Guild Wars 2

In WvW zerg vs Zerg or small scale, what’s better?

Rabid has precision while Dire has vitality. That is the difference between the two armor type. They both have condition damage and toughness.

If you need more critical hit chance, Rabid is better. If you need more sustain, Dire is better. A lot of people use dire, which is the conditionmancer counterpart of soldier’s stats. Start with your build (traits and equipment) and figure out if you have a lot of dependence on critical hits. If you do not, then it may be better to go Dire for added health.

What a lot of people do is go with a mix of Dire and Rabid. For example, I went with Dire armor, Rabid weapons, rings, amulet, and back, and the Dire+Rabid trinkets. I have a 37% crit chance without food (pre-Borderland’s Bloodlust buffs and Fury), which is enough to reliably proc sigils and traits.

They are both bad in Zerg vs Zerg. Choose condition if you’re planning to do more roaming fights.

Personally, I never go above 30% crit chance in wvw roaming on a condi build. Necros only trait crit proc is a 1 second bleed. When I need to proc on crit sigils (like sigil of torment <3) I just pop DS for 50% crit chance while I’m using life transfer, or other DS skills. Investing too heavily in crit chance is a waste in a necro condition build. If you want more damage than dire I recommend using carrion because vitality scales well with necros and the damage from the extra power will beat out the bleeding crit procs from rabid. Still though if you don’t have any crit procs besides the one bleed proc from the 1 point minor in curses your much better off going full dire because the vitality is worth far more than the minimal increase in damage you get from the 1 second bleeds.

Barbed Precision is a 2 second base bleed. The thing with that trait is that those bleeds are almost guaranteed to run their full course and the trait has no cooldown.

like others said, if you are zerging power is the way to go. If you have the gold, just try both dire and rabid.. I don’t know how many different sets of dire and rabid armor I have kicking about

currently running Dire armor and trinkets with rabid weapons, crit at 30%, >29k armor, 26.5k hp, >2.3k condi damage (with full stacks and food). I hit hard and can take a beating
edit hmm looks like that was with outnumbered buff, so tune that down a little

seriously though experiment, the only real cost issue that kicks in is when you start toying with sigils and runes.

If you are on a budget then maybe: full set rabid with undead runes, full set dire with undead then mix and match…/shrug

i’ve been roaming consistently, averaging about 25 hours a week for the past 4 months = 400+ hours of roaming.
I can tell you with a very strong certainty that the best roaming armor set is not full rabid or full dire or a mix of rabid and dire.

In fact, the best is going heavy on carrion, with a mix of a couple of dire/rabid.

going only dire/rabid or a mix of both will put you at a massive disadvantage against anti-condi build.

Carrion on the other hand gives you that power needed to handle anti-condi builds.

Trust me. Try carrion and you’ll see you can handle a great variety of builds that you will encounter when you roam.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Barbed Precision is a 2 second base bleed. The thing with that trait is that those bleeds are almost guaranteed to run their full course and the trait has no cooldown.

Thank you for correcting me, I still prefer the extra survivability, but it’s certainly better than i thought.

i’ve been roaming consistently, averaging about 25 hours a week for the past 4 months = 400+ hours of roaming.
I can tell you with a very strong certainty that the best roaming armor set is not full rabid or full dire or a mix of rabid and dire.

In fact, the best is going heavy on carrion, with a mix of a couple of dire/rabid.

going only dire/rabid or a mix of both will put you at a massive disadvantage against anti-condi build.

Carrion on the other hand gives you that power needed to handle anti-condi builds.

Trust me. Try carrion and you’ll see you can handle a great variety of builds that you will encounter when you roam.

In wvw specifically, there is no build that can counter your condition application enough to prevent you from dealing what is still a really high amount of damage. Even if they are running -condi food, and melandru they still won’t lower your damage enough to make it negligible. Also, the builds that run that are normally far to tanky to do enough damage to kill you while you should still deal enough damage to kill them. It is also important to note that not that many roamers are going to run more than a few condition removals, and certainly not -condition duration food when they could increase their damage with +condi duration or other food. The reason people run -condition stuff is for zerg vs zerg fights where the lowered immobilize/chill is really important.

I disagree =)
go full/heavy condi against a diamond skin ele and watch him go ‘what?’

Mixing armor stats is perfectly fine. I neglected to mention I do the same. Weapons, trinkets, consumables, and trait points are other factors in your build to consider. Also, review your sigils and runes for cool-down timers. Normal attacks can critial hit without CD but extra effects generally have varying chances to proc and, when they do, go on CD where they will not proc on crit’s until the internal timer expires.

After some trial and error figuring out how much critical hit chance you need, any remaining stats should go elsewhere – power, vitality, toughness, or ferocity. For example, if you try a build with 6/2/0/6/0 traits, your armor and trinkets choice could make up for the lack of precision, toughness, and ferocity to even out the stats, or you could further increase the stats you are already heavy on.

Start with your trait distribution, intended weapon type, and additional effects from things like sigils. Then, figure out how much precision you really need (the chance to critical hit.)

Ferocity is additional damage on top of the already substantial bonus for a critical hit. That is why Arenanet changed the name and description. It was easy for players to mis-read the trait information and think that 0 ferrocity = no crit bonus. There was always a bonus (50%?) for critical hits even if the player spent no trait points in Soul Reaping but precision is required to create the critical hit.

Base damage is calculated off of power and so is the critical hit damage when (precision) it proc’s. You automatically get a minimum (916?) power but only about 4% crit chance, one hit in 25 on average, at level 80. Precision scales damage quite a bit indirectly aside from the tie in your trait tree to condition damage bonus. Of course, traiting power, precision, and ferocity is the berserker configuration that sacrifices toughness, boon duration, vitality, and healing. This is why people mix stats. The trades are real but it also means there is more than one right answer.