Guild Wars 2

I’m curious if anyone else does this too, and what other people’s “solutions” might look like.

So, occasionally when bored/unable to sleep, I like to treat ascended equipment as an account-wide brain teaser that can be solved. By which I mean, I have 9 characters (one of each) at level 80, since ascended equipment is account bound, how can I equip them all in such a way that I allow each of them to be able to cover 3 distinct roles in all areas of the game (ie. by swapping armour sets with another character in the same weight category, sharing ascended weapons, and having the minimum pool of communal trinkets).

General points to take into consideration:
Some people take offence to you having survival stats in endgame pve content.
Survival stats are often necessary in wvw.
There are more than 3 distinct roles available through gw2 stat selection.
Runes/sigils might have to be lost in equipment transition from one character to another in favour of different ones.

Personal points I take into consideration: (you don’t have to)
I don’t like condition damage that isn’t backed up by at least a little power.
I shy away from vitality on weapons since I don’t know how it works when you weapon swap from a set with vitality to one without and vice versa during combat.
I still don’t really know some professions that well (ele, engi, thief)
Armour is the most important one to “get right” since it’s expensive and takes up a lot of inventory space to have everyone having backup exotic sets. On that note having one backup ascended set per weight category if it covers a 4th role might be acceptable.

I’m nowhere near having this amount of ascended stuff in game, but as a brain teaser it’s certainly been managing to tease my brain, and now I’m curious if there actually is a good solution anyone else can come up with.

Well, it all depends on the roles you want to play:
Here is my ‘solution’ for 3 Roles (power-dps, condi-dps and heal):
3 Sets with Berserkerstats and scholar-rune, trinkets and weapons berserker too.
You need the following wapons (in case you want to play various different bersi-builds in PvE and be ready for nearly any situation that may arrise):
Greatsword (Warrior, Mesmer, Reaper, Guardian) Force+air
Staff (Ele, Thief) Force+air
Hammer (Guard, Engi, Rev) Force+air
Sword (Thief, Guard, Rev, Mes, Ranger) Force
offhand sword (Mes, Rev, War) air
Pistol (Engi) Force
Offhand Pistol (Thief, mes) air
Shield (Mes, Engi) air
Scepter (Guard, Ele) force
Focus (Ele, Guard, Mes, Reaper) air
Dagger (Ele, Thief, Reaper) force
Offhand-Dagger (Thief, Ele) air
Axe (War, Reaper, Ranger) Force
Offhand-Axe (Ranger, Warr) Air
…
Variations could be using strength-runes instead of scholar at least for the heavy ones, as rev and warr are mostly used for their support.
If you play dungeonheavy you may even consider night-sigills and an sigillslot for specific enemys, instead of the air-sigil for everything.

Condi is mostly the same, but instead of bersi-stats you use viper(and aristocrat-runes i believe), and the main-weapons are different per class and not every class has a good condi-build, but as you want to use every class anyway you probably have to get every weapon anyway too.

For the last role you could go tanky or healing, as you mentioned wvw i guess you want both, so that leaves you with either nomad or magi. Zealot would be for the pve-healing. As i don’t have a lot of knowledge about this role, and far less on the viability of the different classes for that, i would probably go something like that:
Soldier/Nomad for the heavy classes, as they don’t have good groupheales i believe, and can go frontline in wvw with this.
Zealot/Magi for the lether-wearer, as the druid is the best healer and even used in pve for this role, and thief and engi either have range for wvw or are roamer by nature, so that you don’t need really need another gear then condi or bersi for them in wvw, i think.
For the magic-users its a bit trickier, as there third roles could be really different, ele with Zealot for healing, or clerics to be tanky and part of the frontline in wvw(?), wereas Necro would probably profit more from cleric or soldier-gear for the frontline, as in the backline he can use condi or Bersistats (like the ele too). And Mesmer has probably no place in the wvw-frontline and as a backline he is more support, so clerics overall? I again don’t know much about wvw, but that would be my guess.

All of this naturally depends strongly on what you play, which roles you see and how good a player you are. If you don’t survive in bersi-stats, scholarrunes are a moot point. If you really plan on doing it, i advise you to think about each class, which roles you want to play with it, which weapons and stats would be perfect, which acceptable and then look for similarities between weapons and stats, as well as between armor-weight.

Maybe you will find that you only want to play as an example, as a bersi-thief, therefore you ranger and engi have a bit more freedom for the other two roles.

Warrior, Guardian, and Revenant all include power/DPS roles: you can outfit all of them with a single set of zerker + scholar (or strength) runes.

It’s more complicated for the other two armor weights, depending on the content that interests you. Ascended matters for T3-4 fractals, but isn’t required for WvW, open world, and (arguably) raids; understanding the mechanics/encounters matters more.

Consequently, I use Ascended just for fractal builds and exotics for the rest.

Personally, to solve the “survivability” problem I use ascended trinkets. They’re cheap (relatively speaking), can add a lot of “meat” to your character (not as much as a full Soldier/Dire set of course) and obviously they don’t require you to swap runes or sigils about.

As for weapons and armour Artemi.1437’s post is great and is pretty much what you need to do, IMO (I don’t think I’d personally bother with the tanky stats but that’s because I don’t roam/raid).

Thanks to all who replied, especially @Artemi for taking the time to write that post.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Warrior, Guardian, and Revenant all include power/DPS roles: you can outfit all of them with a single set of zerker + scholar (or strength) runes.

It’s more complicated for the other two armor weights, depending on the content that interests you. Ascended matters for T3-4 fractals, but isn’t required for WvW, open world, and (arguably) raids; understanding the mechanics/encounters matters more.

Consequently, I use Ascended just for fractal builds and exotics for the rest.

Ah yeah I realise it’s not needed, it’s more coming from a place of wanting multiple build options for my characters, that gives enough of a nod towards profession optimisation to satisfy, without each of my characters needing to have multiple exotic equipment sets cluttering up their inventory space.
It’d probably be cheaper to just buy them all more bags than to create this much ascended armour but still.

More of a thought exercise for when insomnia kicks in than an actual end goal for my account but it wouldn’t hurt to actually find a solution I liked and could aim towards either hehe.

Berserker makes the most sense for power damage alright, though marauder for the armour is tempting to make it slightly easier to bulk up a bit with it via trinkets for surviving a bit longer in WvW (thanks @Pifil) (the higher precision making up for a potential lack of precision on trinkets)
In saying that I’m not sure how or if 1/3rd marauder would hurt overall performance (or acceptance rates of pugs) in raids/fractals.

No matter how much I look at it and want to differentiate between the weight categories, I think Artemi is also probably right about Viper too. Definitely for the medium classes anyway, (who all seem to have good power coefficients on their condi sets) and while I haven’t dabbled in condi with mesmer yet I know that my necromancer would enjoy that +duration in PvE at least.
Which is a bit of a pity since there are so many condi prefixes available in the game,
but having Viper on the armour (and either weapons or some trinkets, whichever is easier to normalise across characters) would allow for going either full glass or part bulk depending on the content, and even in bulk scenarios, “only” +20-25%ish condi duration is still very tempting.

Not fully convinced for the heavy armour professions that Viper would be the theoretical way to go though.
Warriors I feel would benefit from it nicely but since guardians only really have burning they might do better from raw stats over +dur?
Revenants pretty much have to be hybrid damage dealers if they want to deal in conditions (a point in Viper’s favour) but I also feel like they’d need good bulk since their only condition weapon set is melee.

Then it comes to the tricky problem children of the last slots.

Zealot is a really good call that I’d completely overlooked so thanks for that. Especially for the medium professions.
It would mean a raid druid would be a distinct possibility without having to dedicate an armour set to that sole purpose (ie no Magi armour) as it’d do better than magi for Engi and potentially allow for a bit of fun spent as Dr McNinja.

The other option is if I wanted to dabble in condi while healing the way that Engi and Ranger seem perfectly capable of doing.
Then the only real choice is celestial, due to my dislike of having no power to back condis up. But that rules out a raiding druid should I ever want that.

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk in favour of +boon duration on mesmer, so that would probably mean Commander armour if the whole +40%ish boon duration from stats was needed, if +20-25%ish was fine however then could cover that with trinkets/weapons instead.
Outside of might stacking, boon duration seems a bit of a waste on necromancer, and it’s pretty much the same build as the berserker one but… less satisfying.
The benefit for elementalist as always remains a mystery to me haha!

I’m determined that a ventari revenant will see some play from me in WvW, however unoptimal, so Cleric is probably the way to go with the heavy armour too since a supporty warrior or guardian are both possible with it (those shout runes the warrior uses being the only downside to that plan). Again celestial raises it’s jack of all trades head though. And I know boon duration is a thing to care about for supporty revenants/guardians too but minstrel armour is far too niche for my tastes, I wouldn’t like to have to rely entirely on people around me for doing more than tickling an enemy or boring them to death.

*Edit: Jesus I write too much.

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk in favour of +boon duration on mesmer, so that would probably mean Commander armour if the whole +40%ish boon duration from stats was needed, if +20-25%ish was fine however then could cover that with trinkets/weapons instead.

The meta has just one part with boon duration (legs if you look at the guide from qt, but one ring+one accesoire are possible too and bring you exactly at 100% boon duration with all other buffs). The costly part here is the sigill on the mainhandsword (+33% boon duration after weapon change for 7 seconds, every 9 seconds!) and the commander-runes, which give 30% boon duration and are a big pain to get. The rest would be berserker.
Elementalist can be btw. a good boon-bot (regen, speed, might, fury, protection, stability, vigor), if build for it, so it would also benefit from boon-duration.

About a condibuild for the guard: I doubt that this will be effective, even if you use sinsiter over viper, as guard only has burning. So i wouldn’t compromise the good condibuilds of War and Rev for a lackluster build for the guardian. And even if a condibuild profits more from sinister then viper, its often only a rather small differnce.

With the last set you have to make up your mind about the roles you want to play, here the classes really begin to be diverse, but thats a good thing in my book