Guild Wars 2

As an ele player I must ask you guys

was whirlpool actually killing you?

There was a recent nerf to it. It now does 33% less damage. This as far as I can tell would be because it was too strong (I mean, why else would you nerf a skill)

So, to other classes, was whirlpool seriously killing you that much?

For those who are unaware. Whirlpool used to work like this.

1. first the ele channels for ~2 seconds
2. the ele then loses access to all 20 of his normal skills, and all of his utilities.
3. the ele then starts to move slower
4. ele now does 3000 (on crit) damage a second to anyone stupid enough to still be right next to him. For ~10 seconds

additional notes:
The elementalist was fully vulnerable when this was happening (physical hits, conditions, ETC could all still hurt you)

The skill could only be used once every 3 minutes.

Maybe I was just doing something wrong, was there some trick to whirlpool I missed out on? some way to stop my opponent from just swimming away from my (now slowed down) self? or was holding a directional key, dodging once/twice and then proceeding to kill the elementalist just foreign knowledge?