Guild Wars 2

Good day to you, my cunning thieves,

I finally hit lvl 500 leatherworking today. This means it’s time to start taking my gear to the ascended level. It’s going to be a long quest all in itself. So I am here to get everybody’s opinion.

I am looking for ideal stats balance, and by “ideal”, I mean a little more aggressive than sustain. 55% aggressive 45% survivability kind of balance.

I currently have 4/6 exotic Valkyrie with 2/6 Berserker, and I want to change it up a notch.

What type and mix of armor should I get for my ascended set?
Please share your own ascended stats and strategy.

Important note my jewelry and weapon sets are entirely ascended berseker btw.
I avoid conditions stats at all costs.

Thank you

Let’s be honest here. The effort needed to craft a new ascended armor set is huge. I’d go 100% zerk and any survivability/tweaks would be done with jewelry, starting with rings.

Depends on if you play pve or wvw more, and if you take hidden killer or not. With hidden killer you obviously have more room to take vitality stats because it makes up for the lost precision. I just made a build that was all valkyrie or valkyrie/beserker with hidden killer and was roaming with it for a while. People were surprised when they tried to kill me and couldn’t blow me up like normal (I was sitting on about 23k hp with guard stacks) but on the other hand all of my non stealth skills were critting a lot less than I would have liked.

I think a baseline HP number you should try to go for is 17.5k at least and then the rest into zerker offensive. This is still pretty squishy so you have to play as smart as possible still, but I’m sure you’re used to that by now.

All in all you should craft it piece by piece, start out with making zerker pieces and test the set up out in your preferred game type. If you feel too squishy, make the next piece valk, if you feel like you don’t do enough dmg, make the next piece zerk.

stof.9341:

Let’s be honest here. The effort needed to craft a new ascended armor set is huge. I’d go 100% zerk and any survivability/tweaks would be done with jewelry, starting with rings.

You can change stats of ascended armor pieces in the mystic forge. It’s not that cheap, but you can still do it if you absolutely needed to. The problem with replacing the jewelry to make up for the lost vitality stats is that you just won’t get the same numbers because they don’t have pure valk jewelry.

Edit: An ascended valk chest piece would give the same vitality stats as going full beserker/valk in your trinkets. It would make more sense to me to just craft the chest piece as valk to save his badges, laurels, guild comms, etc.

I’m pretty sure, OCD notwithstanding, that you can tweak your jewelry pieces to get close enough of the stats you want anyway. Because I see no good reason to “get the same numers” as long as you get similar enough values.

And as you say, changing the stats of ascended armor is expensive. What will you do when you switch from a place were you are more confortable in 100% zerk to one where you’d like more HP? When you change multiple times in a day? I’m sure you’ll not switch your armor stats :p

Basically the point is : it’s much cheaper to keep multiple sets of ascended jewelry to tweak your build than multiple sets of ascended armors. So I’d suggest going on the armor for the base building block of your stat builds that will not really change, aka some pieces of zerk, and let the jewelry do the tweaks.

reinforever.8902:

(I was sitting on about 23k hp with guard stacks) but on the other hand all of my non stealth skills were critting a lot less than I would have liked.
[…]
I think a baseline HP number you should try to go for is 17.5k at least

I have exactly 14.2k HP for WvW so I am definitely under the bar, and I don’t think my damage is all that.

stof.9341:

Let’s be honest here. The effort needed to craft a new ascended armor set is huge. I’d go 100% zerk and any survivability/tweaks would be done with jewelry, starting with rings.

And what jewelry would you suggest? Cause I would like some decent HP.. Would anything tankier than Valk be pushing it?

thanks for the feedback guys. I hope i get more people to share their experience.

Kocoff.7582:

reinforever.8902:

(I was sitting on about 23k hp with guard stacks) but on the other hand all of my non stealth skills were critting a lot less than I would have liked.
[…]
I think a baseline HP number you should try to go for is 17.5k at least

I have exactly 14.2k HP for WvW so I am definitely under the bar, and I don’t think my damage is all that.

stof.9341:

Let’s be honest here. The effort needed to craft a new ascended armor set is huge. I’d go 100% zerk and any survivability/tweaks would be done with jewelry, starting with rings.

And what jewelry would you suggest? Cause I would like some decent HP.. Would anything tankier than Valk be pushing it?

thanks for the feedback guys. I hope i get more people to share their experience.

If you’re going to go full zerk armors and try to make up for it in your jewelry pieces, I think going zerk/valk which gives you power main stat, precision, vitality, and ferocity would be a decent choice. Giving up power or ferocity to get vitality or toughness just isn’t the way you’d want to go in my opinion, because that starts cutting into dmg too much. And if you were to go this route, if you made all your armor as berserker (including all your berserker jewelry) except your chest piece as valk, it would be the exact same stat wise as going full zerk in your armor and then going zerkervalk for all of your jewelry.

I need to ask, what do you consider, WvW wise a satisfactory crit chance and power?

I feel like full zerk jewelry with full valk armor set is an ideal stat. According do a build editor, it could leave me at 15k HP, 2.5k power with 40% crit chance without food.

What do you think?

Kocoff.7582:

I need to ask, what do you consider, WvW wise a satisfactory crit chance and power?

I feel like full zerk jewelry with full valk armor set is an ideal stat. According do a build editor, it could leave me at 15k HP, 2.5k power with 40% crit chance without food.

What do you think?

I think that is a very viable baseline for stats. What runes are you planning on running also?

reinforever.8902:

Kocoff.7582:

I need to ask, what do you consider, WvW wise a satisfactory crit chance and power?

I feel like full zerk jewelry with full valk armor set is an ideal stat. According do a build editor, it could leave me at 15k HP, 2.5k power with 40% crit chance without food.

What do you think?

I think that is a very viable baseline for stats. What runes are you planning on running also?

I got Pack Runes.