It has been quite a while since Wyvern so I apologize if I mixed some things up.
To begin with, Fire/water/life etc are popular for good reasons. Assuming that you aren't planning to become some sort of support/resist mage, they are pretty much the best way to blow things up as a mage. I imagine that even if we're forced into specializing all that will happen is that people will decide to switch their second element to something else. Such as death to improve DB or air for its handy spells. It's not as if it's never been done before, it's simply not popular.
If you ask me the reason why earth/spirit/mind/air isn't trained much is simply because there's not enough merits in doing so. To begin with, if you want to train without partying (mind you, partying is still far from popular because of the past this game had) you're definitely going to need some sort of weapon or skill to kill things with. That's still fine but climb a few levels and things become comedic.
Sandstorming things to death? Fearing things until they hopefully walk into a trap somewhere and die? Good luck.
Spirit flat out has no offensive as far as I remember and air is the closest you'll get to something being decent. But even then, decent doesn't mean it's practical as your options are essentially to lightning bolt (and I'm sure we all know how effective that is against tough enemies) or thunderstorm. Unlike firespray/icestorm and the sort, thunderstorm is far from spammable without zapping a hole in your pocket.
Finally, deciding to give up casting magic at all and smashing things to death goes against the principles of being a mage and being forced to do that would be a joke.
The final answer? The easiest way to go is to train at least one offensive element or throw out all ideas of being a support until you're "done" training and only after that, retrain into support.
For as long as there isn't a method to effectively train support characters, offensive builds like fire/water will be the most popular unless the user is a masochist. I'm pretty sure it's much easier to train up as fire/water and then retrain after. It might cost a fair amount of cash but probably beats training up the hard way.
Moving on, now we come to talking about the elements themselves.
I believe that balancing mage guild is going to be a fairly rough ride. The balancing at the moment is basically based off the current mage guild. Changes to the mage guild means the balance will be upset and we're starting from scratch.
Although I reckon wizards have ideas of their own, I have some time so I guess I'll go on with some rambling.
The natural conclusion you'd come to when changing mage guild to act more like a guild is to offer specializations. Whether or not mandatory is up to debate but anyway.
Most of the obvious problems seem to have already been pointed out so I'll skip those and go to another point. One worrisome issue regarding changing mage guild is that, mages already sit on a delicate position with skill points. In fact, delicate is wrong, unless they specialize in a single element they will direly need skill points.
Hopefully we'll dodge a bullet and wizards know that it's not a great idea to do something along the lines of "+10 fire and -5 on all other elements". Depending on the result of balancing however, either not much changes will happen at all (such as we'll simply get +5 on all elements and call it a day) or mages will be forced to adapt to another revolution. Much like when they were forced to give up on ball spells as main offense. For specifics we'll have to wait and see.
Personally I think rather than specializing in one element, it would probably be better to just have mage bonuses that specialize in several if not duo elements. This is simply because it's more or less unheard of for a mage at this point to not put a few points spread out into several elements to reap bonuses.
Specializing in single elements works just fine as well but as mentioned before, it's fairly easy to abuse the system without proper measures in place. Such as the point that people who don't want to change their build can just go and specialize in life, reap additional resist time and resists for little penalties, the worst part is probably just that you'll have a weak dragon breath.
That said, it's just an idea. Probably plenty of flaws as well but I have neither the time nor motivation to work out the details. In any case I'm out of time now so I'm ending the post here.
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