Guild Wars 2

• 2. How to be a good player

Until you have seen the best players at work it is hard to know what you can achieve in this game and how to improve your performance. What makes you a good player is not your build or gear, that is just paper. Instead it is your mindset.
You have to be aware of a few concepts and try to work best on each one of them.

Output.
This is what you provide in a fight. You can breakdown your output into a few categories such as damage, control, defense and support. What ever your build or your play-style you have to do as much as you can in each of these aspects. Remember that the “holy trinity” is in you. Therefore before each encounter you have to think about how to make your presence matter as much as possible by choosing your action carefully. Be conscious of everything your character can do!

Resource management
There is no such thing as mana in this game, but there are many resources you have to manage. The most important is time. The elementalist is a class that can do a lot, but not all of our potential output is appropriate for every situation. If you spend time casting spells with little relevance to the fight then you are wasting your time. You do not want to waste such a valuable resource as time. Similarly you have to consider your endurance, your cooldowns and every skill fact of your abilities. For example using magnetic wave is nice to cleanse your conditions, but if you can blast a field for a beneficial effect and damage your enemies at the same time then you are using your resources efficiently. Similarly if you have AoE support such as elemental attunement then make sure you buff as many allies as possible.
Adaptability is a capital to consider. You may have noticed that you can change you major trait choices when out of combat. Use this to your advantage: run builds that allow for changes of play-style. You have to be prepared to face many different types of encounters and they may not always go as planned. Be conscious of how flexible is your output.

Team play
GW2 is a group game! Remember that you have to pull your own weight but care about your team mates at the same time. Group coordination is the key to excellence.

• 3. Weapon choices

You should learn to master all weapon sets and conjures, changing them according to the situation.

One important concept to understand for every encounters is that melee is generally much more rewarding than range, if you can survive. This is because of many factors. Consider might combos from fire fields : they have an effect radius of 360. This means that if you stand further than 360 units away from your target for some time you will loose on the might stacks that your team can generate. Whether you are at range or in melee you will have to learn how to dodge. So you should try to stay as close to your team mates as possible in order to benefit from their support, and that is in melee range.

The main-hand dagger is our weapon of choice. Its attacks deal high damage at point blank, and due to their above-average melee range it is easy to land hits. You can deal very good and constant damage with this weapon. It is fast paced, it is dynamic and it is fun to play

The obvious off-hand choice is the focus. This weapon gives you incredible utility and support, which is much more valuable than the occasional burst an off-hand dagger can provide. This is a team-play weapon. I can not imagine playing PvE without a focus.

Therefore we are going to be mainly in a Dagger/Focus set up. I will not expand further on how to use each weapon. I advise you to learn by yourself and to read Neko’s guide for further help.

• 4. Basis of the builds

The common ground between the builds I will talk about is my will to manage my resources as efficiently as possible. The elementalists can do many things, he is the jack of all trades, but if you try to do them all at the same time you will certainly fail to be efficient. It is hard to manage having so many possibilities.

You want to have as much synergy as possible between your traits, and you want to avoid wasting resources you invested in. So here is my problematic:
How can I deal strong constant damage, while retaining access to my bursting abilities, to my control skills, to my support output and while maximising the effects of my traits?

The answer is fresh air.
This trait allows us to spend most of our time in the air attunement and to swap out to other attunements on demand. Basically, without this trait you would have to spend 13 seconds waiting for air to be off cooldown after swapping to earth to cleanse you conditions with magnetic wave for example. This would result in a big drop in your damage, because our strongest attack without cooldown is in the air attunement (lightning whip). People are often tempted to invest heavily in arcana in order to solve this problem. The issue is that arcana gives you only boon duration while air gives you precision and critical damage. If you can achieve 19 stacks of might on average then the 30% boon duration from arcana will raise it to 25, this is a boost of about 200 power. For the same amount of points air gives you 300 precision and 30 critical damage which are worth much more. In addition, the master and grand-master minor traits of the arcana trait line are very weak in comparison to that of the air trait line. The 30 points in air are well invested.

Having such an easy access to the air attunement is beneficial not only for its optimal auto-attack, but also to maximize the advantages provided by attunement specific damage boosts (air training). For example you can start a drake’s breath and swap to air as soon as you start casting in order for your spell to benefit from air bonuses.

This synergy is also increased by procs on attunement swaps. When you swap to air you will deal additional single-target damage due to electric discharge . Furthermore, you can take 5 points in arcana in order to achieve arcane fury on attunement swap. Fresh air has a cooldown of 5 seconds, so you will do 2 attunement swaps in 5 seconds, so you will generate more than 4 seconds of fury every 5 seconds for yourself. This is very strong.

The next obvious move is to invest 5 more points in arcana to get access to the adept major trait. This enables you to have vigor on crit. This is a necessary choice for survivability.

The base for our builds is therefore x/30/x/x/10. These 40 points are efficient and they solve our problematic. We will see how we can construct ends builds with our 30 remaining points in the following chapters.

• 5 Gear and Utilities

Direct damage! We are going to try an maximize precision, power and critical damage.
Full berserker is a very safe choice but in order to maximize your damage output it may be best to mix the stats combinations of your gear.

For this analysis I am assuming the following speedrun situation:
- Ascended gear
- Signet of Fire (180 precision)
- Permanent Fury (20% critical chance)
- 25 Might stacks (875 power)
- Strength and Discipline Banners from Warriors (170 power, 170 precision, 15% critical damage)
- 25 Stacks of Bloodlust (250 power)
- Curry Butternut Squash Soup (100 precision & 10 critical damage)

The basis of our build is 30 in air (300 precision, 30% critical damage), therefore the only variable that can affect our stat optimization is Fire (power). The other trait lines offer modifier bonuses that affect our dps independently of stat points. Depending on how many points you put in Fire it will be best to swap a number of armor pieces from berserker to assassin. There are four possible scenarios: 0, 10, 20, or 30 points in Fire.

For these four scenarios it appears optimal to swap your entire armor (head, shoulders, chest, gloves, legs, shoes) to assassin. This results in a shift of -94 Power and +94 Precision from full berserker gear. Our critical chance is therefore brought to 100%. In regards to Fresh Air, this gives the highest consistency in our rotations.

Therefore our gear is best as:
- Armor: assassin
- Weapons: berserker
- Trinkets: berserker

Note however that such mix is only slightly better than a full berserker set. In addition, going full berserker may be a more efficient choice for less optimal situations (out of speedruns)

If you want some survivability you should change some pieces to PVT.
Always keep trinkets in zerker: they have the highest amount of stats for direct damage, but you can play around a bit with armor and weapons. If you are going to switch zerker->PVT you should change pieces in this order of priority: legs/head, chest, weapons, rest. This is because of their suboptimal ratios of stats.
However remember that passive survivability from stats (Toughtness, Vitality) is inferior to active defensive skills. This is why it is more optimal keep a fully offensive gear while achieving survivability via control and active defense.

Runes and sigils

Sigils: +5% direct damage and sigil of battle (might on swap), combined together they provide the highest increase to direct damage possible. When facing hardship I would use a sigil of energy instead of sigil of battle.

Runes: Divinity runes are quite good, but never the best. Yes you make use of all the stats they provide, but the problem is that if you try to use them all then you are using skills that are not necessary and you are not doing a good job. Know what is your job and take the right runes for this.
Consider the following runes:
- Ruby orb: simple and straightforward choice.
- Runes of Strength: if you can maintain a good number of might stacks (9 on average, with the duration bonus) then this set provides more damage than ruby orbs.
- Rune of the Scholar: simply the best choice in terms of increased damage, but risky.

Utilities

To be written soon

Interesting choices:

• Signet of Fire
• Ice Bow to cast Ice Storm, Deep Freeze, and sometimes Frost Fan.
• Glyph of Storms
• Lightning Hammer
• Glyph of Elemental Power
• Arcane Shield
• Arcane Wave

• 6. Final builds

We have 30 points to spend and we have 3 trait lines to consider (arcana should not exceed the 10 points already invested). Let’s take a look at the most interesting choices.

Fire

• Attributes: Power is always desirable; Condition Duration fits our varied condition output.
• Burning Precision allows you to maintain a strong burning uptime on your targets. Good synergy with our rotation, condition duration from fire, and other desirable fire traits.
• Pyromancer’s Alacrity brings the cooldown of Burning speed on par with the cooldown of our fire attunement. This spell is the most important in our rotations so being able to use it more frequently is very strong.
• Persisting flames increases again the potency of Burning Speed and allows us to execute might combos more easily.
• Minors: Sunspot is hard to land since we are not in melee but in mid range; Burning Rage is a strong damage modifiers that fits our play-style very well.

Air

• Attributes: Precision and critical damage together boost our direct damage enormously. The higher our critical hit chance the more consistent our Fresh Air rotations will be.
• Quick Glyphs increases our battlefield control significantly. Very useful.
• Bolt to the Heart is estimated as a 5% boost to damage. This is a good damaging option.
• Air Training boosts the damage in our most used attunement. A must take.
• Fresh Air is the core of our builds, you should know this by now
• Minors: Electric Discharge synergises well with fresh air. This is a good damage boost. Weak Spot allows us to generate a decent amount of vulnerability stacks.

Earth

• Attributes: Toughness will not save you. Controlling the battlefield with our conditions, and our defensive abilities, are what make us survive. Condition damage is negligible since we are dealing direct damage almost exclusively.
• Stone Splinters is a strong damage modifier that is virtually unconditional: we stand at mid range (around 300 range) so this will always be active.

Water

• Attributes: Vitality is a passive stats that boost our survivability significantly. Healing power is appreciated but not essential.
• Vital Striking is a strong damage boost. However it is easy to loose it due to our low health pool. This is also why Water attributes and minor traits are desirable.
• Cleansing Wave is a good support trait. Don’t use it selfishly.
• Minors: Soothing Mist helps with maintaining your group above 90% HP (to keep Runes of the Scholar and Vital Striking activated ). Healing Ripple is a good group heal. Bountiful Power is a desirable damage boost but if you are going to maximise your damage you should probably invest trait points in more offensive trait lines.

This leads us to two kinds of builds.

Normal build

Comfortable: 0/30/10/20/10 (cleansing wave, vital striking, stone splinters)
Damaging variant: 10/30/10/10/10 (burning precision, stone splinters, vital striking)

Optimized build
(with Persisting Flames, providing Fury for the group and dealing strong damage)

Current build: Advised: 30/30/0/0/10 (burning precision, pyromancer’s alacrity)
Damaging variant: 30/30/10/0/0 (burning precision, pyromancer’s alacrity, stone splinters)

• 7. Mechanics

You have to train until you know exactly what you are doing with your spells, until you feel the cooldowns under your skin, until you become the elementalist
The combat mechanics of a fresh air build are very interesting. Be prepared to execute numerous actions per minutes. Coffee is advised, Italian of course.

Use of fresh air
The beauty of this trait is that it does not only recharge your attunement cooldown but also its swapping cooldown. Normally when you swap to an attunement you cannot swap to an other for 1.625 seconds (base recharge time, reduced by arcana). Fresh air bypasses this.
In combat you will spend most of your time in the air attunement. Every time the fresh air internal cooldown is going to be up (every 5 seconds) you can swap to an other attunement for its specific purpose and swap back to air almost instantly due to our high crit chance (berzerker gear and fury). This allows you to be able to use all your skills, benefit from strong buffs, and deal good damage at the same time.

Optimal rotations
There is no such thing. Optimal rotations are just a mental experiment of what skills to chain in order to do the highest consistent damage possible. In game, you will almost never have the opportunity to unfold these rotations because you will have to dodge, react to the unexpected, and adapt. However they are a good measure of what to aim to do in order to get close to maximum damage output. Optimal rotations are guidelines.

• Normal rotation: start in air, swap to fire, burning speed, drake’s breath (if target isn’t perma-burning already), swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, swap to earth, ring of earth, swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, swap to water, cone of cold, swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, repeat.

• Optimized rotation with persisting flames. If your build allows for it, you can use the combined effect of the fire field from burning speed’s trail and the blasts finishers from comet and magnetic wave to give might and fury for your group. This leads us to a two-phased cycle: start in air, swap to fire, cast burning speed, swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, swap to earth, cast ring of earth and magnetic wave (blast), swap to air and cast lightning whip (7 times) until fire is back up. The second phase of the cycle is the same except you swap to water instead of earth and blast your fire field with comet.

Remember to maximize the effect of your traits: electric discharge, arcane fury, sunspot, etc. It is interesting to notice that our rotations generate many hits per second (often more than 2) which is most beneficial for traits like weak spot or burning precision.

• 8. How to use this guide

I am very often posting in this thread to give updates on how to achieve more with the elementalist. I can not go into great details in the first posts of this guide due to character limitations, so I highly advise you to follow the ongoing discussions. Also feel free to ask me anything or contribute in any way: by working together we can all get better

• 9. DPS Calculator

You can find my DPS calculator (the Zalculator) at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B88y8fHnpBfZRnJRdVNqVC1MYXc&usp=sharing
(Requires Excel 2007 or later)

This tool is in its alpha stage. It is functional but not yet complete. I will provide a guide for its use as soon as possible.

• 10. Conclusion

Adapt. Only the fittest will survive!
Make choices, and think ahead. Ultimately what makes you a good player is using the right skill at the right moment, it’s not your traits, not your gear, not your runes and sigils. So I am just giving you guidelines here, and I will be glad to discuss anything with anyone!

Time to level up the elementalist community!

Sincere thanks to Haviz.1340 for his enriching guidance.

• 11. Annex

Elementalist skill data

I see absolutely no reason to put 10 in Fire. Those 10 points would be better split between water and arcane, giving you water 20 (remove condition when switching to water) and arcane 10 (boon when switching attunement).

My biggest problem with this guide is that it purports to be a Direct Damage focused Ele build, but it doesn’t use Lightning Hammer. I understand the utility of the various Ele’s skills and all that, but not even slotting it in, even without the trait, seems like a big mistake.

I did not say that I don’t use LH
It is quite easy to use it with a build very close to this one, but in my set-up I just don’t. I cannot afford to lock myself in just doing melee blinds + damage. Actually saving your teammates from harm (with anti-projectile for example) allows them to continuously deal damage and therefore the total damage of the group is increased. So what I mean is that going LH is usually suboptimal (not in some situations) because you can do about 70% of that damage without it, and enable your teammates to do 10% more each at the same time (for a total of 110% compared to LH). You see my point? It’s about group optimisation.

Reaching 20 in water does not give you much (water V – cleanse on attunement- is attainable at 10). Arcane boons are nice and handy, but in term of usefulness they mostly provide regen and protection, which is already given to me by my guardian mate. So it is more efficient to go for damage (100 power, +5% damage on burning foe).

I play Dagger-Focus Elementalist with Lightning Hammer and it works just fine. I’ll be the first to point out how good Swirling Winds is (I continually tell people to use it in my guide) but it’s on a 30 sec CD or 24 with the CDR. With two hammers and the trait, you should be able to open with a swirling winds, lay down a hammer, smack things around, then place up another Swirling Winds within that timeframe. I just really do feel like putting out a build which talks about being a direct damage-focused PvE Ele but doesn’t mention Lightning Hammer at all is just wrong.

I also agree with the above poster that the Fire trait which gives +5% against burning foes just doesn’t seem nearly as useful as investing more points into Arcane Recharge rate or more points in Water for Bountiful Power and another Water trait. For instance, you could move those 10 in Fire into Water for 25 in Water altogether, so that you have Bountiful Power, Cleansing Wave, and Vital Striking all in the same build. To me, going 10 points into Fire is just a bad idea. I go into Fire because I want Conjurer or Persisting Flames or both.

Lightning hammer is very good at what it does, I don’t deny this. But like I said a build should not be made according to one utility skill because that is just limiting. A build should be able to adapt however, so you could very well be right: if you plan on using LH then go for at least 20 in water and grab that +20% damage on vulnerable target.
However bear in mind that LH is good mostly because of this trait, otherwise its coefficient per second is 1.42 VS 1.22 for lightning whip, and at 2000 power the damage difference is only 16% (plus the 8% from the stats). Factor in the 20% from water and you get something really strong, but you have to be in close melee range (150 instead of 300) and you cannot use most of your active defence reactively without a substantial loss in damage. Also you loose the fury (uptime of at least 70%) and lightning strike procs (coeff/s=0.14), as well as the heal and cleanse from water . . .
So yes, it’s very strong, but limited to CoF-like encounters in my opinion.

Anyway you may have a point: 10 in fire gives a damage increase of 10% (including the 5%) and some condition duration; getting 25 in water can give me more than this (10% above 90% hp, bountyful power ~5%) as well as 1k more hp, not bad! I will have to test whether I stay above 90% hp more than half of the time, but at the moment I prefer to go for consistency.

Arcane recharge rate is almost pointless with this build.

Edit: Although I find it not essential, I will make a paragraph on LH.

Actually what I am most likely to do is swap the 10 points in earth to water in order to reach 25. This is because it seems that the bonus from stone splinters is just 5% and not 10%, and vitality is preferable anyway.

Updated after testing stone splinters (tooltip bugged), it was too good to be true!

if the earth shield had a little more damage AND cleave it could make a decent backup conjure for LH.

Actually earth shield fits quite a nice role, but it could be made more potent without increasing its damage (increased pull aoe, etc).

On topic, I would like to stress the potency of the new improved Weakness. This condition is quite strong: on average it provides a 25% damage reduction (on average, because, it is unreliable and you are still exposed to spikes). With dagger a2 and glyph of elemental power you can maintain it up to close to full uptime in aoe. Consider this!
But this is double-edged: weakness is now quite important to dispell, especially since you cannot spike down most mobs.

Updated every section and added a paragraph about Lightning Hammer.

I wouldn’t do 10 in fire or 25 in water. I’d rather put 20 in water and all the rest in arcana for the staff trait or vigor on crit + longer boonduration and better atunement recharge outweighs the 100 power, condition duration, vitality and healing power you get by quite a bit because having lower attunement recharge and more vigor will allow you to use all your skills more effectively and boons like vigor will last longer allowing you to dodge more thus negating more damage and allowing you to do more damage in long drawn out fights which are quite prevalent in dungeons.

The staff trait is overrated.

Attunement recharge is pointless with this build: 15 extra points in arcane reduce the attunement recharge to ~12s, a 3 second improvement out of 15, that is a 20% increase to my heals from swapping to water (about 1k4) . . . compared to 15% damage and 1k hp?

Vigor is quite nice, but even in Arah I find I am able to sustain myself without it. It is a matter of practice and group set-up. Arcane boons are very nice though, at the moment I do not need them because I am running with a guardian, but this could change!

atm i using 30/20/0/20/0 hammer build or 30/20/0/0/20 s\d or 0/20/0/20/30 d\d when will play easymode

Zelyhn.8069:

The staff trait is overrated.

Attunement recharge is pointless with this build: 15 extra points in arcane reduce the attunement recharge to ~12s, a 3 second improvement out of 15, that is a 20% increase to my heals from swapping to water (about 1k4) . . . compared to 15% damage and 1k hp?

Vigor is quite nice, but even in Arah I find I am able to sustain myself without it. It is a matter of practice and group set-up. Arcane boons are very nice though, at the moment I do not need them because I am running with a guardian, but this could change!

thanks for the in-depth reply, very informative.
Its just that you can spend 4 seconds per atunement and swap around constantly instead of 5 seconds. The difference is minimal but it does prevent you from getting stuck in one atunement. But if you’re a better player than me and can plan when to use what atunement effectively instead of spamming them when you blew all y’r CD’s then yes you can drop some arcane points easy.

I would like to agree but you need to consider this:
Air is the best attunement of direct damage because its auto-attack has the highest power coefficient per second (1.22). So ideally you want to always deal damage in air. Fire auto-attack is a bit less optimal (coeff/s=1.13) and is close-melee single target, so it is a decent back-up for air, but definitely not as good.
Now if you roll between the four attunements and stay in each for four seconds, then you have a cycle of 4 seconds of optimal damage, 4s of not-that-optimal damage, then 4s of bad damage followed by an other 4s of useless animations. Also now that you use all your attunements wihtout planning for them (a cycle!) then it may happen that you get in danger just after getting out of water. It’s very likely, since you will use water regardless of the situation. At this point you have to wait 12 seconds before getting back there. Of course with my build that would be a good 15s, but it is less likely to happen since I don’t include water in a cycle, I plan for it (more or less, since I use it for reactive defence). But that’s just water! There are also plenty of active defence spells that could be locked out for you for several seconds when you need them. Yes it requires some planning and I won’t say that I am so skilled that I can plan for everything, but I find that it is something I can get used to. Try it

With my build you rarely spend more than 1 or 2 seconds per attunement apart from air, so the damage is optimal and you can still use all of the utility.

Mind explaining how fury is locked out on LH?
Thanks in advance.

I really like your concept of using fresh air to enable a build focused primarily on air with the ability to use other attunements solely for their utility. I was also working on a S/F fresh-air build, but feel like you get more survivability from going 30 into arcane as opposed to water. Sure, the stats on arcane don’t directly help you, but the boon duration and boons on swap certainly do. Going into arcane will increase your fury uptime and might stacks. It also gives you more utility for damage while in fire/earth, heal in water (EA dodge roll every 10 s as opposed to health on swap every 15), and defense in air (blinds). With your last 10 points, you can trait how you like (water for cleanse, fire for + damage, or earth for defense/damage trait).

Also, for your notes on LH: you can still attunement swap while holding the LH, and still get the attunement bonuses, so your points about lower fury uptime are incorrect. Also, if you go at least 10 into arcane, you will also get those boons while swapping as you hold the hammer. I am unsure if the lightning strike or fresh air will proc, but there is no reason they shouldn’t.

About LH:
The reason I say that you are locked out of attunement swaps (and fury) is because it is more optimal to stay in water with the 20% increased damage to vulnerable targets. Even if you take 15 arcane (lingering elements, bugged) you will not benefit from this bonus in other attunements. It is a soft-lock, I admit, but a lock nonetheless.
I made some calculations, with 0/30/0/10/30 if you swap attunements constantly to proc perma fury, lightning discharge and stay in water as long as possible (6s) to benefit from the 20%, your LH does 7% more damage than my build’s lightning whip.
This is because you loose the damage from fire, you loose the bonus damage from air, you loose the water bonus on 90% hp and the 1% per boon (~5). However you have a bit more might, which I did not include in my calculation.

About going into arcane rather than water for survivability, you have a point: if you disregard my set-up (I play with a guardian) then arcane gives you more survivability on average in the long run, it’s true.
However I go into water not really just for survivability. Water gives me damage as well, and not just a bit! Water also increases my passive defence (more hp) which solves one of my biggest worries: getting one-shot.
One move that you could do is take 5 points from water (get rid of bountiful power) and put them in arcane to get the boons. In fact it is a matter of play style. It could be quite valid to go for more arcane, depending on your group.
Like I said, never copy a build, experiment and find what is best for you. I like that you ask me this kind of questions, thanks!

Those are way too few points into arcane. You’re gonna get stuck autoattacking a lot while waiting for your attunement cooldowns.

That’s the point! Our main source of damage comes from the AA, so if I can keep using lightning whip while providing active defence and utilities I am being optimal

I have met countless elems who just keep switching attunements without thinking. And the worse was that they would just use any spell but the auto-attacks! The auto-attack, along with a few other spells, are our source of damage in daggers.

Aether McLoud.1975:

Those are way too few points into arcane. You’re gonna get stuck autoattacking a lot while waiting for your attunement cooldowns.

This is a highly offensive Fresh Air DPS build. It uses Fresh Air to rotate through attunements. Lightning Whip is the Ele’s strongest auto, so the basic idea is to use the various burst and utility skills from the other attunements, then go back to Air for Lightning Whip.

Staff ele main 1000+ hours
missing arah p4 for dungeon master

my optimized dps build

Full Berserker
- Staff 1: sigil of bloodlust

- Staff 2: sigil of battle
after 25 stacks or during boss fight

Boon runes (addicted to boon durations)
10 air, 30 water, 30 arcane (safer)
20 air, 20 water, 30 arcane (feeling lucky)

Started with mix of Berserker and PVT
ended up with only Berserker because PVT was no longer needed
(learned to avoid getting downed)

Stat pic sample (without food, fully buffed, gear not best in slot yet)

Usually have Mist Form equipped (even after nerf)

@Qin
You cannot say you are optimized if you decide to lock yourself in one weapon set-up.
Also you intend to go for dps, but you don’t even have 10 in fire for the 10% increased damage in fire: the main source of direct damage in staff.
Therefore I can safely assume (from your 30 arcane) that you like to constantly switch between attunements. While this is generally good in term of output, it is definitively bad in term of direct damage, so your zerker gear is not being used to its fullest.
My advice, if you feel confident with your build, is to try more offensive weapons when the situation allows for it. The main-hand dagger for example is a very strong choice for dealing damage.

That’s why I primarily focus on water and air traits while my boon (might-stacking) burst is in earth and fire thus swapping between all 4 atunements will always be useful.

You are right, swapping between attunements trully is useful, especially when you have points in arcane.
However pretty much everything you can do is useful, the problem is whether what you do is as useful as possible.

Updated:

10/30/0/20/10 is preferable to 10/30/25/5
This is because bountiful power gives you 1% damage per boon, so it is an increase of damage of about 3% to 6% on average.
Arcane boons however provide, at least, might for 15×1.1=16.5 second with a cooldown trigger of ~13 second (attunement cooldown). A single stack of might is roughly equal to 1.5% increased damage with my build, so if you can buff 2 additional team mates as you swap then you are already on par with bountiful power in term of group increased damage.
Giving up 5 points in water reduces your effective hp by about 4% with my build, but you gain regeneration and protection from boons to compensate.
Finally this move is desirable because it opens for more room for flexibility: you now have access to vigor.

Updated:

Edited all sections
Current build 0/30/10/20/10

I will add videos soon.

Zelyhn.8069:

@Qin
You cannot say you are optimized if you decide to lock yourself in one weapon set-up.

Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t your build doing exactly the same thing? Fresh air seems to imply you want to get back to air attunement quickly and frequently, which only seems useful to me when using main hand dagger. Certainly not very useful when using staff.

An attunement is not the same as a weapon (well, it is mechanically, but not in practice), especially in a Fresh Air build. Now, granted I prefer my build with the scepter, but the same applies to dagger.

FA does make us focus on air magic which is our single target damage attunement (by design); however it does not lock us into only using air. In truth, it actually encourages you to use the other three attunements as a compliment to air. This is how Anet (imo) wants us to use a mono-attunement build. All of our strength is in that attunement, but we don’t just stay in it and ignore the others. The only way to use FA and the 15 point minor air trait is to swap attunements frequently.

Now, going into an EA version actually eliminates the choice of which attunement to go to by allowing more of them to be open when you can swap out. I run a different build than this one, but I do only have 10 points in Arcana. Today I tried a 0/30/0/10/30 after being 20/30/0/10/10 and found that I wasn’t thinking about which attunements to use when I could swap. Obviously, I would always hit fire since when that was off CD my two main burst damage abilities (DT and Phoenix) were both off CD too…but choosing when to go to Earth and when to go to Water takes more thought really. I might need a bit of healing and cleansing later in the fight…so I should save water and constantly switch between Fire and Earth. (As in Fire>Air>earth>air>fire, etc.) Or I might need more CC so I would use Fire and Water. when I had 30 in Arcana I could usually rely on all of them being up whenever I needed. (also doing much less damage and both my fire burst not lining up with Fire Attunement CD so it messed me up)

Hope that helps

@ Kahzi
You are right that FA benefits dagger and scepter way more than staff. But my build does not limit the use of the staff, actually I mention many times that I leave room for adaptability that allows you to best respond to any given situation. If you are going to use the staff you can just choose a different trait choice than FA. As for me I still keep it even with staff because I like to spam lightning surge on cd and lightning discharge procs. Like I said, the staff is rarely used for its damage in PvE. If you plan on using it for its damage then it is best to take the + 10% damage in fire attunement from the fire trait line.
By the way you can still deal a decent amount of damage in staff with FA: fire, flame burst (if required), lava font , switch to air instantly, wait, switch to water, ice spike, switch to air instantly, wait, switch to earth, eruption and switch back to air instantly. The idea is that all these other attunement spells will deal their damage while you will be in air, therefore benefiting from + 10% damage and fury without changing the build.

@ Fade
Spot on!
I found that in dagger I did not need more arcana past 10 points for three reasons: no additional damage or support apart from vigor, which I do not require; bugged lingering elements; and no need for lower cooldown on fire (with daggers I can stack near perma burn with a drake’s breath every 12.5 seconds so less cd would not increase my burn damage, and burning speed has 15s cd). But more arcana could be a valid choice: it is more defensive and I can understand why people would want more defense. Still, going 30 in arcane just for a bit more defense and EA is a waste of points in my opinion (in PvE).

Can you tell me which fire traits you are using with your build?

I typically use increased damage in Fire Attunement and shorter Fire spells CDs. I don’t know how this would work for Dagger…but for Scepter with 10 points in Arcana Dragon’s Tooth and Phoenix are either off CD or a couple seconds as soon as I hop into fire. Using a Jade Maw tentacle as a metric, that burst (with just the blast AE from Phoenix) crits for around 10k in my old setup. I just got full scholar last night…so…huge damage increase while in Fire and Air and above 90% HP.

I am not an expert on scepter but I think you could save that + 10% damage in fire: just make sure you swap out of air into fire while the auto-attack is still channeling so that it crits while in fire, then cast your bursts and swap back to air before they land so that they benefit from the + 10% damage of that attunement. You could for example use the burn on crit chance instead, or more likely the + 5% damage to burning foes.
The issue you may have is that phoenix has a quite long cd, even with cd reduction you likely have to wait a few seconds before it is available (16s reduced skill cd VS 12.5s attunement cd), which means that either you waste time waiting for it, or you swap to fire less often or you use phoenix every other fire swaps. This is less of an issue for dagger since burning speed has 15s cd.
Also there is a good chance that the augmented condition duration from the fire trait line is not being used since you likely apply little burn/bleeds.
It simply seems to me that you could do without the fire trait line. You could just choose to cast phoenix once every two fire swaps, and invest those 10-20 points somewhere else, like earth (+ 10% damage under 600 range compensates for the loss of 200 power, stability) and water (healing ripple helps to stay above 90% hp, cleansing on swap). But I can imagine that in scepter you likely don’t need this defense.
Let me know what you think!

I’ll be looking into swapping traits (and sigil of perception) once I get more berserker gear. Right now I’m running Valk armor, zerker weapons, and mostly Cavalier exotics with Valk gems (yellow ones). Necklace is Celestial and one earring…thing…is zerker. Eventually going to be full zerker trinks.

For my current setup, I don’t reliably crit enough (or attune when the ICD is almost up) that I can switch to air all the time before DT and Phoenix hit…so I just take the safe route and stay in fire until they both hit…then switch. I actually haven’t been 80 on my ele for that long (just a couple weeks now…or maybe a month). That said…it’s been a blast so far so definitely sticking to it.

I do know that a S/D ele benefits from being in under 600 range (so would a S/F but not as much). Stability would definitely help for some bosses (CoF1 end boss). I have played around with specs fighting that stupid Norn and his dog (beat it with a 0/30/0/30/10 build). So…those tidbits do work for Scepter overall…just not my current gear setup XD

@OP’s build

The build may work fine, but D/F is awkward in and of itself, which is not your builds fault.

Breakdown of D/F
Fire – Spam your 4 skills then get out. Inflict AoE burning, a bit of damage, a fire field, and a flame shield. Overall low damage.
Air – Accessible whenever, strong auto-attack, 50% uptime weakness, melee, and ranged defensive skill, and a single target KD. Good damage.
Water – Vulnerability, Chill, Heal, and a Daze. Low damage, decent CC.
Earth – Slow bleed stack, leap w/ immobilize, everything skill, and invincible. Low damage.

It’s access to a lot of stuff, and it can work, but you aren’t dealing much damage. Most of your damage is coming from your auto attack, which you’re using fresh air to maintain access to. You run into the same situation as any other ele build though, in that once you swap to an attunement, you may as well just blow as many of the skills as quickly as possible then swap back to air, because it’ll be on lockdown for 12 seconds. Comet and Obsidian Flesh are the only two I wouldn’t spam, and I’d hope I don’t need them in the next 12 seconds.

I just don’t know how useful any of this stuff is when I can essentially do the same thing you’re doing with a Lightning Hammer build and have incredible damage output, while still having access to all the utility from a focus. I can also give my whole party 15 stacks of might for 20+ seconds and 50+ seconds of fury every 30 seconds by going 30 into fire and using scepter focus.

Hello! I really love this build and guide!—
Id love to see a video of it in action! And maybe stats/gear real quick just to get your current ideal setup! Thanks!

I’ve been doing a very similar fresh air build for a while now, mostly used in fractals but some dungeons thrown into the mix, and I’ve been enjoying myself. I’ve been using daggers whenever the situation allows, but I was wondering what you guys thought about the damage on scepter. It seems to me like staff is doing way more single target damage than scepter (even with a fresh air build, not staying purely in fire) and the only time it’s worth pulling out a scepter is when you need range and the defenses from the focus. Am I just imagining this or has anyone else noticed similar? I sure wish we had the ability to export our combat logs so I had some actual evidence to back up my suspicions.

Hello all, thank you for your interest in this thread. I am on a trip, with little access to the web, so I will reply as soon as I can, and videos will be posted when I return :)

@ Shockwave
Actually with this build you usually use at most one or two skills before switching back to air, in fact you spend at best a little more than a few seconds out of this attunement.
The focus is compulsory in high level PvE, and the dagger is simply the best option for damage while maintaining my utility. The fury stacking LH build is the only other build that seems optimal to me, indeed, but not for high level PvE because it is way too clunky (it is good for speedruns mainly). I will explain in a following message why this LH build is hardly used in high level PvE.
If you look at the damage output of my build, in fact it deals a lot (for an elementalist) ! The weapon set allows you to stack a lot of might (more than off-hand dagger) and the combat style is very fluid. Once I post videos you can see this for yourself

@ Kevin
I use full zerker ascended gear, ruby orbs (I would use runes of strength if they were not bugged), sigils of force and battle. Most of the time I use glyph of elemental power, glyph of storms, LH (expect your teammates to pick up the second hammer) or signet of fire.
Videos will come soon!

@ Kahzi
Yes scepter deals very little damage and it is very limited in aoe, I almost never use it. When I have to be at range I usually use the staff, but that is rare. You don’t need combat logs to check this, just look at the coefficients of the spells: Skill data

Ok now I have some time to write about my view of the famous persisting flame LH build.
As I see it there are three builds: 30/0/0/20/20, 30/20/0/20/0, and 30/0/0/10/30

I do not have my spreadsheet available right now so I am just going to talk about the builds without specific calculations. I will update this post with the accurate numbers later if required.

The common ideas of the three builds are the following:
-using the two LH conjured as the main source of damage while staying in the water attunement
-buffing allies with blast finishers on fire fields for fury and might

My general critique is the following:
-buffing allies with fury is nice, but perma buffing is an overkill (no need to use that many resources for this since most classes can have access to fury, persisting flame is very good though)
-relying on using the two LH and staying in water for your damage is far too cluncky.
It is a very simple remark indeed, but let me explain.
Once you conjure the hammer you deal good damage. If you have to drop the hammer then your damage becomes terribly low (scepter) until you pick the second one. It does not seem like much of a problem like this, but when the encounters are challenging (some dungeons, high level fractals) this becomes a huge issue. It has been argued that it is possible to plan to drop the LH every 30 seconds, use utilities and skills from weapon sets and then pick the second LH. I do not disagree with this, but it locks you into cycles of 30s. So basically you have to plan to use all your utility at once every 30s. In my opinion this is terrible. I say this because in challenging PvE you will need to use the focus in air, water and earth. The chance that you will need to be invulnerable, self block projectiles, aoe block projectiles, knock down, and daze all at the same time every 30s is null. At best you can manage a rotation for swirling wind, but that is still very limiting. If at any point, after you pick the LH, you have to use any of the other utilities, or mist form, or pick up an item, then the synergy collapses instantly.
The build relies a lot on the ability to generate blast finishers every 30s in order to give might and fury. This means that every 30 you will have to switch out of water, so this attunement that is required to deal your damage will be locked for some time. In this time you do the persisting flame combos, which are very good (you need only 3 blast every 30s, it is very easy on scepter and takes little time), then you pick up the hammer again. The consequence of this is that for at least 8 (to 13) seconds (depending on arcana) you will not benefit from the modifiers from water. This is crucial! Think of it: for a good third of your time you will not have the 20% increased damage that the build is supposed to give you.
So in short: far too cluncky, limiting, vulnerable to change (not reactive at all) and inconstant.

Now to the builds, in order of viability from lowest to highest in my opinion:

1) 30/0/0/10/30
All you gain is some utility from arcane, 300 power, and 20% more damage. This is very little and as I see it the only advantage of this build is the persisting flame combo (support), the damage itself is low.

2) 30/0/0/20/20
At least here you have decent damage in water attunement. Under the right conditions you get a modifier of 50%, which is good (my build gives 30), but no points in air so in the end you deal less (air gives 300 preci and 30 crit, which is far more beneficial than 300 power, especially under might stacks).

3) 30/20/0/20/0
Awesome damage, likely quite better than my build, but no generation of vulnerability. This is the only LH build that I consider viable, in non-challenging PvE (like speed runs). It is the most cluncky of all LH builds, so in high level PvE it becomes rapidly obsolete.

I would like to add that LH builds have very little ability to generate weakness and protection, which are essential (my build easily keeps 40% uptime on team protection, and near permanent aoe weakness).
And finally, LH is just so much more usefull if used situationally: with an ally wielding the second one, spamming blinds and blasts, and then getting back to constant and fluid damage.

However I agree that persisting flames can be very good.

I hope this explanation is useful to understand why I am quite against using the LH as a main source of dps. I am open to any critiques, and I may be wrong so feel free to let me know if you disagree.

(Written from a mobile device, my apologies for the possible mistakes)

let me offer you a different view on LH usage. So you’re in S/D, you do your fire field blast combo, and you end with Churning Earth, swapping to air mid-cast for some extra damage. THIS POINT is where LH comes in handy. You’re in air left with nothing to do but AA and the occasional skill 2, while waiting for fire cooldown.

You DON’T use Conjurer -> swap to fire when possible -> LH runs out -> DT -> Ring of Fire -> Phoenix -> Fire Grab -> pick up 2nd hammer and apply another 2 fire blasts. This way you can maintain high might stacks.

2nd LH runs out -> do your fire combo -> STAY in fire -> do your fire combo a 2nd time -> THEN swap to earth -> LH will be available -> rinse and repeat.

p.s. in case you didn’t know, “fire combo” involves 2 DT’s before swapping to earth. And yes, you don’t need the Piercing Shards water trait for this.

LH is good for speed runs, this and similiar builds for more challenging content than 3-2-1-dodge.

The build relies a lot on the ability to generate blast finishers every 30s in order to give might and fury. This means that every 30 you will have to switch out of water, so this attunement that is required to deal your damage will be locked for some time.

You’re viewing these builds from the point of view of random parties only. In an LH ele based group you don’t have to provide any sort of fire field beside the first one, after which you immediately swap to water and LH. The guardian(s) provide the fire fields.
Same thing for your comments about the need for CC or reflection. At no point do you have to swap attu to get another fire field again.

Yes, LH ele is pretty much a leech build in that it solely relies on the rest of the group to use their utilities. The dps is well worth it for a lot of content though. Most of the named dungeons, in fact. Whether it’s any good for fractals I can’t really say and would need to test it more there with the typical 2x guardian formations. One of the things that make it work might break on a fractal I haven’t done yet on LH ele, dredge, since.. uh.. you can’t blind the dredge, and they know how to bring a world of hurt.

Pure LH ele builds though are worthless in random parties/pug/group without competent guardians. If you can’t rely on the rest of the group to use their reflection, provide things like aegis, initial blind (before your lh chain starts moving), cc and so on the LH builds are definitively not worth using. That doesn’t mean you can’t use LH but a pure build centered around its use is more pain than gain in a group that is not tailored for it.

@Zelyhn.8069

What do you think about this variation? 0/30/30/0/10
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAodhEmkblR0gjDIjHdgI4BiHWgDwhlC5AA-jAyAYLhQCCIJCI5VEN2ibR0YVLYqSioavRR0qlCIixAA-e

I do not understand the role of water in your build… 10% In water imho can be reached by using 25 trait in earth. (when you dodge you don’t do damage) and with vigor in arcana you’ll regen it fast. Also if you use d/f you have 2 auras which you can use to get 33 seconds of protection (especially during heal channeling)! Also -20% earth recharge allows you to use invulnerability each of your 2nd switch to earth not on a 3rd one!

We get -2k hp but we get +200 toughness 6 sec protection and 10 sec faster invul!