Guild Wars 2

Hey folks! I am a long-time Engineer and I wanted to share some information that might be of some use to players in a similar situation as myself.

A while back I crafted a lovely set of Ascended Berserker armor for my Engineer, prior to DnT’s advisement on Assassin’s coming out. At that time, I worked out that you could achieve a similar stat block and a comparable damage modifier with Rune of the Ranger and using the mini-pet bug to activate the 7% damage mod.

The numbers for the difference in the stat blocks:

66002 | Assassin rifle and armor | Berserker accessories | Scholar runes
1114 Power
893 Precision
845 Ferocity

66002 | Berserker rifle and armor | Berserker accessories | Ranger runes (w/ mini-pet)
1087 Power
920 Precision
845 Ferocity

The second stat block was the one I was working with instead of crafting another armor set. I felt the stats were comparable enough that it was a reasonable alternative. The 7% damage mod was a guarantee (although it was a bug), but that appears now to have been fixed. Lacking the damage mod put Ranger runes out the window, so for the time being, I have switched over to Eagle runes, which keeps the stat block the same, but with a much weaker damage mod.

Despite the loss, I admit I was relying on a bug. I knew that at some point, a fix would be in order and I would have to reinvest into something different.

Another option I checked out was using the assassin earrings from the Arah and CM dungeon collections, in conjunction swapping the rifle to assassin stats, and then also swapping to scholar runes. This still came up a bit short for precision, so I am holding off for now.

For those curious, that stat block would look like:

66002 | Assassin rifle | Berserker armor | Berserker rings, backpiece, and amulet | Assassin Earrings | Scholar Runes
1146 Power
861 Precision
845 Ferocity

Those are my thoughts though. I would love to here any other ideas that might be out there about alternative paths to the same stat block. This was using all Ascended armor, weapons, and accessories, and I was rummaging for a solution without having to include Exotics (although the armor would not be a significant loss in truth).

I use zerk ascended with scholar runes and assassin’s trinkets on my engi. Zerk asc rifle for night dungeons, specific exo assassin rifles for day dungeons (minus arah). Haven’t really felt the need to swap out for more assassin’s, and I think at this point it’d be a very small gain for a very high price.