Guild Wars 2

The good thing about Guild Wars 2 is that, although it still uses ‘levels’, they aren’t that important to the fight anymore. Dodging well and making good use of your skills matters a lot more.

In a sense, you could view this as the modern soldier. Some soldiers got better training and/or equipment (i.e. levels) than others. So if they for example would aim their gun, they’d be more likely to hit. However, making the decision when to shoot is much more important than the tiny difference in how well they can aim (not saying it’s not important of course).

To me, levels in guild wars are like that: training, gear and preparation that’ll give you a slight edge when performing your actions. But making the decision WHEN to do WHAT is where the real challenge comes in. Kinda like a boxer that can train all day to hit as hard as a truck, but he will still need to get past his opponent’s blocks strategically.

Aye, they’re good for bursting things down.

Mjk.7562:

Nope, not practical at all, and only thing you will achieve is to be kicked from the group :P

If I run into people like Sabull then I’d say that’s pretty likely. :-)

To be honest, this is mostly an academic endeavour and not an actual practical build. My main goal is to see if single attunement builds can be done in such a way that the contribute something meaningful to the fight.

On a side note, I should probably mention that through the use of just the Frozen Ground and Arcane Power, it could probably cause perma-chill already. So it could also be incorporated in a swap-based build.

Falcon Night.4653:

So my questions are:
1) Is this a good trait build for a staff Ele?

It can be good, but I recommend you to try Arcana with the Blasting Staff and Elemental Attunement traits. You’ll probably like them, and hitting stuff will get a lot easier.

2) Should I stop mixing the armour stats and just focus on Power/Vit/Toughness, to go along with my traits?

For armor, that’s not a bad choice. Just getting your health up to 15k or so will greatly change your enjoyment of the profession.

3) I’m also thinking of going D/D cause I’ve read somewhere else that this is a better solo build. I’ve tried this before, but ended up missing the ability to take out a ranged mob and a melee mob at the same time. So should I try a D/D instead?

To be honest, there’s not much in PvE that cannot be soloed with the staff. Daggers are primarily better at 1v1 duelling in PvP. For PvE, you should be able to do pretty much anything with the staff as well.

4) I’ve also read somewhere that toughness does not really do anything much for Eles. Is this true? Personally, I find that in certain situations it gives more survivability.

For my own (rough) calculations, 40 toughness grants about 1% damage reduction. So toughness by itself will not save you. Toughness combined with vitality though, rocks.

Nice article. Very informative, because it also explains the various uses of the different traits.

There’s a few things I’d like to comment though.

Zephyr’s Speed: It’s pretty terrible for Air specialists, true. However, it has some minor use for non-specialists. Also, it’s a great skill for Jumping Puzzles. Often, there are jumps that are catered to normal speed and actually become tougher at +33% speed. A 10% speed boost will help you make the jumps without the risks of overshooting.

Stone Flesh: 80 toughness may be meh, but it’ll still decrease the damage you take by roughly 1.5%. There are worse traits.

Lingering Elements: Yeah, it’s not as great as it could be. However, part of that is because it’s bugged. Basically what it should do is increase the duration of all your minor traits to about 50% uptime (instead of 25%) which in theory would be ok. However, it doesn’t work with Stone Flesh to name but an example. The only use it has at the moment is to increase the duration of Soothing Mist application by another 5 seconds. That means that, at the 5th second, you get another 9 seconds of Soothing Mist, resulting in pretty much a 100% uptime. Still not great maybe, but at least it does something.

Elemental Surge: The main reason this skill is worthy of a GM slot is the fact that when you combine it with Arcane Power, it’ll cause the next five skills to cause a condition. This could mean up to 15 seconds of chill, 5 seconds of immobilize or (with chain lightning) 15 applications of blindness. However, as you may have read in one of the other threads, it’s currently as bugged as an anthill and doesn’t work as expected in almost any situation.

SecondtoNone.7549:

How do you get 15s of chill? Elemental surge only gives you 5s per arcane spell? Does Arcane Power make all your next attacks arcane?

Yes, that’s exactly what it does. Your next 5 water blasts cause 3 seconds chill each.

If you combine Elemental Surge with Arcane Power and Water Magic, you can get up to 15 seconds of chill on your target. If you use it with earth, you can immobilize them for 5 seconds with the same combo.

The Order of Whisper daggers supposedly fold when you put them away…

Creslin.1758:

ThiBash.5634:

EatThisShoe.5136:

You might call it misinterpreting, but I am staying on topic from the posts I quoted previously. You responded to my post, which quoted seetoo who is claiming elementalist is not balanced around swapping attunements.

It’s still misinterpeting if you mix other’s posts with mine. I did expand on the topic, stating that neither swapping instantly all the time nor staying in 1 attunement all the time is a 100% surefire tactic. If you have issues with that, discuss stuff with me. If you have issues with someone stating that you should stay in 1 element, take it up with them please.

I dunno man, I read the entire exchange, and you pretty much flat out said that under certain circumstances, it would be good to spam water blast. Here is your quote:

However, what I mean to say is that, under some circumstances, staying in Water a while longer and spamming Water Blast can be a viable tactic.

His post proves that this tactic is almost universally inferior to switching out of water, and then switching back to heal. So not only do you heal more by doing this, you also are actually useful to your group, and not just spamming auto-attack.

I’m not really sure what could be misinterpreted here…under no circumstances is spamming water blast a good idea.

On paper yes. In practice, no. Rare as though they may be.

Is it viable compared to an attunement swapper? Maybe, maybe not. However, I did stumble upon this build that may have some potential and I wanted to share it with the Elementalist community. What say you, viable or not?

Runes
Rune of the Ice

Traits
Elemental Surge
Arcane Mastery
Blasting Staff
Aquamancer’s Alacrity
Shard of Ice
Piercing Shards

Skills
Arcane Power
Arcane Blast
Glyph of Lesser Elementals
Glyph of Elementals

The first thing this build aims to achieve is permanent chill. First, the player casts a quick Arcane Blast to slow the target. Then, they can spam some more chill by combining Arcane Power with Water Blast (this causes 5 hits of 3 seconds chill each). By then, the elementals will have caught up to the target and start spamming their own chill fields. And of course, there’s also Frozen Ground (which can be comboed with Arcane Blast for even more chill). Once your target is slower, it’ll be rather easy to hit them with Ice Spike for a nice 1000 damage per hit (every 3.5 seconds or so).

While doing the above, you’ll also cause quite a bit of vulnerability, which (apart from its own effect) gives you 20% added damage. Healing of course comes through the other water skills.

So what would be your opinion? Would something like this work?

Note that the author of this build does not recommend staying in one attunement. Kids should only attempt this build under adult supervision. Lost dogs will not be replaced.

Sifu.6527:

Obvisously, you didn’t read what the OP proposed. There will be a 12-15 sec cool down on all atunement when you swap weapon except for the atunement you’re in.

Like Creslin said, that doesn’t change things. You’re still allowed to combine skills that were separated for a reason.

Also, you’re not reading my other argument. There are other, simpler ways to fix the range problem than adding weapon swaps.

Changing conjured weapons is one option (maybe through traits). Making magnetic grasp pull foes to you instead of you to them is another. Neither will upset the game balance half as much as adding weapon swaps would.

Karl McLain.5604:

We’ll be adding a bit more functionality to this trait in the near future for the earth portion of the ability (this time, associated with the skill’s cooldown), to keep it in line with our general policy of not having a blast finisher in the same weapon set you have a combo field.

First of all, thank you for your answer. I really appreciate it, honestly.

Second, do note that you could have avoided a lot of elementalist player’s bickering if you’d replied straight away instead of two weeks later.

Still, it’s good that you’re aware of our concern. That’s all we wanted. That you told us that you heard us.

Good, I’ll shut up now.

EatThisShoe.5136:

You might call it misinterpreting, but I am staying on topic from the posts I quoted previously. You responded to my post, which quoted seetoo who is claiming elementalist is not balanced around swapping attunements.

It’s still misinterpeting if you mix other’s posts with mine. I did expand on the topic, stating that neither swapping instantly all the time nor staying in 1 attunement all the time is a 100% surefire tactic. If you have issues with that, discuss stuff with me. If you have issues with someone stating that you should stay in 1 element, take it up with them please.

NdranC.5107:

So D/D has a ‘gasp’ downside? Surely we can’t allow that! It should be able to attack anything everywhere all the time!

No weapon is perfect, problem is while a warrior uses a gs to attack, then all of the sudden a target that is high up or to close to his team shows up (which would be this particular weapon weakness) what do they do? They switch to ANOTHER weapon that is particularly strong for this scenario. While as d/d we just switch the theme of our attacks but nothing really changes with the way we do attack.

And that’s exactly what I mean. Not being able to attack at range at all is a tradeoff for being melee with 4 toolbars.

That’s not saying I don’t want you to be able to have long ranged attacks though. However, those conjure weapons you mention…I believe that the key in solving this whole dilemma lies with them. Changing conjured weapons at least would cause far fewer balance issues than weapon swapping would.

In my opinion, having at least some vitality is vital (no pun intended) for dungeons. It takes just 2k health to survive at least some of the spikes that would otherwise instantly down you if you ever missed a dodge.

Yeroc.7516:

Other than that though, I can’t think of anything that would be OP.

The fact that you can’t think of anything right now doesn’t mean certain combinations couldn’t eventually arise. Even the added blast finishers you mentioned are essentially buffs.

The thing is really, you’re missing the bigger picture here. Sure, it would be cool, and sure, it would be useful. However, skills were separated by weapon for a reason. Guild Wars 1 was a nightmare to balance. Guild Wars 2 a lot less. Adding more complications to it is really something you should avoid, unless there’s no other way to fix it.

Seeing as how this weapon swap ‘issue’ can be solved by other means, I propose to do just that. As Jamie Hyneman would say: “Simpler is better.” And right now, simple fixes would be to either give the Frost Bow 1200 range, or reverse the direction on Magnetic Grasp. Neither of those will cause even half the balance headache your suggestion does.

Oranisagu.3706:

if priorization work in your favour, does it even matter?

If prioritization works in your favor, then no, I suppose it doesn’t matter. To be honest, I didn’t know the game prioritized conditions.

But let me put it in another way. Remember Guild Wars 1? It used to have ‘spike’ skills: skills that delivered a huge amount of damage. To avoid giving that person als a good dps, they had higher cooldowns than skills that did less damage. Often even relatively more, say 10 damage with 1 second recharge or 100 damage with 15 seconds recharge. To me, it feels the same with this skill: it’s much narrower in focus, and much stronger, and as such, it’s got a higher recharge too. It’s ‘removal per second’ may be less, but it’s ‘spike removal’ is much higher and hence it’s balanced.

Dunno if that makes sense, but that’s how I view the skill. Lower recharge may be nice, sure, but it’s not that bad as it is now. Niche maybe, but good for its niche.

Yeroc.7516:

This would be a fun gameplay mechanic and would open the door to new builds.

This is eaxactly the wrong reason to implement in combat weapon swapping. Adding new, potentially devastating new combinations is something you want to avoid for game balance’s sake. Dismissing the auto attacks for a moment, you now have 4*4*4=64 new skill combinations that have to be balanced relatively to eachother.

That’s exactly the thing they wanted to avoid coming from GW1.

EatThisShoe.5136:

No, you can literally get more healing by swapping than you could by staying in water. It’s not just Healing Ripple, but also regen from Elemental Attunement, and if you take Lingering Elements then your Soothing Mist is extended outside of water attunement anyways, and all those arcane traits build up into Evasive Arcana for another heal. Plus if you never attune to earth you can’t use Eruption to combo finish your water fields. And that’s all just counting the healing. You also prevent damage through CC, blinds, protection, etc. so if you prioritized healing you would be losing damage mitigation overall.

Healing bunker builds are a very common elementalist build in tournaments, and they don’t stay in water just to spam Water Blast, they would die. And most of them are 30 arcane. Healing is not a sub-optimal build, it’s been explored extensively, but staying in water IS a sub-optimal way to play a healing build.

You’re misinterpeting what I’m trying to say. I’m not claiming by any means that the best way to play a ‘healing build’ is to spam Water Blast all day. However, what I mean to say is that, under some circumstances, staying in Water a while longer and spamming Water Blast can be a viable tactic. Especially if you’re supporting a melee’s own healing skills (and they already have regeneration for example).

It would mostly apply to situations where going into close range isn’t an option, but your long range heals are on cooldown. Take the champion karka for example. You don’t wanna be close to that thing. But if you got your earth elemental to tank it, it can stay alive a good while longer if you cast a few water blasts on it. Especially if you have a large group of people tossing around other effects.

Again, it’s not a solid long term strategy. But it can be a good short term tactic, in specific situations. That’s all I ever meant to say.

I’m not opposed to an out-of-combat swap. However, it should really be just that. Not a ‘I managed to get out of combat for whatever reason during a fight, quickly switch and abuse the option I really shouldn’t have’ mechanic.

For practical reasons, I’m all for it. Implement it next patch. But also change the Arcana weapon traits to a single trait. You know, just for practical reasons.

MindlessRuff.1948:

ThiBash.5634:

As for water, how about a ‘healing build’? Sure, it’s not great…but you do have an auto attack that you can use to heal whatever melee is whacking at your target as well. It’s not more useful than attunement swapping, true, but it can be useful at times.

If you have a “healing” build the worst thing you can do is stay in water and auto attack. The 15 trait point in water is an AoE heal and can be traited to cleanse multiple conditions from teammates and yourself. If anything you should be switching away from water so you can get the bonus from swapping TO it as much as possible.

Wheter that is worst or not depends on the situation. The healing from the auto attack would be decent. I’m not saying that people should build around it, but there situations in which it would be a viable tactic.

To be honest, I find a mix of stats to be optimal. A bit of power combined with a bit of crit to up my damage, a bit of vitality with a bit of toughness to optimize my defense.

Items like the Triforge Amulet are best for the Elementalist, because we basically make use of everything all the time. Even the most offensive builds have acces to healing skills, and even power based builds cause (some) conditions.

If you already have Cleansing Flame for condition stacks, then I’d say 20% cooldown reduction would be better. It’ll give you (even more) stunbreakers, some added damage and more mobility. The added conditions removal would be redundant.

Arheundel.6451:

-27s Vigor?
Unless you use all your cantrips you don’t get any vigor boon on ele, again let me remind you that there is no cantrip master trait, so I’d assume that an ele would use normal CD cantrips = mist form (75s CD), armour of earth( 90s Cd) and cleansing fire( 50s CD).
And now what will it be? Increase boon duration?
Using all cantrips you’d get 40s vigor duration ( 8s duration of boon *3 *70%)
In all this the stability boon has gone up to 10.5 s duration, still looking for your 12s stability boon where it come from.

Or “amazing healing power”?
Again using all cantrips you’d get 31s of vigor duration, and then you’ve wasted all your cantrips good job for the spectacular playstyle

In the end your obvious lies clearly show how little you know about ele and how much credibility should be given to people complaing about ele survivability

There’s an Arcana trait that has a 33% chance to grant Vigor on critical hits. It’s quite effective too thanks to the boost from Fury. Even if it may not be 100% uptime, it’ll feel like it is.

So how many warrior shouts can remove 4 conditions at once?

Just got a crazy idea. How about, instead of swapping weapons, the devs changed Magnetic Grasp to pull your foe to you instead of you to them?

That would solve all D/D’s problems and would cause a lot less balance issues.

The only way to ‘balance’ it is by making it happen out of combat only.

NdranC.5107:

Gap closers wont help you when the enemy is on a high place, specially since they made it so blink abilities (not jump shot though) can’t teleport you to places where the path finding couldnt find a quick route. Wouldnt help you either when you want to attack an over extended target in a zerg without suiciding on a glass cannon spec.

So D/D has a ‘gasp’ downside? Surely we can’t allow that! It should be able to attack anything everywhere all the time!

Also, there is nothing worth it, in any single ele weapon that makes up for the range/style change loss that weapon swapping gives.

That’s your opinion. To me, the staff is versatile enough that I don’t miss not being able to swap to melee.

The thing you gotta keep in mind is that this is the Elementalist. It’s not a warrior/ranger with different fluff. Your weapons define your role, not your range. If you’re that desperate for a ranged attack, bring the Frost Bow. Summon an Air Elemental for a change. Bring some different utility skills.

The elementalist has the tools to work at different ranges. The difference is that they don’t involve weapon swapping.

BunnytheSwordsman.4173:

As for what happens when all the dragons are dead? I can see Orr becoming sort of the Durmand Priory’s ultimate fantasy-land and it’ll become just this major research site.

This seems the most likely. At first it’ll be fortresses and fortified outposts, then maybe a few people will go there to try their luck. More people will come and in 200 years or so, it may become repopulated.

But the average Tyrian has no reason to go to Orr yet. Safe places like Lion’s Arch or the capitals are dangerous enough. Why would you trek halfway across the world to the source of most of your problems, if you’re just an average Joe the Farmer?

The missing professions’ mechanics though, have been divided among the new professions.

Spirits→Engineering Turrets,War Banners
Weapon Spells→Conjured Weapons & Guardian weapons
Avatars→Racial skills
etc.

So in a way, they’re still around.

How many of those who want weapon swaps actually play D/D?

If you pick D/D then you get the whole package, including the range. You got gap closers. Use them. If not, tough cookie. For the other weapons, the range actually doesn’t matter: they’re just as effective at long and at short range. Range is actually the least defining aspect of our weapon sets.

The ONLY acceptable weapon swap would be an out-of-combat swap, for practical reasons only. And that should either have a cooldown, or an ‘X seconds after combat ended’ effect. But preferably both.

Now as far as the conjures go, they could use a slight increase in range. The frost bow is a longbow for all intents and purposes, so it might as well get a 1200 range.

But in combat weapon swap? No, sorry. If you ask for that, you’re looking for a crutch to hold you up as opposed to learning how to play the class properly.

TwoBit.5903:

As for the skill itself, it goes on cooldown immediately after summoning the golem rather than being locked until the summon dies. You’re looking at 140 second downtime between summons rather than 180. It’s a pretty good tradeoff.

The elemental summon has a 120 seconds downtime after it disappears. It can be traited to lower its cooldown to 96 seconds. So without traits, it’s 20 seconds less than the golem. With traits it’s 44 seconds less.

It can also be used while moving, and it takes less time to cast. Also, I’m not 100% sure the golem would win a dps race with the Fire Elemental (which also boosts your teammates with might).

Overall, the golem isn’t bad per sé. In fact, I use it on my engineer. But I wouldn’t use it on my elementalist.

Not really to be honest. On its own, it may be fairly weak but in a cantrip build, it can remove 4 conditions and its recharge is reduced. That’s fairly powerful for a condition removal skill.

Xolo.3580:

Also: Chill stacks, Immobilize does not stack, so that’s not a bug

Chill stacks in duration, yes, but not in such a way that when you add two 3-second chill effects the result is 12 seconds of chill. Also, immobilize also stacks in duration.

So I’d say that’s pretty much a bug.

Xolo.3580:

Concerning Arcane Power, please add this:

Fireball + Arcane Power = 3 crits and buff is gone.
My bet is that the aoe component of the spell will eat a charge alongside the projectile, resulting in one Fireball eating 2 charges.
This is effectively killing the build I was trying to make…

Then also add this:

When combined with Elemental Surge the following effects appear:
~Water: next 5 Water Blasts activate Arcane Precision, but when using Frozen Ground, the frozen ground ‘eats up’ charges without giving an effect.
~Air: next 5 Chain Lightning casts activate AP but each hit procs, resulting in a grand total of 15 activations per AP.
~When using both Arcane Precision AND Arcane Wave, in water they cause the DOUBLE amount of chill, wheras in Earth they cause only HALF the immobilize.

By all means abuse it. Maybe it’ll draw enough attention to have all other bugs fixed while it’s nerfed.

The fire aura on signet trait requires 20 points…so getting that AND 30/30 earth/water is impossible unfortunately.

EatThisShoe.5136:

what builds stay in water/air?

As for water, how about a ‘healing build’? Sure, it’s not great…but you do have an auto attack that you can use to heal whatever melee is whacking at your target as well. It’s not more useful than attunement swapping, true, but it can be useful at times.

TwoBit.5903:

the 7-Series is a good substitute for our elites because of its amazing damage output.

Except that the recharge is almost 3 times as long, it lasts 20 seconds less and you can’t pick the type of summon. It doesn’t buff your allies either. So sorry, but I disagree. We have one of the best summon elite skills in the game. Cool as golems may be, they’re no substitute. Not by a long shot.

Ehecatl.9172:

And honestly if a million people decide to bunch up and sit on my lava font, they all deserve to take the damage.

That in itself should be reason enough to make AoE’s hit everything. Let positioning mean something for catsoutloud!

Mephane.8496:

jaif.3518:

I easily get 50% of kills because I root someone in range of the zerg, or root them with dragon’s tooth and phoenix incoming.

Slightly off-topic, but I am curious: do you reliably get kill credit for that?

Signet of Earth causes a little bit of damage by itself right?

Odokuro.5049:

I would like to use S/D and Focus on inflicting Conditions, yet have enough initial damage so as not to hit like a wet noodle.

The only way I know to do both awesome condition and awesome normal damage is by picking berserker gear. Otherwise, you may either wanna pick one of them, or lower your expectations to ‘acceptable damage’.

Assuming you’re aiming for a signet/condition build, I’d replace the water and fire traits you picked with something else. Also, I’d recommend the 20% recharge reduction on signets from earth instead of the ‘extra damage vs. bleeders’ (since that won’t affect your conditions). To still cause a reasonable amount of burning, you can either grab Signet of Fire, or just place your fire combo fields wisely and let your team create some mass burning.

For a versatile WvW build, I personally use Glyph of Elemental Power. It’ll add some cripple or chill to your attacks, making duelling a lot easier imho.

ArenaNet has stated in the recent AMA that they’re aware of this issue and intend to fix it soon.

The main reason I’d like an ascended version of the Triforge Pendant is because of the associated lore and trivia. I wouldn’t even mind if they just made it so that you can transmute it into a regular ascended item.

Because let’s face it, Legend of Zelda’s cool…

There’s another trick to getting that immobilize though.

Elemental Surge + Arcane Power. Makes your next 5 earth spells/attacks deal 1 second of immobilize each.

If you plan on doing dungeons, then I recommend to get some vitality to get your health to at least 12k. It’ll help you survive attacks that’ll otherwise down you instantly. You won’t make that with just toughness.

Mephane.8496:

Yeah, I was also hugely let down by them ignoring this question.

It’s probably not so ignoring as it is that they didn’t get round to it. There were a lot of questions.

6. Dagger/Dagger is currently our best weapon loadout.

Very subjective. It may be so for 1vs1 situations, but by no means does it hold true for the entire game.