Guild Wars 2

What do you guys prefer? A prec heavy build or power heavy.

I use 2225 ish power 1733 precision and 101% bonus crit damage, with 1231 vit and 1116 tough. However, power + prec and maybe crit dmg will go up a bit as I get ascended gear and finish replacing my pants and shoes with the CoE gear.

I’ve found best results as* S/P traiting mostly into crit, and gearing towards power/crit dmg % increase.

You will want a good balance of both, in most builds. I don’t think condition damage builds really need much crit, but they definitely need power.

Lol. Had to add an * in between as and S/P, because it was “kittening” out. Neat.

Power has generally better and more reliable returns in terms of damage, but precision creates synergy with any “on-crit” procs, as well as providing some resistance to weakness.

Both are viable.

I’d want 30 in critical strikes before putting any points in DA, but on my gear I’d rather trade precision than power for another stat.

Jefzor.7145:

I’d want 30 in critical strikes before putting any points in DA, but on my gear I’d rather trade precision than power for another stat.

Agreed, when talking about trait trees there’s a lot more at stake than just the raw stats.

DA:
Pros:
->Mug/Serpent’s Touch make Steal crazy potent as a burst ability and can change the whole way you use your profession mechanic.
->Condition duration + weakness-on-poison + vulnerability-on-crit make this an incredible non-damage condition trait line. Simply taking DA traits and keeping those conditions up does more for a group than people realize.
Cons:
->Your average min/max build won’t get the full use out of both +power and +condition duration simultaneously.
->Doesn’t lend itself to a series of short fights, being focused on either winning one fight very quickly (via steal pain), or creating a lot of utility in a drawn-out conflict like a boss fight (via conditions). For PvE farming, the conditions won’t really have the opportunity to help much and steal will only help on one target.

Critical Strikes:
Pros:
->Initiative-on-Crit is bar none the thief’s best initiative regeneration mechanic given enough crit chance and hit volume.
->Both stat bonuses are 100 % focused on direct damage, which makes it a favorite line for high-offense builds.
Cons:
->If you’re going into CS you’re best going deep and having lots of gear support, as the effect of the stats is heavily dependent on having a lot of them. Lots of +critical damage is not very useful if your overall crit rate is low.
->The 10 % damage trait doesn’t mesh well with initiative-hungry builds that can’t hang out at >6 init all the time.
->For some reason CS is “the pistol tree”, and those traits don’t get much play due to being sub-par in combination with weak pistol weapon sets.

I personally found that running 20/30/20/0/0 seems to give me nice defense, all the benefits of the cs tree that I want and all the benefits from the power tree that are useful to me.

You don’t get a lot of opportunities to make that trade-off, since gear choices are so limited and the major and minor traits are much more important than the raw stat boosts.

Which one is better does depend heavily on your build. Generally, I think they are very close in effectiveness, with precision moving ahead as you stack crit damage and add more proc effects to your build. For the build I usually run (25/30/0/0/15) I believe that precision is superior to power when I have a pie active, but power is superior to precision without pie. Since I gear for the hardest content, I thus have a slight preference for precision over power – but, again, the difference is slight, and there are few opportunities to grab precision at the expense of power without junking up your other stats.

Originally I was focused as a D/D with full on Power/Prec/Crit % Dmg. It’s GREAT is PvE against small groups, but horrible in group battles. I had to test many things out with this and waisted tons of gold, but found that having the ability to crit 60-70% of the time far outweighed the ability to hit harder. having a 5-6k crit every 20 or so hits and everythign else ~1k is not as good as hitting something for 3-4k every 2-4 hits.

Currently I now run a prec/toughness/condition damage build and I love it, not only am I able to handle 6 mobs my level at a time without much worry (I’ve gotten 15 with my dancing daggers), I can take much more damage and heal up better.

As for weapons now with this, I still use D/D for solo PvE, but I use P/P for groups, and everyone loves it. I can survive 10x longer now, and my party LOVES my stacking of vulnerability. add that with a sigil or prec on main, and a quickness sigil on off, and you have a rampaging thief.