Guild Wars 2

hello ele community, I have a question: I use a full zerker LH (glass canon) ele 6/6/2/0/0-S/F have 11k health and 1900 armor, is it normal to generate aggro over warriors or other zerker class?, the boss always focus on me, and it makes me kiss the floor.

what is the best ele dps gear or build in dungeons with random people?

From my experience in the game, enemies seem to focus on creatures that do these two things:
-Do lots of damage
-Have low HP

Zerker LH Ele does obscene damage and has about 10k HP base, so for the most part, things will focus you down in dungeons.

The thing that I would suggest would be playing Dagger/Focus. It’s not as high damage (but still very high), but has access to twice as much dodging, and better defensive skills.

Here’s the guides on Ele and Dagger/Focus:
-http://dulfy.net/2014/07/11/gw2-elementalist-pve-class-guide-by-haviz-and-zelyhn/
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sr5tJKLfZk&list=PLwQtsq8Rv5LXQs8gHpDLu-zzl8IdTEWLG&index=3

Yea I totally feel your pain, I’m perfectly comfortable in dungeons I run regularly like CoF, CM, etc but I tried to run a CoE the other day and kept getting nailed by the little Asuran boss. The run was with Guildies and they kept making fun of me for going down so much but there really was nothing I could do.

What I like to do is run 6/2/2/4/0 and make use of some of the helpful water traits like Cleansing Wave when you swap to water. That’s turned into my regular sort of setup.

If I’m in a fantastic party and I know it’s going to fly through the dungeon I’ll run 6/6/2/0/0 like you do (normally 2-3 warriors, guardian, me and one other).

If you’re genuinely struggling with poor parties then I’d go for the guide Neko posted and use D/F. It might not seem much different from your LH build but the problem with LH is that as soon as you conjure it you’re stuck without any defensive weapon skills and have to rely on utility skills (which are usually taken up by conjures and arcane blasts). By just using D/F and getting most of your damage from lightning whip, there’s tons of skills you ckittene to keep you on your feet and you can still stack pretty decent might although the rotation might take some getting used to.

The other option is to go with Staff and camp at the back but this isn’t really benefiting anybody.

Just remember, an Ele is only as good as his party. I know when I’m in a weak party because I go down one heck of a lot more because the DPS purely isn’t high enough. This is fine for Heavy classes but us cloth people just can’t withstand lengthy battles as easily as they can.

The CoE run I mentioned earlier was with 2 guardians and 2 warriors who I knew full well were quite tanky and definitely not zerk. If they’d been in zerk setups then I’d probably have been ok. For scale, on one of the boss bits where you fire 3 cannons into the middle boss and then have to jump down to dps him, he uses Dragons Teeth to attack you. This pretty much 1-hit me 95% of the time… it barely damaged our Heavies at all… Probably took 15% health off the maximum..

I don’t think people realise how squishy we are until they play an ele, and even then they probably only sit back with a staff to avoid constant death. And also how beneficial we are when stacking might and providing fury.

Staff is top DPS weapon for ele so IT IS useful.
You can also provide fury to the party.

I usually run 64202 or 64022.
I want blasting staff because when fights are usually decided by the first dps spike, it makes the difference when using meteor shower.

But with staff i don t usually get much aggro.

It’s not the damage output. The aggro system is simply designed in a way that the class with the lowest sustain (HP, armor) will get attacked first. That’s why eles draw such insane aggro. It’s not the damage output because if you pay attention for a few runs, you will see that the first boss in cof p1 will always attack you first in the beginning of a fight. This question was already raised a few times in this forum btw. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Anet is going to fix this broken system.

Tips to avoid aggro (somewhat):

- Don’t wear ascended armors in a sub-80 level dungeons. Higher armor rating always attracts aggro. That’s how I pass the aggro priority to my fellow thief and guardian o/
- Position yourself behind the boss which can’t be los-stacked to use FGS. If they keep turning to face you, you’re the target. As long as you’re not inside the frontal cone of attack, you’ll avoid most of the auto attack, but get ready to use your damage mitigation against any big hits which might follow up.
- Slow down your burst if you can’t handle the aggro pressure (defensive skills on cd, running out of the endurance), at the cost of the group DPS. But if you’re down, it means your group doesn’t do anything to help you anyways.
- Stay away from the attack range. It is sly, but it works against Lupi. For example, during phase 1, Lupi often does a kick to players in his melee range. It has less than 600 range. Move away from him at 600 range when he looks at you. He won’t be able to initiate the kick and stay idle for 2 seconds. After that he will switch aggro to someone else in range. However if you still stay in that range, you will get his aggro again when he starts the grub attack

LordByron.8369:

Staff is top DPS weapon for ele so IT IS useful.
You can also provide fury to the party.

I usually run 64202 or 64022.
I want blasting staff because when fights are usually decided by the first dps spike, it makes the difference when using meteor shower.

But with staff i don t usually get much aggro.

It might be the top individual DPS but I don’t feel it benefits a party like a Might stacking build does. I’m no expert but I think the staff build generates about 9 Might maximum whereas using a S/F or S/D I can generate 15-25 easily.

I’m assuming a LH build with 25 Might also outdamages a Staff build with 9 Might. I don’t have anything to back this up but that’s just my theory.

Like I said, it completely depends on the party while playing an ele. In a pug party, I run S/F or S/D as I can provide all of the might and all of the fury. In an organised group I might not need to provide all of the might so could get away with just using a staff – this is pretty rare for me though.

To be honest it completely depends on the Scenario though. In CoF I swap between S/F and Staff quite a few times. I use S/F for every 1v1 encounter but then parts like killing the Acolytes I use staff, and getting the bombs, and defending Magg, and destroying the end-structure on P2. Normally using Staff, Frost Bow, FGS and LH it goes down in 1 round.

I think that’s why I love my Ele the most… every situation can be handled differently and I don’t believe there’s a ‘best’ weapon set or ‘highest dps’ as it complete depends on the circumstances. I think even if I didn’t have to worry about Might or Fury I’d prefer to play a LH build just because of the play-style anyway.

cursE.1794:

It’s not the damage output. The aggro system is simply designed in a way that the class with the lowest sustain (HP, armor) will get attacked first. That’s why eles draw such insane aggro. It’s not the damage output because if you pay attention for a few runs, you will see that the first boss in cof p1 will always attack you first in the beginning of a fight. This question was already raised a few times in this forum btw. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Anet is going to fix this broken system.

Damage does play a role in it just not for every enemy. Not all enemies use the same exact aggro mechanic.

Grimezy.5679:

…..

In some dungeons/fractals, stacking might before the fights is not enough given the fight duration.

Staff can stack 10 might and stack fury, also can really burst an aoe with meteor shower+ice bow.

I still prefer versatility over speed record builds.

I don t see many LH ele on mossman for example in fractal pugruns.

P.S: for aggro there are different aggro mechanics as said.
Example dredge fractal lava boss usually has some preference against though players.
Or again ressing genereates the most aggro.
Anet made sure to remove trinity and every chance to manage aggro so we have this broken PvE system.

One thing I know for sure – if the boss has a massive nuke attack, then it focuses either me or the other ele in the party. Totally true story.

I’ve lost count of how many times I trolled my ele partner in our Arah duo. :p You can still do my preventative measurement to a certain degree of success.

Arenanet told us once that mobs were aggroed by the nearest player , which isn’t true most of the time.
In this game mobs attack in general the player doing the most damage in your party, like in most “generic mmos”.
But we all can say that mobs are also aggroed by players with the most armor , less armor , less health. And sometimes farest player. (example Mai trin fractal boss.)