I lvled my ele to 80 and got full CoF gear. (weapon and all). My friend is a fresh 80 warrior and I have to struggle to keep up with his dps. Even then he hits about 4-5k harder then I do. And yes I attunment swap.
Same story man level 80 ele with CoF set here too. Pretty sure most people on this forum talking about how their DPS and survivability eclipses other classes are just ignorant. No matter how you spec, go to a dungeon like CoF with other good players and sit there killing the spiders for an entire minute doing pathetic damage but when any other class comes along you’ll see how it’s HP amazingly starts moving so much faster, consistently, even if you stop attacking to heal. Play those classes and you’ll see why it dies so much faster. I was specced into condi and power at that point. Could easily survive the dungeon with any weapon set too. Any class can.
That doesn’t mean it’s balanced. Eles damage is pathetic. We have literally one viable build, and it’s seriously boring. Think about eles skills. Why would eruption ever hit anyone? Have you seen the cast time and animation on that skill? There is no amount of skill that will make it land. It’s reliant on enemy stupidity. This is why nobody builds damage. As soon as the enemy see a glass cannon, they’ll actually stop standing in your spells and drop you instantly. Relying on enemies lack of intelligence is the opposite of a high skill ceiling class. That’s what people have to get their head around. That’s what Anet needs to understand. Nearly every damaging skill on the elementalist is low skill ceiling. Area denial. That’s all they’re good for. It’s hard to hit mobs if they’re moving let alone players. We have no way to keep people in lava font, they can walk out in one to 2 ticks, that’s if we place it perfectly. Yet its damage is so low. Water 2 is a slightly faster much weaker dragons tooth. I just described to you 3 out of the 4 damage skills a staff ele has at its disposal in realistic PvP. The only reliable damage skill we have is the third in fire with burn. THIS is why eles are all specced into combo field proccing tanks/supports as staff and low to medium DPS tanks as scepter dagger. Our damage skills are utter trash. Playing a good staff ele revolves around hitting water attunement every time it’s up and laying down combo fields purely to roll into them (because the skills themselves do low damage and don’t land). Scepters dragon tooth has this problem, pheonix needs work too (take off all the stupid vigor and condi removal if you don’t want us tanking and actually make it usable outside of melee range), D/D isn’t so bad (yet they think D/D is the weapon set that needs help, maybe in numbers but nothing else). When they nerf our one viable build, which they will, we will have nothing.
I utilise the tank/support or tank/low damage build and I have people asking for my build and saying things along the lines of “you’re the first good elementalist I’ve seen”. This is not how we want to play. Remove the absolute blatent logistical flaws from staff and scepter, then balance. Until dragons tooth has 10k damage and becomes a joke, until pheonix isn’t a melee skill, scepter eles will still be rolling tanks. If you really just nerf our trait synergy with our one viable build, and maybe “increase damage on eruption, lava font, dragons tooth, pheonix and some dagger skills”, I really will be quitting my ele for good. Give us a hard class to play. I know all the elitists here will get upset that I suggest eles low skill, but it really is. Learn your 4 attunements and don’t bother learning to land your skills, it’s pretty irrelevant. Switch to water as much as you can, 7 8 9 are get out of jail free cards, 10 is a trashy potential heal.
I get where you’re coming from though.