MotherKitten.6795

4 reflects with aura on overload and Rebound. Used to be 5 before they ruined the grandmaster trait. 1v1 against a projectile heavy class these reflects are very powerful. Deadeye gives you that warning that your marked, dodge roll and push the shout for a reflect and hit rebound for another reflect when that times out. When idle I always camp earth for the reflect on Rebound.

If you dislike stacking you can also choose to play a class that is less prone to stacking. For example, I would assume that staff Elementalists are still pretty useful and let into squads but there are quite alot of situations where you do better playing one off the tag. Yes, inside towers I usually avoid following tag onto ramps and try to meteor enemy from ground.

Any ele with focus offhand has some pretty solid defense against projectiles, though. 6s area projectile denial, 3s reflect, 3s invuln, ranged interrupt, hard CC, and chill application. It's a very disruptive weapon against ranged opponents. Of course, it could always be more so. So why not tempest? But if you wanted to play core or weaver and you're worried about ranged attacks I wouldn't worry too much. Just run with focus offhand! I've never found the focus projectile skill even close to being as useful as the tempest reflects. You also lose a lot of damage from choosing focus over dagger. Eles tend to get into long 1v1 duels that usually end when you get a good fire grab or churning earth crit on the opponent. That is all gone with focus. The long knockdown from focus is mostly useful to keep people in place to eat a dragon's tooth from scepter. But the best was the old tempest trait that gave you an automatic reflect when health dipped under 90%. That made fighting deadeyes so easy. But anything good ele gets gets nerfed.

Tempes if for no other reason than the many reflects. This nerfs so many projectile based opponents.

I wish all conjured weapons were elite skills.

I like the eotm map, I wish they could find a way to make it busy again. Landscapes are what gw2 is best at imo.

No one I play with thinks alliances will ever happen.

They are always wanted in groups and good at pve. The basic problem is that if you spec to be tanky you do useless damage. All classes lose damage when tanky, but ele damage goes down to so little. It goes the other way too, if you build for damage your tankiness disappears. So if you build to have good damage you can't really take your eyes off the action for very long without dying. This is even in open world pve. Some people get tired of having to work so hard mentally to do things other classes do so easily. The return is you get versatility.

I don't think there is a good scepter build for wvw anymore. At one time it could work as a dueling type build built around burst damage but no longer. For groups larger than 15 you are probably hurting your own side if you don't use staff on ele. Maybe a condi clearing tempest would be useful, but I doubt it would be better than a damage dealing staff user. The damage from weaver is better than all other versions of staff ele. Weaver staff eles are still needed and wanted in wvw zergs, tho behind scourge/firebrand/scrapper. What I do is use all marauder gear with scholar runes and berserk+valk trinkets. Some people like arcane trait and feel with the damage buff from boons they come out ahead. I prefer fire and air as the other two traits. The choices within those trait lines are fairly obvious. If I am having trouble staying alive I will switch air for earth and take stone heart. This results in a two thirds reduction in power damage at the cost of a 30% reduction in your own power. You can dual attune to earth and fire and get the stone heart buff and still do damage with aoes, but the earth autoattack might as well be zero. Whenever possible I go back to fire and air trait lines. If want to be very tanky take melandru runes and stack condi duration reduction. Use the utility skill that reduces by 20%, use food for the same amount and with stone heart on top of that you should very rarely die. It should take a squad wipe to kill you. But your damage isn't very good like this. For utility I usually take the twist of fate, which is better than you think at first, mist form, and the barrier skill. Most staff eles use FGS for elite but I like the 20% damage reduction in earth from the weaver elite. When your second attunement is air and you take the air traitline your auto damage is highest. That is where most of your damage comes from. For 1v1 I still like d/d best even tho sword weaver is supposed to be the best at that. Maybe I just don't know sword weaver well enough. For havoc groups I like d/d/wh tempest. But for more than 15 people I don't see any reason to use anything other than staff weaver, preferably glass cannon build.