Water Attunement
The water attunement was really clutch in some of the more difficult story line quests where I had to help a caravan survive or kit 6-7 NPCs around and do damage while healing myself. Using a Staff with Frozen Ground (ground targeted slow) and Ice Spike (ground targeted delayed aoe) you can deal some consistent damage. It doesn't offer nearly the damage output that fire does, and isn't particularly bursty. It gets the job done if you can't kill them faster than they can kill you. Geyser and Healing Rain are the two healing abilities you get with a staff. These are great for, again, healing a caravan of NPCs (or group of players). They're also good for healing yourself as you're kiting NPCs and maybe took a few shots.For close quarters slow-based "ice" kiting, dagger/focus is pretty effective. You get basically a "frost nova" (wow reference) with Frozen Burst except targets you hit are slowed instead of frozen in place. You can combine that with Freezing Gust to keep an opponent slowed for quite some time. Using Comet you can follow up those slows with a stun. To me I felt like this build had the most utility of any setup, because you can also heal allies and damage enemies with cone of cold (frontal cone aoe). The main auto-attack in this setup applies vulnerability for 6 seconds, which lowers the defense of enemies by 30. I didn't feel like 30 was enough to really make an impact, this build is all about control.
Dagger/Dagger gives you a small heal that removes a condition but you have to sacrifice a stun, and a ranged slow vs. a "frost shield" that slows enemies when you get hit. Dagger in offhand just loses to focus in this attunement.
Scepter main hand was disappointing. You get shatterstone with is a lot like Dragon's Tooth but instead of applying a slow it applies vulnerability (only -30 defense). This really is a drop in the bucket when you consider I had over 800 defense as a squishy Elementalist. The damage/healing hybrid ability Water Trident functions like most hybrid abilities in that it fails to make a significant impact one way or the other. It does weak damage and weak healing, and being on a 20 second cooldown it's just not much use. Ice Shards is the auto attack for Scepter, and it's fairly plain... doesn't apply any kind of effect and does very meager damage.
I found myself often lost when I was looking through these attunement because I think most of them, like this one are suffering an identity crisis. Most of these are probably place-holder skills for useful things later... but right now it looks like they're just there to fill a slot because some ability designer ran out of ideas. If this attunement is supposed to be the "I'm gonna do some control and support with heals" attunement then you can't leave skills like Ice Shards with no kind of effect... and you can't give Water Trident and Cleansing Wave with weak output. Cleansing Wave should remove all debuffs, not just a single condition. With a 40 second cooldown and the amount of conditions being thrown around constantly its not unreasonable for this to cure all conditions on nearby allies... I mean with as much spam that's going on those conditions are going to be replaced just as quickly anyway.
Staff = No slows, AoE Healing, Weak Damage
Dagger/Dagger = Debuffs, Slows, Close Quarters, Weak Heal, Weak Cleanse
Dagger/Focus = Debuffs, Slows, No healing, You get an AoE stun
Scepter/Dagger = Weak auto with no debuff, slow ground target aoe (easily avoidable), weak healing
Scepter/Focus = Same shit as with Scepter but you get the nice AoE stun and a slow.
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