Elementalists are underpowered because you must swap attunements, because you must chain you abilities, because you must dodge and kite like crazy, because you must make the best use of your combo fields and because you must interrupt your own burst to survive against pve enemies, which are generally weak, easy and killed in seconds by the standards of the best professions out there, like the guardian and the warrior.
About skill count (weapons + main mechanics), the Warrior and the Ranger have 12, the Thief has 11 (2 stealth skills? And steal is not a fixed skill), the Guardian has 13, the Mesmer has 14 skills (4 shatters + good auto-attacks), the Necromancer has 15 (DS + DS skills) and the Engineer has between 9 and 29 (?), considering kits are their own version of attunements.
When an Elementalist has effectively 16 skills, and several (= most) of the other professions have more complex and detailed skills than the Elementalist, while having more diversity in range and smaller cooldowns, then I wonder where the advantage is?
Finally, the elementalist is not even the best at AoE. With 3 button presses, a Greatsword Guardian, without weapon swapping (which is as important to them as attunements are to us, but they seem to rely much less on that mechanic) can make a huge aoe burst (burning + symbol tick damage + whirling + leap), stack retaliation from two different sources (for even higher damage), remove conditions twice and blind all foes. 3 buttons. It’s generally enough to take down most of the HP from most pve enemies, and you can pre-use another skill for more damage-over-time ( interruption), and spam auto-attack for might-stacking and clean up respectively before or after the combo.
Enemies will die before you even have the opportunity to swap weapons.
DioGoSylva, this is complete true , and as someone who plays the elementalist and guardian both , i can know it
May the Force be with you