Which is better depends a lot more on your attacks patterns, and how much of your damage comes from your “From Stealth” attacks than your crit chance. When comparing the two traits, measuring critical hit chance is incorrect. You need to determine how much of a percentage of your total damage needs to come from your “From Stealth” attacks with Hidden Killer selected for it to be better than Executioner. (And when doing this I suggest just assuming Hidden Killer will be active 50% of the time, like youre in PVE, even though thats wrong in PVP)
For instance; Lets say you roll up on someone in WvW. They have 20k HP, you BS them for 4k, since they turned to face you randomly at the last second, then melee them down another 8k with your autoattack, then start spamming HS, and when theyre at like 1k HP they get their heal off and it cures them for 9k. You did 4k damage with your BS, 8k with your autoattack and 17k with HS. I don’t care how you spin it, at no point would Hidden Killer have better for this fight.
Lets look at another example; Lets say you come up behind some zerker, healing signet Warrior with 20k HP, you have Hidden Killer selected, and you BS them for 11k, then AA them for 1k, then dodged away because they eviscerated you and it took most of your HP and you had to use your heal (hide in shadows), then you BS’d them again for 11k and they got downed. This was the perfect amount of damage to do in the time frame of 5~ seconds to down that zerker regen signet warrior, who would have been above 50% HP for both backstabs. There is no way you could possibly spin this scenario to put Executioner above Hidden Killer for DPS.
Do you see what Im talking about now? Which is better isn’t determined by critical hit chance, it’s determined by playstyle. These example might be a little strange, and you could even call them extreme, but theyre just to demonstrate my point, and they do a good job of that.
