staff/cantrips tanky ele - work in progress
Also, I’m not claiming originality on this build, just in case there are people who come on here and are all like…that’s a rip off of another build! I understand that there’s a high chance someone else did something like this way before me…so, you know…please don’t be a butt.
tl;dr: cheese uses too many words. cheese should have gone to bed ages ago. Hopefully some of this wall’o’text is useful! ^__^
A few things that I feel would really improve your build:
1) Staff doesn’t really cast as many spells as other weaponsets... and it has all those delicious fields. I recommend swapping out Signet of Restoration for Arcane Brilliance, which is altogether more versatile - might stacking from fire fields and bonus AoE healing when used in water fields, for example. Casting it while standing in a water field with several enemies next to you? Huge burst heal! \o/
2) Pyromancer’s Puissance isn’t very effective on other weapon sets; we can’t really camp in one element, instead needing to rotate through them regularly, so only about 1/4 of spells will proc the trait. It’s arguably worse on Staff than other sets.
It’s true that the maximum possible dps for Staff Ele comes from camping fire attunement and spamming 1 and 2 on a stationary foe... but while running Persisting Flames, not Pyromancer’s Puissance.
Persisting Flames adds 2 seconds duration to fire fields - the important thing for Staff is that this is 2 seconds more to Lava Font, so 2 more ticks of a high-damage AoE. Running both Pyromancer’s Alacrity and Persisting Flames gives *very* high uptime on Lava Fonts, and also gives fury every time you blast anyone’s fire fields... this is a much better dps increase than is gained from Pyromancer’s Puissance.
3) Diamond Skin is... rubbish, in most builds. You need to spec for high toughess and high healing power, and pretty much maintain the regeneration boon, for it to ever be helpful - and in doing this you’ll lose all hope of dealing decent damage.
In PvE: it does have a few niche uses (like Goemm’s Lab, a jumping puzzles that applies movement-impairing conditions, or the Grawl fractal’s boss with the burning floor). Conditions generally aren’t that much of a problem in PvE - and you have loooads of cleanse with Healing Rain and two copies of Cleansing Fire. Those two points would definitely serve you better in any of the other three lines.
In WvW: it will only be effective against 100% condition foes who have absolutely no power damage whatsoever. This is nobody. And that’s 1v1. Get into a teamfight, and you’ll never be above 90% health, not without speccing heavily into healing power and regen and sacrificing all damage-dealing capabilities. Again, the points will be better pretty much anywhere else - putting them into Arcana and picking up Blasting Staff will increase your damage by a reasonable amount against foes in large battles - and can let you hit things a bit farther inside towers with Meteor Shower!
Um... so that’s the three things that immediately stood out to me - there are a few other changes I’d make to skill/trait setup, but it quickly becomes "this is me making this my build" rather than "here are some minor changes that may make your build more effective". Assuming you meant to take Cantrip Mastery in the Water line, my suggestions would make your build look like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFUQFAWnMISjDW4AWOAfEGoAQIOtY4FDCMMXPA-TBCBAB8o+TtKBje/h+eQAAcBBgT5XK6Iaz8HpAkVYE-e
Hah! Too many characters to post. Continued in next post.
tl;dr: post 2/2, also cheese is a bit daft
So yeah, that is hopefully nicer, but there are a few further changes I’d want to make to skills/traits to increase overall survivability and damage: two more points from Earth into Water (so swap Rock Solid for Cleansing Water), and swap out Burning Fire and Cleansing Fire for Pyromancer’s Puissance and Arcane Wave - you’ll lose a bit of stability (though you have two Armor of Earth procs already), and lose some of your burst cleanse... but gain a *lot* more cleanse flexibility (cantrips will now each cleanse a condition), a bit of damage from Bountiful Power, and a great deal of damage from more Lava Fonts. Oh, aye, and Arcane Wave is an instant-cast, 900-range blast finisher, so you can gain more might+fury, or heals, or other effects, along with damage provided by the skill itself..
This would leave the build like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFUQFAWnMISLDW4AWOAfEGoAQIPt4zwLeEYUOA-TBCBAB8o+TtKBje/h+eQAAcBBgT5XK6Iaz8HpAkVYE-e
...which is a mash-up of popular dps Staff builds (those fire traits) and the survivabilty (vitality, healing power, and powerful cleanse) offered by the Water line/cantrip synergies.
Um. I may have gone on a bit. And barely considered your gear.
::looks at gear::
You really did go crazy for the anti-condi setup, didn’t you? You’ll hopefully be cleansing conditions enough that the Generosity sigil can be dropped - most of its procs are likely to be wasted if you bring a reasonable amount of other cleanse.
Popular sigil choices for Elementalists:
Battle - often a solid choice. Grants might to you on weapon swap, so grants might to you pretty much every 9 seconds (the sigil cooldown) if you’re rotating through attunements (which will be in most fights).
Energy - dodges! Restores endurance on swap, again very effective for Elementalists who tend to switch attunements constantly and so proc it on cooldown.
Renewal - a wee bit of healing! On weapon swap! Are you noticing a pattern here? This one’s not as popular as the other two, but is cheaper and provides regular heals to you and those next to you.
Right okay yeah now I am going to bed. Apologies for the wall of text. Gear stats, and runeset, and other possible variations? They can wait. G’night.
Thanks, Cheese! These notes are really helpful!
You’re going to get more damage and more utility out of just using the standard, boring, 0/0/2/6/6 Water-Arcana bunker build in PvP formats.
For PvE dungeoning in particular, I have to suggest using a damage oriented build, so here’s the three I’d suggest:
Fire Staff
Scepter Hammer
Dagger/Focus
If you’re having trouble with those, I suppose you could run one of the PvP builds in Berserker gear and then switch out traits over time until you ended up using one of the actual PvE dungeon builds listed here. Personally, I like the D/F one the most, but it’s up to people’s preferences I find.