Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing around with a couple of different D/D builds post-patch (as well as enjoying staff in WvW!).

30 in arcana is still a must imo, heal on dodge/blast finisher on dodge are just too amazing to pass up. On top of that, attunement CD reduction is still mandatory on D/D’s.

As has been pointed out on the previous page, the new earth 10 trait (10% damage within 600 range) is as good/better than bountiful power. There’s no need to “charge it up” and most of the time you might not even hit 10 traits. In an organized group for fractals or something, this might be different. For example, if the group can stack might FAST, you’ll quickly hit more than 10 boons. So that gives us 10 in earth.

Water is still amazing, and the first V trait (remove condition on swap to water) is still great. So that gives us 10 in water.

10 in air gives us swiftness and fury upon using an aura. I’ve heard some people who dropped this completely, claiming they still get enough fury just from swapping attunements, but I haven’t tried this myself. For a more tanky build this could work very well, but I like the precision and crit damage I get from air as well. I’ll be trying builds without air next though!

0/10/10/10/30 is the base I’m starting from.

I LOVE air 15, it’s quite a huge burst and just combo’s in so well with all your other spells. Air 20 has a few amazing traits as well: 1) extra damage to foes low on health; 2) extra crit damage after using an arcana skill (if you take arcana power this allows for some nice combo’s), 3) 20% CD on air traits for more updrafts and ride the lightning.

Earth 15 isn’t that amazing, but if you go 20 into earth you can pick up armor of earth at 50% health, which is an amazing trait.

And then there’s water. I’ve been tempted to drop points out of this in favor of the former two trait lines. As I said earlier, bountiful power can be replaced by the new earth trait. The water 20 traits I’m not sure about. Regen and vigor on cantrips is amazing, but only in conjunction with water 30 (remove condition upon regen). If I drop the latter, maybe I don’t need the former anymore. I’ll have to play around and see how I do with less condition removals. Perhaps it just takes some adjusting, saving ether renewal for the right time, as well as my stun-breaks. I’m not sure how hard the loss of vitality and healing power will hit me though.

So to sum it up: toying around with 0/20/10/10/30 and variations (0/10/10/20/30; 0/10/20/10/30; 0/10/0/30/30; 0/0/10/30/30). I think going 0 in air and 10/20 in earth (30/20 in water respectively) should still be an amazing bunker build, but I’d like to try out some more offensive approaches.

D/D has been pretty popular since beta/launch. Wooden potatoes helped popularize the D/D aura build IIRC. But yeah, a large part of the recent increase in D/D ele’s is because of great players showcasing their skill on youtube/streams/forums/reddit.

Mahanaxar.1386:

The 2% damage comes from the Water 25 trait that gives you 2% damage per boon. Probably should’ve worded that better.

Oh! Good point, I didn’t realise vigor stacked. That being said, I still don’t think 2% crit chance can have that much of an impact ;p

Mahanaxar.1386:

@Kailoq – I see where you’re coming from with regards to pure damage output, but I personally think precision would be more beneficial in conjunction with the trait that has a 33% chance to grant Vigor on crit. That’s 2% more damage (traited properly) plus quicker endurance regen which means more dodges which means more heals (or earthquakes, or blinds, or useless flame bursts)! But I guess it depends on your playstyle.

There’s only a 51 point difference in precision, which roughly translates into a 2.5% difference in crit chance. With crit damage on the other hand, each time you crit you’ll deal 182% damage, rather than 170%. Evasive arcana has a longer cooldown than vigor regen, even when running with just 30% crit chance. Where are you getting that 2% damage from?

@JonSnow: One factor that might come into it is proper dodging. If you can manage to learn which key-attacks you should dodge, you can neglect a lot of the enemies’ damage. For example, you might want to eat a few auto-attacks, before dodging a very big ability. If you just dodge the first attacks someone throws at you, you’ll be left with no dodges when you see them charge up a more powerful ability. This’ll come with experience, since you need to familiarise yourself with the other classes’ abilities. Apart from that, the only thing that can really save you from burst damage is a bigger health pool and toughness to some extent. Burst damage, just like the name implies, gets dealt instantly. Healing on the other hand, is all about sustain. So it’s normal that a heal-heavy build won’t be able to outheal burst. That being said, if you manage to survive the front of their burst, you CAN heal up again to full, effectively resetting the fight.

@Daphoenix: I’ve been trying both Knights trinkets with the standard jewels and with beryl (pow/vit/critdmg) jewels. If you ever have some spare cash, be sure to give beryl a shot! You swap out a tiny bit of toughness for vitality and you change precision to crit damage. And crit damage just blows precision away when it comes to increasing your damage. My toughness is still around 1638 and I have 18.5K HP. In theory you could swap out the knights amulet for a cleric one (also with beryl/ruby) if you want less HP but more healing power.

ChaosDoom.8459:

By the way, “Play lots of WvW/craft to gain levels too”. What and How to do for WvW specified to leveling? Thanks again for your advise.

Personally, I find WvW to be more fun than most PvE areas. So if you get bored of leveling and getting killed by mobs, just run around a bit in WvW, join the zerg/commander squads and you’ll gain experience for capping points whilst having fun.

ChaosDoom.8459:

How about using 4 x Rune of Altruism so that you have 4 x armor with +15% boon duration and use either 2 x Monk or Water? I believe extending the boon duration would be the key to this build. Would it be a +60% boon duration from armor or my understanding is wrong?

Unfortunately rune of altruism only procs when you use a healing skill. Daphoenix uses sigil of restoration and mostly relies on the passive to heal him. If you prefer ether renewal (I’m toying with it, condition removal + only a 12s CD), then altruism makes sense!

Thanks also for your feedback on 10/10/0/20/30 and daphoneix build 0/10/0/30/30. Now I don’t need to test on 10/10/0/20/30 anymore since aura share or condition removal are much more valuable than might stack.

I’d still suggest you try out both builds in PvP. This will allow you to experience the differences of the builds yourself. Perhaps one build just feels better to you. Overall though, I wouldn’t go lower than 25 in water, because the extra damage based on boons is one of my favorite traits.

Lol Lightning Flash :p now I know the trick. I have been experimenting with RTL for the last 5 days and it’s painful and sad to not be able to execute. It’s me who misread the actual combo.

RTL into updraft works for me? You just need to spam 5 even before your RTL ends.

By the way, I am not sure if I am doing it the right way. From level 1 to 20, I actually uses Condition Duration/Damage based items. I had a extremely hard time leveling. Now I have changed to Fine/Masterwork +Vitality and +Toughness items, leveling become a breeze though my damage still suck big time compared to my warrior friend. I believe D/D elementalist is a late bloomer profession.

They are. I had a terribly hard time leveling up. We are very very very trait dependent. Once you get your first water/arcana traits things will become easier. Also: upgrade your armor every 10 levels, or you’ll just get stomped. Don’t go full glass cannon, or you’ll just die. Try to get an elemental ASAP to tank for you. USE COMBO’S or indeed, fights will last for ages. Still, slow but steady is better than dying. Play lots of WvW/craft to gain levels too, just grinding is hard And story mode quests often throw huge amount of mobs at you, which can be quite hard for a leveling elementalist. The main issue is that you need to make use of all your attunements to the fullest, but without some points in arcana the CD to switch is just too long.

brickforlife.1364:

I’m wondering whether to go from 0/10/0/30/30 to 10/10/0/30/20 or 0/10/10/30/20.

the reasoning behind this is that I dodge a lot. It’s not random dodging but I like to reposition myself a lot during a fight and I feel like by doing what I usually do I won’t make use of fire4, dodge, earth 4, earth 5 for full might stacks. I’ll probably be dodging in and out and everywhere and it’s just a habit of repositioning myself and I can’t get rid of it. So which one would you suggest out of the two?

If you just get into the habit of swapping to water every time you reposition in the fight, you’ll be getting regeneration boons. That alone would be worth it imo. And I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to get rid of it if you really wanted to.

The best advice ofcourse is, try out both builds and see what you like! I’ve been using evasive arcana a lot to get regeration and might stacks (or apply burning so I can open up with a fire5), but I’m going to switch back to 10 in earth one of these days just to compare the feel of the build!

EDIT: A quick summary of all my number crunching:

• Ruby vs beryl jewels results in a 75 effective damage output difference (due to higher precision for ruby) and +900 hp for beryl.
• Soldier vs knight daggers results in +128 vit (1280 hp) for invaders, but 40 less effective damage output (invader has higher power, but less crit chance) and 52 less toughness/armor. One soldier and one knight dagger is in between ofcourse.
• Sapphire jewels grant you an extra 150 healing power. The reduction in healing for the other builds will play a greater role in builds with high toughness compared to vitality. Sapphire also adds 90 extra toughness/armor. The effective damage output is a whooping 265 points lower than ruby (mostly because of less precision/crit chance) compared to ruby and -188 compared to beryl. When comparing knight dagger builds, this difference will grow a bit larger because of the synergy between precision and crit damage.
  EDIT2:
• Soldier/knight trinkets with ruby/beryl jewels (using 2 soldier daggers) respectively grant you 20K/18K HP (coming from 17.5K), ~2.9K effective damage (~100 more than knight daggerx2 + ruby jewels in cleric trinkets) and 2462/2558 armor, while giving up 400 healing power.

@ristomursu: Sounds like a viable option if you have enough gold to keep that up. You could go full divinity then (or even upgrade your armor with jewels) for extra stats. But you’d lose out on some other amazing food buffs. And your overall boon duration would be shorter than a combined monk/water set.

EDIT: Here’s a quick summary of all my number crunching, so you don’t have to go through this entire post
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-Mastering-the-D-D-ele-12-20-12/1141370

@brickforlife: You should check out my last post on the previous page. I linked to a gear calculator and elaborated a bit on berserker jewels. Just be aware of the fact I’m still a relatively new player myself, just one with a soft spot for theorycrafting.

I’ve played around some more and at the moment I think invaders armor, knight’s daggers, cleric’s trinkets with valkyrie jewels might be the best route to take if you want a bit more damage, without sacrificing too much tankiness.

Compared to invaders armor/daggers, cleric trinkets with berserker jewels (hereafter refered to as 1) and invaders armor/dagger, cleric trinkets with sapphire jewels (hereafter referered to as 2), your total HP takes a 400 point hit compared to 1 and 2, armor (from toughness) is 50 higher than 1 and only 40 lower than 2. This means that, the more you rely on healing, the more effective this build will become compared to 1 (because healing augments toughness, the more toughness you have, the better healing becomes).

You gain around 260 “effective damage” compared to 2, which is only 40 less than 1. This large increase in damage is due to the amazing stat efficiency of +crit damage in jewel slots.

If you take cleric’s armor and invader’s trinkets instead, combined with invader daggers and valkyrie jewels, you’d gain a tiny bit of damage (20), armor stays the same, health goes up by 300, but you lose 40 healing power.

As for the viability of a more offensively-orientated D/D, I can’t speak from experience. From what I’ve seen so far though, is that while Daphoenix can make his bunker build shine, there are several other players (Intigo, TGSlasher) who prefer a more offensive spec. I’d say your best bet is to play some SPvP so you can try out different stat combinations free of cost.

@Soyuchi: Same as above

@Orikx: You might find the above build interesting as well

@Draahl: As I mentioned earlier, I’m in no way a professional/veteran player! I’m currently using a sigil of force myself, because I feel it’s the most consistent source of damage. In WvW I do go down from time to time, which is why stacking sigils don’t appeal to me. The same goes for SPvP, where I feel their an all-or-nothing approach. If you’re dominating you become even stronger, but if you’re behind, that sigil is worthless. Every time you die, you lose out on your buffs, whereas a sigil of force provides a constant damage boost.

About the sigil of battle:

All sigils with “on swap” AND “on crit” effects, share an internal cooldown. This means that combining a sigil of battle (9s iCD) with a sigil of fire (5s iCD) means you can’t gain any might for 5 seconds right after the sigil of fire procs (and vice versa).

References: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jncAIlBbNk
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10ilke/how_sigils_work/

That’s one possibility why you’re getting low might stacks.

Other possibilities are: low arcana trait points. Arcana increases our boon duration, which allows for quicker might stacking. The same goes for runes of the monk and water. That being said, even without runes it’s easy to get some might stacks going. Remember you have to be in combat and you only gain might if there’s 9s between attunement swaps.

The third factor that allows for high might stacking is setting up combo fields. The easiest way for us to stack might is opening up with fire4, swapping into earth attunement, dodge rolling INTO the ring of fire (only if you have evasive arcana, the earth proc counts as a blast finisher if you land INSIDE a combo field, not if you dodge OUT of one), followed up by earth 4 and 5 (both blast finishers that grant might). You’ll get an extra 3 stacks of might because you swapped attunements. Alternatively you can start out in Air and use air4+5 as an opener, so that when you switch to fire you’ll gain even more might.

Sigil of battle is too good to pass up on elementalists, because we HAVE to swap often to either do a full rotation, or switch to whatever the situation calls for (gap closers, heals, damage, cc). This means we’ll always be stacking might. Might is amazing because it increases all sources of damage, both normal and condition. The ele being as versatile as he is, profits greatly from this; we have a lot of normal as well as condition damage (this is the main reason why Daphoenix likes divinity runes as well, not only is it incredibly stat efficient, but ele’s profit from all stats because of how versatile we our, both offense/defense-wise).

If you’re looking for a sigil for your off-hand dagger, I would suggest either a “stacking” one, like the might/condition/whatever you fancy, or a standard sigil of force. 5% damage is nothing to be scoffed at!

EDIT: Here’s a quick summary of all my number crunching, so you don’t have to go through this entire post
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-Mastering-the-D-D-ele-12-20-12/1141370

Hi everyone,

I found this nice calculator on reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/115mln/power_vs_precision_vs_critical_damage_what_do_we/c6jn8f7), but unfortunately it didn’t have the option to mix trinkets/upgrade components. I modified the excel sheet a bit to allow this manipulation. Hope you guys find it useful! All credit goes to the original publisher, I just made some minor adjustments. Also, I haven’t changed the rune section to allow mixing different runes yet, but for now you can use the ‘misc’ row to add the stats manually.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlZUN9OfsZ7DdG0yQnYxbWZjLWxPcmU4elQwS2xlQkE

Download it and open with excel or copy it to your own google docs to edit it. Somewhere along the way I removed the drop-down menu functionallity, but you can just change gear by checking the right name in the “stats” sheet: i.e. invader/knight/whatetever for armor and weapons, saphire/ruby for trinkets and jewels, 2 water, 2 monk and 2 divinity runes.

EDIT: Turns out someone already made an optimised version of this! It offers drop-down menu’s well, so it’s much more user-friendly in that regard. http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/136aa7/pve_gear_calculatorefficiency_optimizer/

EDIT2: My thoughts so far! Starting from a standard full invader armor/weapons + cleric’s trinkets set, the most optimal way (stat efficient) to improve your damage is by putting berserker jewels in the trinket’s upgrade slots. Because of this, berserker jewels are the only sensible upgrade components for anyone looking to increase their damage. Knight’s jewels do offer precision, but as far as upgrade components go, anything offering crit % damage would be much more efficient.

Adding ruby/berserker jewels to the cleric trinkets raises your crit dmg % by 18 (from 1.64 to 1.82 damage), crit % by 5%, power by 60 and “effective damage” by 220 damage. You lose out on 150 healing power and 90 toughness. The latter is what worries me the most.

From this point on, any points spent in precision or crit % damage, are better off being invested in power instead. But since all of our equipment adds power already, the 2nd most efficient stat is precision.

Swapping out invader armor for more cleric pieces results in a much lower effective HP, because you end up losing vitality for healing power.

If anyone is wondering, the total stats you gain from armor+weapons are 495-352-352 vs trinkets 504-343-343.

Changing weapons is another option, but again, you lose out on tankiness. Replacing invader’s daggers with Knight’s is the most conservative option. You lose some vitality, but actually gain some toughness. Power goes down a little, but since you add more precision your overall damage increases. As I mentioned earlier, adding power is more stat efficient than both precision and crit damage in our current build, but out of the latter two, precision is more efficient stat-wise for everything but jewels. So going Knight’s daggers seems like a possibility for anyone willing to trade some health for an even higher damage output (mainly due to a higher crit chance).

I didn’t play around with condition damage, but others might be able to figure out interesting stat combinations. The main reason crit damage appeals to me is because it increases burst (which is the one thing “lacking” from my original build) and it ties in great with the constant fury uptime thanks to the aura traits.

Due to a discussion with Intigo, another great D/D ele (http://www.youtube.com/user/IntigoGW2?feature=watch), I’ve been trying out Valkyrie’s amulet with a soldier’s jewel in PvP. Basically I sacrifice some healing power in exchange for more crit damage. I really like the fact you can deal quite a bit more burst damage when you really need it, i.e. when you need to dispose of an opponent really quickly.

The downside is my crit chance is only around 30%, even with fury.

In PvE/WvW there are numerous other options though, like mixing ruby jewels with cleric’s trinkets (jewels are amazingly stat efficient when it comes to crit damage, see: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/12dmi5/tip_stat_optimization_with_crit_damage/ ), or even going full berserker on some trinkets/jewels. Alternatively emerald/knight’s looks promising as well (that’s what TGSlasher is using IIRC). I’m trying to build an excel cheat at the moment to try out different combinations of invader/cleric’s armor and invader’s/cleric’s/berserkers jewels/trinkets. Unfortunately valkyrie grants vitality rather than toughness in PvE

All credit for these ponderings go to Intigo ;p

EDIT: I can also confirm the usefulness of the water 5 trait when leveling!

@AmagicalFishy: The major argument for using both those traits is the follwing. Thanks to the water III trait your cantrips will grant you regeneration. Switching to water attunement grants regeneration as well. This means you have up to four methods of removing conditions (three cantrips + water attunement swap). You’ll be using your cantrips in panic-situations most of the time. Lightning flash/mistform to gain distance AND remove any stuns? Yes please!

I believe switching to water will remove two conditions yes, one for the switch, one for the regeneration effect.

As for granting condition removal to your allies, Daphoenix posted this: To my knowledge, you can even remove additional conditions off yourself by giving allies regeneration at the same time, because all boon effects from swapping to attunements are applied to allies within app. 300 units of range around your character.

@Wolf Fivousix: It might be hard to execute this build to its maximum potential, but I can attest to the fact that it’s one of the best builds regardless. As are small deviations on it ofcourse (for example TGSlasher’s 10 fire variety, or other people’s builds which sacrifice some defensive equipment for offensive).

But in general, stacking boons through aura’s and attunement swaps, taking a lot of arcana and water traits for defensive purposes and faster switching and last but not least, keeping a high damage output thanks to the water 25 trait and might stacking (sigil of battle, etc.) seems like the most sensible way to play D/D elementalist. I started out as D/D and I’ve been constantly getting WRECKED by PvE. In WvW I was just running around, dying often, getting kills when I got lucky. Our innate defense is so so low, we can’t afford to go class cannon with a short range dagger build. With this build my PvP and WvW have gotten a lot better. Glass cannon builds don’t seem as effective in this GW2 imo, control and mobility are the names of the game.

Granted, I’ve gotten better as a player too. And finally acquiring exotic armor with some health and toughness probably helped a lot as well. But even then, I think this build is one of the best starting points for any aspiring D/D elementalist. Unfortunately, starting out as a level 1 D/D dagger (and leveling to about level 30) is a horrendous experience. I think most new players would be discouraged by its seemingly ineffective damage output and defensive capabilites.

After trying out this build some more in WvW, all I can say is: wow! The innate tankiness is amazing. I’m currently using a mix of power/magic find/crit/precision/vit lvl 70 rares and even now I can afford to dive into large groups, disrupt/burn them and make it out safely thanks to all the condition removers. In a straight up 1v1 switching to water is like getting a second life. This seems to be especially strong on ele’s because we have several escape spells as well, which can be used to gain enough distance to heal up.

I’m still debating what kind of stats I want on my armor though. A soldier/cleric mix would increase my sustained fighting capabilities, but I like TGSlasher’s approach as well: stack some more offensive stats and rely on your traits for sustain.

According to the wiki, signet of restoration’s passive effect grants 10% of your healing power every time you cast a spell. To me this makes a cleric build sound very tempting (because even during your offensive spell rotation, you will be restoring health), but as Daphoenix pointed out, stacking too much healing power without health can cause you to overheal. I find it hard to assess whether or not this will be a major problem though. Though I’ve heard other people complain that the scaling on healing power is quite low, so dumping too many armor points into it might be overkill.

What runes is everyone using? I heard boon duration ones got nerfed? I’ve always been a fan of earth runes, mainly because of the protection duration and the magnetic aura it grants. But since I removed 10 points out of earth, my aura’s no longer grant protection, rendering this rune quite useless

@daphoenix: Thanks for the quick reply! You raise a very good point about protection not being available whenever you want it. I hadn’t considered that because I used to auto-cast the water and air aura’s whenever I swapped to these attunements (a trick mentioned by Wooden Potato’s right after launch). I also regulary cast fire 4 + earth 3 to get the earth aura. Additionaly: attuning to earth would grant protection too. I’m not sure if this protection could be maintained throughout the battle though.

On top of that, maintaining protection sounds easy when you can just use the same spell rotation constantly (i.e. in PvE), but I can see why this tactic would fall to pieces when applied in PvP

What are your thoughts on using a Power/Toughness/Healing set instead of Power/Toughness/Vitality?

Toughness and healing complement eachother very well, because your “rather small” health pool suddenly becomes worth much more effective HP. More healing power means you can refill your health pool more quickly.

I know this has been covered extensively: but I’m also playing around with the idea of lowering either the water or arcana trait to 20 and putting 10 points into earth, picking up the “auras grant protection” perk. Protection just sounds too good for a rather defensive build. Yet you’d lose out on some boon duration, switching and Evasive Arcana.

Alternatively: putting 10 more points into Air would give us access to Alacrity. Cooldown reduction on the lightning aura and updraft sound amazing as well.

My old build was close to 20-10-10-10-20. My boon duration was much shorter and I lacked health/healing power, but thanks to fury and the fire-perk that caused crits to burn (as well as the extra damage vs burned targets) my damage output was quite high. As long as my aura’s were up I was pretty tanky due to the protection perk in earth. But my healing skills were non-existant compared to your build. And I missed out on all the remove-condition options.

So thanks for the guide, I enjoyed your videos as well!