Guild Wars 2

Old build was 20/25/0/10/15 for Groups GS Axe/Mace (or 30/25/0/0/15 for CoF due to no guardian)

New build for anything is 30/25/0/0/15, this does about 1% more damage than 20/25/0/10/15 with 9 buffs up permanently which is really impossible.

Did we gain or lose damage? With an average of 5 buffs we lost about 5.5% damage (and the free 1K Health).

Difference between the old and new is
100 more power
5% More Axe/Mace Damage
7% less damage
9% less crit chance

What about the 30/0/0/10/30 Axe Spec?

It actual does pretty much equal damage as GS + Axe/Mace BUT this is assuming equal amount of might on both builds, also it lacks Vuln debuff on crit from GS.

I can keep 8 might on myself in the 30/0/0/10/30 build just from swapping weapons every 5 seconds which is of course what you should be accomplishing in both builds.
with my fgj and my parties along with signet it remains easily capped at 25.

As for vuln stacks I am not sure why the gs auto attack is a huge deal since in an ideal rotation you should only have to use the gs auto 1 time. though axe/mace itself has a 13-14% uptime of 8 stacks of vulnerability. losing vuln on crit could be a pretty big loss. Maybe slotting a vuln/crit sigil would be worth it for a full axe build probably not though since most structured group have at least 2 warriors maintaining vul through them and a guard would be really easy.

Also if you swap out of axe/mace before the axe chain is complete your dps takes a hit now that the bulk is at the end. Staying in axe to complete the chain also neglects using 100b asap which is the bulk of your overall damage in the swap build which wasn’t a problem before since axe damage was pretty evenly spread out before patch.

I would recommend structured groups taking at least 1 axe and 1 gs warr at least since the jobs each do are pretty well separated now but both are still very useful. some groups may now play eles which offer some pretty great might stacking along with fury stacking now, this might end the need for FGJ is tight groups and make OOM a much more compelling shout if only to maintain both 25 might and vuln.

The vuln loss is mainly from the crit trait in Arms. You actually dont lose much dps with the axe change because you always open with #2 in axe then do an Axe Chain. Then you either do #4 or #5 and swap or do the first part of the axe chain which was barely touched. Personally im sticking with the GS Axe Mace build.