Yup. Ele is built to all its strengths. It farts boons out more than a guardian, with 5 second protection on a 10 sec cd. It has the highest sustained and burst condition removal of any class, making it immune to most condi specs that are not engineers. Its arcane line comes with perma vigor in renewing stamina, gives them extra blasting with evasive arcana, and increases the boon duration that they already drown you with.
On top of the high protection and regen uptime, they get access to frost aura for another 10% damage reduction and a self peel. Signet of Restoration is no Healing Signet, but is close enough that with all the native healing skills eles have, they generate as much healing as an adrenal healing warrior with healing signet. Their cantrips cover nicely all their weaknesses — mist form to prevent subsequent bursts on their low health, cleansing fire to provide defense against spike condi application and apply burning, which not only does damage but triggers blind from burning ashes and boosts their damage as their minor gives them a damage modifier on burning targets. Lightning Flash gives them a flexible gap closer/creator in case they do get kited.
On top of that they have 3 gap closers, one that evades and does a metric ton of damage plus burning, one that roots the target before the ele leaps to them (so they can combo the root into a fire grab), and one in air attunement. All of these on top of lightning flash.
Added to these is the amount of combo fields and blasts they have access to in the same builds, allowing them easy might stacks and with persisting flames permafury and long lasting fire fields. So you have bunkers that can achieve bruiser damage by might stacking.
Then you have a class that despite high sustain also has high sustained damage, because unlike the mesmer their autoattacks don’t suck total kitten , so with lightning whip spam they actually hurt and sustain pressure, on top of the cleaving they already do. And on top of their high sustained damage from strong autoattacks and might stacking, they have plenty of high burst skills like burning speed and fire grab into air attunement lightning strike. They also got built in projectile defense on their ring of earth, which also cripples aoe…
In fact, I find it hilarious they thought Blinding Dissipation was too strong and nerfed it while ele keeps blinding ashes as is with their rate of burning application. It’s a farce. Mesmer is purely a burst class with awful sustained damage and nowhere near the potential of sustain an ele has, and yet the QQ train saw them first in the list of nerfs.
The only natural counters it ever had were sword/dagger thief, which was nerfed since it was absurd against other classes, and necromancer (which is also constantly nerfed). With those two main counters removed who could successfully counter the ele’s rampant boon application, the ele is now what it is, a build without its checks. Cele signet necro remains its only 1v1 bad match up, but the ele can easily disengage or contest a point still.
. Would have preferred a radius on the phantasm of 360 but it will do!