Guild Wars 2 Open Beta - Elementalist Air Attunement

Air Attunement

  I was skeptical of the Air attunement at first but it ended up being the main attunement of the best beta PvP build I could come up with.  I used Scepter/Dagger.

Build

  The movement speed passives you get by remaining in Air attunement are really useful for positioning and getting around the maps in PvP.  Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave combined with Lightning Strike make for a nice burst of initial damage, and the blindness caused by Elemental Surge buy you some downtime while your next burst charges up.  Ride the lightning compliments your movement speed, so you can position and going in in a very calculated way.  For survivability and escapes you have Updraft which is kind of the GTFO move that knocks enemies away, and of course Mist Form for brief invulnerability.

  This build involves essentially no twisting between attunements, which means it shouldn't be optimal for an Elementalist.  Optimal for an Elementalist ought to entail utilizing multiple attunements to utilize the right tool at the right time... but I had the most success in PvP with this strict Air build.

  The thing that makes me apprehensive about whether this attunement will be viable once the class is reworked is that most of the abilities using most of the weapons don't have much utility attached to them.  With Fire you've got burning that gets applied... with Water you've got slows/heals (although mostly junk)... with Earth you have bleeds and some survivability (although not much) but with Air you've got nothing really.  It's mostly straight damage with one blind/vulnerability debuff max at a time.

  The staff gives you a nice balance of damage and control, between Chain Lightning and Lightning Surge you've got okay damage (while not as high as Fire staff, and no utility).  Between Gust and Static Field you've got some decent control, while its not a root or a polymorph its more of a shove.  Windborne Speed isn't really that impressive of an escape, but its nice to have something to remove impairments.

  When using dagger main hand I can't quite buy into the philosophy behind abilities like Shocking Aura (when you're hit the enemy is stunned).  As a squishy Elementalist I don't want to get hit.  I don't want to be in a situation where I have to rely on taking 4-6k damage to inflict a 1 second stun.  It's not cost effective.  I'm also not on-board with the philosophy behind abilities like Lightning Whip, which is a melee range weapon.  It's pretty simple math to figure out if you're in melee range swapping hits with someone smacking you for 3k and you're only hitting them for 300, you're going to die pretty fast.

  So what does this attunement have to offer a twisting Elementalist build?  Single target burst?  The beta honestly confused me more than anything with these abilities, but I guess you can't exactly get a good grasp on these things in just a few days.

Guild Wars 2 Open Beta - Elementalist Earth Attunement

Earth Attunement

  I had high hopes for this attunement.  It became apparent in the open beta that stacking bleeds was a very good way to do a lot of damage over time.  Commonly when getting killed you would review where the source of most of the damage came from, and often Bleeds would be the highest damage incoming.  The earth attunement has some ways to apply bleeds but what I was hoping for with this attunement was some substantial  survivability.  I mean if we loosely equate attunement to profiles, fire would be your sustain damage profile, water would be your control and healing profile, air is your burst profile, and earth should be a survivability profile... but there isn't a whole lot of uniqueness in Earth right now.  If the concept of the Elementalist is going to be a "twisting" mechanic between attunements to maximize the effectiveness, its important that these attunements bring something useful to the table.  At this time I don't see "a complete package" using any given weapon set among all attunements. (of course its just beta).

  This attunement was the biggest pain to level because it seemed like it was the least useful, most confused, and least thought out.  Stacking bleeds is nice, but survivability has to be there for an Elementalist to bleed an opponent to death.  The closest you get to some good defense is scepter/focus, where you get a little armor from Rock Barrier, and an "oh shit" button in Obsidian Flesh.  The real question is, if Earth attunement is going to be the survivability mode (bear form!) then your other attunements have to not be shit when you're using scepter/focus.

Fire = Scepter isn't bad, Focus isn't optimal.
Water = You get a decent slow/stun combo with Focus, but a weak heal and other throw away abilities with Scepter
Air = Lightning strike is an okay nuke from scepter, and gale isn't bad utility

  So overall the options for Scepter/Focus are "meh."

  Dust Devil (earth) and Blinding Flash (Air) are basically duplicates.
Magnetic Wave (earth) and Swirling Wind (Air) are also redundant.
You probably won't be using Gale when you have Freezing Gust/Comet combo.

  Maybe in situations where you need to mitigate a lot of projectile damage and make your opponent miss the next attack it might be a perfect spec... but you're still left with a junk heal in water...but decent damage in fire.

  Overall I'm not seeing the internal consistency in this class yet.  Maybe next beta weekend Elementalist will get a tweak or maybe I'll see more as I'm playing.

Guild Wars 2 Open Beta - Elementalist Water Attunement

Water Attunement

  The water attunement was really clutch in some of the more difficult story line quests where I had to help a caravan survive or kit 6-7 NPCs around and do damage while healing myself.  Using a Staff with Frozen Ground (ground targeted slow) and Ice Spike (ground targeted delayed aoe) you can deal some consistent damage.  It doesn't offer nearly the damage output that fire does, and isn't particularly bursty.  It gets the job done if you can't kill them faster than they can kill you.  Geyser and Healing Rain are the two healing abilities you get with a staff.  These are great for, again, healing a caravan of NPCs (or group of players).  They're also good for healing yourself as you're kiting NPCs and maybe took a few shots.

  For close quarters slow-based "ice" kiting, dagger/focus is pretty effective.  You get basically a "frost nova" (wow reference) with Frozen Burst except targets you hit are slowed instead of frozen in place.  You can combine that with Freezing Gust to keep an opponent slowed for quite some time.  Using Comet you can follow up those slows with a stun.  To me I felt like this build had the most utility of any setup, because you can also heal allies and damage enemies with cone of cold (frontal cone aoe).  The main auto-attack in this setup applies vulnerability for 6 seconds, which lowers the defense of enemies by 30.  I didn't feel like 30 was enough to really make an impact, this build is all about control.

  Dagger/Dagger gives you a small heal that removes a condition but you have to sacrifice a stun, and a ranged slow vs. a "frost shield" that slows enemies when you get hit.  Dagger in offhand just loses to focus in this attunement.

  Scepter main hand was disappointing.  You get shatterstone with is a lot like Dragon's Tooth but instead of applying a slow it applies vulnerability (only -30 defense).  This really is a drop in the bucket when you consider I had over 800 defense as a squishy Elementalist.  The damage/healing hybrid ability Water Trident functions like most hybrid abilities in that it fails to make a significant impact one way or the other.  It does weak damage and weak healing, and being on a 20 second cooldown it's just not much use.  Ice Shards is the auto attack for Scepter, and it's fairly plain... doesn't apply any kind of effect and does very meager damage.

  I found myself often lost when I was looking through these attunement because I think most of them, like this one are suffering an identity crisis.  Most of these are probably place-holder skills for useful things later... but right now it looks like they're just there to fill a slot because some ability designer ran out of ideas.  If this attunement is supposed to be the "I'm gonna do some control and support with heals" attunement then you can't leave skills like Ice Shards with no kind of effect... and you can't give Water Trident and Cleansing Wave with weak output.  Cleansing Wave should remove all debuffs, not just a single condition.  With a 40 second cooldown and the amount of conditions being thrown around constantly its not unreasonable for this to cure all conditions on nearby allies... I mean with as much spam that's going on those conditions are going to be replaced just as quickly anyway.

Staff = No slows, AoE Healing, Weak Damage
Dagger/Dagger = Debuffs, Slows, Close Quarters, Weak Heal, Weak Cleanse
Dagger/Focus = Debuffs, Slows, No healing, You get an AoE stun
Scepter/Dagger = Weak auto with no debuff, slow ground target aoe (easily avoidable), weak healing
Scepter/Focus = Same shit as with Scepter but you get the nice AoE stun and a slow.

Guild Wars 2 Open Beta - Elementalist Fire Attunement

Fire Attunement

  The fire attunement used with a staff gives a lot of AoE that makes leveling a breeze.  You can take out pretty much anything with AoE.  The NPC's aren't that smart so you can basically kite them in a small circle without too much trouble, throwing AoE down for them to stupidly walk through.  They walk right through your path of fire when you use burning retreat also.  With Meteor Shower and Lava Font and Burning Retreat you can clear 5-6+ NPCs solo without much trouble (taking damage only from ranged archers and casters).

  Using scepter/dagger was just as effective with Dragon's Tooth (targeted delayed aoe), Phoenix (linear aoe + burst), and Fire Grab (frontal cone aoe).  The only real difference is that when you're using a staff you can be farther away, which I prefer only because of the "oh shit" situations where things don't go as planned.  Scepter/Dagger and Dagger/Dagger or Dagger/Focus or Scepter/Focus don't give you the elbow room in some situations.

  The main mechanic in the Fire Attunement is a condition called burning.  Burning isn't quite as good as Bleeding because Bleeding can stack on top of itself.  Burning stacks in duration.  This makes sustain important in a PvP situation where you're utilizing burning as a source of damage because you have to be able to outlast while your opponent slowly dies.  This is much more effective of a condition to rely on for Guardians than for the Elementalist.

  Balancing this is going to be tricky because as is, fire isn't bursty enough in my opinion.  The attunement with the most burst potential is Air/Arcane with Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave in your 678 slots.  If fire is going to represent the "consistent sustained damage" attunement it needs some kind of utility, preferably a stun of some kind.  If fire is going to represent the "own your face with an explosion" attunement it needs its damaged buffed.

  Abilities like Fire Shield should mitigate some damage, or at least return as much damage as the caster takes to add some survivability.  Taking 300 burning damage when you have 20k hp isn't a sufficient deterrent to stop those melee rangers from smacking you in the face for 6k.  (Rangers wielding two handed melee weapons were extremely overpowered in the open beta).

Staff = Ground targeted AoE, no real nukes aside from Meteor Shower (which isn't guaranteed hits)
Dagger/Dagger = Close quarters frontal cone aoe, no stuns, very vulnerable, leap, Dragon's Claw does not apply burning.
Dagger/Focus = Close quarters frontal cone aoe, hard to place flamewall (easy to avoid), fire shield that does very little damage and adds no EHP.
Scepter/Dagger = Contradiction between distance casting (scepter) and close quarters burst (Fire Grab).  It's easy to apply burning, but to take advantage of the burst in Fire Grab you've got to put yourself in a bad position.
Scepter/Focus = Again, Flamewall and Fire shield are junk, but the first three abilities from Scepter are good.