Hello,
After remembering the ele playstyle from the first beta weekend i think now that the ele is suffering from a paradigm shift since then, probably arrgravated by a change in the design team.
The caracteristic of ele at first wrere the abscence of attunement CD in alliance with high skill CD’s and traits boosting single attunements. Looking at this i think the ele was initially designed to sit in one attunement (fire for aoe dmg, air for single target, water for haling and earth for tankyness specialisation) with the possibility of quick swps to another attunement for versatility before coming back to main attunement. The high CD were there to ensure that one could not use the powerfull skills of other attunements too often, while the attunement cd reduction and other attunement enhancing traits made so that the choosen attunement would be more viable to stay in.
After first weekend beta all tat was deemed too powerfull and Anet slapped a quick fix in giving attunement swaps a big CD. I think this was a big mistake as it induced a paradigm shift. Due to the attunement swap CD the playstyle was completely changed and now players had to do the attunement dance in order to be effective (being excluded for your main attunement for 16 secs everytime you need to dip in another attunement makes the cost too big to specialise in one element).
Sadly the big skill CD remained and the traitline were not updated to the shift in playstyle. Concurently Anet began to nerf all skills encouraging to stay in one attunement (healing skills in water, mobility in air) as it interfered in the attunement dance. I think this is due to the presence of a new design team which did not know the initial design decisions and had to guess fro the release class playstyles.
So now i think Anet should choose how ele are to be played and stick to it and fix plroblems.
Either go back to old design and reduce attunement CD to less than 5 secs, keep the traits as they are and perhaps nerf slightly the most powerfull skills to avoid too much versability (i don’t think it is needed as now all class are being better played than at fisrt weekend beta)
Or stick to the attunement dance style but then fix traits to encourage swaps (for example instead of a reduction to fire spells cooldowns we could have a cross attunement cooldown reduction to all aoe skills, or instead of increased damage while in fire we could have increased damage to first skill cast after swap or whatever cross attunement traits Anet deems fun) and reduce the overlong skills CD’s hidden between the attunement swap CD.
Anyways Anet should make the decision and fix the class accordingly
Cheers