Guild Wars 2 – How to Learn Weaver (Ele)

Advice to Learning Weaver

All credit goes to Totally Innocent Chatbot!

Don’t worry too much about perfecting your rotations or learning every single skill combination right off the bat, just start it simple and learn things as you go. As you get more familiar with different abilities through experience, you’ll be able to understand better how they “fit in” and work them into your normal attack patterns naturally.

For as complicated as Weaver rotations often appear, the underlying concepts behind them are relatively simple. For condition-focused DPS, you spend the majority of your time just attuning your way from full Fire to full Earth and back again (Fire/Earth > Fire/Fire > Earth/Fire > Earth/Earth > Fire/Earth, repeat), firing off all of your damage-focused skills that aren’t on cooldown at each step along the way, and autoattacking with skill 1 to fill in the gaps; for power DPS, it’ll probably be about the same except rotating between Air and Fire instead. Your CC skills for breaking blue bars tend to come from Air, Water, or some combo with one of those, so you don’t need to switch over there all that often.

Things get a bit more complicated when you’re trying to make full use of the Weave Self elite skill, since it wants you to rotate through all four elements within a certain length of time, and the buffs it gives highly encourage you to wait as long as possible before attuning to the fourth and final one. But the underlying concept is still the same – most of your damage comes from two primary elements, and the others just get thrown in partway through for a bit of extra utility, or when your “core” skills are on cooldown.

Yes, it’s more button presses than you may be used to on other classes, but overall I think that people really overstate how “complicated” Weaver really is. And whenever you’re not locking yourself into a rigid damage rotation, it’s also one of the most versatile ways to play Elementalist with how rapidly you can swap attunements to deal with any situation. With 26 different weapon skills within any one weapon set, the most complicated part is really just familiarizing yourself with what each one actually does, and why it is or isn’t a good one to focus on using as a result.

For any curious, my build is a Sword/Focus Weaver with pure Viper’s stats on all gear, built primarily around stacking and maximizing Burning damage, with extra Bleed thrown in as a secondary condition damage source.