Guild Wars 2

Which one is better for dmg oriented build?

Eagle. why even use pack, you lose so much dps just for some m/f/s and some swiftness
eagle good for PvE

/in my opinion

eagle
mesmer
ogre
scholar
divinity
ruby orb
ranger

Really what you prefer and can afford

Last time I checked the Pack runes were still bugged and didn’t give you one of the stats it is supposed to.

Divinity, Wurm, Scholar, Melandru and Lyssa are the only real choices IMO.
Divinity/Wurm offer the most versatility for adding some defense depending on how much you can afford. Scholar is the best for DPS. And Lyssa/Melandru are the best for utility purposes.

wish.1027:

Divinity, Wurm, Scholar, Melandru and Lyssa are the only real choices IMO.
Divinity/Wurm offer the most versatility for adding some defense depending on how much you can afford. Scholar is the best for DPS. And Lyssa/Melandru are the best for utility purposes.

Wouldn’t something like 5 Scholar and 1 Divinity be better than Scholar runes below 90% health though? I honestly don’t think that the 6th Scholar rune is viable because keeping your health above 90% at all times is close to impossible, so you’re going to lose that bonus pretty quickly in any real fight.

I was wondering, what about superior rune of Rage? 10% crit damage at all times, 15% crit damage under fury?

I guess this is more viable with warriors who have easy access to fury, but we do have thrill of the crime, kinda sorta fury…

I seriously think runes are overrated, just use orbs. If you are just going for damage, take orb. You wont see any difference.

Unless you are going for some specific rune thingy like animal summon, boon duration, boon proc, condition duration, condition proc etc.

I read somewhere that the 6th scholar rune is only worth it if you can stay above 90% hp for 25% of the fight which isn’t hard to do if you run full glass build, if you are looking for a more balanced build then I would go for Lyssa, Divinity, Wurm, or Orbs.

Edit: BTW Rage is garbage even with 100% fury uptime.

Silver.4798:

I was wondering, what about superior rune of Rage? 10% crit damage at all times, 15% crit damage under fury?

I guess this is more viable with warriors who have easy access to fury, but we do have thrill of the crime, kinda sorta fury…

+ 5% crit damage is only + 1% damage for your average thief. 25 Power is basically worth the same amount of damage as + 5% crit damage.

Rissou.7213:

I seriously think runes are overrated, just use orbs. If you are just going for damage, take orb. You wont see any difference.

You wont notice the difference in game when playing. But if you do the math or if there was a way to parse, you would notice. Runes offer more than orbs, even if all youre looking for is DPS.

Crimes.5317:

I read somewhere that the 6th scholar rune is only worth it if you can stay above 90% hp for 25% of the fight which isn’t hard to do if you run full glass build, if you are looking for a more balanced build then I would go for Lyssa, Divinity, Wurm, or Orbs.

Edit: BTW Rage is garbage even with 100% fury uptime.

Anything is better than the 6th Scholar rune if youre not above 90%. Scholar runes are for when you take 0 damage. Like when you do COF p1. You take 0 damage or you die in half a second and you wear all berserker gear and just try to max your DPS.

Why the love for Eagle runes?

I find that with eagle runes, I rarely crit as high as when using a power rune, hence I thought pack would be a good candidate.

The trade off is that eagle gets me more crits while pack gives me more dmg on crit. But then on TP eagle is about 6x as much as pack, so may be I wasn’t getting something quite right.

Above 90% though scholar is a beast, but it tapers off drastically as the fight goes on.

But yeah someone explain to me why the love for eagle runes, which seems that for pure dps, power bonus is highly deseriable, no since it affects both crit and non-crit hits.

Ogre is by far my favorite for consistent, general purpose DPS.

160 power and 4% dmg for non-crits, and (3 + 4*(150+crtdmg)/100)% dmg for crits, which works out to be 11% for 50 critdmg and 13% for 100 critdmg. The rock dog is not particularly reliable, but when it does spawn it gives a decent boost of 1k every 3 seconds until it soaks up 6k of damage for you and your team.

It also happens to offer the highest burst potential (whereby only power, direct %dmg boosts and critdmg matters) for both crits and non-crits asides from Scholar at 90%+ HP. This is why many high tier burst builds in sPvP run with it.

Ruby Orbs are my 2nd choice. 120 power, 84 prec, 12% critdmg is a very nice balanced distribution for DPS. Plus they’re cheaper than most popular DPS Runes.

6 Piece Scholar set is great for those fights where you can faceroll and barely get hit at all, but for anything decently challenging, you’re better off replacing the 6th piece with a Ruby orb for 180 power, 10% crit dmg, 14 prec. Although even then this set is still completely overpriced for what it offers DPS wise. You take Scholar for 1 reason only: Burst. For burst builds, you want your initial burst to hit as hard as possible and disengage if they’re not dead by the end of it, and this is what Scholar excels at.

Eagle runes’ overall burst potential and DPS really suffers due to the lack of a power boost. The only decent use case is for timed bursts when targets falls below 50% in PvP, but even then your burst potential is significantly lower than with any of the above.

Similar story for Rune of the Pack for the lack of any %dmg or critdmg boosts. As a Thief you’re not going to be struck often enough for the m/f/s to pop often enough to matter, and if you are, might as well take Back Fighting to go along with it because you’d likely be in down state often enough to justify it.

Kaon.7192:

(3 + 4*(150+crtdmg)/100)% dmg for crits, which works out to be 11% for 50 critdmg and 13% for 100 critdmg.

This is wrong, or Im reading it incorrectly.

The way you calculate crit damage is to write crit damage and rate out in decimals (move the “.” two to the left, 120% Crit damage would be 1.2, 50% crit chance would be 0.5) then use the following formula:
Crit damage increase:
(1.5 + oldcritdamage + addedcritdamage) / (1.5 + oldcritdamage) =1.XXYYY
XX.YYY * .critrate = %damage increase

You should of known what you were doing is wrong, because adding to a whole number gives diminishing returns, not increasing, and you got 11% damage for 3% crit damage at 50% base and 13% at 100% base… which makes no sense.
(1.5 + 1 + .03) / (1.5 + 1)= 1.012
With 100% crit damage adding 3% more crit damage is a 1.2% damage increase if your crit rate is 100%. If your crit rate is 50%~ it’s
1.2 * .5= .6
0.6%~ damage.

With 50% crit damage base
(1.5 + .5 + .03) / (1.5 + .5)= 1.015
Its worth 1.5% damage at 100% crit rate, 0.75% damage at 50% crit rate.

For the optimal response on which rune/orb to use, you will need to post the build will be using. As there are actually magic numbers where each one will out perform the other.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/D-D-full-DPS-for-PvE/2662952