Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone, Ziggy here!

I’m a main Mesmer since release and since a very long time also a main Engineer. I offer anyone, anytime help with this fantastic class, ingame, teaching, supporting and showing what ever one needs or wants to know ‘bout engi (and mes). I’ve been helping and theorycrafting with dozens of players so far, with a AP range from 1 to 20k.

Since the last time I’ve been checking on my “perfect gear”, much has changed. The recent patch affected us like all the others, changing so much and now that I’m getting used to the new traits, especially the “must have” ones, I’ve been starting to update my equip again.

Like I already did with Mesmer (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Best-Equipment-Power-PvE/first#post5226789), I’ve been working on what the best stuff to get is right now. It took me another 4 hours to get the results and make them visual appealing, but here it is, to be shared with you! (Note that this thread is about POWER oriented playstyle, havent tested condi yet, but I’m on it.)

I myself have been and still am using strength runes, since I used them in my ascended armor before the introduction of PS warriors. I know that scholar runes are better, as you can see, but since strength runes are so expensive I wanted to know how much the difference was and if I should change them regardless of wasting so much money. So don’t get distracted by those strength runes in the calculations, if I’d start over again, I’d use scholars for sure!

What I’ve discovered is:

Crit chance seems not to be utmost important anymore. We have many new traits that give us +10% crit chance, wich is similiar to 210 precision! That’s huge! And we got 2 of them. I don’t suggest to use the 240> range one for fractals, but it’s a must have for dungeons.

(you only have to look at the bold and underlined numbers on the right | kitten on the left side means assassin armor, further assassin equip is noted with a + | no spotter included)

If you think I’ve made a mistake, let me know. Otherwise, what do you think?

Thanks for reading, greez!

- your Ziggy

Edit: Made a tiny mistake, thought banners give 180 instead of 170 stats. Changed that, final results remain the same though! greez!
Edit: Changed text to fit more the results! Thx to krixis.9538! greez!
Edit: Removed reflected dmg, since it’s not that relevant to us (had it from Mes calcs) but I added another line with both crit chance traits active! greez!

I have seen advice like this in the past for other GW2 builds and as someone that came from the WOW theory crafting days it’s never made sense to me. Back then the recommended builds would be something like get to 66% crit then build power.

The reason being that on a given roll for if an ability will crit everything past that up to your critical chance is basically wasted stats. I have never seen a GW2 theory crafter take that into account and I’ve never understood why, have any insight?

Because its a lucky strike then. It’s like in the pokémon games. You like pokémon? Sure you do, everyone does so there are like attacks that have 100 damage and 50% accuracy. You can take this one for a 100 dmg skill, but pro players favor a skill with 70 damage and 100% accuracy. Sure, if the one with 100 dmg hits, the 50% more accuracy were “wasted stats”, but over the time of 100 of those this, it becomes clear that one is better than the other most of the time.

Do you know what I mean? 200% crit damage, 2000 power, 50% crit chance = 3000 dps. 200% crit damage 2200 power, 25% crit chance = 2750 dps, even though the single crit in the first one hits for 4000 and the 2nd one 4400.

Alone.1784:

I have seen advice like this in the past for other GW2 builds and as someone that came from the WOW theory crafting days it’s never made sense to me. Back then the recommended builds would be something like get to 66% crit then build power.

The reason being that on a given roll for if an ability will crit everything past that up to your critical chance is basically wasted stats. I have never seen a GW2 theory crafter take that into account and I’ve never understood why, have any insight?

If you do crit some of your precision is “wasted”.
If you do not crit all of your ferocity is “wasted”.

Thats sort of the simple/dirty explanation behind why DPS calculations work, but honestly if you look into the math for even a little bit you should be able to see in alot more detail why theorycrafted builds are the way they are.

Alone.1784:

The reason being that on a given roll for if an ability will crit everything past that up to your critical chance is basically wasted stats. I have never seen a GW2 theory crafter take that into account and I’ve never understood why, have any insight?

Because that line of reasoning is pretty nonsensical.

Your crit rate determines how frequently you critically hit. Whether a particular roll of the random number generator would be a critical hit with a 20% or lower crit chance, a prior or later roll will require 80% or more. The distribution of RNG rolls over time should be more or less even, and your number of crits over time will likewise correspond roughly to your crit chance.

If you’re concerned about reliable burst damage, and you’re using a slow attack or one with a lengthy cooldown, more power in lieu of crit will let you down less often. But where damage per second is concerned, you want to worry about your average output over time, not how much crit chance is “enough” (unless you’re in danger of exceeding 100%, of course) for an individual roll to be a crit.

Interesting. I will have to pick up some Assassin armor and give this a try! Thank you for the detailed graph!

Koja.5169:

Because that line of reasoning is pretty nonsensical.

The idea that maxing out crit chance at the expense of power for the most dps is counter intuitive to me, it has diminishing returns. There has to be a number based on power, precision, and ferocity that has max dps.

I scoured the web for a bit and found a few guides:

The most recent is Brazil from DnT recommending zerkers, around 11:28 on his video you can see his spreadsheet with the breakdown of stats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-k-BLJiBbA

I found their generic power vs precision table as well.
http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/19418960-math-balancing-power-precision-ferocity-based-on-ep

full zerk gear. get your power as high as possible.

high calibour = 10% crit chance in melee. 10% crit chance vs bleed target. I have full ascended and have 50% crit chance from gear. 20% crit chance from traits = 70% and fury puts me at 90%. warrior banner is like 95% crit chance.

I use sigil of force and sigil of air so I could get over 100% crit chance if I used 7% crit sigil but I don’t really care about 5% u really wont notice it in a normal group.
this 5% would only matter for world record breaking speed clears.
which btw is why the meta exists for those types of ppl. normal players wont even notice much difference or even understand

vuln is not an issue in groups anymore as most classes have the ability to stack 10 + vuln themselves combined with engies we have sustained 20-25 for the entire fight.

don’t even try to use assassin gear in this topic. with the combined traits zerk is the best gear as it +power as main then +crit as second and + crit dmg = same as assassin.

now all we need to do is get all the other classes to understand that the gear has changed for direct dmg engies.

a lot of ppl still insist I use “assassin” gear as engie even thou its not optimal anymore.

Alone.1784:

The most recent is Brazil from DnT recommending zerkers, around 11:28 on his video you can see his spreadsheet with the breakdown of stats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-k-BLJiBbA

I lost faith in DnT with these bunch of guides. I always thought they were reliable, but especially the necro guide + the “we replaced war for necro and killed lupi so fast” vid makes clear that they want to manipulate TP prices. Me mentioning that on the necro vid got my comment removed immediately wich speaks for itself. Increasing blood prices by telling “you can easy change from kitten to zerk” may be part of this plan aswell.

But that’s just my current opinion on them. I loved them until this patch… But whatever Brazil says on that vid – I did the complete math myself and just because DnT are good speedrun guild doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong.

Alone.1784:

I found their generic power vs precision table as well.
http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/19418960-math-balancing-power-precision-ferocity-based-on-ep

This table only shows the balance between power precision and ferocity. The best thing you could do is run major precision and minor power and don’t invest in ferocity at all, but since you can’t do that, kitten is the best thing you can do as you can see on the bottom left of the table. Pardon me – not kitten itself, but to get near 100% crit chane.

krixis.9538:

high calibour = 10% crit chance in melee. 10% crit chance vs bleed target. I have full ascended and have 50% crit chance from gear. 20% crit chance from traits = 70% and fury puts me at 90%. warrior banner is like 95% crit chance.

don’t even try to use assassin gear in this topic. with the combined traits zerk is the best gear as it +power as main then +crit as second and + crit dmg = same as assassin.

now all we need to do is get all the other classes to understand that the gear has changed for direct dmg engies.

a lot of ppl still insist I use “assassin” gear as engie even thou its not optimal anymore.

50% crit chance + 20% from fury are indeed 70%. But banners will give you 8%, not another 20%. = 78%. If you use both 10% crit chance traits wich is perfect for dungeons and rather good in fotm, you get your 98% and this is perfect.

I didn’t say “go assassin at any cost”, I said “try to get 100% crit chance when full buffed at any cost”. That’s a huge difference. But yes you are totally right, zerk is better than assassin now with the new traits. I accidently didn’t underline the zerker resuslts wich may have caused sorta the wrong message. I changed the math and added these results instead:

“What I’ve discovered is:

Crit chance seems not to be utmost important anymore. We have many new traits that give us +10% crit chance, wich is similiar to 210 precision! That’s huge! And we got 2 of them. I don’t suggest to use the 240> range one for fractals, but it’s a must have for dungeons."

Thank you!

Spread sheets do overvalue crit.
There is a few reasons why.

First, the law of averages.
Theorycrafting and spreadsheets give crit chance an absolute value. they work on this imaginary value where 1% crit means you WILL get 1% more crits.

like for example. a fight that lasts 10 hits.
1000 power and 52% crit vs 1100 power and 50% crit.
2% makes no sense here. you can’t have 2% of 10. its not a whole number. In this scenario, the power is clearly better, despite what a spreadsheet might tell you. the raw increase in damage will be measureable over 10 hits, the 2% crit will not be.
“in theory” you should get 2 more crits over 100 hits. doesn’t mean you will. That power however is direct. you will get it. Any given fight, that 2% will likely have zero impact. its impact would be measured over thousands of hits. (including trash…)

PvP will definitely favor power for this reason, crit should really be measured in multiples of 10% or so there.

Not everything is critable.
This one should be obvious. esp with world bosses atm…
Turrets used to not be. doors, wurm eggs, teq fingers, ice pillars iirc.. a few pve bosses. the molten furnace fractal core can’t be crit iirc.

WoW had a different formula for damage and stat value. Its been a while since I played and did the math. So i won’t really get into it.
But there was several “rolls” for damage.
A hit vs miss. then a hit vs crit.
Accuracy was most important, as a miss would cancel crits, or something like that.
And then on gear, stats had values. Where there was dimishing returns on stats. Spreading them out gave better value. Gw2’s stat system is different.

Lots of free crit in firearms, and super high fury uptime. I would doubt assassins is best now. Especially with stats on gear, pumping zerkers power.
If the spreadsheet is putting out a number with crit and power gear being similar. Value the power one slightly more then the spreadsheet says. There is no absolute value here. As it depends on the content you are doing.