Guild Wars 2

I’m leveling an Elementalist now, and after trying some weapons I decided Staff is the best for me.

Most of the time I’m camping fire of course, and all fire skills feel great. Sometimes I am forced to attune water for the healing, and that’s fine, since most water skills are also great, yet I think water #1 could do more damage.

My problem with Staff actually is air and earth. After leveling for quite some time, I noticed I pretty much never use air and earth. Air skills simply seem out of place. Only time I think they might be useful is for AoE taging during events, but fire can also do that and do better. I’m feeling air is simply a weaker version of fire, with no identity. Since fire is already the AoE king, air could easily have been a single target dps option. Earth skills seem weird on Staff as well. Earth is supposed to be the defensive attunement, yet there is no protection or invulnerability on Staff.

So guys, you also feel weird using air and earth on Staff? How can I addapt my play style to make better use of these attunements?

Air main pupose is CC with knockback, stun and blind. Additionally you get swiftness + movement impairing condition cleanse with #4 and an ok damage skill on #1 (and a very strong aoe damage skill with air overload)

Earth main purpose is also CC with “way-blocking” on #4 and immobilize on #5 (and on earth overload). You also get a nice explo finisher on a short CD with #2 (overload is also an explo finisher) and magnetic aura for projectile reflection on #3.

All around earth and air are not for damage but for CC and utility. And in that regard they are really useful.

I am currently leveling another Elementalist and finding similar issues to what you are facing. The first thing that I can tie the awkwardness to is the fact that a new player does not get air attunement until level 11 and earth attunement until level 15. While still early in the game, the time to get there forces a lot of new players to be comfortable with fire and water.

The second thing that I can point to is that in PvE, leveling especially, a player tends to not need air or earth unless they are against some challenging/more difficult encounter. This is largely due to the fact that most enemies die within a couple of seconds in a Lava Font or Meteor Shower.

That all being said, it is still useful to learn how to best use each attunement due to the nature of Elementalist. For starters, Dromina said it already, earth and air attunements are both utility focused. They are useful when you need to kite more difficult enemies or prevent a large group of small mobs from swarming you. Don’t forget that Lightning Surge (Air #2) is an AoE (at the target’s melee range) blind with a very high damage coefficient and that Magnetic Aura (Earth #3) give you a Magnetic Aura that will reflect projectiles.

Other useful things you can do with earth is to use Eruption (Earth #2) before switching to another attunement. Eruption has a long delay Blast Finisher and you can use that to your advantage by switching into fire attunement to lay down a Lava Font ontop of it for a Fire Field. The resulting Blast Finisher in the Fire Field will give you 3 stacks of Might for 20 seconds.

I hope this helps and good luck with leveling!

air and earth still need some help though
I’d strengthen the 2 skills, as that seems to be the theme of staff. Skill 2 is the main damage. but air and earth don’t have that so much.

So I’d make air 2 have either a faster cast or do more damage (currently it’s about the same dps as autoattack). and perhaps also lower the cooldown. I was kinda wary of giving it too much blind, but blind is a weaker condition than it used to be anyway.

For earth 2 I’d shorten the delay by enough to enable blasting an air field with the air field cast first. and hmm…

You’re doing it right. The only reason to go earth is to open with #2 and #4/#5 then fire until dead.