Guild Wars 2

How much damage do you lose approx from going from Zerkers to Marauders? and how does that compare to the amount of survivability you gain?

From what I can gather, considering Thief only has around ~12k HP at base, they have quite a lot to gain from a small increase in Vitality compared to say a Necro’s already high health-pool. But considering we have Critical Strikes which scale really well with both Power and Ferocity, something Zerker gear has in buckets, is the damage loss worth it if you can already play around your low health-pool? Or can your own skill only carry you so far?

I mean for both PvE and PvP settings… As I dabble a little bit on both sides, so share your opinion! I would really appreciate it.

I am not really looking for solid facts, just general opinions. I was thinking of switching from Zerkers to Marauders, but I am poor and constantly so..

I personally play my thief with full zerker because i’m comfortable with its huge movility not being limited by CD’s. My D/D elementalist in the other hand i play it with marauder trinkets to get to 15k HP and the loss is a 10% in critical damage (but a gain of 6% critical chance).

It’s exactly the same with thief since both thief and ele have the same HP pool and a trait to transform precision into ferocity. With a full set of marauder you get 18k HP but you lose 20% critical damage so it’s not worth it, i just throw the trinkets in if i feel like it and that’s all.

PvE, whatever you’re comfortable with.

PvP/WvW, Marauder is pretty much the only choice unless you like getting repeatedly one-shotted by builds with two to four times your effective health and multiple invulns/defenses you’ll be unable to slip through; you won’t race them in damage and absolutely won’t in durability; marauder is just insurance so that zero-cast-time-instant-nuke doesn’t auto-down you. In WvW Berserker/Valkyrie mix is also good.

Don’t use Crit Strikes in PvP/WvW unless you want to handicap yourself; every trait line except SA on the trapper cancer build is better.

Zerker for higher end pve content because its a numbers game.

Marauders for everything else. You’ll lose about 9% damage, but gain around 54% more health. The damage/defense tradeoff is obvious.

Marauders for sPvP and WvW. Berserker for everything else. You can use Marauder in PvE as well, but not in raids. The damage falloff is noticeable and you want Berserker in PvE because it feels better. Due to ‘Invigorating Precision’ you don’t die as easily as people say you do in Berserker and can actually be quite tanky. If there’s a Ventari Rev or a Druid supporting you, you never die. Only high damage spikes will kill you. You can compliment yourself with food if you’re having trouble.

You get about 6% health per 1% DPS you give up. It depends a bit upon build and game type (the buffs you expect to have). See below – you get about 6.2% health per 1% DPS in a PvP spec and minimal boons (just some might and fury), but only 5.8% in a raid build with full buffs.

Numbers are a bit better if you use a Ferocious Maintenance Oil (which you should in general – it’s about a 1% DPS boost in raids on top of the extra health) – you get a 6.7% HP boost per 1% DPS sacrificed using a PvP/solo build, and 6.2% with full raid buffs.

You rarely, if ever, want to go full Marauder – on the margin, each additional piece of Marauder is adding a lower percentage health increase (due to the higher base without it), while costing you more damage on the margin (due to a lower base). Plus the real value of additional health diminishes hard once you have enough to stop getting one shot. Still, the first few pieces are a pretty fantastic deal.

For the sake of comparison, you can get an additional 4500 HP or so (increasing your base HP from 11645 to over 16000) for the same DPS trade-off as taking Invigorating Precision.

The bend in the PvE chart comes from hitting the crit cap – there’s some leeway as I don’t assume 100% uptime on Keen Observer.

I use marauder accessories chest legs and head, rest is full zerk. This has been my personal best balance for 2 reasons

1. enough hp to survive most “1shot” mechanics low surviving builds suffer from in pve.

2. Best balance of defense and offense to keep me fighting. remember, dead zerker <living player.

Pvp it varies, dps difference is definitely noticeable so just pick what works for you, some people play a little more aggressive and marauder is better to keep them alive during that. Zerker can pop in and spike and disappear if played well.

WvW idk I don’t play that lame mode for a long time now.