GW2. How To Fight Elementalist. How To Beat Elementalist. Class Mechanics. Matchup Guide. Elementalist Tempest Weaver Catalyst. Guild Wars 2 PvP.

Your ability to adapt to situations in PvP is tied to your knowledge of your class and the classes you will be facing. This is a basic guide to understanding Elementalists in PvP so that you can figure out how to fight them without learning to play the Elementalist class entirely.

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Mechanics

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Elementalists have access to four sets of weapon skills for each weapon. These are tied to each elemental Attunement:

Fire – Water – Air – Earth

When entering an attunement, there is a decent cooldown before they can reenter the previous attunement again. This means that keeping track of which attunements they are in can tell you what skills they can use and which skills they can’t use.

Fire Attunement offers only damage. While in this attunement they can be dangerous but also very vulnerable.

Air Attunement offers crowd control, mobility, and burst damage. While they are in this attunement they may be looking to start a combo.

Water Attunement offers healing, cleansing, and chills. While in this attunement they have very little counter pressure and will be able to regain their health.

Earth Attunement offers crowd control and defensive abilities. While in this attunement they will be harder to focus and be able to set up a combo.

Using this information, how you should play against an Elementalist depends on which attunement they are in which can be seen by the buff bar. Here are some general tips:

• Avoid placing conditions on Elementalists until after they leave Water attunement
• Wait until an Elementalist has left the Earth attunement to use burst damage on them
• Save your dodges and defensive cooldowns for when they are in the Fire and Air attunements
• Play aggressively when they are in Fire and Water attunement
• Avoid using skills that are easily interrupted when they are in Air and Earth attunement

Elementalists also have a large number of skills to use, so they will often constantly rotate through many skills because they generally do not run out of cooldowns. For this reason, the conditions Chill and Confusion are extremely potent against them.

Chill increases their cooldowns which can disrupt the flow of their rotations because the attunement swap cooldown is also affected by this. They will get trapped in an attunement for longer with no skills to use, or the actual weapon skills will still be on cooldown from the last time they swapped into that attunement.

Confusion punishes them for each skill they cast, meaning they need to pick and choose which skills to use, and even swapping attunement counts as a skill that will trigger confusion damage.

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Downed State

If you manage to get an enemy Elementalist into the downed state, disposing of them involves handling a few skills:

Mist Form: They can become invulnerable and regain the ability to move to reposition for a few seconds. Conditions applied to them will stick and therefore Immobilize cast on them before they mist form will prevent them from repositioning. Put damage into a squishy Elementalist’s downed state and only stomp them if they have already used mist form.

Single Targeted Immobilize – After 8 seconds they can channel an immobilize on one player for a few seconds. This can become dangerous if you are handling other threats at the same time. Line of sight when this becomes available or evade/block while the channel happens.

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Traits

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While you can learn how to play against meta builds, not everyone plays the same builds and some variations of Elementalist may differ from one another. Understanding their traits and how they synergize with their class can help you to fight them.

Most Elementalists run the Arcane trait line to reduce attunement cooldowns and to give them extra boons, which further emphasizes playing around which attunement they are in.

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The elite specializations Elementalists can play offer new mechanics to play around.

Tempest

Tempests generally support their allies. They can also Overload any of their attunements to invest in a more powerful spell in that attunement as well as break stuns at the beginning of the cast. This overload becomes available to that attunement five seconds after swapping the attunement. Therefore. you know that they won’t be able to use their overload to stun break right after they swapped attunements. The best time to CC a tempest is right after they swap if you intend to lock them down and finish them. If you don’t want to lock them down but disrupt their powerful overloads, then save your CC to interrupt the overload which will prevent the powerful effect that occurs when they complete the 4-second cast.

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Weaver

Weavers gain access to many more skills per weapon due to the Dual Attacks that they gain depending on the order in which they weave in and out of their attunements. They can be in two attunements at the same time, and their attunement swap cooldown is reduced but applied to every attunement. This means they will generally swap attunements every 4 seconds. Prefer burst damage over sustained pressure because they generate small amounts of barrier over time.

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Catalyst

Combo Fields are improved and more readily available as Catalysts can create them with their Jade Sphere. Although these combo fields may not do much damage, Blinds and Aegis are not as effective against catalysts due to the constant pulsing damage of the Jade Spheres. Lure them out of their combo fields to avoid giving them extra synergy from the combos. They have superior boon application, so corruption and boon removal may be effective.

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Matchups

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There is always a potential to beat an enemy either by rotating into better fights or outplaying their mechanics, but these are the main dynamics of how specific classes interact with Elementalists:

Elementalist Counters

Guardian

• Elementalists thrive in sustained fights that guardians create
• Guardians do not lock down enemies efficiently enough to control Elementalists
• Elementalists handle Aegis well with their many different skills

Ranger

• Elementalists often have projectile counters
• Ranger pets can be killed without Elementalists running out of cooldowns
• Elementalists have more sustain than rangers

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Situational Dangers

Warrior

• Warriors have plenty of CC and burst which can overwhelm an Elementalist in a 1v1
• Elementalists have more sustain than warriors in a 1v1
• Elementalists that beat warriors in 1v1 often are less useful in team fights

Thief

• Thieves can burst Elementalists before they can benefit from their sustain
• Elementalists have plenty of incidental damage to pressure thieves even when they aren’t focusing on it
• Elementalists do not like outnumbered situations that thieves like to create, but this requires more of the thief’s time to manage

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Counters Elementalist

Necromancer

• Necromancers have plenty of chills to counter Elementalists
• Necromancers can corrupt the boons Elementalists need for survivability
• Elementalists can’t handle the overwhelming pressure of a necromancer

Mesmer

• Elementalists may not survive the mesmer burst to get to their sustain
• Condition Mesmers have plenty of confusion which counters Elementalists
• The synergy and rotation of Elementalists get disrupted by Mesmers

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Animations

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NOTE: If you want to know the currently updated builds that people may be playing check out the PvP Builds, and WvW Builds.

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