Guild Wars 2

New to the game, quick question.

What would be the ideal balance of Crit Damage to Crit Chance?

Right now, in just armor/weapon—no mods, I’m at 55% crit chance with 68 crit damage. What should be the focus of my armor/weapon enhancements?

Thanks!!!

best balance 50% chance 100% crit dmg. full berserk

You want well over 50% crit chance. If you can get to ~70% without Fury, then you’re fine. With full berserker’s gear and 30 in prec trait line you should be 68% if I remember correctly.

100 crit dmg is a fair number, but more is never a bad thing, especially if your base crit chance is high.

Just be aware that when you ask this question, many people will pull “magic” numbers out of their #$%. You can actually look at how the stats are distributed on various pieces of gear and determine optimums for certain scenarios. There is no simple answer here because crit damage becomes more valuable the more precision you have. Having precision and crit damage without sufficient power would be useless.

However, with that said, going through those calculations is often not necessary. Most people decide whether they want to be tanky or contribute massive damage. Most tanky players won’t bother to build any precision or crit damage. Most DPS players will just maximize both.

Mathematically, it’s impossible to answer this question without knowing how the two trade off. e.g. If you give up 5% crit chance, how much % crit damage do you gain? You also need a starting point (e.g. at 25% crit chance, you’re at 50% crit damage). If you don’t know the tradeoff, then you’ve got two unknowns and one equation, and it’s impossible to solve for a maximum.

Once you know the tradeoff, you can just plot a graph spanning from 0% crit chance to max% crit chance.

Average damage w/ crits = (1.5+crit_damage_%)(crit_chance_%) + (1-crit_chance_%)

e.g. for crit_damage_% = 50% and crit_chance_% = 30%
Average damage w/ crits = (1.5 + 0.5)(0.3) + (1-0.3)
= (2)(0.3) + 0.7
= 1.3 times your damage with no crits

Running some sample numbers through this, it seems like crit chance is usually more valuable. Add a sigil which procs on crit and crit chance is even more favored.

so as a rule of thumb, stats like power, vitality, and condition damage scale incredibly well, whereas stats like toughness, precision, healing, and crit damage scale pretty poorly. so the answer is always some mixture of both.

for instance, precision starts to scale a lot better if/when you’ve stacked a ton of power (2400+) and crit damage. however having crit damage without precision is useless, and either without power doesnt do much for straight dps (tho a crit/condition build can be made).

same thing for defensive stats. toughness scales fairly poorly, but the more you have the better healing and vitality scale

but, per an above posters point, its more about deciding what u want to be (tanky, damage, balanced, etc), and then stacking the stats needed for that vision, and the numbers basically take care of themselves.