Would like to check your guild out. I am currently looking for an active WvW/Raid oriented guild. I am not on Blackgate but your guild sounds nice enough that I am more than happy to transfer myself there to join.
I see and understand your point. My reason behind associating the utilities based on the specific attunement in this specific post was based on how the Developers introduced them. I look at being able to mix fire signet, lesser glyph of storms, and armor of earth along with fire traits etc. subjective. I do not think or promote that these things are limited only to the attunements and trait lines. I would just simply like to cover those things in depth in other posts, gradually working towards tempest so that players by that time fully understanding what direction they want or what works more for them.
Tempest in my thoughts, is really all about being able to really combine multiple utilities, traits, and skills, so I wanted by the time the reader(s) get to that point they understand on their own what areas in other attunements have exception to the rules when used certain ways.
Thanks Sourde for your feedback! I updated the clarification of weakness. Your points in the third paragraph I will omit because it is subjective. I like what you said from your fourth paragraph on down. The whole idea behind leaving those parts out from every attunement is to help players, new and old, to find their own way by giving them the necessary tools to come to an conclusion. In my next post(s) I plan to really pick apart weapons and attunements, and to give a few practical suggestions to help those to be able to customize builds on their own.
I will clear a few things about air and earth, but the rest I read from your post is preference. Thanks for the reply in pointing those few things out.
Ele is just fine and is much more balance and diverse compared to older models for the profession. If you are trying to use d/d and fire, for the majority of the time, thinking fire is going to give you the best damage then you have totally thrown out what each ele attunement specializes in. If you are having issues playing as an ele, then try using different weapons and basing your set-up along with sigils, runes, and amulet according to your build. Something also important to remember is certain conditions like weakness have a higher value in PvP and WvW and have little to no impact in PvE, so emphasis your build according. Enjoy!
I designed this for new players and old players alike who are learning how to play elementalist and those who are not accustomed to the elementalist changes.
Understanding Fire Attunement:
Attune to fire, gaining heavy damage and burning abilities. (How does fire attunement apply heavy damage? Through power and burning condition damage).
Understanding Water Attunement:
Attune to water, gaining superior support and healing abilities. (How does water give support? Depending on how much support you plan to give, support can be increased based on acessories/amulets/armor with healing power traits).
Understanding Air Attunement:
Attune to air, gaining heavy damage and control abilities. (How does air apply heavy damage? Through power damage along with blindness, vulnerability, and weakness).
Understanding Earth Attunement:
Attune to earth, gaining superior damage-over-time and defensive abilities. (How does earth apply damage and defense? Depending on the weapon equipped earth focuses using condition damage such as bleeds along with cripple, immobilization, reflective auras and some area denial skills for defense.)
After understanding the different attunements its important to choose your unique traits, and utility skills. Depending on your attunement preference(s) will decide how much boon, condition, damage, defense, and recharge you will have.
What is Arcane:
focuses on general improvements, arcane utility skills, and the switching of attunements.
Arcane Traits – give increased attunement(s) recharge, boons, and critical chance. You have the choice of selecting traits that can increase your support skills, apply conditions on critical, give more damage per boon on you, and cast spells after dodging.
Arcane utilities – are great for causing critical damage. Arcane Mastery - Arcane description describes it giving general improvements, making many think it is a less desired trait line. When you accompany Arcane trait line along with Arcane utilities is where it becomes quite strong on its own. Knowing how to blast combo finishers on friendly AoE fields or your own can give you additional conditions on enemies. Another more overlooked trait about Arcane is that it allows lingering attunement boons while swapping. If you have attunements more preferred to use, arcane will only add to the desired attunement while giving general improvements to other attunements when swapping to them.
What is Air:
focuses on use of air magic and additionally glyphs, movement speed, and spike damage.
Air Traits – give improvements to movement speed, vulnerability, and lightning attack upon attuning to air. You have the choice of selecting increased damage pass a certain thresh-hold, increased critical strike, attunement recharge, gaining boons through using glyphs, and shock aura when someone uses control skills on you.
Air utilities – are glyphs that apply conditions, group support, AoE (Area of Effect), and pet support through elementals. Air Mastery - Air is probably the most not well understood trait line next to arcane. Using air is about burst damage, applying debuff conditions on enemies and control. When you apply weakness you have the chance limit the amount of damage by 50% (glancing blows), you will take from an attack while slowing down the recharge of endurance by 50%, stacking up to 5 max, giving you good spike control when needed. Blindness is also a great control skill that makes the next outgoing attack miss. Unlike weakness, blindness is best used in escaping a heavy blow, or to help you close the distance between you and a enemy. Applying vulnerability is used to increase the critical damage and normal damage an enemy takes. With glyph of storms it will increas by 2% and 1% from critical hits plus increase the condition damage to your enemy, stacking up to 25 max.
What is Water:
focuses on use of water magic and defensive tactics, as well as exploiting Vulnerability on foes.
Water Traits – gives you access to passive self-healing, ally healing, and attunement to water healing. You have the choice to select traits that increase damage, outgoing healing, endurance regeneration, ally aura support, and cantrip cool down reduction.
Water utilities – are your healing skills and cantrips. Despite most associating water with ice bow, healing skills can remove conditions, apply boons depending your current attunement, used as a blast finisher, passive healing, and healing your team. Cantrips can instantly cure controlling conditions as well as give boons, cure conditions, and teleport causing damage to enemies. Water Mastery - Water can be misunderstood as primarily healing support for a team but it design is about defense. Mastering water on its own is about survival and keeping the enemy away long enough to stay alive, either until the needed attunement is available or team assistance arrives. Chilled not only slows your opponents movements down but it also slows down your enemies skill recharge rate by -66%. Water also calls for knowing when to use healing skills on yourself depending on how high or low your healing power is. Using your healing power at low health works well if your healing power is high but if your healing power is low it will do less healing, so knowing when to use it is important.
What is Earth:
focuses on use of bleeds, defense, and signets.
Earth Traits – grants increased toughness, damage and condition upon attuning to earth, and damage reduction. Your choices to choose from range from decreasing damage taken through boons, stability to avoid controlling conditions, increased condition damage, earth recharge speed, condition removal, and critical damage avoidance.
Earth utilities – are signets, that give passive abilities and active abilities. Fire signet emphasis on increased critical chance on passive, and burning damage on active. Water signet focuses on curing conditions every 10 seconds when passive and applying chilling when activated. Earth signet on passive improves toughness and when active causes bleeding damage while immobilizing. Air signet will give you increased movement speed while the signet is still passive and when activated will blind up to 5 targets around you. Earth Mastery - Many understand earth as only defense, but earth attunement is using a spike defense for a certain amount of time while applying conditions. It can be used for team support just as well for solo. Earth excels at applying cripple condition to enemies to help with keeping enemies from escaping close range encounters or slowing them down so you can create distance. The next best thing earth does is applying bleeding damage. Using earth’s bleeding damage along with protection, stability, and its control conditions like cripple, blindness, and immobilize work great, allowing you to apply good condition damage and move away from your enemy.
What is Fire:
focuses on use of fire magic and conjured weapons.
Fire Traits – gives power increase, fire aura, direct damage when attuning to fire, and increased damage to burning foes. The choices available to you in fire can make critical hits cause burning damage, more access to fire auras, condition cleanse, increased condition damage, might, increased damage, skill recharge reduction, critical chance increase, and blindness.
Fire utilities – are your conjured weapons. Conjuring one of these utilities gives you the weapon and spawns another in the area you choose giving you an attribute bonus, also depending on the weapon type.
-Flame Axe will increase power and condition damage. The skills available will cause burning damage, direct damage, and give might.
-Frost Bow will increase condition duration, and healing. It’s skills can cause healing, vulnerability, chilled, and bleeding.
-Lightning Hammer will increase critical hit chance, and damage. It causes heavy direct damage, blindness, and stun.
-Earth Shield will increase vitality and toughness. The skills available once summoned causes bleeding, cripple, and gives protection.
-Fiery Greatsword will increase power and condition damage. Its skills will cause from direct damage, to burning damage, and cripple. Fire Mastery - Despite what many will say on the state of elementalist, fire use to be the jack-of-all-trades, but now fire has its own very distinctive play style unique like all the others. Fire is not just about raw damage but also about condition damage too! Fire attunement is offensive but matters what weapon is equipped as your standard weapon(s) or conjured. Example is using staff is not ideal for being offensive at close range, compared to dagger as the main hand, and scepter is better suited for offense from what is between staff and dagger, the mid range areas. What’s great about fire is those using it as a primary do not need to spec into tempest to camp in fire, which is why many feel it is underwhelmed in this area. By simply summoning Fiery elite sword or the flame axe, you are able to safely attune into other elements while remaining in fire, continuing the damage and condition applying. Each conjured weapon also allows access to other types of condition damages, control conditions, boons, and special unique things that makes this weapon better at certain things. Understanding that is key to fire mastery. If conjure weapons is not your style you have so much versatility with fires good offense to use the skills that are on your dagger(s), focus, scepter, or staff, which mostly have fairly good cool-down times, allowing fire skills to be spammed much more frequent.
What is Tempest:
gain access to warhorns, a set of shout skills, and the ability to overload attunements for powerful effects.
Tempest Traits – gives singularity, allowing you to overload an attunement, swiftness when overloading an attunement, and protection while overloading an attunement. Your choices to select from in the traits concentrate on super-speed, endurance regeneration, auras when overloading, weakness, team might, health regeneration from auras, stability during overloads, boon duration, applied conditions on you 100% reduction, sand squall, and frost aura.
Tempest Utilities – are shouts that can only be accessed once the Tempest trait is slotted. Shouts apply 360 conditions to enemies or breaks stun to the tempest and surrounding allies.
“Feel the Burn” – applies 360 damage, with burning condition in 600 radius around you, and applies fire aura to you and your allies.
“Eye of the Storm” – applies 360 stun break, and super speed for you and allies, in a 600 radius.
“Aftershock” – applies 360 damage, with cripple, and immobilize in 600 radius on enemies around you, and also applies magnetic aura on you, plus allies.
“Flash-Freeze” – applies 360 damage, and chilled to enemies around you, in a 600 radius, while adding frost aura to you and your allies. Tempest Mastery - Tempest is the most used and probably one of the less understood next to fire. Overloading is an important part of tempest, but what makes tempest stand apart is its ability to control enemies. It is also great to know how many controlling skills do you wish to have access to. Tempest can control enemies around them with their shouts, and overloads. Additional control can be found in elementalist weapons and how you play with tempest using certain skills. Tempest have the most control using warhorn, overloads and having access to their shouts. Without the warhorn you loose less control and removing shouts as well. Like fire it all depends what you are comfortable with and the type of tempest build you are going for. There are offensive tempest builds, defensive builds, spike damage builds, condition builds, and builds that focus on more than just one. Also with tempest it emphasis more on your sigils and runes depending on your build. For instance if you are looking to increase a specific condition damage or duration, it is important to use what is needed, based on how you play. A tempest that focuses primarily in air may use sigil's of peril (increasing vulnerability duration), sigil of paralyzation (increasing stun duration), sigil of debility (increasing weakness duration), sigil of air (causing lightning strike on critical), sigil of mischief (blinding enemies) would help your offensive abilities. Runes can work in a similar way, it is mainly all about finding the balance you desire.
Weapons:
Elementalist weapons work just like all others for other classes. Some are designed for long range, close range, mid range and defense. The best thing to do when selecting which weapon you like, choose what style of play you prefer and feels comfortable to you. below is a breakdown of what each elementalist weapon excels in.
Dagger – Emphasizes close range, heavy damage spells.
Focus (Off hand only) – Provides supportive spells in form of energy shields, disabling snares and defensive area effects.
Scepter – Casts various single and multiple target, medium range spells.
Staff – Can cast different area effect spells with direct or lasting effects.
Warhorn – (Off Hand Only Tempest Specialization Only) – Provides assistance to you in both supporting your allies and creating disruptive areas for enemies.
Ele has been my main since the guild wars 1 beta so idk what your talking ab out Naurgalen
Ive literally always been an ele..
Second the aura duration nerf wasnt even that bad, w/ overloads and shouts you can have an aura up permanently
Third i dont use the burn build vs teams with a necro, that would just be a bad.. i use d/w or d/f vs teams with a necro/thief
thiefs are good spike classes and as a power ele its going to be tough, but not impossible between reflects blocks and overloads to protect you, plus stoneheart if you use earth thief is low on my priority list.
I have been watching your post lately about elementalist and it is great to see others who are out of the old meta-build boxes. So many just do not try out different builds. It can not be a better time to be an elementalist in guild wars 2 right now. Before we only had fire attunement or nothing, and it was D/D or nothing, but with the changes, weapons and attunements have diversity that has been much needed for the profession. Metabattle has so many blinded as what is possible with professions that they are not willing to test other possibilities on their own. Ele is so diverse having multiple skills and utilities that can be used to do similar things but in different attunements, really allowing us more freedom now like other professions to customize their build. Elementalist can be used even without Tempest and is still very viable. In fact I prefer if I am playing D/D to trait Arcane, Water, and Fire. I will mix it with different variation of condition, and power and those who feel necro’s are an problem, that particular traiting along with torment sigil here and a endurance sigil there, mixed with rune of the revenant will make just about any necro blush.
Greetings Dajman! It’s good to see Elementalist players understanding since the changes and HoT release Staff can be played offensive. Many still cling to what is still considered Meta stating that the “numbers,” don’t lie, but most of the time they forget the game has checks and balances. Everytime Karl and the rest of those who work on elementalist improve things to make Ele more viable outside of fire I cheer and watch the naysayers come out and try to defend the only way to play/meta style. Since the release of HoT it has been even more reason to enjoy elementalist, because you can really experiment and really customize it to your desired focus attunement(s).
So lets talk about this staff ele you witnessed! Did you see certain spells more often than some? Did you see skills such as cantrips used defensively? What about shouts? Was the elementalist using the AoE’s as crowd control? Was the Thief and Ranger using traditional traits or were they the new ones such as Daredevil and Druid? Answering those things could lead you to your answers. My suggestions would be to start looking in some type of condition build. Second note that the elementalist who was playing against the two players was already at a disadvantage because it was 2 against 1, so do not assume that any build is the answer to your questions.
Condition builds that evolve around earth magic would probably be ideal because you stated they played against a ranger. In my experience Earth is always great at handling rangers with long bows because of magnetic aura, cripple and bleed damage it inflicts. Fighting against a thief is a great deal about area denial, if the thief is sneaky melee type and if they are using pistol(s), earth, fire and air magic have skills that work to even up the fight. Below I have linked what is a viable build that should fulfill your general information.
My best advice is to experiment with different condition, power, and vitality set-ups until you create the play style you saw in WvW against the ranger, and thief. Sites like meta-battle are great for certain things, but they will not explain how and what each skill use has depending on your build. There isn’t such a thing as a wrong build, just matters on what you want your build to do and knowing what works for it, so play with different things and have fun!
Don’t see anything wrong with fresh air, but the sigils seem to be off. If you are using marauder you are focusing on damage with conditions like bleed, cripple, burn, and freeze being small and more on air attunment, which has a big focus on blinds, weakness and vulnerability. Celestial excels at having something able to handle just about any thing. When you gravitate away from Celestial you are then making a build that is focused on a custom/specific play, so it is always good to understand the attunements you want to focus on. Whats fun about elementalist is there are more combinations depending on the weapon and style of play you are looking for.
Your build looks good. I only changed a few things that could be guaranteed. Everything on your build is only a suggestion. I changed your runes, 1 sigil, 1 accessory (Necklace), and your Staff.
Good thing about Ele is there is really no wrong way to play Elementalist. You have access to all styles of damage. You can be master of them all (Celestial), Focus on condition (Sinister/Rampager/Rabid), Power/Critical damage (Knight,Cavalier,Marauder,Berserk), and many more. If you are playing in Heart of Throns areas wearing Berserk on all your armor and Trinket slots is not good playing alone. Also Berserk leaves you with very little defense. A good point to start is figuring out what are your prime attunement(s) that you wish to use and use armor and trinkets that will support it. [Example] – Fire Water Air or Earth. Then you can decide what type of weapon works best for your build, and what sigils you want to use based on your focused attunement. An example for that would be increased conditions, vulnerability etc. Just play with different styles of armors and go from there.
I have been using this distinct build for Ele. For me personally Berserk is not where Elementalist will ever be since the armor/trait rework to the present and beyond. Marauder maybe what those Elementalist wanting high p,p,& crit. will enjoy as it comes with 1 extra, Vitality. So on to the build.
?? What this build rely’s on is the stack of vulnerability and its duration applied on enemies. By doing so you increase critical damage while increasing damage. Before it was important to stack might to do higher damage, but if you understand how vulnerability works, it operates like might stacking but in reverse, (A Debuff). This is done with Glyph of storms, Air Attunement, Air Overload, Chain Lightning, Lightning Surge, and water attunements, Ice Spike.
?? Using skills like Static Field, Gust, Unsteady Field, and don’t forget Lightning Rod will apply weakness, making enemies attacks decrease by 50%.
?? Your condition damages will come from Earth, and Fire skills allowing you to still do good damage while either waiting to attune back in to air or water.
?? Arcane Line works very well with a high critical Tempest build. Arcane Fury, grants you fury when switching attunements, 20% critical chance additional increase.Arcane Precision grants more vulnerability when attuned to water, and more weakness when attuned to air, if landing a critical hit. Elemental Contingency grants more fury if struck while being attuned to air.
?? Depending on your play style, you can swap out the final Arcane trait, Evasive Arcana with Elemental Surge, and Flash-Freeze/Mist Form for one of the Arcane utilities, (Arcane Blast, Arcane Wave, Arcane Power), gaining an additional 150 ferocity.
First, THANK YOU KARL MCLAIN, AND EVERYONE ELSE AT ANET FOR ALL THE WORK ON TEMPEST! I played with Staff, Dagger/Dagger, Dagger/Warhorn, Scepter/Warhorn and Scepter/Focus, during the beta. Tempest really feels like a amazing breath of fresh air from the required constant Fire, fire, fire play that is always demanded for Elementalist. For my staff builds I used Knight armor set, with a mixture of different condition damage accessories allowing me to focus air as my focus attunement and for Warhorn builds I used a mixture of toughness/vitality armors with rampage accessories for Dagger and Scepter. Those made me feel more comfortable with being able to take more damage while staying in a closer distance compared to Staff use. Shouts work great, and I do not see many changes that really need to be worked other than Distance vs Cooldown on Warhorn:
In WvW I felt that the warhorn cast times were a bit too slow on recharge. But as I played I thought that perhaps to improve warhorn, could the distance of warhorn skills traveling a longer distance before they time out would probably be a bigger help. Tidal Surge really felt like it really needs a bit more distance. Running next to my Commander I was not even able to knock any enemies back with it or heal much of anyone who was just a little up front of me, making it a little difficult to use effective. Water Globe works very well also, but I felt it needed a bit more distance because as our Commander pushed us forward the healing would miss the intended players mostly because of its time traveling. I have no issues with the speed, and welcome the slow travel because to me its travel really feels like a crowd control skill. I will not dive deeper into anymore of the traits because in a general sense I just feel that the rest of the warhorn skills could benefit with a bit more travel distance, and the cooldown time feels it can remain as is without causing heavy overhauls to the work you guys have done.
I am not certain if this is the area to suggest this, and this is my first post here su I am sorry if this is not the correct place to post this. I was curious after seeing the Balthazar Ragalia. Can we get some similar for Lyssa, Dwayna, Kormir, Melandru, and Grenth Ragalia?
