Raids: How and Where to get started?

[asmariya.1096]

Hi everyone! I would like to begin raiding but I'm not really sure where or how I should start off. I have ascended staff and one ascended gear piece, with the rest of my gear being exotic. I also have most of my ascended accessories except they are for a build I'm not longer using (Berserker's, switched to Minstrel's recently). Is this gear enough for groups to let me in to start raiding or learning to raid, or do I need to build up more first? If I can start, which are the best raids to start off with that I may be able to actually find groups for? Thanks in advance!

[Kelieto.6375]

We're missing some info before we can help you out.Which region do you play on? NA or EU?Which professions/roles are you planning on playing? I see you have an "ascended staff" which is great but you "switched to minstrel's recently" and honestly that already sounds like bad news. Did you actually mean you switched FROM minstrel TO berserker? With more info we can help you out!

[asmariya.1096]

@"Kelieto.6375" said:We're missing some info before we can help you out.Which region do you play on? NA or EU?Which professions/roles are you planning on playing? I see you have an "ascended staff" which is great but you "switched to minstrel's recently" and honestly that already sounds like bad news. Did you actually mean you switched FROM minstrel TO berserker? With more info we can help you out!

I'm playing Staff Tempest on NA servers right now. As far as I can tell Staff Tempest with a focus on heals is the most viable build for Elementalists right now. Before I stopped playing it was focused on DPS, Berserker's, but they've been highly nerfed since then it seems. I know Weaver can be one of the best builds, but that its also really difficult. I mostly play WvW, so I switched my gear to Maklain's/Minstrel's for that. I'm really not sure what build is best for eles in raid/fractals though. From what I know, they are sometimes used as secondary healers after Druids.

[Cyninja.2954]

@asmariya.1096 said:

@"Kelieto.6375" said:We're missing some info before we can help you out.Which region do you play on? NA or EU?Which professions/roles are you planning on playing? I see you have an "ascended staff" which is great but you "switched to minstrel's recently" and honestly that already sounds like bad news. Did you actually mean you switched FROM minstrel TO berserker? With more info we can help you out!

I'm playing Staff Tempest on NA servers right now. As far as I can tell Staff Tempest with a focus on heals is the most viable build for Elementalists right now. Before I stopped playing it was focused on DPS, Berserker's, but they've been highly nerfed since then it seems. I know Weaver can be one of the best builds, but that its also really difficult. I mostly play WvW, so I switched my gear to Maklain's/Minstrel's for that. I'm really not sure what build is best for eles in raid/fractals though. From what I know, they are sometimes used as secondary healers after Druids.

1.) Heal tempest works in pve raids, is quite strong in pve raids, but not every group will be able to fit one. It depends on the commander and if he wants to run druid+heal tempest.

2.) Minstrel gear is an absolute no-no in pve for healer, unless you want to tank. Given you are inexperienced, it is an absolute no-no for you. If you want to play a support tempest, go for Magi or Harrier gear. Exotic is fine. Tanking on most fights which have a tank mechanic is toughness based, as such Minstrel gear would put you above what most tanks run. At the very least your commander would need to know about it and the group would have to be able to adapt to this.

3.) Power damage elementalist (either tempest or weaver, though weaver is slightly stronger) is still a strong power damage pick. You could try running a power build as dps. Some practice on the damage golem would be advisable.

4.) Exotic gear is fine for raids. Having multiple classes is better than having 1 class in full ascended. You want to be flexible.

If you want to start raiding, my advice would be to:

• join a friendly guild which does casual raids and raid training
• join one of the raid training discord servers
• join training groups in LFG

[Antycypator.9874]

1. Raiding guilds — they may look for beginers. You can find them in LFG under Raids or just ask in LA or DR.
2. Join training squads — they usualy don't require any KP or LI. If you don't know any mechanics — don't be afraid to ask to explain them.

It could be difficult to get into raids as a PUG if you don't have any experience or LI.

[Kelieto.6375]

Okay so we have a starting point for you to work from!1) First of all you need to replace as much of the minstrel gear as you can. The toughness will mess up the tanking on some bosses. You don't necessarily have to get rid of ALL of it but as much as you can will help greatly. Having less than 1.2k shouldn't be a problem but getting as close to 1k as you can is the goal.2) You need to understand that while Healing Tempest is very strong, you may encounter some people that tell you you're playing an "off meta garbage build". You can completely ignore them because sure, the build isn't meta but it's incredibly powerful in the correct situations. I myself would have no problem if someone joined my group and wanted to play the build but not everyone is like me.3) You want to ideally find a nice training static. These are surprisingly difficult to find despite the fact that there are many and I really mean many people like you who just want to get into raids. Y'all need to find each other and group up! Be on the lookout for guilds recruiting in the LFG or on the forums. You can even try the guild recruitment subreddit. I've had success finding members for my group from there before and I hope you find success too!

I have some recommendations for quick fixes for your gear:Option 1: You can buy Exotic Magi Armour for cheap from the TP. If you have a character with Level 400 tailoring, you can check to see if it's cheaper to craft any pieces yourself but I personally wouldn't bother. You can do the same for the Exotic Magi Staff. Then you can farm Ascalonian Catacombs and buy 6 x Superior Runes of the Monk. This will require 720 tokens so it will take 3 days minimum. Finally, you can pick up a Superior Sigil of Water and Superior Sigil of Transference off the TP.Option 2: Farm Ascalonian Catacombs for the armour and runes at the same time! At 1380 tokens for a full set, it will take you a minimum of 5 days to get. This is because the Exotic Magi armour you buy from the vendor automatically comes with the rune! The Exotic Magi Staff doesn't come with any useful sigils so you might as well go the TP route for that.

Now for trinkets, take a look at this for a backpack and these for amulet, rings and accessories. Yes they are only rare and yes other people will say I'm insane for recommending them but they are cheap af and readily available. Add in some cheap Magi upgrades and you'll be good enough to go. This will literally be the quickest way for you to patch up your gear issues. No toughness issues with the tank and more than adequate healing. I think you can get some Exotic trinkets from this npc too if the temple is safe!

If you don't mind taking the time to prepare more then your best bet is to farm some Living Story currencies or something and buy various ascended trinkets and pick harrier stats. You'll eventually do this anyway but if you happen to find a nice group and can't wait to get started then I definitely recommend the rare magi/exotic temple stuff as a cheap starter thing.

I'm assuming you already know the rest of the build in regards to traits and skills.

Of course, it's easy to say "join training groups" and "join this" and "join that" but the hardest part is finding a nice group you fit well into for long term raiding. Definitely go back to my point 3 above once you feel you're ready to get started! I don't play on NA so this is as much help as I can give you. Good luck!

[MoVitae.2417]

That's very thougtful and helpful advice. Thank you Kelieto.

[asmariya.1096]

@"Kelieto.6375" said:Okay so we have a starting point for you to work from!1) First of all you need to replace as much of the minstrel gear as you can. The toughness will mess up the tanking on some bosses. You don't necessarily have to get rid of ALL of it but as much as you can will help greatly. Having less than 1.2k shouldn't be a problem but getting as close to 1k as you can is the goal.2) You need to understand that while Healing Tempest is very strong, you may encounter some people that tell you you're playing an "off meta garbage build". You can completely ignore them because sure, the build isn't meta but it's incredibly powerful in the correct situations. I myself would have no problem if someone joined my group and wanted to play the build but not everyone is like me.3) You want to ideally find a nice training static. These are surprisingly difficult to find despite the fact that there are many and I really mean many people like you who just want to get into raids. Y'all need to find each other and group up! Be on the lookout for guilds recruiting in the LFG or on the forums. You can even try the guild recruitment subreddit. I've had success finding members for my group from there before and I hope you find success too!

I have some recommendations for quick fixes for your gear:Option 1: You can buy Exotic Magi Armour for cheap from the TP. If you have a character with Level 400 tailoring, you can check to see if it's cheaper to craft any pieces yourself but I personally wouldn't bother. You can do the same for the Exotic Magi Staff. Then you can farm Ascalonian Catacombs and buy 6 x Superior Runes of the Monk. This will require 720 tokens so it will take 3 days minimum. Finally, you can pick up a Superior Sigil of Water and Superior Sigil of Transference off the TP.Option 2: Farm Ascalonian Catacombs for the armour and runes at the same time! At 1380 tokens for a full set, it will take you a minimum of 5 days to get. This is because the Exotic Magi armour you buy from the vendor automatically comes with the rune! The Exotic Magi Staff doesn't come with any useful sigils so you might as well go the TP route for that.

Now for trinkets, take a look at this for a backpack and these for amulet, rings and accessories. Yes they are only rare and yes other people will say I'm insane for recommending them but they are cheap af and readily available. Add in some cheap Magi upgrades and you'll be good enough to go. This will literally be the quickest way for you to patch up your gear issues. No toughness issues with the tank and more than adequate healing. I think you can get some Exotic trinkets from this npc too if the temple is safe!

If you don't mind taking the time to prepare more then your best bet is to farm some Living Story currencies or something and buy various ascended trinkets and pick harrier stats. You'll eventually do this anyway but if you happen to find a nice group and can't wait to get started then I definitely recommend the rare magi/exotic temple stuff as a cheap starter thing.

I'm assuming you already know the rest of the build in regards to traits and skills.

Of course, it's easy to say "join training groups" and "join this" and "join that" but the hardest part is finding a nice group you fit well into for long term raiding. Definitely go back to my point 3 above once you feel you're ready to get started! I don't play on NA so this is as much help as I can give you. Good luck!

This is great advice! Thank you so much for your help! If I were to focus on a damage build, what set would be most viable for Eles atm? I have both Hot and PoF expansions.

[Sigfodr.9576]

A good site to know:https://snowcrows.com/raids/builds/elementalist/tempest/power/

also on the same site:https://snowcrows.com/raids/training/

[Kelieto.6375]

@"asmariya.1096" said:This is great advice! Thank you so much for your help! If I were to focus on a damage build, what set would be most viable for Eles atm? I have both Hot and PoF expansions.

So Weaver and Tempest are both viable but Weaver is slightly better for dps. You can copy the Power Weaver build from Snow Crows.

In my opinion, the rotation is fairly simple to learn and just requires quick fingers to execute it close to optimally so practice and muscle memory will serve you well. If you're having trouble with Conjure Weapons (because honestly picking them up from the ground is really clunky) then you can ignore them. You'll see a noticable hit to your short term burst dps but you won't see that big of a hit to your long term dps. It's important to reach 100% crit chance for the fresh air build and if you don't want to bother with min-maxing your stats then you can just go full berserker stats for everything and then swap Lightning Hammer/Arcane Blast with Signet of Fire. You'll pretty much end up wasting about 100 stat points (slightly less if you just buy exotic berserker to get started) for the simplicity of gearing up. However, if you don't have a Druid in your subgroup to give you spotter then you waste almost nothing!

I think your best bet for starting gear is full exotic berserker armour, an ascended berserker sword+dagger and ascended berserker trinkets. Superior Sigils of Force+Impact and Superior Rune of the Scholar x 6. Then using Signet of Fire to make up for missing precision. I must emphasise that this build I'm giving you is to just start you off and that if you end up getting serious about raiding in the future then you should definitely consider slowly moving towards the more meta/min-maxed builds other people have put the time in to calculate, create and test.

You can get your ascended berserker sword and dagger from the PoF Elite Spec weapon collections! Weaver/Holosmith for your sword and Spellbreaker/Soulbeast for your Dagger. If you can't select berserker stats from any of these weapons then stat changing them in the mystic forge shouldn't be too expensive for you.

Ascended berserker rings are easy af to acquire at 10 pristine fractal relics each. They are called the Red Ring of Death and the Crystalline Band. There's way too many ways to get ascended backpieces now but I think maybe getting one from Siren's Landing in LS3:E6 would be the quickest? Ascended amulet from the laurel vendor for 30 laurels or the wvw laurel vendor for 20 laurels + 250 badges of honor. Ascended accessories from the guild trader. If you don't have laurels/guild commendations readily available then you should just farm LS3 maps.

You can get exotic berserker armour from lots of different dungeons: Citadel of Flame, Crucible of Eternity and The Ruined City of Arah. However, because they don't come with useful runes this time, I recommend you just buy them from the TP unless you want to do the dungeons anyway. As you can see, this Zhed set is very cheap and costs less than 1g per piece on buy orders! If you really wanted to go even cheaper you could change the level search to 76-78 but honestly, the stat loss and savings are both negligable so I wouldn't bother. I recommend that you don't listen to anyone that tells you to buy berserker exotic armour from the orr temples. You can't salvage them and Superior Rune of the Scholar x 6 is quite pricy so you wouldn't be able to salvage and reuse them when you want to upgrade to ascended!

One thing I just realised I didn't touch on here and my previous post was consumable buffs! You can use the expensive ones Snow Crows and everyone else recommends but I'm a serious raider myself and I use cheap things like Avocado Smoothie. I have never used Sweet and Spicy Butternut Squash and I never will while it continues to have insane costs (I'm grateful for the people that do because I make a lot of money selling mine to them lmao). I also use this cheap sharpening stone but for this one I'll happily admit that it's going to far to save money on consumables but I'm doing it anyway!

For my previous post: For Heal Tempest, both best in slot consumables are absolutely worth their cost with very few alternatives worth mentioning.

Edit: I just remembered you could also consider using Plate of Truffle Steak. This will give you enough precision to drop Signet of Fire and you'll waste less stats!

[Lorfi.7562]

I wouldn't run staff healer tempest, while tempest is an amazing healer you're way better off running d/wh because here you give some more utitility and in worst case if your druid dies or is for some reason bad at might stacking you're able to keep 25might with the help from chronos and some firefield blasts. Staff is just 95% only healing which isn't good in raids imo because utility/boons>raw heal output when you run two healers.

[Kelieto.6375]

@"Lorfi.7562" said:if your druid diesYou wanna know how to stop your druid from dying? Run staff heal tempest. ?

Now, I'm not going to go into a deep argument over this but there are situations for each build and you just completely dismissed them for staff tempest. For example, "utility/boons>raw heal output" immediately falls short if everyone is dead. The OP is seeking advice for getting started which means he's likely going to be joining groups with other inexperienced players. Will they need staff healing tempest? Maybe, maybe not.

Sure, maybe I could hard carry a clueless group on Cairn as a sc/wh heal tempest but it's a hell of a lot easier and I really mean a hell of a lot easier for me to do so as a staff heal tempest. Double Geyser res every 13-16 seconds is nothing to laugh at. It actually keeps the bad players alive. Heck, in my opinion, there are more situations where staff heal tempest can be used than a warhorn build simply because if your group is good enough that it doesn't need the healing from staff tempest to kill a particular boss then it's not going to be hindered by having one either. That's the beauty of these so called "wheelchair builds".

[Lorfi.7562]

@Kelieto.6375 said:

@"Lorfi.7562" said:if your druid diesYou wanna know how to stop your druid from dying? Run staff heal tempest. ?

Now, I'm not going to go into a deep argument over this but there are situations for each build and you just completely dismissed them for staff tempest. For example, "utility/boons>raw heal output" immediately falls short if everyone is dead. The OP is seeking advice for getting started which means he's likely going to be joining groups with other inexperienced players. Will they need staff healing tempest? Maybe, maybe not.

Sure, maybe I could hard carry a clueless group on Cairn as a sc/wh heal tempest but it's a hell of a lot easier and I really mean a hell of a lot easier for me to do so as a staff heal tempest. Double Geyser res every 13-16 seconds is nothing to laugh at. It actually keeps the bad players alive. Heck, in my opinion, there are more situations where staff heal tempest can be used than a warhorn build simply because if your group is good enough that it doesn't need the healing from staff tempest to kill a particular boss then it's not going to be hindered by having one either. That's the beauty of these so called "wheelchair builds".

the only reason someone should fully die when rezzing is allowed is cause of one shot mechanics tho, but yeh guess staff tempest has some uses in horrible groups where noone knows you're allowed to press F to rez, sidestep obvious damage and pay some attention to mechanics.

But yeh, I'm 100% against hard carrying nubs and forgiving them to fail mechanic after mechanic. In training runs it literally teaches them way less than to wipe and start over and discuss what they failed and how to overcome it, In exp pug runs I'll just leave if I the squad dies two or three times cause of same reason and commie doesn't bother fixing the problem (low dps players, same people failing mechs).

But in the end everyone can play what they want with, just wanted OP know d/wh tempest healer is easier to find exp pugs with and being usefull in those squads.

[lare.5129]

3 steps do do that1) go training golem and earn rotation2)find pve guild wiht runs3)don't go raids.