Personally, I PK'ed 3? PCs in under 8 days played with a miscreant/gicker...so no, it's not just buffing their mundane skills. The mundane skills absolutely help immensely, but there's pretty much no mundane subclass you could pair with a miscreant and wreck people at 8 days (unless you have access to heramide).
So, if they had picked artisan/mage-subclass - they'd be scary because they are elementalists? I'm not asking if every PC, NPC, and VNPC in the game world would respond appropriately to their existence, because we already know that's not true. I'm asking if the code of the elementalist sub-class itself would support the scariness attributed to the fact that they are elementalists.
If the answer is no, then the answer is no. No, elementalist subclasses are not in and of themselves scary in the way full elementalist classes were, whereas once upon a time, full elementalist guilds were scary. Even vivaduans - the so-called "healers" of the group - had the potential to be absolutely horrifying, without having any useful non-magick combat skills.
To me it's the same concern I had with trap being removed back in the day. Sure, you can now emote out that there's a trap on that door lock. But there's no actual damage done, no coded risk for failure, and no coded reward for success. When was the last time you saw anyone roleplay out a trapped lock? For me, the last time I saw it, was when there was an actual trap code.
A big chunk of "the thing that made Elemental main guilds scary" was removed from game play. Sure you can emote it out. But the code no longer supports it. The thing that made them scary was the way they were created to work in tangent with each other and in fact how every spell within a single mage's capacity was designed to work with/off every other spell in that single mage's capacity. Take away the fluff pieces, and you have a solid core of skills/spells that are designed to work with each other. If you remove one of those spells, you remove a HUGE part of why they are so scary.
This plus this plus this plus this = no need to pretend that theoretically according to the docs, this character can do horrible things to yours. It means they really CAN do horrible things to yours.
This plus this plus this - but not this = you're going to have to just pretend, because those horrible things cannot happen.