Guild Wars 2

I often hear a lot about the D/D Elementalist and Staff ele, are there any viable builds for the scepter or focus? I’m trying to figure out the pros and cons of each weapon and if any are entirely superior to another. I’d like to work with a scepter build, simply because I never see anyone using it, but I’m assuming that there is probably a reason for that.

Also, is the focus just plain worse than dagger?

sorry can’t give you a spec. Just share my view why I prefer daggers.

Why I like daggers is because I love the attunument rotation, switching attunuments often and using alot of different skills and disorienting mobility to best my opponents. Sometimes even stunlocking for long time. I can use it with full burst berserker gear, with more carrion (no all out) condition based and in between.
Every attunument I go I have 5 skills that all have their uses.

But for me I cannot say the same for Scepter and Focus.
Focus air and earth are amazing, but fire and water lacking compared to dagger counter parts.
I do not enjoy Scepter fire (because I dont enjoy Dragons tooth), water is lacking, basicly you can only go there for the heal 3, while dagger can go visit it to dps.
The whole aoe department is non existant. And you are less in control of the damage you do (cleansable, easily avoidable, and air is long channel until the bigger dmg) compared to daggers. And you spend more time spamming.

Ofc focus and scepter can work, but these are reasons why I don’t use them.
Most Scepter builds will include toughness/&endurance during channeling. And I usually am full condition damage geared and built if I wanna mess around with Scepter. Vigor build can fit with more air too and arcane. Among others.

I like dagger/focus, or scepter/dagger for wvwvw.

I find that there are times when I want ranged and dagger is fairly strictly short range. Highest dps however, so I always want to carry one in one hand however.

I find that scepter/dagger wins out for a range/melee combo, just because if youre going to go ranged scepter has more options than focus.

There is a very simple Scepter/Focus condition build. Mainly focused in Earth. It involved stacking bleeding damage via Stone Shards (your skill 1 ability in earth). It’s stacks x3 every autocast.

http://en.gw2codex.com/build/4163-brimstone

I like this build as it’s very simple to play. It’s great for 1v1 battle’s. May be lacking a little in 2vs1 or more.

given a general power build with minimal condition dmg this is the stats on auto atks (dagger and sceptre)

Auto atks

Sceptre

flamestrike 101, 656 burning , total 757, DPS 605.6
Ice shards 180 DPS 240
Arc lightning 3x 30 3x 60 4x 91, total 634 DPS 211.33
Stone Shards 150, bleeding 765 total 915, DPS 610

Dagger

Dragons claw 126×3 DPS 756 (all 3 hit)
Vapor Blade 111×2 DPS 444 + 4x vulnerability(return strike also hits)
Lightning whip 235 DPS 470
Impale 168+ 340 bleed DPS 677.33

as you can see the strongest hits are dagger fire assuming all 3 hits, which is pretty short range, if not the best is the dagger earth auto, which on first glance appears worse than the sceptre as its only 1 stack of bleed, it is however 1/2 the casting time and 2 seconds longer bleed, coupled with the higher normal dmg its a better option, however as you can see the sceptres earth auto atk is nothing to laugh at, its decent dmg and at range, keeping you safer! that being said, the lightning (although looking cool) is completely lackluster dealing pityful dmg, even at the end of the channel. the water also being terrible. if your going condition dmg build then the fire/earth on sceptre are great, but the other attunement are not so good. used only for the offhand dagger utilitys and the crappy placeable heal, which is just worse than the daggers cone of cold. sceptre is just awful, it used to be better, now its pointlessly crap. dont get me wrong its still useable, but it pigeon holes you, and feels slower then the dagger which is more dynamic and intresting even without ea

Plenty of favorable posts about scepter/dagger in PvE. Just realize it can do a lot more DPS point-blank than ranged, both because of the skill mix and because of might stacking.

When you’re playing against live people, however, the slow-hitting nature of the big Fire skills can be problematic.

I’ve been play-testing a S/F build after some initial frustrations with it. I have had enormous success with my new build in dungeons, including fractals. I used to hate the focus, and I still think fire and water need a revisit, fire in particular. That said, this build deviates quite a bit from conventional Ele wisdom.

This is a support build with some bite. It does not require a ton of attunement dancing.

Before I go any further. This has only been tested in PvE / Dungeons and in some very limited cases, Wv3.

Weapons:
Scepter (Superior sigil of fire)
Focus (superior sigil of accuracy).

Armor:
Glass Cannon
Full bezerker’s w/ ruby orbs, accessories, full ruby orich.

That’s right, I glass cannon in dungeons, and no I don’t spend the whole time on my butt. In fact, I go entire dungeons without even being downed once. The focus provides great defense, so you can be more flexible in the stats you choose.

Traits:
20 fire
Take the 30% burn on crit
and
CONJURED WEAPONS! (yeah, I’ll explain later).

Air 30
Take
Reduced recharge on glyphs
Bolt to the heart (20% dmg past certain health. You can also take the one where you get more endurance when you channel if you want buffs from arcane)
Aeromancer’s alacrity (20% cooldown on air spells – will explain later)

Earth – none

Water – 10
Take cleansing wave

Arcane – 10
I know most want the attunement swap buff but,
Take Renewing Stamina, 33% chance vigor on crit, unless you changed your air as cited above.

Utilities:
Lightning Hammer
Cantrip of your choice. I go cleansing on this one.
Glyph of Storms, Signet Air, or Radiation field (asura), or Frost Bow. I’d mess with the glyph of elemental attunement if it procc’d more.

Elite:
Fiery Greatsword.

Play style. This is still in the alpha/beta phase, no real “rotation,” but what I’ve done so far works really well.

I try to keep blind up as much as possible. Between the storm, the 8 recharge blind spell in air (w/ reduced cooldown), the hammer spam and signet air if I took it, I dramatically reduce incoming damage while still dishing out damage of my own.

I spend most of my time in air, spamming 1,2,3. I do fun damage, especially with all the crits. While I’m critting, I’m AOE bursting, doing burning damage, and gaining vigor. I’ve had up to 45 seconds of vigor built up. With all of that vigor, I can dodge like a mofo.

Large group of mobs? Go lightning hammer and w/ 25 charges (encourage a friend for even more fun, just have them stagger their hit off yours), you get mad aoe damage w/ aoe blinds. Not enough blinds? Drop glyph of storms in earth first or use signet air. Need more control/support as an asura? Drop radiation field and beat the mobs in it with your hammer. Blind, weakness, poison. Damage w/ crits? One attack chain has done 7-8k damage, while doing the blinds. And I’m just hitting the #1 button. I can keep doing it, over and over, and over. Hammer is just awesome. 5 then 2 for a free daze. 3 for a knockback. Herd your mobs together then go back to spamming 1. Use 5 to escape if you need to.

Things getting worse? Drop the FGS. #5 the mob. Then #3 cripple through them. Then DESELECT TARGET and #4 run through the now crippled mob. Then auto attack the one in the middle of the pack. Holy numbers… Holy, holy numbers. Get a friend to do the same with your other sword…. It’s like the second coming of Jesus.

Don’t be stingy with your weapons. With 25 charges, each of these is a beast, especially used at the same time.

Getting spanked? Save that cantrip! Use your earth 4 and 5 to send back the pain or ignore it. Use air 5 to knock down pesky baddies and air 4 to provide your entire team (if they’re smart enough to take it) 6 full seconds of projectile-free living. Not enough? Switch to water and chill them or daze them a little.

Overall tactic. Hang back, dealing damage from max range. Flip out your weapons when it gets tough. Drop them and go defense when things get ugly. Dodge like a ninja because you won’t have to worry about endurance any more.

This build is extremely flexible. It is fun. It provides a ton of team support. It doesn’t involve staff or EA. It let’s you glass cannon in a dungeon, provided you’re not just dialing it in.

I’ll work on a better guide than this, maybe w/ some video, but I’m loving it. I have no desire to even go back to my beloved D/D.

Oh, and I’m effective from multiple ranges; no weapon swap needed.

S/F is mostly for PvE and WvWvW. Too many cast times for spvp.

yep im sure s/f is absolutely fine everywhere – spvp, in spvp mobility is one of our greatest weapon, so that dagger offhand is super seriarrrr

I played D/F from pre-release stress tests up until recently. I stopped playing it because it was too easy; I got bored. The build revolves around being able to out-survive anything and everything. I like it quite a lot; it works well in PvE and SPvP, though not so well in WvW and dungeons. It gets its defense from active abilities, toughness, and healing, and gets its offense from condition damage.

I tried S/F and just did not like the playstyle. IMO focus synergizes much better with dagger than with scepter. I found S/F to be quite sub-par and underwhelming in all areas.

Scepter and focus is amazing! Particularly the water and earth skills on focus.

Dagger and Dagger=Loads of damage, risky
Staff=Loads of control, Slow
Scepter and Dagger= Lots of damage with control
Scepter and Focus= THE MOST TANKY an ELEMENTALIST can be.

Magnetic Wave: Removes 3 conditions! and a Blast finisher
Obsidian Flesh: Invulnerable for 4 seconds
Freezing gust: Chill (perfect on bosses)
Comet: Blast finish with a Daze
Swirling Winds: Big shield that destroys projectiles (sometimes useful)

I use a Sceptre and Focus for the new island in PvE. Reflect the young casca’s missiles with Magnetic Wave, and bleed with Obsidian Shards.

For WvWvW I see elementalist commanders (my server is Sea of Sorrows) using the focus due to the massive utility/survivability. You can set up siege very quickly under Swirling Winds, and you can even disentegrate Treb shots with it.

PlatypusRex.3428:

Oh, and I’m effective from multiple ranges; no weapon swap needed.

Sounds like a cool build. I have played around with a couple of builds lately focusing on CW’s too and found them to be very effective for PvE. You say Wv3 too though so I would like to see your build.

Alurazle.5430:

Scepter and focus is amazing! Particularly the water and earth skills on focus.

Dagger and Dagger=Loads of damage, risky
Staff=Loads of control, Slow
Scepter and Dagger= Lots of damage with control
Scepter and Focus= THE MOST TANKY an ELEMENTALIST can be.

Magnetic Wave: Removes 3 conditions! and a Blast finisher
Obsidian Flesh: Invulnerable for 4 seconds
Freezing gust: Chill (perfect on bosses)
Comet: Blast finish with a Daze
Swirling Winds: Big shield that destroys projectiles (sometimes useful)

Could some one share a S/F build? The one above -Ive linked it below- relies heavily on long duration burns and bleeds which in sPvP would just be negated!

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k3d;0J0B2FY0B5sN-Z0;9;4T9T;01480;014B;4SN1;0J;0NV05NV051Fu

I used pretty much exclusively in S/F in PvE content. Although I will admit it’s no longer applicable due to the last patch.

Went full Knights gear, 2/2/2 boon runes, 0/20/0/20/30 with Evasive Arcana, Vigor on crit procs, boons on attunement swap, remove condition on water attunement. Usually started in Air for the blind/AoE projectile negation/knockdown/constant Vigor procs, then Fire attunement > Flame Wall > Dragon’s Tooth > Phoenix > roll on the Flame Wall while swapping to Water for water roll while casting Arcane Wave > Comet > Freezing Gust/Trident (depending on what I thought the group could use more) > roll on the Flame Wall while swapping to Earth > Magnetic Wave > Dust Devil > Rock Barrier > swith to Air > summon Lightning Hammer while using Lightning Strike and Blinding Flash. Then I’d go to town with Lightning Hammer, swapping Fire > Water > Earth > Air when they come back up but still holding the hammer.

This basically meant a permanent 23 stacks of 34s of Might for myself, and 21 AoE stacks of Might for my team (and do all this in melee in dungeons, so everyone up front would benefit from it. This permanent Might helped a lot for making up for the fact that Knights armor is Toughness/Power/Precision instead of Power/X/X. If I used my healing glyph in fire, that meant 25 stacks of Might. This also kept Regeneration and Protection up pretty much permanently, and I usually ended fights with at least a minute of Vigor left. After doing the Might dance, using the hammer conjure (which is actually pretty good damage wise) with its constant blinds along with Regen/Protection/water roll let me facetank for a good while and simultaneously blast finisher in whatever I wanted (AoE weakness, healing, etc.). If I wanted more damage, I would have taken out 5 points from Air and shoved it into Water for the 2% damage per boon. Between pretty much constant Might, Vigor, Regen, Protection, Swiftness, and Fury solo, that’s already an additional 12% damage up at almost all times. With any Guardian in the group and the lightning hammer, that’s pretty much 100% Retaliation uptime, too. Since making fixed rotations in PvE is a whole lot easier, this is easy to replicate constantly. The only reason I didn’t go 25 water is because I’m lazy and enjoy having 30 seconds of swiftness with a 20 second cooldown.

Unfortunately, with the gutting of Evasive Arcana and the breaking of Dragon’s Tooth’s blast finisher, I lost 9 stacks of might. More importantly to me, without the hectic dodging, it feels a whole lot less active to me :|

Scepter and focus is an odd combo. Nothing like D/F which is quite neat for SPvP. The scepter has some strange skills that range from incredibly slowly cast fire and earth (auto attack) skills, to quick air and water skills. S/F is an odd combo that doesn’t mix well, imho. I get the feeling that the focus was made with the dagger mainhand in mind.

Regarding S/F. You might want to focus on the burst skills, but switching to earth sort of feels depressing, as you have an auto attack that causes low burst damage only (and nr.2, but really not worth much). Focusing on condition damage leaves the air and water attunements left out and completely worthless damage-wise.

Personally I just can’t live with playing something that renders about 50% or more of the offensive skills useless.

I enjoy S/F in pve and wvw. I think it has more survivability than all the other sets.

The air and water skills are good damage.

Malcastus.6240:

Regarding S/F. You might want to focus on the burst skills, but switching to earth sort of feels depressing, as you have an auto attack that causes low burst damage only (and nr.2, but really not worth much). Focusing on condition damage leaves the air and water attunements left out and completely worthless damage-wise.

Personally I just can’t live with playing something that renders about 50% or more of the offensive skills useless.

Swapping from Air to fire is the main burst you will get from a S/F set-up. Stay in air until you get into a good position lighting strike, gale, dragon tooth, phoenix. It is not as much burst as a D/D set-up but you should be able to burst someone down with it.

You do not need to use all of your offensive skills to do reasonable damage. If you are a condition spec the bulk of your damage will be in fire/earth for any weapon. Power/crit spec the majority of your damage will be in fire/air. Water attunement, no matter what weapon is mainly for support/utility. Arcane spec are the only elementalist I expect to see using all weapon skills.

Useless in WvW small man
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-Staff
-SnF
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Useful in WvW small man
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-DnD
-SnD
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Useful in WvW zerg
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-Staff
-SnF
-SnD
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Best 2v1 or 1v1 WvW spec
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DnD
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I love scepter/focus (I’m pve) heres why. I can stack 25 stacks might very fast by myself. You have a fire field flamewall. I lay that then i have my blasts dragons tooth, phoenix then switch to water drop a comet with sigil i get might from switch as well as blast then finally i switch to earth and get my last blast magnetic wave. comet gives me a daze and magnetic wave reflect and condition removal. Im usally alrdy stacked in pve so staying alive is important and making the blasts hit is easy I finish in earth cause it also has invulnerbilty i can click if got agro it has blinds which are very nice and bleeds can stack on monster while wait for fire be back up and do my rotaion agian. IFFF i dont have 25 stacks might i have cantrips which give me 3 stacks per instantly and a glyph elemetal hamrony heal i usally use for the might since my skills keep me alive. ALLL my skills have reduced cools cause put 2 traits in water for the cantrips ans my glyphs i get reduced from air 3 trait and reduced cools on fore spells in fire traits. I usally use ele for this reason since elite skills reduced cool and using great sword makes slow hit defensive spells and elemtal does damage while i’m doing damage and stacking might yess greatsword awsome and nice use sometimes but got be closer and harder hit my invulnerabilty spell when got drop a sword first so sliggty risker to use anyway elemental takes care its self has reduced cool and gives me a buff when use it plus i can damage while its damaging where sword got choose my weapon skills over sword skills. I have full points in fire and air so max damage stats. I get swirling winds which is amazing for staying alive and killing large groups in pve. I got channeling spells in air that if used properly aka take mob in back and let it hit all monsters in front the targeted mob it does amazing damage. Single target moving around cant hit with dragons tooth? go earth it does alot damage. Cantrips are amazing cause i get an extra invulnerabity to get through traps if want with mistform also try rezzing in mistform folled by obsidian flesh yea nothing can kill you as rezzing that person keeps dieing in fire its amazing and gives me might. typicaly though i keep mistform off bar cause cant damage in it and rather spam teleport/armor earth/cleansing fire all of which are amazing for stuff like fractals where even if don’t need skill for a clense a quick port or stabilty still give 9 stacks might instantly and can cast them same time casting weapon skills. and all people claiming water useless it stacking invulnerabilty wicked fast the chill is amazing for kiting and a 2 sec daze which is also a blast isnt bad but with my build doesn’t matter cause dont have stay in it longer than takes to use a chill/blast/heal before can switch to any other attunement for damage. I dont like dagger cause have be close to use it and alot times its dangerous and you dont have skills to defend yourself you get from a focus or ability to back off and stay safe distance get from the scepter. staff not bad but cant stack as much might. Might not only helps you but also helps your party. Sorry this so long just felt someone needed explain how versitile and powerful the scepter/focus combo is.

thats pretty much the meta s/f or s/d build for pvp

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAr9AdOLZ4zMgDgRsGEDEHBCAdwiXhlAA-TJxHwADeAAa2fAwJAQZZAA

Should not necro a thread that has out of date info. 1 year old, 1 Year Old, 1 Kitten Year Old.

Wyrden.4713:

thats pretty much the meta s/f or s/d build for pvp

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAr9AdOLZ4zMgDgRsGEDEHBCAdwiXhlAA-TJxHwADeAAa2fAwJAQZZAA

Really? I haven’t been active in spvp lately but is s/f really meta now? is it burst specs?

yep, its a bursty spec

s/f isnt rly meta, d/d is still meta, but if someone loves scepter thats the meta for scepter in pvp

Its the build I run after being shown by zoose and it is very busty and you have a lot of survivability with earth #5 , arcane shield, earth #4 and mist form.

Arrive at a team fight or on someone being dressed, drop a dragon tooth, pheonix and arcane blast. it does hurt and can change the tide pretty easily. S/d is more offensive still and you can do some amazing things with it.