Guild Wars 2

Not sure what you mean about viable damage, to me all that means is you can kill stuff and stay alive (cause, you know, dead eles deal no damage).

You say you’ll be swapping attunements no matter the build, so you won’t lose any might stacking (except from the grandmaster fire trait, but without a single point in fire I can hit 25 stacks of might myself with S/D or S/F, so it’s not like you can’t have might in air).

For an air damage build, I’d put at least 15 points into air for the lightning strike on swap.

If you want single target burst, you’re going to want a scepter, staff is a ranged aoe/cc/support weapon and mainhand dagger is a PBAoE weapon primarily. You can do good single target damage with both, but scepter dagger air-swap>#2>#4 is like 3 hits in ~1sec, hard to get anything like that (in air) on dagger or staff. That combo is basically a guaranteed down on an injured foe with the bolt to the heart trait.

My “current” favorite build…

S/D with 15/0/0/25/30. If you can’t maintain 25 might stacks, you can’t ele J/K

…actually I’m not kidding…

Might comes from blast finishers. I actually don’t run Spell Slinger because I don’t run any cantrips (mist form is for kittens). 18 AoE might stack chain in s/d, and then cycle back for another 18 as soon as you can. Easy to maintain 25 stacks without Spell Slinger on cantrips if you’re good.

If you are running cantrips, then spell slinger takes you to an immediate 25 stacks on yourself, 18 on the whole party, but I’ll take extra dmg output utilites over cantrips any day, and it’s plenty easy enough to hold 25 stacks without them.

I’ll also sometimes run a 0/15/0/25/30 build and load up on Glyphs. Might stack chain then drop Sandstorm to blind everyone you just beat the crap out of… swap to air and flashbang them with a dodgeroll to blind them again… priceless.

I live and die by blast finishers

my main set is P/V/T from AC, a couple FOTM rings from drops (one’s basically PVT and I can’t remember the other’s stats lol). The rest of my gear is exotic crafted zerkers and my scepter and daggers are CoF zerkers. My staff is AC Prec/Vit/Healing Power (but I run a very specific staff build in wvw)

I leveled all the way to 80 while prioritizing air attunement for damage. It’s so easy to kite monsters in circles while casting arc lightning… and of course the blind also helps.