Guild Wars 2

I can still swap attunements with Fiery Greatsword, I also still get the buffs from my Trait; it really is just another way to give melee elementalists another way to beat on things. The conjure weapons are nice because, for example, I can swap to Earth to get the bonus toughness from my traits there -and still do fire-levels of damage.- Or, with Earth Shield, I can have a defensive weapon while in Water and regenerating. Being able to access skill types outside your current attunement is the reason for the conjure skills.

1. On the Hero Panel, Trait page in the mists. At a trainer (where you bought your manual) in Tyria.

2. Do you want to do condition damage or crits for damage? That’s the biggest choice for damage dealing, with any weapon being OK at a critical focus build, but really needing to go daggers or scepters for conditions. Usually, you’ll want to maximize Power and then either Precision or Condition Damage (or both, but then you’ll be missing defensive stats, which may be OK if that’s what you want.)

3. All the PvP gear in the Mists is free, so experiment what works best with your build.

4. Elementalists can be excellent support, but probably the key is to at least be able to routinely clear conditions from allies as frequently as possible; the Water trait line will help with that somewhat.

5 & 6 are too dependent on everything else to say for certain, except that melee is incredibly dangerous, even for dagger/dagger elementalists, so pick those melee fights carefully!

As an aside: I never understood why Dagger got cleansing wave instead of Focus. I thought that, at some point, they’d swap the two to give Daggers a daze and another damage attack, while letting the Focus continue to be support oriented.

Really, what survivability does X/Dagger give you?

Fire has nothing (Focus at least gives you Fire shield and a combo field). Water it gives you a heal and chill armor (better than the chill/Comet in Focus, but not really “survival” since the chill is for staying on your target but the heal/condition cleanse is definitely survival).

Earth you get a knock down and a long cast time nuke compared to Magnetic Shield and Obsidian Flesh (Focus wins out again). Air daggers gives you RTL and Updraft, which are crucial for your spike and too long a cooldown to use to spike AND escape with, compared to Focus getting a projectile screen and knock down. If you want survivability, you get a focus, not a dagger offhand.

TL;DR: Dagger is good for damage, but I would not say it is good for survivability.

I tried Dagger/Dagger, but I felt like I was just missing something, not exactly sure what. It was painful to lose Ride the Lightening/Updraft, but I felt like Dagger/Focus gave me a little more flexibility. Being able to deflect projectiles was OK, but the gap closer was really important, so I’m not sure if I’d suggest the change, but it is at least worth testing out. I think, though, I’m slowly drifting towards Scepter/Dagger.

Most groups usually have a person or two focused solely on doing damage; every class should be able to bring raw damage builds (and this is coming from someone who usually plays support.) If you have enough damage and need more support, when putting your group together say that you need support, not damage. Problem solved.

Just a quick note: I think he means the path is getting blocked (so, when you Ride the Lightning, a rock that you’d normally walk over causes you hang in space), not complaining about someone using a skill to BLOCK the attack.

I think Meteor Swarm just does damage so that if you want cripple/CC you have to swap over (of course, Lava Chains underwater sort of messes with this reasoning, but, whatever.) I think really all Meteor Swarm needs is some way to make it more consistent (maybe give the meteors some more splash so even indirect hits still do something to anyone in the AoE?)

I think, even without committing 20 points to Arcane, you pretty much need to put in at least 10 points and trait for the boons on attunement. I do feel like whenever I try to fiddle with traits in PvP, I always feel like I’m getting cramped trait wise, a feeling I don’t have on my Engineer, Warrior, Mesmer or Guardian PvP alts. I’m not sure if that just means Elementalists are less focused (and have more flex), or if I’m just doing it wrong, but a lot of the things listed here (especially cast times) really play into my problems (even though I do enjoy the class.)

I think if you have auto attack on, forgot to toggle it off after killing something and target something else, the toggle is still “on.” Just make sure to hit ESC and that should stop any auto attacking.

Though, I do still randomly start spinning in place and only ALT-tabbing fixes that.

I noticed the personal story section, even though I’ve only gotten to about Lvl.25 on my main because GameStop never shipped my collector’s edition box, is a bit wonky. Dialogue choices are present for my Sylvari (moon/shield vision) that clearly relate to the knight or stag vision when I’m talking with the Mother Tree (though everything else seems to synch up). Not sure why this is, but I think that the personal stories are a bit unstable at the moment.

When this happened to me, after forcing a re-patch the problem was solved. I don’t know why, I don’t know if the solution was caused by re-patching, but if you don’t have any other trouble shooting paths open to you, try that.