Old (and bad) player coming back :P
I missed season 1, but it appeared it was a celestial tempest build that used cantrips. Now its a cleric bunker build that uses shouts. So essentially you missed healbot ele. Its fun for awhile, but ends up being boring after a a season.
This season we had a minor nerf to our shout cooldowns. That and the introduction of thief, warrior into the meta (on top of removing merc amulet) you have a pretty heavy decent balanced game with the right comp. Most players I feel are playing condi these days, which makes playing an ele incredibely hard (stacking condi builds makes it impossible to cleanse conditions fast enough). I stopped trying to play ranked this season because of these reasons.
Bad Elementalist
Yes you have mesmer, necro and warrior as condition calsses and two of then is very common often more. But i had on today without condi ….
Its pretty balaced in mix and this means you always need to deal with power and condi
Th shout CD nerf was evil. I hate it as long as we donĀ“t get -20 CD on souts in tempestous aria, which might make a non bunker build useful…. Maybe not enough for meta but playable …
Don’t play pvp, it’ll make you quit the game again right away. Play pve, given that you’re among the lucky ones who don’t experience consistent game crashes in big blobs, e.g. in dragons stand. Because there is still no map slot reserved for you to enable you to rejoin the same map.
I moved to another game after the first two seasons pvp. its horrible. PvE is fun so i came back and tried it for the first time. I am playing since the game came out and never left PvP so this was a big stap for me.
If you have a good hardware and are normaly able to play with nice graphic, forget it in Dragon Stance or Tarir. Your game will crash every 20 minutes. Reduce everything to low or middle and you are fine. I can play every other map, even WvW in highest Settings, but in these two maps my game crashes allways. Its annoying if you get a crash at the end fight and are not able to join the map again in time.