Guild Wars 2

Copypasta’ing this for my [DnT] guildmate who created this build guide. I didn’t do any of the work or name the build. The guide’s writer will be monitoring this thread to answer questions.

The Ebola Warrior: Condition Damage in PvE

Preface:

This build is designed for solo dungeon play primarily. It is strictly suboptimal in PvE groups. In absolutely perfect conditions, It makes a bit less than 9,000 dps, which means it makes a bit less than 4,000 DPS fewer than the top Berserker builds. However, in solo play it makes around 7k DPS. The top solo berserker builds make around 7k DPS. Therefore in a solo setting this build competitive, give or take boss mechanics that are anti-condition damage.

Can you use it in groups? Yes, but you shouldn’t. What if you want to anyway? I’ll show you how.

Gear:

Rabid Armor with Runes of the Aristocracy. These runes are similar to Runes of Strength, but for Condition Damage. They provide 175 condition damage and 45% Might duration. Since Might buffs both Condition Damage and direct damage, this is a very powerful runeset for this build. These runes are only obtainable for Caudecus Manor tokens. Ouch!

2x Rabid Sword. Sigil of Strength, Sigil of Bursting. Sigil of Strength with the aforementioned Runes equals 8 stacks of Might over time. Bursting adds a further 6% condition damage.

1x Rabid Longbow with Sigil of Battle and a variable sigil of your choice. We won’t often swap to Longbow, but when we do, Battle will provide 3 long lasting Might stacks. For difficult content like dungeon boss solos I recommend Sigil of Energy in the other slot. If you do not think you need Energy, Geomancy is a very strong choice.

Rabid Trinkets. Rabid gear gives lots of condition damage. It makes you crit a lot. Critting is very good for a build with bleed on crit. It gives lots of toughness which is good for surviving on tough solos.

Traits:

2/6/0/0/6

Strength = Great Fortitude. This will give us additional Vitality. The main reason to take 2 points into this line is the 10% condition duration, which is a big DPS boost and will conveniently bring us to 100% Bleed duration.

Arms: Deep Cuts, Blademaster, Dual Wield Agility. Deep Cuts is a 50% bleed duration trait, and a key to the build. Blademaster is an additional 10% crit chance with a sword. DWA is a 6-8% IAS which will add more adrenaline, more bleeds more dps.

Discipline: Mighty Defenses, Signet Mastery, Burst Mastery. Might Defenses combined with off-hand Sword and Runes of the Aristocracy represents a really powerful adept trait, especially against bosses with ranged attacks, or groups of trash mobs with ranged attacks. Signet Mastery is self-explanatory. Burst Mastery makes Combustive shot better. A key trait is at 5, where you gain a Might on weapon swap for 10 seconds, or 14.5 second with these runes. More Might = better dps.

Utility Skills:

Skills should, as always, be swapped as needed. The default skills are...

Signet of Fury, Banner of Strength, For Great Justice. These either add Might, Condition Damage or crit chance. All of which this build wants. Healing Signet is the best heal, as usual.

Playstyle:

For the most part, you will camp sword/sword. Auto attack as much as possible and use Impale on cool down to maximize Torment. Use Sword block on cool down to build up Might and Bleeds unless needed to hold back for defense. When do you swap to Longbow? When your enemy is about to run out of Burning. Burning is about 20% of your DPS so you want the boss perma burning. When you see the burning running out, swap to Longbow, Fan of Flame, Combustive Shot, Arching Arrow, Pin Down, swap back to Sword. Don’t go back to longbow again until the burn is close to expiration. Alternatively, in difficult fights with an energy sigil you should swap as often as is required to survive. Additionally, when you Strength banner comes off cool down, you want to swap to Longbow and drop the banner into your Combustive Shot fire field for more Might.

Special Thanks:

Guang, Spoj, and Dub who all contributed theorycraft to the build.

Group Play (Not Endorsed):

2/6/0/6/0

Take Inspiring Banners, Empowered Allies and Phalanx Strength. This build will generate quite a bit of Might for the entire party. It will do relatively competitive DPS to the direct damage PS variants, assuming no one else in your group is condition damage. Again this is suboptimal and I do not endorse it, but this is what to run if you wanted to.

Consumables

Koi Cakes: 40% Condition Duration and 70 Condition Damage
Mastery Tuning Crystals: More condition damage.

It’s not just you. Many young elementalists have this problem. In fact, there are many threads about this in the Players Helping Players and especially the Elementalist forums. Try searching those for terms like “early elementalist”, “baby elementalist”, and “low level elementalist” for even more tips!

The first problem is that all elementalist weapon sets play very differently. D/D and D/F are very much melee, while S/D and S/F allow you to keep some space between you and your enemy. Staff allows you the most space, but then there’s the problem of keeping your enemy in your AoE and not in your face.

Elementalists require very active defenses to keep alive. Learn which moves you can combo together to give yourself buffs and heals or to give your enemy conditions. The wiki is good for that. Additionally, learn what moves will allow you to control the mob outright. Using those to interrupt incoming damage is smart, as is immobilizing your enemy while you wait for Dragon’s Tooth or Meteor Shower to hit.

You also have to equip and choose skills with survivability in mind. The best utility for an elementalist at a low level is Glyph of Lesser Elementals. It summons something to facetank for you, so then you can focus more on attacking and less on evading. Mist Form is super great and even is a staple for some level 80 builds, and Arcane Shield can help you survive while you’re still learning what an elementalist does. Other good early utilities include Arcane Wave (for the combo finishers) as well as Glyph of Storms (fire storm is good damage).

Ping me in-game if you have any more questions. Elementalists are a “love ’em or hate ’em” kind of class, though, so maybe it’s just not for you. Necros and Mesmsers play very differently, though, so don’t discount them because the Ele doesn’t work for you.

@Tika: It was great to see you in game last night (though I think I was busy running away from Risen or trying to take a temple while you were logged on). I hope all your connectivity issues were resolved!

@cat: Invite sent yesterday! I was having problems logging onto the forums after I sent the invite though. Strange!

Also, for anyone on the NA servers looking for things to do before the Southsun events happen, the Legion has a few planned activities:

• Saturday, 10:00 AM PDT: Grab your coffee and join us for a low-key, friendly, PvE-combat centric roleplaying event on TC where there are no expectations other than that you’ll try!
• Saturday, 12:00 noon PDT: TC Legion Guild Rush
• Sunday, 1:00 PM PDT: TC Legion Guild Bounty (followed by an allied guild’s Guild Challenge)
• Monday, 7:00 PM PDT: Is your supply of Omnomberries running low? Join us for a quick run through Malchor’s Leap on TC important gathering nodes (maybe plus a temple or two) and then into Cursed Shore for some events.

I’ll be on Vent for the Rush and Orr run, as well – info is on the first page. We use our ally’s Vent server for the Bounty and Challenge, please visit the Legion guild website at http://operationunion.enjin.com for that server’s information.

Nilkemia.8507:

Warning: Text fence. T.l,d.r. version at the end.

After leveling one of every other profession to 80, I’ve started trying Elementalist again.

But it seems a lot of the time, I die or otherwise have trouble dealing with enemies that I’d be defeating easier with most of the other professions.

- Armor is focused on vitality, with some mixed trinkets. Despite this, still feeling squishy. Any more than 2 enemies at a time is troublesome, especially if any are ranged.

- On top of being squishy, I don’t seem to hit really hard either if I’m using anything but fire (and sometimes earth).

- Settled on scepter/dagger for now. Dagger/dagger I’d like more, but not great range wise. Staff has a lot of range, but either doesn’t hit hard or the hard hitting moves are just slow. Haven’t used focus at all. Scepter feels really limited to single target most of the time too, the AoEs it does have are slow most of the time.

- Using Signet of Fire for more crit chance, and Signet of Air to move faster. Third utility varies.

- The conjured weapons. I really wanted to like these, and thought I would, since they seemed like engineer kits (which were fun to use). But the conjured charge limit means you pretty much should never use the 1 skill and stick to the others (which gets annoying when they’re all on cooldown and you can’t just switch between the conjured weapon and your regular weapons at will like the engineer can), and the time limit means I feel like rushing to use all the charges (or grab the extra conjure early). In the end, they make me just want to use kits again. Meh. :/

Too long, didn’t read? : I’d like some advice. How does one play elementalist well and not die a lot, because right now I feel like elementalist sucks.

• Armor: Well I guess I can’t fault you there for wanting more HP. You’re going to be squishy even with Sentinel’s gear, though, so try to focus on not getting hit instead of absorbing blows. You can do this through using blinds, positioning, dodging, and using an elemental to facetank for you.

• Hitting Hard and Weapon Choice: As others have already mentioned, you want to stack might using a fire field and blast finishers, then wreck your opponents. For staff, this uses mainly fire attunement, for scepter, this means using a Lightning Hammer because scepter’s sustained damage is trash, and for mainhand dagger this means attacking in air attunement. More info about weapon skills are in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-DPS-Elementalist-for-PvE/3436702 and https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Best-elementalist-LEVELING-build-guide/3816598 (not my topic). Dagger is less melee than you may think – most of the skills have a range of 300, which is farther than melee – giving you the ability to attack and kite melee mobs. Ranged mobs you’re better off LoSing behind a tree or something and bursting if they’re aggroed onto you and not your elemental.

• Slot Skills: Signet of Fire is nice, but when leveling via solo PvE exploration, Glyph of Lesser Elementals and Glyph of Elementals are much nicer in that it gives you something else to draw aggro. Just cast in earth attunement. Glyph of Storms can give you an AoE blind to keep you safe, as well. Arcane Brilliance and Arcane Wave give you blast finishers, which give you might when used in a fire field, which then helps you kill stuff faster.

• Conjures: Lightning Hammer is wonderful. Its auto attack chain blinds enemies and it is pretty hard hitting – so in many situations it’s the only thing you should be using when you have a LH. Fiery Greatsword and Frost Bow are situationally useful in open world, and for them use the burst skills (FGS 3, 4, 5; FB 4, 3) and drop and go back to your weapons.

Scepter Air AA increases in its damage per hit over the full channel, from .1 for the first 3 hits, to .2 for the next 3 hits, to .3 for the last 4 hits. The overhead damage is summed, but the increments are displayed in the combat log.

Also, guide has been updated for HoT. Sorry for the delay.

So it didn’t result in any deaths, but here’s one that still has me scratching my head.

Lupi did his ballet act and started floating up into the air for his AoE life drain. The party started dodging/running away as per standard protocol, but as Lupi was still on his way up, he interrupted his animation and put a Necrid Trap on me that also got the guy next to me. I really wish I was recording that just to see exactly what happened there. And it wasn’t just me imaging things – the whole party was like “what was that?”

Yep, there are a number of us on the NA side who call Tarnished Coast our home. On that same list you’re looking at, those who are on the same server as you will have their locations listed in white, and it will be a map such as Lion’s Arch, Gendarran Fields, Blazeridge Steppes, etc. Those who are not on the same server will have their server name listed in orange (Tarnished Coast, Gunnar’s Hold, Piken Square, etc).

This isn’t completely reliable, because if someone is guesting it will show their current location – so when I guest to Ferguson’s Crossing for a major event because I was sent to overflow on TC, all my guildmates will see Ferguson’s Crossing. But it helps!

I would suggest that if you are looking for people to play with over in EU, don’t hesitate to whisper players on other EU servers – chances are they’ll be able to guest over if they’re free. A list of server names (and if they’re EU or NA) is available on the wiki.

Lots of weapons are useful in higher level fractals. Staff for a quick buff before a battle, hammer for protection, sword for blinds, etc, etc. As far as higher level fractal guardian play, you should take a look at Obal’s guide with builds and video tutorials:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guardian-Video-Guide-for-Fractals-Shown-at-48/first#post2322682

I solo with 30/30/0/0/10 D/F, and yes, Glyph of Elementals (Earth) is amazing at pulling aggro, while Glyph of Storms (Earth) will keep things blinded while you burst it down. The weapon set is only mid-range, but it has a good amount of survivability with its defensive skills in air and earth attunements as well as interrupts in water and air attunements, and you can always toss on a staff if you need a pure ranged setup for something.

Welcome Hedix!

It is easier to get in contact with you in-game if you accept an invitation to the LoH. But that does not mean you have to leave your current guild at all! In GW2, you can be a member of up to 5 guilds with the ability to represent only 1. So what you could do is accept an invite to LoH but not rep it – that way, Noppy, Snowhound, and other EU LoH members could see your online status and invite you to play with them via tells.

maxinion.8396:

cranos.5913:

The build I’m most interested in is the s/f LH build for might and fury. Checked yours and Anierna’s guide on it. Armor-wise there’s a difference, Anierna says go assassins and here it says go zerk (talking full exotic here).

So I guess the basic question is, which is it?

Notice also that DEKeyz says go for perception stacking, and Anierna for bloodlust. The difference in the armor sets, after full stacking, is going to be basically marginal. Berserker is way easier to get, so I personally just went with that.

I could certainly give more specific armor recommendations for each build. Note that I even make a comment about particular armor sets being slightly better for some particular builds even in my guide. However, as someone who loves the versatility of the elementalist in different situations, I felt it was more appropriate to just recommend a single armor set and stack and eat food accordingly.

Very few dungeons put you in situations where it is difficult to build stacks in the first minute or two of the dungeon. The challenge is then learning to play at a level such that you keep your stacks. Here’s what we have:

• AC: Spiders that trigger the Spider Queen
• TA: Nightmare vines and spiders or archers in the old paths, spiders and other mobs in the first room of the new path
• SE P1: Inquest along the way to Nokk
• SE P3: Dredge along the way to and following Volkov
• CoF: Path 1 doesn’t have much stacking material. Path 2 has devourers and Path 3 has the trash around the torches and first boss.
• CoE: Icebrood up to and including the first champ plus the 4 golems
• HotW P1: First room of enemies or enemies preceeding Aldus
• Arah: Infinitely spawning Risen plus spiders.
• Fractals: Of the starting fractals, only in Swampland is it inconvenient to build stacks.

The other factor that I weight in my recommendations is the EP when wielding an FGS. In many dungeons, the FGS is an important source of DPS for an ele. Using Assassin’s armor and stacking bloodlust may be more optimal for LH use, but is less optimal for FGS and your equipped weapon.

Take, for example, the 30/10/10/20/0 build. I tend to run this one in casual dungeon runs because of its provision of fury – really helpful when the party consists of something like ele/guard/mes/ranger or thief/warr. Our rangers don’t typically use moas for fury, so without PF, our party would not have 100% fury uptime. Such a build would be unnecessary in a party composition of something like ele/guard/war/war/(mes or ranger or war) where there are plenty of other sources of fury. Under the standard assumptions of my spreadsheet (25 might and vuln, permafury, banners of discipline and strength, signet of fire, 100% health for whole battle) here are the effective powers that I get:

• For exotic berserker armor, using Sweet and Spicy Butternut soup with 25 Perception stacks grants an EP of 26356 for my base weapon, 28258 with a LH, and 28258 with FGS.
• For exotic assassin’s armor, using Curry Butternut soup with 25 Bloodlust stacks grants an EP of 26264 (99.65%) with the base weapon, 28361 (100.36%) with LH, and 28131 (99.55%) with FGS.

Thus while assassin’s with bloodlust and precision food is slightly more optimal for LH, it is slightly less optimal for base weapons and FGS. Additionally, if you were going for a speedkill for a boss (implying FGS), the highest EP available using either exotic armor set is 28425 using Berserker’s armor with precision food and stacks.

Overall, for most builds, there is a bloodlust stack and a perception stack option (with different corresponding armors). One option favors LH, the other favors FGS, and in most cases those options will allow you to use the unfavored weapon for less than a 1% loss in EP. Such differences in EP will be hard to see in game with the RNG in the combat system.

It’s had a 0.2 cast time and 0.2 aftercast time for a very long time. I think a while ago it was 0.4 cast time, 0.2 aftercast.

The “Contract Asuran Outsourcing” consumable is a one-time use deal that lets you put one upgrade onto an extra build track. As Gil said, they’re more useful for a large/active guild that has a lot of influence coming in.

I use them on those expensive upgrades that take a while (any level 3, 4, or 5 unlocks or the Guild Treasure Trove or Deep Cave, for example). That way the construction of that upgrade doesn’t take up a normal build slot for three days or a week that I’d normally use for banners, MF bonus, or Gather bonus.

You use the Contract Asuran Outsourcing by first queuing up the item you want on this “side track” to be next on the build order. So if you are currently working on two banners and want to use the Contract on Arch 3, add Arch 3 to the queue (so that it would be next in line to start) and then use the Contract to start it. Anything in the queue after Arch 3 will then start after your banners are finished – Arch 3 is never bumped onto your normal build tracks.

Note that you can only have one thing in the Contract Asuran Outsourcing slot at a time, and you can only save one Contract Asuran Outsourcing at a time, so no stocking up and building all those WvW fort buffs at the same time!

Hope this helps! If you have any specific questions (or if I completely confused you) please let me know.

Lendruil.9061:

Can you please tell me what exactly makes an ele so useful in frac and can’t be done with a war or guard, except from fgs?

With a scepter-based build and lightning hammer, you can provide a hefty number of might stacks plus permafury for your group while maintaining blinds and doing a good bit of damage. With a dagger/focus build you can help cover reflects using swirling winds, provide a reasonable number of might stacks plus permafury using a DPS-oriented rotation, interrupt and help take down stacks of Defiant, and keep yourself alive for a long time using the earth focus skills. And if you have to swap to something ranged, camping fire with a staff isn’t awful DPS.

Lendruil.9061:

What is expected here from a good ele?

Might, fury, blinds, damage, and dodging. Just because you’re the most fragile profession (by base health and armor) doesn’t mean you’re allowed to take dirt naps significantly more often than others or that you should be building tanky. Go for as much zerk gear as you can handle and if you’re having problems surviving, grab knight’s chest, helm, and pants (assuming you’re going with exotic armor, asc weaps and trinkets) with the intention of getting to full zerk.

As of right now, the two trait distributions that provide good DPS while providing that permafury support are base 30/30/0/0/0 for D/F (put the last 10 in earth for more damage or arcana for vigor) or 30/10/10/20/0 for Scepter+LH. Since all the weapon sets have built-in condition removal, you don’t really need to take traits for condition removal.

Some of my favorite slot skills are

• Heals: Ether Renewal if I’ll need more condition removal, Glyph of Healing if I need a good, quick heal, or Signet of Restoration if I don’t expect I’ll need a significant heal
• Lightning Hammer: Blinds, blasts, damage, and Static Field for mob control
• Arcane Wave: Blast finisher
• Glyph of Storms in Earth attunement: AoE blind for 10 seconds
• Arcane Shield: Blocks the next 3 attacks over 5 seconds and is a stunbreaker. Good if you run out of dodges or need to help rez someone.
• Mist Form: Become invulnerable for 3ish seconds. Good if you run out of dodges or need to help rez someone, but you’ll lose your conjure.
• Glyph of Elemental Power in earth (cripple) or water (chill) for kiting bosses.
• Frost Bow (particularly skill 4) or Glyph of Storms in Air for AoE trash mob clearing.
• Cleansing Fire: if I think I’ll need even more condition removal
• Signet of Fire: 180 precision (if I don’t have anything else to take)
• Elites: FGS (of course) or, in some cases, Glyph of Elementals in earth to have a dumb and durable thing to draw aggro and facetank hits – even better now that it’s not affected by agony.

I went with the incredibly Celtic and impossible-to-spell “Scoithniamhe.” I did take the most complicated spelling of it and then add an “e” to the end, though.

… It means brilliant blossom, so it fits a Sylvari very well!

A full set of scholar runes will give you a total of 175 power, 100 ferocity, and a 10% modifier to direct damage when over 90% health.

First, two questions: what sigil are you using, and what 6-0 skills do you use most often?

My ele runs the 0/10/0/30/30 spec and uses zerker’s/knight’s gear so I can switch from a staff powerhouse to a D/D or S/D aurasharer at will, but I have some friends that run some variation on 30/x/30/x/x and those are viable builds.

It seems like you are trying to mix a condi ele with a bit of a signet build, but I’m not sure how well those two mesh together for you without knowing your 6-0 skills. You are doing a great job on maxing out your condition damage except in your ascended gear (sorry, I know that stuff is a pain to get). A P/T/V back isn’t a bad choice for survivability, but your rings are sub-optimal. As NinjaEd said, you either want to stack precision (in addition to your condition damage, which would require a complete redo of your gear for little change in your DPS) or avoid it. Similarly, unless you truly believe that the +% MF really helps your drops, scrap that in favor of more Power/Cond Dmg/Toughness/Vitality.

Staff is a good weapon for condition damage builds, as is Scepter/Dagger (plus carry a focus for situational use). Dagger/Dagger is usually considered a weaker weapon set for pure condition builds, but is good for a signet/aura build.

As far as traits go, if you want to go for more condition damage, check out Earth IV and Earth VIII. If you happen to use a lot of cantrips, then check out Fire IV, as well. If you use solely signets, then you may want to look into running a signet/aura build when you use scepter/dagger, scepter/focus, or dagger/dagger, which makes use of Fire IX, Earth II, Earth V and Earth XII – traiting 10 into Air for the Air I major trait also boosts this signet/aura build even more.

Overall, great job on boosting your damage while maintaining some survivability.

Grok Krog.9581:

Go Sword/Sword and Sword/Pistol

Definitely highest DPS phantasms, though you’d want different traits than what the OP has. I think the standard trait distribution is based around 10/30/0/0/20. And keep a focus around for utility. If you need the focus, I think /Pistol is better if your phantasms are appropriately traited. Note that Phantasmal Haste doesn’t affect the Zerker (GS) or Swordsman (Sw), so if you’re sticking with GS and Sw/Sw, then you can pick a different trait.

Skills in a DPS oriented group should almost always be the mantra heal (for extra DPS with traits), and a mix of mantras, feedback, signet of inspiration (in a boon heavy group), and possibly null field (but mantra of resolve is competitive with NF now), and of course timewarp.

Now if you mean a shatter build, that’s a completely different ballgame.

Purple Miku.7032:

Awesome advice in your videos and thread. I checked your youtube a while back after the ferocity changes to see whether or not I was doing what I needed to be doing properly and pretty much the only difference that I really found was that I tended to prefer keeping fresh air regardless D/F or S/F, but that’s because I’m not that fast at changing traits. :<

Scepter-Hammer-Conjurer-FreshAir is a pretty solid setup because you can get to your preferred attunement (Air) whenever you want and make use of extra Electric Discharge procs. I think I wrote down the rotation down somewhere, or if not, I’ll include it in the next edition of the guide.

Purple Miku.7032:

One thing that I usually say though is that I personally don’t think it’s worth getting scholar on an ele unless you’re running dungeons with organised groups that perform well on a consistent basis… After asking Nike to help me decide on strength vs scholar for my ascended set on my ele, it only reinforced my suspicion that scholar might not be ideal for my purposes since I usually solo Arah or pug (he worked it out for 662 to be approximately 7% better DPS in scholar over strength in optimal conditions).

Yeah, at full scholar’s buff uptime, Strength is only about 7-8% worse than Scholar’s without factoring extra might (so it will be more like 3-7% worse if you are using that extra might). For soloing, I pretty much always use my Strength set with a sigil of strength and can keep up 20+ might as long as I’m not interrupting my rotation too much. Staff eles lose the most by using strength runes as they stack the least might innately. And as a reminder for others reading the thread, Flame Legion runes are a good budget-conscious runeset for all weapon sets.

Rainshine.5493:

I have a question from the perspective of the fury-bot. When running that I typically have been doing a Lightning Hammer build, with FGS as my elite.

My question is one of efficiency. I pre-stack might/fury for bosses … I assume I should hang onto FGS until it runs out, rather than wall-rushing and then dropping it for LH? I find if there’s another ele they also are usually running FGS and so there are no real fire fields to blast with the hammer chain. Relying on someone other than another ele in PUGS for fire fields seems a non-starter.

I am still very new to the dungeon scene so I’d appreciate insight.

FGS is actually pretty mediocre if you aren’t rushing, especially if you don’t have might. If four of you are using FGSs (with two eles in party), I would recommend dropping it after your second or third rush to re-stack might and then pull out another conjure if no one else is re-stacking might by then. The rationale behind this is that the three other people FGSing with might will do more than enough damage to make up for you dropping your FGS. If only two of you are using FGS’s, I would hold onto it as long as your targets are nicely positioned – as soon as it moves off the wall, drop FGS to re-stack because you need pretty good rushes and whirls (like 70% of strikes connect) for an unmighted FGS rotation to be more DPS than your normal LH rotation.

Hammer’s auto-attack is weak/boring compared to a warrior’s other weapons, that’s true. But an elementalist has to give up a lot to make a “Hammer Time” build, namely:

- Survivability by traiting to get those extra 10 swings
- Usefulness that would be gained by other traits when the hammer is down
- Stats of base weapon (Weapon power, stat boosts, sigil effects) are removed for mild boosts in precision and crit damage on a 969 (@lvl 80) base power weapon.
- Teammates run off with the conjured weapons.

On the other hand, all the other elementalist’s conjured weapons are really bad. Compare a longbow to a frost bow for a chuckle.