Suggestion: Ascended Limited Stat Swap
Or, you could just experiment with different builds using exotic armor, since it’s pretty much dirt cheap. About the only expensive thing when experimenting with builds is sigils/runes, and even then you can usually find a cheaper alternative.
I’d say no for this. As calyx said, you can already experiment using cheaper gear. To be honest, by the time you can afford and craft ascended, you should already know what your primary builds are and craft your armor accordingly.
and style to turn them into craters and dust.” -Tonn
Number-crunching for ecto salvages – periodically updated
Just because you could experiment with different builds using cheaper gears doesn’t mean you should not be able to experiment with it on the higher tier. The gear stat on different tiers are also different. For example:
Here is the chart of various offense rating for 5/5/2/0/2 guardian build with different gear quality set up:
Full Ascended Berserker: 4693.1
Full Exotic Berserker: 4310.26
Full Rare Berserker: 3906.9
Full Masterwork Berserker: 3724.73
Full Ascended Soldier w/ Power infusion: 3341.76
Full Fine Berserker: 3148.45
Full Ascended Sentinel w/ Power infusion: 2945.68
Basic Berserker: 2403.54
What does the offense rating mean?
To find the total dps of one full 10.1 seconds for greatsword rotation done to a 2600 armor target, multiply the offense rating by the following appropriate coefficients:
Ascended: 7.656585, Exotic: 7.291157, Rare: 6.462854, Masterwork: 6.003459, Fine: 5.561465, Basic: 4.440819
The following is the total damage for the full greatsword rotation
Full Ascended Berserker: 35933 (100 %)
Full Exotic Berserker: 31426 (87.46 %)
Full Ascended Soldier w/ Power infusion: 25586 (71.21 %)
Full Rare Berserker: 25249 (70.27 %)
Full Ascended Sentinel w/ Power infusion: 22553 (62.77 %)
Full Masterwork Berserker: 22361 (62.23 %)
Full Fine Berserker: 17509 (48.73 %)
Basic Berserker: 10673 (29.70 %)
As you can see the calculation seems to imply exotic berserker is better than ascended soldier in both cases, however if you measure by power rating only even masterwork beserker is better than ascended soldier in term of damage. However when you take into account of full rotation. Ascended soldier actually beats Rare berserker and masterwork.
Just because you don’t want to experiment with it doesn’t mean other people don’t want to. The tier stats are different. Experimentation is not the same. And this is just pure damage calculation. There are people who would like to verify that these are correct (approximately) without having to creating several different sets.
What about condition dmg, healing, etc. There are those who wants to experiment with those as well.