Build:Weaver - Earth Hammerweaver

The community gave this build a rating, making it second-tier: Good

Focused on: Condition damage and Sustain

Designed for: PvP Conquest

Expansions required:

Difficulty:

Easy

This build was last updated on October 23, 2024 and is up to date for the October 8, 2024 patch.

Overview

A condition damage based bunker Weaver build for PvP with good damage and high survivability. Primarily serves as a duelist but also has enough AoE damage to be relevant in teamfights.

The build's extremely durable against direct damage thanks to Earth and the high Stone Heart uptime, but condition matchups can take some practice.

Skill Bar

Hammer

Utility

Template Code

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Specializations

Variants

• Master's Fortitude is also a viable option, adding more passive survivability to the build.

Equipment

Hammer

Sigil

Sigil

Rune

Amulet

Relic

Equipment Variants

Runes

• Rune of Svanir - the build's greatest counter is Chill as it messes with attunement swap cooldowns, and the mediocre cleansing can make it hard to get rid of it sometimes. Svanir rune's -66% chill duration could solve this problem if you expect the enemy team to have a lot of chill access (from Necromancers for instance, Reaper especially). You could also take Earthen Blessing on Earth with this rune in order to build up further resistance to this condition.

Sigils

• Sigil of Smoldering or Sigil of Doom over Sigil of Cleansing - if you can afford to give up condition removal for more damage.

Relics

• Relic of Rivers - solid option if more cleansing is needed via Woven Stride synergy, and you get some Alacrity as a bonus.

• Relic of the Flock - provides extra healing much like Nayos.

• Relic of Febe - better cleansing via Woven Stride synergy, solid option against Chill too if you're not opting for Svanir rune. Also makes it easier to maintain Swiftness in general, you could even consider using a charge of your healing skill while roaming between capture points with this relic.

• Relic of the Mirage - adds a new cover condition to the build for slightly higher damage and to make it harder to cleanse your more important conditions.

Usage

Elite specialization basics

• Weaver allows the Elementalist to attune to 2 elements at the same time, and skills 1-5 are decided based on both. Let's call them primary and secondary attunements.

• If you swap to Fire Attunement then fire becomes your primary attunement and weapon skills 1-2 will be fire skills. Afterwards if you switch to Water Attunement for example then water is now your primary attunement and fire's moved to secondary - now skills 1-2 are water and 4-5 are fire. Skill 3 is a dual skill influenced by both active attunements.

• Hammer trivializes the dual attack mechanic quite a bit, since every dual attack does the same thing: activates a swirling orb with passive bonuses. The attunements will determine the bonuses. You don't really have to learn new skills if you were already familiar with Hammer.

• The order of the attunements doesn't matter here, water primary with fire secondary has the same dual attack as fire primary and water secondary.

General

• Swapping attunements counts as a weapon swap which means it procs Sigil of Energy and Sigil of Cleansing (once every 9 seconds).

• Dual attuning to the same element isn't really recommended here. You don't gain any new Hammer skills and won't proc your on-swap traits either.

• Skill #3 on each attunement is an orb skill, consider this your secondary profession mechanic. Air and Fire grant offensive bonuses while Water and Earth supply you with defensive ones. All 4 orbs also pulse damage and apply conditions around you while active, and as a Weaver you can activate up to 2 new orbs at once thanks to the dual attuning mechanic:
  • Flame Wheel on Fire increases your damage.
  • Icy Coil on Water grants condition damage reduction.
  • Crescent Wind on Air increases crit chance.
  • Rocky Loop on Earth reduces direct damage.

• Each orb has a duration of 8 seconds, but whenever you add a new orb to the mix the duration of all previous orbs is refreshed. Once you've rotated through all 4 attunements the orbs will inevitably fall off - this is when you should use the chain skill Grand Finale which shoots them at your target for damage.

• Whenever you swap to a new attunement you should always start with activating its dual orb skill.

• Immutable Stone is a channeled block - the aura is applied after you block something. This gives you a little bit of time to swap attunements before that happens and get an aura of your choice as the aura is granted based on your current attunement.
  • On Weaver it's already easy to get whichever aura you want since it's based on your primary attunement, but let's say you're on Fire/Earth, if you activate Immutable Stone and immediately swap to Air you can still get a Shocking Aura if you time it right.

• You can cancel the spinning animation of Twist of Fate by stowing your weapon. This also cancels the evade frame but sometimes you may want to do this so you can start attacking sooner, for example if you were cleaving a downed enemy but got CC'd you can quickly break the CC with ToF then cancel the spin to keep cleaving.

Damage

• Try to have Flame Wheel and Crescent Wind active before beginning to unload your harder hitting skills.

• Fire Attunement has the most damage, followed by Earth.

• Air Attunement is more about CC than damage.

• Water Attunement can do quite a bit of damage on Hammer but it has no damaging conditions which sets it back a bit on Sage amulet. While it's primarily a defensive attunement the damage is fine and it has Crashing Font, which is the only gapcloser in the build.

• Skill #2 on every attunement is a decent offensive ability, so you can keep pressuring targets regardless of which attunement you're swapping to next.

• Skill #5 becomes Ground Pound after you swap out of Earth primary. Not only does this do heavy damage but also applies Immobilize which can then be used to set up skills with long cast times such as Hurricane of Pain or Rain of Blows. It's also good for forcing enemies to tank multiple ticks of Primordial Stance which is one of your most important offensive skills.

• Swapping out of Air can be used in a similar way to set up burst, as skills #4 and #5 on Air CC targets.

• Primordial Stance can instantly add burst to any attack sequence:
  • Fire Attunement has the highest raw damage output.
  • Air Attunement is also a good choice because of the Vulnerability stacking, but this condition's effectivenes severely depends on how pressured your target already is. If the target doesn't have any damaging conditions and isn't being focused by your team, Vulnerability doesn't do much, in that case Earth is superior.
  • Water Attunement does not directly help with damage, but the snare and CD increase can still be valuable - especially in mirror matchups, as Chill is one of Elementalist's greatest weaknesses.

• You can obtain up to 47% extra crit chance through traits and skills:
  • Swapping attunements gives you Fury for 20%.
  • You have another 15% crit against targets with Weakness when playing with Superior Elements - the main source of Weakness in the build is the passive of the Air orb Crescent Wind.
  • Coincidentally the same orb also gives +12% crit chance while active.

• Surging Flames is a cone attack best used in melee range to make sure all 3 projectiles hit the target.

• Triple Sear creates 3 AoEs on the ground - try to position this in a way that your opponent is in the center of this skill so they get hit by all 3.

• Molten End is rather straightforward, just a big smash you should aim to land when the target has Burning. All the other Fire skills apply Burning so that shouldn't be hard.

Burst combo example

1. Let's assume you're on Earth/Air.
2. Wind Storm for CC.
3. Whirling Stones
4. Primordial Stance to stack some Vulnerability (for 1-2 seconds) before you're completely out of Air. You can activate this while casting Whirling Stones.
5. Swap to Fire.
6. Immediately activate the orb skill Dual Orbits: Fire and Earth
7. Ground Pound
8. Surging Flames in point-blank range.

Survival

• Swap to Earth Attunement whenever you're getting pressured. This will give you barrier, Stability, Protection, damage reduction from various traits and immunity to critical hits via Stone Heart.
  • Stone Heart briefly reactivates when you leave Earth!
  • Attuning to Earth twice in a row offers no benefits.

• Keep attuning to Earth every second time you swap attunements if you want to play things extra safe. For example: Water ⇒ Earth ⇒ Air ⇒ Earth ⇒ Fire ⇒ Earth, repeat.

• High uptime on Air's orb skill Crescent Wind is crucial in melee as Weakness can shut down Power builds on its own. Since it's instant you're able to reactivate it even while stunned.

• Earth skill #2 Whirling Stones destroys projectiles, offering protection against some ranged specs on quite a low CD.

• Most of your condition cleansing will come from Water and Air attunement.

• On Water Attunement the first dodge you perform heals and cleanses 1 condition from you and nearby allies. On Water secondary you also have access to Cleansing Typhoon which is the closest thing this build has a mass cleanse and its effectiveness scales with the number of enemies struck, much like the healing of Crashing Font.

• Another important tool for fighting conditions is Woven Stride, which makes you lose 1 condition when you gain Swiftness or Superspeed (once every 5 seconds). Several skills provide these buffs:
  • Swapping to Air Attunement.
  • Using Wind Storm (Air #4).
  • The utility skill Twist of Fate.
  • Potentially your healing skill Aquatic Stance when playing with Relic of Febe.

• Immutable Stone on Earth is one of your best defensive skills. It blocks an attack and grants a huge amount of barrier + an aura based on your current primary attunement.
  • Air's Shocking Aura can deal with melee attackers, Earth's Magnetic Aura shuts down projectiles and Water's Frost Aura offers direct damage mitigation.

• Aquatic Stance can give you Resistance once every 15 seconds via trait synergy. This boon allows you to ignore conditions such as Immobilized, Weakness or Chill.

Mobility

• Keep swapping in and out of Air Attunement for Swiftness when roaming between capture points! Dual attuning to Air won't work. It doesn't really matter which other attunement you're swapping to, but Water has Crashing Font for extra mobility.