Guild Wars 2

So I have this 80 mesmer with exotic assassins gear which I used to play a lot near release but haven’t touched for at least a year. I played it again in dungeons a couple of times today (with a build from metabattle.com – http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_S/S_/F_/P) and really enjoyed it. As of what I have read/seen so far, mesmers like to take assassins gear to get as close to 100% crit chance as possible (for 100% crit reflects I guess?), even though assassins is known to have slightly less dps than berserkers. Now I happen to have more than enough materials/gold to craft a new set of ascended gear, but I noticed that with ascended assassins gear+traits+runes+consumables+buffs (discipline, spotter etc)+fury, crit chance goes way above 100%. This is obviously a lot of wasted precision that could have been much more useful as power. So basically, I’m wondering if it makes sense to calculate how much precision I need to get exactly 80% crit chance (taking into account consumables, traits, runes and buffs) so that I can determine the ideal mix of ascended berserker/assassins gear to get as close as possible to that amount of precision (for 80% crit chance). That way, crit chance will be 100% with fury up, but no precision will be wasted.

Also, I heard from a speedrunning group that crit chance also seems to scale with your target’s level, and therefore doesn’t stay true to the tooltip. For example, if the tooltip would say you have 90% crit chance but you’re fighting a lvl 82 mob, your real crit chance would be lower than 90%. Does anyone have more info on this?

Thanks

you dont need to calculate just throw it in to a builder online. i would shoot for 80% no higher. not sure about the second part i dont spend much time in pve

Zypher.9536:

even though assassins is known to have slightly less dps than berserkers

That’s a common misconception. Assassins (edit: armor and weapons, trinkets are zerk) at full buffs is higher dps than Berserker.

If you’re capping precision, use food that has other stats such as Power/Ferocity. Otherwise, the only time you should be hitting over 100% is when you have a ranger in a party.

frifox.5283:

Zypher.9536:

even though assassins is known to have slightly less dps than berserkers

That’s a common misconception. Assassins (edit: armor and weapons, trinkets are zerk) at full buffs is higher dps than Berserker.

I just was gonna say you dungeon addicts contradict eachother until I saw your edit; though that might still be true. Here’s how I get the idea:

Miku Lawrence.6329:

By the way, post-patch makes Full Zerk w/ Scholar do 1,62% more damage than Assassin w/ Ranger due to Might being nerfed to 30 power per stack (currently 1,46%). Feel the nerf ~

Generally spoken though; for all I know, power adds way more to damage than precision; ESPECIALLY since the introduction of ferocity and thus decrease of crit-dmg. The only thing where assassins would be favorable is reflects, since they are calculated with your critchance (and crit-dmg I guess), but the power of the target. At least that’s what I got out of all the posts I’ve read, written by speedrunners and spreadsheet-heroes.

And well… the issue with the reflects is, that you can’t reflect everything. And even the things you CAN reflect, require you to actually know them all and also get the timing right. So I daresay for the normal, a bit more casual player, zerker is the way to go.

Note the “Zerk with Scholars” vs. “Assassins with Rangers”. If we were to compare gear stats runes should be kept consistent across both sets. The runes alone can account for up to ~2% (if my memory serves me right) difference in dps.

And yes, contradiction may arise because some generalize their math and some account for every single bit, like proc’ing bleeding from phantasms, vuln from our sword aa, usage of blurred frenzy in rotation, startup rotation, etc…

I’ll definitely be re-doing my math after the patch as soon as I verify that skill coefficients and attack rates are still the same for phantasms and our sword. It has happened before like with Warden where ANet lowered their skill coefficient as well as changed the attack rate yet didn’t put anything in the patch notes to let us know.