Problem with celestial gears is the loss in power, where the “extra” stats in precision and crit dmg don’t help you as much as you’d like.
In a bunker setup, replacing some PVT gear with celestial gear is often both a survivability and DPS loss…though it isn’t immediately apparent until you crunch some numbers. Of course this isn’t ALWAYS the case and depends on your full stat setup.
The thing with stats though, is that they tend to be cumulative. For example, if you have more power, precision becomes better. If you have more toughness, healing power becomes better. So while what you’re saying may certainly be true for individual celestial pieces, the cumulative effect tends to get stronger the more you equip.
For example, for precision to add the same amount of damage as power, you’ll need 100% crit bonus, or 50% critical damage. The current celestial items grant 29% critical damage, and with most eles running 10 points in air, that’s 39% already. My prediction is that by the time the full celestial set is released, it will be best-in-slot for elementalists. Add in the condition damage, and you’ll far outperfom a bunker in terms of damage without giving up nearly as much defense as picking berserker trinkets would have.
The main thing to keep in mind though, is that picking celestial gear is mostly for those that don’t want to play either full bunker, or glass cannon. And for that, it simply out performs mixing full offensive and full defensive trinkets. With the elementalist making use of all the stats in any of their builds, it’s a very efficient choice.
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/
This isn’t a snarky reply, I just don’t feel like going back and loading everything up again, it takes a while.
It’s worth fiddling with to see what celestial gear does and doesn’t do when paired with other various gear types.
It’s iffy throwing in celestial gear with PVT and clerics gear. That’s where both dps and survivability losses can appear. If you want celestial to actually raise your damage more than PVT gear does, it seems that some choice berserker items are needed in the equation as well. Back slot being the best place to start with ascended backpieces offering 5% crit dmg vs 35 stats, the best tradeoff available atm on gear.
As for more celestial items being available later on where you could really load it up (and I’m not sure whether that actually works out, as your power would be very low, offseting the higher crit chance/damage to the point where the build would value more power by far the most) there’s also the possibility that ascended weapons/armor may not have celestial variants.
When considering bunker setups (or any setup really, but especially ones with hefty amounts of additional boon duration) there’s also might stacks to consider, fortunately the build calculator allows you to add stacks of might to your character so you can put down a reasonable average point as to where your character tends to be might wise.
From what I’ve seen, celestial items seem better used to add survivability to a glass cannon vs being used to add damage to a bunker, where bunkers can sometimes end up losing damage from celestial too. With heavy berserker setups that sub a few pieces of celestial in though, they’re able to maintain damage at a higher level subbing in 2 pieces of celestial vs 2 pieces of PVT gear.
It’s a neat toy and worth fiddling with. One thing it can’t really do for you is quantify how valuable the added condition damage is though. Lots of stuff to do on it, so you may well find combos of celestial gear that are viable which I didn’t.
really want to know what people think about getting free 441 stats points but spread in all ways, especially on elementalist
1:1 atm