The build needs a nerf, my main is an ele, who happens to play a much weaker scepter/dagger simply because d/d bunker feels cheesy and for mostly aesthetic reasons as well. So let’s get that “you’re biased against eles” crap out of the way.
I know d/d ele will get nerfed, but I would like to point out that necessarily it is not the weaponset or the spec that needs nerfing (besides excessive condition removal from water traits).
1) Boons are too strong. Stability and protection in particular; when you put stability aoe like the guardian can on extremely high damage dealing classes like the warrior or thief or mesmer, this is basically extreme unavoidable damage. The stability durations are too long and it should not be something you can hand out in AoE. Same goes for Protection, which my ele and other guardians can easily provide for teammates at too high a rate.
Put time warp and aoe stability together, and it’s outright ridiculous.
2)Boons are too accessible and only countered steadily by a necro and to a lesser extent a mesmer. Corrupt Boon and mesmer shatter boon removal cannot compete either with the rate at which guardians and eles renew boons by the bunch.
3)Boon duration stacking runes synergize too well with boon duration traitlines like Arcana
The build you see is the culmination of really poor innate ele survivability. Any builds that don’t heavily invest in Water traits or arcana will be 2/3-shot in the current state of burst by the very fact that the ele starts at 13k hp without heavy investment in defensive traits and gear, and our stun breakers are all in rather high cooldowns, some nearly double of my mesmer’s stunbreaker cooldowns. An ele’s burst delivery, unlike mesmer or warrior or thief is delivered piecemiel via chaining highly telegraphed skills, whereas something like blurred frenzy>shatter or steal>cnd/backstab, frenzy>100b is so much more immediate and cannot be stalled. Simply put, a burst specced ele cannot exist in a meta where other classes can deliver the burst more reliably and shut down the ele by virtue of higher healthpool/defensive utility that can be used offensively on shorter cooldowns (the only defensive utility that can be used offensively as far as I see on the ele is Arcane Shield and Armor of Earth, both of which have >75 sec cd’s, versus Blurred Frenzy and Stealth bursting’s much lesser cooldowns).
You will simply not see any d/d or scepter builds that don’t have points in water or arcana, simply because eles need to exploit the OP state of boons like protection and stability to have any chance at staying active among enemy warriors and thieves and mesmers. Unlike a warrior (or thief or mesmer with high avoidance skills that can be used offensively duch as stealth detargeting or immunities), an ele cannot spec for berserker or power/prec builds. Condition builds are weak in the game unless you can spread aoe conditions ala Epidemic for pressure — condition builds will never compete single target with burst builds’ sustained damage in the current state of the game.
So, before you consider touching actual weaponskills or utilities, you might look to removing boon duration runes or making the rune bonus effects non-stacking (so you can’t use 2 sup water and 2 sup monk and 2 major water in wvw and to a lesser extent something similar in spvp), and touching the defensive boons like protection and stability in how accessible they are to the guardian and elementalist.
You may want to do something like making boon duration traitlines not stack with gear, because the fact is that bunker builds are abusing these features, and guardians/ele the most since they have such ample access to boons that completely put them above the other classes in staying power while losing not so much offense because might stacking is so effective in the same build.
P.S. Find me an ele who isn’t using Mist Form. Not only because you can channel abilities through it, but simpyl because it is the only real defensive ability that buys you time to recover and bide someone’s burst sequence in a way the other stunbreakers cannot. Perhaps you should consider making Arcane Shield another stunbreaker to compete with Mist Form. And once you nerf boon durations and stacking on ele bunkers, look at their base health and stunbreaker cooldowns.
P.S.S. A way to fix mist form to not be so dominant is to shorten the cooldown to 30 seconds but make the mist only last 2 seconds. You should also halve the cooldown of Arcane Shield without any nerfs to it (it never warranted such a high cd), and for Armor of Earth you could bring the cooldown to 35-40 seconds and lessen the duration of stability.
(edited by Zenith.7301)