Survivability play
Full zerk with Scholar runes is the meta. Basically, you shouldn’t get hit. There often is a druid healer to keep you alive and in Scholar bonus because you can’t realistically avoid everything. But it sounds like you get hit a lot more than you should.
I’m experimenting with using Valkyrie trinkets and armor to see how high I can get my health pool. So far I’m at just a little over 20k, and while I’ve noticed the drop in my dps over my ascended Beserker gear I wouldn’t say that it’s unmanageable. The biggest hit I’m taking is lower crits, but I expected this.
Mostly this is for those times when I don’t feel like playing dodgeball on top of whatever else I’m doing.
If you don’t want to bother making Valkyrie ascended armor you could try just swapping out your trinkets.
What weapons do you use? I started off dagger/warhorn, now I’m using staff for range/safety.
Dagger/Warhorn, Scepter/Warhorn and Staff are all viable. Staff is best for ranging, Scepter/Warhorn gives the biggest opening burst and Dagger/Warhorn has the simplest playstyle.
You can try marauders for more hp, and the dps loss is not that huge compared with valkyrie.
Also for open world pve you can swap one of your specs to earth, elemental shielding gives you protection everytime you get an aura and hardy conduit gives you better protection than the rest of the professions.
I try to use this for open world pve, is a D/Wh build for when i need more survival.
Thanks for input, I’ve tried the suggestions and it has helped. Ironically I’ve been doing much better going back to what I know. I’ve invested in Arcana and going for dodges (like thief) and surviving much longer. I know it’s not meta but it works for me know. Maybe, the other things will work after I’m more used to ele and have unlearned my thief playstyle.
This is me on my charr trying to cleanse: