Mmm, I'm conflicted on Catalyst being the way it is from the trailer (which... they need someone to do a better way of advertising those professions because this has been a problem with all the EoD spec trailers so far in that a lot of the trailers do not sell the class very well and expectations run wild).
I'm just... tired of being in the close range, is all. I play Weaver mostly, generally enjoyable though a bit frustrating because haha, I'm playing the lowest health, lowest armor profession on US servers when I'm an Australian, which just exacerbates the survivability issue combined with the effects vomit that makes determining tells rather difficult.
For a profession that is stated to prefer ranged combat in the character creation screen, I have to raise an eye at the fact that all three of their elite specs heavily prefer close-range, combined with nerfs over the years making the usage of staff and scepter impractical, frustrating and unfun (damage numbers aside, they really do need to be brought up to the levels of other classes handling of the weapons, please give them some TLC and QoL, ANet). It's kinda confounding. Unless, you know... they actually take a look at staff and scepter and Elementalist's entire ranged options and make them better or buff core elementalist and actually do a massive balance pass over the entire profession come the expansion (Wishful thinking, I know).
That said the press-kit gives me hope of it being a useful and fun class to play. Fire and Air being 'mid-range' attacks whilst Earth and Water are the dedicated close range sound like a fun time. That said if we have a trait like Virtuoso's Mental Focus where we're heavily incentivised to go close-range, we better get some tons of survivability to offset the fact we are the most fragile class compared to others, because Weaver's barrier on one skill on their entire hotbar compared to other sources of barrier make me a liiiiiittle jealous of the other classes. Unless we get something like Scrapper's barrier-on-hit trait without the Vitality decrease.