best gear for s/d fresh air ?
You’ll need lots of power, crit chance, and crit damage. Those are most important. But you don’t want to be squishy so i’d advise against going full zerker. so toughness and vit are also important. Soldier’s and knight’s gear for armor are great, i’ll leave it up to you to find the combination that suits you best. For trinkets, you have a choice of celestial (don’t use too many of these as your power and def will suffer from it as a result), zerker, cavalier. Mix pieces and see what you’re comfortable with.
What the Nik said. Crit%60 for both % and chance % is a requirement.
Long term you might want to look at all Celestial as a possibility, since its been said that ANet will be removing Magic Find thereby buffing up the remaining stats a bit to compensate.
I think a few people have done the numbers, and Celestial, from a min/max perspective on all traits is clearly superior. yes, its not focused into three traits like Berserker’s or Rampager’s, but from pure total stats Celestial is clearly superior.
Point is, a base of Celestial gear, then mix and match other gear to suit is not a bad long term goal (given how fused quartz works). In PvE, you can do fine will all Zerker and Ruby Orbs, as long as you pick the right traits (such as Vigor) and can dodge and manage CC options well. In WvWvW, you can even run the same if you NEVER leave your zerg, as being caught out in even a 1v1 with no Vitality or Toughness is almost a surefire ticket to Downed state.
I plan on getting all Celestial at some point, primarily armor and then weapons, and use my trinket and back slot to switch out for what I need most. IME, a base of around 1400 Toughness in PvE, and 1600 in WvWvW is necessary to be viable, and shouldn’t be too tough to get. With easy access to Fury and Might, not to mention Bloodlust sigil and then switching out to Force, damage is usually not too bad even in full PVT gear, since Power is our best offensive stat by far. But IIRC, even with a full Celestial setup, you’re not losing out too significantly on Power, and you acquire a boatload of critical damage. Since the new hot builds utilize 30 point in Air, adding some crit chance in trinkets, and making sure you can access good Fury uptime will sort out your damage issues.
You don’t have to go zerker to get high damage. being glass with ele in general is foolish given our low base survivability. You can make a tanky burst build with a bit of experimenting. If you want to test it out and not spend a ton of money, try full soldier or mixture of soldier and knight armor with ruby orbs, zerker scepter, soldier or valk dagger, cavalier accessories (which you can get for karma easily from Balthazar temple) and put exquisite ruby jewels in those. And go for 0/30/10/20/10 for your traits. this will work decently until you get ascended gear at which point you may want to use some zerker accessories. rings are easy enough to get anyway.