Build Suggestions?

You're a level 3, and you want help with a build? O.o

When your character is that young you really should be experimenting for yourself.

As far as Energy Management goes, yes, this is very important. The most used energy management skills would be:

[skill]Fire Attunement[/skill] and [skill]Glyph of Lesser Energy[/skill]

or, when you can gain the elite:

[skill]Elemental Attunement[/skill] and [skill]Fire Attunement[/skill]

The latter gives you 80% of the energy cost of the skill back and is really excellent energy management, however, you do lose an elite slot. There are other forms of energy management, but the two given above tend to be the most used.

Remember, an Elementalist who spams "My energy is 2 of 104!" in missions is a BAD Ele.

I'm not going to tell you what skills to use at this stage, because I believe you really should experiment when you're this young, but in order for others to help you you should tell us which campaign you have started in, as the starter skills for each continent tend to be a little different.

Personally I think [skill]Glyph of Energy[/skill] and [skill]Fire Attunement[/skill] is the best combo for a Fire Ele especially if they are playing as a Nuker.

I've not played much with Glyph of Energy, though I may do now it's buffed. I don't like taking elite energy management skills much, I generally rather use good olf GoLE and Attunement and take a more fun elite.

Also Glyph of Energy is a pain to get hold of.

I've... played around with Glyph of Energy since the buff.

It's... pretty useless for Air eles.
Ok with Earth... but Unsteady Ground is still better. It helps if you like spamming Earthquakes.
Decent enough with Fire, but Mind Blast blows it out the water for energy management; the only skill that really shines with GoE is Rodgort's... Which already syncs well enough on a Mind Blaster.
It's bearable with Water, if you just wanna lay down Deep Freeze as much as possible; but without Shatterstone or Trident, the build as a whole still feels kinda weak.

Glyph of Energy only works well with Earthquake and Obs flame and earth builds, there are what... 3 fire skills that cause exhaustion? 1 being terrible (Mind Burn), the other kind of meh (Meteor) and the third meteor shower, which is manageable without the glyph.

The fire elites from Nightfall are too good to pass up (if you have nightfall), if you just have Prophecies / Factions, the elite on a fire ele you probably want is [skill]Elemental Attunement[/skill], combined with [skill]Fire Attunement[/skill], then use [skill]Rodgort's Invocation[/skill] (this skill is essentially the best non elite fire skill around) - you have unlimited energy essentially and be able to spam it all day doing a lot of damage.

The Mind skills aren't awfully terrible now. There are worse.

Question asked before, but...what chapters do you have?

Quote:

Mind freeze and Mind Shock were never terrible, they were always ok skills. Mind burn has always been incredibly crappy, though. Glyph of energy is essentially the elite obsidian flame, since that's the only spell worth using it on most of the time. It does have some use, however, in an area with obscene enchant stripping where your attunement will get fried in a few seconds.

To the OP: Play around with skills until you hit level 20, then start worrying about tuning your builds. In Guild Wars, you can change your build as often as you like, take advantage of that. The levels from 1-20 are a great chance to figure out how game mechanics work, and if you're still having trouble when you hit 20, post the build you're running at the time, and we'll be more than happy to tear it to pieces .

That is all really helpful. Thank you.

I wasn't aware how much freedom you have with skills throughout the game. (Former Diablo II player right here) I was under the impression that you may need to plan ahead and really gear your character in a certain way from day 1 in order to be successful. I'm very pleased to hear that that is in fact not the case. One of the things I hated about Diablo II was the type of structure that was forced upon you and required you to dedicate yourself to one style of play throughout the game.