Guild Wars 2

So I’m looking at GW2 again after about a year and a half, and I figured I’d start working towards some ascended armor. Given how expensive it is, I don’t want to make a quick decision, and the game may have changed a lot over the months so I’m wondering- what seems to be the best overall stat scheme for WvW/PvE?

As far as trinkets go, I have a full set of zerker trinkets, and a decent amount of celestial ones, and any type is easy enough to get. So overall, there are sets with some concerns in each one.

1)I know zerker is great for PvE, so it’s worth considering, but I’m worried about how it stands up in WvW.
2) Is full celestial a good/better WvW option (I could switch to zerk trinkets for pve)? 3)The last option would be PVT since that was the WvW staple when I left, but I’m hesitant to choose this because of the lack of raw damage that always seems to be in high demand.

Some profession can find a way to have the same armor in PvE and WvW if they are roaming. But for an Elementalist, that’s not really possible.

Roaming with an elementalist will need a mix of knight and celestial
Zerging with an elementalist will need a mix of zerker and soldier
PvE with an elementalist will need full zerker

But now that I think about it there could be a solution for you. You could take a full zerker armor with superior rune of strength. When you PvE you take a full zerker trinkets and when you WvW zerg you replace 2 rings and your amulet to soldier. It will give you around the same stats as soldier armor + zerker trinkets.

If you want to roam on the other end, you will need two armor. Choice which mode you want to play more PvE or Roaming? Make your ascended armor for the mode you prefer and keep an exotic armor for the other mode.

Always pick berserker for ascended if you’re going to craft it, for almost every class.

Celestial is underperforming in PvE and as you become a better player over time every stat combo besides berserker will progressively become less and less useful.

Some players will say “anything can work in PvE” but the exact same argument can be made for both PvP and WvW. Everything can work in all game modes.

Now the real question is, does efficiency/optimizing your gameplay matter to you? If so, pick the smart choice.

The difference in attributes from exotic to ascended ARMOR is very, very small btw. It’s a huge price for little gain.

For one, I wouldn’t make Ascended anything but weapons right now. Weapons are usually pretty useful and unless them somehow dismantle the Power build meta, Berserker weapons are always going to be useful no matter what. I just don’t see them doing this so they are safe bets to build.

Armor on the other hand can shift constantly. They’re already talking about changing up encounter mechanics for HOT where stacking and bursting boss down with maximum DPS isn’t going to be viable. Or in their words, it’s due to “bad encounter design.” So whether or not that will really continue to work you don’t know. There’s also the matter of specializations. You may find that after investing 500g in Ascended armor you’re now going to play the new Guardian specialization and well that’s all wasted now isn’kitten

As for the actual gear…

There’s lots of ways to mix and match gear. A lot of it comes down to spec. I almost always have 6 points in Air so I always have maximum Precision and Ferocity from just specing into that line. This is because Lightning Rod is awesome in WvW and Fresh Air is awesome at just about anything else Lightning Rod isn’t awesome at.

With that in mind, I always run PVT (Soldiers) armor. The high power base doesn’t detract much from PvE dungeons or fractals and the extra Vit/Tough is largely needed for self survivability in WvW. I run Strength runes as well because I S/D and D/D a lot and occasionally spec into 6 Fire for the extra might as Staff for event farm otherwise I’d be running Pack.

What I instead swap out is jewelry. I use Ascended Berserker Jewelry and Weapons which in turn make up all the stat deficiencies I have. Even compared to someone who is 66020 with full Zerker gear, when I spec similar I am only missing out on a very minor amount of crit and ferocity (talking a few % here) and if someone is gonna bust my chops for that then I usually don’t got time for them. Conversely for WvW I have Knight Jewelry (Emeralds) with Celestial (Charged Quartz) gems socketed in. That gives me a colossal boost in survivability for zerg or solo roaming.

Works great, never have problems, and doesn’t take up huge inventory cause it’s 5 jewelry pieces that I swap back and forth.

Don’t make it.

I made a set and it is my only regret.

Invest the money and time into getting a legendary. You can swap the stats at will making it a worthwhile investment.

Until Anet applies the same feature to ascended armor and weapons, it’s just not worth it to create it.

I don’t understand why they haven’t. They have given us the ability to switch traits at will and play different builds, but this doesn’t amount to anything outside of sPvP, because our gear choices lock us into a particular set of stats which is optimized for a certain style of play.

You’ll spend all that time and cash into crafting one particular set of gear and unless you intend to play WvW or PvE exclusively, whatever you choose will end up being deficient in one or the other.

Or you build according to the current meta for whatever area of the game you want to focus on and in HoT, it ends up being worthless when they make some tweak to game mechanics.

All for a marginal stat increase and some minor bonuses that will amount to nothing when you venture into a non-80 zone and get downleveled.

The only reason it is necessary if you are going to do very high level fractals. Even then, if you get ascended accessories, which you will naturally get by playing the game, they give enough AR to do up to level 20 fractals.

With all that said, if you still want to craft it, what I did is craft celestial armor and I have a collection of berserker and knights trinkets I swap out based on whether I feel I need more dps and toughness.

But, probably, the best approach is to craft zerker armor and then have a collection of accessories you can rotate in for whether you are playing PvE or WvW.

You should ask yourself which game mode you’re playing most often.

I would just go for it. If you can’t wait and want to give ‘the last finishing touch’ to your charackter.
The overall damage increase of acended over exotic is minimal and can be only recognised when playing at the cap. I would recommend crafting weapons first. They’re way cheaper to get and the higher damage you’re dealing is recognisable.

For fractals. You can easily reach 50+ AR resistance by just having trinkets. So acended armor isn’t really necessary.
As far as I can recall it’ even possible to get to 70 AR by just having trinkets and your weapons equipped with infusions.

So I think crafting acended armor can be – somehow a goal to work to, until the expansion gets around. And at the moment the expansion won’t be around tomorrow.
So the gold/matts spent can be regained until the expansion airs.
Acended gear is the best gear obtainable at the moment and this fact won’t change in the future.

For WvW. Solo roaming – won’t be easy with zerk armor but it’s not impossible. Changing trinkets should be considered when going WvW.

I would just think about what you’re playing at the moment mostly and what’s pretty likely to be played in near/far future.

Best wishes

MadRabbit.3179:

Don’t make it.
I made a set and it is my only regret.

All for a marginal stat increase and some minor bonuses that will amount to nothing when you venture into a non-80 zone and get downleveled.

This is pretty much the main reason why i don’t make ascended gear, i would rather have two-three sets of exotic 80ties for WvW and PvE that i can swap at will, than heavily invest into one set.

Ascended gear is really not that great stat wise, the increase is marginal and you won’t be feeling it, but the effort to make those, is substantially harder and costly, compared to just making a 20g exotic set of your wishes.

I only made one full Berserker Ascended set for lvl 50 fractals, otherwise it’s not very useful to make IMO stats wise as it’s a very tiny bit boost to exotic stats

I don’t really pve, and mainly play WvW. I love the balance of full celestial armor/weapon/trinkets as subjectively I feel like it gives me the perfect balance between damage and survivability. That’s just my subjective feeling however, as I don’t regret having done the time sink for the set.

Personally, WvW is my favorite game mode (roaming) so I base everything else around that. So I would recommend celestial for sure.

Just some personal observations:

1. The PvE meta will change with HoT most likely.
2. The Elementalist even now makes good use of most stats.
3. Highly likely that stats other than Zerk will see more use as the game goes on.

Given that, the most obvious solution for an Ele is to craft ascended Celestial armor, plop the meta runes into it, craft Legendary weapons (to switch stats on the fly) and pick up a collection of ascended trinkets with various stats.

You mix and match what you need, using Celestial armor as your foundation. Specializations might see the Elementalist becoming on par with Necros for condition damage, or a change up in how condis are handled might see a better use than power for certain builds.

But given that you can acquire ascended rings from Fractals (enough to fill a bank after a couple of weeks), accessories from guild commendations and amulets relatively cheaply, they’re the most obvious area to shore up a build. Have a Zerk trinket set for PvE, and a Knight’s/Nomad’s/Soldier’s set(s) for WvW, and if you can afford a couple of different weapons or a Legendary or two, you should be all set for both modes.

I mean after all, its not like the damage difference from Zerk→Celestial armor is THAT much, plus you get more condi damage and a host of other stats which may be weighted more favorably in the coming months.