Guild Wars 2

should I get gear/upgrades the same as my traits, or should I increase other attributes instead to make up for them?
So, if my traits give me power and condition duration should I choose armor that adds to these or that add to something like vitality – to be more all-rounded?
noob question I know but there you go

Choose traits for the abilities they give.
Choose gear for the stats that compliment your way of playing and the abilities that you have chosen.

Example: you play heavy on condition damage, choose traits that apply conditions and abilities that increase condition duration and condition damage. The stats the lines give are of secondary importance. Build condition damage via gear, for example dire stats.

I don’t think it’s a noob question at all. Everyone has to think about it when putting a build together and I don’t think there’s a single right answer, it really depends on the build you’re making.

Some people want to make sure they’re putting as many points as possible into the same lines (min/maxing), and for that you do need your traits and gear to match. For example ‘glass cannon’ builds (or berserker/zerker after the prefix) use only power, precision and critical damage and generally people using these builds will put everything they can into just those lines.

Whereas other builds need a mix of stats and then it’s a bit more complicated. For example my new ranger build uses precision, critical damage, condition damage and toughness and there are no traits or gear that provide that so I had to do a bit of juggling.

As I said there’s no specific right way to do it but what I did was start by choosing the trait lines I wanted based on the bonuses they give, because you generally can’t get those from your gear. I tried to make them to stats where possible – if I was debating between two lines and one had the stats I wanted I’d go with that one.

Then I used gear to fill in the gaps and bring me up to the numbers I wanted. Which again could be a complete matching set of mix-and-match pieces and runes depending on what you want.

One sort-of exception to what I said earlier (that I’ve only just thought of) is that there are certain stats that only really work in pairs, so if you’re going to put points into one you really need to make sure you have points in the other as well.

The most obvious one is precision and critical damage. There’s no point building up your critical damage if you have so little precision that you rarely score critical hits because you wouldn’t get much use from all those points. It’s less of an issue the other way around (because even at 0 critical damage your critical hits still do 1.5x normal damage) but it’s still much better to build both or skip both.

Likewise it’s not worth pouring points into healing power if your vitality (and therefore health) is low enough that the base healing from your skills would bring you back up to maximum. (Unless of course your making a support build with AoE healing.)

You can use just one of these skills of course (I mentioned above making a build with some points in healing power and none in vitality) but you need to bear in mind that you won’t be getting the most from those points and they could probably be better spent elsewhere so you should probably have a good reason for doing it.

Henestly, it really depends on what your going for. Personally i try to mesh my gear a traits toward a focused goal on how I want said character to perform and function in various combat situations.

Thanks a lot guys!!

Just want to add that, while you’re investing into trait lines for the actual traits, you’re still gaining the stats that go along with them. So, for example, if you put 30pts into the power trait line (thus gaining 300 power), you can get away with substituting a piece or 2 of your power gear with some that’s got defensive stats without losing too much. Trait first, then access your gear. You may find that whilst traiting you’ve gained some stats you didn’t realize you had.