Making an auramancer out of this elite spec seems good on paper but only until you fully understand how the Sphere works. Oh sure, it's going to be great in groups and against world bosses regardless, but what about solo play? The way the Sphere works gimps it, IMO.
The Sphere is necessary for solo fields. Quite a few skills want the Catalyst stay close to their enemy, stay in melee, or even stand still to coax the enemy into not moving out of a channeled attack. For this to be reasonable, Catalyst has to have a lot of tankiness or sustain. I assumed this tankiness was going to be coming from the Auramancer traits and from the Sphere boons, but apparently for most of the battle when solo I have to make due with nothing? Why is there both an energy mechanic AND a cooldown, anyways? Why does that cooldown start only when the field goes away? And why are both of those aspects punished at full severity for dismissing the Sphere early because either combat is over or it needs to be moved? To me, this is as bad as the clunky and slow animations of the Willbender.
Unless there's some drastic changes to the up-time and quality of life of the Sphere, or you put some field skills on Hammer, I'm just going to continue using Weaver on my Elementalist. I would happily give up the constant Sphere boons if it meant the Sphere itself could be constant. When most of my gameplay is in the open world, I cannot rely on other players' fields.
