Guild Wars 2

I’ve been inactive for 3 months and came back and read a ton about celestial gear getting nerfed, but also heard something about only helm shoulder and boots got nerfed bad. Can someone clarify what happened with the gear? I’ve been saving for full celestial ascended gear and don’t know if I should get full celestial gear, only the chest and legs if the others got nerfed the most, or if another armor type is better. Thanks

Ferocity

• Ferocity is a new stat added to the game. This stat will increase critical damage for each point acquired, similar to the way precision increases the character’s critical hit chance. All current items, food, upgrades, traits, and skills that previously provided critical damage have now been converted to providing the ferocity stat. In most cases, these stat values were set to the standard secondary stat value of the item’s level and rarity. At level 80, every 15 points of ferocity increases the critical damage by 1%. The downscaling for critical damage and ferocity has been improved to function similarly to how precision and critical hit are downscaled.

UI Updates

• The ferocity stat will be listed next to the critical damage stat.
  Critical damage will now display the character’s base critical damage as well the bonus provided from the ferocity stat.

• Each character’s base critical hit damage is 150% of a normal hit.

Celestial Gear

• Increased the stats provided from the celestial stat combination by 6.5% to compensate for the new ferocity changes.

• Increased the PvP celestial stat selection so that it will use the proper stat ratios. Previously this stat combination in PvP was providing much lower stats than intended.

Source (patch notes)

TL;DR – Critical damage was reduced for the celestial stat combination while there was an increase in all other stats.

dukevonart.2691:

TL;DR – Critical damage was reduced for the celestial stat combination while there was an increase in all other stats.

If you’re lucky, they even changed the celestial stats on armor you already have so you don’t have to go out and buy/find/craft replacements.

My experience & luck: not so great, evidently (see attached)

Celestial gear got destroyed by Anet, so did Divinity runes. Everyone moved to Strength runes and an offensive/defensive gear combo.

In what way did celestial gear get destroyed? Edit: Aight, it’s the critical damage nerf.

Divinity runes got wrecked but celestial is still a solid choice. If you think celestial was destroyed then you cared about the critical damage the most the gap between celestial and zerker is smaller now but zerker has more critical damage. Every critical damage gear was nerfed though.

To the comment that helm, boots and shoulder got nerfed, the minor items of celestial used to give outsized gains in crit damage so ppl would take that and get defensive gear for pants and coat to try and have the best of defense and offense. That doesn’t work anymore, crit damage is now distrubuted across minor and major gear pieces the same way all the other stats are distrubuted.