A question which come up quite often these days is why so many eles are using d/d both in PvE and PvP.
The simple answer would be that with dagger/dagger an ele does not need to worry about snaring the target prior to start attacking him, the attack skills haven’t got huge delay or far too obvious casting animations.
In the past people used to favour scepter over dagger not for the sustained dmg potential but rather for the spike potential, unfortunately the DT/phoenix combo is so poorly designed that in practice you will never be able to hit an average player equipped with common reaction time, let’s say that out of 10 players : 2 are bad, 5 are average and 3 are very good.
Now a s/d glass cannon will work only against the 2 bad players ( in the sense of being actually able to kill them on the first hit), against the 5 average players there’s a 60% that the combo will fail and 40% chance it will hit while still being unable to kill them, lastly against the last 3 good players, the combo will never yeld any good results on the contrary
To further aggravate the problem is the fact that a glass cannon ele rely on long CD skills to achieve big number while still being forced into going all out in attack with little concern for defense, the ele lack strong passive defense like a warrior( armour+ HP); mesmer (clones spamming); thief (stealth), all the ele has got is active defense strongly based on reaction times and few “oh kitten” utilities.
Now once realized that burst on scepter is largely impossible to achieve, people tried to use the scepter as sustained dmg weapon…not good luck there also, as said before a scepter user must rely on CC to land the heavy hitting skills : dragon’s tooth -phoenix given their huge delay in activation, this leave the ele with the rather sad air tree dmg or try to apply stacks of bleeding with earth 1; nothing that can be compared to the dagger MH.
The d/d is so complete, it offers everything : all ele conditions – fast travel – great anti-mele defense – great sustained dmg on moderate CD – great spike skills easier to land – faster and more frequent self-healing, what more could you ask for?
It doesn’t come as a surprise that 70% of eles are using D/D, so the question now is : how is Anet planning to change scepter/staff in light of these facts?
The d/d is complete, it got no useless “filler skills” , in every attunement you can use 1 to 5 without a dramatic drop in performance, the only true set which reflect the nature of the GW2 ele : versality!
And this is something that your average non ele player find too hard to counter,this is the reason of the whine threads :" D/D ele too strong QQ!"
Now I trust Anet to make the right decisions when it comes to buffs/nerfs and let’s not forget about the recent nerfs : ‘healing ripple’ minor trait healing halved, removal of blast finisher from Evasive Arcane trait, all intended in reducing the survivability of the ele….and still people complain, but anyway here few ides for Anet:
1) Remove delay from staff/scepter skills, reduce the dmg but remove the delay ( lava font-eruption-lightning surge-dragon’s tooth-phoenix)
2) Increase radius and speed of projectiles ( shockwave-gust-dust devil)
3) Add seconday effects/increase dmg ( ice shards -shatterstone-fire shield-flame wall-static field-unsteady ground)