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Speaking of, does anyone know of any charts that summarize all the different stat combinations for lvl 80 gear you can get? I can find ones for the god shrine armors or for crafting, but nothing that combines crafted, karma, dungeon, wuvwuv, etc all in one place.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Tried something different today and took my level 2 ranger to Southsun Cove to pick up a Juvenile Reef Drake. The waypoint is easy to get and there's a nice rock formation near the end of the shoreline by the drake cave where you can stand to be somewhat safe. Hard part is usually the two reef drakes and then the Broodmother guarding the entrance. Takes a few tries but its definately doable.
Okay, so for level 80 armor: is it better to get armor that boosts the stats provided for your trait lines, or that makes up for the stats you haven't invested traits in?
I understand already that many people have different armor for different situations (I, for one, have every intention of picking up a set of good MF gear, but that won't be my main adventuring set, nor will it necessarily be the same as what I wear into WuvWuv or dungeons) but I'm talking about your day-to-day "Whatever situation I get into, this is usually what I'll be wearing" set.
By the top thing I mean like... let's take my current Engineer build: 0/30/10/30/0
Would I want to get something that mostly boosts Precision, Condition Damage, and Vitality, or would I want to get something that mostly boosts Power, Toughness, and Critical Damage?
That depends. If you have a lot of precision but not a lot of critical damage, it makes sense to want to boost critical damage to make such a high precision worthwhile. It may not make sense to boost power if you don't have a lot of damage-dealing skills.
Take this with a grain of salt of course; I'm not an engineer!
But for example with my ele, I have 30/0/0/20/20 - that's +power, +condition damage, +healing power, and +vitality. Mainly, anyway. My equipment stats are Carrion (Power, Condition Damage, Vitality) and Cleric (Power, Healing Power, Toughness). I ignore precision and critical damage all together because they don't add much to my build, and I balance out Vitality and Toughness because each serve their own purpose.
It was discussed earlier in the thread, but Vitality vs Toughness is basically down to surviving conditions versus reducing incoming direct damage. It makes sense to balance between the two of them, but it also makes sense to go with more Toughness if you have a lot of condition-removing skills, or more Vitality if you have a lot of invulnerability/damage mitigation/blocking/endurance-increasing skills.
Because an ele has both condition removal and lots of immunity, I choose to go with both Vitality and Toughness on my equipment (4 pieces of Carrion armor and my chestpiece and pants are Cleric's).
It really is up to you. You can't miss with adding Vitality or Toughness to your build. It's just a question of adding both or one more than the other, and what other stat you want to boost alongside them.
What stats to buy, of course, is still not for new players to know.
generally speaking, any stat combo is going to help
the reason that it's not as "important" for lower-level players to know is because your trait tree is locked up until you hit level 60, which means you won't have a very synergistic build until then because your points will be spread over a broader range of trait paths.
So as long as you are accounting for what Kupi says above (don't boost Condition Damage if you don't deal Conditions), then anything with any stat boost is going to be useful. With an elementalist, literally ANY STAT is going to be useful.
Do not worry about your stats until you hit 60!
In fact, to my mind, it's almost better to have a diverse gear set as a still-leveling newbie. You won't over commit yourself and become a glass cannon that dies constantly, or be unable to deal enough damage quickly enough because you stacked only toughness. It'll give you a well rounded character that should get you through most situations until you're high enough level to have access to all your traits and skills and have enough experience to know how it is you'd like to play from there on out. It's also worth noting that you'll have to update your gear constantly anyway as you level, so it's not necessarily worth it to get attached. Not to mention that early on, gear only improves one stat instead of three, so it's easier to pigeonhole yourself into a problematic build.
That depends. If you have a lot of precision but not a lot of critical damage, it makes sense to want to boost critical damage to make such a high precision worthwhile. It may not make sense to boost power if you don't have a lot of damage-dealing skills.
Take this with a grain of salt of course; I'm not an engineer!
But for example with my ele, I have 30/0/0/20/20 - that's +power, +condition damage, +healing power, and +vitality. Mainly, anyway. My equipment stats are Carrion (Power, Condition Damage, Vitality) and Cleric (Power, Healing Power, Toughness). I ignore precision and critical damage all together because they don't add much to my build, and I balance out Vitality and Toughness because each serve their own purpose.
It was discussed earlier in the thread, but Vitality vs Toughness is basically down to surviving conditions versus reducing incoming direct damage. It makes sense to balance between the two of them, but it also makes sense to go with more Toughness if you have a lot of condition-removing skills, or more Vitality if you have a lot of invulnerability/damage mitigation/blocking/endurance-increasing skills.
Because an ele has both condition removal and lots of immunity, I choose to go with both Vitality and Toughness on my equipment (4 pieces of Carrion armor and my chestpiece and pants are Cleric's).
It really is up to you. You can't miss with adding Vitality or Toughness to your build. It's just a question of adding both or one more than the other, and what other stat you want to boost alongside them.
This is truth. One thing to note is that equipment/itemization makes up the majority of your stats. The stat boosts off of traits aren't insignificant, but they don't always feed into your build. Sometimes you just need that particular trait, right? So while it would be ideal if there's perfect synergy between traits and the bonuses off of the trait points themselves, where you want your build to go is really supported more by your gear than anything. So use your equipment to fill holes (not enough toughness/healing/what have you) and pump up what it is you're trying to accomplish (condition damage/precision/whatever). And definitely take a long hard look at your runes. Treat them like extra traits. The bonuses are nice, but it's the effects that are the real meat. And don't be afraid to mix and match. While the six-piece bonuses are frequently strong, you can stack up three two-piece bonuses of the same effect sometimes and end up with something more appropriate and focused for your build. For example, you could do 2 Air/2 Speed/2 of the Pack and get +60% swiftness duration, you know, if that's super important to you. And as Viv pointed out, outside of sPVP, there's a lot of room for granularity in stats for your gear. You don't have to do 100% berserker's. There's a lot of room to really fine tune your stats via gear.
OhtheVogonity on
Oh freddled gruntbuggly...thy micturations are to me/ As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee
On my engineer, I went for the AC set, which is Power/Toughness/Vitality and comes with some extra healing from the full set of runes of the monk. While it did boost my survivability, I also found I seem to get targeted more in dungeons, so keep that in mind
Okay, so for level 80 armor: is it better to get armor that boosts the stats provided for your trait lines, or that makes up for the stats you haven't invested traits in?
I understand already that many people have different armor for different situations (I, for one, have every intention of picking up a set of good MF gear, but that won't be my main adventuring set, nor will it necessarily be the same as what I wear into WuvWuv or dungeons) but I'm talking about your day-to-day "Whatever situation I get into, this is usually what I'll be wearing" set.
By the top thing I mean like... let's take my current Engineer build: 0/30/10/30/0
Would I want to get something that mostly boosts Precision, Condition Damage, and Vitality, or would I want to get something that mostly boosts Power, Toughness, and Critical Damage?
Honestly, those stat bonuses from traits don't really matter for gearing. Whatever build you take comes with those stats, essentially for free. Whatever stats your build needs to function, get those on your armour. If it doesn't line up with or balance out the trait line stats, who cares.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
The best stats are toughness, healing power and critical damage.
What stats to buy, of course, is still not for new players to know.
On lower level characters, Vitality is never a bad bet. And yeah, just keeping your gear up to snuff every 5/10 levels will make a bigger difference than any stat combination.
+1
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Vitality, toughness and power and you can just stand there and auto-attack everything.
So I've tested it for about a week now... windowed mode fixes the mouse camera panning issue. Typically I use windowed mode in MMOs anyway, but this one alt-tabs in and out of game so fast I never bothered. But I should have bothered, because that glitch is just game breaking at times.
The traits are more important than the stats, but if you can find some synergy between the traits your picking and the stats you desire, that's a bonus.
In otherwords, don't pick up crappy traits because you want that extra precision, but also consider that the value of a trait line in total is (Traits + Stats). If you have to make a choice, traits>stats as you can always gear for different stats, but the traits will define your character.
The best stats are toughness, healing power and critical damage.
And I can't tell if you're serious or not, but...
Toughness is also fantastic if you have a lot of ways to heal yourself, since it'll "doubl up" on giving you more effective hit points AND making your healing more effective per % of health.
Healing power, at least for Warriors and Guardians (the two classes I'm most familiar with) is by far the worse stat choice. It may be better for engineers or elementalists who can trait for more healing specific builds, although in my experience trying to be a pure healer isn't necessarily a fantastic choice in GW2.
Critical damage is only useful when combine with high precision, and it's generally better to not trade power for crit damage, as higher power will ultimately lend to more overall damage, since it will give you higher normal hits, which in turn gives you higher critical hits.
ironzerg on
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
The traits are more important than the stats, but if you can find some synergy between the traits your picking and the stats you desire, that's a bonus.
In otherwords, don't pick up crappy traits because you want that extra precision, but also consider that the value of a trait line in total is (Traits + Stats). If you have to make a choice, traits>stats as you can always gear for different stats, but the traits will define your character.
The best stats are toughness, healing power and critical damage.
And I can't tell if you're serious or not, but...
Toughness is also fantastic if you have a lot of ways to heal yourself, since it'll "doubl up" on giving you more effective hit points AND making your healing more effective per % of health.
Healing power, at least for Warriors and Guardians (the two classes I'm most familiar with) is by far the worse stat choice. It may be better for engineers or elementalists who can trait for more healing specific builds, although in my experience trying to be a pure healer isn't necessarily a fantastic choice in GW2.
Critical damage is only useful when combine with high precision, and it's generally better to not trade power for crit damage, as higher power will ultimately lend to more overall damage, since it will give you higher normal hits, which in turn gives you higher critical hits.
Healing power on guardians is good/great if you hit 900-1000 healing power and trait bunker or shouts. between cool downs, and shouts heal on boons, and aegis heals on removals, and all the other heals you can take a beating almost indefinitely. and the ability to splash the party with boons and regens is a massive help.
best part of it is @ only 900ish I have PLENTY of outer stats to make me have some pretty good offense as well. over 1000 sees DR and is overkill.
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
edited November 2012
ectos pushing 40. 40.
remember the days when we thought the market had finally normalized and it was safe. yeah.
Via reddit- how to break the harpies knockdown.
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
It's not how effective is healing power, it's the opportunity cost. Throw 600-700 more toughness on top of that (instead of healing power), and see where it gets you. Or power. Or precision.
Being able to take a beating indefinitely is likely overkill in PvE.
Okay, so for level 80 armor: is it better to get armor that boosts the stats provided for your trait lines, or that makes up for the stats you haven't invested traits in?
I understand already that many people have different armor for different situations (I, for one, have every intention of picking up a set of good MF gear, but that won't be my main adventuring set, nor will it necessarily be the same as what I wear into WuvWuv or dungeons) but I'm talking about your day-to-day "Whatever situation I get into, this is usually what I'll be wearing" set.
By the top thing I mean like... let's take my current Engineer build: 0/30/10/30/0
Would I want to get something that mostly boosts Precision, Condition Damage, and Vitality, or would I want to get something that mostly boosts Power, Toughness, and Critical Damage?
I know this has mostly been answered, but I thought I'd chime in anyways. Depending on class, it is the major and minor traits that are more important than the raw stats. Figure out what weapon/utility skills or playstyle you like the best, then figure out how to make those things better through traits (some classes have an easier time with this than others). The stats they come with are just a bonus. Then if you're still confused, get Power/vit/toughness as your starter set of gear. These three stats help every class and every build do more raw damage and become harder to kill.
Then after that you can start making decisions based on what you'd like to see differently in your stats. Not doing enough damage? Replace some vit/toughness with precision/crit damage. Want to do more condition damage? Replace some pow with condition damage, etc.
Keep in mind a lot of this depends on class. Some classes have other things to consider. For example, Elementalists have their class skill (attunement) cooldown shortened by putting points in arcane. Necro's class skill is also improved by their 5th line. Some classes like thief will generally always be relatively squishy compared to other classes, as much of their survivability is based on mobility and stealth, and therefore you might get better results over building glass cannon (since mobility or stealth is always available to you regardless of vit/toughness). Some classes will never have amazing spike damage, so you might get good results building tanky.
I found with my engineer that they could do some good damage from short to mid range, and have some of the best survivability utilities and traits in the game. A lot of them are early in trait lines as well (invis on immobilize, elixer s at 25%, elixer B at 75% etc) This means they can be pretty survivable with minimal points in vit/toughness. So for me, putting points in precision and power was a good choice, and then a decent mix between vit/toughness with your other stats gave me a build with good-high survivability, and very good damage.
It's not how effective is healing power, it's the opportunity cost. Throw 600-700 more toughness on top of that (instead of healing power), and see where it gets you. Or power. Or precision.
Being able to take a beating indefinitely is likely overkill in PvE.
But it is hilarious. Cleric's is great for guardians built for crazy healing; +healing is obvious, as is +toughness, and +power means you don't take forever to kill things. Mitigate 100% everything (in PvE) always. Solo champions every day.
I think it depends for healing power; direct heals seem to benefit way more than hots.
I run both my Guardian and Warrior in full Cleric + Sapphire sets with 2x Sup Monk, 2x Major Monk, and 2x Sup Water runes in tanky/shout builds and it works pretty fantastically. Other people don't really care if you aren't doing a ton of damage when they can just go balls to the wall and not worry about dodging everything, since they're getting fed a steady stream of heals.
I run my Ele in a support staff build in Dungeons, and she has no +healing on gear other than her staff and the the 300 from Water trait line. She's feeding out regen, condition removal and protection every 9 seconds or so though so idk.
I might be doing everything wrong, but it seems effective so far?
mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
edited November 2012
I have said it before and will say it again- 1) There is no wrong way to spec a guardian minus condition damage ever.
But in heal gear with a mace and traits your symbol heals 5k per tick-> 20k health in 5 seconds. thats huge.
Staff 4 is right behind it.
The numbers in the reddit thread only bear out that some of the heals are not as optimal- but they still work.
the thing is what aspect of the dang game? Pve in the overworld? Id not go +heals. Dungeon? not +heals? Wvwvw not fully traited heals? wouldnt go +heals. Fractals? ill take the heals Spvp bunker times? Heals
If you feel its wrong thats cool see number 1 again. Guardians are monsters in this game. they get nerfed every patch because of it. there is no wrong way sans cond dmg.
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
So on topic of stats: I hate Condition Damage. Hate it hate it hate it.
It probably has to do with the group I leveled my Ele with: Warrior, Thief, Engi & Guardian. Hooray I can put up burns and bleeds that don't stack independently from the other two burns and other two bleeds in the group. Now, because I'm still programmed from being in a heroic wow progression guild (clean for 11 months now) I do still have a full Exotic set of CD gear, and it's fantastic solo, but it just feels so crippled when even one other person overlaps. I've swapped to full Ruby/Berserker's for pretty much everything.
Is it better for Mesmers/Necros? I don't know what I'm doing with them yet really.
So on topic of stats: I hate Condition Damage. Hate it hate it hate it.
It probably has to do with the group I leveled my Ele with: Warrior, Thief, Engi & Guardian. Hooray I can put up burns and bleeds that don't stack independently from the other two burns and other two bleeds in the group. Now, because I'm still programmed from being in a heroic wow progression guild (clean for 11 months now) I do still have a full Exotic set of CD gear, and it's fantastic solo, but it just feels so crippled when even one other person overlaps. I've swapped to full Ruby/Berserker's for pretty much everything.
Is it better for Mesmers/Necros? I don't know what I'm doing with them yet really.
Cond damg is fantastic if you have access to all three conditions. a ranger with an Axe and torch and short-bow. Engineers and thieves. Even two conditions with fast access is pretty good.
Fire is the worst condition due to its stacking properties. Bleeding the best.
cant speak to ele's though and again- this entire conversation is broken by which phase of the game you come (pve, dungeons, fractals, wvw, spvp)
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
I remember hearing that condition damage only takes in consideration the highest damage source, so if you're not the highest in the group your personal contribution is lessened by that, but I don't know for sure.
So on topic of stats: I hate Condition Damage. Hate it hate it hate it.
It probably has to do with the group I leveled my Ele with: Warrior, Thief, Engi & Guardian. Hooray I can put up burns and bleeds that don't stack independently from the other two burns and other two bleeds in the group. Now, because I'm still programmed from being in a heroic wow progression guild (clean for 11 months now) I do still have a full Exotic set of CD gear, and it's fantastic solo, but it just feels so crippled when even one other person overlaps. I've swapped to full Ruby/Berserker's for pretty much everything.
Is it better for Mesmers/Necros? I don't know what I'm doing with them yet really.
I'd need to investigate, but I think the necro utilily Epidemic takes into account your condition damage when spreading conditions instead of just copying the instances applied to the primary target.
If so, +condition damage is really important for a conditions necro because you really should always be rolling with Epidemic unless you know you're only going to be fighting a solo mob.
If Epidemic doesn't take your condition damage into account, there is no real reason not to use it when fighting in a group against another group, even when you are not specced for conditions/corruptions because the copied conditions only depend upon other players' condition damage.
It's hard to point out the 'best' stats because there are so many different parts of the game: grinding in Orr, Wuvwuv, Spvp, dungeons, fractals, etc.
You'll probably want different sets of gear for different things. I really wish we could have two different trait setups and toggle between them at a button press. Charge me 3s or whatever each time I do it if you want. But my Orr farming traits are not the best traits for fractals.
Levelling up, condition damage is actually better than it might otherwise be because you'll largely be working solo/in a small group. My exotic orr farming set is, for example, carrion, because it's cheap and because as a soloing guardian my burns work just fine.
But then for wuvwuv or dungeons or fractals I have a different exotic set.
I'd say while levelling, stay away from +healing. You'll likely only have one real source of healing, your 6 skill, until you unlock better traits/utilities. Also don't get +crit damage unless you have lots of precision.
It's almost impossible to go wrong with power/precision/vitality in my experience, while levelling up. You want to kill stuff as fast as you can while having just enough HP /defensive tricks to survive.
I don't see why people say fire is bad. It's IIRC the damage of 5.5 stacks of bleeding, and at least for the ele, most skills that apply it either do it in addition to doing other things or have a very short casting time.
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
Burning is the worst as it stacks duration only.... So in a group setting if just 1 person has hirer condition damage than you all of your burning is moot as his will tick and yours will not. highest tick wins. So in a group setting this can be very very problematic for say a guardian who only has real access to burning- any points in condition damage are wasted unless you stunted very hard towards it.
Burning does have the best condition damage to actual DPS ratio- but the only 1 stack thing kills its usefullness in MANY NOT ALL settings. dps = 8 + (4 * Level) + (0.25 * Condition Damage) per second
poison is in the middle cond dmg to dps ratio wise and with the same stacking but it allso puts a 33% debuff on the heals the target can recieve. dps = 4 + Level + (0.1 * Condition Damage) per second
Bleeding stacks on top of itself up to 25 times, but has the worst cond dmg to dps ratio. Best for groups as you just pile it on. dps = 0.5 * Level + 0.05 * Condition Damage + 2.5 = per stack per second
Solo burning is very very powerful- but in any grouping scenario any +condition damage for just burning may be completely mooted by the mechanics. So its subjectively worse based on the fact that most things you do in this game are grouped.
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
+1
mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
edited November 2012
Double post wth.
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited November 2012
So, from a support perspective, going for condition duration instead of damage as a burn-enabled class might be the smarter way of burninating the country side? The burn stays on longer, so the actual condition damage people end up doing more damage, making shit die faster?
reVerse on
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
So, from a support perspective, going for condition duration instead of damage as a burn-enabled class might be the smarter way of burninating the country side? The burn stays on longer, so the actual condition damage people end up doing more damage, making shit die faster?
No. Your longer burn would still be over written by the stronger burn.
the game is flexible enough that if you are in a group with like a stacked fire ele and talked for a second about how you are built you can change up traits and armor on the fly to get around this.
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
0
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
So, from a support perspective, going for condition duration instead of damage as a burn-enabled class might be the smarter way of burninating the country side? The burn stays on longer, so the actual condition damage people end up doing more damage, making shit die faster?
No. Your longer burn would still be over written by the stronger burn.
So, from a support perspective, going for condition duration instead of damage as a burn-enabled class might be the smarter way of burninating the country side?
I dunno about that; in a group, guardians can easily tick burning for the entire life of the enemy with just a couple traits and one utility skill. If you go heavy into it, though, you can glass cannon against enemies poor at condition removal, since there are so many ways to spike >10s worth of burning damage as is.
If I were going to farm grenth, I'd go for condition damage, toughness, and healing power (apothecary set) because of how the spectrals work. Same with any other enemy that hits too hard for you to stay around for very long.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
+1
mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
So, from a support perspective, going for condition duration instead of damage as a burn-enabled class might be the smarter way of burninating the country side?
I dunno about that; in a group, guardians can easily tick burning for the entire life of the enemy with just a couple traits and one utility skill. If you go heavy into it, though, you can glass cannon against enemies poor at condition removal, since there are so many ways to spike >10s worth of burning damage as is.
If I were going to farm grenth, I'd go for condition damage, toughness, and healing power (apothecary set) because of how the spectrals work. Same with any other enemy that hits too hard for you to stay around for very long.
SMART stuff on the masterworks, boss. very smart stuff.
the issue will be you have a double random case of : 1) did you get a rare 2) does it sell well OR did i get an ecto?
I know what I'm doing at lunch
mojojoeo on
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
hey guys, did you know you can forge masterworks to rares
masterworks are 2s each, 20% chance to upgrade,
Same 20% chance to upgrade if you put 4 in the MF as rares have, right? So you'd need 4x5 20 masterworks (on average) which is ~40s which is more than most of the cheap rares go for.
Er, or was before the ecto price rise. I guess if rare prices lag behind ecto prices and masterwork prices lag behind that it gives you an alternate route to fulfilling ecto demand if you are speedy
Regarding greens to rares in the mystic forge, it's all about if you like gambling or not! It costs 8s to make 1 combine with masterworks. Thus, the average cost to make 1 rare, would be 32s. (1 in 5 chances, every failure gives you 1 more masterwork, thus, 4 failures gives you one more forge chance without buying 4 more masterwork items)
Likewise, when you assume 20% chance for rares to exotics, if the random rare costs you 20s (buy orders), it costs you 80s per combine and 3.2g to average 1 exotic.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
I tried the skill pattern mentioned earlier, and I love it. Even though my attunement recharge rate is crap right now.
So, traits. From what I've gathered, 20 into Arcane seems pretty standard, due to the attunement rate recharge. For the selectable traits, I was thinking Elemental Attunement, and... Windborne Dagger? (I'm d/d.)
Beyond that, I'm not sure what else to get. 15 in Water seems good for Soothing Mist and Healing Ripple. Zephyr's Speed in Air and Stone Flesh in Earth also seem worth picking up.
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Every prefix in the game, along with what it's on and from where.
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Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I understand already that many people have different armor for different situations (I, for one, have every intention of picking up a set of good MF gear, but that won't be my main adventuring set, nor will it necessarily be the same as what I wear into WuvWuv or dungeons) but I'm talking about your day-to-day "Whatever situation I get into, this is usually what I'll be wearing" set.
By the top thing I mean like... let's take my current Engineer build: 0/30/10/30/0
Would I want to get something that mostly boosts Precision, Condition Damage, and Vitality, or would I want to get something that mostly boosts Power, Toughness, and Critical Damage?
Take this with a grain of salt of course; I'm not an engineer!
But for example with my ele, I have 30/0/0/20/20 - that's +power, +condition damage, +healing power, and +vitality. Mainly, anyway. My equipment stats are Carrion (Power, Condition Damage, Vitality) and Cleric (Power, Healing Power, Toughness). I ignore precision and critical damage all together because they don't add much to my build, and I balance out Vitality and Toughness because each serve their own purpose.
It was discussed earlier in the thread, but Vitality vs Toughness is basically down to surviving conditions versus reducing incoming direct damage. It makes sense to balance between the two of them, but it also makes sense to go with more Toughness if you have a lot of condition-removing skills, or more Vitality if you have a lot of invulnerability/damage mitigation/blocking/endurance-increasing skills.
Because an ele has both condition removal and lots of immunity, I choose to go with both Vitality and Toughness on my equipment (4 pieces of Carrion armor and my chestpiece and pants are Cleric's).
It really is up to you. You can't miss with adding Vitality or Toughness to your build. It's just a question of adding both or one more than the other, and what other stat you want to boost alongside them.
In fact, to my mind, it's almost better to have a diverse gear set as a still-leveling newbie. You won't over commit yourself and become a glass cannon that dies constantly, or be unable to deal enough damage quickly enough because you stacked only toughness. It'll give you a well rounded character that should get you through most situations until you're high enough level to have access to all your traits and skills and have enough experience to know how it is you'd like to play from there on out. It's also worth noting that you'll have to update your gear constantly anyway as you level, so it's not necessarily worth it to get attached. Not to mention that early on, gear only improves one stat instead of three, so it's easier to pigeonhole yourself into a problematic build.
This is truth. One thing to note is that equipment/itemization makes up the majority of your stats. The stat boosts off of traits aren't insignificant, but they don't always feed into your build. Sometimes you just need that particular trait, right? So while it would be ideal if there's perfect synergy between traits and the bonuses off of the trait points themselves, where you want your build to go is really supported more by your gear than anything. So use your equipment to fill holes (not enough toughness/healing/what have you) and pump up what it is you're trying to accomplish (condition damage/precision/whatever). And definitely take a long hard look at your runes. Treat them like extra traits. The bonuses are nice, but it's the effects that are the real meat. And don't be afraid to mix and match. While the six-piece bonuses are frequently strong, you can stack up three two-piece bonuses of the same effect sometimes and end up with something more appropriate and focused for your build. For example, you could do 2 Air/2 Speed/2 of the Pack and get +60% swiftness duration, you know, if that's super important to you. And as Viv pointed out, outside of sPVP, there's a lot of room for granularity in stats for your gear. You don't have to do 100% berserker's. There's a lot of room to really fine tune your stats via gear.
Honestly, those stat bonuses from traits don't really matter for gearing. Whatever build you take comes with those stats, essentially for free. Whatever stats your build needs to function, get those on your armour. If it doesn't line up with or balance out the trait line stats, who cares.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In otherwords, don't pick up crappy traits because you want that extra precision, but also consider that the value of a trait line in total is (Traits + Stats). If you have to make a choice, traits>stats as you can always gear for different stats, but the traits will define your character.
And I can't tell if you're serious or not, but...
Toughness is also fantastic if you have a lot of ways to heal yourself, since it'll "doubl up" on giving you more effective hit points AND making your healing more effective per % of health.
Healing power, at least for Warriors and Guardians (the two classes I'm most familiar with) is by far the worse stat choice. It may be better for engineers or elementalists who can trait for more healing specific builds, although in my experience trying to be a pure healer isn't necessarily a fantastic choice in GW2.
Critical damage is only useful when combine with high precision, and it's generally better to not trade power for crit damage, as higher power will ultimately lend to more overall damage, since it will give you higher normal hits, which in turn gives you higher critical hits.
Healing power on guardians is good/great if you hit 900-1000 healing power and trait bunker or shouts. between cool downs, and shouts heal on boons, and aegis heals on removals, and all the other heals you can take a beating almost indefinitely. and the ability to splash the party with boons and regens is a massive help.
best part of it is @ only 900ish I have PLENTY of outer stats to make me have some pretty good offense as well. over 1000 sees DR and is overkill.
remember the days when we thought the market had finally normalized and it was safe. yeah.
Via reddit- how to break the harpies knockdown.
Being able to take a beating indefinitely is likely overkill in PvE.
EDIT: Numbers: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/122puj/guardian_values_for_various_healing_skills_based/
I know this has mostly been answered, but I thought I'd chime in anyways. Depending on class, it is the major and minor traits that are more important than the raw stats. Figure out what weapon/utility skills or playstyle you like the best, then figure out how to make those things better through traits (some classes have an easier time with this than others). The stats they come with are just a bonus. Then if you're still confused, get Power/vit/toughness as your starter set of gear. These three stats help every class and every build do more raw damage and become harder to kill.
Then after that you can start making decisions based on what you'd like to see differently in your stats. Not doing enough damage? Replace some vit/toughness with precision/crit damage. Want to do more condition damage? Replace some pow with condition damage, etc.
Keep in mind a lot of this depends on class. Some classes have other things to consider. For example, Elementalists have their class skill (attunement) cooldown shortened by putting points in arcane. Necro's class skill is also improved by their 5th line. Some classes like thief will generally always be relatively squishy compared to other classes, as much of their survivability is based on mobility and stealth, and therefore you might get better results over building glass cannon (since mobility or stealth is always available to you regardless of vit/toughness). Some classes will never have amazing spike damage, so you might get good results building tanky.
I found with my engineer that they could do some good damage from short to mid range, and have some of the best survivability utilities and traits in the game. A lot of them are early in trait lines as well (invis on immobilize, elixer s at 25%, elixer B at 75% etc) This means they can be pretty survivable with minimal points in vit/toughness. So for me, putting points in precision and power was a good choice, and then a decent mix between vit/toughness with your other stats gave me a build with good-high survivability, and very good damage.
But it is hilarious. Cleric's is great for guardians built for crazy healing; +healing is obvious, as is +toughness, and +power means you don't take forever to kill things. Mitigate 100% everything (in PvE) always. Solo champions every day.
I run both my Guardian and Warrior in full Cleric + Sapphire sets with 2x Sup Monk, 2x Major Monk, and 2x Sup Water runes in tanky/shout builds and it works pretty fantastically. Other people don't really care if you aren't doing a ton of damage when they can just go balls to the wall and not worry about dodging everything, since they're getting fed a steady stream of heals.
I run my Ele in a support staff build in Dungeons, and she has no +healing on gear other than her staff and the the 300 from Water trait line. She's feeding out regen, condition removal and protection every 9 seconds or so though so idk.
I might be doing everything wrong, but it seems effective so far?
Edit: I can spel and grammr pre-coffee, I swear.
But in heal gear with a mace and traits your symbol heals 5k per tick-> 20k health in 5 seconds. thats huge.
Staff 4 is right behind it.
The numbers in the reddit thread only bear out that some of the heals are not as optimal- but they still work.
the thing is what aspect of the dang game? Pve in the overworld? Id not go +heals. Dungeon? not +heals? Wvwvw not fully traited heals? wouldnt go +heals. Fractals? ill take the heals Spvp bunker times? Heals
If you feel its wrong thats cool see number 1 again. Guardians are monsters in this game. they get nerfed every patch because of it. there is no wrong way sans cond dmg.
It probably has to do with the group I leveled my Ele with: Warrior, Thief, Engi & Guardian. Hooray I can put up burns and bleeds that don't stack independently from the other two burns and other two bleeds in the group. Now, because I'm still programmed from being in a heroic wow progression guild (clean for 11 months now) I do still have a full Exotic set of CD gear, and it's fantastic solo, but it just feels so crippled when even one other person overlaps. I've swapped to full Ruby/Berserker's for pretty much everything.
Is it better for Mesmers/Necros? I don't know what I'm doing with them yet really.
Cond damg is fantastic if you have access to all three conditions. a ranger with an Axe and torch and short-bow. Engineers and thieves. Even two conditions with fast access is pretty good.
Fire is the worst condition due to its stacking properties. Bleeding the best.
cant speak to ele's though and again- this entire conversation is broken by which phase of the game you come (pve, dungeons, fractals, wvw, spvp)
I'd need to investigate, but I think the necro utilily Epidemic takes into account your condition damage when spreading conditions instead of just copying the instances applied to the primary target.
If so, +condition damage is really important for a conditions necro because you really should always be rolling with Epidemic unless you know you're only going to be fighting a solo mob.
If Epidemic doesn't take your condition damage into account, there is no real reason not to use it when fighting in a group against another group, even when you are not specced for conditions/corruptions because the copied conditions only depend upon other players' condition damage.
It's hard to point out the 'best' stats because there are so many different parts of the game: grinding in Orr, Wuvwuv, Spvp, dungeons, fractals, etc.
You'll probably want different sets of gear for different things. I really wish we could have two different trait setups and toggle between them at a button press. Charge me 3s or whatever each time I do it if you want. But my Orr farming traits are not the best traits for fractals.
Levelling up, condition damage is actually better than it might otherwise be because you'll largely be working solo/in a small group. My exotic orr farming set is, for example, carrion, because it's cheap and because as a soloing guardian my burns work just fine.
But then for wuvwuv or dungeons or fractals I have a different exotic set.
I'd say while levelling, stay away from +healing. You'll likely only have one real source of healing, your 6 skill, until you unlock better traits/utilities. Also don't get +crit damage unless you have lots of precision.
It's almost impossible to go wrong with power/precision/vitality in my experience, while levelling up. You want to kill stuff as fast as you can while having just enough HP /defensive tricks to survive.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Burning is the worst as it stacks duration only.... So in a group setting if just 1 person has hirer condition damage than you all of your burning is moot as his will tick and yours will not. highest tick wins. So in a group setting this can be very very problematic for say a guardian who only has real access to burning- any points in condition damage are wasted unless you stunted very hard towards it.
Burning does have the best condition damage to actual DPS ratio- but the only 1 stack thing kills its usefullness in MANY NOT ALL settings. dps = 8 + (4 * Level) + (0.25 * Condition Damage) per second
poison is in the middle cond dmg to dps ratio wise and with the same stacking but it allso puts a 33% debuff on the heals the target can recieve. dps = 4 + Level + (0.1 * Condition Damage) per second
Bleeding stacks on top of itself up to 25 times, but has the worst cond dmg to dps ratio. Best for groups as you just pile it on. dps = 0.5 * Level + 0.05 * Condition Damage + 2.5 = per stack per second
Solo burning is very very powerful- but in any grouping scenario any +condition damage for just burning may be completely mooted by the mechanics. So its subjectively worse based on the fact that most things you do in this game are grouped.
No. Your longer burn would still be over written by the stronger burn.
the game is flexible enough that if you are in a group with like a stacked fire ele and talked for a second about how you are built you can change up traits and armor on the fly to get around this.
Well that's just ridiculous.
masterworks are 2s each, 20% chance to upgrade,
I dunno about that; in a group, guardians can easily tick burning for the entire life of the enemy with just a couple traits and one utility skill. If you go heavy into it, though, you can glass cannon against enemies poor at condition removal, since there are so many ways to spike >10s worth of burning damage as is.
If I were going to farm grenth, I'd go for condition damage, toughness, and healing power (apothecary set) because of how the spectrals work. Same with any other enemy that hits too hard for you to stay around for very long.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
SMART stuff on the masterworks, boss. very smart stuff.
the issue will be you have a double random case of : 1) did you get a rare 2) does it sell well OR did i get an ecto?
I know what I'm doing at lunch
Same 20% chance to upgrade if you put 4 in the MF as rares have, right? So you'd need 4x5 20 masterworks (on average) which is ~40s which is more than most of the cheap rares go for.
Er, or was before the ecto price rise. I guess if rare prices lag behind ecto prices and masterwork prices lag behind that it gives you an alternate route to fulfilling ecto demand if you are speedy
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Likewise, when you assume 20% chance for rares to exotics, if the random rare costs you 20s (buy orders), it costs you 80s per combine and 3.2g to average 1 exotic.
You are a goddamn genius.
yours for just :
1 Eldritch Scroll
70 Mystic Coin
250 Glob of Ectoplasm
10 Orichalcum Ingot
I tried the skill pattern mentioned earlier, and I love it. Even though my attunement recharge rate is crap right now.
So, traits. From what I've gathered, 20 into Arcane seems pretty standard, due to the attunement rate recharge. For the selectable traits, I was thinking Elemental Attunement, and... Windborne Dagger? (I'm d/d.)
Beyond that, I'm not sure what else to get. 15 in Water seems good for Soothing Mist and Healing Ripple. Zephyr's Speed in Air and Stone Flesh in Earth also seem worth picking up.
Any suggestions?