Guild Wars 2

… does anyone think full Assassin’s gear might outdo zerk in PvE now?

I know the general rule has always been ‘zerk is slightly higher dps but certain builds benefit from more frequent crits’ but now if you have the air spec equipped you’d get extra ferocity to boot, not to mention extra vuln from Weak Spot.

I haven’t quite gone over the math yet, but I think sin’’s might be a touch better than zerk now.

Well just looking at the stat differences you’re trading 548 Power for ~14% crit damage or basically trading 20% of your power for 14% more crit damage.
Both builds will reach 100% crit chance in parties but the Berserker Ele will have more overall damage than the assassin’s ele due to the greater power base, which is in part due to the fact that all of the damage mod’s on Ele scale off of power and they do nothing to crit damage which is it’s own separate set of damage.

hm… i rarely see dungeon groups maxing out crit chance, but that would still be a good point if i was in a more optimized group. i have a couple friends who we then fill out the party with pugs and none of them main a warrior or ranger or anything else that buffs crit chance outside of fury.

also if i’m not mistaken the ele’s damage buffs would stack exactly the same with either set up a +10% modifier would still increase dps by 10% regardless of how that base damge is working.

1.1*(power+power*crit chance*crit damage) would still multiply the damage by 1.1

tl;dr: i disagree with your second point, but your first point makes the argument boil down to how much crit chance you are getting from the party.

EDIT: friend of mine just pointed out that the dungeon we do most often is AC and that full assassin gear would prevent me from killing graveling mounds in one ice storm since you can’t crit objects like those for some reason. a slightly circumstantial point, but when the difference between either stat set is so small it becomes a pretty big deal.