Guild Wars 2

Guys I want your take on this, which one will you pick in the WvW scenario with the given gear prefixes: Berserker’s or Assassin’s.

And if I am going for a burst backstab build which one is better among the two?

Berserker.

Berserker/Valkyrie for Backstab-build (when playing with hidden killer)

Never Assassin’s.

If you’re optimizing for the damage of a given backstab, Valkyrie. For DPS in general, berserker.

Thanks. Can someone post a sample build with a Valkyrie stat in it? Never seen one yet.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpyplPx0J8PNBNBtdFGeI4uGlYGaFAA-TliDABuqE0gHAAAm/Q4EAsz+DfoPQgjAgPK/i4QAAj6PECQwWA-w
Made it quickly, you can go for more zerker if you want. (its D/P, but D/D works, too)

My gratitude. Bookmarked the build for future referencing.

Go for a mix. Full zerkers is optimal but higher crit % takes Better advantage of executioner

I have no idea how people can give you advice without asking for your traits or your weapons. Do you need SA to survive? Do you want trickery? Do you prefer D/P or D/D?

For example, if you run sleight of hand, thrill of the crime, and pack runes, then pick zerk/valk over assassin’s because you’re going to maintain very high fury up-time. If you don’t have access to a lot of fury, then mix some assassin’s in so you don’t have to pick hidden killer over executioner. This assumes you trait into critical strikes at all, which you certainly don’t have to.

What stats you pick depends crucially on your traits, weapons, runes, sigils, etc.

Coronit.9432:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpyplPx0J8PNBNBtdFGeI4uGlYGaFAA-TliDABuqE0gHAAAm/Q4EAsz+DfoPQgjAgPK/i4QAAj6PECQwWA-w
Made it quickly, you can go for more zerker if you want. (its D/P, but D/D works, too)

You generally don’t need 18k health, especially playing D/P. Would spec a lot more knight/cav/zerk in, and take out half of the valk pieces.

mango.9267:

I have no idea how people can give you advice without asking for your traits or your weapons. Do you need SA to survive? Do you want trickery? Do you prefer D/P or D/D?

For example, if you run sleight of hand, thrill of the crime, and pack runes, then pick zerk/valk over assassin’s because you’re going to maintain very high fury up-time. If you don’t have access to a lot of fury, then mix some assassin’s in so you don’t have to pick hidden killer over executioner. This assumes you trait into critical strikes at all, which you certainly don’t have to.

What stats you pick depends crucially on your traits, weapons, runes, sigils, etc.

Coronit.9432:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpyplPx0J8PNBNBtdFGeI4uGlYGaFAA-TliDABuqE0gHAAAm/Q4EAsz+DfoPQgjAgPK/i4QAAj6PECQwWA-w
Made it quickly, you can go for more zerker if you want. (its D/P, but D/D works, too)

You generally don’t need 18k health, especially playing D/P. Would spec a lot more knight/cav/zerk in, and take out half of the valk pieces.

No no no

This fella wants to play teef with his kitten in his hand

Ala Full Glass

mango.9267:

I have no idea how people can give you advice without asking for your traits or your weapons. Do you need SA to survive? Do you want trickery? Do you prefer D/P or D/D?

For example, if you run sleight of hand, thrill of the crime, and pack runes, then pick zerk/valk over assassin’s because you’re going to maintain very high fury up-time. If you don’t have access to a lot of fury, then mix some assassin’s in so you don’t have to pick hidden killer over executioner. This assumes you trait into critical strikes at all, which you certainly don’t have to.

You have a point there. Usually, I run a D/D 26006 build with thrill of the crime and executioner in it. Have not tried running pack runes, tho. Since 6 Runes of the Traveller happens to be my favorite, that bonus movespeed is sooo good to drop.

Coronit.9432:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpyplPx0J8PNBNBtdFGeI4uGlYGaFAA-TliDABuqE0gHAAAm/Q4EAsz+DfoPQgjAgPK/i4QAAj6PECQwWA-w
Made it quickly, you can go for more zerker if you want. (its D/P, but D/D works, too)

I know very little about the intricacies of builds, but I thought it was a little strange to have a Ferocity heavy build with only 30% crit chance. Is that a common thing?

It is a usual thing. Since crit-chance can be improved using other means such as fury sustain or getting traits like hidden-killer and such.

Reinn.7436:

It is a usual thing. Since crit-chance can be improved using other means such as fury sustain or getting traits like hidden-killer and such.

The build presented has only a 25% chance of fury (that requires being hit). If it procs, that’s 50% crit with fury for 10 secs. It has hidden killer and two sources of stealth. However, they’re on 30 and 40 second intervals. One of them is the heal skill and burning it for stealth to get the crit seems odd to me. At best, alternating between them without regard for actual healing and if attacking ends the stealth, you get at best one attack every 15 seconds or so with guaranteed crit while burning your heals to no effect.

Playing around with builds (again, I’m basically a noob at this and could be completely wrong), I tweaked the build to use Assassin armor (the question in the OP), Soldier trinkets, dropped DA for Acro, swapped out some traits in CS, changed 2 utility skills, swapped stone for oil, and came up with this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpxplPxwJ8PNhPBtdASwr5OER4DdNDA-TVCBwA12f4oyvFm/kcCAA8EAIq+TK9BTUCu5QAQIABLAA-w

It has just under 200 less power at base, but with all the Might buffs, it goes way over that differential easily. It also has way more crit chance, slightly less health, more armor, and more initiative boosts. I didn’t get too deep into it. I was mainly looking at power vs precision initially. I could also see possibilities for dropping the stealth focus for greater benefits elsewhere.

I’m not so sure about the zerker is better than assassin argument. It looks, to my noobish eyes, like there’s more to it. I’d be happy to hear someone rip it all apart. I’m still trying to figure all this stuff out.

Black Frog.9274:

The build presented has only a 25% chance of fury (that requires being hit). If it procs, that’s 50% crit with fury for 10 secs. It has hidden killer and two sources of stealth. However, they’re on 30 and 40 second intervals. One of them is the heal skill and burning it for stealth to get the crit seems odd to me. At best, alternating between them without regard for actual healing and if attacking ends the stealth, you get at best one attack every 15 seconds or so with guaranteed crit while burning your heals to no effect.

D/P has nearly unlimited access to stealth using the black powder/heartseeker combo. The idea behind this build is to rely on hidden killer to consistently crit on backstabs, which are the main source of damage. Very rarely will you blow your utilities for an offensive stealth. There are a ton of weaknesses to this build, but it’s very beginner friendly because of how defensive it is and how consistent the crits are.

Black Frog.9274:

Playing around with builds (again, I’m basically a noob at this and could be completely wrong), I tweaked the build to use Assassin armor (the question in the OP), Soldier trinkets, dropped DA for Acro, swapped out some traits in CS, changed 2 utility skills, swapped stone for oil, and came up with this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVlsMpxplPxwJ8PNhPBtdASwr5OER4DdNDA-TVCBwA12f4oyvFm/kcCAA8EAIq+TK9BTUCu5QAQIABLAA-w

If you trait 6 points into critical strikes, there’s absolutely no reason not to take either hidden killer or executioner. Both traits are outstanding. With 69% crit chance, I highly, highly, highly recommend executioner. Also, I’d recommend mixing knight/valk over soldier, and putting both fire and air sigils on your D/P.

It depends just how heavily you want to invest in damage and how much you want to sacrifice doing so.

This is effectively the setup I will use on a given day. It’s glassy signet stab and conditions will destroy you, especially Dire PU mesmers, but the results in terms of burst damage throughputs are like no other.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoYVlsMpypNOxzJ8PNxLhs9nTr8btuLCA-TlSBABWq+zDPAgIOEAXt/oUBLlVLqEEFtF4pDYhjEAAnAgAAIAeuzduzduz5m38m38m3sUARMMC-w

maybe one or two pieces of assassin’s gear to get your crit chance up (weapons too if you want it higher) but i personally run full zerker with the +percision signet (can’t remember the name) with that i have ~65% crit chance while maintaining high power and ferocity.

you can make assassin’s work if you want higher crit but IMO zerkers is better for all around dps.

I would say zerker or zerker / valk has higher theoretical damage, but on average will be out damaged by a build based on assassins / zerk mix. Hidden killer can help balance a lack of precision if your build is based mostly off backstab damage i.e. d/p, but as a d/d s/d thief you will also want you’re c&d to proc. This becomes more pronounced with a might stacking build, since an assassins build would see a 18% or so power boost as opposed to a zerker’s 15% boost.

I’m not a fan of thief’s fury access. The only reliable ferocity is from dumping a load of points into trickery. I say a load because thrill of the crime’s fury will only see a 1/3 up-time, often less, unless you take sleight of hand. Putting 6 into trickery gives you some nice initiative / boon steal capability, but don’t forget you’ve just put a mostly useless 300 points into condition damage. Also, ferocity can be removed and severely cut your burst damage.

Long story short, assassins equals:
-Better sustain damage due to more reliable crits outside of fury up time (don’t forget sigil prcos for air / fire)
-Negligible damage loss, probably a gain, if you build for might (trickery can’t do this)
-More health (practiced tolerance)
-Less pressure to burst after a steal.

What you lose compared to zerker:
-1 hit wonder opening burst might be a little lower due to the time needed to ramp up might stacks.

Assassin’s will never beat out full berserker in anything unless huge, constant might stacking is involved on constant auto-attacks regarding PvE DPS throughputs. This is due to the ferocity change to critical damage increasing dependency on power since the critical damage ratio has fallen by a fair margin.

If you’re stabbing, Valkyrie is the answer on the basis that vitality -> power food will further augment stab damage per hit, you’re operating under a 100% critical chance on HK, anyways, so might stacking does little to help the initial burst, and you’ll be able to receive more damage while out of stealth after your burst since your health pool will be higher than Assassin’s + PT, anyways. Not to mention the increased power will make base mug and CnD hit harder enough to compensate for the lack of possible crits on the opening CnD.

Back before the ferocity change there were corner cases where assassin gear could outperform berserker gear, though the difference was small.

Post-ferocity change, those cases are essentially non-existent. I cannot think of any plausible situation where assassin gear will out-DPS berserker gear; even with maximum possible ferocity and 25 might stacks the performance gap is just too large.

I just did some quick calcs during my lunch break. I used the formulas from the wiki for average damage with critical chance and the power info for base damage. I used the power and crit information from the d/p power build and my build (or at least a version I had at one point when I was playing around). I used the 981 number for an exotic dagger (and co-eff from wiki entry) and plugged it in:

dagger——-power——-co-eff——-damage/hit
981————-2153———-0.56———-454.9123385
981————-2415———-0.56———-510.2709231

Higher power, more damage. Obvious.

Then I added in the crit average damage information:

Crit chance———crit dmg———avg dmg
0.73 —-——————1.98—————-780.3566254 <— Higher w/ crit heavy build
0.3————————-2.17 —-———-689.3760171

That doesn’t take the procs or other things into account. Nor does it consider the much higher HP of the power build. There’s definitely a more nuanced balancing act going on. This thread has been a good education for me. Thanks for the information.

Right. This is of course a situation where sustained damage is being calculated on Double strike exclusively, and we’re operating under the assumption that the thief is not utilizing fury, banners, spotter, etc. When the coefficients increase, the effectiveness of power does and the effectiveness of precision doesn’t.

This is why berserker remains more effective for DPS and burst in most scenarios; high coefficient bombs which have better power scaling paired with some fury end up making the set deal more sustained damage. This is especially apparent on stab thieves seeing as HK provides a 100% critical chance on their highest-hitting skill, making the effectiveness of assassin’s gear even lower than it would normally be.

I’m still convinced mixing in some extra precision from assassins with zerker is important for at least for pvp / wvw. I suspect this is because for a low number of hits the crit deviation will be large and can particularly hurt some builds for damage reliability.

Lets say it takes you eight hits to kill someone, then every single crit is vital. A pair of missed crits might lose you 4k damage. Making up for those 2 lost crits via power would require a huge number of stats to make up for (assume 2k average damage / hit, 8 hits, that’s a 25% power increase to make up for damage lost ~500 power). I agree HK somewhat negates this argument, but not all builds use HK.

If anyone’s interested, I made an excel sheet to calculate average DPS between two builds with precision / power as avariable. Straight power pretty much always comes out on top, but bear in mind damage output will be less reliable for dps spikes (see the binomial for crits at the bottom of the sheet).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uwlu2vfuhtrcgpn/docs.xlsx?dl=0

I do understand what you’re saying, however in most cases, the extra power (for the stab build type mentioned by the OP) is far more beneficial as in some cases it can lead to those extra criticals not even being necessary.

Where the assassins will come out ahead is if proc on crit effects maximized> This is every proc on crit. Both weapons, things like the food and any proc on crit effects from food and the traits like Vulnerability, IP and the like. Added to this the more attacks over a short period of time the better. This takes better advantage of durations.

Just as example the trait sundering strikes has no ICD. You can build up considerably more stacks of that with a higher crit rate and this increases ALL incoming damage by that percentage. In a larger scale fight this will lead to more damage incoming on target then just having higher power on ones own. In a high crit build with decent condition durations you can get this to 20 stacks in short order.

Might stacks from food/ or sigils also come in quicker allowing one to stack more of the same.

If one is looking for a single effect like might then berserker is likely better. If one is looking at garnering as many proc on crit effects as possible then assassins can be advantageous.

With a D/D set I would go more zerker then assassins as over a given period of time you are not attacking as much as a person using unload on a p/p set as example. When you do this the chances for an on crit effect drop so raw damage more beneficial. Further if one uses air/fire sigils , the longer cooldown translates to less a benefit from a higher proc on crit rate. The proc on crit rate using assassins works best with low or no cooldowns.