Guild Wars 2

Elementalists are supposed to be versatile, I took that as the different attunements would have different ranges and functions.
They have different functions but you are pigeonholed into 1 range which is dictated by your weapon choice.

Weapon swaps are a solution to this problem, but ANet won’t like that one. If they were proposed, attunements still are on a separate cool down to weapon swaps, so switching to fire starts its cool down and switching to staff then from S/D will still have fire on its cool down. It throws more tools into our vast toolbox but these tools can adapt to different situations now.

Range adaptations will be far more useful and imo needed to balance the ele nicely. A D/D build that can swap to staff for whatever sounds quite bad, but when you realise they are locked out of their (nerfed) escape skills in exchange for some healing and AOE it seems a whole lot better.

S/D will be probably more often used, S/F might be seen for once! By adding a weapon swap to the elementalist, the standard D/D bunker build doesn’t change much. They wouldn’t want to swap weapons anyway. But for wanting to actually be useful at multiple ranges, this will be the simpler fix to implement and helps give players more options.

e.g. a D/D gets damaged, runs away and swaps to staff to add some HOT onto its position, can blast the enemies now from afar but has a far more difficult time running away than if it just stayed in D/D.