Is full out offensive a good tactic?

Hey, so I mostly play defensive play styles in games. I like not dying and will often pick the most defensive route. I might take longer to get there, but I'll get there in one piece.

That being said; sometimes you just want to blow a dude up. I already have 3 level 80's. Mesmer/Chronomancer (focused on support/cc) Necromancer/Reaper (Either condition, or power/minion build) and a Guardian/firebrand (condition, and tanky/healing builds)

I'm playing my elementalist now and am wondering if it's a good idea to stack all power/condition damage/precision on my gear? So far I've been playing a lot of water attunement with vitality and power gear.

I was thinking of; when I hit L80; making a fire attunement dps build, and was wondering if it's viable at all, or if I should still stack vitality in place of one of the above stats? Or should I stick to either condition damage, or power and stack Precision and ferocity?

Also, when I get there, is Tempest, or Weaver better for raw damage output? (I still want as much AoE as I can get)

You want power, precision and ferocity in majority of the pve as ele (maybe some vitality, but it shouldnt be your focus). Defense in gw2 (pve) can be rather worthless because active damage mitigating means that you can take 0 damage from enemy in literally any gear+trait combination. At that point it's pretty worthless to go with defense because you can just kill enemies while they arent able to damage you (since that damage mitigation isnt permanent).

As ele you have access to aoe blinds (glyph of storms), highest range melee weapon (dagger), elementals to pull aggro, aoe cc (staff), decent mobility for kiting (superspeed in air, lightning flash, a few dagger/staff skills), some decent defensive skills (arcane shield, armor of earth, mist form).

When it comes to open world I'd always suggest tempest over weaver in every situation where you can play solo. Specifically fresh air builds (any weapon combination, usually d/w, s/w or staff; focus if CC is needed) or burn tempest (d/w or s/w; focus for CC). It's easier to play than weaver, has easier access to defensive skills, has higher minimal range of effectiveness (tempest is mostly played mid range, weaver can vary from extremely close to target to staying at max range), has additional blinds+aoe cc on warhorn, has better aoe coverage (depending on weaver build it can be a very small or a very big difference) and the most importantly - it has easy access to stability and stun breaks, something that you really dont want to have in pve as utility skill but you need in many situations. Burn tempest is also pretty strong support for group events since it can provide offensive boons to a lot of allies.

Weaver is superior in other aspects such as doing raw damage when you're buffed (big group events) or when you're trying to solo some harder content (in which case you'll definitely need defensive gear, specifically healing power combined with condition damage because direct damage require 3 gear stats mentioned earlier while condition damage can be mostly done with just 1, celestial gear can also be decent) such as HoT group hero points and similar. Core ele with d/d and celestial gear also works great in second situation.

Generally, the most aoe damage and coverage will come from fresh air staff tempest, but in situations when you have allies around, staff weaver will be better in damage output. The most damaging ele build currently is sw/d weaver, but it has quite low aoe potential.

Well, should've specified a bit more about the game mode, but I will try to give a generalized answer. Point #1 for Open World PvE, Point #2 for Raids/Fractals, Point #3 for PvP/WvW.

1) In Open World: Tempest is mostly better than Weaver because it has better defensive capabilities and higher cleave from Air Overload and is better at stacking Might and some few other boons, also in solo content, Tempest makes use of Fresh Air better than a Weaver, which is a quite powerful buff, so if you're looking for bursting down weak mobs I would go for Tempest as it's faster with FA abuse, but as the fights gets longer, Weaver has better fluidity and is more preferable from my own POV. However, I would say play whichever specialization you like the most. I prefer Weaver and find Tempest boring in comparison though I know it's better when solo, but tbh, the difference isn't that much once you learn them both, but I would start on Tempest first since the dual attuning on Weaver is hard if the basics of the class aren't ok-ish-ly grasped. You can run Staff on either e-spec and although it's a slow weapon, once you know the tricks to playing it you will find things quite easy and even sometimes easier than other faster weapons... Staff is for the maximum AoE potential in terms of damage, cc, etc basically everything on staff is mostly AoE. Sword/dagger or sword/focus on Weaver; focus is more defensive, dagger has better mobility and damage. Scepter/warhorn or dagger/warhorn on Tempest, scepter is for more damage, and dagger is for better survivability. That's it for the most damage output in terms of weapons. You can run Fire-Air-X, Fire-Arcane-X or Air-Arcane-X, with Fire-Air-X being the highest in terms of damage (but make sure to not pick Fresh Air if you're playing staff weaver). Fire-Air-Arcane for core Ele... Staff for max damage, but feel free to try other weapon combinations. There is also a condition Weaver/Tempset build if you love playing condi builds, Sword/Focus ( https://snowcrows.com/raids/builds/elementalist/weaver/condition/ ), for Weaver. For condi tempest: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJBLhdSfJ00AW0AY2AQHBWEAM3W7st2GEAClHghYwOoIA-jxRFQBjUJYDV+5rHAQ/U/5F7PAgTAQ70DEAIBwNdT3UgUA6OaD-e

2) In High-End PvE: You go full glass when DPS and this the role that Ele shines at the most in PvE because the defensive/supportive capabilities to compete aren't there (yet), but they can still be played and they seem to somehow get slightly better the last few patches. Weaver is run as sword/dagger and is higher damage generally because now it's o longer solo content, Tempest scepter/wh has more burst but only on Large Hitboxes (because warhorn Air #5 can hit many times), yet after ~15s of the burst, Weaver will pull ahead. Better check snowcrows.com and discretize.eu for more information on build and rotations.

3) In PvP/WvW: Since stats are a bit limited in PvP, it's harder to play on the offense than defense because you can't stack some toughness/vitality/food/utility to balance it out, but if you ant the challenge then your best bet is Scepter/Focus Fresh Air core ele and also the same but in the Weaver variant. This is mostly a power-based build which focuses on bursting down your opponent when they can't block/invuln./etc. Weaver is mostly more bursty because of double Fresh Air procs, but it's harder. The burst rotation is mostly dual attack followed by instant double proc'ing Fresh Air then use Scepter 2 on Air, during this rotation you use Arcane Blast for more burst if you would like to go full offense, the faster you perform the rotation, the better it is, because opposing to most one shot build, FA sc/f weaver lacks sustain and runs out of moves pretty quickly once it's used it's burst and would need some to be ready to attack again. In WvW, this glass build is a bit more forgiving because you can customize your gear and food/utility to match your needs, yet it's still hard. However this build runs Air line, not Fire, because you will need ir for Fresh Air, Arcane for defense and Weaver line... maybe you can run Fire line instead of Weaver if you intend to play core Ele. You can also play as a DPS staff backline running Fire-Air-Weaver, Fire-Arcane-Weaver, or Fire-Air-Arcane if you do not have e-specs, but Weaver is more slippery and easier to reach out for more skills when needed.

Hope I have covered most points. Feel free to ask on anything and Good luck! The class is really fun to play.

For the tactic itself, yeah it's good. I like bursting more than stalling out for long and taking things slow. You kill other before they reach you, or you build defense and have a long duel. So the strategy is good if you can make use of the damage.

Zerk PvE weaver here. Playing full offensive is totally viable if you have a healer to back you up. That said, you will probably have to get used to using your endurance cautiously. Never use it as a movement tool, only for dodging things you wouldn't otherwise be able to dodge.

That said, while I do play full offensive in higher-tier fractals, in others areas of the game I usually switch Superior Elements to Master's Fortitude, and Signet of Fire to Signet of Earth. It effectively makes you around 50% harder to kill, and surprisingly doesn't reduce your DPS by a lot. I am more confortable playing this way and only go full offensive when I know I can trust my healer in group content.