1. There are no absolute diminishing returns or artificial caps in GW2 like in many other games (aka no such thing as “Aight I’m capped at 45% crit chance and now I push all my stats to power!” or “After 13k armor it starts diminishingly return defence per stat point! So after that focus everything on health!”.
These are always the magical cutting spots on stat priorities in other games.
The limiter in GW2 is only what sets are available, and for direct damage the highest dpschoise is obvious, full berserker and nothing less.
And when you take condition skills into the rotation you require alot more assumptions to correctly model the situation, the target, rotation, situation…
So as the optimum can vary so much in different situations and rotations, and you often need defencive stats. People just tend to use these couple of methods to move in the more efficient direction if they like to think about these things.
Ofc there are exceptions to these general rules, like condition stacking with sigils and special traits through crits (great on engineer!). Or necros naturally high health = tough >>> vit. For example.
- Use stat efficient crit damage pieces. Watch how much stats you loose per crit damage . Ruby jewellery (5/ and 7/%) are the most stat efficient way of gaining it. Shoulders, Boots, Gloves (12/%) from the armor. Think ascended trinkets have efficient crit damage pieces but haven’t checked.
- Mix of stats gives higher results, mix of [power&perc&critdmg], mix of tough&vit. Not just all out on one. And power is nearly always the best direct damage stat. This results straight from the damage calculation formula.
Tool http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/engineer/ can help greatly thinking about these. (Make sure to add fury and might from buffs!!)
- When you want full out damage, in most cases go direct damage. And as we mentioned before → full berserker. Because of the condition caps, meaning you can rarely reach the same dps as a full direct damage can if you go condition.
2. You can get both 100%. Crit damage is easier to get up there, or atleast more common. For the 100% crit you’ll need fury and quite near all the foods and buffs for it you can.
Pistol #1 not something you want to build around :P, but the optimum I’d guess gonna be full rampager for pistol 1, just because it’s DD part is minimal.
But anyway you don’t wanna take too theoretical approach for this game as the combat can be so situational and no simple stat cutoff points exist. Unless you wanna write a program to model the rotations urself :P.
. Thanks !