Guild Wars 2

My female elementalist.

Use your incinerator, you won’t regret it.

The magic nuking from ranged, being squishy but hard to pin down. Tricky little guy.

That’s actually quite accurate. Welcome to the elementalist forum, you’ve come to the right place.

This might be of interest for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

@Topic: The one perfect gear setup doesn’t exist. If the gear is about balanced (which should be the case for d/d builds), then it depends on your personal preference if you want to have more sustain or damage. There are (in theory!) optimal tradeoffs between crit damage and precision or toughness and vitality but you’re talking about a quantum tradeoff between sustain and damage. There is no general answer to this as you have to find out what fits your playstyle.

The reason my first answer was a bit sarcastic is that your headline is totally misleading. If you claim that there are different “builds” you posted and only one piece of armor (builds include sigils, runes, weapons, traits, utilities, bufffood etc. etc.) is different, you will cause a lot of confusion for people who click on those links trying to help you out.

Roll a dice lol. The only difference between gear 1 and 3 is the backpiece, seriously? Thats enough for you to open a thread?^^

Craft the mystic clovers first, that’s all one needs to know. Also, keep an eye on the price of spark for a while and buy when you think it’s cheaper than usual. Use karma for obisdian shards.

9/10 because she is quite unique looking actually adult and not like a baby-faced 16 year old teenager with a mouth so small that she couldn’t even eat a cheeseburger.

1 ele going for might stacking and lightning hammer while the other ele goes just full dmg with a staff is a very good combo since the lh ele can blast the fields the staff ele places.

Don’t go for diamond skin. Diamond skin is totally op against condition specs as d/d ele with regeneration, healing from water attunement and evasive arcana + healing signet, on d/f however, you don’t have enough passive/“rotation-build-in” healing to make diamond skin effective.

From a very general perspective, I would suggest to try the following: The focus is a very strong offset weapon because of it’s amazing defensive utilities that have to be used wisely and situation dependend. Thus, the change from d/d to d/f is giving up the attunement rotation where you just blow everything thats ready. So I would strongly suggest to go for fresh air, so for example you can jump to earth, get the invuln. when you need it and jump back to lightning which also gives a nice little burst everytime.

So one thing I would try is:

- fresh air
- go a little bit to the zerker side of the force
- compensate the lack of healing and sustain with your focus utility defensive skills

eyesrutherford.1357:

My elementalist Æroxe. Love her adorableness.

Sorry for not posting a picture here but did you seriously take a photo of your monitor and instead of making a screenshot?

I would suggest you spend your first load of gold into berserker armor and weapons with the right runes and sigils so you can do pve content without being a burden to the group. Then you have the basics to make enough money to afford your desired wvw equipment.

@Thunder d/f fresh air is an awesome build that has everything; damage, might/fury stacking, defensive capabilities while keeping the ele playstyle of attunement switching. Look at zelyhns signature.

Human for armor styles, asura for animations and laughs.

Another thing to remember when playing d/d is to bring a tissue to fights in case you come across elitist who will immediately start crying about how op he thinks you are.

Looks very balanced, any further changes would be a matter of personal preference. The amount of celestial is fine. It’s not the number of pieces that count, but the amount of stats they add. Aiming for 500 healing power is a solid choice IMO.

I can’t believe that this kitten can be unfixed for such a long time. You make a game that relies on active targetting of spells, teleports etc. and then you screw the entire netcode with 1 patch and do nothing about it. PvP on d/d ele has become borderline unplayable now. Even ride the lightning doesn’t finish without me teleporting around like crazy. When will you finally take care of this problem of broken core mechanics?

You suggest huge buffs to every single attunement (like 33% passive buff to movement speed while attuned to air, wtf). What you overlook is that such buffs would be totally overpowered if people still used attunement rotations. It’s simply not going to work. You’re trying to build a car with rectangular wheels here.

You should always add a link to the build used in the description of your videos.

2 attunements useless? I hope you are below lvl 20 cause thats the point where you should know what it means to play an elementalist. Ele is one of the most fun and easiest classes to level and certainly not underpowered. Not at all. If you don’t like switching attunements you should switch classes right away cause it aint getting any “better” at higher levels.

When was the last time a developer read/posted on the elementalist forum?

The last time I remember was when a guy from arenanet introduced himself, claiming that there will be more communication with the ele community. Oh man… the irony

Ele has its use in every part of the game while necro shines primarily in pvp. However, even there it’s less fun because of the complete lack of stability (which makes you a living punching ball in group fights) and mobility. As a necro, you are committed to every fight since you can’t run away, as an elementalist you can usually disengage if you have to. Elementalist has a place in optimal group setups for dungeons/fractals while necro usually does not. Thus, I recommend elementalist due to his usefulness in all aspects of the game and his more satisfying gameplay.

@lightningBlaze So far I thought condition ele wasn’t really a good option compared to celestial d/d but this build looks excellent (in theory). It has synergies I didn’t even know of. Must try.

After first thought, I think lh does not work in tpvp because of its slow attack and the very fast paced nature of pvp in GW2. You might be better off using icebow to increase the burst because your job as a squishy staff ele is to put pressure on nodes and not get in the middle of the fight.

The closest thing to what you’re trying to achieve is the s/f fresh air build imo. It’s not bound to the classic rotation style.

Welcome to GW2. You either play the classes that are actually fun with little rewards for high skill investment or the braindead, boring classes with high rewards for little skill investment (-> warrior).

Some people like the boring classes as long as they ZOMG OLOLOL the kitten out of their opponent, some cannot stand boring classes and APM the kitten out of their keyboard to be able to keep up with them. I think this is what Devs mean when they say the player can choose a class according to his “playstyle”.

Mes is easy, there #2 makes a clone, however any clone generating ability needs a target to cast. So if you stealth stomp a mes they literally can’t do anything.

Mesmers don’t need a target to cast their downed invisibility skill. They will always teleport even if you are stealthed and the only one around.

I think the crying is not that much about the nerf itself. It’s more like the fgs wallrush was the only thing left that made an elementalist elite skill actually strong. Take that away and you can officially dump the elites. IF they rework the fgs, why don’t they do it in a way that it gets useful besides running away?

The second thing is something that most people forget. Usability of fgs in dungeons will not be nerfed, it will be destroyed. The dmg before the nerf was op, but what they now did was to completely kill the fgs by removing the multiple fire fields. They could’ve just nerfed the dmg by 50% so it was not op anymore but still a good move.

Galandil.9641:

Steel Courage.1250:

I am wanting to be a thief with high damage in and out of stealth with evade stability or tankyness to it.

Anything else?

Maybe a rocket launcher? Or a nuke? Or both?

High damage, tankyness and cool looks. He wants to be Iron Man.

Thanks very much guys.

Since I dont want to open a new thread for this, maybe you can help me. Do you know what armor this is? The chest is certainly human cultural, but I’m not quite sure about the rest.

Sick good how you killed that guardian in the beginning. He couldn’t even finish his coffee.

Sorry for the offtopic, but blink is your most important tool as a d/d ele to land your burning speed. It’s a must have.

Warriors are an easmode class with very simple rotations. The best you can do is to find out the build and play it yourself for half an hour. If you don’t know about warrior builds, they seem op. However, their cheezyness makes it easy to beat them if you know what you’re up against. In general, if you run the standard d/d celestial ele build with ether renewal against condi warr, you should be fine.

It’s not the damage output. The aggro system is simply designed in a way that the class with the lowest sustain (HP, armor) will get attacked first. That’s why eles draw such insane aggro. It’s not the damage output because if you pay attention for a few runs, you will see that the first boss in cof p1 will always attack you first in the beginning of a fight. This question was already raised a few times in this forum btw. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Anet is going to fix this broken system.

Many skills that make d/d celestial work in spvp are missing if you use focus offhand, e.g. frost armor, ride the lightning, cleansing wave etc. Focus offhand has some decent skills such as earth 4 and 5 to compensate for this, however, major synergies are lost (healing power -> cleansing wave, zephyrs boon -> frost armor). Fire 4 from focus to provide the fire field is also more difficult and takes more time to cast than ring of fire.

Another thing to consider is that you have to rely on close range combat yet you have only two gap closers (blink and rtl). Burning speed does not count as a gap closer because its too important as a damage spell. A necro can slow you on 1200 range and if you dont get close to pressure him, you will have to backup. Thus, with focus offhand, you sacrifice one of your two gap closers.

Focus offhand might work if the player is really good (this applies for almost every build though), but I don’t think it’s worth going for it.

Remove the stupid attunement cooldown (and move it to those passive effects you get from attunement swapping) and all problems are fixed.

Everyone asking for a nerf of strength runes does not understand that this runeset is the last thing that keeps pvp from being an all out condition war.

Sylvari themed warrior with some blue accents from backpiece and weapons.

How do you balance a class that is designed to be super easy to play yet must still be able to compete at higher skill levels?

Is it balanced that anyone who fights a warrior has always to be super careful of what the warrior does because if he hits one or two buttons, it can mean the end of the fight (8k evis, skull crack into 100 blades, etc.) but this does not apply the other way around?

Again and again, people say that evis is easy to dodge because you can clearly see the animation. Then you have never fought against an asura warrior. Dodging a skill with a 3/4 second cast time in the middle of a fight is extremely hard to pull off when you are managing your own skills at the same time against human/norn/charr, it’s almost impossible against asura.

People seem to have accepted that warriors are the shining dev toy of arenanet and that it’s ok that they can 2-hit you while you cannot kill them because they will always be able to get away from a fight. IMHO, if a class is designed so it can be easily picked by noobs, it should not dominate all skill levels as it currently does.

You might consider changing your utilities. Signet of earth for example is an excellent choice for a glassy staff ele since it immobilizes your opponent for almost 4 (!) seconds on a 30 second CD and the passive bonus is +180 toughness. I would also use arcane blast instead of signet of fire so you can 1 shot enemies with 1 big combo. Overall, nice video, although you benefit from the unability of your opponents to realize that you are the primary target.

Firegrab definitely needs a fix. Sometimes the opponent is right in front of me and the firegrab hits nothing. I main ele for over a year now yet I have no idea how to predict what this skill is doing and how to use the mechanics in a way that it actually hits if you aim it correct.

All weapon sets do well in the right situations (even d/d in pvp and for leveling) and it depends on your playstyle what you prefer. If you don’t like LH, go for d/f which is completely viable. Considering this versatility, the ele is in a quite good spot in pve and I think it’s not justified to talk about bad design here. Dungeon content design is another story.

I wouldn’t run full zerker when leveling. Use a mix of zerker/knight/soldier, get zephyrs boon and put more points in arcana, as pointed out by DutchRiders. The rules of zerker meta don’t apply for solo leveling since you’re on your own and there are no “roles” to fit.

You need to distinguish between open world content, dungeons with pug groups, dungeons with a guild group, difficult content such as fractals. Staff for example, is good in open world content and certain situations in dungeons/fractals. For dungeons with pug groups and difficult content, d/f is an excellent choice in my opinion. For optimized runs, use S/D +LH for its superior might stacking capabilities and highest dps.

I want to point out though that d/f does very good dps and does just SLIGHTLY worse than S/D + LH. The numbers of lightning whip seem small, but one has to consider that it’s a double attack. It does two attacks in 1,15 seconds while a full LH attack chain takes 2,8 seconds. If I calculate my dps from just auto attacking after might stacking against the veteran giant in cursed shore (with normal dungeon food and sigils, no bloodlust), I get about 7k dps for d/f and only a few hundred more for LH.

IMHO, the only “bad” choice for level 80 pve content is d/d.

“making it impossible for Condition Engineers, Necromancers, Rangers, Thieves, Mesmers or Warriors” I smell a l2p issue

qft

I understand that thieves and rangers have serious problems with our condition cleanse, however the condition spam of engineers/mesmers/necros is so insanely high that ele would be underpowered if we didn’t have it.

Zelyhn, elementalist since the beginning of time, a cunning and shrewd scholar with the ambition to influence all spheres of power in Tyria:

That’s a solid 9/10.

I don’t want to judge if this build is viable or not, but the thing that I noticed is that it doesn’t have enough on-demand condition cleanse. Against condition engineers, for example, your cleansing fire will be triggered by him within 3 seconds infight by just autoattacking you and then the only thing thats left is your signet that removes 1 condition every 10 seconds. Yes, there is phoenix, but thats not really an option when your fire attunement is on cooldown.

Edit: Ok there is magnetic wave but still.. I don’t think this is enough to stand a solid chance in the current condition meta.

First of all, forget about being a bunker. Your job is to attack, cap points and assist in teamfights. The playstyle of a d/d ele is pretty much similar to a thief. You do bursts of damage and stack might, then you retreat, heal up and go in again.

It’s very important to aim and land your fire bursts which is why Lightning Flash is an absolute must have for a d/d ele in spvp. You pop an aura for fury, then use burning speed and teleport on top of the opponent to set him under pressure. Then swap to earth and water to land your explosion finishers in your fire field. In the beginning of fights, it’s more important to stack might than to hit your enemy with your earth/fire blast finishers. As you have 20+ stacks of might, you do enough damage to finally down the enemy.

One thing to keep in mind is to not over extend. After you did your damage, reset the fight a little bit and heal up. The key to playing a d/d ele successfully is mobility and patience. Aim your burning speed and fire grab well then retreat a little to keep your 10-15 second heals on cooldown (water attunement, water dodge roll, ether renewal) and repeat.

One common mistake of many new d/d ele players is, that they tend to waste their spells because the flow of button mashing makes them think they have plenty of them. This is not the way to success. Keep your flow up, but try to aim spells like burning speed very precisely.

This is the build I am referring to.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoYhMM6cW4wyBf0APAC5fv2JKQ5qJfC-TJRGwAAOBAJeAAg2fYZZAA

Staff is good in the following scenarios:

- open world events due to its high aoe dps on 1200 range

- WvW zerging because of meteor shower and water fields

- in certain situations in dungeons, e.g. cof path 2 (last “boss”), ta up/forward (the tree)

In spvp, fractals/dungeons (except certain situations) and wvw roaming, I would recommend using another weapon set.

dimek.4592:

(efforts/results = efficiency)

Ele must be the most efficient class in the game then

After watching this video, conditionalist looks like a viable option to me. It seems all you have to do is make sure you’re fighting total noobs who are afk as you engage them.

Anomaly.7612:

cursE.1794:

Time for an update with the new (old) backpiece and that amazing crimson red dye.

Ooooo. What gloves and shoulders are those?!

Citadel of flame shoulders and hellfire gloves.