Guild Wars 2

How important is it?

How much is needed?

As much as is necessary to optimize damage. If you’re talking about gear, then yes, take it. It scales better on jewel attachments (you can get +18% from jewels basically for free) but it’s a good investment on pretty much everything. As for traits, generally you will want to go 30 in Valor anyway to get AH but if you are already full berserker gear, you won’t feel the loss of 10-20% crit damage that much, especially if you’re dropping it to take a +5% or +10% damage trait.

There are 3 offensive attributes : Power, Precision and crit dmg.
- Power will always be effective. If you crank your power from 1,500 to 2,000 you will have a “permanent” +33 more dmg than previously.
- Precision will allow you to trigger crit. strikes which bypass the Weakness condition as well as trigger vigor, sigils, …
- When you crit you will deal extra dmg based on your % crit dmg. If you have 0% you will deal 150% of your non-crit dmg. If you have 30% crit dmg you will now deal 180% of your non-crit dmg.

That said
- they are less effective without a good Precision
- each point will increase your global DPS lesser and lesser the more you have.

Now if you are a PvE player, don’t try to maximize them unless you are confiant with your character as it will result in a loss of other attributes. If you are a PvP player it’s quite different as landing a crit is much more important as players don’t have the same HP as PvE bosses, this falls into the “burst” section.

A good value is something higher than 30 (to me, as PvE Guardian but everybody won’t feel the same). Not that any extra point will be wasted but if you have 50, maybe you should try to get some extra power/precision or HP/toughness/healing rather than more %crit dmg.
I feel more useful for my team to succeed by having higher crit chances with Empowering Might (Honor VIII) and boon duration bonus (Rune Water x2 ; Monk x2 ; Pirate x2 ; Virtues 10) rather than just % crit dmg.

As Guanglai Kangyi said, it’s recommended to have those +18% by Jewels. I also recommend to have shoulders/gloves/boots as Berserker. 30 in Valor is quite popular so you won’t have much trouble having a high value as Guardian.

What do people see as optimal?

Would I do similar overall damage with pvt armor and power cranked to the max? Or is there a huge drop off? I find it hard to tell in WvW. Believe it or not people actually hit me in combat, thieves would cut me to shreds without a decent amount of survivability.

Atm I run ~2900 attack and armor, 45-50% crit, 16000+ health and about 60-65% crit damage.

your stats are pretty solid and well balanced.. i have arround 3k attack 46% crit with 67% crit dmg 3050 armor and 16775 hp. this stats are buffed with buffood the oil and the omnom cakes wich gives 66% chance on krit to get health back.. i use GS and hammer. GS with fire sigill and hammer with the sigill that has a chance of 33% on crit to restore healths.

in wvw u can front fight with it in large combats wich is pretty funny and insane. i use shelter for this and renewed focus for this as this works best for this kind of combat how i do it.. always jump in first kill some foes or do a lot fo dmg and run back when u start to get dmg with shelter renewed focus and stand ur ground. when u do this sometimes u will see that enemy zerg will run away as tehy get a ton of dmg and u kinda moral boost ur team to do the same