Elementalist Guide!

[#Triplex]

~All credits goes to Kendar Muert of guildwars guru for this guide!


All right- The elementalist. Where to begin… I will lay out everything with large headings, so you can easily find whatever it is you need.

Tanking in this guide, when used, means holding the aggro, and Tank, when used, means the guy who is doing it; and also happens to be a warrior or dervish.
ELEMENTALIST ATTRIBUTES-

AIR- No inherent effect. Many Elementalist skills, especially spells which deal lightning damage to and debilitate a single enemy, become more effective with higher Air Magic.

Air has no special bonus like energy storage does, however, it specializes in something very important- all out onslaught. IF you want to cripple an opponents team, air is not way to go- however, if you want to completely obliterate them, it most definitely is. Air has something called armor penetration in many of its skills, which means that if an enemy has 80 armor level, and you hit him with say, Lightning Orb, his armor will be 15% less effective. The amount of armor penetration is listed in all the titles of skills in the air attribute. Air can also blind, with blinding flash, or surge, or it can knock down, with skills like lightning surge, gale, and whirlwind. The one main problem with the air line used to be is that many of its better skills caused exhaustion. Not anymore- that has been fixed in some fairly recent buffs to the air line around the time of EOTN release.


EARTH- No inherent effect. Many Elementalist skills, especially spells which protect you or your allies or deal earth damage, become more effective with higher Earth Magic.

Earth has some large damage dealing skills, but they all cost too much for the earth line to be as viable as a nuker as the fire line, which is what most groups look for in an elementalist in PvE, although wards, shutdown, and spiking are all popular. Nuking with the earth line can be done however- Combinations such as Earthquake and Unsteady Ground are fairly common, but require good energy storage. Earth’s specialty though, is defense- earth packs tons of skills called wards, which reduce enemy elemental damage, physical damage, prevent knockdown, and bestow other, similar benefits. If you find, for some reason, that you need to have more armor against attack, or perhaps block any spell cast at you altogether, Earth is your line. Obsidian Flesh can prevent all spells from targeting you for a certain period of time, as well as add armor to you, so you don’t take as much damage from physical attacks. If you find you are being crowded in by melee attackers in the area you are at, you can take a skill like aftershock or splinter armor to cause them some damage or block attacks, and perhaps pull out a victory over your opponent. A good earth mage can also take out single targets with combos like the Ebon Hawk, Stoning combination.


FIRE- No inherent effect. Many Elementalist skills, especially spells that burn your foes or deal fire damage in large areas, become more effective with higher Fire Magic.

Fire is also a very good line, but it has far less versatility than the other three. With Air, Earth, and Water, you can have some armor skills, or a skill that allows you to disable an opponent while you run away- not so with the Fire line. The Elementalist’s fire line is focused solely on doing damage to your opponent. You will not find any party buffs, kiting skills, or heavy suppression skills in the Fire line. Instead, you will find skills like Meteor Shower, which can simultaneously knock down a target and hit him for 100+ damage, or immolate, which, while expensive seeming for its effect, is a very good skill for finishing people off with a small blast of damage and a short burn. You will also find skills like Fireball or Liquid Flame, which can target one person or a group, as you choose. If someone decides to harass a skilled fire mage, you should be aware that they will more than likely prevail if you brought only nuking skills. While Searing Heat, Rodgorts Invocation, and Meteor Shower are all good skills in the right context, they will not deter a warrior who is intent on hacking you to death, or a Mesmer who wishes to spike you to hell and back. In order to prevail against these kind of threats, a fire mage should always bring one or two single target fire spells, or, depending on whether you need a rez or not, your teams needs, and your personal taste, Flame Djinns Haste, which
Is a very versatile skill that will blast enemies for a sizeable amount of damage, and give you a speed boost to get away. The one major drawback to fire is that it has long casting times on many of the skills, which help keep defense difficult. You also can very easily scatter aggro with the fire line in PvE, so you should be careful.


WATER- Allocate points to Water Magic to increase the duration and effectiveness of your water skills, which slow enemy movement.

Water is probably my favorite line, although I do not find a use for it very often. There are large spike skills, such as Shatterstone or Vapor Blade, which can correlate to the fire skills Mind Burn and Liquid Flame, respectively. Water has some very good defensive skills, such as the elite Mist Form, which makes it so that you do not take or deal any physical damage in melee for a bit(they cant hurt you with a weapon, and you can’t wand). While this may sound like a detriment, the damage done by your spells far outweighs anything lost by not wanding someone to death- you spend most of your time casting anyway. The water line also has some nice AoE spells, such as Deep Freeze or Maelstrom, and some very good shutdown skills, such as (again) Deep Freeze or Blurred Vision. Deep Freeze is a versatile skill, since it can provide damage and slow people down- there are many skills like that in the water line.


Energy Storage- Energy Storage increases your hero’s maximum Energy, and improves skills that help you regenerate Energy.

I saved energy storage for last, because I believe it to be the MOST important thing to know about elementalists- how to properly manage your energy so that you will never find yourself out of a job.

An Elementalist has the most versatile abilities in the whole game- they can defend, they can attack, and they can shut down. They can do all of these well, if the player who plays can do them well. However, all that high damage, the ability to make your team nigh impervious to damage coming towards you, the ability to turn yourself into a living rock, or a fluid master of ice that can freeze opponents and leave them there while you run on to your next goal- all that ability comes with a very high price. That price is exacted on your energy bar. Many people make the mistake of thinking that because elementalists have such high energy, they do not need to be careful with it. That is foolish and wrong, because while the elementalist may have a very large reservoir of energy, they also have the MOST high cost skills in the entire game. If, say, a monk or a Mesmer tries to pull off an elementalist combo without abnormal energy management for that class, they would quickly find themselves without any energy to speak of. The reason the elementalist has the high energy, is because crosses with the elementalist class would be far too powerful if done often, so the energy cost of all the good spells is high. Because of that, elementalists need higher than normal energy bars; as you can see, because of the proportions, energy management is all the more necessary.

Dual attunement- Dual attunement is one popular form of energy management, which involves casting Elemental Attunement and the Attunement of your chosen attribute on yourself simultaneously. This, while giving you nearly unlimited energy, has one monumental flaw- you are depending on enchantments. In PvE, the majority of the time this is no problem. However, in PvP, you will almost always be stripped, and left defenseless. This is not to say enchantments do not work- they work wonderfully, and can be indefinitely maintained. However, you must keep in mind that if you use enchantments, you can be incapacitated.

Glyph of Lesser Energy- many elementalists choose to use the Glyph of Lesser Energy as a primary energy management- that Is no problem, and works well. The only issue is that since it is a glyph, you cannot use it constantly, so take another form of energy management as well.

Other management- There are really too many to list other than these two, which are the most common. Many elementalists in the fire line enjoy skills like mind blast and glowing gaze, which give back the energy required for the spell to be cast and normally that much or more again. There are also elementalists who enjoy using Mesmer energy management, such as Ether Signet, to keep energy flow up and available.


BASIC STRATEGIES-

I will not get into a whole lot of strategies, since there are plenty of guides on aggro, and team mechanics for PvE and PvP. There is one very important thing to understand though, and that is how the AI of npcs reacts to AoE spells, whether in PvE or PvP.

An elementalist creates what could be called a damage vortex, and if you concentrate many spells in one spot, anyone or anything that steps there has the potential to be killed. ANET, because the game would be hardly challenging, and barely fun, if you could do that easily, gave the AI the ability to recognize when someone does that. Normally, when you create a damage vortex, the AI will do one of two things- run away, heal, and come back, with all your spells spent, or rush straight towards you, with all your spells spent. At this point, your teammates will be about ready to strangle you to death, so it is best to not let that happen. What an elementalist should do, is follow the crappy diagram below. The O is your AoE, the * is the enemy, and the T is the tank. The ... are placeholders so the diagram looks right.
...O
O**O
...T
The tank is holding aggro, and if you hit the enemy dead on, they will break. So what you should do, is create an AoE circle, which will box them in, keep them focused on the tank, and do damage. If not using a tank, then you do the same thing, just around the melee character who happens to be taking aggro.

The other basic idea an elementalist should get used to, is scatter. This is when there is so much damage at one time, the AI all run around and, well, scatter. If this happens, you should only target groups of two or more that have scattered, since you want to get as much out of your skills as possible.
If there are no little groups, target the casters, since you are long range, and the tank can easily chase down any melee- they will most likely come to him.


An elementalist has very little armor compared to other classes, long cast times, and the wand or staff you carry generally sucks at damage dealing. A monk cannot deal damage in most occasions- they are too busy saving your ass. A Ranger generally can do about as much damage as an ele to a single target, or do widespread damage to mobs, but those things, as an ele, are mainly your job. The ranger or paragon are generally there to shut down casters. Dervishes and Warriors act as all out damage output on the front lines, keeping any enemies off of your back, and a Mesmer is there to basically kill or shut down anything that is important to destroy, or that cannot, for some reason, be taken care of by anyone else. All classes have a specialty, and some can cross class to help out, but none can match you, the elementalist, for sheer damage output.

If you as an ele come under fire, know that you will shortly die, unless they don’t have strips and you have Aura with high energy storage, or some other self heal that most elementalists don’t use in PvE. An elementalist is what is called a glass cannon- We do a ton of damage, but take a ton ourselves. Because of all of this, your primary objective is Self Preservation. A good and skilled elementalist can keep himself alive and take out entire mobs by his or herself, using scatter from aoe to their advantage in keeping the majority of foes off their back until they can kill them.

However, you must realize that in many areas, you will not be able to do this because of strips and interrupts. This means that you should protect your teammates, if you can. If you see something rushing at the monk, divert it to you, or aoe it once it gets to the monk. All the damage hitting the monsters in the frontlines doesn’t count for jack if your monk gets wiped by a rogue Charr or something, because then YOU have no heal except for what you brought on your bar, which won’t be much, and whatever another support class may have brought- generally enough to suspend death until a monk can get to you, but not keep you from hitting the dirt if half a mob decides the mage looks tasty.

All of this put together comes to two main points-

1. Keep the hell out of the way, in the backlines. There is something called chain aggro, which means that if someone aggroes something, and someone else is in that person’s aggro bubble, the aggroed creature will go for the one with the least health or armor, forming a “chain”. Guess what? That’d be you, Mr. Squishy. So stay back, and blast what you can, when you can, without pulling the mob to the backlines. If something does come to the backlines, make it scatter, so that your backlines aren’t in danger, and regroup farther back.

2. YOU ARE NOT INVINCIBLE. Many elementalists charge to the frontlines, or decide that since they can do 150 damage + burning to several monsters in a radius every few seconds, they can take out an entire mob on their own. This is folly- you will die. If not you, then you will take the mob back to the backlines with you via chain aggro. Casters are called “squishy” for a reason, and it has nothing to do with us being cuddly. Its what happens to us after the second or so Dragon Slash or Burning Arrow. We squish, we squelch, our insides become outsides, and our outsides become insides… We get royally jacked. Now, sometimes, an especially good warrior, monk, or other guy will be so good that he almost miraculously saves your sorry ass. This is something he should not have done. If you are stupid enough to pull a mob to yourself, you deserve to stay grey.