Earth Elementalist

I'm thinking of playing an Earth Elementalist in the up-coming beta. I was wondering if anyone who has experience with this specialization could give their feedback. I have a few questions:

1. Have you seen 'stone daggers', that looks like a basic, staple
skill (like flare) and I'd expect it to be in Ascelon City, but it is not.
For example, the ice elementals have low-level ice spells, but
the equivalent stone elementals are lacking the equivalent.

2. Eruption looks interesting (available at Lion's Arch) since it
blinds after 5 seconds. How big is the area of effect? In pratice
is it useful... it is costly.

3. Ward against Melee is useful? I guess it would only apply to
attacking warriors and not to a Ranger's bow or Elementalist
spell/wand.

4. Armour of Earth looks very nice. In pratice how useful is it?

Any other suggestions? It looks like one would have to play a Fire elementalist to Lion's Arch before you could switch specializations, is this true?

Stone Daggers is only available via gambling in Lion's Arch. This is rather inconvenient as Stone Daggers is a skill that is only useful at low levels - once you hit level 20 it's just a gigantic waste of energy. So by the time you can get the skill, it's useless. Of course, at the same time this is a minor blessing, as Earth Elementalists are not taught bad habits from a young age.


Interesting is a good way to put it. In practice it's a PvE filler skill - the damage is pretty blah and the energy cost is crazy for the effect, but monsters will stand in it and there aren't a lot of better options around, so what can you do? So grab it for your PvE skill bar, sigh, and never look back.


Certainly - the Wards are one of the biggest selling points of Earth for PvE. Drop a melee / elemental Ward as dictated by the situation to handle the defense of all of your ranged attackers for the critical parts of a battle.


How bad does the slowdown affect you? If you're a ranged attacker and don't want to run, the skill is outstanding. If you're going to tank in melee and drop PBAoEs on people, then it's great. If you're in PvP and have to run after people, you're going to hate it. Personally, I say it's the most solid skill in the line and you should be using it unless you have a very good reason not to.


You pretty much have to play a Fire Elementalist throughout Old Ascalon, and you have a choice of Fire and Air until you get to Lion's Arch. What you get at Lion's Arch is access to charms and necklaces, which should give you the skills you need to play one of the other two professions while you hunt down the specialized trainers, or pharm the gold to gamble critical skills. Perhaps the best idea is to buy the necklaces and charms with another character, and have a friend mule them over to your low level character in Ascalon City.

Earth is primarily a defensive line, with a few very good nukes - so you'll be able to toss in a couple of solid hits but you aren't going to be able to chain cast damage very effectively. In PvE you want to focus on AoEs - Earthquake is the best area of effect nuke in the game, Eruption is servicable but not exactly good, and Aftershock is a decent PBAoE if you can set it up right. Besides those, though, concentrate on the defensive skills in the line and use your secondary.

In PvP, Earthquake is still good, but the real money is in Obsidian Flame - the permiere one hit kill skill available. Just be careful not to destroy yourself with exhaustion. Stoning is pretty bad but you can use it if you really need another nuke, but generally it's like Stone Daggers - a big waste of energy.

Earth is the deepest Elementalist line, but also the one with the least inherent synergy. The best Earth Elementalists are going to lean heavily upon their secondaries, so keep that in mind when designing your character.

Peace,
-CxE