Guild Wars 2

I have a Warrior and I’m thinking of making a Guardian mainly for WvWvW but I have huge concerns with the Ascended items.

Someone calculated that the difference with trinkets is 15% then weapons and now armour which i’m guessing are all accumulative (20-30% difference in stats all together ) from exotic means i’ll be months before I can even think about competing on an ‘even’ stat level in WvW.

Are my concerns justified?

Well you forgot about the Guard killer and Defense against Guard buffs. So until Wxp becomes account bound a little later down the road you’re also looking at facing people with 100 extra Power, Condition dmg and 250 more Vitality. So just level your Guard knowing you can’t compete on “even” ground for a good long while and don’t let it bother you if you can’t take on a fully geared fully stacked enemy in WvW. Sucks but that’s how it is I guess. I play five characters in WvW so I feel your pain.

Actually, no. Ascended gear is only 10% more powerful than exotics overall. While Ascended trinkets are 10% more powerful than exotic trinkets, the 10% increase is ONLY in regards to the trinkets. If you were looking at the stat increase overall if you used Ascended trinkets and exotic armor/weapons, versus full exotic, the overall increase would only be about 3.3%. When you get full Ascended armor and weapons, that’s when you get a 10% overall stat increase.

Even then, stats are not everything. In one WvW matchup, there was this enemy engineer who had Guard Killer and Defense Against Guards maxed out, and would thus kill guards for Guard Leech and Applied Fortitude, giving himself a stat advantage when he roamed. My friend (who had no stacks and was in exotics) noticed him harassing people and dueled him. Despite the stat disadvantage, he easily stomped the engineer and decided to wait by the camp the engineer used for stacks. He waited for the engi to come out (again, with full stacks) and beat him again.

By this point, he’d attracted a few other WvWers who were watching him camp the engi. Each of them 1v1ed the engi when he came out with stacks, and each of them won. They then decided to cut to the chase and intercepted the engi before he could kill any guards, at which point my friend 1v1ed him and absolutely melted him. Logically, the engi gave up after that.

The moral of this story is that stats cannot carry you. What ultimately matters in this game is how well you play- how well you watch your opponent, how creatively you use your environment, how well you use your skills. In zergs, the stats matter even less- what matters then is how well you coordinate with your commander for pulls, feints, pushes, and coordinated AoE/CC bombing.

“Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.” -Euripides. Go ahead and WvW, especially if you want to do group battles, and focus on improving your own skills rather than fretting about stats.