Engineer toolkits uses a utility skill, and they only have 5 weapon skills. I also find that toolkits typically contain some special case skills, that are mostly useless. I’ve got a lvl 80 engineer. Engineer is among the more fun characters, but the elementalist is more fun.
It seems that the Attunement Swap mechanic really just adds artificial complexity in the form of more mental gymnastics by forcing Ele players to memorize rotations and multiple hidden and layered cooldowns
Every build has some degree of rotation. Most other classes have 2 weapons, and has rotations based on switching between those. Elementalists tends to have 1-2 very potent skills in an attunement, and with free weapon swapping, they would have rotations that consisted of starting with these. Currently that doesn’t happen because then you’d end up with all attunements on cooldown, and that can be dangerous for a squishy mage.
With free attunement swapping they would have to nerf elementalists (particulary their powerful skills), and the ideal rotations would very likely mean switching attunement for every skill, doubling the number of button you’d have to press. Elementalists would loose their “punch”.
Elementalists have many skills, but they don’t require you to know lots of keybindings to play them effectively. It relies more on correctly swapping attunements, which is made harder because an elementalist must handle four weapon skill sets, instead of just two.
Well first, kits in utility slots are made up for by tool bar skills which are essentially your utility skills.
Second, those “very potent” skills in attunements are balanced by having larger than normal cooldowns.
And yes other classes have rotations too, for normal DMG abilities, Elementalists essentially have to create a rotation out of their long cooldown situational abilities because they’ll be locked out of them when they actually need to use them, rotations for lower cooldown dmg abilities is fine…
Third, you’re down playing Engy toolkits so hard lol, they’ve been buffed so much, especially toolkit, every ability is strong and has a use.
Let me redirect you to Elementalist’s Focus fire skills, or Focus #4 water skill, or perhaps the 2 second single target knockdown in air that’s balanced with a 50 second cooldown on a weapon skill (attunement cooldowns don’t balance this at all).
Or how about the fact that Staff Ele basically loses more than 50% of their dmg when they lock themselves out of Fire attunement, because Water does NO dmg, the auto is currently useless because the heal radius is practically microscopic, and staff Air attacks are pathetic.
The best way to describe the current Elementalist with Attunements : “Using situational skills when you don’t need them because you’ll rarely have access to them when you do.”
There’s 2 ways they could go with this :
1.) Reinforce the 4 Attunement swap playstyle, reduce or even remove attunement cooldowns and balance the procs accordingly. The best way to play Ele is now to swap constantly and rotate dmg abilities for the most dmg output and actually have access to important utilities when you actually need them, playstyle is no longer terribly clunky and Ele might have better survivability.
This would also require a change to the current bonus Arcana Trait line gives to attunement cooldowns, I made a suggestion for it and reworking Attunement Lingering Bonuses here : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/What-I-d-Change-Staff-and-Arcana/first#post2830288
2.) Go with the design of focusing on Trait Trees to determine playstyle. Arcana trait line reducing attunement cooldowns drastically (to like 5 seconds or so), and giving benefits for using all 4 elements. While the other trait lines help you specialize in each Element and make those Attunements solid standalone weapon sets.
With option #2 this would mean you could even go Water focused and your water attunement is actually a good standalone weapon set, it has dmg, utility etc, but with more emphasis on Support, think Mesmer or Guardian Staff.
Then you could either spec into making 2 Element Attunements solid, with the other 2 adding a little extra (which would serve as our extra abilities as a class mechanic) but would keep the ludicrous attunement cooldowns (16-20 seconds), with 25 minor point trait in each trait tree giving you a Fresh Air equivalent.
Or you could specialize in 1 element as well as Arcana and have 3 ok attunements and 1 solid one and swap constantly.
I’m up for either one, although option 1 sounds like a ton less work, aside from redoing traits to be more versatile for every attunement.
Trust me, Ive read it.