Guild Wars 2

Dahir.4158:

You do what you want in pve. In wvw it’s different.

As per the OP, this is a thread about PvE, so of course we’re talking about builds for PvE…

reikken.4961:

while testing with the jaxnx dps meter, on core ele continually swapping attunements resulted in nearly the same dps, especially when I used dagger off hand (ring of fire has the same cooldown as fire attunement, while flame wall’s is slightly longer, making you have to stay in fire 2-3 seconds too long and thus making burning speed less efficient)

First, base ele condi damage is insignificant compared to tempest condi as well as the condi of other classes. If you have access to Tempest, you should absolutely be using it for a condi build. If you do not have access to Tempest, then to be honest your DPS will be subpar and you will be a detriment to your group. If you are a casual player then of course this doesn’t matter, but if you engage in any activity in which your group relies on your DPS then you should bring a power build.

Also, despite the cooldown difference, Flamewall does significantly more DPS than Ring of Fire and is worth the extra time spent in Fire Attunement (especially since there is no reason to swap out of Fire for DPS purposes). Ring of Fire requires an enemy to actually pass through it to apply burning. Just sitting in the ring will not apply extra stacks, so RoF will do subpar damage to any stationary boss. Maybe that’s why you were getting nearly the same DPS from camping Fire Attunement vs swapping.

Finally, even if an enemy did continually pass through the Ring of Fire, Flamewall still does better DPS even with its longer cooldown, so there really is no reason whatsoever to use OH dagger over OH focus for DPS.

Actually you only need two accessories to have Assassin’s stats for maximum DPS benefit. Maxing crit chance is easier than you think. Everything else is Berserker.

Also, D/x doesn’t use Lightning Hammer in PvE because you never spend more than a second or two outside of Air attunement, and LH is a DPS loss over the Air/Fire skills.

And if you want to tank, then swap out your accessories for Cleric’s stats. Ele makes a great tank because it has such high self heals. Ele can even fulfill both the healing and tanking role simultaneously with full Cleric/Zealot gear. It can be a bit tough, but is totally possible and there are videos of it being done.

Edit for link:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XCVPgNNAmNA0RgFBALIAUAOACXySQKwt1ObztA-TxRBABkpEDPdAPcBAMTJIAPAgrUeQp6PkBQfBA-e

Without Spotter/Banners you are looking at 89.81% crit chance. Spotter’s is another 7.14% and Banner of Discipline is another 8.09%, for a total of 105.04%. Even if you dropped Signet of Fire you would still be sitting at 96.46% crit chance. Even if you don’t have a Druid healer, you are still sitting at 97.9% crit chance.

Equipping anymore than 2 Assassin’s accessories is absolute overkill. Equipping an entire armor set and possibly more, as you suggested, is quite simply a waste of stats and will lower your DPS in all situations.

And of course, if you’re running the D/x build then you have the 9% crit chance from Aeromancer’s training, so you are guaranteed to have max crit chance at all times.

You should probably change all of that ascended gear back to zerker rofl. =p

Kaleban.9834:

I would say stick with Sinister until the more experienced and knowledgeable theorycrafters have had a run at Viper.

Theorycrafting has already been done.

Particlar’s build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqKc1_CyFH4
Raid example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpZm4c5gss8

WP’s build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKnSjhdl7U

Notice that both Particlar and WP have less than 120 expertise. Particlar uses only one viper weapon while WP uses two. Everything else is sinister.

Dahir.4158:

Yes it does…

No… it doesnt. Condi ele camps fire attunement for burns. You don’t swap to earth unless for some reason you need the other utilities it offers.

Rozbuska.5263:

Some ppl should realize that old meta where only thing what matters was top notch dps is gone and also we no longer have top dps in game so you should start consider some swaps for utility stuff if you dont wanna be replaced. Pistols have better dps thats simply truth but did they help you break bar? No.

Top notch DPS is gone? Try telling that to Gorseval, or even VG to a lesser extent. Sure some top guilds can burn him fast enough to not worry about timers, but the majority of raiders still have issues with the enrage, which means top notch DPS is absolutely needed. Gorseval mechanics are incredibly easy, the only difficult thing about that fight is the DPS check. Top DPS is no longer the only thing that matters in a fight, and is of course always secondary to personal skill and mechanics, but it is still absolutely important.

Engi has plenty of utility without hammer (as I show below, hammer provides almost no group utility). It is in fact possible for classes to do top notch DPS and bring great utility. You often don’t have to choose one or the other.

Hammer provides:
- Vulnerability
- Personal reflect
- Personal evade
- Block
- Lightning field
None of these are useful to the raid. 25x vulnerability is so easily applied that with 10 players you will never not have it. Two out of three of the raid bosses don’t even have abilities that can be reflected, and the third boss you generally don’t want to reflect, so that’s useless too. Evade and block are definitely nice, but completely unnecessary if you and your healer are doing your job. And lighting field? That provides no benefit to the raid and is actually a hindrance if you end up blocking a fire (for burns) or water (for healing) field.

Why you would bring breakbars into this is beyond me. Hammer offers no CC and so is no better at breaking bars than pistol. When a fight has a stringent DPS check, there is absolutely no reason to bring a weapon that offers less DPS and no beneficial utility to the group.

In fact, pistols offer significantly better utility than hammer. Glue Shot is incredibly powerful on Seekers and Charged Souls. Hammer offers nothing.

tl;dr
For a condi build, you can bring a subpar DPS weapon (unless a build is provided that proves hammer DPS to be on par with pistol, in which case I will gladly retract this statement) with no useful utility, or you can bring a high DPS weapon with great utility.

If you are simply doing open world content, the difference between the two weapons is not really an issue (and the personal defense on hammer might serve you better against HoT mobs), but for endgame content you are hurting not only yourself but also your entire group by not bringing pistols.

reikken.4961:

Except for drake’s breath/dragon’s tooth, most of your burn sources have a cooldown that’s about as long as the attunement cooldown, or longer, or don’t come from weapon skills. so you can use all your long cooldown moves, then swap to earth while you start the cast for drake’s breath, and then apply bleeds and miss out on almost no burning

but it isn’t that much better than just sitting around waiting for another drake’s breath, and it requires investment into bleeds, which you could invest into something else

Except that OLF applies a very large number of burns, is an integral part of the condi ele DPS rotation, and increases the cooldown of fire attunement to 17.5s. Swapping out to earth loses you a huge amount of DPS.

Condi ele doesn’t do bleeds.

Burn ele:
Balthazar Rune: 45% Burn duration
Adept Trait: 20% Burn duration
Koi Cake: 20% Condi duration
Toxic Maintenance/Sharpening: 10% Condi duration

Total: 95% Burn duration with no viper’s gear.

The only way a full condi DPS ele works is by going full burn. Bleeds do pretty garbage DPS, especially because you need to swap to Earth attunement to apply them, which means you lose your burn generating abilities. Therefore burns are the only condi you apply that matters, and so burn duration is all you need.

Sinister > Viper for ele.

Ele main here, been hardcore raiding for about 7 years and am definitely looking for a consistent raiding group to knock out Spirit Vale. I have gear and experience with running zerker/condi DPS, healing, or tanking on my ele. Also have every other class except Warr at 80 with exotic gear matching their meta builds.

Main ele here, left you guys an app. =D

Fresh Air does recharge Air Attunement if you swap attunements. Unsure if it supposed to be able to recharge the overload if you stay in Air Attunement.

Before I say anything, I want to applaud you looking for new build ideas. Regardless of how well it worked out, trying to find something besides the cookie cutter meta builds is always a respectable goal. Unfortunately in this particular case your build will not work as well as you were hoping. Your math on scepter/water versus staff/fire was off by quite a bit.

First of all, if you are looking at the ability numbers from in-game then the bonuses from Aquamancer’s/Pyromancer’s Training are already accounted for. Secondly, 25 stacks of vulnerability is extremely easy to keep applied in a group setting, so there is no point in taking either that extra 25% modifier or the 20% from Bolt to the Heart into account (if it affects both scepter and staff equally, then it is irrelevant for comparison purposes).

Here are the proper base numbers, taken from the Hero window (thus gear is not taken into account, only passive modifiers from traits) and some quick math:

Scepter (in Water attunement):
- Ice Shards: 363 damage, 0.75s cast time, no CD. Yields 484 DPCT and 484 DPS.
- Shatterstone: 554 damage, 0.5s cast time, 2s CD. Yields 1108 DPCT and 221 DPS.
- Water Trident: 316 damage, 0.5s cast time, 13.5s CD. Yields 632 DPCT and 22.6 DPS.
- Comet: 505 damage, 0.75s cast time, 16.75s CD. Yields 673.3 DPS and 28.9 DPS.
- 20% Damage modifier from Piercing Shards
- DPS: 908.4

Staff (in Fire attunement)
- Fireball: 571 damage, 1s cast time, no CD. Yields 571 DPCT and 571 DPS.
- Lava Font: 2148 damage, 0.2s “invisible” cast time, 4s CD. Yields 10740 DPCT and 511.4 DPS.
- Flame Burst (with 2x Burning condi): 1901 damage, 0.5s cast time, 6.75 CD. Yields 3802 DPCT and 262.2 DPS.
- Meteor Shower (assuming 1/3 of meteors hit): 6914.2 damage, 3.75s cast time, 20s CD. Yields 1843.8 DPCT and 291.1 DPS
- DPS: 1635.8
Extra side note in that all of staff’s attacks are AoE, whereas only 3/4 of scepter’s attacks are AoE (and they are smaller AoE’s than staff).

Camping fire staff yields almost double the DPS of water scepter. Also staff brings significantly more utility than scepter. Swapping to water provides very high healing and one of the most powerful condition clears in the game. Earth provides reflect, immob, and cripple. Air provides swiftness, knockback, and stun. Scepter has some utility as well, but not nearly enough to make up for the horrendous lack of DPS.

You are of course free to play however you want, but if you are considering bringing this build into dungeons/fractals/etc. then be warned that you will be a significant hindrance to your team. You will be doing subpar DPS without nearly enough support to make up for the difference.

I feel ashamed for not knowing of this earlier. You sir are amazing, thank you!

Slightly off topic question here, but how are you seeing the exact health values of your phantasms? As far as I’ve been able to find there is only the near-useless health bar that doesn’t show any values.

It was removed because it was a semi-crappy trait. Fire Aura is not all that powerful, and if you are playing properly you will rarely ever activate your signets, so the trait was never used.

The Fire Aura portion of its effect was added to the Conjurer trait though.

This made me rofl so hard.

+1

If you want a burst caster, go S/D ele. It doesn’t have the survivability or sustain of D/D and against a full team of pros you are going to have a hard time, but a good S/D ele playing against average/experienced players will do just fine.

Scepter/Dagger has incredible burst damage, though it requires a high level of skill to play. Single target burst is the hallmark of the scepter. It is also a ranged weapon, so you’ll get the feel of a caster archetype.

Luvok.5697:

The best PvP build is with melee weapons that require close range.

Welcome to GW2, where we don’t have to follow the extremely rigid stereotypes about magic.

The biggest perk is survivability and uptime/sustain.

For D/D or D/F ele this is true. For other ele builds it’s not true at all. Also GW2 in general is all about survivability. There are no tanks or healers because each class has its own basic survivability.

The long range (staff) build is used mainly for buff/backline benefits.

That is one use, but it is not in any way the main use. Staff ele is the second highest damage dealer in the game, and has significantly more burst damage than the number one damage dealer (sinister engi).

There are no real “nuke” spells.

Meteor Shower, Glyph of Storms in air attunement, and Ice Bow #4 are three of the hardest hitting abilities in the game. In fact Ice Bow #4 is often touted as being so strong that it is just below “exploit” status. If used on a large mob, Meteor Shower and Ice Bow #4 are THE number one hardest hitting aoe abilities in the game (and are stronger than most single target abilities).

Ele still has horrible survivability but not on-demand damage to justify it.

Staff ele has poor survivability compared to most other classes, but as mentioned before has incredible damage to make up for it.
D/D and D/F have amazing survivability (D/D especially has some of the highest survivability in the game and is nearly immortal when played properly) and have less damage to make up for it.

Luvok.5697:

I’m a relatively new player and I feel that Ele is not at all what I expect when playing a caster class. It also seems that everything is justified around D/D which seems sort of stupid.

I’m not sure what I’d even do to change it. I just know that playing an Ele feels nothing like a caster archetype I’d expect it to. I don’t think I like it.

I’m sorry you feel that way. It is true that D/D is the meta build for PvP (although it is nearly useless outside of sPvP/WvW roaming), but the reason it is meta is because it is currently one of the strongest builds to play in PvP. A good D/D ele can survive just about anything and is extremely powerful once the player has self buffed themselves with enough might.

While it is true that D/D breaks heavily from the standard mage archetype in PvP, when you are in PvE the staff is the strongest build available. Staff ele is the quintessential mage.

So if you are strictly a PvP player then ele might not be for you, but anywhere outside PvP you will find that ele is exactly the caster archetype you were looking for.

TheLastNobody.8319:

Slight amendum lily, weakness is great for long sustained attacks but against big burst your going on a coin flip. Sorry not preaching just saying. If it provided a straight up 25% damage reduction it’d be very very nice.

This is true, and is why avoidance tanks have always been sub-optimal in other MMOs. Having an attack be reduced only half the time is an awful way to mitigate damage, and is why the weakness condition is terrible for bosses. Weakness isn’t bad against other players because they have more sustain DPS, but against bosses that are mostly big burst hitters it’s completely unreliable. Half the time weakness will save your life, the other half it will allow a huge spike of damage to hit you (and most likely kill you).

Not to say that weakness is useless, just that it isn’t at all reliable and is one of the worst damage reduction options available. Against bosses weakness really should just provide a flat damage decrease.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Concept-Elite-Specialisation-The-Weaver

I would still give mesmer a shot. Sword/Sword mesmer has three melee abilities, one ability that is designed to teleport you into melee (basically a magic leap), and one ability that summons a melee phantasm. There is nothing NOT melee about it. =p

Plus the meta for mesmer is Sword/Sword and Sword/Focus or Sword/Pistol. The Focus offhand is still mostly a melee weapon because the phantasm it summons is melee and blocks projectiles if you are standing near it (encouraging you to be in melee). The pistol is definitely ranged, but you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.

If you are looking for a class that is purely 100% only using magic melee abilities, then you are completely out of luck. The only classes that have full weapon sets (both main and offhand) that are STRICTLY melee are warrior, ranger, and thief (and even ranger is iffy). Every single other class has some sort of ability on their weapons that is either a leap or a small ranged ability.

Slightly off topic, the reason conjures have not been balanced is because balancing abilities is VERY difficult. Whenever a dev balances even a single ability, they have to take into account every single possible combination of other abilities, traits, sigils, runes, and the abilities of other classes. If they don’t do this (or don’t do it very well) then it creates the possibility of some ability or trait or sigil/rune combination performing far better than was intended and can very easily lead to overpowered builds. This is why balancing takes so long. Going through every imaginable combination to make sure there are no obscure combos that lead to an OP build takes an enormous amount of time and effort. It’s not as simple as “just increase the damage on x ability!” because that one little change can have dramatic consequences (think butterfly effect).

If that weren’t bad enough, conjures are not single abilities, but five abilities all rolled into one. That means conjures are roughly five times harder to balance than other abilities.

Because eles have other utilities that are very powerful and provide very versatile functions, the fact of the matter is eles do not NEED conjures to be buffed in order to perform excellently in any situation. For this reason, fixing conjures is very low on ANet’s priority list. I’m sure they will be addressed at some point, but not now. This is a good thing. Which would you rather have, ANet fixing utilities that are not needed for ele to perform well, or ANet fixing other balance issues that cause huge disparities in gameplay? The obvious answer is that the big issues need to be addressed first, and things like conjures need to be sidelined.

Ah, I see your point. Yeah ele does not really hit things with its weapons themselves. Lightning Hammer does, but as I said it’s not optimal at all.

Sorry again for ele not being what you wanted, but I would definitely encourage you to check out mesmer or necro, because they do actually hit enemies with the weapons as opposed to only using magical attacks in melee range.

Celestial is king for D/D builds.

There may be times when you want to swap some celestial gear for knights or berserkers, but celestial should be your foundation. If full celestial is too expensive/taking too long/etc., then don’t feel like you are completely gimping yourself by taking a substitute though.

You did not mention game mode, so my advice here is primarily for PvE (apologies if this is not what you were looking for).

If you are looking for a melee magic user but D/D is not melee enough for you then you’re not really going to have a good time with ele (although ele, primarily D/F ele, is probably the most versatile class in the game, able to fulfill nearly any role).

Respectfully, I disagree that D/D or D/F is not a true melee build. Are you perhaps using the Water or Earth auto attacks often? Because when played properly you are pretty much only using the Air auto attack, which has only a little more range than standard melee weapons. When played to its strengths, D/D or D/F dances between the attunements, using Fire/Water/Earth for big hitting cooldown abilities and swapping back to Air in between each to use the Air auto attack while waiting for attunements to recharge. Just in case you did not have it, here is a link to the PvE D/F build (note that D/D is really only useful in PvP or when playing by yourself):
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_D/F

Regardless, that is just my opinion. If you disagree then I apologize for ele not being what you were looking for. Unfortunately, to answer your question, most conjures are not super useful, and the ones that are useful are only used for one or two abilities and then are dropped completely.

If you are just looking to have fun and not looking to bring the most out of your class then you can definitely get away with using the old Scepter Lightning Hammer build. This build used to be very powerful, but after the specialization update it has fallen quite a bit behind the Staff and D/F builds (not to say that is bad, just that it is not nearly as strong as it once was). It prioritizes the Lightning Hammer conjure (obviously lol) which has a very powerful auto attack chain and is a melee weapon. When the LH is not being used however, you are left with the mid-range scepter as your weapon. A link to the build can be found here:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_S/x_LH

Of course, if you really don’t care about optimizing your build, then you could do a D/D Lightning Hammer setup. That would be about as melee as ele will ever get, though you will be very sub-optimal in group settings.

Unfortunately, if none of these builds are to your liking then the melee aspect of ele may just not be for you. If this is a deal breaker, then I would recommend trying out the mesmer. The optimal mesmer builds are almost all completely melee oriented. Necromancer would be another solid choice because the optimal build prioritizes the dagger, and once HoT arrives necros will get another powerful melee weapon in the form of the greatsword.

@Yashuoa:
The first place you should always go for new builds is metabattle.com. There you will find the standard builds used in dungeons/sPvP/WvW. Note however that metabattle builds are only generic builds. Once you have found a build that suits your style you should play around with it. Ask others for advice, practice duels, their takes on the build, etc. and tweak the build to your liking. Metabattle is an excellent resource for the foundations of a build, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all, so don’t just copy/paste something from metabattle and think you are good to go.

@Ithilwen:

I’m in my fourth year now of playing Mesmer.

Erm… Game has been out for three years. GW1 had such completely different mechanics and the mesmer profession in particular was so different from the GW2 mesmer (plus there are very few GW1 vets playing when compared to all the new people that have never touched GW1) that you can’t honestly cite playing GW1 as any sort of experience with GW2. So I’m not really sure where you are pulling 4 years from… Clearly your anecdotes are flawed right from the start if you don’t even know how long you’ve been playing.

Ithilwen.1529:

Help is hard to come by. No one will tell you the combos.. the skill sequences.. Such as I know I learned mainly through careful analysis of gameplay videos and trial and error.

I have always found immense help from the mesmer community, both on the forums here and from the [OMFG] guild. In fact, I have often quoted the mesmer community as one of the more cohesive and helpful communities. I don’t know why you have such a bad experience, but judging from your posts that were reported to the mods and subsequently deleted just a few minutes ago, I would assume that your bad experience from other mesmers is largely due to your personal attitude. If you act like a jerk or take offense from every little comment, even when there wasn’t anything to be offended by, then of course no one is going to want to help you.

Ithilwen.1529:

We, Mesmers in general, are hurt by this.

Only you are hurt by this. The majority of other players have a good time with the mesmer community.

But regardless, this topic has gone off the rails for too long, and the moderators were right to delete your little outbursts. Let’s get back on topic shall we?

Bandit.8279:

Stop walking across it silly. When your mom tells you the stove top is hot it means do not touch!

This.

The circle only applies three stacks of burning when the ability is initially cast. After that, you only get new stacks of burning if you stand on the actual ring. Standing inside the ring does NOT give you further stacks.

In the future it may be better to learn how an ability works before crying for a nerf.

@MeveM

You are mostly right, however necros do two things better than most other classes. One is soft CC. Necros have excellent sources of chill/fear/blind/etc. Two is damage soaking. With all of their life steal, high health, and DS/RS, necros are excellent at taking hits.

Right now neither of these is of any real use in dungeons/fractals because most bosses are immune/highly resistant to soft CC and pve is so easy that you don’t need to soak damage.

However, Robert Gee has already stated that they are reworking soft CC to be of much more use in endgame PvE. So ANet is promising us that necros will at least have that use. On top of that, raids are promised to be extremely challenging and require some people to run survivability builds. If this turns out to be true then necros may have a use as a pseudo tank (not a classical tank of course, but a GW2 version).

This is all still speculation of course, but necro does have a slim hope.

You are actually in huge luck. The meta staff ele build fits all of your criteria extremely well. Just about every attack is an aoe of some kind, the build performs decently on its own (although dagger/focus works better solo), the build is ridiculously useful in groups (even without ice bow), and for the most part you will be camping fire attunement and only using other attunements very briefly or for specific situations.

A great guide to the build can be found here:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_Staff

It’s no secret that the necro class is not much of a team player when it comes to PvE. Mostly this is because necro’s group support is mainly in the form of boon removal/corruption and soft CC’s such as blind/chill/etc., none of which have a significant impact on bosses.

At the moment this is not a very big issue because the current endgame (dungeons/fractals) are quite easy and do not require too much min/maxing. However, if raids prove to be as challenging as ANet promises, necro’s lack of team support will become significantly more of a hindrance.

So! Do we know if HoT will bring PvE improvements for necro? This could be either in the form of improved group support from Reaper, or making bosses more susceptible to control effects. Do we know if either of these will occur?

Basically what I’m asking is: Will necro be more useful in hardcore PvE with HoT?

I could maybe see Blackjack as an acceptable name for a heavy stealth-based elite (like thief would really need that), but for the martial arts style elite spec we have now? Yeah, thankfully they changed it from Blackjack. That is far worse than the completely unoriginal Daredevil.

If you want to go defensive, go with Sword/Sword and /Torch. The low cooldowns on Blur from Sword #2, Block from Sword #4, and the Blind/Stealth from Torch #4 pretty much guarantee you a way to avoid any damage. Sword/Sword also does very good DPS.

This is a game with magic, completely unrealistic science, explosions that can heal you, people who can run flat out for hours without tiring, people who (without any advanced technology or magic, aka warriors) can take down giants, dragons, and other massively overpowering enemies singlehandedly (when those enemies could literally just lay down and roll all over the ground and squash every single player dead), and about a hundred other science-breaking mechanics. Don’t pull that “this is more realistic” crap on something as small as this when there are so many bigger issues at hand.

I am totally for trying to make games as realistic as possible (within the bounds of keeping them interesting and fun), but gameplay mechanics should always have a higher priority than realism.

Grenadier is an example of when ANet should bend the rules on physics and make the gameplay more balanced instead of making it more realistic.

Thanks for the replies!

Ross Biddle, that link is to an ele build? o.O

I generally run mesmer in my guild’s WvW zergs for portals, veils, focus pulls, and the like. However, while I feel comfortable with my specific roles, I’m not really sure what I should be doing in between the portal bombs and veil rushes against other zergs. What would be a good playstyle against small/large zergs? At the moment I am running Sw/F and GS, and when I’m not using the focus for pulls I try to just take down individual players. This seems inefficient and not entirely helpful to my own zerg though.

Basically my question is, as a mesmer, what is my role during the fight (after portal bombs or veil rushes)?

Hey everyone! I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately and am looking for a mesmer build reminiscent of the old shutdown builds we used to run in GW1 (consisting of things like Psychic Instability, Wastrel’s Demise, Panic, Cry of Frustration, Power Drain, Backfire, etc.).

I know most of the mesmer’s shutdown capabilities have been lost, partly due to the lack of energy mechanics, but what would you guys say is the closest viable build GW2 mesmers can get to the old school shutdowns?

In PvE staff is amazing, and that metabattle build is a great choice. Just remember that while metabattle should always be your first stop for new builds, it is not the be-all-and-end-all. The nice thing about GW2 is there is usually a lot of leeway for builds, so feel free to experiment and change some things around. The metabattle builds should always be your foundations, but if you prefer some traits or utilities over others then feel free to swap them out. Also remember that the metabattle staff build is intended for dungeons/fractals, not leveling up.

With that being said, I highly recommend NOT using staff in sPvP. Staff is great in PvE and WvW, but in sPvP you will find it very difficult to use with any success. In sPvP I would recommend dagger/dagger (or perhaps scepter/dagger if you don’t like melee). Again, metabattle has the base builds for sPvP (they are listed under “Conquest”, so I would suggest checking those out.

I think you guys are forgetting that facets are not the only way to generate fury/might…

If you need to run the fury/might facets at all times to keep high uptime on those buffs then your group members are not doing their jobs.

Yes, by yourself you need to keep the facets active almost all the time for 100% uptime, but in a group you will have plenty of duration/stacks to comfortably use the facet’s active abilities any time you want.

Despite his signature, Blaine Tog’s advice is good if you are doing PvP or WvW content, but bullet numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 are not at all true for PvE. Follow his advice if you are doing PvP, otherwise see these revisions:

1. Staff is the highest damage output weapon eles have. Dagger/Dagger puts out great burst, mobility, and survivability (which is why it is excellent in PvP) but over a longer period of time (such as when fighting a boss) staff will do significantly more damage. However, remember that staff’s dps comes almost entirely from Lava Font, which requires the enemy to stay in one place for a long period of time.

That being said, staff gameplay is ridiculously boring. If you are looking for something more interesting I would suggest dagger/focus (for more survivability and only a small reduction in overall damage) or dagger/dagger (for more burst but a bigger loss in overall damage). Using melee weapons will also force you to become a better player.

2. Cantrips have significantly less use in PvE than PvP. Lightning Flash is always a great skill for mobility or quickly getting out of red circles, but other than that you will generally want to avoid cantrips. Mist Form or Armor of Earth can be used if you need more survivability, but honestly despite ele’s low HP and armor, they have incredibly high active survivability when played right, so you should never really need MF or AoE.

So your utilities depend on whether you are doing open world PvE or dungeons. For open world, you should generally run Lightning Flash, Signet of Fire, and a choice of Glyph of Storms, Arcane Wave, or Glyph of Elemental Power. For dungeons you should run Signet of Fire, Glyph of Storms, and Conjure Frost Bow.

3. Water/Arcane is amazing in PvP, but for PvE you should only take one of them. Water is better for dungeons while Arcane is better for soloing. In PvE you should be running Fire/Air/x. Contrary to Blaine Tog’s comment, eles actually have extremely high survivability. The only issue is players need to be skilled to bring out the elementalist’s full potential.

5. Celestial is the meta in PvP (for good reason) but it is generally bad to use in PvE. Even Power/Vitality/Toughness is not really optimal. You should be focusing on Power/Precision/Ferocity gear and using your own skill to survive instead of relying on your gear as a crutch. If you find yourself dieing a lot, try to learn from your deaths before getting Vitality/Toughness gear. Of course, if you’re getting frustrated then definitely swap out for sturdier gear until you get better, but you really should try to learn your dodges and defensive skills first.

Two extra notes: Summoning elementals is, as Blaine Tog said, an amazing tool. Just remember that only the earth elemental is excellent at getting aggro on mobs. The fire ele just does damage, the air ele does a bit of damage and stuns, and the ice ele does a bit of damage and heals. But if you want to get mobs off you, go with the earth ele.

Also, while you absolutely should be swapping attunements often, don’t just faceroll your keyboard and use every ability off cooldown. Bringing out the true power and survivability of the elementalist requires using abilities from different attunements in the proper order so that they synergize together.

tl;dr
Follow Blaine Tog’s advice for PvP/WvW, but for PvE check out the following guides:
Dagger/Focus: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_D/F
Staff: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_Staff
These two guides are designed around level 80 dungeons, but their builds, gear, and skill usage are generally unchanged for open world PvE leveling.

Also just a closing note, whenever I say “you should” in my post, I’m not trying to be elitist. These responses are simply the most efficient way of leveling. If you do not like the weapons/armor listed, or the build listed, or the utilities used, then by all means, don’t use them. The bottom line is this a game, so do what makes you the happiest!

I would have both a staff and a dagger/focus or dagger/dagger combo handy at all times.

Staff has the highest damage output, and does amazing aoe damage, but it requires mobs to stay in one place (and it’s crazy boring). For this reason it is best used in dungeons and big group events.

Dagger mainhand with a focus or dagger offhand has better burst and mobility than staff, which makes it more suited to traveling and completing hearts. Offhand dagger provides more mobility while focus provides more survivability, so the choice is up to you.

If you don’t like the dagger mainhand you can swap it out for a scepter. Scepter has great burst as well but almost no cleaving, which is not good for completing hearts or events.

For all of your gear you should go with Power/Precision, and once you get access to triple stat gear go for Berserker’s (Power/Precision/Ferocity). You should have plenty of survivability with this gear, but if you find yourself dieing too often feel free to swap in some Power/Toughness or Power/Vitality gear (Toughness will protect you better from direct damage while Vitality will protect you better from condition damage).

For your build you will want to end up with Fire/Air/Arcane (for solo) or Fire/Air/Water (for group content). I would take a look at this setup:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_D/F
It was built for a level 80 character but you can easily adapt it to leveling. Just drop the Ice Bow and Fiery Greatsword. Replace the utility with Arcane Shield, Lightning Flash, Arcane Wave, or w/e else you like. Replace the elite with Glyph if Elementals.

Contestation is where you are contesting a capture point. When you enter an enemy’s capture point you begin to contest that point and they stop gaining points from it. If no enemies are around you will capture the point, but if enemies show up and remain inside the point with you then the point will be contested until one of you is killed or leaves the point.

Assassin does not exist in GW2. Assassin was a profession in GW1. Thief is the GW2 equivalent of the GW1 Assassin.

While I would definitely like to see some quickness boons for ele (it goes so well with the Air specialization), I do not think Slow fits any ele themes. Slow is more of a mesmer themed condition. I think more sources of Chill would better suit the ele theme than Slow would.

Just my two cents.

umadbro?

In all seriousness though, you have a good point regarding turrets. They did promote very little skill. However, the solution is not to make them useless, but to make them challenging to use. ANet should make the Tool Kit (or some other kit) extremely turret focused and make turret maintenance an important part of the build’s gameplay.

For example take the idea of healing turrets by hitting them with your wrench and expand on it. Have base damage of turrets set low and then give the wrench short-cooldown abilities that buff a single turret’s damage, or cause it to apply conditions on its next hit, etc. These are ideas just off the top of my head, but you get the general idea. Turning turret use into a skill based “mini-game” is a far better alternative than just letting 25% of our utility skills be totally useless.

OneKlicKill.4285:

Being “In” or “Out” of theme doesn’t change the fact that its current state is really bad.
Propose
Instant cast
Breakstun
2 seconds of haste
50% reduc on your next ability
pick 2-3 if all seem too OP for an elite…

I would also add something that tries to prevent it accidentally being wasted. Perhaps make it only affect abilities with a cooldown greater than x or something of that nature. If I blow Rebound and a nearby warrior ally is still channeling 100B, I don’t want to waste my elite knocking 2-3s off that CD when he was actually planning to use the reduction for one of his much more useful abilities.

This elite forces us to make sure every single person affected is aware of the situation, not doing anything else, has their powerful abilities ready to go, and won’t need to activate a different ability right after we finish our cast. The micromanagement needed to make this elite useful is crazy high, and the reward for a perfectly coordinated use of the elite is incredibly small considering the risks.

It’s simply subpar.

I still don’t understand…OP is complaining because other classes are boring to play? Disregarding the blatanly wrong implications regarding ranger damage, survivability, and skill ceiling, if you would rather play a class that doesn’t require skill then go play it. Eles are awesome because they are actually fun to play and have excellent performance.

That video though, good fight between the ele and the necro

4
/fifteencharacters

OneKlicKill.4285:

Seriously, you can have it; none of us want another trash tier elite that doesn’t even fit our class theme.

This.

That elite is subpar. I won’t say it’s complete garbage, but it’s nowhere near elite-status.

The cast time makes it impractical to use with our big OH S*** buttons like AoE, MF, and LF, and unless you are running with a very skilled and coordinated group and are really lucky to have just the right circumstances, the group support functionality of the elite is going to be largely wasted. If people don’t know you are about to pop Rebound, or if they’re optimal ability is already on cooldown, or if they accidentally use some random unimportant weapon skill, then the whole thing is wasted. There is way too much potential for user error, and the reward is not enough to outweigh the risk. ANet tried to make a high-risk-high-reward elite for tempest, but let’s face it, they failed.

Hopefully ANet realizes their mistake and redesigns the elite before it goes live. Hopefully they don’t just modify some of the numbers to make more viable, because they need to just completely scrap it and start over.

ANet, normally I hate it when game devs appeal to all the QQ’ers, but this ability is the exception. Please listen to your players and go back to the drawing board with this one.

Love the video, but I don’t understand your title. Are you complaining about when you get double teamed or excited about a close 1v1?

skowcia.8257:

Well reason for rev to gain in combat weapon swap was the ability to switch between close and range combat. At this point ele should have weapon swap as well to get that luxury too.

Would that make them op? Absolutely, not like they arent op at all right now. Solution? Rebalance with weapon swap in mind. A lot of work for devs? Nobody care, balance is their job after all.

Or a much simpler solution; rebalance the attunements so that each weapon has some melee and some ranged depending on your attunement. This would be vastly easier to balance than the complete overhaul needed to give eles weapon swaps. Or fix conjures so that they are useful and give us access to different ranges at will.

Also, saying nobody cares about the workload for devs is an extremely ignorant statement. While it is absolutely their jobs to balance the classes, the actual process of balancing still takes an enormous amount of time. As a programmer myself I can tell you that rebalancing things in games like this is not nearly as simple as just changing a few values. So while you might be apathetic to the devs workload, you need to remember that the more complex the solution, the longer it will take to get done and the more likely it is to be imbalanced.

We need the simplest solution to the ele range issue, and giving eles weapon swaps is not even close to a simple solution when you consider the massive work and time that would need to be done. If you want more diversity in the range of your weapons then come up with a solution that would not take months of concentrated effort just to implement, and then even longer to balance.

Does anyone else have lag issues with the Trading Post and Gem Store? I don’t have any lag issues anywhere else (even in huge boss events) and I’m running GW2 on an SSD, but for some reason the entire Black Lion Trading Company window is very laggy, especially when I’m trying to buy items from the TP. I don’t ever get black screens or errors of any kind, just straight lag.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve this, or if it even is solvable?

Quick specs:
Intel Core i5-3570K
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 770
Samsung 840 Pro Series 128GB SSD

1. Staff ele is easier to play than most mesmer builds. D/D ele is harder to play than most mesmer builds.

2. For the best output I would follow this:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_S/S_/F_/P

For just general running around or having fun it doesn’t really matter what you go with, but I like to run something like this for convenience:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAR8cnsIClohNqBmpBUrhlUDC96Zf7kDoEBo8DnoAA-TBBXgAAK/C190r+zjSQA-e

3. Mesmers are really useful right now, both in PvE, WvW, and sPvP. In PvE everyone wants at least one mesmer for the awesome reflects, Time Warp, and general group support. Mesmers can also output respectable DPS (though not nearly as strong as some other classes like ele).