Guild Wars 2

Update again: Glyph of Elemental Power glitches if exposed to the Lingering Elements trait. The cast must finish while only a single attunement is active, and must be fire attunement if you want burning
Major update: Glyph of Elemental Power’s burning on hit only functions while attuned to fire, which may completely destroy the “glyph” part of this build. Currently thinking what else to do.

I’m up late and perhaps not thinking entirely correctly, but I’ve looked at the elementalist recently and wanted to try and work out a build that might make conditions work. After screwing around with a build editor for a couple hours tonight, I ended up with this (PvE/WvW-specific due to sPvP having different stats on gear and no food) build:

Build link

The core features of the build:

Mainhand Scepter: This gives us access to Stone Shards which will provide the bulk of our bleeding output
Glyph of Elemental Power: this will give us a near-constant burning effect.
100% bleed duration: With 100% bleed duration, stone shards should give us 12 second bleeds at a rate of 3 bleeds every 2 seconds. This means we should hover around 18 stacks of bleeding before considering other sources.
70% general condition duration: This will extend the burning from Glyph of Elemental Power to 5.1 seconds, so it should usually be reapplied with the next attack after it wears off. Also benefits any secondary conditions, as we’re likely to occasional cripple or chill things.
Quick Glyphs: Reduces Glyph of Elemental Power’s cooldown to 36 seconds, minimising downtime on it
Sigil of Earth: Should theoretically provide the rest of our bleed stacks, letting us hover at or near 25 full stacks
Giver’s weapons and Rare Veggie Pizza provide a major increase to our condition duration, and are important to this working. Neither is available in sPvP, so this build is limited to PvE and WvW and will be hard to test in sPvP

Due to lack of funding and only making this today, I haven’t gotten round to actually trying this out in-game yet. However, exotic rabid armor and trinkets are available at 42k karma each, so in terms of gold this should be fairly cheap to initially gear. It’s just the Giver weapons, sigils and runes that should be expensive. Giver weapons give 10% condition duration regardless of rarity, so it’s possible to grab cheap masterwork/rare ones instead; the only drawback is slightly less direct damage output and vitality. That leaves the sigils and runes as the major barrier to testing this quickly.

(Cont’d in next post)

Optional stuff
Everything else is secondary and interchangeable, but here’s my reasoning for what we have

Offhand Focus: As we’re going to be sticking in earth for the majority of the time, focus has decent defensive abilities with Magnetic Wave and Obsidian Flesh, as well as Fire Aura and Flamewall for some additional burning while we’re in fire attunement. There’s also some decent utility in water and air attunement. I’ll accept that dagger is likely viable here as well, but the earth skills for it aren’t as strong defensively and prevent casting of our main attack, where Focus’s earth skills are instant-cast

Glyph of Elemental Harmony: We’re taking glyph traits, so this has some decent synergy. Ether Renewal is viable if using a Focus, however, thanks to Obsidian Flesh (pop Obsidian Flesh for 4 seconds of invulnerability and use that time for Ether Renewal)

Sigil of Corruption: This is simply being used for the bonus condition damage; in situations where killstacking is difficult, perhaps a Sigil of Agony to extend bleed duration (and allow for lower food costs) or a Sigil of Smoldering to help maintain burning uptime instead.

Glyph of Storms: Used in earth attunement, this stacks a 2 second bleed each second (4 seconds with our bleed duration); this helps accelerate our bleeds at the start of an encounter. It also periodically blinds things, which against non-champion mobs will heavily reduce damage we take at the beginning of a fight.
Glyph of Elementals/Lesser Elementals: Just more stuff to synergize with the glyph traits, though the elite apparently doesn’t work with Inscription right now. These guys should help take the heat off of us in PvE, as this build will likely be quite squishy.

As for other potential utilities, Glyph of Lesser Elementals can be dropped; potentially for something like Cleansing Fire for stunbreak/condi removal + extra burning, or Signet of Fire (entirely for extra burning). Asura characters could even go as far as using Radiation field, which would have 6 applications of poison for 5 seconds each over 15 seconds (giving 50% uptime on poison, around 80-90% uptime on burning and potentially somewhere around 22-25 bleed stacks at all times, until the Glyph of Elemental Power expires)

The other elementalist elite skills are fairly counterproductive for this; if we want to maximize damage output, we need access to our scepter, so FGS is out; same for Tornado.

(Cont’d in next post)

Remaining traits

Cleansing Wave (Water V): The only water trait that’s significant for this build in the Adept and Master traits; damage multipliers won’t affect conditions, and the other traits affect skills we won’t be using. Water’s been taken to 15 purely for Healing Ripple and Soothing Mists.
Evasive Arcana (Arcana XI): This build benefits heavily from the effects of this trait in fire and earth attunements, as they burn and bleed respectively. As always, water dodge is useful too.
Renewing Stamina (Arcana VI): We have 50% crit, and 30% boon duration means 1.5 seconds in which to crit in order to maintain permanent Vigor. Vigor is a nice thing, after all.
Elemental Attunement (Arcana V): More or less a staple of any build. We’re spending a lot of time in earth and may benefit more from another trait, though there aren’t many other options in the Adept or Master slots that are relevant.
Inscription (Air VIII): a 3.9 second protection boon every time we cast a glyph in earth, or 13 second regeneration if we cast one in water. Not too shabby if we run lots of glyphs.

There are 5 free trait points as there aren’t any Master traits in water worth getting with the current skill set-up. These could be spent in fire to get 5% condition duration and reduce food costs (with 5% extra condition duration, the food can be Super Veggie Pizza instead of Rare Veggie Pizza and save a fair amount of money).

Optionally a further 10 points can be removed from Air, as Inscription may not be useful for everyone. In that case, I’d personally suggest 10 in fire for Burning Precision (30% chance to burn for 1 second on crit) and 5 in earth for condition damage and the minor trait, as we’re likely to be in earth most of the time (the extra condition duration going from 5 to 10 in fire doesn’t let us reach any extra break points in bleed duration, unfortunately)

Or you could replace Inscription with Zephyr’s Focus, as Stone Shards counts as a channelled skill (essentially, we’ll have Vigor while casting it, which is most of the time – however, this renders Renewing Stamina nearly obsolete, and there isn’t much that can be used to replace it that’s relevant)

(Finished in next post)

How to play

In theory:
1) Initiate encounter in Fire attunement
2) Pop Glyph of Elemental Power (Must be in fire when we cast this or it won’t cause burning)
3) (Optional) Use any skills from fire that cause burning (Flamewall and Fire aura are both appropriate with offhand focus, as is offhand dagger’s Ring of Fire)
4) Attune to Earth
5) Drop Glyph of Storms to accelerate initial bleed stacks
6) Spam Stone Shards
7) (Optional) Cast Rock Barrier at any point for the bonus toughness

Use any of the following on cooldown if appropriate: Glyph of (Lesser) Elementals, Signet of Fire (if opponent is not burning, else keep for precision bonus), Radiation Field. If you have Cleansing Fire, use it when necessary. Try to aim dodges towards opponents for the additional bleeds and burns (unless in water attunement, of course)

When Glyph of Elemental Power expires, switch out of earth to any other attunement (likely water to quickly heal up). Switch to fire (if not already in it) once the GoEP’s recharged and start over. Glyph of Storms has a longer cooldown and may cast later with each rotation during long fights.

During fights, this build should start out burning things and quickly ramp up to 20-25 stacks of bleeding (+poison for Asura characters), but have a brief lull during the period when not in earth attunement. Sigil of Earth should help maintain some level of bleeds at all times, however.

Theoretical DPS output is somewhere around 100 damage per second per bleed stack (2500 with 25 stacks), 600 damage per second for burning and 200 damage per second if an asura and using Radiation field. That’s around 3k-3.3k damage per second before factoring in the (weak) direct damage, which doesn’t sound too bad for a build with a small amount of defensive stats.

I ended up staying up to long thinking about this and it may not be the best build in the world, but it looks like it should be relatively solid. The biggest weakness appears to be lack of AoE damage, as Stone Shards is single target, so once the Glyph of Storms/Radiation Field expires, we have no further AoE for a while. Anyways, thanks for reading this far, feel free to leave comments and let me know if you try it out and it works.

The concept seems viable and if anything, I commend you for trying something different.

One thing you may or may not have thought about, is that earth scepter 2 combines pretty well with radiation field. The result will be 5 seconds of extra poison. To ensure optimal use of poison, the key is to combo with the radiation field as much as possible.

Another option could be to use Sigil of Doom on your weapon. Since eles swap attunements fairly often, this could provide a good chunk of poison to your build.

I like your concept, very nice. I tried for a long time to make a build like this work, only I went a different direction.

My setup was 30/0/30/10/0 because I found that maxing earth and fire gave me +condition damage, duration, and +toughness. I used full Carrion with 2x afflicted, 2x centaur, and 2x krait. With fancy veggie pizza it was hitting ~4k per auto attack with stone shards.

I ran ether renewal, signets of fire, water and earth. Signet of fire had perma burn for ~8k and I was traited to maintain signet passives which is nice for the extra condition removal and toughness from signets of water and earth. Signets of water and earth gave me some good CC because 30 in fire extended their duration.

Anyway, I sat at ~18k health and a ton of toughness. Stacked 20 bleeds with just stone shards, perma burn & CC with signets. This was the only build I could develop that allowed Ele to take hits and still have some DPS in the form of DoT.

I didn’t see much incentive to put points in Arcana because there wasn’t much reason to leave earth attunement, except on structures. Carrion does give you nice power for when you need to use it.

That’s just a quick summary of how I did it, I won’t get further into it because I find that mine just didn’t really work out. The problem that I could never resolve was that my setup was entirely limited to single target. There are far too many situations where single target DoT is just not sufficient for a conditions build.

I’d love to run it though, so if you find that your build works out after testing please let us know!

I am still in the process of trying to determine what path with S/D I am going to take so I have been switching between builds every 3 or so nights. I have run multiple signets and/or cantrip builds. Now I am working on glyphs w/ cantrips.

For the last couple of nights I have run a 0/30/0/10/30:
Air: quick glyphs, inscription, bolt
Water: Soothing Disruption
Arcane: Elemental Attunement, Renewing Stamina, Evasive Arcana

glyph of elemental harmony, Glyph of elemental power, cleansing flame, lightning flash, glyph of elementals (unless portal bomb then I go tornado)

As stated still new so I have been running with knight/soldier gear with a bit of beserker (rare or lower).

So far this has been one of my favorite builds.

ThiBash.5634:

The concept seems viable and if anything, I commend you for trying something different.

One thing you may or may not have thought about, is that earth scepter 2 combines pretty well with radiation field. The result will be 5 seconds of extra poison. To ensure optimal use of poison, the key is to combo with the radiation field as much as possible.

Another option could be to use Sigil of Doom on your weapon. Since eles swap attunements fairly often, this could provide a good chunk of poison to your build.

I hadn’t thought too much about earth scepter 2, but that definitely works fairly well. Stone Shards should have a similar effect in the downtime.

The idea with this is to stick to earth attunement as much as possible, so it won’t get much benefit out of Sigil of Doom; also, sigil cooldowns are global, so it would interfere with Sigil of Earth.

xbaunx.6438:

That’s just a quick summary of how I did it, I won’t get further into it because I find that mine just didn’t really work out. The problem that I could never resolve was that my setup was entirely limited to single target. There are far too many situations where single target DoT is just not sufficient for a conditions build.

I’d love to run it though, so if you find that your build works out after testing please let us know!

With mine, single target should be somewhat alleviated; Glyph of Elemental Power’s internal cooldown is on a per-target basis, meaning it should be constantly burning anything caught in my incidental AoE effects, which will likely include Glyph of Storms, Radiation Field and Dust Devil, Sigil of Earth will similarly occasionally bleed additional targets and Radiation Field will help maintain poison.

The hard part’s going to be learning to play it.

Annnnd the glyph only functions while in fire attunement; it stops applying burning when in any other attunement and doesn’t even start applying the condition for the new attunement. Gonna have to rethink a few things. Edit: The wiki and skill tooltip don’t mention anything about the glyph only functioning while you stay in the attunement it was cast in. Really annoying.

I’ve tried a number of builds so I’ll chime in on my experience with a similar build from an spvp perspective (my pve build hardly changes) although most of what I say should apply to wvw.

Glyph of elemental power (goep): This effect works from the attunement in which the glyph was cast. You can use the glyph in fire attunement and then switch to earth and the burns will still proc, but make sure the glyph finished casting before swapping attunements. That means your earth auto attacks can burn your target. The icd is about 5 seconds with a very high chance to proc.

Goep is also bugged if you use phoenix; see this from when I was playing around with a goep cond spec + might stacking.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Glyph-of-Elemental-Power-burning-myself

Bug 2: Zephyr’s Focus doesn’t actually work with the earth auto and only the air auto, even though Obsidian Focus works with both after a fix from some patch in 2012.

This build is squishy; squishier than the balanced power/crit ele. Toughness is about the same, if not, less. You have no cantrips and air5, earth4 and earth5 won’t protect you for long enough to stack up your conditions and have them do their damage. You will literally die in less than 3 seconds against a glass cannon thief unless you use earth5 for invuln. Then you will either lose out on bleeds if you have to swap to fire to cast goep or burns if you choose to stay in earth unless you precasted goep before engaging. Afterwards, the thief will go back into stealth before you have a chance to apply your conditions and ramp up your damage unless you have a group to help lock them down. By then though, they might be dead already. Even a gc warrior will hurt you a butt ton. You also have less healing power one of the major ways which that an ele mitigates damage.

The majority of the time you’re in earth attunement trying to stack bleeds which means you’ll swap to earth attunement less than you would in another build and as a result have far less protection uptime from elemental attunement. Once you leave earth attunement, your dps drops dramatically since you’re locked out of earth attunement for at least 10 seconds. This is especially bad when your opponent cleanses.

Many condition builds rely on building up conditions on an opponent and surviving long enough for the conditions to do their work. If your opponent knows your only way of stacking bleeds is through earth auto attacks, they can easily take advantage of this and use their cleanses once you leave earth attunement to reapply goep or heal up. The ele’s inherent squishiness, limited ways of applying bleeds and other conditions to cover them, and lack of burst (compared to the crit ele) compound into a major problem with our condition specs in any form of pvp, especially when fighting against burst specs. In pve, burn duration stacking and bleed cap across the party become the problem.

Precision and crit damage are wasted on a build like this since the fire and earth auto attacks have low base damage. I would wear a mix of carrion and apothecary gear in a condition setup aiming for a certain amount of tankiness, and move points from air to either earth for more defense+cond damage or fire for power+cond duration which will work nicely with the power from carrion gear and further improving cond duration. The traits I’d take are fire II or V, and fire VII (scepter might stacking feels much more fluid when I take this trait because of the lower cd on phoenix). You have less goep uptime here without air III but this can be alleviated from signet of fire, fire attunement skills, evasive arcana, or just using time to heal up.

Here’s my staff build that’s given me moderate success in spvp and solo queue tpvp although that should maybe be left for another thread.
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-kZ;1J0BJVV065-N-Z0;9;6TJJ;428A48-47-V;5jwmAjwmA1cv

ThiBash.5634:

Another option could be to use Sigil of Doom on your weapon. Since eles swap attunements fairly often, this could provide a good chunk of poison to your build.

The condition builds require staying in earth attunement more so you won’t be swapping as much as you might with another ele build. Also, this will only affect a single target so pets and AI are a problem for this sigil.

edit: mentioned already

Here’s WP’s attempt at a condition spec for anyone that hasn’t seen it. A lot of insight in the video.

Adastra seems to think otherwise, so I ran another test on Glyph of Elemental Power.

I turned off any traits that might give me burning for any reason, fired off the Glyph in Fire attunement, swapped to water for the ice shards attack, and waited for the Glyph to cause burning.

It didn’t. The glyph’s buff description currently reads “Chance for fire spells to cause burning”.

I’ve tried looking up if this has ever been a change in patch notes, but as far as I can tell, the glyph has never officially been changed. Either it’s always been this way and the wiki’s plain wrong on it, or ANet never told us they changed it.

Dingle.2743:

Adastra seems to think otherwise, so I ran another test on Glyph of Elemental Power.

I turned off any traits that might give me burning for any reason, fired off the Glyph in Fire attunement, swapped to water for the ice shards attack, and waited for the Glyph to cause burning.

It didn’t. The glyph’s buff description currently reads “Chance for fire spells to cause burning”.

I’ve tried looking up if this has ever been a change in patch notes, but as far as I can tell, the glyph has never officially been changed. Either it’s always been this way and the wiki’s plain wrong on it, or ANet never told us they changed it.

I think you missed the link to my goep bug report post. I’ll edit it so the link’s more visible.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Glyph-of-Elemental-Power-burning-myself

In there, you can clearly see me burn the golem and myself with the water dagger auto. I filed a /bug report in game a few months ago and this was never fixed; the forum post is somewhat recent.

Here’s another screenshot with a scepter water attack auto.

I managed to get it to work and it is just being weird. I gues the game just gives up working out what attunement you’re in if lingering elements is active, because I can switch attunements and have the glyph work normally if I don’t have 15 in arcana. Well, it applies the new attunement’s effect if I switch before it finishes. With Lingering Elements it simply did nothing.

I… also heavily changed the build to a version with only 10 points in arcana and none in water, resulting in this

I heavily invested in fire and earth to reach the next 2 second breakpoint for stone shards, which enables a stable 21 stacks of bleeding, plus the critbleeds from Sigil of Earth results in nigh-permanent 25 stacks (the bleed readout says 13 seconds but should be 14 seconds according to the numbers… which may mean I’ve hit the condition duration cap). This frees up the slot that Glyph of Storms is in, although that glyph is still useful in AoE situations with Glyph of Elemental Power.

I actually initially replaced Glyph of Storms with Glyph of Elemental Power, because I was using Signet of Fire at the time. Signet of Fire lets me maintain permanent burning with just that and Burning Precision, so I decided to use Glyph of Elemental Power for the cripple effect. This has resulted in something… quite defensive, while still having a full condition output.

Defensively, it has 3k armor while channeling with Rock Barrier active, around 80% uptime on vigor (1 dodge per 6 seconds or so), 20 sec cooldown on Magnetic Wave (strong condi removal, projectile reflect), 40 sec cooldown on Obsidian Flesh, permanent or close to permanent cripple and an elite elemental, which will likely be a tanky earth elemental. Oh, and heavy condi removal from Ether Renewal, which is likely to be cast while Obsidian Flesh is active.

Offensively, permanent 25 bleed stacks, burning and poison, with about 1.6k condition damage.

Edit: Some testing shows that radiation field can trigger Glyph of Elemental Power. I just killed a level 80 Dolyak with a single utility skill that deals no direct damage. The pulses are infrequent enough that it doesn’t always trigger any burning at all, though.

Edit2: actually, radiation field does have some direct damage, it’s just not listed in the tooltip and may be mistaken for the poison ticks.

Might work in PvE, but it is quite worthless in WvW.

This has tested fairly nicely in open world PvE so far; running the build in my last post has actually enabled me to solo certain melee champions in Orr. Gotta love permanent cripple + 80% vigor. Having that much to keep away from mobs while maintaining 3k damage per second is pretty nice.

I’m yet to take this into WvW or a dungeon, but there are some bosses that it may perform well against (bosses with primarily melee range attacks), and some builds are likely to be very weak against this (e.g. warriors without a strong ranged weapon set). Having 15% uptime on projectile reflection and 10% uptime on obsidian flesh will probably help in situations where cripple + vigor isn’t enough for full damage reduction.

No/weak AoE means it’s not so good for zerg scenarios, but it should perform well in 1v1.

The major drawbacks of bringing condition builds to a dungeon are always going to be burns stacking duration and bleeds stacking to 25 unless you coordinate your group to use mostly, if not all, direct damage skills. Having a guardian or another elementalist in the party is going to decrease the burn uptime by quite a bit. In a party, you already regularly see ~10-15 stacks of bleeds on bosses and permanent burn.

In 1v1, it would still suffer from the problem of having no stun breakers, low hp, and reliance on earth attunement for damage. You yourself can be vulnerable to condition damage if you use your earth4 to reflect leaving only phoenix. You lose half your dps as soon as you leave earth to heal. You’d have to swap out pretty quickly unless you burn your earth4/5 cds right off the bat. It would absolutely destroy anyone without condition removals or CC though. I can see this doing particularly well against most warriors and mesmers. Rangers would seem to pose a problem because of your lack of CC and they can make use of the spring to remove conditions and burst heal.

Adastra.9821:

The major drawbacks of bringing condition builds to a dungeon are always going to be burns stacking duration and bleeds stacking to 25 unless you coordinate your group to use mostly, if not all, direct damage skills. Having a guardian or another elementalist in the party is going to decrease the burn uptime by quite a bit. In a party, you already regularly see ~10-15 stacks of bleeds on bosses and permanent burn.

This is an issue with condition builds, yes, but ANet have confirmed that they’re working on this. Having a viable build available when that time comes will speed up the process of getting an optimal build (I’m not going to claim this is optimal now, but it’s certainly viable if the environment shifts to enable conditions)

Adastra.9821:

In 1v1, it would still suffer from the problem of having no stun breakers, low hp, and reliance on earth attunement for damage. You yourself can be vulnerable to condition damage if you use your earth4 to reflect leaving only phoenix. You lose half your dps as soon as you leave earth to heal. You’d have to swap out pretty quickly unless you burn your earth4/5 cds right off the bat. It would absolutely destroy anyone without condition removals or CC though. I can see this doing particularly well against most warriors and mesmers. Rangers would seem to pose a problem because of your lack of CC and they can make use of the spring to remove conditions and burst heal.

This is mostly right. It’s possible to opt out of Radiation Field to provide room for a stun breaker (radiation field provides about 6.25% of total damage output, but the healing reduction and weakness are strong utility. Most players, however, would step out of it before they stack high), though that would bring the total unique conditions down to 3 and be easier to deal with.

Theoretically the build works with Staff as well, which provides enough bleeds to hit cap without Sigil of Earth (and also in an AoE), but takes longer to ramp up to the cap and naturally eruption is nigh-impossible to land in PvP. It also has less defensive options, having only magnetic aura, which is essentially a weaker magnetic wave with a longer cooldown unless you have powerful auras… lasts a little longer, though it’s actually visible to players. That last part could be important for Magnetic Wave – because the only visual indicator is a very shortlived and uncommon buff icon, it’s likely players won’t realise it’s there and keep using projectile attacks.

Why fire’s embrace instead of ember’s might? If you can maintain burning then it seems like 5% damage would be better then 3 sec of fire shield every 30 seconds.

The single strongest attack the build uses deals so little damage Fire’s Embrace will never add more than 20 damage; on the other hand extending the burn from Signet of Fire allows for not requiring the Signet on CD and getting some benefit from the +90 precision passive effect (as this build gets burning, bleeding and vigor on crit, a 4% higher crit rate has more meaning than 5% damage on Stone Shards, which has a base damage of 50)

I was also considering the “Signets give Fire Aura” trait, but as we shouldn’t be in melee range to begin with, it’s a little hard to justify. That said, a D/F version of the build could make use of Written in Stone with Signet of Restoration and give the Fire Aura on signet trait some more use. D/F would be slightly less stable and slightly longer bleed ramp time, with less defensive 2/3 abilities, which is why I’m not running it, but could be useful with Sig of Restoration (and have some small AoE radius on the main attack)