Guild Wars 2

Don’t reply to this thread, reply onto my recent one :P

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-Mastering-the-D-D-elementalist-11-6-12/first#post656535

Thanks

Really nice.

Could you please post your build and gear?
Ofc you are D/D, a weapon I really can’t stand.

A question: how do you manage to not die while happily standing in the middle of 4-5 people and casting churning Earth? I tried against my guildies (I have full earth and full thoughness gear) but between the 22k health thief who still crits me for 6.9k, the illusions each critting me for 2.9k and so on, I die in like 1-2 secs if I do that stuff.

Also, if your speed is what’s required to play Ele, I may as well uninstall.

Hey Vaerah,

My build is 10 air 20 earth 30 water and 20 arcana.
10 air> zephy’s boon
10 earth> earth’s embrace
20 water >soothing disruption, cleansing wave
20 arcana > elemental attunement , arcane shielding

The last 10 points are optional, but the above 60 points I feel are vital to any tanking/roaming/aoe dps build.

I put my last 10 points in either water, earth or arcane
For water> cleansing water
For arcana> evasive arcana
For earth> stone splitters

Armor
Full Doylaks
PvP Soldier’s amulet

Weapons
Dagger 5% dmg
Dagger +10 power per kill

I will put a more in depth guide later/reasoning as to why I picked skills/traits/armor/weapons with PvP tips and tricks as an elementalist/general PvP tips.

another video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB28MHUs18A&feature=youtu.be

Very Impressive! I would love to see an in-depth guide on your current build, definitely going to try it.

Dolyak’s armor is Vit, Power and Condition damage right?
What runes did you use?

Awesome vid, gives me some hope that I’m not useless in PvP, I guess I’ve really underestimated the water traits, they seems to give you 3x the survivability I have with my 20/20/20/0/10 build.

Well played daphoenix I enjoyed watching it.

To Wulfrim:

I’m not 100% sure about the best stats in general are for elementalists. However, to my knowledge D/D builds benefit more so from power and precision than condition damage.

This build centers fairly heavily on changing attunements constantly. That being said, neither water nor air offer any sort of condition damage.

Doylaks offers toughness and vitality, and at 6 runes approximately 30 hp/sec.
I used the standard soldiers amulet that all characters are preset to.

That’s what I don’t understand. I’m at the auction and I’m looking up Dolyak’s armor and the only piece available is Vit, Power and Condition. Is Dolyak a rune as well?

Edit: Yeah I did find the Dolyak rune, what stats do you have on your armor?

To Wulfrim:

I’m using PvP armor / gear sets which are different than PvE armor sets. PvP armor sets have no inherent bonuses as you get those stats on 1 PvP amulet instead.

Also, PvP gear is free and is gotten at merchants at heart of mist

daphoenix.4283:

Hey Vaerah,
another video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB28MHUs18A&feature=youtu.be

Thank you!

Also, the second video is awesome, please keep them coming!

Only thing that sort of “saddens” me is that players like you is what will prevent elementalists from getting any sort of buff.

I put you in the 0.1% of the playerbase, but ArenaNET will just see people like you achieving glorious wins.
Basically Elementalist is Elitementalist, be the 0.1% or GTFO this class as the 0.1% will keep it exactly as is.
If they buff Elementalist, players like you will just solo whole battlefields.

Hey Vaerah,

:] I’ll take the 0.1% as a compliment, lol

I still think elementalist is underpowered at the moment. Many people will agree that elementalist is not a top tier class. We have a decent amount of bugs still concerning current skills, have a lackluster of trait sets, a joke of a downed state, some rather useless elite skills, low base stats, and no fall damage traits.

I will update more videos and tutorials in the future:]
Also if you guys have any questions I have a decent amount of knowledge about game mechanics / PvP tips / strategies, etc

IGN: Excala

Yes, I have a question: could you please expand a bit about your rotation?

Is my feeling that S/D is pointless? I mean, I see you live because you constantly CC even while surrounded. S/D gives less CC but you’ll still be constantly surrounded, there’s just not CDs enough to keep 4-5 people away at range to make range work for you and reduce the incoming damage.

I hope you don’t mind but I copied your build and tried it out last night for a few hours. it works wonders compared to my old build. I was running a 20/20/20/0/10 build. Your build has increased my survivability five fold and I have seen no noticeable drop in damage. Though I think the change to vit/tough gear helped a lot also, I think I was using the berzerker’s amulet before.

I think more than anything, this build shows just how useless 90% of our traits are. I removed nearly all of my traits from the “damage” trees (fire/air supposedly) and I am doing the same amount of damage as before, with 3x the healing power and twice the health.

Confirming that our DPS traits are completely, utterly, absurdly useless.

I had fire (including +10% damage and stuff) and now I have zero in fire. The damage is basically the same.
I tried full condition gear plus necromancer in all slots plus full earth and the damage is basically the same of now that I have 20 and zero gear for it.
So I am playing a variation of the OP spec. Compared to my former spec his is about 10% tankier and – on paper – much less DPS. Guess what, giving up the damage stuff and going so much into water did not change my effective damage at all.

Bumping this build for validity. 4 ticks on water breath is awesome. Still like my Condition Fire build but this build is absolutely valid. I tanked a whole team on me 3 matches in a row. Match 2 they had to focus 4 on me just to get me down and sometimes they couldn’t even catch me. RTL no target, Cleansing Flame, Mist Form. They had to keep 3 on me just to lock/cripple me for the kill and when they did, I would just RTL right back into them and pop Updraft to make them work for it.

I still run my 30/x/20/10/10 condition build but this one just worked its way up to #2. Good build OP. FYI, I run Mist, Arcane Blast and Cleansing Flame and Glyph for my Utilities.

Looking at his video I think this is the build:

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.1.1.0.13.0.4.0.4.0.2.8.21.23.24.8.8.7.0.0.0.16.0.0.33.36.0.48.50.0.65.69.0.0.10.20.20.20

Any advice to a new ele on leveling build?

His build is posted in the 3rd post.

Nice vid. I run something similar build but max in water for aura spreading. Very nice for support in 8v8 but lower self dps. Can’t believe how many of those big earth aoe people just eat. Most times I try them people run away or interrupt me.

I run this build as well in PvE – with 30 Points in Water to switch between aura-sharing (fury, swiftness and protection from other traits get shared as well) and cleanse-on-regeneration.

For leveling, I’d take put the first 5 points in water (the minor trait grants basically a half regeneration boon to you and any nerby allies while you are in water) and the next 10 into Arcane (the minor trait lengthes the passive regeneration bonus when you leave water and then you can choose from a pool of really good major traits).

After that, trait what you like first ^^

So, I am really liking a variation of this build, to the point I want to use it in WvWvW and everywhere.

Anyone could please tell me how to “translate” daphoenix gear and jewels into “regular PvE / crafted” items? IE how can I translate the PvP soldier’s amulet in craftable / purchasable items with similar stats?

Hey Vaerah,

I just made 6 WvW videos while i was playing for 2 hours. Its still uploading on youtube, but if you subscribe to my channel you’ll see it.

Gearwise for PvE and Wv3 from PvP is relatively simple.

Logic behind which stats to pick:

Defensively, toughness is considered the best stat when compared against vitality and healing power. From what I know so far, healing power does not increase your overall heal by a large factor. However, an elemenentalist has more means of healing than any other class, even more than an guardian without sacrificing DPS.

Basically, you want to get as much toughness and healing power as possible, while sustaining a reasonable amount of vitality. Why? Healing power and toughness makes you last much longer in a battle, whereas vitality is a fixed value. Remember that battles for an elementalist are won usually by dragging out the fight as your opponents do not have your survivability.

Offensively, you want to optimize for power and condition damage. Precision from my experience is not as useful as power, and I’d rather not rely on chance to deal damage. Power boosts damage for ALL abilities (not their DoT effect however) so you cannot go wrong here. An elementalist benefits very much from condition damage as well, since fire and earth heavily rely on it. Fire2-4 deal burning damage, and earth1-2,5 deal bleeding damage. Condition damage can range up to 8000 DoT damage from fire2 (drakes breath) if you have 1000 condition damage (see hero screen > attack to see your condition damage). Earth 5 (churning earth) ranges up to 7000 condition damage with 1000 condition damage.

^ These values indicated above are enormous for an elementalist, so a mix of condition damage and power is needed. You don’t want to entirely rely on one type of damage as conditions can be removed.

This is what I run in Wv3 and PvE

Clerics Exotic set (Condition damage, toughness, healing power)
Jewelery Exotic Set (Power, condition damage, and vitality)
Guild backpack (doesn’t matter what you pick here) + gem(^same stats as jewelery)

Dagger one and two(Condition damage, precision, and power)
Dagger sigils (+10 power per kill, gain 3 stacks of might when you swap in battle)

Staff and Trident(Condition damage, precision, and power)
Sigil (5% damage)

SKILLS:
Basically everything I mentioned in post 3. Take out cleansing fire for vapor form since you will need it to survive large scale battles.
I run 20 earth (5% damage within melee range)

Logic behind picking sigils and weapons:
You need a staff for long range zerg battles in Wv3. D/D is your primary weapon set for battles with battle scales of 10v10 or less. Anything higher, use a staff.

10 power is needed for D/D. I’ve found that there should be more power than condition damage from personal experience. The added power is also very useful for a staff and trident, where the predominant stats are precisionpower.

One of the daggers gives you 3 stacks of might upon switching. Why not 5% damage?
I’m not an expert at game mechanics (I may be wrong here), but when your power is approximately 1500-1700, you are only getting an effective return of about 50-100 power. 5% damage may also apply to condition damage as well.

You might ask yourself “But I don’t swap weapons as an elementalist!” Attunement switching is considered weapon swapping. The sigil has a 9second cooldown, and the elementalist benefits the MOST of this sigil of any class. Why? Your constantly changing attunements to maximize damage to maximize the CD recharge, whereas other classes change weapons based on situations.

Each stack of might gives you 35 power and 35 condition. You can effectively stack up to 6 stacks of might EASILY (and 9 stacks if you have 30 arcana), which is an effective 6×35 =200 power AND condition damage. This dwarfs the 5% damage by a factor of 2 or more.

Oh and by the way you can add an additional 10 stacks of might using d/d by using fire4 followed by earth4 and 5 with arcane blast for an additional 350 power and condition damage! Use it against annoying guardian tankers that never die, while covering your DPS conditions with non DPS ones such as vulnerability, immobilization, weakness, chill, etc so that people can’t remove your massive DPS DoTs

I hope this answers your question

I will upload a future guide later
Subscribe to my channel if you want more tips and guides: P

Thank you, you are most kind and helpful!
Of course I am subscribed to your videos.

Hahaha, I am watching the videos, they are nice.
I can already imagine when in WvWvW you server are cornered, 50 vs 10 and you get there. "Hey guys Excala is here. Excala don’t be too unfair against those guys they are just 50, they can’t stand a chance!

Edit: on an unrelated note: if somebody at ANet are watching these videos, forget ever getting our class buffed.

@daphoenix

Cool video. What do your traits look like? I can tell you have Evasive Arcana in there, and probably 20 in water. What else?

Great video — but I can’t help but mention in that first fight the laughably bad GS warrior who can’t figure out how HB works to you see him off in corners just swinging away at nothing.

@daphoenix

I just noticed you did not mention which upgrades to put in Clerics Exotic set or I don’t understand what to put. Do I have to put Doylak in there like for PvP?

I see little crit numbers flying around and the only upside is 3k more health than me. I’m on DB and would love to see who’s dagger/dagger build would win.

I love watching you dagger guys, mostly because I can’t do it. I need S/d range to do anything of value — probably because my brain can’t do the attunement switching as fast as you need.

@ Kellhus – you need to practice more playing ele is fun.

@Eicherjw – I play on FA but if you wanna 1v1 for fun u can pm me when I’m on and we can join an empty server in PvP.

@Vaerah – Yeah you buy the exotic clerics set off auction house, then buy 6 doylak runes and put them in each armor piece like you do in PvP

@Pincushion- I sorta hid the build in that long line of text, so I will put it out again.

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.1.1.0.13.0.34.0.0.0.2.8.21.23.24.8.7.7.0.0.0.16.0.0.33.36.0.48.50.0.64.65.0.0.10.20.20.20

^link to build for PvP. Put +10 power per kill on one of the daggers.

For PvE and Wv3 use

Clerics Exotic set (Condition damage, toughness, healing power) +Doylaks rune
Jewelery Exotic Set (Power, condition damage, and vitality)
Guild backpack (doesn’t matter what you pick here) + gem(^same stats as jewelery)

Dagger one and two(Condition damage, precision, and power)
Dagger sigils (+10 power per kill, gain 3 stacks of might when you swap in battle)

Staff and Trident(Condition damage, precision, and power)
Sigil (5% damage)

SKILLS:
Basically what that link has for PvP, and take out cleansing fire for vapor form since you will need it to survive large scale battles.

daphoenix.4283:

Clerics Exotic set (Condition damage, toughness, healing power) +Doylaks rune

Clerics is Power/Toughness/Healing, do you mean something else?

@daphoenix

Using your build between my Fire/Earth Power Condition build. I like both. Have been watching your videos. I’ve been adapting my play style, taking what I like and what I don’t but there’s one thing I can’t grasp. Your boons. You seem to have a lot more than I do.

I understand the build works off constant attune swap, which is awesome and works right into my gameplay. But I never seem to have the amount of boons you do. I’ve watched the W3 and the PvP vids. I can kite a team of 5 and completely stall them. It’s absolutely awesome. But in your Vid’s, you seem to stack a lot of boons. Around 3 or 4 more than I can. It all works out in the end in PvP ( Wv3 I’m only 64) but I’m a tad bit interested how you get those boons to stack.

I was playing sPvP earlier and took down a sub par Warrior trying to spam his 1k or w/e with his Guardian. They couldn’t take me down due to constant attune swap and Water wrecking them when they lined up. I ignored the Warrior somewhat while focusing the Guardian.

Anyways, I was able to down one and force the revive. By then I could cycle KD’s and keep them from reviving until back up arrived which was awesome.

Don’t get me wrong, the build works extremely well for my play style. So does my Fire/Earth Condition build. I just can’t stack those boons.

Sometimes on a good rotation I can stack most of them, but it’s just crazy man. That 1v2 on the Guard & War I had was insane. Fantastic build.

There is a lot of room to work with this class.

@ Tk Takashi . Yeah your right I had a typo there.

@hakurface thanks for the feedback.
Most of the boon stacks come from a combination of the arcana

Here’s the build link again. Some reason my last link didn’t work

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.1.1.0.13.0.0.0.0.0.2.8.21.23.24.8.7.7.0.0.0.16.0.0.33.36.0.48.50.0.65.64.0.0.10.20.20.20

My boons comes from swapping attunements a lot, as swapping attunements grants you 5 seconds of a specific boon. I also get boons from Zehpyr’s Boon (10 air trait), which gives me 12-14seconds of swiftness on air3 and 5-6seconds on Water4. In addition, I get lots of might boons from my weapon sigil (gain 3 stacks of might per weapon/attunement swap) and from using combination skills. Combination skills is where i throw down fire4 (ring of fire) and use it with arcane blast and earth 4 and 5.

I also get vigor and regeneration from my cantrips – cleansing fire and armor of earth. Armor of earth (earth 10 trait) is casted once you HP is below 50%, and combined with soothing disruption (water 10 trait), I get about a 2k automatic regenerative heal.

Also swapping attunements grants you 2 seconds of fury as well. Casting healing skill 6 grants a boon also.

Hi, for the Pve build? Could u please post what armor u use? i tried search for clerics but cant find any with cond, tough, and healing. is it a whole set ur using? or do you use those with +power too? just mixing them up between healing power, and though… etc.? And what jewelery are you using? What to search for? Thank you-

I made an error on the armor stats. Cleric is power, toughness, and healing power.

Exotic Jewelery sets I use are the ones that have condition damage, vitality, and power.

I have noticed that even using the indicated spec and gear I get hit with higher damage and deal less damage than what I see on the video.
Ie I still get hit for 6.5k hits by one player and it’s common to see > 3k crits from random attacks off the others. But in your videos you seem to get so little. How do you do that?
I try being mobile, use earth aoe stun, water slows and air “bubble” (stun on hit) and ofc RTL + knockdown but I don’t know how to stay alive while they are on cooldown. IE I dodge a necro bite but I still get hit for 3.5k anyway (if I stayed it rises to more).

I mean, am I the only player on a server where opponents focus you all the time and I always get at least 2 thieves on my face? It’s like I had an aggro sign on my head.

I rolled up this spec and I’m using the 42k gear from Orr and it’s standard set (5% extra dmg on enemies below 50%). It’s a beast of a setup. I win 90% of my solo fights, wipe out a camp in no time, and my survivability is up. I believe with the Dolyak runes it will increase more. Not only that, but is really really fun to play. Its a very active setup and you really have to pay attention to cool downs. As I played a bard in DAoC this style of play is pretty common to me (6 active hot bars in small man, 8 in 8man play).

If you can handle the switching and the combo sets, play this. You can play around a bit with the extra 10 points as thats really a preference and some of the skills can be messed around with (i switched out Arcane Blast for the Earth signet so I can root someone when my knockdowns are down). All in all a very fun and effective build. Thanks for posting it!

Of course we promptly got the developers eyes on this kind of build and we’ll get it nerfed. Figures

some more random videos of wv3

I just tried this build in spvp, 5 wins later (1st or 2nd player every time) I love this build. The balance between survivability and raw dmg is pretty awesome. I’m going to try this in pve now.

My build is very similar and we play very similar playstyles. I will be posting my build soon with a short vid when i have the time.

:D ty for feedback

I uploaded some more videos demonstrating some more epic escapes and kills

Good build. This is like a variation of the tank heal build that devs mentioned about nerfing. So basically any good of eles are being “watched”.

What!/ Devs mentioned nerfing eles…. I wouldn’t of posted my build if I knew that. Its pretty hard to kill these builds but whats the issue .. we cant do much dmg at all if we run these builds.. why the F would they not look at guardians first, they are still harder to kill than us IMO

Rhoto.8791:

What!/ Devs mentioned nerfing eles…. I wouldn’t of posted my build if I knew that. Its pretty hard to kill these builds but whats the issue .. we cant do much dmg at all if we run these builds.. why the F would they not look at guardians first, they are still harder to kill than us IMO

Mesmer, Guardian and Eles are being watched. I believe because devs think we are a little too good i.e. tank heal yet decent damage. Same as bunker guardians.

Phoenix

How does this setup perform in PvE? It seems that using the following below … the condition damage is not very high. Instead you have lots of toughness and vitality. It just seems the power and condition dmg from these set is low. No way the PvE set will reach 1000 condition dmg compared to the PvP set.

Cleric armor + Dolyak Rune
Carrion Jewelries set
Rampager Weapons

I tried it too in spvp and pve (L23 currently). in Spvp its very nice and you swift between attunements activating attacks. i like the mobility and the rogue-type of gameplay. In pve it works even better!!

ty!

daphoenix

:D ty for feedback

I uploaded some more videos demonstrating some more epic escapes and killd

How do you create those static fields, with D/D?

@ Vaerah

Those are experimental teleportation guns. I forget where on the map I buy them, but you can do a google / youtube search for them

Here’s a link i found showing where u can buy them

Any class can use it, and it is very useful for doing complicated jukes / ganks
I’ve used it in a few videos to set up traps while I’m running with churning earth, and quickly changing escape direction using its portal ability.

Example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgG_IwJTQBA&feature=plcp

Somehow my poorly misjudged teleportation gun ended up being used as an escape route.

@seithan

Yeah I did some analysis on stats and PvE gear stats < PvP stats to my knowledge. My condition damage I believe is 800-850. My PvE power and toughness are about 300 points each lower than my PvP setup, and my HP is about 2000hp less.

It doesn’t really matter what the stats are for Wv3 because all of your enemies are equally handicapped in that sense as you are.

@Rhoto and Vaerah
Yeah sorry if I end up making this class more inferior than it already is in some aspects by posting these videos (I obviously don’t want ele nerfed myself!), but I thought people would find it entertaining and helpful for learning some PvP tactics.

daphoenix.4283:

@Rhoto and Vaerah
Yeah sorry if I end up making this class more inferior than it already is in some aspects by posting these videos (I obviously don’t want ele nerfed myself!), but I thought people would find it entertaining and helpful for learning some PvP tactics.

Daphoenix, you certainly don’t have to be sorry, you actually provide the other elementalists a point of reference at how they could do if they were in the 0.1% minority who has your same situation awareness, knowledge of so many tricks of the trade and so on.
Who should be sorry is the developer who see a 0.1% minority succeed in the one viable build and wants to ALSO nerf those 0.1% into uselessness.

I mean, are we constantly surrounded by OP elementalists and seeing them engorge sPvP, tournaments, PvE and WvWvW like we see mesmers / thieves and warriors?

No, eh? That’s what’s sick, to have a class that requires to be a 0.1% player just to be competitive, forced in one build and still being “watched with attention”. WE watched with attention. I don’t know if it’s more tragic, humorous or just pathetic.