Took an 9 month break and this skill hasn't been changed yet, despite the obviously flaw of having it SA into Iframe, instead of Iframe into SA?
Hit stagger completely nullifies the ability 90% of the time.

Was the intent to not use it as an escape? 
Explain yourselves..

When reboot was on its way, they considered the feedback about giving more mobility to Awakening Casters. They got wind of that annoyingly repeated idea that Awakening Casters are turrets and falsely assumed that it was the desired design direction players playing the class wanted; they've likely listened to the crap people who don't play the class repeat ( who knows it seems that so many players share their opinion about Awakening Casters when they don't even play or want to play it: "It's designed as a turret class" - "It's not supposed to have mobility" - "It should have slow casts, it's their identity" - "We don't want to make a second succession caster type meta." - "It was overpowered in large scale 6 years ago; don't do X or we get back to that meta.").

As such, what we got was likely the worst mobility skill with a full bingo of weakness given intentionally. Such as a precast animation ; a long precast animation ; no iframes ; unprotected gap at the end; massively long cooldown (15 sec). They thought they had to go so far with the design weaknesses with Elementalization that the skill itself wasn't doing its intended purpose and you'd always come face to face with one of its weakness whenever the situation to use it would arise. All of this was done by design due to some prehistorical BDO concept that mobility on Awakening Caster = Overpowered and meta breaking (no joke, ask around, you get this bizarre opinion from players when you dig far enough).

They took pity one year after because the class was just awful and a resounding failure in the new competitive Arena of Solare mode. They decided to cut down the precast animation by half and to a conditional quarter of the cast following a cast. They have closed the gap at the end (not -entirely-). Halved the cooldown to 7. Upped the stamina cost (not too relevant, but you run out of stamina against a E buff striker btw). And more importantly, they gave it a iframe during movement.

So many buffs, wow! All issues fixed?! Heck no. The starting designs were so weak for Elementalization, it is crippled by a lack of creativity from the developpers, and retrograde conceptions of what Awakening Casters should be, and also because the skill was so bad from the start that it'd look bad to reduce a cooldown by 75% for instance (they'd just prove how wrong they were and they're too proud to say this.) 

What they need to do / consider about Elementalization 

1. At the very least, consider giving it SA at the end such as were proposed during the scrapped Global Lab patch of December 22 of 2023. The change was very disappointing because we expected so much more, but its still an adequate way to close the gaps. (Minor change)

2. Allow Elementalization -> Flow : Magical Evasion without its current gap.  (Minor change)

3. Allow S + E  command (currently the unimportant staff ranged freeze) in staff to cancel staff skills (including magnus) in the way teleport does already and swap to Awakening Weapon. (Significant change).

4. Change the Super Armor at the start of the skill to invincibility so that the skill can be used defensively against Grabs or a true safe movement without getting clipped by damage. (The signifcant change we have been wanting since day 1 of reboot)


What will likely happen?

The developpers will likely do one of the four points listed and go for a minor change, or they might consider a fifth one that is completely insignificant all considered. The goal is only to have them point up to say, "SEE? We haven't forgotten about X!" then radio silence until next year.

There is nothing that can be done. Players have expectations and their expectation is that Awakening Witch is a free and easy target just to feel good about themselves and practice their PvE rotations on and pretend its PvP. Developpers listen to the desires of the 49 other classes / spec and there's more enjoyments to be had for them having a free bully target than there is enjoyment for the 2 Awakening Casters hoping for a decent gameplay experience.

Im fine with this if they tuned up the damage enough to where people avoided us. You can't have "its a turrent class" and "its weaker than most of the other classes", that's just pants on head idiotic.. *COUGHS IN CLASS MODIFIER DAMAGES* /HACK /HACK /HACK ..

I would agree with all of these, however, imho, 4 is the most important to make the skill worth anything. Especially with hit stagger. I've literally moved .5m using the skill when getting hit with a 20 hit BS ability. 
Given the damage outside of capped wars/siege, SA almost means nothing outside of a 1v1 or 1v2. Full iframe or worthless in pvp.
Also, there isn't a class in the game that can't close the gap on a Full TP, which is our only reliable iframe currently.

THey never say the quiet part out loud, "Why invest resources in old characters that won't drive cash shop sales when we can just roll out a more powerful class, with better movement, which will drive cash shop $$$, and have the added bonus of calling it "content".

At this point, I've given up. it feels like they are never going to give awakening casters any love and are instead going to keep making new classes with all of the suggestions, like with succ nova, sage(both), succ drak, woosa(both), maegu(succ), and no doubt the new male mage class will continue the trend of being built off things awake wiz/witch have been asking for for years.

They could at the very least remove the cooldown on flow magic evasion, like other classes like lahn, sage, sorc, tamer, succ ranger, ect have, or give a multi use charge system like woosa/maegu/valk, but I have kind of lost hope at this point, and am trying to force myself into playing a more updated mage.

I just came back to grind out ator's shoes, grab the new pve artifacts, and prolly will only jhammer log again.
No hope here either...