Hey guys, I’ve been playing ele since launch and to start off with, I think your question is pretty big because it requires us to consider many factors. I should actually be studying for my exams so I’ll only go over the ones that I think are most important. I’ll also go about answering these from memory (which may or may not be accurate due to stress from finals), so correct me if I’m wrong anywhere.
But how did people back then think?
The ele mentality, which held up for a significant period after launch, was that you had to constantly be switching elements to maximize utility and damage. In fact, you were considered bad if you camped an element, so essentially camping fire in staff or air 1 with dagger didn’t exist (this is still true today, but slightly more accepted because now it is encouraged to camp fire on staff for dps and only swap when you need the utility. You’d use the skills, swap, and then use those skills – i.e. there was no autoattacking in fire for dps). The way to constantly swap elements was achieved through 30 in arcana, back then the attunement swap cooldowns were a little longer than they are now; I think they used to have a 15 seconds cooldown without 30 in arcana. So 30 in arcana essentially became mandatory.
Why was this ‘auramancer’ meta?
Arcana was essential to nearly all builds, for staff you’d need to go into 20 for blasting staff, there was also the boons on swap trait and evasive arcana. I think with the 30 in arcana being a solid backbone, we didn’t really have any other great trait lines which lead to dumping 10 points into air and 30 into water. Air traits sucked, there was no fresh air. Fire traits sucked as well, persisting flames didn’t give fury, so you really just had pyromancer’s puissance if you decided to go 30 in fire. The lack of good grandmaster traits in fire and air resulted in us being pigeonholed into water and arcana, giving rise to the auramancer. This was positively prescribed and made popular by top pvp/wvw gameplay eles like daphoenix, who even had a detailed guide written on the forums of this build.
And when and how did the shift towards what we have now begin? When and how did the paradigm shift occur?
When they buffed persisting flames, you had more s/x lightning hammer builds and you also got the manly man pure dps staff builds. When they added fresh air, you would be able to stray away from 30 in arcana since you weren’t so dependent on the reduced cooldowns for attunement swapping. As a side note, lightning whip sucked for a long time as well because it had trouble connecting with your target. With the buffing of fresh air, you got d/f fresh air builds rolling and the 30 in arcana mentality was broken. With the dps staff builds, the constantly swapping attunements mentality was broken as well, (for me at least) since I started to camp in fire for dps rather than swapping when it was unnecessary.
Hopefully my insights and experiences as someone who has played since beta and launch helped to show what was going through people’s minds early on but I’m sure different people had different experiences with the evolution of the ele meta, but this was just how mine went and I mentioned the things that affected me the most.
TL;DR – fire and air trait lines sucked in the beginning, everyone went 0/10/0/30/30. Fresh air added, persisting flames buffed lead to 30 in arcana not being a requirement and eventually this evolved into the meta builds today.
