Guild Wars 2

Hey there my purple butterflies fellows!

I am just making my first ascended armor (yes I am one of those guys who don’t farm for gold) and I need your help with choosing what armor to make:

Berserker armor + berserker trinkets: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fhQQJARWlknpMt1qxUNcrNipxg6yObOSGQDlMkxB-TVCBABYp8DgDogHPBAB3fIPdNbcJAC4AFUp6PnpEMAACwNvZ28mZzbezb+oH9oH9oHtbO0bO0bezSBYmwI-w

Assassin armor + berserker trinkets: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fhQQJARWlknpMt1qxUNcrNipxg6yObOSGQDlMkxB-TVCBABCu/woq/cmSQsU+BwBUwjnAQe6a24SAEwBKIAACwNvZ28mZzbezb+oH9oH9oHtbO0bO0bezSBYmwI-w

I am usually running shatter builds (Gs+Staff or Gs+Sword/torch) or power PU, and sometimes Phantasm builds but rarely.

As you can see from links above, full berserker has 0,77% better damage but assassin+berserker has 5% better critical chance. With “sharper images” this means that each illusion has 5% more chance for 356 damage bleed which is 17.8 damage benefit. With 2 or more illusions out, this damage is already better than with full berserker assuming target doesn’t have condition duration reduction. And to be honest even with shatter builds you have 3 illusions out almost all of the time. Additional bonus is on-crit sigils, but with high critical chance you are limited with sigils cooldowns anyway. Downside is also (0,77%) reduced phantasm damage.

What do you guys use? What am I missing something here?

If you’re running shatter, you don’t benefit from phantasms critting that much. Additionally, they won’t be alive that long. Yes, when you clones crit, they will also apply bleeds, but clones hit much slower than phantasms (other than Sword and Staff Phantasm).

I would say Berz for Shatter. Assassins is good if you have phants out and are planning on keeping them out.

Hm, thats funny because I thought the exact opposite.

Since phantasms do actual damage, their DPS goes up linerly with your DPS (based on power, crit %, crit dmg). So phantasm build would benefit more from higher DPS gear than from lower DPS with higher crit %.

But because clones do almost no actual damage, only condition damage, higher crit % would benefit them more because it means more on-crit conditions.

With phantasm builds you aim to have 3 phantasms up, but with shatter builds and high clone production you usually have 0-2 phantasms, the rest are clones.

So the dilemma is whether 5% higher illusion bleeding chance is worth 0,77% personal and phantasm damage, including shatters.

You can follow the link in my sig for some discussion on this for phantasm builds. For phantasm, even without taking into account that reflects are better when you have more precision, Assassin’s weapons and armor is preferred.

Not sure about shatter, but without the bleed-on-crit from phantasms, I’m guessing that Berserker will be your better option.