Guild Wars 2

So I was thinking of making a P/D condition build for a change and I can’t decide between Rabid or Carrion for stats.

Rabid: Condition damage (main), toughness, precision
Carrion: Condition damage (main), power, vitality

I’m just not sure if whether toughness or vitality would be better for a thief. This is for WvW btw.

Carrion is much better than Rabid IMO for the following reasons:

1) Power is very useful for Conditions, we don’t get any condi triggers off of CS so precision is terrible in exchange

2) I prefer Vitality over toughness. I would really rather have 22k hp to deal with burst than extra toughness especially given if anyone melees me I either stealth and blind them or shadowstep away or withdraw or pistol 3 away and dump torment on them.

Note: Arenanet hates thieves so you cannot buy an Carrion ascended gear.

I agree with Carrion being a better option than Rabid. As runes, many people use a mixture of runes to maximise bleeding duration. I prefer adventurer runes for the extra endurance refill that my build relies on and condition damage instead of duration.

Note: really annoying that there is no power, vit, condi only ascended gear out there…

I’ve said it in other threads (including one near this one :P):

Carrion curbstomps Rabid, specially on a Thief.

For direct damage Power is so superior to Precission that if you had to distribute 1000 points among them, the derivate for max average damage says that you give the 1000 points to Power, and then take very few extra poits from Precission (resulting on a very small percentage of negative crits that heal the target instead of damaging it) to achieve the highest direct damage average.

That’s how poor is Precission compared to Power. Even if you invest in Critical Damage (sacrificing stat points from a different stat), Power is still vastly superior to Precission (investing on Crit Damage and Precission is only worth it once Power already has a tremendous investment, you sacrifice all your defensive stats but as full zerker can clean most things in PvE it still works).

If you were a Necro, maybe you could use it (through the best necro condi builds still mix Carrion with Rabid and Rampager), but the Thief has very little benefit from crits on condition builds (and Sigil of Earth is far from enough to compensate).

Then the Vitality vs Toughness could be debatable (on paper Vitality is better, but over time Vit doesn’t affect the heal over time while Toughness does), but with the Thief being a low tier HP profession (and despite armors have a visual reason to give extra stats, HP tiers are bigger than armor tiers even if the physical form of your toon is the same) so any extra HP you get will be more valuable for you than for a Warrior or Necro. If you’re P/D you will already invest 30 in SA for 300 extra Toughness, so that plus the Vit from Carrion is a good balance.

So Carrion all the way.

Carrion: 1980 armor, 17245 health
Rabid: 2624 armor, 10805 health

Right off the bat, we note that carrion provides you with 60% more health at the cost of 33% armor. While it’s a little more complex than that, this illustrates how characters with low base health pools (elementalist, guardians and thieves) will have a tendency to benefit from vitality more than higher health characters.

If we take a necromancer, which is a high health low toughness class, for instance, we get the following values:

Carrion: 1836 armor, 24812 health
Rabid: 2480 armor, 18372 health

Carrion provides 35% more health at the cost of 35% armor. Then comes into consideration that condition necromancers benefit much more from precision than from power, due to traits such as Dhuumfire, Barbed Precision, etc. and overall low power coefficients. However, the thief gets no such traits, and tends to have much higher power scalling.

To add to this, necromancers have several built-in ways of shedding conditions (Putrid Mark, Consume, Locust Swarm, Spiteful Removal…), while thieves do not. Given that toughness provides no mitigation against said conditions, carrion’s vitality stands out once again here.

TLDR: Carrion for thief because precision is near useless for non-power builds, and vitality scales better at low health levels than toughness does. It also provides some sort of buffer against conditions, which toughness does not.

edit: one should note that toughness’s value goes up as you heal. However, the illustrated 30~% disparity is still huge, and the other aspects (condition damage, power scalling…) should obviously not be neglected.