Guild Wars 2

First let me preface I am really looking for experienced opinion, not second hand hearsay as I already know what the general consensus is.

I am about to start making ascended armor. I have ascended weapons and trinkets (full zerk.) I am thinking of making it half celestial half zerk and want to know if its a good idea. OR mix in soldier with zerk, maybe cleric.

I do EVERYTHING. I am too lazy to have multiple gear sets.

I want experiences that are realistic, like for dungeons the consensus is run full zerk except unless you’re in a premade dungeon group with a dungeon running guild (like what 10% of the population?) with really experienced players and/or a tanky class like war/guard you’re going to die a lot in pugs and you really really DON’T want to go full zerk. And then there’s the fact that I do teq everyday and zerk is bad for that fight.

So the majority of my play time I need it for (wvw, teq, open world) is not zerk ideal.

Again, been playing since the beginning off and on and I want gear I’m happy with. I like playing a celestial ele in PvP the most. Hence was thinking that. But I hear some people say you get better stats by mixing gear? If so which gear is good to mix? For all around general purpose?

Thanks

On paper Celestial will give you the most total number of stats added up all together when compared to getting a full set of anything else by far, but you run into an issue of jack of all master of none.

Particularly for the type of content you regularly play you’ll want to focus on Power. Going with Full Cel over say Berserker/Solider mix you’re losing nearly 600 Power (I need to re-lookup the exact number but it was between 580-590) which is the equivalent of 19-20 stacks of might. Specifically you’ll be losing out on damage against Teq and attacking enemy siege since you have no crit to modify your damage.

I have a full Celestial set that I ran with in both PvE (for funzies) and WvW, but after a while I noticed that my damage output seriously suffered, and the extra stats I got wasn’t really worthwhile as the vit/toughness didn’t really get me that much more survivability while my extra healing power made almost no different due to being overshadowed by coordinated water blasting from the zerg. Healing Power was more noticeable at the personal level as Ele skills have generous healing ratios, but it didn’t feel high enough for “heal-botting” at the group level. Condi damage? Burns and bleeds…yay.

So while I’m a proponent of multiple sets, for the sake of your request, I would recommend a mixture of soldier/berserker. Something like this is versatile to work in both WvW and PvE. The only swapping you would need to do is on your traits and skills to accommodate for your situation (note that I only have the gear page filled out).

If you want to mix to much different stat, celestial is way better.

Why:
If you add every stat given by celestial stuff EXCLUDING condition and healing power, you reach almost the same amough of stat that a “regular” stuff would give you (we’re talking about ~10 less stat for celestial / piece), so with condition and healing power, which are very strong stat on ele, celestial is 100% better for “all kind of play” type of player.

About my experience. Half celestial half zerk works fine in full zerk dongeon run (not the most efficient obviously, but it works). In wvw zerg (aka staff), especially with the upcoming change spliting stat and trait, i suggest some defensive stuff. I’m curently running full zerk exept 2trincket PVR. But before getting my zerk jewelerry i was with pure celestial trincket, its less efficient cause staff does terrible condition and you’re not about healing in zerg, buut the damage it still done and your survivability is good.
For roaming, i suggest celestial over zerk, but that’s bcause i’m a DD player.

On my mind, i’d rather have zerker armor + celestial trincket cause celestial is no that nice on mesmer and necromancer, so if you plan to build them too, you would need in the end zerker armor AND celestial if you go celestial armor :/
Trincket are very easy to get, so that why i suggest you to go zerker armor if you plan on mixing celestial with zerk. ut if you only care about your ele, i’d say cele armor is nice.

This is what I run for WvW.
(or I did before I ran guild builds for WvW)

The HP is a bit low but with Guard Stacks (currently) it’s okay cause I gain around 2500 extra HP towards the 18k range as WvW moves on throughout the week and you gain the HP boost from score. The food is extremely easy to get (Lotus are everywhere in Orr and the only other part is Pepper which is cheap/easy) and the Stones are pretty standard. Lightning Rod catches so many people with damage but unfortunately that damage doesn’t contribute towards bags

Depending how the night is going I’ll swap in more Berserker accessories as needed.

When I do PvE I typically run something like this

This is the fairly standard combo for dungeons. I personally enjoy the additional armor and if HOT wasn’t coming up soon I’d be investing in Resilient Infusions for an even 2400 armor. If your group is sucking or tougher fights like Mai Trin (dem pistol shots) I usually swap 4 points out of Air and throw them back into Water for more survivability. I probably shouldn’t take Blasting Staff but honestly I don’t really care and prefer the larger size haha but putting it in Vital Striking will raise your HP a bit as well.

I used to carry around 5 different armor sets but over time I got lazy and only wanted one as well. This suit serves me for everything in game giving me the best of all worlds. Celestial isn’t a terrible idea, but it wastes too many stat points on Condition and Healing and is going to be receiving a nerf with HOT making hybrid gear builds ostensibly better. Now I wear this suit and only have a set of Berserker accessories in the bag alongside full Ascended weapon set.

I understand your concerns, but let me tell you that you will seriously regret the decision of mixing stats later on in the longrun.

First of all tequatl is literally half-afkable. Soldiers isn’t needed in the least bit. It maybe was useful back when the majority of people didn’t understand the encounter and everybody was desperately trying to guest into desolation/blackgate just for a chance of succeeding, but these days any pug map has an easy time doing it. There’s nothing to min-max there unless you’re somehow magically able to get your own map with your own guild, which is nearly impossible due to the megaservers.

WvW and instanced PvE are different stories.

In both of these you can min-max, but whether or not you should completely depends up to you and what you are doing in both game modes.

For WvW if you just casually do it then there’s no reason to care about using full ascended _ there because anything can work. If you roam, you will certainly get rekt in full berserker very easily and I’d say celestial would probably be better there.

However in PvE, berserker is way better than celestial and all other options. Dungeons, be it in pugs or efficient and organised groups, are very easy to clear. Even with no armor and trinkets you can easily succeed if you know what to bring, what to use and in what order. They are all based off of repetition/memory, and the more you do them the more and more pointless any defensive attributes become.

Open world PvE has never been difficult to succeed in as it’s designed to be done by any and all classes and any and all builds. World bosses can’t be crit, but the fact of the matter is that you don’t deal any higher damage in soldier than you do in berserker when you’re fighting a structure/object. You deal the same damage on those. But anything else in the game that can be crit, soldier is absolute rubbish.

The thing you need to keep in mind is that in this game, EVERYTHING is viable. Viable by definition means “capable of working,” and that’s just that – everything can work.

This means that despite one type of gearset not being optimal in a current setting, it can still get the job done.

But with that in mind, there is literally no game mode, no dungeon, no activity that berserker doesn’t give you the best damage output for (unless we’re talking about condi builds in PvP-related scenarios).

As far as direct damage goes, berserker will absolutely always reign supreme. It therefore has the highest potential out of all other geartypes.

In the longrun, you will benefit more from making a full berserker ascended set than anything else unless you exclusively WvW or farm open world bosses. If you want an all-purpose set, get berserker.

I hope my post has helped you OP.

People have always said that ascended armor wasn’t worth it, but I noticed a significant damage increase when I equipped my ascended armor set.

Well if I remember correctly between exotic berserker and ascended berserker the full set difference is ~5% DPS increase (assuming level 80) and a ~5% DPS increase for ascended weapons over exotic.

So it’s pretty much around the difference between using and not using food in a dungeon at level 80 (not quite, but the point I’m making is that the difference is marginal unless you’re talking ascended upgrades from all exotic trinkets, armor and weapons… then it’s quite large). I could be wrong on this but it’s what I remember from around a year ago after ferocity was rolled out.

Vinteros Asteano.1209:

People have always said that ascended armor wasn’t worth it, but I noticed a significant damage increase when I equipped my ascended armor set.

It’s a 3% increase in stats for armor and a 5% increase in stats for weapons I believe and if you scale down to lower level content the stats gained are basically gone. This of course isn’t counting the Infusion slots.

The thing I noticed the most for Ascended armor is the actual amount of Armor you get from it cause it’s a pretty decent bump towards Armor rating. This let me tweak my stats slightly different and take a piece of Soldier (more power) or two over Knight or Cavalier instead while tweaking stats for WvW.

That said it’s 300-500g depending on prices and armor suit you make (light is more expensive since most of the cost revolves around Damask) and that’s a lot for some people.

Unless you solo roam on D/D in WvW, close to zerk will be optimal for literally everything you do.

Ascended Weapon quality does not exist until level 80. So if you go into a zone that down scales you you lose the benefit of that weapon category. E.G a 79 zone will adjust your weapon to Exotic quality and use according stats when calculating damage output. Go down to a zone as low as 1 and your weapon is only counted Fine at best.

Trinket-wise the stat difference between Exotic and Ascended is very noticeable. On Armor and weapons, not so much unless your min-maxing and trying to squeeze out every last point; however, you run into the Attribute cap issue to where in downscaled zones stats above certain values are effectively “lost” as the game will set a hard cap on stats. So unless you do 80 only content some of your ascended (even Exotic) stats get chopped off if your not familiar with the caps.

why are we even discussing exo vs ascended? I am only interested in stat types…I shouldnt have mentioned ascended at all aparently lol

Honestly, given the high cost of armor, I would hold off a bit on crafting ascended armor for eles until after the trait-line update. Taking stats off of the trait-lines is going to seriously influence how you build your ele, and will probably make a few pieces of soldiers necessary just to compete.

Perhaps you’ll be able to just change some trinkets, or maybe celestial will become more valuable. It is hard to tell without knowing completely how the stats will be redistributed.

Mightybird.6034:

why are we even discussing exo vs ascended? I am only interested in stat types…I shouldnt have mentioned ascended at all aparently lol

Ascended vs non Ascended matters a lot because there’s a few options out there not available or hard to replicate such as Soldier’s Trinkets and such (because there’s no exotic gems/crests with Soldier stats). When you’re trying to min-max stats around in various combinations this can be critical.

Sounds like ultimately though you just need to aim for WvW stats and what will work for you there and just deal with those stats in every other game mode. There’s really nothing you can’t do in this game in WvW gear except maybe super high end 40-50 Fractals.

Ascended vs Exo was brought up because of the minor boosts in stats, Weapon Power, and Defense could potentially influence your stat choice.

My personal issue being with Attribute caps. If you’re already capped out in a stat it would be pointless to go with an armor that just adds more to that stat. E.G. In AC Power caps just shy of 2400. So if you already have 2400 or more in your current setup and decide to go for Berserker or Soldier’s the increase in Power from that Ascended gear would do nothing for you. In that case it would be beneficial to take another gear stat that doesn’t focus so much on power and instead could be shuffled out elsewhere. In situations like that you could swap Berserker armor for Assassin armor. Less focus on power to keep you below the cap and you are instead moving those points into a stat that will benefit from it. Again, this is my personal min-maxng advice.

There’s also stat combinations that exist in Ascended that are not obtainable in in Exo form. The fact that you already have [and I assume] decided on your Weapon and Trinkets being berserker stats also plays a factor is what armor would be best for catch-all type play. Had you said you had Exo Trinkets the discussion (or at least my 2 copper) would have been different.

I use a Cele/Zerker mix. It’s amazing.

Elementalists are one of the few classes that use ALL stats at all times (depending on build, ofc), so cele is great for them. You will get more DPS, Sustain, etc, from going Cele then from mix/matching other gear stats. That said, DPS does suffer quite a bit compared to Zerker, so I don’t recommend 100% Cele.

I use Cele Trinkets and a Cele staff, and Berserkers armor. Gives the cele build taht extra punch it needs to be competitive. Runes are negotiable depending on build. I’m using a signet build with very easy burning application, and also I have Signet of Air as a stun break in my build so I use Rune of The Flame Legion for a cheap DPS boost (+dmg while target is burning); without the signet I’d use Traveler for the speed.

It also benefits from skipping most of the Charged Quartz time gating, since Cele trinkets are available for laurels, so thats a plus.

Since exotics are so cheap I’d recommend just doing some experimenting until you find some point in the middle of full zerk and full cele that you’re happy with, damage / durability wise.

If you ever do get ascended, I’d recommend full zerkers, with an extra set of cele trinkets (since they’re so much cheaper to get than armor).

Personally, if I’m pugging dungeons I’m not very familiar with, I just switch my amulet and accessories from zerkers to some knights or PVT pieces I got with laurels, and rings with some spare fractal ones. It’s pretty much all that’s necessary for me to stay alive, and I’ve found any more than that impacts your damage too much.

Firstly traitlines won’t give you stats anymore after patch and base stats gonna be adjusted. I play mainly as dd ele in wvw soloroam + pvp and there cele is amazing, but for me i would rather have more power then vitality in this build, but after patch it should change (200-300 vitality from traitline). With cele you can do everything (you wont have top dmg), but i find it very fun to be jack of all trades.

I have full zerk trinkets, and a set of cele (asc) armor and a set of zerk (exo). Due to the trinkets, my power loss with celestial isn’t too bad, but I still like having the zerk set when i want the highest dps I can output, like in dungeons or running with my guild in wvw.
In dungeons, it’s particularly easy to run full zerk if you know the mechanics of the fights, and can avoid getting hit more easily. But, it’s not as forgiving, so if you do get hit, u feel it a lot more, and u can’t recover as quickly (heals) compared to celestial.