Guild Wars 2

I am running the following, using a Staff. It’s a Healer/Support focused build, exceptionally good at removing Conditions and providing a steady stream of buffs and healing.

I am currently equipped with Cleric’s prefixed gear ( + Healing, + Toughness, + Power), which, in my opinion, best compliments the build.

0 Fire
10 Air
0 Earth
30 Water
30 Arcana

The following traits :

Air 1 : Quick Glyphs

Water 1 : Cleansing Wave

Water 2 : Aquamancer’s Alacrity

Water 3 : Cleansing Waters

Arcana 1 : Elemental Attunement

Arcana 2 : Blasting Staff

Arcana 3 : Evasive Arcana

—

Healing Skill : Glyph of Elemental Harmony

Utility Skills : Arcane Blast, Glyph of Renewal, Arcane Shield

Elite Skills : Glyph of Elementals

Superior Sigil of Renewal

Rune of the Water (x2)

Rune of the Monk (x2)

Rune of the Fire (x2)

These selections and the reasoning for them are outlined below.

Cleansing Wave, Elemental Attunement, Healing Ripple: Healing Ripple is free, but these tailor to the general idea above, that you should be switching elements whenever your CDs are all active to benefit most from your traits.

Quick Glyphs Affects an excellent choice of healing skills, which allows you to gain 3 stacks of Might for some extra damage, add Regen, which combined with Cleansing Waters removes a condition as well, to dampen incoming big hits with the Protection, should you need Protection for a longer period of time, or even is useful for just running around randomly, applying Swiftness.

Evasive Arcana : enhances your burst healing by applying an extra ~2k of Healing + 1 Condition Removed when you need it, or can be used in Earth by rolling into a Water field for an Area Healing combo. The blind effect can be useful situationally, and the Fire burst isn’t half bad either.

Blasting Staff This is merely my own preference of traits. I prefer the larger areas to be able to dodge-roll into when using the Earth-version to trigger a Blast combo, but if you were to want to select a different one, I’d suggest using Arcane Mastery

Aquamancer’s Alacrity This allows you to get access to your Water fields more often, especially Healing Rains, which removes a brilliant 3 Conditions per tick due to Cleansing Waters

Skills

Glyph of Elemental Harmony The reasons are listed above under the Quick Glyphs reasoning.

Arcane Blast With a meager 20 second CD, it’s an amazing, easy to use Blast Finisher, which is otherwise in relatively short supply with a staff.

Arcane Shield It breaks stun and blocks 3 attacks. The CD is rather high IMO, at 75 seconds, but it’s not a bad choice, especially since it still lets you perform actions and can be activated while activating other skills.

Glyph of Renewal This is, in my opinion, one of the most potent and yet underused skills that we have available. There are really only two elements that you want to generally use it while attuned to, since Water’s effect has been broken to date, and the Air’s effect of teleporting the target to you is highly situational, but not to be disregarded.

Earth allows you to bring up to 3 downed targets back to life. Useful if you survive an attack that your allies didn’t.

Fire, on the other hand, is useful if you have the 3.25 seconds to devote to applying an auto-rez to yourself, and is doubly useful if you need to pick up a downed target already. That effect is amazingly potent and is not to be underestimated.

Note that this glyph functions on NPCs as well, making it nice to have for some events at times.

Glyph of Elementals : Arguably the only useful Elite skill that we have, and its versatile to whatever your party needs at the moment. I usually use either Earth or Water, depending on the situation, but Air and Fire can be useful as well.

Rune of the Water, Rune of the Monk : These two sets of two will further increase your Boon Duration bonus to 60%, which makes a good bit of your support ability that much better, especially Might, Protection and Regeneration. With these four, you can easily stack Swiftness or Regeneration to minutes at a time using various sources.

Rune of the Fire Gives you +20% Might Duration, which appears to stack after the 60% bonus from the other sources.

Sigil of Renewal Makes it so that, on a 9 Sec CD, you restore around 500 HP to nearby allies when you swap attunements. Since you do so often, it’s a steady amount of health boosting to your allies.

According to the Wiki, the healing power coefficient makes the bonus equal to 10% of your Healing Power, so that adds up.

For a Water/Arcana Elementalist in “Cleric’s” gear, this is actually pretty decent. Despite the healing being around 500, it triggers almost every 9 seconds (I assume roughly around every 10 seconds) since I’m usually switching elements as often as possible to trigger Elemental Attunement, Healing Ripple and Cleansing Wave. { As well as Cleansing Water by extension. }

Given that it has its own separate CD, it’s not a bad thing to add to the near constant Regen and Soothing Mists healing that you also give allies.

Not to mention that if you’re using a staff for healing like I prefer, there is not a great list of good sigils to use for an Arcana/Water based healer, since the only other decent healing Sigils are either on kill {sort of useful, but not to my tastes} or the On Crit, which is a low chance due to compounding percentages and since you have a low Precision. Having two sigils using D/D makes it a bit more viable, but even at that, why not have it?

For what it’s worth, it seems to occur during large groups of PCs in combat, thus why it almost always occurs in WvWvW.

If I had to guess, I’d think that the game’s sound channels are overloading and it results in this, but that is pure speculation.

While not ‘game breaking’ by definition, I’d be almost willing to demand that this gets fixed before anything else….

The biggest problem is how insanely irritating it is, and that the only fix is to close the game out and restart it; forcing you to requeue for WvW ( The only place I’ve seen this happen to date)

I just noticed this with my Water gem. Was quite diappointed too….

The simple answer? I’m not sure there is an easy fix.

The complicated answer? There is no singular problem here, it is a myriad of issues all compounding into the effects we see. Lowest base HP and Toughness in-game, combined with lower damage dealing potential on average make up a decent chunk of it. If we’re supposed to be ‘glass cannons’ as our HP and Defense imply, then give us our ‘cannon’ part back. From there, other things can be adapted and/or fixed to better work overall.

As for me, if I had to complain about one thing that I want fixed ASAP, it’s our complete lack of underwater capabilities. It’s just ungodly, and I will willingly take the extra half hour + just to ensure that I can use Whirlpool for each big fight on story quests that are underwater. It’s that terrible.

And yes, if our attunements actually did what they advertised, it might make a bit more sense. Air is a particular cuplrit on this in regards to a Staff.

I want to note as well that my interpretation of the intentions of GW2 is so that there is no ‘best weapon’ for a class; it’s all about a matter of preference. If you prefer the AoE and support capabilities of the staff much like I do, then that should be equally as viable as a Sceptre/Dagger or Dagger/Dagger as far as damage output goes, balanced a bit for AoE and Combo Fields applied, but not to the horrific degree that they are now.

For healing as Elementalist, I use the following.

Staff

30 Water -> Hydromancers Alacrity, Cleansing Water, Cleansing Wave

30 Arcana -> Blasting Staff, Elemental Attunement, Evasive Arcana*

10 Air – > Soothing Winds

Essentially burn your water CDs as often as possible, making use of your Blast Finishers into the effects of Healing Rain and Geyser whenever you can (Arcane Blast doubles as an extra heal in this way) . Otherwise, keep your water Attunement on CD, as switching into Water will give you and nearby allies ~6 seconds of Regeneration, remove 2 Conditions and grant a decent chunk of healing.

When not healing, switching into Earth to give nearby allies the Protection is also a good move, as is going to Fire to give them an extra stack of Might.

Also keep in mind that due to the +30% Buff Duration from Arcana, the effects from Elemental Harmony which otherwise are just fun extras in some cases can actually be used to great effect, especially since they are all the same as you get from switching into that element. Going into Earth and then using it to heal and gain some extra Protection can net you roughly 7 seconds, which isn’t half bad in the defensive department.

• I have had mixed success with Evasive Arcana, so feel free to change it out if you have little luck with it. It is the ‘optimal’ selection, however, should it be working correctly for you. As before, I’ve had mixed success with it personally.

This works expecially well in PvE or WvW, as there tend to be others around to aid ; in SPvP, this heavily relies on there being another person around to actually heal, and you will end up being fragile. I tried it out for a little while in SPvP pugs and wasn’t particularly happy with it, but I’m also not a SPvP-type either, preferring WvW and PvE.

I cannot emphasize enough though, that most importantly, know what you have to offer in all elements and use whatever is most appropriate for the moment. That’ll get you more mileage as an Elementalist in general, and with healing it’s no exception.

I would love to see the #1 abilities gain the standard " 20% Physical Projectile Finisher " that many other classes basic attacks get.

That being said, what about Ice Spike? That looks about as much of a Blast Finisher as Dragon’s Tooth… so why is that not one?

I recall reading somewhere also that lowering the absolutely massive delays on many of our attacks (Ice Spike, Eruption, Dragon’s Tooth etc.) might help a bit as well to alleviate the combo usage issues.

Truga.5897:

DaedalusDragon.3754:

What? There are many bugs in the elementalist.

Lol. Not saying there aren’t some annoying bugs but… 2 posts of minor bugs in our forum as opposed to:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necromancer-bugs-compilation-NB66-NT15-NP6

3/4 of that class is broken. It just doesn’t work right. You should check the other forums a bit before claiming the world is ending.

And yet for a class that is 3/4 broken, it still vastly outclasses elementalists. Thank you for reinforcing our point.

I am fairly certain we’re not claiming that we’re more mechanically broken than any other class, as I cannot prove nor disprove such a statement. Each class is going to have its bugs; ’tis the nature of an MMO.

What I can say with certainty is that Elementalists are by far the most numerically broken class in-game at the moment. When the Effort : Return ratio is so far out of balance that people who know what they’re doing are changing classes because it’s so far under par, there’s a problem.

I must echo the problems of these skills at current.

20-30 charges would go very, very quickly if it changed attunements with you, further balancing this concept in my opinion. Toss the ability on a single 150 second CD and allow it to swap, and the skill(s) might see some use.

To solve the secondary (or primary, depending on your point of view) issue of it creating a second weapon, make the weapon not spawned in your hands not change attunements with you if you pick up the new one and make it reflect the attunement you’re currently in, as per Glyphs. Essentially, the ones created for allies would function as they currently do, while the one in your hands would be a LOT more useful for the caster than it currently is (effectively being near-useless as it stands right now)

I do so love my Elementalist ; currently Water / Arcana specced wielding a staff for healing support. The overall idea for the class is great, application a little less so, but all in all, I won’t give it up.

I’m making a second Elementalist solely for the use of Written in Stone, which I regard to be the most awesome Trait (even if not the most powerful) that we have available.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure we’re the only class that can give ourselves 15 seconds of auto-rezzing. So that does count for something, no?

The issues have been said over and over again, so I won’t even mention them.

The other classes, in comparison, were just… redundant. Elementalist has been so much better.