Guild Wars 2

Those runes are better for zerk gear and for a guardian?

I’m using zerk gear + scholar for dungeons now, but i can’t always have 25 stacks of might.

Should i stay with the scholar ones?

I’d say just find a warrior/ele who isn’t garbage and keep scholar.

Guards don’t output enough might to justify strength runes. Scholar is the best choice.

A phallanx can make you 25 mighzs

Adam.4103:

Guards don’t output enough might to justify strength runes. Scholar is the best choice.

R-really? So, which classes can sustain might? Warrior and Ele?

aophts.9862:

Adam.4103:

Guards don’t output enough might to justify strength runes. Scholar is the best choice.

R-really? So, which classes can sustain might? Warrior and Ele?

Warrior and ele if played right can easily maintain 25 might stacks for a group.

Guardian struggles to maintain 5.

Your much better off using scholar, flame legion or pack runes (depending on how much gold you have)

Runes of Strength are fine if you always pug. Every time I have a slow dungeon run, I look down at my boons and see we don’t have enough might. At the same time, I’ve never been in a group with consistent 25 stacks of might and thought that we weren’t killing stuff fast enough. I’ve always been happy with that speed and felt no need to optimise further. If we don’t have 25 stacks of might, we’re usually not killing stuff fast enough to stay above 90% hp anyways.

If you’re running with a static group, or willing to be picky about who you pug with, then scholar is better.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

aophts.9862:

Adam.4103:

Guards don’t output enough might to justify strength runes. Scholar is the best choice.

R-really? So, which classes can sustain might? Warrior and Ele?

Warrior and ele if played right can easily maintain 25 might stacks for a group.

Guardian struggles to maintain 5.

Your much better off using scholar, flame legion or pack runes (depending on how much gold you have)

Well, i have 4 sets and 2 of those have the flame legion runes, but one was for roaming in WvW.

I think pack runes would be better for me, i’m kinda failing at the 90% HP thing and this is bothering me so much.

They give precision too, that is nice.

The guardian:

• Is crit-deficient on traits (needs more precision to reach 64% critrate)
• Does damage through both burning and direct damage
• Ferocity has no effect on the former
• Precision amps both direct and burning, and burning amps both damage and critrate
• Has limited swiftness duration/no 25% skill
• Cannot maintain more than 8 stacks of might under perfect conditions

Pack runes:

• Give fury, swiftness and might
• Amps power and precision
• Extends swiftness duration

Scholar’s runes:

• Give power and ferocity
• Only gives 10% additional damage when above 90% HP

Strength runes:

• Gives power only
• Gives pemanent additional damage given might, but only 5%

Pack > Scholar > Strength

Pack is used for crit deficient classes, scholar is used for high crit classes and strength is used for high AoE might classes. Using the wrong type for the wrong class is a DPS loss at a potentially higher cost.

Hayashi.3416:

Pack > Scholar > Strength

Pack is used for crit deficient classes, scholar is used for high crit classes and strength is used for high AoE might classes. Using the wrong type for the wrong class is a DPS loss at a potentially higher cost.

I didn’t think you were right, so I did the math for Whirling Wrath using pvp zerk stats and the math supports it.

Here it is with just the spin damage, assuming no boon duration increase.
http://i.imgur.com/X8cIZop.png

Here’s the gist:
Strength runes isn’t all that great considering the options.

Scholar runes will be better if you add fury into the mix, but you need to be above 90% hp. Full health all the time without fury is still worse than Pack runes.

Pack runes give 10 second boons every 20 seconds, so I used half boon effectiveness as an average. Pack runes is better than Scholar runes even considering full health all the time and half boon effectiveness. If anyone else in your party has pack runes, you can assume full boon effectiveness which should outpace scholar drastically if you ever fall below 90% hp.

There’s additional factors here when considering builds because of trait and sigil interactions, though it’s inherently complicated because of the number of possible combinations. Either way, if considering the additional factors singly:

Radiance IV Radiant Fire: Activates 6% more often under Pack => Boosts Radiance II, IX, Grandmaster; Zeal I; Honor Minor, IV. Glacial Heart is unaffected as cooldown is limiting factor.
Radiance II Inner Fire: Reduces Pack’s innate effectiveness as the % benefit from Fury is reduced
Any on-crit sigil: Activates 6% more often. All on crit sigil effects are unable to crit – for instance SS.Air’s lightning strike cannot crit – so Ferocity has no effect on these.

We use 6% as a guide since the actual boost of 125 divided by the 21 scaling factor is almost exactly 6%. The actual game system does use decimals in its critrate however.

Lastly consider that the buffs provided by pack are AoE and thus if they don’t already have full uptime on swiftness/fury it’s an additional buff over and above that on you, and the swiftness factor present on Pack that isn’t present on Scholar. How much this affects runs depends – runspeed tends to be a major consideration for guardians if we deal with Crucible of Eternity and Arah (esp. Path II), while it’s not really something you need to care about if we deal with Sorrow’s Embrace. Alternatively, if you are being buffed by teammates to full fury uptime without requiring any further input from the rune, Pack becomes less useful than Scholar is. It’s why some classes like thieves that currently have >100% fury uptime, very high mobility and high evade uptime (ergo, never get hit) are optimal on Scholar rather than Pack.

The whole discussion assumes, of course, that you stay above 90% all of the time – otherwise there isn’t really a need to do much calcs except for interest’s sake. Intrinsically precision tends to scale better than ferocity when both are available since 15 points per % with a base of ~200% is less of an impact than 21 points per % with a base of ~50% – having fewer points of ferocity awarded doesn’t help.

Considering the different kind of runes brought by party members is yet another headache since it’s difficult to get any hard numbers especially given the nature of groups having semi-random class distributions. To a first approximation it goes like ‘Strength => Mightbuffer builds’, ‘Pack => Crit-deficient builds/classes’, ‘Scholars => High-crit builds’ as this ‘tends’ to achieve the best result – 10% more DPS on an already-high DPS class contributes more to party DPS than it does on a lower one, more might uptime on something that pumps 18-22 can push party might to permanent 25 but may add only 1 stack on a lower output build, and everything else dumps AoE fury/swiftness instead. If you ever have a dedicated dungeon group where people have permanent builds they use however, it’s a completely different story.