Guild Wars 2

I’m talking generally greatsword, but the topic goes as far as we consider DAMAGE.
crit chance wins on the aspect that it procs on-hit effects, and that means MORE might/vulnerability/bleed stacks with greatsword(check arms tree, with greatsword you are bound to get forceful greatsword(might) and will probably get rending strikes(vuln) – precise strikes(bleed) comes as a passive bonus(chance is pretty low, but it’s used not for condition damage, but rather for that 10% damage bonus on bleeding targets that is going to proc sooner.. with more crit chance.). And your sigil in weapon may as well proc based on critical chance – in fact, fire/strength do, and these are probably the most common ones for greatsword. There’s also amazing food that does benefit from critical chance – omnomberry pies/ghosts – it gives a 66% chance to leech ~200 HP when you crit(leech = heal yourself and damage affected enemy) without any internal cooldown(which means amazing amounts of heal/damage on HB/Whirl).
While it can be problematic to get 100% critical chance, if you keep up nourishment(Master’s maintenance oil/omnomberry ghost), have 30 in arms as well as 10 in discipline(for 9% crit chance trait), gear knight’s/zerks and slot precision orientied runes(<3 superior rune of lyssa), fury boon, as well as superior sigil of perception inside your weapon(note, you can change weapon onto one with different sigil inside while still keeping 25 stacks up!), you are dealing with problem of having too much critical chance rather than having too little of it.
It also prevents weakness from harming your damage output, and removes RNG factor.
And what would you think about 100% critical chance?

Evalia.7103:

And what would you think about 100% critical chance?

I think, and mind you I could be wrong once I pop out a napkin and scribble some math on it, that it’s far too much specialization and investment for that one stat. In other words I find I’m happy with a base 30%(ish) crit chance, around 40% crit damage bonus and higher base power/vit/toughness. In other words I like a more balanced build as best I can design it. Since we have perma fury whether we want it or not for the most part I find at a base 30ish crit, 50 with fury I crit quite often enough to proc my fire sigil like clockwork on the 5sec cd. Just seems like I’d be giving up too much for a small potential gain.

^ I agree with Braxxus and also, if you plan on going 100% crit, you might as well also go full berzerk and get that crit % dmg up as high as you can. But i guarantee anyone with more than a peanut size brain can melt you as fast as you could melt them. But its a thought im sure others have thought about. I just think Warriors shine in more sustained dmg and small bursts with good survivability to round us out. Its kinda like effective health pool. The more toughness you have, the more vitality you need to make it efficient and vice versa. Same thing works with High crit or glass cannon builds, high burst dmg but die just as fast isnt as effective if you had medium-high dmg and above average survivability and tanking skills.

Math follows!
4% base crit chance.
20% from fury, 9% from trait.
4+20+9 = 33 alltogether.
now, we know that 1% critical chance equals to 21 precision. It also rounds up or down depending on the number(Or so it does in your character window at the very least).
(100-33)x21 = 1407(bonus required precision to reach 100% critical chance)
Let’s make that 1397 because it is somewhere 99.55% and it will round up to 100%.
Don’t forget that you have 916 base precision that does nothing to your crit chance -
so with stated above you want 2313(916+1397) number to show up in your character window, as well as 91% crit chance(9% from trait do not show up for some reason!)
Where do we get that bonus 1397 precision now is the real question.
300 – arms. Pretty common for GS users.
250 – superior sigil of perception. Is it a sacrifice? not at all, since once you charge it, you can switch to a different weapon with different sigil.
165 – runes. I’m in love with superior runes of lyssa(btw, 20/30/0/10/10 set-up with Empowered trait in tactics)
70 – omnomberry ghost, favourite food of 100% critical chance guy.
6% of your toughness and 4% of your vitality from Master maintenance oil, well around 150 for me.
alltogether 935 precision. And we needed 1397.
That means we still need 462 precision from our gear.
128 is possible to squeeze out of our weapon(As a secondary stat – Knight/Zerk), 224 out of our armor(same as GS), and 360 from our trinkets, that is if you slot everything for precision(Knight/Zerk once again).
Overkill of 250 precision(462-224-128-360 = -250). That’s with tons of toughness from knight’s gear.
In the result i substituted some of knight pieces on some of valkyrie/beryl pieces, because I naturally wanted some bonus critical damage.. TBH I would appreciate toughness/power/critdmg combination, but the only thing i’ve found with those stats
was ascended backpack out of scale, as well as ascended rings. Gotta farm for them!

Lol nice math =D

CoaxialMazer.9140:

^ I agree with Braxxus and also, if you plan on going 100% crit, you might as well also go full berzerk and get that crit % dmg up as high as you can. But i guarantee anyone with more than a peanut size brain can melt you as fast as you could melt them. But its a thought im sure others have thought about. I just think Warriors shine in more sustained dmg and small bursts with good survivability to round us out. Its kinda like effective health pool. The more toughness you have, the more vitality you need to make it efficient and vice versa. Same thing works with High crit or glass cannon builds, high burst dmg but die just as fast isnt as effective if you had medium-high dmg and above average survivability and tanking skills.

Why would one think that 100% critical chance is glass cannon?
It sounds as such, but I didn’t overlook sustain. I have solid amount of vitality/toughness from my knight/valk pieces, my food lets me regenarate a solid amount of HP(especially with 100% critical chance hehe, I regenerate inbetween 3-4k per HB assumed I hit 3 targets), and I <3 superior rune of lyssa because it removes all conditions and gives me all boons. Which is perfect for survival.

CoaxialMazer.9140:

Lol nice math =D

That’s human friendly math, I didn’t want to scare anyone with formulas and stuff.

Evalia.7103:

CoaxialMazer.9140:

^ I agree with Braxxus and also, if you plan on going 100% crit, you might as well also go full berzerk and get that crit % dmg up as high as you can. But i guarantee anyone with more than a peanut size brain can melt you as fast as you could melt them. But its a thought im sure others have thought about. I just think Warriors shine in more sustained dmg and small bursts with good survivability to round us out. Its kinda like effective health pool. The more toughness you have, the more vitality you need to make it efficient and vice versa. Same thing works with High crit or glass cannon builds, high burst dmg but die just as fast isnt as effective if you had medium-high dmg and above average survivability and tanking skills.

Why would one think that 100% critical chance is glass cannon?
It sounds as such, but I didn’t overlook sustain. I have solid amount of vitality/toughness from my knight/valk pieces, my food lets me regenarate a solid amount of HP(especially with 100% critical chance hehe, I regenerate inbetween 3-4k per HB assumed I hit 3 targets), and I <3 superior rune of lyssa because it removes all conditions and gives me all boons. Which is perfect for survival.

I wasnt stating that 100% crit chance was glass cannon, but the berzerk gear i was pointing at (if you had 100% crit chance, its tempting to get all zerk gear and see how high your numbers go). I know there are plenty of ways to go 100% and still have survivability. I for one enjoy the challenge of Condition build and i have it working pretty well as of late, but everyone plays differently. I just don’t suggest whoever goes 100% crit to expect to rock like nuts if they go full zerk gear. I really do think that warrior’s true potential lies in the fact that our damage can be balanced to be both quite above average.

Evalia.7103:

CoaxialMazer.9140:

Lol nice math =D

That’s human friendly math, I didn’t want to scare anyone with formulas and stuff.

Haha, no problem with alternative maths <— Mechanical Engineer/Math Major
Indeed theory building for characters is fun =P

well whats your health / armor / attack? :P

I’m sorry but your walls of text are really hard to read.

Crit chance is good though. I think every warrior should have at least 40% base and always have fury on. So ye. Crit chance!

@Evalia and CoaxialMazer
Here is a great reddit post with solid analysis of crit vs damage. HERE

The formula doesn’t take into account on crit signets or food, but 100% crit chance will be stat budget overkill imo.

kwayso.5162:

@Evalia and CoaxialMazer
Here is a great reddit post with solid analysis of crit vs damage. HERE

The formula doesn’t take into account on crit signets or food, but 100% crit chance will be stat budget overkill imo.

If it was just precision and crit damage it would be really easy to pick which one is optimal for you. But we get might, vulnerability, bleed and possibly other procs… I’d like to see the math of how that translates to dps.

Ozzrel.9825:

If it was just precision and crit damage it would be really easy to pick which one is optimal for you. But we get might, vulnerability, bleed and possibly other procs… I’d like to see the math of how that translates to dps.

This is where experimentation or more complex modeling would be necessary. I still think that you would be sacrificing too much damage to keep crit at 100%. Uptime on boons or conditions can be very high without taking crit chance to 100%. Especially on procs that have internal cooldowns.

100% crit is overkill, I run with around 87% with Fury up and it’s pretty rare that I don’t crit, you could free up some of that stat investment into something else.

Evalia.7103:

70 – omnomberry ghost, favourite food of 100% critical chance guy.
6% of your toughness and 4% of your vitality from Master maintenance oil, well around 150 for me.

Are you saying you can use food and master maintenace oil at the same time? They are both listed as nouroishment, so I always thought it was one or the other.

Nevermind; I made some maintenance oil and you can indeed have both a food buff and a tool buff up at the same time. I had no idea.

Switch Empowered in Tactics for Inspiring Banners and take the precision banner for 90 precision and 10% critical damage.With the trait, you have only about 3-4 seconds downtime on the banner, and its range is 900 iirc.

I don’t know about level 80 but in the 30s I have maintained a critical chance of about 78-80% which can be buffed up to 98-100% by keeping the fury buff up from arcing slice. Here’s how I did it:

My healing, utility, and elite skills are all signets. I got the trait “Deep Strike” which requires 10 points in Arms. This trait gives you a bonus +40 precision for each unactivated signet, for a total of 200. At my level this nearly doubles my crit chance.

Can someone verify whether or not this works at 80?

I believe 90% is enough.
No fight is going to last long enough for a 10% non-crit to be of any serious mathematical value.
Also, we have a trait that gives burst skills an increased 10% crit chance so I think 90% is the key number.

On my current build I’m sitting on an 80% crit rate but that’s because I use runes (boon duration+45%) instead of Orbs.

Would work for PvE
But you would get destroyed in WvW

I’m having a hard time believing that 10 or even 20% less crit chance wouldn’t make a significant difference to DPS. Having 90% crit chance doesn’t mean what some people think it means. It’s not absolute like 100%. At 90% crit you may crit less than 90% of the time because each hit has a 10% chance to not crit. You are not guaranteed to crit 90% of the time. At 100% you are guaranteed a crit 100% of the time (unless using an ability that doesn’t crit or the crit is somehow mitigated).

I got 5 numbers out of a random number generator from 1-100 and two out of the 5 were over 90 and three were over 85. This means that if this were me killing something in 5 hits, and I had 90% crit chance, 40% of my hits would not be crits, not 10%. That increases to 60% if my crit chance was 85%. Now I understand this is going to be different every time, but there’s going to be a difference in DPS vs guaranteed crits.

Why do you think in WoW people used to have to get to the hit cap (where it was impossible to miss vs. boss npcs) otherwise their dps would be a lot lower. Even if you were 2% miss chance your dps would suffer more than 2%. Here we’re not missing but we’re doing at least 30% less damage with each non-crit.

In Guild Wars there’s no real measurement of DPS so you can’t see the difference it makes but trust me it makes some difference. In a fight vs normal mobs you probably wouldn’t care but on a tough boss fight or in a fight where time is essential it will make a difference.

ebrum.7413:

I’m having a hard time believing that 10 or even 20% less crit chance wouldn’t make a significant difference to DPS. Having 90% crit chance doesn’t mean what some people think it means. It’s not absolute like 100%. At 90% crit you may crit less than 90% of the time because each hit has a 10% chance to not crit. You are not guaranteed to crit 90% of the time. At 100% you are guaranteed a crit 100% of the time (unless using an ability that doesn’t crit or the crit is somehow mitigated).

I got 5 numbers out of a random number generator from 1-100 and two out of the 5 were over 90 and three were over 85. This means that if this were me killing something in 5 hits, and I had 90% crit chance, 40% of my hits would not be crits, not 10%. That increases to 60% if my crit chance was 85%. Now I understand this is going to be different every time, but there’s going to be a difference in DPS vs guaranteed crits.

Using the following stats:

• 2300 Power
• 2313 Precision (which, with the addition of 29% crit chance from FGJ and Adrenaline based, should be 100% crit chance)
• 93% Critical Damage bonus
• 32% Damage bonus

I calculate that the average damage loss is 5.88% with a 10% loss of critical chance. A 20% loss of critical chance would be an average damage loss of 11.77%. [EDIT] This assumes that the loss of the critical chance is without some other gain that affects damage.

In your example of five random numbers, with two being above 90, well, it’s not impossible. It’s just a rare event. Yes, there will be cases where out of five hits two don’t crit and yes, your damage output would suffer. If you’re taking on an enemy that would go down in five critical hits, and you only crit on three, well, sure, they’re still standing… until you hit them a sixth time. However, an enemy going down in 5-6 hits probably doesn’t pose much a threat so what’s one or two more quick hits?

The question comes down to what does it cost to reach 100% critical chance and is that trade off worth it. If you are trading power for precision, I would argue that a large majority of the time it is not worth it. If you want maximum damage, you maximize first your power, then your precision and critical damage.

Whether or not a player is willing to trade off power for precision has to be in conjunction with what the additional precision (and thus critical chance) brings to to the table.

Some math, with these assumptions:

• Full Exoctic Berserker’s gear
• Ruby Orbs on armor
• 20/30/0/0/20 stat layout
• 70 Precision from Food (Cause what glass cannon doesn’t run Omnomberry Pies or the Ghosts?)

That leaves a Sigil of Perception vs. Sigil of Bloodlust and Maintenance Oil vs. Sharpening stone. With no Toughness/Vitality additions, the secondary consumable is worth 91 points. So, we can either get 341 Power or 341 Precision (or a mix):

• 341 Power gives a 14.55% average damage bonus
• 341 Precision gives a 10.53% average damage bonus
• 250 Precision / 91 Power gives a 11.9% average damage bonus
• 91 Precision / 250 Power gives a 13.77% average damage bonus

Let me point out, that as you move away from full Berserker’s gear, (say to Knight’s), the delta between Power and Precision becomes greater. This should make sense because Knight’s gives up critical Damage (and a small bit of power) to gain toughness.. As your critical damage is lowered, the ‘reward’ for a critical hit is not as high making precision less and less valuable. Where a critical hit may have hit for 243% your base damage now it hits for only 226%.

All this math is obviously focused on ONE thing, the pure raw damage from the simple swing of the blade. It does NOT take into account any additional damage that might be found from Sigils or skills that rely on a critical hit. But consider this: If you go from 100% to 90% critical chance, out of a 100 hits, that means you would (on average) have 10 fewer critical hits to activate an on-crit skill. If you had a 60% chance to gain, say Might (i.e., Sigil of Strength) of crit, you would los (on average) 6 stacks of might over the course of 100 hits.

TLDR: For a damage focused warrior, power trumps precision for damage. Make your own decision if the cost of more critical chance is worth it.

Regardless of PvP, WvW, or PvE, I would highly recommend that you do NOT go for a glass cannon crit build using melee weapons.

PvE ~ a single mistake could mean wipe. If you play near flawless (Some people do), then I guess it could be viable.
WvW/PvP ~ P/V/T seems to be the way to go for everyone going melee.

That being said, if you don’t mind going ranged, then I highly recommend that you go glass cannon crit style
PvE, you have the safety of range + w/ a competent player playing the character, there is a very small chance of wiping.
PvP/WvW ~ You swap a few skills to make yourself more party friendly, but basically the same 10/30/0/0/30 build and you just kill shot the crap out of people, then get owned yourself. It’s honestly a fun way to play (unless you want to go shattercat like everyone else and fail miserably after realizing that only a few people can pull it off magnificently)
I usually score in the upper tier w/ a glass cannon range build.

With my 2330 Power, 85% CritChance and 2.44 CritDamage using Power*(1-CritChance + CritChance*CritDamage):
With 10 Might base value is:
2680*(0.15 + 0.85*2.44) = 5 960
Add 250 Power
2930*(0.15 + 0.85*2.44) = 6 516
Add 250 Precision
2680*(0.03 + 0.97*2.44) = 6 423

With 20 Might base value is:
3030*(0.15 + 0.85*2.44) = 6 738
Add 250 Power
3280*(0.15 + 0.85*2.44) = 7 294
Add 250 Precision
3030*(0.03 + 0.97*2.44) = 7 262

And this ignores additional on-crit effects.