Condi builds: Condition damage main, vitality second, toughness third. Only one of these may be used per party in PvE due to condition capping.
Direct damage builds: Power and precision main, critical damage third. Precision is more important than power at very high levels of critdmg%, power is more important than precision before that; never exceed 73% critrate no matter what as a ranger Spotter adds 7%, a warrior banner adds 8%, and fury adds 20%. Going over 100% critrate is a waste. For this cause most builds that can maintain fury uptime and with critrate increasing traits do better with pure Berserker. Mesmers are a general exception to this as they do not have reliable fury and generally don’t have good critrate increasing traits, so Assassin works better. Some thief builds are also exceptions.
Tanking builds: Toughness first, power second, healing power or vitality third. Not of much use except at high level fractals, fail parties and World vs. World.
Healing builds: Healing power first, toughness second, power third. Not of much use except at high level fractals, fail parties and World vs World. Also, only the Ranger, Engineer and Guardian in specific builds can do this role – every other class doesn’t have good multipliers per unit time on AoE heals.
This is in general. Different builds have different build-specific stats. Some stat combinations are useless because those stats are never used together.
Most speedruns consist of multiple berserkers/assassins with one healer/tank. Failed runs usually consist of nothing but berserkers with bad players. Slow runs consist of multiple people with heal/survivability stats or more than one condition damager. Maxed runs consist of a dire ranger/rabid necro, 1-2 berserker warriors, 1 assassin mesmer, a celestial elementalist and a cleric guardian in the place of the second berserker warrior for especially difficult content – but this only works within elite groups, the kind that take WvW keeps and Orr Temples with a single party – chances are, you haven’t seen any. Attempting to find 4 players good enough to pull off a maxed run in a PuG is impossible; the most reliable bet to roll for speed in a PuG is a berserker warrior, and the most reliable bet to roll for non-wiping in a PuG is a celestial elementalist.
Or you can bring whichever combination would work best between the other 4 members of your PuG team and the dungeon characteristics, but you’d need to have multiple specialised 80s to pull that off. Stats are tied to weapon, utility skills, traits, runes and sigils; changing a trait build often changes the optimum gear combination.
If not min/maxing and just trying to get by, the simple answer for an above average build is ‘as many soldier pieces as you need to keep you alive and berserker in everything else’.
Rangers are mainly a condition class by the way. You’ll achieve meh performance with a full direct damage spec with the sword mainhand that you can use anywhere, or good performance with a full condition spec that you can only use if no other condition user is in the group.
… don’t use direct damage on the longbow or you’re going to have a bad time.
And lastly, the scepter’s autoattack on a mesmer is bad for direct damage. Its other skills are relatively good, but you’ll need a Sword mainhand in your alternate set; the scepter-inclusive set’s going to be used only for its other skills. The scepter’s main purpose is actually on condition clone explosion builds.
