Guild Wars 2

Elementalist utility signets look really good on paper: they can be traited deeply into, their actives have their uses, their cooldowns are short and their passives can be retained. They become far less useful however in practice due to their 3/4 second cast time, which make them difficult to land mid-combo in pve and generally unusable in pvp.

How are you going to chase someone with signet of earth if they’re out of range by the time you cast it?
How will signet of water help slow your foe when the cast time is slower than the chill you’d inflict on them?
How are you going to get any of these activated without leaving yourselkittenwardly vulnerable and susceptible to a very likely interrupt/stun?

The solution is to drastically reduce the cast time on these utilities. Instant preferably, 1/4 seconds realistically.

I kinda agree on this, those are signets, not mantras, right?
The casting time is really quite long for the effect they offer, should be much shorter imho.

I think the high cast-times are a factor but the main reason is that the signets themselves are pretty weak and don’t offer any survivability or mobility. Glyphs suffer from the same problem, except they are even weaker and slower casting with crappier traits. Kitten knows what they were smoking when they designed conjures.

Unfortunately, Ele has been designed to require survivability-oriented skills in the utility slots and signets, glyphs, and conjures all don’t cut it.