Guild Wars 2

Hello, I have a level 50 ele that I want either 30 in water and 20 in earth or vice versa, which leaves me 20 points to stick somewhere and I’m leaning towards Arcana for the cooldown reduction + boon duration as I really like my staff.

My issue here is where should I head with gear? Power/vit/tough? or go full offence like power/pris/cond-crit? and what runes would be a good call here? power and vitality so i buff my damage but add some extra HP?

On a side not.. signets vs cantrips! :P

Cantrips are better imo, not too fond of any signet build, I think if you want support 30 in Water would be better, I’m playing with 0/10/10/30/20 with Knight’s armor w/ Superior runes of the Earth and it’s great, some people like going Cleric’s Armor but your heals should be doing fine without that healing power. These are my D/D traits and armor though for Dungeons and WvW, I stopped with Staff cuz wasn’t too fond of it so I haven’t really messed around with the traits or utilities for 1. But either way I’d say Valkyrie’s Armor or Knight’s. Maybe Cleric’s if you’re like the others and want more healing power.
As for Runes, anything that fits your playstyle or ones that’ll beef your build more and kinda work around your armor.

If you want to use healing gear and put points into earth then imo your best bet is to go condition damage because bleed/burn scale similarly to most heal spells, from 5% to 25%+. Full Carrion supplemented with however much healing you want. Personally that would be 0 healing and no point in water because with the stuff you get from your other attunements and your skills you don’t really need those points and can spend them on something else, e.g. instead of puny attunement heals that require you to dance around (i.e. you’re not doing DPS in spec’s primary attunement) and other heal over time effects that scale poorly you can stack condition duration and keep weakness on the boss 100% of the time and reduce it’s regular damage by 50%.

Earth and Water give you condition damage and healing so your traits already kind of hint at this setup.

For PvE dungeons as an Ele I use a heavy condition damage build and stay in earth almost the whole time during combat. I support the group by finishing their fields with eruption for AOE boons, keeping up Weakness with Earth 1, cripple/bind, and all the other goodies you get with elemental attunement and your other fields. Plus one cast of my Eruption does 13.8k (AOE) damage over 20 seconds and my Signet of Fire burns for 10.4k over 16 seconds with near 100% uptime.

Thanks for the tips, I am heading towards the idea of going full healing, 20 earth and 20 arcana for the boons (maybe for the blasting staff trait for bigger aoes too) and i think the idea of more offensive stats on my gear sounds like a good idea. Any hmm condition damage sounds like a good idea considering I generally bleed and burn my foes.