Guild Wars 2

I have been reading a lot on thiefs since mine is getting ready to hit 80. I am really interested in the power/vit/toughness thieves that are running S/D and SB.

What I am curious about is that power is the primary attribute but no points are spend in the power line – deadly arts. Many of the builds that I see are heavy in critical strikes and shadow arts.

Is there a hard cap to power? Shouldn’t a build like this be stacking power and toughness?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Infiltrator’s Strike > Heartseeker.

Well, one reason not to stack exclusively power is that power and precision stack multiplicatively.

100 power does less damage than 50 power and 50 precision.

I started my S/D with a lot of Power/Tough/Vit gear. It was very sturdy.

In that build, i had to rely a lot more on Fury (had it on Steal and when they were below 50% health and from runes). I did well, but fights were slow if the furys were on cooldown, and even still, I wanted more damage!

So I added quickness to the build, which helped. I had a lot of might in the build as well, to add even more power. I kept noticing that fury was great! Every time I landed a blow with that much power and it crit, wow! What would happen if I added some “crit damage” into the mix?

So I replaced my gear with Valk (I still have one Power/Tough/Vit piece… I’m thinking of adding one more back, not sure yet). I still had P/T/V jewelry. But now my hits were even harder. I had the same power (from Valk) as I did, and same HP, but a little less toughness. I could live with that for hitting harder. Then I noticed, GC thieves are hitting me HARD. I have a lot of HP but they are critting the crap out of me. How do I survive against them long enough to stun/daze/blind lock them as an S/D?

Then I swapped my P/T/V trinkets with Pow/Prec/Toughness from Emerald , and slotted them with ruby jewels. Now I hit hard harder than ever, with quickness, 17k health, and 1500 toughness. I don’t have as much HP (but still a fair amount from my Valk gear, and 30 in acrobatics). But that 3-4k more HP wasn’t doing me any good against conditions (I remove them easily enough) and I needed more toughness against GC bursts… so now it feels just right.

Maybe you like the more bunker/long fight/control aspect of S/D so all that 20k health and 2500 toughness is for you. Some want to push S/D into GC territory and rely more on stealth, good for them! I want to do a bit of both, but rely more on stun breaks and shadowsteps (which of course you can do in P/V/T as well, but you’ll be doing less damage). It all depends.

I started S/D + D/D as a PVT base as well but after a lot of playing with it I have slowly evolved it to full zerker/rubyorbs. The surivaiblity loss is almost not noticeable. You would be surprised how much of our defense is from traits and just plain avoidance with shadowsteps, stealth and dodges. With ~13,500 health (with 20 in acro and some wvw bonuses) you end up reacting based on % of health globe with your abilities so yea, you may need to shadowstep or return or evade and miss out on an extra auto attack in certain situations but it’s more than made up for with the better damage output of full zerk.

The biggest difference is you can’t eat a full burst form a GC thief or shatter mesmer or even one knockdown from a zerk or balanced d/d ele so you have to be on your toes for those fights. On the plus side you have plenty of dps to put them on defensive.

Hi…I’m assumuing your speaking for WvW…so this is what my advice is good for as I don’t PvE much…

I started the opposite…full berserker with knight and valk pieces to balance it out…then I kept reading about P/V/T gear so I farmed for it and started trying it out…so far not impressed…yes the staying power is there…but you hit for considerably less damage…

I agree with the above post…learn to dodge and trait appropriately (Trait SA for example and go for Feline Grace and dodge your life away) and the gear becomes a lot less important as to what you SHOULD have and what you WANT to have…meaning…if you like to dish out damage, and want fights to end quickly…

But don’t neglect toughness…its underrrated IMO…and anything below 15K HP is asking for trouble…so mix it up there are tons of posts on the subject…P/V/T gear with Ruby orbs, Berserker gear with valk weapons and emerald orbs…orbs are cheap and can achieve a lot on stats when wanting to try out certain stats to see if they fit your playstyle…one thing you should never play with are your jewels…those should always be berserker all the way…

Go read this guy’s post on the subject…good, sound information on there…

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/68426-wvw-stealth-sd-balanced-build-theorycrafting/

Good luck!

Rivets.9064:

Is there a hard cap to power? Shouldn’t a build like this be stacking power and toughness?

Traits can actually do something more active and supplement your build – and sometimes that is more important then the relatively small boost to static attribute. If someone with a power / crit oriented build does not spec in Deadly Arts they did so because they liked the traits from another line better.

That said, the +30% critical damage you can get on the Critical Strikes trait line is quite significant. Sadly the traits in that line are a bit underwhelming, but that is likely to compensate.

frans.8092:

Rivets.9064:

Is there a hard cap to power? Shouldn’t a build like this be stacking power and toughness?

That said, the +30% critical damage you can get on the Critical Strikes trait line is quite significant. Sadly the traits in that line are a bit underwhelming, but that is likely to compensate.

Power and toughness. Regardless of survivability you should be stacking power in one way or another. Doesn’t matter if you mix it with survivability or crit damage/chance its the main DPS stat and a requirement if you actually want to DPS.

Toughness not so much. If you are good at not getting hit than toughness may not benefit you all that much. However, toughness is the best defensive stat in the game and if you do get hit there is nothing wrong with stacking it.

@frans

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/12dmi5/tip_stat_optimization_with_crit_damage/

you are right actually. In comparison to what you will give up to get it other places that 30% has lots of value in the way of stats you don’t have to give up to get it.

Edit:
Also http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Executioner and http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hidden_Killer are really good grand master traits. The rest of the line (beside the minors which I like) are pretty bad.

A few pieces of PVT won’t hurt. You need to get some vitality somewhere, you still get your big chunk of power, and while toughness isn’t amazing for you it doesn’t hurt. I wouldn’t want more than 20-30% of my gear stat balance in PVT, but a couple pieces can go a long way towards your ability to take a hit without having a terrible effect on your damage.

Shufflepants.9785:

Well, one reason not to stack exclusively power is that power and precision stack multiplicatively.

100 power does less damage than 50 power and 50 precision.

Except it doesn’t. 100 Power > 50/50.

And you cannot even comment on the value of Precision without accounting for Crit-Damage and those two stats scale proportionately.

Power is almost always the best DPS stat by far. The only exceptions are when you cause Conditions on Crits or need to procc your weapon Sigils.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/17zsxz/practical_case_of_power_vs_precision_math/

It is also, though, easier to get gear itemized with power. You are, generally, not trading power for precision. You are trading toughness or vitality for precision, you get the same amount of power. The exception being Knights/Emerald, which has toughness as main stat, so you get slightly less power/prec, but again you get both at once.

Shufflepants.9785:

Well, one reason not to stack exclusively power is that power and precision stack multiplicatively.

100 power does less damage than 50 power and 50 precision.

Theoretically true in concept, but not true in application.

Precision scales rather poorly unless you have on-crit effects or heavy crit damage%. With no/low crit synergy in the build, it takes a kittenton of power before the value of power decays such that Precision becomes relevant.

Edit: nm, tangent already addressed.

Anyways, personally I would start with a full Berserker build, then swap items one by one to Knights and/or to Valk until you find a comfortable balance. Knight swaps should prioritize the high ratio slots: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item_nomenclature#Comparison_of_numeric_vs._percentage_attributes

Valk swaps should prioritize the low ratio slots.

One could also start in the reverse with a full PVT build, and swap in Knight/Valk. Either way. Kind of depends on playstyle really. If you personally intend to soak up more enemy attention, you want more VT. If you intend to kill and run, you want more crit damage. Shrug.

Shufflepants.9785:

Well, one reason not to stack exclusively power is that power and precision stack multiplicatively.

100 power does less damage than 50 power and 50 precision.

In fact 100 power does far more damage than 50-50 (even with 200% CD). To the point that with the basic 150% CD, if you do the derivate, the result is that getting “negative precision” (impossible I know) and giving that precission to Power you get even better damage (which means, not only never critting, but having a small percentage of negative damage crits, would still result on more damage on average giving those points to power).

Mathematically power increases your average damage muuuuuuuch faster than Precision in this game. Not to mention that it forces you to sacrifice 2 atribute increases (one for Precision and one for Critical Damage as none of them do much for you without the other).

Precision is only good in those situations:

- When you already have a lot of power, so it increases what you can do, but always with Power as a primary attribute (most sets including Precision also include Power as primary anyway).

- When you have a huge load of “on crit” effects and your build focus on them.

- A combination of both situations.

EDIT: I didn’t read the other comments saying basically the same :P

So after looking at links and reading this thread…should I be getting my precision and crit damage from ruby in my slots? And not from any actual gear or trinkets?

Fiddler.5174:

So after looking at links and reading this thread…should I be getting my precision and crit damage from ruby in my slots? And not from any actual gear or trinkets?

The only outliner here is Crit-Damage since it’s a flat %-increase rather than a numerical value.

Getting Crit Damage from Orbs/Gems is by far the most efficient as you only sacrifice 5 or 7.5 regulat stat points per 1% Crit-Damage.

Take a Chest for example where you trade 72 stats for 5% Crit-Damage (14.4 stats per 1% Crit-Damage) and it shouldn’t be hard to see why.

Where can I find the math for how power scales with damage to find out how much of a % damage increase adding X amount of power is to X amount of power.

I would also like to know the base damage increase for a critical hits, and what the tiers for crit chance are at level 80, and basically all about how critical hits function in this game.

I also find it tiresome that people would say things like 50/50 power/precision is better than 100 power, then someone else comes along and says that it’s not true, but doesn’t prove it wrong with math. How is anyone suppose to know the real answer when people are simply stating what look like opinions with no mathematical backing?

Dee Jay.2460:

The only outliner here is Crit-Damage since it’s a flat %-increase rather than a numerical value.

More specifically, ANet for some reason did not balance crit damage across item slots. There are some item slots where a -1% crit damage would make the “ratio” of crit% to “normal stat” equal to other items.

Most item slots are that way. You could have ALL slots with a fairly equal “1:14” ratio or whatever, if the crit damage % were nerfed everywhere.

Honestly, it’s very very strange. They either intentionally or negligently over-complicated the stat tradeoffs with the result of players wasting gear and causing them to do more farming/crafting/purchasing gems to make up for the learning curve. In addition to an overall damage increase in PvE rulesets (including WvW).

wish.3102:

Where can I find the math for how power scales with damage to find out how much of a % damage increase adding X amount of power is to X amount of power.

From a total damage perspective, take your “X amount of additional power” and divide by your current total power.

E.g. if you have 2000 power, then +100 power will add 100/2000 = 5% total damage. It’s pretty straightforward.

I would also like to know the base damage increase for a critical hits, and what the tiers for crit chance areat level 80, and basically all about how critical hits function in this game.

Base crit damage is +50%, or *150%.

Crit chance is 1% per 21 precision.

Imagine a generic random attack with 1k weapon damage, 2000 power, with a 30% chance to crit, and +50% bonus crit damage (so +100% crit damage, e.g. double damage) against a target with 2000 armor.

Average damage: 1000 * 2000 * (1 + .3*(1)) / 2000 = 1300 damage.
Add 100 power: 1000 * 2100 * (1 + .3*(1)) / 2000 = 1365.
Add 100 prec instead: 1000 * 2000 * (1 + .3476*(1)) / 2000 = 1348.
Add 10% crit damage instead: 1000 * 2000 * (1 + .3*(1.1)) / 2000 = 1330.

Power wins, and this is with a high amount of base power. The lower your power is, the more valuable power is. You can re-run the above examples with whatever your current stats are or w/e. You need a kittenton of crit damage%, and already-high-base-power before precision becomes better than power.

Note that in general, power rarely conflicts with precision. Only cases are sigil stacks, rampager versus <insert power>, fine tuning of knights accessories, etc, and trait line investments.

So from this logic…since power seems to affect dmg more…would making sure that every item of gear has power as the main stat and throwing points into deadly arts over worrying about crit and prec be better? and to just build tanky with rest of stats? For example what this thread is initially about…PVT? Cause I don’t see thiefs having that many “on crit” traits…

The conclusion is that:

- When comparing power versus precision or crit damage, power is going to win in most cases

- Precision usually does not compete with power (when choosing between Knight’s and Soldier’s gear, precision is competing with Toughness)

- Precision does not have strong value unless you have SOMETHING else that is synergizing with crits; Thieves don’t have many crit synergies except for raw crit damage%

- Traits should generally be chosen based on the actual traits, not the trait line stat boost; the stats make a little difference, but the traits tend to matter more (mostly because gear tends to have a lot more stats than what you get through trait lines)

In terms of assessing tank gear, the point is that if you have max power, you have “a good fraction” of your damage. You are not “gimp” by any stretch if you have low crit%.

If you have high power, and you want more damage output … then your next step will be precision/crit%. That will always be true. Just make sure you have power sorted out first.

mattbitts.7490:

So from this logic…since power seems to affect dmg more…would making sure that every item of gear has power as the main stat and throwing points into deadly arts over worrying about crit and prec be better? and to just build tanky with rest of stats? For example what this thread is initially about…PVT? Cause I don’t see thiefs having that many “on crit” traits…

I don’t think taking trait lines only for their stat is a good way to go. Traits are too powerful. Unless you are talking about just having the max damage possible for your profession. Deadly arts matches well for GC thieves anyway so it’s not an issue for them. It’s more for a more balanced build, I wouldn’t waist traits like that.