Gridania quest help

I'm stuck on the first part of the 4th Gridania quest and it's so frustrating! I need to kill this wood elemental but i can't get to cause his attacks bring down HALF of my health! I'm a rank 15 archer so i don't have any healing abilities or anything! Also no merchants in gridania sell potions and i'm not gunna grind my alchemy level to 21 just so i'm aloud to make potions that no one in gradania sells ingredients for! Then Sumi asks to pick a ward in the middle of the battle so i pick one and press the button at the top but nothing happens! and i refuse to grind my level up cause i grinded a whole day just to get to level 15 to be able to do this mission! ugh!

Seems your in a bit of a pickle then. If you refuse to lvl further and refuse to play other classes to unlock the cure spell, and earn other skills that raise your defenses like protect/shell/stoneskin, or even some DoTs like Bio/Poison. There are also skills from Marauder, Pugilist and Lancer that will return some HP to you as well. As it stands from what you've said though, you're SoL until you're willing to help yourself first and become properly prepared for that battle!

Yes, this battle was difficult for my boyfriend who just leveled up GLA, but at the time was easy for me as a thm, so i told him to get cure and some other spells. Voila he did it.

Actually you don't need to do any fighting at all for this quest.

What you're supposed to do is sit by the Padjal in the back (forgot his name) and let the npcs that assist you do all the dirty work. The npcs will eventually cycle in and out as they take damage, so no worries about being the only one left on the field.

Now you may have noticed at certain points of the fight, the elemental will change it's element. At this point, talk to the Padjal and select the element of the barrier that corresponds to what the element is now using. Then you should get a new command action, something with warding. You get 3 charges of this ward to place (usually on your npc companions). Rinse and repeat as the element keeps changing affinities.

Sometimes you may pick up a little aggro. Just as long as you never take any real battle actions (don't even cure of buff yourself of any sort!), place the ward up, and stay out of the aoe range of the elemental as best as you can, this should be a lot easier to bypass.

haha yeah i finished it a while ago i didn't do anything except switch element wards until the elementals health was low then i started hitting him. kinda sucks that archer has no healing abilities though. well i don't know i'm only rank 15