Let me begin by saying that I haven’t done any PvP yet (both sPvP and WvWvW) so this will be entirely focused on PvE content and Dungeons.
For the most part, it is my opinion that D/D is the only practical weapon configuration outside of Dungeons and the rare Champion. Even though I haven’t done any PvP, I’m totally confident that any other weapon combination is suboptimal as it severely limits your choice of attunements.
For example:
Dragon’s Tooth will never hit a moving target due to the drop delay. Ice Spike suffers from the same issue, as does Erruption and Shatterstone. I find that while soloing abilities with a delays such as these are unusable, therefore diminishing the effectiveness of that attunement.
While using Daggers, I find myself using 18 of the 20 skills regularly (Magnetic Grasp and Frost Aura I don’t use too often but I can see them being fantastic for PvP)
Unfortunately, there are several bugs that severely hurt the Dagger playstyle. The Arcana IX trait straight up doesn’t work. “Ride the Lightning” frequently bugs and effectively stuns you for the duration as does Magnetic Grasp, the “blast” from Burning Speed often triggers at the beginning rather than the end, and so on. Even with these bugs, the D/D playstyle works really well.
I have a lot of fun playing my elementalist, but there are a number of things that diminish my enjoyment.
Being forced to use a Scepter or Staff for Dungeons, a number of events, and certain champions simply because standing in melee is suicide isn’t fun, especially when Elementalists don’t have weapon sets they can switch between. I understand there are situations where melee is suicide for every profession but at least the others have the option of having a ranged set to switch to.
I can appreciate that since daggers have a higher potential damage output than the other weapons, there has to be a survivability tradeoff. What I can’t begin to fathom is why an Elementalist stacking as much Vitality as possible will still have less health than a naked and traitless Warrior. This has serious implications while levelling. Several times I found myself downed and on my way to being dead simply because a Wolf lept at me and 1 shot me even though every piece of gear had Vitality and Toughness on it.
I’ve only spent a short time playing a Thief and found they have very similar issues, at least early on. Maybe it’s just the style of the game and I should get used to it but being forced into playing ranged really limits my enjoyment of the game.
I feel like I need to state that I found many of these issues very early on and only hoped it would get better in later levels and to some extent it did. But the core issues are still there. Anything but D/D feels like a traditional MMO support class only you can’t heal very much.