it always comes down to your playstyle (for example: how much vitality and toughness you need etc).

Might stacking is actually the domain of s/d because of the large amount of blast finishers (as mentioned earlier, staff has a very good fire combo field as well, but you are lacking the blast finishers to set it off consistently).

For runes, you might want to give boon duration runes a shot as well. They are much cheaper and elementalist is very good at stacking its own boons. The bonuses they give are not to be taken lightly. Their only issue is that they don’t appear on the stats table of your character screen when you log in, so most people dont see the benefits immediately.

Thank you for the information, but which traits would be good in the 0-10-0-30-30 defiantly going to look into this .

Pretty much all of what Columbo said. Most things a staff can do, other sets can do better. That said, I really like using the staff and have alot of fun with it.

I’m currently running http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4R0kT0w4Z0-Z0;9;5T44T;145A;4347;9;5k51s with mostly Berserker gear. However I’m thinking of moving points from earth and possibly air into water to get cleansing wave and healing ripple. Some of the spell/trait choices could be further optimized, as I have a couple of safety nets to compensate for me being bad at dodge rolling, and generally making bad decisions/mistakes. For example the elite skill should probably be the flaming greatsword, however I have the elemental equipped so I can summon it just before I’m downed to increase my chances of rallying.

The biggest “problem” I have with staff is, that you have to work really hard to get any kind of damage output. Once again as Columbo mentioned, the only blast finisher you have is earth 2, and the wind up from that is longer than duration of most of the fields, so you may want to find a friend with a lot of blast finishers, and tell them to spam it inside your fire 2.

I think for starters you should be fine with this build. In this build, I have also selected two cheap buff foods, Mango pie and Hardened sharpening stone. You can get these cheap off the trading post.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhImKbzR5gjDAkHmcCLiCWUeMzO2A-jUDBYLIoLA0HIkIAZPFRjtsNsVXBp8KaqaCy6FYqSJ1jDzbIpyAYuFA-w

kind of wish i came here before i spent my tokens/laurels on ascended gear but again thanks i’ll have a look and see how it fits.

again thank you to both of you for the help

although another question i have is how come the sigil on the staff? eles can’t swap weapons unless out of combat?

If you’ve already spent the cash on ascended valk trinkets, i would suggest that you mix in knights armor pieces (Toughness, power, precision). This will give you a decent survivability and crit rate. Compared to my build you basically traded some survivability for more damage. It depends on how you play whether this is a good idea.

As for the sigil, every attunement switch on an ele counts as a weapon switch, so we actually proc this sigil far more often than other classes (it has an internal cooldown of 9 seconds though)

Just on a side note: Altough this is not really a good idea for WvW group play, Valkyrie sets are used very often on s/d burst eles. Just pop arcane might before your dmg roation starts so every hit will be critical. The fire your main dmg dealers in (very) quick succession. This is often used in top level pvp matches. For example the following video shows how an ele used a very powerful burst to decide a very narrow match (The ele in the video even took it a step further and used berserker gear, but omitted the arcane might utility):

well the 2 asceneded i got is power/toughness/cri dam

and i don’t mind trading the rings up but the amulet will take me a while.

however so i shouldn’t use my valk armour and trade the in for soilders/knights?

However another thing i am considering, is keeping my current gear and using it as farming gear and then the gear you’ve suggested looks like very good dungeon/fratcals gear.

Although if i only change out the armour valk- knights then i can keep my ascended. is my current thought process.

and yet again thanks for helping me :P very much appreciated as i was getting bored with my ele, this is helping me to love my ele again

also where can i get knights armour? can i get it for dungeon tokens like solider?

I use a staff build. Hp/prec/vit armor with water runes. Sigil of water or something like that. Basically a healer and condition v remover in dungeons.

Basically what I wanted to say is that in order to make the most out of your crit dmg gear you might want to get your crit rate up. From your gear it looked like your have very high crit dmg but almost no precision (as you also have no points in air).

very good point, however i have now changed to 20-30-0-10-10 which seems to be working