Guild Wars 2

Here’s my Condition build which has been serving me very well in sPVP and free tourneys.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;0_-34FKlHkC0p3gJ-K0g3VIFC0A4BK;5TJ-J;116A14;217-K-F4aNH4dZH9fgm92VY

Mostly it’s the common things in many similar Staff / Scepter & Dagger builds, because they simply work, so I’ll focus on the more uncommon things I enjoy to round it up as a solid solo and team fighter with good defence and couple tricks up the sleeve.

Curses and Death Magic traits are the bread and butter for the chosen weapon set; maximise your Bleeds, Corruption utilities and Marks. I’d consider 30 in Curses and 10 in Death Magic, for Greater Marks, a must leaving you with 30 points to customize.
Sigil, Rune and Accessory choises are the usual optimised set for survivability, longer lasting bleeds and getting the most out of Sigil of Earth and Barbed Precision trait. Rabid Amulet is simply the best, it has everything you need, don’t leave home without it.
The utility skill selection is also very common: Consume Conditions is very powerful, Epidemic is the cornerstone of the condition build making you extremely dangerous in group situations and Corrupt Boon is for melting boon stacking builds (often otherwise hard to kill bunkers).

Spectral Walk and the Flesh Golem are the more uncommon choises. The Walk gives you mobility on call as well as a great trick for losing opponents (while your conditions eat on them). Flesh Golem is a good all-rounder, nice cc and damage for solo fights and can also tackle a whole team in group fights if aligned correctly.
Plague could be better group utility for a coordinated team but I find it lacking in Hot joins and random Free trounaments as you don’t do that much damage yourself and rather just disrupt the opponents, leaving the dirty job to your teammates who might or might not be up to the task.

The rest of my traits I spent in picking up Staff Mastery from Death Magic for simple utility and Last Gasp & Decaying Swarm from Soul Reaping to give you good defensive tools when you need them as well as a solid source of Life Force. The Decaying Swarm might seem weak on paper but in reality it’s a snare and switfness exactly when you need them.

As for the common traits I didn’t pick:

The rest of the Mark related traits are rather weak, Spiteful Marks does pitiful damage as it’s only 10% on top of the already small initial trigger damage of the marks. Soul Marks on the other hand, while potentially decent in aoe situations but weak in single target, is just not needed due to the Spectral Armor and Spectral Walk giving Life Force.

Mark of Evasion is nice but only causes 2 bleeds and is not really needed on top of your weapon skills, besides you should rather hang back at range and not be dodging around in the melee.

Reaper’s Might is good but it’s for shooting away Power dependent Life Blasts, which is not worthwile as the damage in this build is lacking.

The Death Shroud entry traits are powerful but in my opinion only worth it in a power build that keeps popping in and out of Shroud all the time. With Condition Necro I find myself using the Shroud mostly for stunbreak, burst damage dump and quick fear, no benefit for hanging around in it.

And the common utilities I didn’t pick:

Power for Blood is just not needed, it’s additional damage but your weaponskills already are quite powerful enough as they are. Also while the Epidemic and Corrupt Boon are more or less mandatory I rather spend the last slot for an escape option.

Plague Signet is another which is simply not needed, off hand dagger #4 and Staff #4 handle the job quite well as they are.

Signet of Spite is all in all rather lacking, a bit of damage and a snare on a rather lengthy cooldown, not worth it.

Wells are powerful but not required in this build as you already have a lot of aoe effects already.

After playing warrior for a while, starting an elementalist has been an interesting and different kind of experience. I’d like to thank @daphoenix for inspiration and share couple of thoughts from my journies so far.

D/D Elementalist is definitely a fun way to level in pve, lot’s of damage, lot’s of tricks, but it’s a rough start. The build which as been discussed in this thread is based a lot on the boons and abilities you gain from traits, so early on you don’t have any of these. This becomes quickly apparent as the play style looks so fun with dashing in and massive aoe, which get you dead (note: Burning Speed into an Elite and adds = down before animation completes), but don’t despair.

It took me the first 10 levels to figure out what the different elements really do (it’s not as black and white as “aoe stance” “dot stance”…) and the next 10 to start to understand how they work in combination and get comfortable with cycling through the elements. At the same time I learned how to keep just the right distance from enemies to handle incoming damage, so groups and elites become manageable quite quickly.

For leveling I would highly recommend specking your first 10 points into Earth and picking Earth’s Embrace major, the survivability you get from this crucial. After that either Arcane for more utility or Water for survivability, depending on how comfortable you feel. For gear I would recommend going all Toughness or Vitality before level 25.
My reasoning is that you can already travel very fast with the base skills from daggers and the air attuned heal. Also your base damage with daggers is pretty high and you get 100 condition from Earth to boost burns and bleeds further. So the only thing you need is to stay alive, so I would suggest focusing fully on that. It will all even out and start to flow better after 25 or so levels, at which point you can go any which way you want.

It really is a fun way to play this game, high risk and reward with a lot of utility on the side. Embrace the complexity, experiment and push your boundaries. Soon enough one more add will just feel like more the merrier

gduber.9756:

If Orr was a more happy place, people would be nicer. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a moment. You come home from work, deal with the kids, get the wife off your back and finally get a chance to sit down for a little while to work on your GW2 toon. In short order, you’re mad at the mobs, you’re mad at the events, you’re mad that your bags were completely full and you barely broke 20 silver (on average), you don’t know for sure if all the magic-find drugs you’re on are working, it cost over a silver to get to where you need to go but you can’t go there because it’s contested, so you have to run through 20 mobs to get to the last 30 seconds of an event and only to have another one spawn from where you just left, and DR kicks in shortly thereafter.

Not exactly a scenario that promotes happy feelings in players.

I can’t really agree with this. Considering I used to do the whole “hardcore WoW raiding” thing and now I have the aforementioned wife and kids, I prefer to spend my time in GW2 exploring the map and enjoying the jump puzzles and hidden areas.

I simply don’t have the time to get involved in the single minded grinding for karma or whatever else is needed to craft a legendary items etc. I rather do some activities where I can actually achieve something with the time I have.

So I would rather assume that the hostile crowd focusing on efficient grinding is more in the teen and student demographics. (Also the whole stfulolnoob -thing starts to seem more and more pointless after a time

Considering that in PVE when you are killing one or few mobs at a time you pop in and out of combat so the health reset kicks in, so in the run of the mill slaughtering on a given countryside you don’t even need a small heal. It’s only when you encounter something more challenging that your health starts to matter, in these cases the more powerful on cooldown heal becomes more useful than a small regen.

The only upside of the signet is in a fight which lasts less than two activations of the more powerful active skills, so a case where you first benefit from the passive regen and then as a last ditch use the active and live to tell about it. In any other scenario you are just losing on efficiency, so all in all I see very little point for running the signet unless you want it for the +40 precision trait.