Guild Wars 2

Hey, I’m currently using a mix of valk and berserker stuff, but I was wondering if anyone has tried using cavalier at all (power,tough,crit dmg). Basically same thing as Valk, but with toughness instead of vitality. I was just wondering if anyone has tested any builds using it, and whether or not is viable. Thanks!

Usually people mix Valk and Knight armour with Zerker trinkets/weapons, but I see no reason why you couldn’t replace some of those trinkets with Cavalier.

You just need to weigh up the loss of precision against the gaining of toughness.

Here’s a great PvE calculator: http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/

Let us know how it works out.

Im using full cavalier accessories at the moment, i find it better then the valkyrie :p it gave me about 300 more toughness if i remember right

I’m using a mix 4/6 armor valk, 2/6knight, 4/6 jewel zerk, 2/6cavalier
not bad.

I cannot think of a situation off the top of my head where I would prefer it over both Valkyrie and Knight’s. It’s not a particularly good set for the thief.

Ensign.2189:

I cannot think of a situation off the top of my head where I would prefer it over both Valkyrie and Knight’s. It’s not a particularly good set for the thief.

Well using cavalier instead of knights for toughness lets you keep critical damage, which is of most importance for hidden killer backstab builds, which are getting kittened by anet in a week ty.

Ensign.2189:

I cannot think of a situation off the top of my head where I would prefer it over both Valkyrie and Knight’s. It’s not a particularly good set for the thief.

Playing with shout warriors for example. You have almost perma fury (so less need of knight’s precision) and a lot of healings (self and from group members) so high toughness is preferable to a large life pool (toughness > vitality).

I’d like to note that on Cavaliers gear power is a secondary stat. If your trying to maximize you damage you don’t want to use Cavaliers. It would be better to Mix Valk/zerker/soldiers for defense. Reason being is you Crit damage is based off the amount of power you have. Power will always be more important then crit damage (at some point I’m sure they might even out but with the gear available power out weighs crit damage)

Just keep that in mind when using cavaliers gear toughness in the primary stat and power/crit damage are secondary.

I swapped out my zerker jewels for cavalier’s today and tested them on pve monsters. The cavalier jewels gave me an extra 300 toughness, but I noticed that the damage was only reduced by 100 on the monsters. I don’t think it’s actually worth it. Any opinions, and has anyone tried running full pvt gear?

Zikory.6871:

I’d like to note that on Cavaliers gear power is a secondary stat. If your trying to maximize you damage you don’t want to use Cavaliers. It would be better to Mix Valk/zerker/soldiers for defense. Reason being is you Crit damage is based off the amount of power you have. Power will always be more important then crit damage (at some point I’m sure they might even out but with the gear available power out weighs crit damage)

Just keep that in mind when using cavaliers gear toughness in the primary stat and power/crit damage are secondary.

Actually, Crit Damage is better than Power if you have at least a moderate amount of Precision. Once you get enough Precision, Power is only still useful to invest in because its needed for taking out structures and for some consistency in damage.
Once you reach a little under 25% crit chance the two break even. Any more than that and Crit Damage is better.
Specifically, for the same stat allocation enough Power to get you around 0.45% extra raw damage would get you 2% Crit Damage. If 25% of your attacks are crits, that is 0.5% extra overall damage.

-Edit- Wait, that’s off… I need to look again at how much Power grants 1% damage, because my math on that here is wrong.
-Edit- Okay, I can’t seem to find any exact numbers on it, but I seem to have given Power roughly half the value I should have, which is significant.
Odds are Crit Damage should be universally better once you have at least 46% crit chance, which is somewhat significant but still easily reached by a Precision stacking build.
Also worth noting is that Precision becomes superior to Power once you have at least around 60% Crit Damage.

iBlasiannn.4279:

I swapped out my zerker jewels for cavalier’s today and tested them on pve monsters. The cavalier jewels gave me an extra 300 toughness, but I noticed that the damage was only reduced by 100 on the monsters. I don’t think it’s actually worth it. Any opinions, and has anyone tried running full pvt gear?

A full pvt set will take out too much damage I think.
As I said I made a mix and the result is:

Power: 2001
Precision: 1849
Toughness: 1496
Vitality: 1365
Critical Damage: 102%
Critical Chance: 65.44% (from behind/side) +12% (25 stacks) + 20% fury
Armor: 2560
Health: 15293

Grimwolf.7163:

Zikory.6871:

I’d like to note that on Cavaliers gear power is a secondary stat. If your trying to maximize you damage you don’t want to use Cavaliers. It would be better to Mix Valk/zerker/soldiers for defense. Reason being is you Crit damage is based off the amount of power you have. Power will always be more important then crit damage (at some point I’m sure they might even out but with the gear available power out weighs crit damage)

Just keep that in mind when using cavaliers gear toughness in the primary stat and power/crit damage are secondary.

Actually, Crit Damage is better than Power if you have at least a moderate amount of Precision. Once you get enough Precision, Power is only still useful to invest in because its needed for taking out structures and for some consistency in damage.
Once you reach a little under 25% crit chance the two break even. Any more than that and Crit Damage is better.
Specifically, for the same stat allocation enough Power to get you around 0.45% extra raw damage would get you 2% Crit Damage. If 25% of your attacks are crits, that is 0.5% extra overall damage.

-Edit- Wait, that’s off… I need to look again at how much Power grants 1% damage, because my math on that here is wrong.
-Edit- Okay, I can’t seem to find any exact numbers on it, but I seem to have given Power roughly half the value I should have, which is significant.
Odds are Crit Damage should be universally better once you have at least 46% crit chance, which is somewhat significant but still easily reached by a Precision stacking build.
Also worth noting is that Precision becomes superior to Power once you have at least around 60% Crit Damage.

So would it be possible to run a build that doesn’t rely on precision and crit. damage. So basically PvT gear and accessories and traits focused only into power and survivability. From what you said about the crit damage being better once you reach 46%. As of right now, my build only gives me 37% crit chance 95% crit damage, 44% from behind, and about 50% once I factor in nourishments. From your info, am I losing power because my base crit. chance is lower than 46%?

iBlasiannn.4279:

Grimwolf.7163:

Zikory.6871:

I’d like to note that on Cavaliers gear power is a secondary stat. If your trying to maximize you damage you don’t want to use Cavaliers. It would be better to Mix Valk/zerker/soldiers for defense. Reason being is you Crit damage is based off the amount of power you have. Power will always be more important then crit damage (at some point I’m sure they might even out but with the gear available power out weighs crit damage)

Just keep that in mind when using cavaliers gear toughness in the primary stat and power/crit damage are secondary.

Actually, Crit Damage is better than Power if you have at least a moderate amount of Precision. Once you get enough Precision, Power is only still useful to invest in because its needed for taking out structures and for some consistency in damage.
Once you reach a little under 25% crit chance the two break even. Any more than that and Crit Damage is better.
Specifically, for the same stat allocation enough Power to get you around 0.45% extra raw damage would get you 2% Crit Damage. If 25% of your attacks are crits, that is 0.5% extra overall damage.

-Edit- Wait, that’s off… I need to look again at how much Power grants 1% damage, because my math on that here is wrong.
-Edit- Okay, I can’t seem to find any exact numbers on it, but I seem to have given Power roughly half the value I should have, which is significant.
Odds are Crit Damage should be universally better once you have at least 46% crit chance, which is somewhat significant but still easily reached by a Precision stacking build.
Also worth noting is that Precision becomes superior to Power once you have at least around 60% Crit Damage.

So would it be possible to run a build that doesn’t rely on precision and crit. damage. So basically PvT gear and accessories and traits focused only into power and survivability. From what you said about the crit damage being better once you reach 46%. As of right now, my build only gives me 37% crit chance 95% crit damage, 44% from behind, and about 50% once I factor in nourishments. From your info, am I losing power because my base crit. chance is lower than 46%?

No, because that much crit damage makes every bit of Precision you have far more valuable than Power against living targets (not structures).

Critical damage is essentially never a better stat than power on your weapons, armor, or jewelry.

Let’s say you want to know, for a given critical chance, how much power you need to have to make 12 power equal to 1 critical bonus damage – 12 because that’s the best possible trade-off for critical damage you can get on your weapons, armor, or jewelry. Assume for the moment that you have a 100% crit chance, which should make critical bonus damage awesome.

In that case (100% critical chance, 12:1 crit damage to power) you prefer critical damage to power when you already have more than (1800 + 12*critdamage) power.

That means that you’d want at least 2160 power before you even touched critical bonus damage if all you had was 30 in critical strikes. You’d want 2376 power before you touched it with 30 in critical strikes and ruby orbs in your jewelry.

At real values of critical chance, the two aren’t even close. For a heavy, heavy crit build I value critical damage at about 8 power worth of stats. You’re not going to get that anywhere.

The numbers Grimwolf posted are true if you can get a 1:1 ratio of critical bonus damage to power. It is true that 1 critical bonus damage surpasses 1 power at very low levels of crit chance – but there isn’t a single place in the game you can get a 1:1 trade-off between critical damage and power.

You can get crit damage without Power from runes. you’re also fully capable of getting Precision without Power, which at higher levels of crit damage is optimal.
Of course, a Precision item without Power just has a defensive stat or Condition Damage instead, which won’t help your offense more than Power would.
But yeah, you’ll end up with a fair amount of Power regardless simply due to stat itemization.
I suppose it was a spectacularly critical point I failed to mention, that with most gear there is no way to focus effectively on Precision or crit damage without also focusing on Power.
This would mostly be for when choosing runes and traits.

Karolis.4261:

Well using cavalier instead of knights for toughness lets you keep critical damage, which is of most importance for hidden killer backstab builds, which are getting kittened by anet in a week ty.

Power is a minor stat on Cavalier gear. That blunts most of the benefit you would gain from the additional critical bonus damage. I would honestly prefer Soldier gear to Cavalier if you badly needed toughness for some reason – between the two the damage is very close, and you get a ton more defensive stats from the Soldier’s gear.

Daendur.2357:

Playing with shout warriors for example. You have almost perma fury (so less need of knight’s precision) and a lot of healings (self and from group members) so high toughness is preferable to a large life pool (toughness > vitality).

I usually assume permanent Fury when comparing stats. Even with permanent fury, I prefer Knight’s to Cavalier’s gear right up to the point where I have a 100% critical hit chance. I would take the 21 precision to go from 99% to 100% crit chance over 2% crit damage in a heartbeat.

Grimwolf.7163:

you’re also fully capable of getting Precision without Power, which at higher levels of crit damage is optimal.

Precision will basically never be more valuable than Power from a raw attack damage standpoint; the maximum damage spec has a higher power than precision for every achievable value of critical damage; it’s going to hover around 80% as valuable as power in most crit focused specs.

Precision is more valuable than power once you take procs into account. Increasing the proc rate is a big deal even if all you have is an Air/Fire proc; if you consider the initiative recuperation from critical strikes and take pies into account, it wins by a clear margin.

You’d need around 200% critical bonus damage before you’d want precision > power without taking procs into account.

-Edit- Me and my stupid math, making yet another critical error that nullifies all of it. Just forget what was here before.

And in saying that you would need 200% crit damage for Precision to be > Power, how much Power do you think you need for a 1% damage boost?
I’m going to have to test this directly to be certain, because it would have to scale ridiculously fast for that to be the case.

Grimwolf.7163:

1% crit damage, in itemization, is valued at 32 of any other stat.

…what has lead you to believe that?

Grimwolf.7163:

And in saying that you would need 200% crit damage for Precision to be > Power, how much Power do you think you need for a 1% damage boost?

Power/100.

Well, I had a long post including my testing and results, but kittening cat jumped on my keyboard and deleted it all, so I’ll summarize.
I was wrong, power scales at 20 per 1% damage increase. You would need 105% crit damage for Precision to be better than Power for raw damage, and 75% crit chance for crit damage to be better.
Also rounding botches up itemization of crit damage on gear.
1% crit is equal to 12 in another stat most pieces, 14.4 on chest, and 16 on head and legs. It’s supposed to be 16 before rounding.
When I said 32 before that was a total dur on my part; I already knew it was 16 but got it mixed up in my head and botched that entire line of math.
Also, for some reason Ruby Jewels itemize crit damage ridiculously well, granting 3% crit damage in place of a mere 15 in another stat. More than 3x its normal value. This means that in upgrade slots, with the availability of Ruby Jewels, crit damage easily outscales all else in terms of raw damage with a mere 24% crit chance.
Basically, unless there’s a particular rune effect you want then you should absolutely use Ruby Jewels in every possible slot, which if you want some defensive stats would likely mean taking those stats on the armor itself. In particular, I would definitely avoid crit damage on the head and legs since they scale the worst.

Grimwolf.7163:

Well, I had a long post including my testing and results, but kittening cat jumped on my keyboard and deleted it all, so I’ll summarize.
I was wrong, power scales at 20 per 1% damage increase. You would need 105% crit damage for Precision to be better than Power for raw damage, and 75% crit chance for crit damage to be better.

You’re going to have to show your work, these numbers aren’t consistent with any stat distribution.

Mine:

power = 2000
critchance = 0.75
critbonusdmg = 1.05

Marginal damage of 1 Power = (power+1)/power = 0.05%
Marginal damage of 1 Precision = (1+(critchance+1/2100)*(critbonusdmg+0.5)) /
(1+critchance*(critbonusdmg+0.5)) = 0.0341%
Marginal damage of 1 Critical Damage = (1+critchance*(critbonusdmg+0.51)) /
(1+critchance*(critbonusdmg+0.5)) = 0.3468%

Value of Precision in Power = MaginalPrecision/MarginalPower = 0.6826
Value of Critical Damage in Power = MarginalCritDamage/MarginalPower = 6.9364

Tweak initial values to find the marginal values of other stats at stat base you prefer.

EDIT – formatting

Ah… I see where I went wrong. My math had an error in it assuming that 100% crit damage would equal 4x damage on crit, when in fact it would be 3×. So yeah, you would need around 200%, not 105%, for Precision to beat out Power.
100% crit damage would make 21 Precision add about 0.75% overall damage, compared to 20 Power adding 1%.
I was only slightly wrong in my value of crit damage vs Power. You’d need an 80% crit chance for them to be equal.
Gain from crit damage = Crit Chance x Crit Damage.
80%(0.8) Crit Chance x 1%(0.01) Crit Damage = 0.8%(0.008) damage gain.
1% Crit Chance = 16 Power.
20 Power = 1% Damage
16 Power = 0.8% Damage (16/20 = 0.8)
This means you need 27% crit chance for the crit damage in Ruby Jewels to be superior to a raw Power bonus, such as from runes or something. At the very least, if you have at least this much crit chance then you could see the Ruby Jewels as allowing you to double-dip in Power for an absolutely massive bonus.
With ~27% crit chance, even before considering the extra Precision, each jewel grants the equivalent of 40 Power; 2% extra overall damage. If you have it in every piece of armor plus trinkets, 12 slots, that would be the equivalent of 480 Power, or 24% more damage.
The jewels themselves would grant 8.6% crit chance, making the base amount you need before getting the jewels only ~18.4%.

problem is because there all multipliers its never a straight x amount = x% gain

which also means they all have a slight diminishing return.

For example 21 power would only be a 1% gain if you were already at 2100 power.

I’ve been looking things over, and assuming you have Hidden Killer, Cavalier armor combined with Berserker trinkets and all Ruby jewels seems like a very solid choice.
It may have Toughness placed above Power, but with all Berserker trinkets that extra defense is actually preferable.
For further optimization to take advantage of the Crit Damage rounding, I’d make the two rings Cavalier, and the hands and boots Berserker.

-EDIT-
And after searching, it’s looking like Cavalier armor does not exist. You can only find it on trinkets.
Soldier could be an effective alternative. You would lose out on 16% critical damage, but you would gain an extra 4.5% total damage which is only a mild overall loss, but you would also gain even greater defense. It may very well be an even better option than Cavalier.
-EDIT-
Yay, another terrible mistake on my part. Only crappy gems can go in armor, not Jewels. I’ll have to rethink this.
For the armor itself, Scholar runes seem like they’d be a solid choice.

Thanks to Cav gear I have 16k life 2450 armor and still 3-shotting people.
Not sure how that will work when Thief is fixed tho.

Dasorine.1964:

which also means they all have a slight diminishing return.

For example 21 power would only be a 1% gain if you were already at 2100 power.

Pretty much this. Everything gives linear returns, which on a percentage scale is diminishing. You have to know your starting point to evaluate the different stats correctly.