Guild Wars 2

Hello, I’ve just reached 80 recently, and now I need to pick some exos for my power/crit ranger. At this moment, I’ve already crafted a full set of berserker’s amulet/rings/earrings and a berserker’s LB. When I was going to craft a berserker medium set, one of my guildies advice me to make a valkyrie set instead, and use precision runes for addition crit rate, be cuz, as he said, we ranger need more survivability to actually deal damage, and for us, crit rate around 50~55% is enough. After some calculating, I found that I cant reach that 50% mark (I’m 30 skirmish btw), instead, it’s just around 40~45 if I use valkyrie set. So I really need some advice here please, for someone that don’t have much time to play like me, gold is one of my biggest problem so I really can’t afford a second set. Thank you.

Bumb. Really need help here please.

If you’re pushing 40-45% Crit Rate, any more precision is a waste – by context, you’re going to want to add more Power or Crit Damage, to further increase your damage, rather than merely increasing Precision.

Fury is one of the boons that the Ranger has readily available that can be kept up rather effeciently, which increases Critical Hit rate by 20%, making 40% = 60%, 50% = 70%, etc.

Valkyrie has both Power and Crit Damage – and on top of that, Vitality! Vitality is a very important stat, as all that DPS means nothing if you’re getting downed in a few shots from enemies. I, personally, like to mix Valkyrie and Berserker on my Ranger – getting 40% Crit Rate is ideal for my Ranger. Any more than that would be detrimental to both overall damage and survivability.

I would just like to interject that Precision (crit rate) means you hit for more damage SOME of the time. Power (overal damage) means you hit for more damage all of the time. That may seem like a useless point to make, but I lot of people get crit-happy. Granted, a lot of sigils and the like give buffs based on crit, so if you are going for high crit rate, then make sure you are taking advantage of sigils, boons, etc that capitalize on your crit chances.

If you’re pushing 40-45% Crit Rate, any more precision is a waste

Why would you say that? There’s no diminishing returns on precision unless you’re using a sigil with an on-critical activation and a cooldown (like a sigil of air.) Otherwise, going from 45 to 46 is going to increase your average damage by the same amount as going from 5 to 6.

If you have a lot of bonus critical damage (from berserker’s or valkyrie’s items or from investment into the Skirmishing trait line) then every point of precision is worth even more.

With my berserker gear set on I have 99% bonus critical damage, which means my critical hits land for 249% of base damage instead of the normal 150%. That means every 21 points of precision (1% critical chance at level 80) increases my average damage by 2.49%. By contrast, 21 power will increase my attack stat by less than 1%.

Precision is a much better offensive stat than power if you are also stacking critical damage and focusing on direct damage attacks instead of conditions.