Guild Wars 2

just reached 80 and while playing ele i noticed that its so squishy and does not do much damage. can you tell me what to do so i can do pve or dungeon?
i want to know what you think first so i wont waste my gold buying gear ^^,
ty very much for your help.

Learn from self experience or from guides created by experienced successful Ele players. When you ask these sort of questions on the forum without you giving yourself time to search, you can expect many negative and positive comments that will confuse you. There are some very good guides for pve right above this sub foru. Try those first.

Ele is one of the hardest classes to learn how to play, but once you master its mechanics it becomes incredibly fun!

Also, we do a lot of damage

If you don’t want to waste your gold on gear, I recommend starting out with Soldier’s gear (Power/Toughness/Vitality). That’ll give you some room for errors while you learn things like how your weapon skills interact, how to dodge, how certain boss fights work and (last but not least) how to make proper use of combos. Once you get the hang of that, you can replace some of your gear with more damage orientated stuff and deal out some major damage.

I to am curious as to the best/simplest build to get started into dungeons.

Well, the simplest build would likely be a staff fire-based build, with longer lasting fire fields and extra damage while attuned to fire.

But the best ele builds aren’t simple. Knowing how and when to swap attunements (the how being combining skills), as well as smart dodging and kiting, is a big part of ele gameplay. Many builds use Evasive Arcana and Elemental Attunement, which give you lots of boons, and an on demand blast finisher on your earth dodge roll. There’s also the lightning hammer build, which effectively turns you into a warrior. However, even that build requires some reading and proper team/trait/gear setup before you can play it well.

I think it was Zelhyn that made a thread on PvE eles? Maybe you should check that one out.

Ele should have a disclaimer at the character creation screen that reads: “Don’t use if you are expecting to faceroll and win.”

Hard to say because we don’t know what you don’t know. We don’t know if you know how to dodge or if you do, if you know how to generate vigor. We don’t know if your dps is low because or your skill usage, because you have penalized yourself with low power, or have a bad synergy between precision and critical damage. Not knowing whether you are having issues with sPvP, WvW, or Pve makes a difference. Builds for sPvP are much more critical for example. Survivability can be handled many different ways and your build affects what the best techniques you will have

Guides are great for premade characters and great synergies applicable no matter what build you use. The wiki is fantastic for looking at all the nuts and bolts. Reading through this forum is a great tool, once you get by the qq, there is a lot to learn here.

One of the best tools we have is the sPvP area where, for free, you can equip your character with any gear and weapons, try out your dps on the test dummys, and even try out your luck on live npcs.