Lightning Rod core elementalist Guild Wars 2 PvP Guide
Build overview
The Lightning Rod Core Elementalist looks to isolate single targets and burst them down with incredible crowd control and overwhelming burst damage.
Your targets for this build are isolated enemies or side node duels to contest. Many players bring 1/2 stun breaks while the lightning rod elementalist has 3-4 controlling effects! Meaning that the more you are focusing on a single target the more damage you will be pumping! Let's look at the weapons!
Weapons
The Lightning Rod Elementalist utilizes the double daggers as a weapon choice. This offers strong mobility and excellent burst damage through air and fire. Not to mention great sustained damage through all of the attunements.
The daggers require you to be incredibly close to targets so keep this in mind that if enemies can outrange you, you’ll have a tough time.
Skills
The skills for the Lightning Rod Elementalist focus on improving overall mobility and sustain of the build.
Signet of Restoration gives you health back each time that you utilize any skill. This skill can still be benefited by casting even if there’s nothing to hit as its on cast, not on hit! Because we are utilizing the Written in Stone grandmaster trait in the Earth Traitline, we have 100% uptime on all our signets as well!
Signet of Air is by far your best stun break as well as free 25%. This ability is mainly used when you are in a pinch and need to escape while also giving a sweet sweet blind!
Armor of Earth is our main defensive as this applies significant stability, protection, and of course acts as a stun break. This should be used in the midst of a fight to guarantee you don’t lose control and have the damage reduction to survive.
Lightning Flash is in my opinion the best mobility skill for the Elementalist. Not only does it cover a good distance, it also can be used in the middle of your animations, or even while you are crowd controlled! Use this traverse terrain and move out of harms way!
Tornado can be used in a number of ways. The main benefit is of course the crowd control effects that can be used in a teamfight or even in a 1v1! Any crowd control will apply extra damage with lightning rod making it super strong to remove targets from nodes or upset a teamfight!
Traitlines
For this build we run air, earth, and arcane. The air traitline focuses on giving us significantly more spike damage inside the air attunement but more specifically, the Lightning Rod ability which deals some great free damage and then applies weakness to the target when they are crowd controlled. Luckily the air attunment has an on demand Shocking Aura that stuns when you are struck as well as Updraft that knocks back foes that are caught within the circle. Not to mention the earth offhand dagger ability Earthquake knocks down foes!
The Earth traitline looks to keep protection uptime for your own survival as well as reducing any type of movement slowing abilities. The major skill being Written in Stone offers the best ability that allows us to upkeep our signet passive abilities while allowing us to use the active! This plays a major factor when you are sustaining hp and then need to use your heal to stay alive!
The Arcane traitline looks to improve overall sustain, while giving you some serious boon uptime. The Grandmaster trait Evasive Arcana gives you sweet bonus effects when you dodge roll in combat. When you are in water you get some condition cleansing, while it air you blind foes at the end which helps you get some fantastic 1v1 capabilities.
Amulet, Runes, and Sigils
For this build we look to have a more defensive set up. Marauders allows us to have good damage and crits while giving us hp that we so desperately need.
Rune of Earth increases our protection uptime while also giving us some serious extra healing. Remember in the Arcane traitline we are running Arcane Restoration which helps us out immensely with passive healing as we swap attunments while Signet of Restoration gives us extra healing each cast we make so our healing is significant passively.
For this build our standard Sigil of Cleansing and Sigil of Energy give us excellent sustain which of course is the strong suit of the elementalist. Cleansing more importantly is only really offered here, in our water attunments, or from Evasive Arcana in water attunement so we are somewhat limited.
Build Playstyle
So the general thought of any Lightning Rod Elementalist is to overwhelm targets with incredible damage and crowd control from a number of sources. Between the protection uptime and passive healing it makes for a bear to deal with as enemies attempt to engage you.
This build starts to lack a bit more when you are engaging multiple condition heavy enemies as the cleansing on this build is not fantastic so be wary about trying to 1v1 these types of foes.
You should be attempting to fight on side nodes or enter in team fights at the right moment to decimate an enemy before charging out of harms way. If you synchronize well with your teams crowd control you can completely lock out an enemy with all the control you bring to the table!
