Elemental Equilibrium

If you have ancestral bond, where you can't cause damage yourself, do you trigger EE if you say, use chain lighting, and try to use a searing bond?

No you have to actually deal some elemental damage for Elemental Equilibrium to do anything, so self casting Chain Lightning and the like wont apply the equilibrium debuff while having Ancestral Bond as it prevents you from dealing any damage yourself.

Searing Bond will never trigger Elemental Equilibrium under any circumstances since it only deals degeneration damage and degeneration damage doesn't hit and Elemental Equilibrium only takes effect on hits that deal elemental damage.

you can use traps or mines (or other totems) to trigger EE with AB. Searing bond deals damage over time which dont hit thus cannot trigger EE. Lightning trap with chain or ice nova trap would be the examples of good EE trigger trap (+ multiple traps).

Haha, see, Ludvator? :)

Damage does get mentioned, but it obviously doesn't get mentioned enough, 'hitting with damage' isn't a very intuitive concept and no other description in the game uses it.

:)

Oh, it's perfectly clear and intuitive to us, we've seen enough of their descriptions to notice when something is off.

But I've seen this asked way too many times, even by fairly experienced players, to confidently claim the description is even remotely good. Of course, Doomfletch and some others are in a league of their own, but EE is still pretty unfortunately worded.