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nice-profession-mechanic · 2 months ago

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Lowering the Elementalist Barrier to Entry

Hello! So a few days ago I asked people what issues they were having that have kept them from playing elementalist. Because I love this class and I think that everyone who wants to should be able to enjoy it, I wanted to put together a guide that would help people find a way to enjoy this class despite it's inherent complexity.

A list of the complaints that I will be addressing.

1. There's too many skills to reasonably remember

2. Even the low intensity builds are still too high intensity/keybinding issues

3. It's too fragile

4. Rotations are difficult to remember

5. The main concept of the class just doesn't click for me

So, with that said, I am going to go on a spec by spec basis to try and address these concerns. I'm going to break down the basic concepts of the class, bonk you on the head for trying to overcomplicate things, provide some truly low intensity alternatives, and give you some survivability techniques.

I do want to add a disclaimer: Elementalist is still a difficult and demanding class, and even the low intensity builds can be more demanding if you have motor skill issues, and if you find that these issues make it too difficult to play, that's perfectly fine. I do have a treat in store, a tempest build that uses one attunement only, and can be built as either a condi DPS or as an alac DPS. These tips are meant to help you play it in open world, and to be more survivable in open world situations, and to learn how to play the class so you can more comfortably bring it into instanced content if that's your jam.

(Also, credit to soulbeastdragon for these nifty dividers!)

Core elementalist. This bit is probably going to be the longest as it will touch on most of the general concerns, and a lot of the concepts I touch on translate well into each elite spec. Don't worry LI players I will get to you later. Core ele just doesn't have enough going for it to make a true low intensity build work in my opinion.

As you level a new elementalist, it tries to ease you into having a ton of buttons available by giving you one attunement at a time, but then as soon as you swap weapons all that goes out the window and you have 20 new skills to learn. Or do you? Every elementalist build will gravitate towards two attunements more than the other two. Power = fire/air, Condi = fire/earth. Even with hybrid damage builds, you'll often find that you use two elements more than the other two. So what that means is that you can treat it just like any other class that can weapon swap, learn 10 skills as best as you can, and then start branching out into learning the other 10 skills. A lot of times, with these other attunements, you are only dipping into them for one or two skills before leaving. dagger/dagger ele, for instance, might swap to water while running away from danger to cast 5 for the heal and condi cleanse, and 2 for the heal, before swapping to another attunement to re-engage. You might have a fire field that needs blasting so you swap to water to cast 3 before leaving water. This is how good elementalists are able to survive. However, if you are reading this guide, you aren't a good elementalist (yet), so let's talk defense.

Elementalist has one of the lowest health pools in the game, and it's easy to feel like you drop dead at a moments notice. Stats help with survivability a lot, but I'm not going to bore you with specifics. Just know that celestial gear works great on ele because you are able to make good use of every piece of that stat block. It's great on catalyst especially because they get a bonus 10-20% to all their stats. There's a reason why your level 80 boosts give you full exotic celestial gear. Think of celestial stats like training wheels, as you start to learn how to play the spec better, swap some pieces out for more specialized pieces. (Dragons and marauders for power. vipers, carrion, and trailblazers for condi. Minstrels, harriers, etc for support if you're a masochist.)

Every elementalist build relies on auras to an extent, and every traitline has some methods of interacting with auras. The most notable ones are smothering auras in fire (cleanse a condi everytime you get an aura, cleanse 2 everytime you transmute an aura), and elemental shielding in earth, (grant protection to allies you grant an aura to), and written in stone (signets grant auras and keep their passives while on cooldown). Tempest and catalyst have the most obvious aura synergies, but even weaver uses auras, (leaping through a fire field with sword fire or air 2 to cleanse condis, get protection, etc).

The other methods of damage mitigation that ele has are as follows: dodging (try using sigil of energy), blocks/invulnerability (hammer earth 4, focus earth 5, catalyst earth augment), passive regeneration (either regen through traits, or using signet of restoration in your healing slot) and simply not being there (lightning flash, keeping distance when using ranged weapons).

And now for utilities! Most elementalist utilities suck, and you usually end up using the same 6 or 7 on every build. However, in terms of survivability, you've got a decent chunk. Stunbreaks are always great to have, and my personal favorites are signet of air and armor of earth. Armor of earth is the better defensive skill, giving barrier, protection, and hella stability, but signet of air tickles the "go fast" part of my brain and it's on a lower cooldown. Mist form is another decent defensive skill, helping you to reposition and ensure that channeled skills complete. (Fun fact, if you are stomping a downed player in PvP or WvW, you can use mist form to ensure that it isn't interrupted). Other notable defensive utility is conjure earth shield, but that's maybe a bit too complicated for the scope of this guide. It's there if you want to use it tho.

But that's still a lot of skills! I know! Take it slow, start with signets for your utilities, learn two attunements and one set of utilities, then start learning where to fit the other attunements in.

I have a hard time swapping attunements! What are some good keybinds for me? Attunement swapping needs to basically be second nature. I've got my attunements bound to buttons on my mouse, that way one hand deals with weapon skills and movement and the other deals with attunement swapping. This has helped me from getting my fingers tangled frequently, and I cannot recommend it enough. Otherwise, just having good keybinds for your attunements that let you swap fluidly will be your best bet. For a while there, I used E S D F for my movement keys, kept weapon skills on 1-5, set my attunements to Q W R T, with jade sphere on A, with heal and utilities on 6 ZXCG. But, mind you, I've also got massive able bodied hands that can reach from Z to 8. Find whatever works for you, but you should practice being able to swap attunements until it is second nature and you can do it while moving.

Now, here's a build you could use. I like using d/d to teach people the basics of core ele because it is very mobile and it has a decent mix of power and condi damage, auras, and crowd control. I'd recommend celestial stats, because again this is the training wheels build, probably also a sigil of energy just to be safe, and a handfull of signet skills on your bar (heal signet, earth, air, maybe also fire). Here's the build:

The main ideas of this build are to keep moving, use fire and earth for damage, air and water to catch up/slow down enemies. Auras grant you protection and cleanse condis, using signet skills grants you auras, disabling enemies (air 5, earth 4, etc) give you boons, and casting skills in fire attunement will give you might that converts into damage when you swap out of fire. Dodge rolling also casts a skill, (blast finisher in earth attunement, sizeable heal in water, notably).

Ok, I think that's all for core elementalist, so far I've touched on how best to learn skills (take it slow and piece by piece), how to feel less squishy (stats, traits, auras, and active defense), and the main concept of the class (pick two elements, the others are supporting elements, build accordingly to the elements you pick), and the portable of good keybinds, potentially delegating attunement swaps to your mouse-hand. So, let's talk about the elite specs.

Tempest is the first ele elite spec added to the game, and it is honestly the one that I recommend everyone learn how to play. And for you low-intensity players, I got a build for you! This build uses only one attunement and can still pump out respectable damage, and provide whatever auras you need, stability, protection etc. For that one person who said they play on controller and can only really use one attunement, this one's for you. But first, the tempest basics

I talk a lot about the pacing of each elementalist spec, catalyst has the most frenetic pace, weaver is the most evenly paced, tempest is slower paced, and core ele is between tempest and weaver in terms of pace. What I mean by this in regards to tempest is that you have a lot of downtime where you are casting longer channeled skills or waiting for your overloaded attunements to be back up, and the difficulty of this spec comes from your positioning. Tempest takes auras that ele already leaned pretty heavily on, and turns them into a supportive powerhouse. I personally don't recommend playing heal tempest, in that it feels bad to swap out of water attunement and immediately need access to healing skills again, but if that's your can of worms then go lay in it. DPS tempest is much more lenient in that it's set "rotation" is to swap between two attunements, cast most of your weapon skills, overload, swap to a new attunement, and repeat.

And now, the low intensity, one attunement build I promised:

This is meant to be used as a condi build, so gear accordingly, but you can honestly use this with either mainhand scepter or pistol, and either offhand focus or warhorn. (or heck, you could pick your mainhand and then equip each offhand so you can pick and choose with a click of a button). The gist with this build is that you can press all your fire attunement skills off cooldown, overload whenever it is available, and repeat. If you take pistol, use fire 3 to stock a bullet and spend it on fire 2.

For utilities, dealers choice but here are my recommendations. Signet of restoration to get frost aura with written in stone, signet of fire to add more burning as well as boost your crit chance for burning precision, Feel the Burn for more burning. I'd also take the elite Glyph of Elementals because that is basically set and forget. Take relic of the fractal, sigil of bursting, sigil of earth, runes of balthazar. You want to try and hit 100% burning duration and as high of condi damage as you can. If you want to turn this into an alacDPS build, you can too! Just swap the tempest trait around, put a sigil of concentration in your warhorn, and invest a little more of your stats into concentration, and you now have a 1 attunement condi alacDPS tempest that can still pull it's weight DPS wise.

If you want to use more than one attunement however, you can easily swap between fire and earth, which will honestly help with your alac uptime if you choose to go that route. You can treat this as a low intensity build that only uses one attunement, or you can swap between two attunements to get more bang for your buck.

But now, one of the current best power DPS builds, Fresh Air Tempest:

For instanced content, mix and match berserker's, assassin's, dragon's and marauders in order to get to 75% crit chance with signet of fire and sigil of accuracy. You use scepter/warhorn, sigil of accuracy, sigil of force, runes of the scholar, and relic of fireworks. The entire idea of the build is to overload air a lot, swap to water and cast 2 and 3, go back to air and overload it again, then swap to fire and cast 5 and 3, (or 2 then 3 if 5 is on cooldown), then back to air. Your cadence should be: Overload air -> cast 2 skills in water -> Overload air -> cast 2 skills in fire -> Overload air. Everytime we crit, we refresh the cooldown on air attunement, and since we have 100% crit chance with fury, it basically doesn't have a cooldown.

The utility skills you need to make this build do high DPS are signet of fire, glyph of storms, feel the burn, and take the elite glyph of elementals. Cast storms in air when waiting for air overload, cast glyph of elementals in fire. Cast air 2 and 3 whenever they are available, they are instant cast and won't interrupt your other skills. Again, this build is probably not low intensity, but it is low learning curve.

Now for my personal favorite, weaver. Weaver is a spec with very little middle ground, in that either you love it or you hate it, you can play it or you can't, and it's either the most fragile thing ever or utterly unkillable, there is no in-between. I'm going to talk about some of the basics of weaver, a little about the weaver mindset that you have to be in, and then I'm going to teach you how to survive a 20 kiloton nuclear detonation through the power of spinning.

The thing that trips people up the most about weaver is the way that it swaps attunements. For those who don't know, when you change attunements on weaver, your 1 and 2 skills go to the new element, your 4 and 5 stay in the old element, and your 3rd skill is a mix of the two, a dual attack. What's also important to remember is that the interval at which you will be swapping attunements is more or less constant. Once you swap attunements, you can't swap again for another 4 seconds, so it almost takes on a musical aspect. Weaver plays in 4/4 time. Go find a song, get it stuck in your head, then take a weaver and run around the open world for a bit, and tell me that that doesn't feel good to play.

The important things to remember, when you swap to a new attunement, you are doing it because you want to use the 2 skill in that new attunement. The dual attack is secondary, and your 4 and 5 skills were determined when you last swapped attunements (so treat them like nice lil bonuses that can help with your current situation). Swap attunements, press 2, press 3, decide to either hit 4 or 5, then wait until you can repeat. When you get good at this, you can start to anticipate what your 4 and 5 skills are going to be, and you can pick an attunement that will compliment them.

You want to look at a rotation guide for weaver? Stop thinking about it on a skill by skill basis, pay attention to the attunement swaps. What attunement do they jump to at what point in the rotation, and why? Don't get bogged down in the minutiae of "use this skill before this other skill" just yet, focus on the broader strokes of which attunements you need to be swapping to, use some of your skills, and move on to the next one.

Weave self and why this skill is actually just a set and forget buff. Weave self has been a pain point in learning weaver for a lot of people, mainly because they look at a rotation guide and their head starts to spin. So, with my 9 years of experience in elementalist, I am here to tell you, "Stop worrying about it!" Weave self is a 20 second buff that lowers your attunement swap cooldown and gets more powerful the more attunements that you swap into, after you collect all four then you get an extra 10 seconds with all those buffs (except the attunement cooldown), and the option to use it again for an AoE float. Don't worry about collecting all the buffs, use weave self to lower your attunement cooldowns, and then just keep playing as normal. If you want to squeeze the extra 10 seconds out of the buff, be my guest, but it's not gonna make or break you. Tailored victory isn't as uber powerful as it may seem, it's an AoE unblockable float, which is nice, but again, it's not gonna make or break you. It's not reliable as CC for break bars, (because you need 10 seconds notice to even get access to it), it doesn't do a ton of damage, it's neat against trash mobs and that's about it. Use weave self as a set and forget buff, and then just let it expire at the end of it's duration. If it happens to line up with a CC phase, definitely go for that tho.

Now, how to survive armageddon, credit to Achromant for this meme, but we are going to be playing type B weaver here

We are going to be taking sword/dagger weaver and making it nigh unkillable. Anyone who has followed me for a while knows that I can't shut up about this build, so I'll make it quick. Either Relic of Nayos or relic of the rivers, sigil of energy, dealers choice runes, and honestly dealers choice of stats but I like celestial stats for this, any mix of vitality/toughness/healing power with whatever damage stats you want. Any of the traits that I haven't selected are dealers choice, but I'll talk a lil about what to pick and why. Utilities, signet of restoration, twist of fate, lightning flash, and primordial stance, and dealers choice of elite but I like weave self.

This build has a few different things going for it. The grandmaster trait, Woven Stride, says "gain swiftness when hit with inhibiting conditions, whenever you get swiftness or superspeed, gain regen", and the water grandmaster trait says "cleanse a condition from allies you grant regen to", and relic of Nayos says "heal whenever you cleanse a condition". I'm sure that you can see where that's going. Woven stride currently has a 5 second internal cooldown, (so basically once every attunement), but they are talking about lowering it to 3 seconds, and the other two pieces to that combo do not have any sort of internal cooldown.

The other portion to this build is to dodge frequently. The water trait "Flow like Water" gives you a decent heal everytime you dodge an attack, sigil of energy gives you an extra dodge roll every 2 attunements, evasive arcana casts a spell whenever you dodge. You can swap flow like water out for soothing disruption if you like having more vigor, but I like the heal on evade because you have 3 evade skills and a stunbreak with an evade attached. If you take relic of the rivers, this means that you can get alacrity anytime you dodge roll, which is often, and alacrity helps speed up your entire game plan, as well as the rate at which you attunement swap.

For the trait spots that I left blank, in arcane, I recommend arcane resurrection if you play with friends just because you can pick them up a little easier if they go down, but the others are worth mentioning. Gaining a boon whenever you disable a foe is great on this build because you have a lot of disables, and gaining arcane shield on elite skill use is also very nice in certain situations. In the weaver skill tree, Elemental Pursuit, superspeed whenever you inflict inhibiting conditions (immob, chill, cripple) feeds back into the woven stride look and actually helps us to be tankier. Master's fortitude however just gives us a larger health pool to work with. Weaver's prowess can help us to do a little more damage if we're feeling safe enough, swift revenge can again feed back into the woven stride loop (I wouldn't take this AND Elemental Pursuit, that's just overkill), and Bolstered Elements gives you protection anytime that you activate a stance. (this trait may be getting reworked soon to trigger when activating your elite skill instead of at a low health threshold)

It's important to note here, that 1. You don't deal a lot of damage, most of your damage will come from stunlocking your opponents and chaining skills together. It's also important to note that, remember when I said "when you swap attunements you are doing it for your 2nd skill"? Well, your 2nd skills are all a combo field or finisher (sometimes both), and they are all movement skills that will help you to either gap-close or retreat depending on attunement. (exception being earth 2, you stay in the same spot, but you do evade with a blast finisher). If you double-attune to an element, you are doing it solely for the 3rd skill.

Your offensive rotation takes you through fire, earth, and air, and honestly get a lil jiggy with the order on those because it doesn't super matter, and your defensive rotation is mostly water, air, and sometimes earth. I prefer starting air/fire or air/air, going to fire/air, earth/fire, earth/earth or air/earth, then swapping to air to complete the loop.

Now I say that this build is indestructible, and in the right hands I mean it. I took this build into PvP for a while, and I have been able to hold a point 1v3 for upwards of a minute with some practice. This build is ridiculously tanky and it eats condi damage for breakfast.

It's definitely not low intensity, so if you have motor issues or arthritis or what have you, you may want to avoid it, but for people who are just starting out on weaver then this build will be excellent for you. And hey, once you learn this build, any of the squishier builds will still take some getting used to, but the muscle memory will act as a foundation to build those skills on.

Catalyst is a spec that I have been going back and forth with over whether or not I like it. It kind of takes the auramancer aspect of tempest and does it better but selfishly. To break it down, the first time you combo in an attunement you get an aura based on that attunement, and everytime you get an aura you start the giant rube goldberg machine that is the catalyst traitline in motion, usually ending up with you having +10-20% to all your stats, nigh permanent stability, damage reduction, and almost every boon in the game.

The catalyst's profession mechanic is the jade sphere! This is a ground targeted skill that grants boons to allies, and is also a combo field! Catalyst's weapon, the hammer, has no innate combo fields, so it relies entirely on the jade spheres. For hammer catalyst at least, your "rotation" is that you swap to a new attunement, you press 3 if you don't already have that orbital, drop your jade sphere, press 5 to combo inside it, use whatever other skills you want, then swap to a new attunement and repeat ad nauseum. I'd recommend that you build this with some defensive stats, but it honestly gets enough defense once it gets going that you could run this in full berserkers and still facetank shit. Side note, if you have a jade sphere deployed, you can't gain energy, so you must wait until your jade sphere has worn off to build up energy to keep deploying spheres. Ultimately this doesn't matter too much, but in a lot of high end PvE builds, you wanna try and drop your jade spheres for 2 elements one right after the other to minimize the amount of time you have a jade sphere deployed for.

Your elite skill is another set and forget skill where you say "That attunement had a lot of good skills, let's run it back", and this has some crazy applications like double meteor shower, double ride the lightning, double knockdowns, etc.

For hammer catalyst, I recommend something like this with power stats, (berserkers, marauders, maybe diviners). This is the build I use for PvP and WvW hammer catalyst, because it is very self-sufficient.

In order to play hammer catalyst, everytime you swap to a new attunement you need to press 3 to get that orbital, then you plop down your jade sphere and press either 4 or 5 inside of it, press your 2 skill if you feel you need it, and then swap to the next attunement. The biggest way you generate energy is with your orbitals, they don't do a lot of damage individually, but if you don't have a jade sphere deployed then they stack up a lot of energy very quickly.

I like to turn on "snap ground targeted skills to current target", put all my skills on instant cast, and then just chase people. 10/10, tons of fun. Other fun notes, you can cast hammer air 4 while being out of range of an enemy, and use lightning flash before the cast finishes to close the distance and get a surprise knockdown! This is a lot more useful now that hammer air 4 doesn't send you flying backwards.

However, hammer catalyst isn't the only way to play catalyst! Dagger/dagger catalyst is incredibly fun, and it's a lot more mobile and still just as tanky, you just have to be careful to use your combo finishers inside your fields and you are golden. You can honestly still use the same traits as earlier, but feel free to get a lil jiggy with them.

Let's talk a bit about the various weapons that elementalist has access to.

Staff. Staff is a long-ranged utility weapon, it's all about keeping your distance from enemies and doing damage to them from ranged. It's not a great weapon in my opinion, but it gets points for having geyser, which can be neat for a heal tempest build that takes Arcane Ressurection.

Dagger mainhand. The entire point of this weapon is to stick to your enemy like glue, slow em down with cripples and chills, and then give em a taste of your halitosis. It should be noted that dagger 3 in fire is a dash, an evade, and a combo field, dagger 3 in earth is a dash, an evade, and a combo finisher, dagger water 3 is a blast finisher and air 2 is also a blast finisher. This weapon has the easiest access to shocking aura, which is an incredibly powerful defensive tool.

Dagger offhand. Yo dawg, we heard you liked Metallica, so we put a skill called Ride the Lightning onto your weapon and it's the best dash skill in the game. Anyways, this weapon has access to a lot of CC skills, better helping you stick to your enemy like glue, plenty of strong power and condi damage skills, (fire 4 and 5, earth 5), and good condi cleanse and access to frost aura.

Scepter. Scepter was pistol before pistol was cool You want to try and keep your distance from your enemies and burst them down. Scepter lends itself really well to a Fresh Air playstyle because you can start your air auto-attack, swap to a new attunement, crit with your air auto, cast a few skills, and then swap back.

Focus. This is your defensive offhand skill. You've got projectile reflect, projectile destruction, stuns, knockdowns, the last true invulnerability in the game, and one of the most fiddly fire fields in existence. And also, fire aura on a weapon skill, which lets you get nuts value from smothering auras.

Warhorn. Doot doot! This is the support weapon that is used on every single ele DPS build nowadays, and that's because it has a long duration fire field that lets you stack persisting flames really easily. Lightning orb is also a great DPS skill, you just have to aim it just right so that it spends the most amount of time in range of the boss.

Sword. Dance fucker dance like you never had a chance! This weapon is a fully melee weapon that lets you, again, stick to your enemies like glue, and riddle them with an onslaught of power and condi damage. Weaver makes the best use of this weapon by far, but it's seen a lot of success on tempest and catalyst, mainly because the 3rd skill in fire and air hits like a truck.

Hammer. This weapon doesn't particularly have any use outside of catalyst? Like, it used to be a strong condi weapon for condi tempest, I tried making it work on fresh air weaver, but it just feels better paired with catalyst. The orbitals only exist to charge up catalyst energy and as a small buff, and the lack of combo fields on this weapon means that doesn't really feel like it's being fully utilised outside of catalyst.

Pistol. Don't play pistol weaver, just trust me. Or do, and watch your brain melt trying to figure out how bullets work with dual skills. Pistol catalyst and pistol tempest are perfectly fine though. Before they changed scepter to be more of a power weapon, pistol and scepter kind of occupied the same niche of "midrange condition weapon". The unique mechanic with this weapon is that when you use your 2 or 3 skills, you either stock an elemental bullet or you spend an elemental bullet to get a bonus effect. Most of the worthwhile bonus effects are on the 2nd skills, at least as far as DPS is concerned, whereas the bonus effects on the 3rd skills tend to be more defensive.

But Matt! Spear elementalist is so cool! Can we talk about spear elementalist!

Spear ele follows a pretty same-y rotation between all the attunements across all elite specs. 5 - 2 - 4 - 3 - 5, the only difference being weaver which can either use the dual skill to double attune to their new element immediately, or as fodder for charging up a glyph. Tempest likes spear becasue it's a new power weapon for the already kind of busted power tempest build, catalyst likes spear because they saw "cast things inside a circle" and said "Hang on, I already cast things inside a circle". Your 2nd skill is a small poke skill that usually you have to target, your 3rd skill is an instant cast buff that has a small immediate effect and empowers your next spear attack*, your 4th skill is a targeted skill that does an extra effect if you hit with the very center of it. Your 5th skill puts down a large magic circle that gives you access to a new spell, but you can cast 3 things inside (other weapon skills, utilities, auto-attacks, hell even swapping attunements counts if you play weaver), and then you get a more powerful version of that skill. With this weapon it is important to keep your distance from your enemies if possible, and to poke them down from range.

*except water 3, which sends you careening towards wherever you misplaced your mouse cursor

Anyways! That's it for my "small" elementalist guide! Please let me know if there is anything I missed, or if you have any questions! Get out there and have fun being the master of the elements you were destined to be! Just remember to have fun and take breaks if you need to, and to not try and learn the entire spec all at once. I have been playing this class for years and there is STILL new stuff that I am learning. Just take your time and read your skills, and have fun!

#gw2 #guild wars 2 #guild wars 2 elementalist #this is great #it might make me play my elementalist that hasnt been touched since before HoT came out again #im also a bit mad that elementalist gets all those extra skills and thief still only have 2 off hand weapons #thief and elementalist share the lowest base health pool #downstate rotation siblings

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