Guild Wars 2

Hey guys!

So after almost 4 years of playing this game, I have finally decided to actually actively go for ascended armor. With that said, a lot of my friends in game (some of which run with elitist groups/guilds) have told me to get commander’s gear and weapons, while I’ve read (mainly on these forums) that commander’s gear is a waste if you run with a herald.

So I don’t have a stable raiding group, and the dungeon/fractal group I run with doesn’t have a herald (albeit no one cares about efficiency in 5 man instances).

I am not at all good at number crunching, and was wondering what the actual dps difference would be between having commander’s gear (say, commander’s weapons and armor) and having full zerk/assassin?

Would it be worth it investing in commander’s gear?

For dungeons: You don’t need boon duration. F5 and TW is enough as fights are short. What matters more is reflect damage = precision, ferocity and rune of scholar or basically berserker/assassin+rune of scholar serves you best. Exotic armor is fine here.

The only place ascended armor really matters is fotm and agony infusions. Fotm is closer to dungeons with reflects mattering. However fights last longer than in dungeons, especially at tier 4 so boon duration is still more important than dungeons. Since I often bring feedback and even SotE for perma reflect on some fights, this leaves little room for SoI+wells. Boon thieves from lvl 81-100 can also really put a stopper on quickness as even if you dodge every attack, your team probably wont. Portal can also take a spot… basically Rune of Chrono isn’t as best in slot in fotm as it is in raids. I would actually recommend either scholar for reflects or leadership+sigil of concentration and food for 93% boon duration if you are going to try and force boons into this. Actually… now that I think about it, I wonder if arcane thievery+SoI might have some weird synergy with boon thief…. anyhow…

With raids Rune of Chrono and hitting 100% boon duration become much more important but also ascended matters less. Without a stable group it’s really hard to say especially with whether or not a group expects you to tank determining whether you want the toughness or not. Herald or not changes a lot too.

So yeah, because of rune choice, the answer to your actual question is tough as it depends on which mode you are in. I just picked Rune of Chrono for the math:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hGDRyA-npoRAv7kmNfmMeDy7lcMgrQxUgBjOjPC9lq0/edit?usp=sharing
Columns K-N answer the math of tankiness, dmg, reflect damage and boon duration. TLDR to your question Basically for each 20% boon duration from ascended commanders, you lose 13-18% dps.

If you even decide to raid, it honestly might be easier for exotic jewelry berserker or knights and commander set for you. Socket doubloons in there for 24% boon duration (more than ascended commander anyways). These let you easily swap between tank and dps in raids while having decent boon duration with or without a herald. Check row 5/6 in the excel file and just swap to berserker trinkets if the group doesn’t want a tank/has a herald. Spares you having two sets of ascended armor with commander and berserker.

Go for Marauder, not commander. Commander gear isn’t very good comparatively.

My mesmer build: http://asphyxia.tv/wvw-roaming-mesmer-build/

I run a mix of Marauder and Zerker on mine. It works out very well for pretty much every game mode.

In contrast with the guy above, Marauder is in fact fairly useless for what you are asking about (might be good in WvW idk I don’t play that mode) Mesmer already has fairly high base health and a lot of active mitigation to help you stay alive. If you want additional vit its much easier to just pick up a valk ring or two instead of crafting an entire marauder set.

As for Commander, yes it is very useful for raiding. The problem you hit is that you can’t get boon duration off runes since you wanna use Chrono runes for the quickness on wells. What you stand to gain is the boon duration off the armour. Your aim is to hit 100% boon duration (actually slightly less but not too important for present purposes) to pump out quickness to your team. With full commander armour and the necklace from story achieves you will hit ~18% boon duration. You get an additional 30% from food (48%) and if you group with a rev you will hit 98% which is enough, commander weapons are not needed if you run with a revenant.

Without a rev you can still get to 100% but you will have to run the 33% Sigil of Concentration. With Commander armour, weapons and 2 exotic commander trinkets with plat doubloons in them you will reach enough boon duration to hit 100% (including 30% from food and 33% from the sigil)

For those reasons its pretty useful in raids (the toughness also means you dont need extra rings to tank some fights)

As for actual damage and to answer the question it really doesn’t matter that much because mesmer dps is so bad, from my testing with the tank build in commander gear you are gonna hit 7-8k dps with normal buffs, with zerk and a dps build you will hit 10-11k (check this post for a good outline of relative dmg between classes https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/)

So yes you lose a bit of damage, no it is not a lot cus mesmer dps is already so bad however you get the ability to max out boon duration. In fractals/dungeons this doesn’t really matter that much, for raids it does. If you are serious about raids I’d get commander, if not, get zerk. Zerk is useful since you can use it on other cloth classes, commanders is pretty niche for mesmer raiding.

Yeah, I’ll agree that marauder is a worthless choice. It’s lower damage than zerker with marginal survivability bonuses. It’s awful for PvE and not as good as a knights/cavs/valks mix for WvW stuff.

So regarding commander vs berserker, it depends on what you’re doing and your team. In fractals, commander gear is useless because the fights don’t last long enough to need 100% uptime across combos, so berserker gear is far better. In raids, commander gear is potentially useful to extend your quickness duration and make your rotations more flexible, but it’s not required as long as you have a herald with you.

I was speaking in terms of WvW, I apologize if the question was more directed at PvE.

Heya,

Raids / 10 men content
Unless you are the only Chrono and without a Rev, or tanking, Commander’s gear is simply a waste of damage.
50% Rev, 30% Food and 33% Sigil is way enough to fully sustain your team with Quickness.

FotM / Dungeons / 5 men content
You will never need Commander’s gear here. In dungeons nothing survives long enough that you’d waste damage for more boon duration and in high FotM, condi would be optimal. Commander is wasted imo since you’re now 1/5 of your team, no longer 1/10.

TL;DR:
pugs, maybe, organized, no.

greez!

Thank you all for your responses! Very much appreciated. Yes, I was inquiring more about PvE than WvW, but thanks for your input anyway, @Josh XT.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

For dungeons: You don’t need boon duration. F5 and TW is enough as fights are short. What matters more is reflect damage = precision, ferocity and rune of scholar or basically berserker/assassin+rune of scholar serves you best. Exotic armor is fine here.

The only place ascended armor really matters is fotm and agony infusions. Fotm is closer to dungeons with reflects mattering. However fights last longer than in dungeons, especially at tier 4 so boon duration is still more important than dungeons. Since I often bring feedback and even SotE for perma reflect on some fights, this leaves little room for SoI+wells. Boon thieves from lvl 81-100 can also really put a stopper on quickness as even if you dodge every attack, your team probably wont. Portal can also take a spot… basically Rune of Chrono isn’t as best in slot in fotm as it is in raids. I would actually recommend either scholar for reflects or leadership+sigil of concentration and food for 93% boon duration if you are going to try and force boons into this. Actually… now that I think about it, I wonder if arcane thievery+SoI might have some weird synergy with boon thief…. anyhow…

With raids Rune of Chrono and hitting 100% boon duration become much more important but also ascended matters less. Without a stable group it’s really hard to say especially with whether or not a group expects you to tank determining whether you want the toughness or not. Herald or not changes a lot too.

So yeah, because of rune choice, the answer to your actual question is tough as it depends on which mode you are in. I just picked Rune of Chrono for the math:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hGDRyA-npoRAv7kmNfmMeDy7lcMgrQxUgBjOjPC9lq0/edit?usp=sharing
Columns K-N answer the math of tankiness, dmg, reflect damage and boon duration. TLDR to your question Basically for each 20% boon duration from ascended commanders, you lose 13-18% dps.

If you even decide to raid, it honestly might be easier for exotic jewelry berserker or knights and commander set for you. Socket doubloons in there for 24% boon duration (more than ascended commander anyways). These let you easily swap between tank and dps in raids while having decent boon duration with or without a herald. Check row 5/6 in the excel file and just swap to berserker trinkets if the group doesn’t want a tank/has a herald. Spares you having two sets of ascended armor with commander and berserker.

Thank you for taking the time to make a spreadsheet! Does adding the Sigil of Concentration to the mix change any part of your conclusion?

For dungeons and fotm, the answer is always zerker/assassins (unless going condi but condi has weaker reflects). The sigil is basically a choice of an extra ~4 seconds of quickness per boss or sigil of air (it’s really not as great as some ppl say but better than nothing). If you want to go full try hard sigil of night or slaying help with reflects too. So basically how many weapons are you willing to have and how often you are willing to swap them changes the answer.

For raids, some ppl don’t like that sigil because the rotation is harder but I stand by that plus food and a herald being 100% enough of the time. When you get boon duration from equipment stats is when there is no herald. How you get it… I think the doubloons are better than ascended. Basically losing sigil of air for 33% boon duration is the easiest trade off to make of dps to boons