Guild Wars 2

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Cosmic-elementalist-guide-PVE-WvW/first#post1398235

There’s some good information regarding spec and gear.

Also there’s Vit/Heal/Cond gear from CM Explorable. I pair it up Cleric’s gear but thinking of swapping to the Tough/Heal/Cond gear as well (but it’s pretty kitten expensive).

Galum.6128:

So to round of my argument: If someone plays the game the way it is meant to be, he or she will get rewarded. That this is based on the amount of damage that person does is only practical (prevents cheating) and is in line with the aim of the game: kill npc/enemy players by doing damage. All your other spells are just there to aid you in the objective of doing damage. Don’t turn means into ends of themselves.

Someone who gets it, I’m amazed!

Tosha Daydreamer.9251:

Except air as a staff ele. Haven’t figured out a good use for air yet.

So a lot of Fire’s AOE is all designed around tightly packed groups. Sometimes mobs come at you spread out. This is where Air’s Chain Lightning attack comes in since it has a pretty decent chain distance. Also remember the Chain will bounce back. So for example in AC dungeon when/if Troll is attacking Kohler, I will attack the troll with Chain which will bounce to Kohler then back to Troll for double helping of damage. Also Blinding Flash hits pretty kitten hard when you’re all spec’d for damage. Gale is pretty “meh” because it’s a super slow projectile that can be easily dodged.

Add on the fact you can chain Static Field → Arcane Wave for Area Swiftness on top of Windborne Speed on top of Glyph of Elemental Harmony and you actually end up with permanent Swiftness (2/3rds of it AOE).

Air isn’t bad, but typically it’s a fall back if you’re find yourself out of Fire for whatever reason and want to keep doing DPS (since the DPS in Water and Earth is beyond terrible).

Gaudrath.6725:

You sitting in Fire just makes for a good laugh.
When was the last time you downed/killed a non-afk wall defender just with fire?

I beat your Puissance Might stacks with Sigils of Battle and Might self-combos, we have plenty of those. Your “3rd dodge” in Fire, well, I got perma vigor and Evasive Arcana, beat that with one extra dodge on a 20 second cooldown.
And hey, I got Burning Retreat just like you do, on top of everything else.

Look, it is not a matter of being innovative with the class. Ignoring the main class mechanic is not innovative, it is nonsense. What would you say to the Thief who refuses to use Stealth or to the warrior who refuses to use Adrenaline?

On a daily basis. With 12-13 stacks of might and my gear/setup I hit hard.

Staff has two possible might combos: Eruption → Lava Font and Lava Font → Arcane Wave. Of course you could just combo it all together. You could do a third if you want to try to setup a Lava Font → Earth → Evasive Arcana but then you can’t Eruption → Lava Font so it all comes out being the same. All in all you’re looking at around 6 stacks of might 2/3rds of the time without any kind of +Boon duration (Arcane Wave is a 30s recast, Area Might is 20s). Sigil of Battle has a 9-10 second internal cool down which means at most you will also get 6 stacks of Might out of that.

Best case scenario, you pull equal stacks of might (since Puissance will net you around 10 stacks constantly and Arcane Wave combo is available to anyone). Unfortunately this is where Spec does you in as 30 points in fire for Puissance will put you much further ahead (and I certainly never heard of any 30/0/0/0/30 builds!). As for Vigor, because I don’t care about swapping, I can easily take “Renewing Stamina” which with sufficient crit rating (even gear is enough) will give you permanent vigor and put me on par. Evasive Arcana is just crap after the blast finisher nerf, not really holding much over my head by not having it.

There are actual warrior builds that don’t use their Adrenaline skill and instead rely on that bar being full to increase their damage as well as super power their heal. One is actually quite popular. That’s not to say all Warrior builds are like that, nor is it to say that all Elementalist builds should stay in one attunement. When I play D/D spec I am regularly swapping around like a madman because that is the play style for that build. When I am doing pure staff DPS I don’t swap at all.

Different builds, different purposes, different play styles. Sometimes you need the all the tools in the box. Sometimes you just need a hammer.

zTales.4392:

So a Staff Elementalist shouldn’t ever switch to water to heal?

Okay.

Say it with me now: It. Depends. On. What. You. Are. Doing.

If you got 0 points in the Water Line, swapping to Water to heal is a poor choice. Why? Let me elaborate. For one, any regen you do give to others or yourself is going to be substantially weaker than the regen any other class would give. Regen stacks duration, in the sense that it will tick for your (say) 10s of super weak regeneration before getting to say a Guardian’s regeneration who may have a decent chunk of +healing gear on. Wasting time to go to Earth, Eruption, then to Water, then Geyser isn’t going to help anyone if it blast finishers for 500 healing when people got 15,000 hit points.

Again, it all comes down to context of what you’re doing, who you’re with, what weapon you have equipped, what gear you have equipped, what traits you are, etc. Simply telling people to use all their attunements when they scenario may dictate otherwise is simply bad advice.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Sad to say but this is an issue to almost all aspects of the game and not just WvW. If you play pure support, you will definitely have less loots since loot require you to tag mobs whether in dungeons or in open PVE. The game does not force everyone to play DPS per se, but rather a balance of DPS and support IMO. It does however discourages pure support roles.

Some changes to the way loots are distributed is definitely welcome. But i think it is hard to achieve.

Thankfully just about every class has some way to provide support to the team while also being able to kick out enough DPS to contribute.

Gaudrath.6725:

Support is something certain classes like the elementalist can do very well, and can and do influence the course of a fight.

Right now the game rewards only pure damage dealers. It doesn’t reward anything but frenetic AoE spammage in huge zergfests. It doesn’t differentiate between players who just spam whatever they can whenever they can and players who take the effort to setup tactical combo fields, clear conditions and apply boons on top of the damage they deal anyway.

If that’s by design, then it’s a poor design and should be changed.

The design is to encourage players to bring offense, defense and support all at once rather than simply go overboard on one or the other. Unfortunately players, being the way that they are, rarely go with design intentions. Players, again being the way that they are, rarely innovate design wise and generally copy what others regurgitate as the “mandatory” or “successful” builds that they see others doing.

This leads to the current scenario where player X joins a group and is asked/volunteers to play support based on another group who brings support eles (who originally probably didn’t care about bags) who is now shocked to find out that riding the !@#$ seat isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (or rewarded).

Instead of adapting to the clearly designed game mechanics (which doesn’t require balls to the walls DPS to get credit for kills but at least some measure of DPS in your build be it gear or traits) instead we come to make a post to overhaul the game design to support people playing the game the way they didn’t design it to be played in the first place.

I’m sure they’ll get right on that.

Gaudrath.6725:

Look, it is simple. There is no way an ele who stays in one attunement can top the damage output of an ele who uses all four. Not to mention that you might as well take another warrior then if you are looking for that sort of thing. If you want a force multiplier for your party, then take an ele who knows what they are doing and is using all the tools at their disposal.

The only simple part of this whole conversation is none of you seem to want to provide the context of what you’re doing, what you’re playing or any actual details about what it is you’re talking about. That makes largely what you’re talking about to be completely irrelevant because it all applies to a specific scenario that you won’t state. If you really think your advice applies in all scenarios you’re wrong.

For example, I can tell everything you’ve posted in this thread you’re a D/D Ele. Virtually nothing of what you’ve said applies to a staff ele or S/D Ele. Trying to apply your advice to a Staff just creates useless and largely shoddy game play that people have come to expect out of Elementalists. In fact I’d easily argue that while playing staff I do far better when sticking to Fire both defensively (burning retreat counts as a 3rd dodge) and offensively (Puissance’s might stacks are tough to beat).

They didn’t want pure support characters in this game by design. I highly doubt they will reward the game play even if people have figured out ways to create pure support builds and play styles.

Wasn’t trolling at all. I was trying to show there are reasons why people do what they do and generally aren’t just completely random.

kostbabis.8791:

To be honest i dont know with what i d laugh at more..An elementalist staying in 1 attunement doing pitiful damage and dying over and over again ?..
Or an ele in a dungeon spazzing through attunements putting water in cd when nobody needs it,cutting his dps in fire at half,capping the bleed stacks with his pitiful 0 condition damage or using air cc in a boss with infinite defiant stacks ? :P

So. Freaking. This.

I see this all the time out of other Elementalists when I run dungeons who generally spout the same garbage advice about swapping around as the original poster. You see them drop just random things or swap to random attunements and you have to wonder if they really think randomly swapping around doing a bunch of weak crap they aren’t spec’d/geared for is going to help anyone. I do crazy fast COF runs on my Mesmer with Warriors and no one ever cares about support or condition removal. Just more damage. We’ll never be able to come close because you have this self perpetuating sterotype of what the Ele is and should be without ever being able to look at what it could be.

zTales.4392:

Wow. I’m not being a troll, you just have no idea where I’m coming from. Okay, let me try and make this as clear as I possibly can by using an example…

There’s a level 10 Elementalist fighting in Queensdale. He will not leave fire attunement. Due to the fact that Elementalists are squishy as heck at such low levels, he’s dying ridiculously often. Would it be better to,
A) Suggest that he stay in fire, get better gear, and learn to play.
B) Switch to water attunement, pop Frost Aura, heal.

In this case, I want people to realize that it’s okay to switch to water attunement. Do you understand now?

Actually you’re the one who just doesn’t quite seem to grasp the concept. Until said Ele in your example asks for advice, telling that other person a “better” way to play the character to his makes you no different than the guy telling you to pick 1-2 elements and stick to them (the way he plays the ele).

Maybe that level 10 ele is just unlocking skills with fire? So now you switch up the arguement and say what if it was a level 40 ele sticking in fire and dying? Again, maybe he’s trying out a build for himself and trying to figure out if it’s viable rather than eat the same spoon fed build everyone else talks about? Maybe he’s doing high risk burst play with S/D trying to blow everything up in 2 seconds?

The big concept you seem to be having a problem with is it’s not about the quality of advice here. Even if you tell a player by doing X they will eat thunder and crap lightning the point is you’re still telling them what to do and how to play. It’s identical on every level to another player telling you how to play even if their advice is unbelievably terrible. You’re both telling them how to play the game.

Why doesn’t the advice matter? Because all advice is debatable on the context and scenario it’s being given for. Fire/Air is great for Dynamic Event farming but you probably wouldn’t want to stay in them full time for WvW. Water/Earth has some great support based builds but you probably wouldn’t use them while soloing. D/D is a great, versatile build but you’re still going to want a few Staff eles around for field generation in large group play. Your arguement and message provides NONE of this context and states:

zTales.4392

If you want to be effective, it is best that you use all of your attunements.

zTales.4392:

Read the edit, then tell me if you’ve actually read the entire first post. I’m not telling people “LOL Use every attunement exactly at the right time or you’ll suck and die in a hole.” or some kitten like that. I’m saying “it’s best to”, “you may want to”, etc. -_-

I can only assume you’re some some of elaborate troll at this point because:

zTales.4392:

I was taken aback. The way he was wording everything, and the way he was linking me his oh-so l33t exotic Pre/CndDmg/Pow gear… it was like he was trying to mentor me. He acted as if he was entitled to preach about his build, and he seemed like he was trying to convince me to pick one or two attunements to use indefinitely.

and

zTales.4392:

My message to new Elementalists:
Do NOT be fooled by people like that. If you want to be effective, it is best that you use all of your attunements. Sure, you may favor one or two attunement(s) more than the rest, but you should still use the others when needed. It’s not difficult to learn, and you don’t want to get into the habit of only using 1-3 attunements, as it will drastically hinder you. In fact, (and I’ve seen this happen) dungeon groups may kick you out because you’re constantly dying they can clearly tell that you don’t know what you’re doing.

Are the exact same thing. That guy was trying to give you tips on how to play better and here you are trying to give tips to everyone. Your points on how to play are every bit debatable as his given the right context of what we’re talking about. There’s far too many assumptions going on regarding build, weapon and what the person is doing at that time (all of which matters in this game).

zTales.4392:

I don’t see what’s so ‘elitist’ about anything that I’ve said. My tone isn’t condescending at all. Your scathing tone, however, makes you sound like a jerk.

Edit: How come you can’t give people advice without getting hate for it? Seriously?

If you can’t see the absurdity of you not liking a person lecturing you and telling you how to play the class and then coming to the forums and making a post telling others how to play the class you’re probably just going to get it.

Shimond.2478:

Well obviously depending on the weapon some attunes are better than others for tagging, but d/d has no problem hitting 5 people in ANY attune – every single one has an AE so the argument that sticking in fire is the best way to tag targets (at least as d/d) is completely false.

Not to mention you’re going to get far more out of your class with deep arcana and attune swapping. You can claim you don’t spec that way but you’re trying to be a special snowflake and quite frankly – inferior at the class as it’s currently designed.

Also lets not forget this thread is clearly titled ‘new elementalists’ – we’re not talking about tagging mobs at 80 in Orr anyway so I don’t know why this is even relevant to the conversation. Trust me, I tried the one attune method for 40 painful levels (and then stopped playing the class altogether while I got 3 others to 80) – I’d save new elementalists that pain. It might work out ok end game, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Simply having AOE attacks is not the same as being able to get credit on mobs. Ask any Mesmer or Necro player as they both have plenty of AOE but not enough AOE burst damage to reliably get tags on events.

Orr events were brought up because the person the original poster was talking about was a level 80 who was trying to give advice to a level 46 at a Dynamic Event. Even if you ignore Orr, any area where there’s high competition with lots of people doing the highest burst damage possible for the most amount of credit is sound advice. However said 46 then comes here and makes some elitist post about his way is the right way as if perpetuating the perceived standard way to play an Elementalist is doing some sort of public service.

There was a time when deep Arcana (as in 30) was standard because of how powerful Evasive Arcana was creating blast finishers on demand. That time has passed. There are still some specs that take advantage of the Attunement Swap and Boon Duration bonus (such as D/D) but to imply that it’s mandatory in any fashion is simply ignorant and lacking in imagination.

This entire thread is terrible and pretty much exemplifies the wretched “elite status” that some Elementalists are trying to say they have for playing this class.

I sit in just Fire all the time. It mostly has to deal with 30 points in Fire and Pyromancer’s Puissance. On average just using auto attack (1) you earn around 10 stacks of Might. With Lava Font and Arcane Wave you can stack an extra 3 due to Area Might (hence why you may stick in the melee range). Switching Attunements gives you a 9-12s cool down typically. In that time frame you will loose nearly all your might stacks. So even doing something as simple as swapping to Earth to setup a blast finisher with Eruption will just cost you damage for virtually no net gain. Also because I am not attunement swapping around like a madman I can take Renewing Stamina instead of Elemental Attunement and have permanent Vigor. Permanent Vigor means that I can dodge anything at any time to avoid any boss mechanics as needed.

The guy in question likely was trying to teach you more about Dynamic Events and how at 80 when in Orr you’re going to be mostly in Fire/Air to get tags for events and never use Water/Earth. This is to get the most amount of loot possible because Staff or Dagger primary (most common weapons) Fire/Air tags the most amount of kills for loot. Trying to do Dynamic Events in Water/Earth later on when you have 10-20 people at an event and things are dying before Ice Spike would even fall from the sky would just be an exercise in frustration.

The gear in question was likely one of two reasons. One, “Rampagers” (Prec/Pow/Cond) has the highest +Precision on all the gear for critting. Two, he likely was using Burning Precision which 30% chance to burn on crit. This way on massive Crit bounces of Chain Lightning (Air 1 on Staff) or Lightning Whip (Air 1 on Dagger) you’re spreading burning as well. Also Flame Burst is a relatively decent AOE being fairly spammable (8-10s cool down) and dealing good damage with Condition damage. Is it the most solid build? No. I’d build Pow/Prec/CritDmg as well but give the guy credit for thinking outside the box instead of working towards the cookie cutter, rubber stamped 0/10/0/30/30 build as you clearly seem to be working towards (or some slight variation of it).

All that said I do not always just sit in one attunement, but instead play the Elementalist adaptively. If things are going poorly and I need to do CC’s then I do so. I don’t just randomly switch attunements like some schizophrenic moron. However if I’m in a group and I have a Warrior or Guardian clearing conditions and everyone’s generally doing alright there’s no reason NOT to just sit there and do damage.

Finally the “lack of damage” argument is faulty on two fronts. First, you just can’t compare melee of any kind in this game to ranged. They simply won’t be on par, the game is overtuned for melee. Second, without meters there’s no way to actually tell how classes/players are doing. As a person who plays Ele/Mes/Guard/Eng the only one I’ve found better is the Guardian and Mesmer melee (which brings us back to the first point).

You can now go back to your smug superiority and patting yourselves on the back for how much “better” you are at such an “advanced” class.

Fuzzion.2504:

I dont care what they do with yawnfest s/tPvP.

But please dont touch our WvWvW ele

Yea I’m incredibly disappointed with them as a company with this whole interconnected BS they’re spouting how they want X class to play the same when they go into SPvP, WvW or PvE. Quite frankly it’s unrealistic and it’s never going to work. You’re simply not going to play the same build in WvW as SPvP because it’s two different environments with two different requirements. My 30 vs 30 spec obviously isn’t going to be the same as if I am going to be fighting 2v2 so why even bother?

They need to go back to implementing the PvE vs PvP version of each skill again like they did in GW1. This way they can feel free to change and muck up whatever they want for SPvP without screwing up the game for WvW and PvE.

Again I just hope before they screw with anything they boost the other Ele lines a bit to make them into viable builds that are competitive.

Chancer.3716:

@Kodiac As always chap thank you for you input Ive been trying out my own variant of your old cantrip style of play and have to admit I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Thanks man. I actually got it originally from Towren’s Post on GW2 Guru (second one down).

You can see post date wise it was made back on 9/30 which is why I call it old haha…

Watching the whole video and not just the 30 second clip where they mentioned that the Ele has too many small things that work together I am not worried. They said, repeatedly, they aren’t interested in playing whack-a-mole and in fact want to introduce more good builds to the scene to see if the current builds are really that powerful or just a matter of not being any other viable counters/builds. They want strong builds, but they also want strong counters. If after they introduce and add strong counters said builds are still too strong they are going to look at adjusting as needed.

I’ve leveled multiple Elementalists now and I find it hard to play any other class other than Mesmer.

Elementalist was a useless charlatan in GW1 because everything of any note had such high armor that Elementalist damage was basically useless before the Heroic nerf/Ele Buff.

Coming here and posting about whatever while not playing the game is novel and all but you’re so out of connect with the game that a lot of your posts come off as pure whine and honestly do no good or service. I can tell you as a coder in my own right that if my users came to me with similar off collar demands and bold declarations I’d ignore you completely.

Feedback is only part of the development process. Any company worth a kitten is going to run metrics and look into the data. You could very well make some remark like S/F is garbage, but when they go into the numbers and see out of all the Eles created that 21% of them actively use focus or tracking other similar numbers (such as number of times each ele skill is used) you begin to get a more realistic data spread of what users are actually doing instead of saying. This means you could come up with the most logical and sound argument in the world of why X, Y or Z needs to be changed but if the data doesn’t support your claim it doesn’t mean it’ll happen. More over that would need to be fit into the development schedule so you may not see it for months yet if it isn’t a priority.

I’ve been playing for MMOs for 14 years and I can tell you that you’re better off just moving on or adjusting yourself rather than try to get Devs to change something. Without vastly overwhelming community support, they tend to march to the beat of their own drum.

Caffynated.5713:

It isn’t a bad build, but it isn’t nearly as popular as it was. I would compare a phantasm mesmer to a glyph ele. It works and it’s pretty strong, but you’re clearly less powerful than other options.

Dunno every time I bring stupid amounts of reflect cause of 25 in Inspiration and kick out 4-6k Berserkers I find it hard to have a Shatter build come close while still offering huge hit points, toughness, power and precision. Honestly tried them with all sorts of gear combinations and none of them really came close to performing as well as the Phantasm burst.

Caffynated.5713:

Mesmer at launch was primarily played as a phantasm burst spec with a spread of other builds. Within a month the meta had changed and most mesmers were shatter burst specced, but you still saw phantasm builds a lot until the nerf. Recently the confusion spammer has become more popular ( at least from what I’ve seen).

I still play as Phantasm burst and it still does pretty kitten well. The only real nerf I’ve felt to it on my Mesmer was the no LOS thing in WvW. The build is just so perfect in terms of offense and defense it’s hard to give up.

You can get Soldier’s (PVT) gear out of dungeons. The most popular one is Ascalon Catacombs explorable mode which takes 1380 tokens for a full set. The dungeon is fairly easy to do even with moderate gear. Also Eles are typically welcome because Frost Bow makes Paths 1 and 3 easy against the burrows. It’s extremely easy to get runs for this dungeon.

You can also buy the Soldiers gear from Temple Karma vendors, all but the legs. Each piece costs 42500 karma. Searching Google for “Dulfy Temple Gear” should tell ya everything you need. You can also buy the Soldier trinkets and such as needed from the Grenth Temple.

Dagger 2 Fire/Ice is a channeled attack. Any channeled attack in the game that has increasing damage is actually just the damage total for the entire channel. So each tick does 80 would display has 80, 160, 240, 320, 400 as in that one attack did 400 total to the target.

Arcane Precision has a (seemingly low) chance to proc whenever you perform a critical. So for example if you pull out a staff and sling Earth 1 at a dummy with Arcane Precision and lots of crit you will notice once every so often you will also add a Bleed to the target in addition to the standard Weakness.

I never once said Elementalists are OP. What I did say there were a number of parts to this class that are perfectly fine in their current design. I also said that there are a number of design issues with the class as well that are built into the Elementalist and extremely hard to address without doing a class overhaul. Those class overhauls tend to not happen and it took an absurd number of years before they addressed the Elementalist design in GW1 even (long after even EOTN was released).

Comparing Melee anything to a ranged based character in this game is never going to fly. Melee is, for all intents and purposes, overtuned compared to range. This has to deal with the fact that unlike Guild Wars 1 they aren’t separating out game balance in PvP and PvE and more atrociously they’re lumping WvW in with PvE. This is why ranged primary characters (Eles, Necros, Engineers, Rangers) are considered the weakest in the game compared to the melee characters (War, Thief, Guard, and Sword Mesmer). If they made things equivalent you would then see gross imbalance for WvW content. Until you see them create three different versions of skills, or make WvW fall under SPvP, it will never be equal.

Your choice, then, is basically to sit down and accept it or reroll the class that is superior. Creating giant whine posts about how they are not equal does not fundamentally solve the issue and instead only is complaining about the symptoms of the main issue at hand.

I’ll also state that being dismissive is not really in your best interest. When you state that Staff can’t do anything with a mob in your face you’re just inviting players like myself to chime in and tell you that you’re wrong. If you’d take the time to expand on your thoughts and provide examples you might find people are less likely to negatively respond to your offhand dissmissive remarks (and consequently Devs might take them more seriously). No one is going to take a hyperbolic remark like, “no one uses this after level 2!” seriously.

Water is the most underrated tree? Are you kidding me? I haven’t see a build outside of Glass Cannon that doesn’t have 20-30 in Water and even most Glass Cannons have at least 10 in Water.

Also your water build doesn’t make sense at all. You take:

10: Cleansing Wave
20: Soothing Disruption or Aquamancer’s Alacrity
30: Cantrip Mastery or Soothing Wave

In reality you should have done:

10: Soothing Disruption or Aquamancer’s Alacrity
20: Cantrip Mastery or Soothing Wave
30: Cleansing Water

The reason is because with 10 in Arcane and Elemental Attunement every time you swap to Water you and all allies get Regeneration. With Cleansing Water, any source of regen clears a Condition. However in addition to this same functionality as Cleansing Wave you also gain additional condition removal for S/D build using Soothing Disruption.

Not feeling the “Ultimate” in this build.

Personally the only way I’ve been able to do anything decent with a Scepter was to stack absurd levels of zerker gear and 30/30/0/10/0 spec and then it did okay because I could burst anything down in a single auto attack cycle and lightning strike.

Otherwise D/D or Staff just does it better.

The real truth is you see a 0/10/0/30/20 spec (with other points elsewhere) because D/D and Staff gets the most out of the traits in those points. This is because our trait lines are garbage.

Fire is terrible and is mostly used for the +Power it gives. Air has two good traits both of which are available 10 points in. Earth is almost decent but suffers from trait placement so it’s also garbage.

However long as I’m not as bad as an Engineer is I am okay with the way things are.

frostflare.6390:

Also Ele is not op. No one could convince me otherwise. Yes, we have alot of Aoe packets of damage, but even in full damage and beserker sets we deal what 2k a meteor? I see Warriors pull of 20K kill shots, and a theif the other day hti me for 14K with his Backstab. Yes we can unleash a lot of aoe, but the aoe does minor damage. So we have to unleash like 5 aoe’s for the damage of one killshot.

Uh…I hit for 4k a meteor when in full zerk (gear and spec) and 6k against undergeared/underleveled specs. That said I still agree, hard to really come close to balance when most of the melee classes in the game can pull of absurd levels of burst damage.

covenn.7165:

As a staff ele you aren’t maximizing your damage output if you don’t hit the maximum amount of targets. I would rather have a 6k hits on 5 targets than a 8k hit one one. If we are referring to other types of fights, then using a staff period isn’t optimal.

I’d rather finished a down guy with a super charged Lava Font doing maximum damage possible rather than maybe hit a few extra targets. Most alive people will dodge out of the fields and they pretty much can all be dodged out of in a single dodge. Better make that 1-2 ticks that will land hit harder in my experience.

covenn.7165:

Sure not everyone will do it. However, any competent player with a gap closer will because they realize that not only is a cannon staff ele free points and easy to kill, they are deadly if left alone.

The only trouble I have is a thief honestly. Just about every other class requires some form of CC to stop you which the time it takes them to do the CC is usually enough to counter with a stunbreaker or something of that nature and get away. This is because no one really knows what spec you are when you spec staff. I could be on a 20/0/0/30/20 cantrip build and actually be somewhat defensive or I could be a 0/0/10/30/30 super defense support build OR actually full double glass cannon spec and gear.

Maybe it’s just cause how I play or the length of time I’ve been playing it but I might get 1-3 shot only once in a great while. I think this mostly has to deal with how everyone’s blabbing on about how PVT gear is mandatory with defensive specs so you don’t really see much spike anymore outside of large blobs.

covenn.7165:

Interesting comment about blasting staff. It would be a no brainer to user if there was no AoE target limit of course… but I guess you are always sure to have 5 people in radius? Personally, when I switch to staff from D/D for a choke/keep I retrait my second arcane ability to pick it up. I want to make sure I always hit 5 people to maximize effectiveness (given that I am specced and geared for D/D primarily)

When you play Zerker spec you’re going for the most amount of damage possible not necessarily hit the most amount of people. An extra 10 points in Arcane will cost you elsewhere lowering said damage.

With full Zerker gear and full rubies I hit 61% crit and 100% crit damage with 30 in Air as well. Tupac’s advice won’t lead you wrong (albeit unsure about Air 12 but there’s really no other decent options so it doesn’t really matter). A lot of the times people quote you those absurdly high numbers remember that some people are bolstered up to 80 and you’ll see 8k crits cause you hit some level 5 who’s coming in there for Skill Points.

A lot of people are going to come here and tell you that you’re going to get 1-3 shot by EVERYONE. This isn’t true. It happens for sure, but it’s not an every fight occurrence if you play intelligently:

1. Find a team to attach yourself to. You don’t have to be in an organized group with them, just find some group of people and just follow them around. Use them as a meat shield to soak up damage for you and serve as a distraction.

2. Don’t be in the thick of things soaking up AOE damage. Fight along the edges.

3. Play defensively. Secure routes for retreats. If things look like they’re going south, retreat.

Mesmer has a few builds as well and aren’t limited to just the 20/20/0/0/30 spec that’s popular at the moment. It’s like saying Elementalists are only 0/10/0/30/30 because that’s the popular Elementalist spec at the moment.

Focus Offhand is also pretty kitten good. Temporal Curtain is all around an amazing utility skill that can be used in any variety of situations. You can yank people off walls with it. You can help split up an enemy ball by pulling them out of each other. I’m even spec’d down 20 in Inspiration and all focus skills reflect. No one even expects it cause they’re looking for a Feedback bubble.

That said Byron is right. Runes are just another element to the character like weapons, traits and utility slots. Typically choosing one thing means you’re potentially giving up another. If you go signet of Air, you lose a utility slot. If you’re relying on Ride the Lightning, you’re forced into D/D or S/D. If you combo out Windborne/Glyph/etc you’re stuck to Staff usually. It’s all a trade off. In the case of the Mesmer you’re leveraging your Rune slots to gain Permanent AOE swiftness you can’t otherwise get through traits and utilities.

haviz.1340:

Arheundel.6451:

If elementalist are OP why do you run a high survival build? You shoud be fine with a staff and 20/0/20/10/20, if you think you’re that good on ele and they’re OP I invite you to play the ele without strong healing, make a video and then I’ll believe you, even better try that build in tPvP and pls don’t come saying “you need the right build to play”, nah man if something OP I could walk in PvP without selecting any particular trait/utility and faceroll people with zero effort, show me that you can do it…then I’ll agree with you

Agreed.

More issues, why our theoretically independent of attunements +dmg traits are in water line (Bountiful Power and Vital Striking), basically a survival line? Why Fire line is so bad? You will probably do more or at least similiar dps with 30 in water than in 30 in fire if you won’t stay in fire permanently.

30 Fire isn’t too bad as it’s pretty viable to stay in staff full time. Really though it should be increased to 2 stacks of Might or double it’s current duration. The problem is that if you’re 30 Fire you’re not hurting for more damage.

The real line that needs work is Air. Other than Bolt to the Heart there just isn’t much that’s decent in that whole line.

pdboddy.4162:

Has the OP been deleting their posts, because the conversation seems disjointed now.

The Mods have been. Received a few PMs from them saying replies have been deleted cause the posts I’ve quoted were deleted.

I use full Zerker Armor all the time. I primarily use a Staff Cantrip build. I am in this almost all the time and use it for PvE or WvW.

20 Fire (Internal Fire, Pyromancer’s Alacrity)
30 Water (Soothing Disruption, Cantrip Mastery, Cleansing Water)
20 Arcane (Elemental Attunement, Blasting Staff)

or

30 Fire (Burning Precision/Internal Fire, Pyromancer’s Alacrity, Pyromancer’s Pussiance)
30 Water (Soothing Disruption, Cantrip Mastery, Cleansing Water)
10 Arcane (Elemental Attunement)

Glyph of Elemental Harmony
Arcane Wave / Cleansing Flame / Mist Form
Your choice Elite

The main idea is to rely on the two powerful Cantrips of Cleansing Fire and Mist Form for defensive cool downs. This leaves you to be able to sit in Fire or Air for offense and swap to Water for powerful healing cool downs. Leverage your numerous sources of regeneration to clear off Conditions using Cleansing Fire to survive scenarios when CC’d and numerous conditions are stacked on you out of no where. Your gear should give you sufficient offense to down most people in group combat.

You probably won’t win many 1v1s and the like when roaming but that’s more to do with the current meta that favors defensively built roamers who win through attrition. In group setting you offer offense and a smidgeon of support which is all that can be expected of anyone.

davidcrickett.8536:

Please discuss. I’m getting very interested in your Old Cantrips style . Tried with Overlords’ build, but went (bananas) all Clerics, took me only three hours to kill a certain spider at Rata Pten at lvl 60, but it didn’t kill me. (All my other professions got killed by it).

A lot of people underestimate the defensive power of Cantrips when combined with Soothing Disruption and Cleansing Water. Cantrip Mastery puts that power on much more reasonable cool downs.

The other day I had a guy swear up and down the board that you have to have PVT gear to survive any kind of group battle and doubly so as an Elementalist. Later that night I was in a huge 20 on 20 battle near an enemy spawn and I was one of the last people to die using a 20/0/0/30/20 build in full Berserker gear. I was even able to gasp get some kills and quite a few bags!

That’s by far my favorite build and one I am in probably a good 70% of the time cause it has probably the best mix of offense, defense and utility.

davidcrickett.8536:

Is this your build?

No. My build is:

10 Earth (Armor of Earth)
30 Water (Aquamancer’s Alacrity, Soothing Disruption, Cleansing Water)
30 Arcane (Elemental Attunement, Blasting Staff, Evasive Arcana)

Glyph of Elemental Harmony
Arcane Wave / Cleansing Fire / Mist Form
Tornado

Staff: Superior Sigil of Energy
Runes: 2 Superior Dwayna, 2 Superior Monk, 2 Major Runes of Sanctuary

Not sold on the rune setup yet. Regeneration is probably our best/lasting heal that we have (since it gets the most out of +Healing stat) so I’ve tried to do my best to keep it up. I have considered also possibly a Lyssa setup and use GoE/Tornado more like a 2-3 minute clear all conditions and get all boons but Precision seems like a wasted stat and I’m already set for a huge amount of condition removal. Even in siege style scenarios or defenses I mostly use Eruption to take advantage of my extra +Condition damage in a massive radius (and 12-18 bleeds is nothing to sneeze at).

Shimond.2478:

Kodiak.3281:

I have been and continue to be hugely disappointed by the lack of “shut down” style of play that I had in GW1. They’ve nerfed confusion into the ground so much it’s just not possible.

I imagine they felt it wasn’t terribly fun to be on the receiving end of it :P

But yea that’s what I miss too, they were more about controlling the opponents actions than…illusions? I guess is the focus now.

I think it has to deal more with the pacing of GW2 more than anything. In GW1 it was pretty easy to avoid taking actions because you didn’t have anything that was outrageously fast. Where as in GW2 you could do 5 actions in about the time frame of 1-2 seconds which with shut down is absurdly unforgiving.

Shame though because it was an element that made PvP very interesting as they weren’t really killing you but instead taking you out of the fight by punishing actions through damage.

Shimond.2478:

Mesmer was my class of choice in GW1, but I just can’t get into them here. Definitely prefer Elementalist.

I have been and continue to be hugely disappointed by the lack of “shut down” style of play that I had in GW1. They’ve nerfed confusion into the ground so much it’s just not possible.

Windwalker.2047:

ThiBash.5634:

There are also duration increasing runes, aura boons builds, combos…seriously, the last thing you need to worry about is perma swiftness. There’s hardly any build that can’t get it.

Which is why traits like windbourne dagger and such are 100% useless and should be changed,which is the point the op was trying to make.

But they’re not useless.

To maintain permanent Swiftness you pretty much are going to mostly be in Air and using cool downs that you may not want to be using in combat. I certainly don’t want to be wasting Static Field and Arcane Wave in the middle of combat nor just widly use my heal for a bit of speed if I may need it to actually heal. These also require staff. Then there’s Signet of Air which is 25% but it also takes up 1/3rd of your utility slots.

There’s “One with Air” trait that adds 25% but you’re forced to stay in Air. It’s also the only run speed that I know of that worked in the Mad King’s Clock Tower much to the jealousy of those around me. Then we come to “Windborne Dagger” which is only 15% but it has no limitations other than you use a specific weapon.

Is it perfect? Probably not. Then again I’m thinking back to my Mesmer who pretty much has to wear 6/6 Centaur Runes just to get any kind of speed at all and realize that we’re not in a bad shape at all.

hans.7265:

Glass Canon Builds depend so much on Group Settings if you dont have enough Grp DPS you are going to die very often because you cant hold through the hole fight.

I would like to see some Autoattacks buffed thats one of my concerns, the Damage differences are just to high between the different attunments in my Opinion.
Or a Buff to Attunment Recharge Rate and a Nerf in Arcana so its comes to the same with 30 Points in Arcan as now, but without you have 3-4 Sec less. Because if you use a build without Arcana then you get stuck in earth Attunment or Water and its just a huge DPS loss.

Personally I’d like to see the differences between melee attacks and ranged attacks in general get tighter. For example on my Mesmer I do nearly twice the damage in melee with a 1h sword than I do with my 2h sword in the same time frame. That kind of disparity is absurd.

Unfortunately this likely has a base in the fact that WvW counts as PvE and suddenly upping ranged damage (or lowering melee) would create a huge imbalance class wise.

Lillian Wandom Hale.7102:

Let me be the one to say that you’re useless, and warrior with ONE shout can cover your whole build XD ..

And ..even more…if you knew HOW TO READ, you would see that I wrote that dungeons are OK/easy ..but they are just 5% of the game

Go back to school please (him and I were talking about lvl 30-35 in AC Explorable with Daggers ….)

learn to read …

Let me be the one to tell you that your threads on the forums are typically pointless whines that have nothing to do with any of the core issues of the class. You started out this thread by stating the problems with the class are we can’t face roll content like other classes…and then went on a large whine about summoned weapons as if THAT was the critical Elementalist issue.

You’re making a pretty kitten huge assumption you’ll have a warrior along. The last 5 dungeon runs I’ve had (5 separate groups) I had one warrior on and they weren’t even shout spec (or at the very least no one but me was clearing conditions). Again, the point of the build isn’t to be a condition removal bot but instead empower Cantrips into absurdly strong defensive cool downs which add survivability allowing you to be offensive. The fact you can fall back on a support role as needed is just a huge boon to you and your party and comes back to the treasured ideal of having offense and support.

Also I have absolutely NO issues with any aspect of the game even if I did use staff full time. I solo Dynamic Events just fine. I do big group Dynamic Events just fine (and get buckets of loot). I do hearts just fine. I do dungeons just fine. I’m even leveling up a second elementalist at the moment (diff race) primarily as Staff and having no real issues. This is because I’m experienced with the Elementalist and know what I am doing with it. I know the tricks and combos to be effective.

The whole learn to read thing is absolutely comical. You should probably take your own advice because you just come off like a total moron. The guy said playing as a staff or dd was same as any other class’ weapons and then you retorted that it’ll get worse in dungeons and worse in the world 55+. On both statements, you’re wrong.

davidcrickett.8536:

*Kodiak, you link to an empty skill calculator. Nice discusssion.
“…maintaining Gale, Static Field + Arcane Wave and Glyph of Elemental Harmony”… Gale? Elemental harmony? Please elaborate.
Is there a place you can get an overview over elementalist staff+field combos?

Builder isn’t blank when I click on it…hrm.

Yea I did mean Windborne Speed. Static Field is an Air field which when a blast finisher is done it gives you Area Swiftness which is basically identical to Windborne Speed. Glyph of Elemental Harmony in Air also gives you Swiftness. All 3 of these give 10s (base) of Swiftness but because of the 30 points in Arcane it’ll be 39s of Swiftness total (before any Runes and Food). However the skills themselves reset in 25s (Glyph), 30s (Windborne) and 40s (Static) meaning you can keep up Swiftness like this forever and 26s of it is AOE for your allies as well (who are also throwing out Swiftness as well meaning you can sometimes not use your heal). If you just sat there and rotated all 3 sources you’ll actually get ahead of it and generate minutes of swiftness.

This part of the reason why a lot of people consider Arcane Wave to be so mandatory. We can drop:

Fire Field (Lava Font, Burning Retreat ) which is Area Might
Water Field (Geyser, Healing Rain) which is Area Heal
Ice Field (Frozen Ground) which is Area Frost Armor
Air FIeld (Static Field) which is Area Swiftness

That’s a lot of advantages for a group that we can self combo with on demand. The fact it’s instant and can be done on demand (so even if you’re casting something else you can do Arcane Wave) is pretty spectacular.

The real discussion to be had is runes.

Edit: Unable to link a different editor. Not sure what to say there.

I typically roll all the casters in the game.

I like my Ele because he’s got some really strong AOE damage. More over while doing said damage he can still provide group support in some fashion. You also got a few viable specs with Staff Cantrip, D/D Bunker and Staff Support. The hardest part is I feel this class lacks active defenses and has it’s utility slot skills on stupid long cool downs.

I like my Mesmer cause he’s got absurd active defenses no matter what spec you play. They also have amazing group utility and damage. Where I feel it suffers though is a lack of AOE which makes Dynamic Event farming tenuous at best. Otherwise he’s pretty much amazing at everything else with multiple viable specs.

My Necro I was always disappointed in. While he does have an amazing condition based spec and people are coming up with new power well builds I never really felt he did anything of note. For example even in large groups (20-30) you’ll only ever want a handful of necros for blinds/fears and anymore is pretty much a waste. The condition cap leaves a lot to be desired in PvE when conditions are the spec necros by far excel at. The fact that mob AI targets pets first means that those long cool down pets die quick and take seemingly forever to come back up. Even the huge survivability (through hitpoints, toughness, deathshroud and condition management) isn’t really unique since a mesmer can easily be just as survivable with it’s active defenses. Their lack of targeted AOE makes them even worse at Dyanmic Events than a Mesmer hah.

I’ve leveled other classes as well (Engineer, Guardian) but I always come back to Ele and Mesmer as my two mains.

Elementalist is one of the few classes that can easily stack permanent swiftness which is greater than the 25% passive that most classes get AND we get that too.

Lillian Wandom Hale.7102:

You’ll feel it in just few levels when you enter AC with your Ele.
If you don’t like Dungeons, then around lvl 55+

I run a 30/0/0/30/10 build (or 20/0/0/30/20) and I never have problems in dungeons using full Berserker Gear, a staff and defensive cantrips. With that much in Power and gear I am able to kick out pretty decent damage. Because I’m heavily spec’d into Water I’m able to provide great group support via water such as mass condition removal with Healing Rain or Geyser → Arcane Wave for an area heal.

Now defensively you may be raising an eyebrow but I assure you that Arcane Wave, Cleansing Flames and Mistform I’m quite defensible. Do I die? Certainly. But my Mesmer with 2500 armor and 18k hp dies too. It gets better with time as you learn your class.

I stumbled on the same spec while looking for a good farming build and I love it for farming events out in Orr.

Chancer.3716:

@ Kodiak We do run very similar style builds Have been considering running with tornado over the elemental, especially considering having healing bolts flying out with knockbacks and such within healing rain would be nice to add to the group play we have going on. Certainly use Static field and frozen ground to capture many “Unsuspecting” pray.

Thank you for your input Raised a lot of points I haven’t considered in all honesty.

Well the biggest part of the Staff Support Elementalist meta is field management on the battlefield. That includes (but not limited to):

1. Players drop a lot of combo fields. For example Guardians are notorious for just randomly throwing out Symbols all over the kitten place which turns all our Blast finishers into AOE retaliation. That’s great if you want it but terrible if you wanted an Area Heal. I cringe when I do a blast finisher only to see AOE Weakness because some Thief/Necro dropped a poison field to hit 1 guy in the back ranks.

Paying attention to what fields are down and being with people who don’t throw down fields indiscriminately is very important.

2. Gauging how the battle progresses in real time is a critical skill to cultivate. Most staff eles are in the rear with the gear in large battles and as such you need to gauge what the enemy force is doing and how you are doing. If allies are starting to pull off to the side, you can adjust tactics from there. Being able to predict and analyze what’s going on well help you predict your best course of action.

3. Reacting to how the battlefield progresses is also critically important. Doing Blast finishers in a big brawl area is likely to net random results at best because players are dropping any number of fields (blind wells, symbols, ice fields, poison fields, etc). This means trying to pull off a Healing Rain → Blast combo isn’t advised in that scenario but instead using Water and evading for Cleansing Area will provide better results.

So we come to the Tornado discussion of using a Water Field and Tornado. It’s not a bad idea, but given the duration of each you’d definitely want it to be Healing Rain and also avoid running into any other fields. This may or may not be unavoidable. I notice when I do it I combo at least 2-3 different bolts each time (honestly, typically cleansing due to light fields).

That all said (I wanted to separate out this part) the problem with the Elementalist is one of class design around our Auras.

The advantage to having twice the effective equipped weapons as everyone else is we have more access to attacks. For example as staff we can swap between Fire which is a lot of ground based AOE to Lightning which is a lot more targeted based AOE. We need support or defense we can swap to Water for heals or Earth for defense and CC. There’s a lot of attacks and utility packed into those weapon auras.

The disadvantages however are more subtle:

1. We have to constantly swap between attunements. Even in situations where say Fire is good we usually can’t just sit in Fire because it’s lacking in comparison to other classes’ weapon skills. So we end up forced to swap around constantly just to keep up. Yes it’s advantageous that we can swap to other auras as needed, but we tend to have to swap just to keep up to something drilled down and streamlined as some other classes’ weapon sets are.

2. Our utility skills have ridiculously long cool downs. Look at things like “Stand Your Ground” (a guardian shout) that does the same thing as “Armor of Earth” but is on half the cool down timer and is AOE! Another great example is “Lightning Flash” and Mesmer’s “Blink.” Almost all our utility is on ridiculously absurd timers because it’s balanced around the point that we have access to 4 weapon sets worth of utility. This generally puts us at a huge disadvantage compared to classes because they have powerful cool downs on short timers while our powerful cool downs are on much longer timers because we also have access to some mediocre utility from our weapons.

Had we received similar class design to other classes, such as having access to 2 auras for 1 weapon or 2 weapons imbued with 1 aura we could have probably gotten much stronger utility skills and stronger weapon skills. Instead by design we’re forced to constantly swap around and effectively “work” harder than other classes to do similar results.

That said you’ll also notice it’s all the melee based classes in this game that are generally regarded as “easymode” or “OP.” Warrior, Guardian, Thief, Mesmer (sword) are all considered highest DPS and most survivable in the game. Meanwhile all the other ranged based characters (Necros, Eles, Rangers, Engineers) are all considered generally weaker by comparison. This is also game design and is something that really should also be corrected.

Conjure Lightning Hammer is absurdly strong. It’s so strong that if people actually started to abuse it like they should be doing it’ll probably get nerfed. The power comes from it’s base attack which is every 0.5 seconds the third of which is:

1. A blast finisher
2. An AOE blind

I want to be clear on that: an AOE blind every 1.5 seconds. At that rate, nothing short of multi-hit attacks can hit you as the average attack speed of the mobs in game is around the same. This means once you get ahead of their attacks, you’ll pretty much always blind the mobs and take zero damage. With Conjurer and 2 Hammers (1 in hand, 1 on ground to be picked up after for a total of 50 charges) one player can permanently blind a target indefinitely within cool down time frame.

I rocked a Conjure/Cantrip build from 40-80 and it was probably the easiest character I leveled. The only challenge I ever encountered was against Dredge who are immune to blind. The fact that weapon stats now transfer through as well as Sigils is just all the better.