Guild Wars 2

I’m sure this has been asked before, but can someone please either explain, or link me to a good discussion on the benefits of the three damage stats and how to balance them out? I’ve long since given up trying to use the search on here.

hmmm. i feel like that’s kind of tough. i can only speak from a Guardian’s perspective.. but these are usually my personal thresholds, unless if i’m going for any specialized build:

Attack: 3k (Power ~1,890)
Crit chance: 40% (Precision ~1,680)
Crit damage: 60%

and i strive to hit these stats as i feel it’s most “balanced” in this sense. and it works for me. in terms of thinking how much precision you can give up for power, or how much crit dmg needed for a certain amount of crit chance.. it’s tough. since the damage equation takes into account skill coefficients as well as your opponents / mobs armor as well, i feel it’s hard to do hard math.

Well there are a lot of those threads around somewhere, not sure which is the best I’ve read, a lot often seem to get bogged down in some faulty maths and/or assumptions or statements.

The most common issue I’ve seen lately in these threads is people often work on the basis that 21 power = 1% damage gain, which only works if your basing the base damage off of 2100 power at all times.

If your ok at maths and such I’d recommend grabbing the 2 formulas and trying to work it out for yourself, else I think: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Value-of-Precision/first#post1851776

was the latest discussion I saw about this.

Here’s my take, in simple terms:

Power = the amount of damage you can dish out, consistently

Crit Damage = the amount of additional damage (on top of what Power allowed you) you can dish out, base on your crit chance. The base crit damage is an additional of 50% damage added to what your Power allowed. Additional crit damage (due to stats, boons, etc.) is added on top of this 50%.

Crit chance = chance to produce Crit Damage

Precision = Increase your Crit chance.

So base on the above simple description, what you want to increase will base on how you want to play your profession, and what kind of build. For example:

If you don’t care about dishing out additional spike damage and are more interested in making sure you have consistently good damage, than focus on Power.

If you want to dish out good burst and spike damage, you want to have a good crit chance and crit damage. Bit when you focus on this two (three actually, since Precision come into play for crit chance) , know that your Power will suffer. The result: not-so-good consistent damage, but when you do crit, you do some really good damage. How often will that happen? Depend on your crit chance.

Exception: Glass Cannon Zerker build can pack all these stats: Power, Precision, Crit Damage. But their survivability is greatly compromised. This build is base on “kill-them first-before-getting-killed” philosophy. So for this build, there is no need to balance between the stats, just get all of them!

So how you balance, depend on how you want to play your profession.