Guild Wars 2

S/D is a bit of everything. Fire has some direct damage with DoT and AoE buffing (combo field with 2 finishers in the set itself.) Water is support with vulnerability, heal, and a chill aura. Air is direct damage with mobility and two very good CC skills. Earth is serious DoT damage with a self armor buff and, again, two very good CC skills.

And I’m not sure if you’d want to reduce Updraft and Earthquake to 30 seconds each. That means you’d have an interrupt + knockdown available every 15 seconds in Dagger offhand. Combine that with the blinds in those two attunements if you run S/D and that might be too much damage mitigation over time. Or it might be the right amount. I dunno. I’m not a game designer, and I don’t have access to the metrics anyways. :P

brogarn.8723:

I don’t know how those of you who are good with this class keep track of cool downs on 4 different sets of 5 abilities, along with what they do, how to use them, when they can be used, and what to do if they can’t. It’s juggling with different shaped and weighted objects all falling at different speeds. And that’s just keeping track of what you’re doing. Never mind also trying to track what other players or mobs or both are doing. Boggles the mind.

Brogarn, it’s mostly practice. Really, when you start unlocking the abilities when you first create your elementalist, that’s when you should be getting the feel for each skill. If you were like me though, you grinded through that on each weapon as fast as you could and didn’t really learn anything. Oops. Basically what happened to me is I just played in Air with S/D and slogged through things. If I got in trouble, I’d switch to water for a heal. I was very inefficient, and frankly, I stunk at even plain ol’ PvE.

So I just started paying attention to every skill on every attunement on S/D and looked for synergies. I started paying attention to this forum (not the QQ, but for the tips and tricks.) More importantly, I started practicing. Not just doing hearts or events, but finding some quick critter spawns out in the woods and practicing skill rotations on them. I’m lvl 66 and I still do that sometimes. Last night was practicing might stacks against Ettins that can interrupt and trying to get as much might stacked as possible.

Eventually, you will get a feel for it. I still don’t have it perfect. I’ll hit an attunement before it’s refreshed sometimes. I’ll go into the wrong attunement. I’ll forget to target phoenix on the ground somewhere before hitting another skill (I did that a LOT last night in the might stacking practice!)

It’s an absolute blast (pun semi-intended) to do the attunement dance. I prefer S/D, but I love watching videos of D/D ele’s hopping all over the place doing their version of the dance. I don’t even want to go level my alts (I have two alts, both… level 1) because of the fun of the attunement dance.

On the original topic, don’t dare take away my 4 attunements in combat. It’s the best part of the class in my opinion.

you can get the Sigil of Battle (and any other sigil) from other players via the Trading Post. I have one slotted in my dagger currently.

Just gotta ignore the QQ and focus on the posts about improving the pew pew. Seriously, there will always be detractors, even if every single class and every single skill is taught to sing in perfect harmony and everyone ANet buys everyone a coke (not in that order.) Granted, the noise to signal ratio in this forum is way off right now, but you can find the good posts in amongst the very non-constructive posts.

Don’t quit the character if you enjoy it, just don’t bother with the QQ on here. Or just do what I do, have a nice little chuckle imagining some person with veins popping out of their forehead when they were typing their rage post!

Svenn.5209:

But… all classes have 916 to all base stats at level 80.

Maybe they meant we should get medium or heavy armor then?

Also, not kiting skills but in Scepter, Lightning 3 and Earth 3 (sorry forgot names and can’t get to wiki right now) cause blindness. Causing the target to miss you once is almost as helpful as being out of melee range. More so at times because kiting doesn’t work against ranged attacks.

If I was designing a game, I would have different aggro schemes for different monsters based on their personalities, but… if I was just doing a general “screw the PCs” aggro scheme I would not do it based on which PC was most threatening, but which PC could I kill the fastest. That would be the lowest armor, lowest health target that’s in my range. I’m not saying that’s how GW2 prioritizes aggro, but if it does, it makes a lot of sense to me. If I have multiple things hitting me, I want less things hitting me as soon as possible. Of course, there would be other factors to consider. If the heavier target hits a LOT harder, then that might be the priority. If the heavier target is a lot closer and I’m a melee only monster, maybe I prioritize range more than toughness/health.

All I know is I was fighting a champion troll with one other person yesterday and that troll locked on me and chased me around that room just about from the start, save for when I got to pop my greater elemental. Then it killed the elemental before chasing me again. Mean troll. Though, I didn’t have enough condition removers slotted or traited, otherwise I probably could have kite tanked it well enough for both of us to drop it. Troll did a ranged knockdown followed by a bleed like every 10 seconds or so. Again, mean troll.

Fire 4-3-2 Earth 4-5 is the might stacker Shinobi is referring to. Arcane Wave can be added in there as well. Might increases both regular and condition damage, so it’s great to have. +Condition Damage in general is good as the might stack combo includes burning and bleeding.

I don’t have a lot of experience yet (only lvl 59) but I agree with the Shinobi. Fire 1 is only really good to apply burning, but you will get that from the other skills in Fire, so not a lot of reason to use it. Only Water 5 has condition removal built in (unless Phoenix, Fire 3 does to? can’t remember if it does or only applies Vigor) so you may want a utility like Cleansing Fire to help with condition removal if you don’t trait for it.

I don’t really have enough experience to really say who is right or who is wrong, or whatever. But, if another class really can excel in PvP (or higher end PvE) just by staying in one weapon set and using at most 2 skills, then obviously, either one of those skills is overpowered or both of the skills are overpowered (in the case of thief, the initiative mechanic is the problem allowing them to spam one skill for high bursting.) I really hope that Elementalist never gets to the point where we can sit in one attunement and use just a couple of skills and excel. Same principle why I liked Warden in LotRO.

yeah, pugs are definitely not the way to go if you want effective or efficient. They are ugly, just like the dog breed. (No offense to any pug owners, I’m sure your pug is a sweet little dog.)

My kitten wishes I stay home all day stroking him, he would be one happy cat! Sorry, the profanity filter is just hilarious.

you mean might adds to both power and condition damage. Power alone still is for weapon/spells only, right? I’m easily confused!

and yeah, I really should be taking a required online training course right now…

Not specific to teaming or solo play, but the traits that do more damage to targets based on burning, bleeding, health under 25%, those extend to bleeding and burning damage as well as straight weapon/spell damage? So the 5% more damage to bleeding targets actually makes the bleeds 5% stronger as well? I just thought it acted like power and only affected weapon/spell damage. Silly me again!

Hah, I completely missed that it was a dungeon discussion (read the entire subject line next time, nifty)! Still, some might would be beneficial in a team setting right? Both DT and Phoenix are ranged blast finishers, so it’s not a complete waste if you aren’t in melee. Plus, if another class drops a different type field, you can get some affects off their field. Anyways, I’ll check back to see your playstyle section!

Were you going to expand on the Playstyle section you alluded to in the initial post? One thing I have found I’m doing more of is starting in Fire attunement for the 4-2-3 (plus Arcane wave) might stacking before switching to Earth (and if you get a 4 or 5 from Earth in, that’s another 3 might.) Plus I’m using the sigil that grants 2 might on weapon swaps, well attunement swapping for us. That gives a significant might stack to start off on a tough mob. I’ve been using a bloodlust sigil on the offhand. Might switch to corruption for even better bleed damage.

No clue why you aren’t seeing them. I get critical hits a lot with a 30% or more chance.

Saw this as well. Whichever one gets applied first is the only one. And after thinking about it, it makes sense. If you carried weapons that had each stacking sigil, once you got to max stacks, you could switch to the next sigil. Eventually, you’d have every stacking sigil maxed out at the same time until you went down or moved to a new zone. That seems a lot stronger than the non-stacking sigils.

Bsquared.3421:

/snip

Don’t go making sense Bsquared. That’s not allowed on a forum. It’s gotta all be overreaction and QQ because my pew pew isn’t strong enough.

Besides, it’s not like every single selectable trait is element specific. For example, the 30% chance of burning on a crit (though it’s not very powerful) happens in any attunement. Cause more damage to targets with less than 25% health is another one.

S/D Fire 4-2-3 is definitely nice. And as Skyfire said, I also have Arcane Wave on 7 to get the extra might stacks (9 total off that). Usually everything is burning at that point, so Fire 5 will do extra damage. I’m only PvE right now and just lvl 48 so I’m far from experienced.