Guild Wars 2

I’ve been holding off on making my Ascended armor. I really want to slap on my full Traveler’s Rune set, but I’m not sure which armor build would work best with that combination. Sometimes I go full Zerker, sometimes I go Condi/Venom share. Of course I have different gear sets to go with the two builds. But I’m at a loss when it comes to using Traveler runes:

+30 all stats
+6% Crit Damage
+15% Boon duration
+10% Condition duration
+25% Speed

Should I just do full Ascended Celestial and run a hybrid Thief? Or just go full Zerker like everyone else? What say you, the Thief community?

Make an Ascended set for the build that is most important to you, the one for which a tiny sliver of stats and a little bit of extra defense might make a difference. If you do Fractals, the build you use there is probably the best choice.

Keep exotic sets for your other builds. And keep using those builds when appropriate. Ascended armor is not much better than exotic, and having the appropriate build/ gear for each situation is more important than 5% more armor.

Don’t let the pink lock you in

I use the same set in both fractals and WvW, so an easy choice there lol :P

I’d agree with Oghier, do the set you use in fractals. Getting the extra infusion slots is the main reason I can see for doing it, and fractals is where they have the most impact. The extra stats are nice, but you won’t miss them if you have a better set of exotics for another build (Lyssa/zerker for S/D, for example).

Well there is still hope that ANet may make stats exchangeable in the future. But for now Agony Resistance is the main reason to get Ascended Gear so that’s what it should be based on.

My intuition is that the condition build will suffer less from not having ascended armor - and will likely perform better with a full set of exotic dire then with ascended celestial.

That said, an ascended combination of Soldiers armor with Berserker weapons and trinkets will outdamage an exotic full berserker by 15% and offer substantially better survival. For full berserker ascended gear hits about 30% harder then exotic gear (not a sliver in my opinion).

The power difference between exotic and ascended trinkets is quite large. I would get the two sets of ascended trinkets, matching each build

Weapons see a step up in weapon-damage and attributes, because direct damage profits more from the damage increase I’d go for an ascended zerker set of weapons first, and a condition set later.

frans.8092:

For full berserker ascended gear hits about 30% harder then exotic gear (not a sliver in my opinion).

It’s not a sliver when you’re talking about the full set, including weapons and trinkets. The OP asked about armor.

In which case, it’s not even a big sliver. Other than those running high-end fractals, most people would probably be better off getting their ascended weapons and trinkets, then selling whatever bolts of damask they can make. The armor is very little bang for a whole lot of bucks.

That is true, and I would certainly not recommend going celestial because two different ascended sets are too expensive. You’d actually loose out on it.