I take back a bit of what I said in the original post about SPvP.
I got soooooo mind-numbingly bored of playing my warrior that I decided to try it out just for giggles and so far it's actually quite respectable. Changes made:
- Earth runes instead of Traveler, but still Water & Monk for boon duration despite being nerfed/weaker
- 10 trait points in air moved to earth and picking trait 5, Elemental Shielding (protection on aura activation)
- Non-Battle sigil is Sigil of Accuracy for the 5% crit, to compensate for losing precision from air traitline & gear
- Amulet is Settler but jewel is Barbarian - could probably fudge with another jewel but Barbarian gets you to 15k health which is a huge help in surviving burst DPSers, and the power+precision secondaries fill gaps in the stat loadout (the mere 75 precision is about 4% crit, and the build needs a certain level of crit for Renewing Stamina to proc perma-vigor)
The significantly shorter boon duration isn't as problematic as I was expecting. So far my biggest challenges are with decap engis, who're only problematic because they have so much blasted CC and Armor of Earth's stability is on such a long cooldown. The extra toughness from moving air points to earth helps keep roughly the same level of overall survivability though, plus the added protection duration from Earth runes.
In brief: definitely not "impossible" in SPvP, but viable with some tweaking :cheer: