How is the relative strength of a profession/weapon determined?

I've been trying to think of a new class/build to play, but with most builds simply discussed in the context of being "good" or "bad", without elaboration on exactly how good or bad they are, it's hard to make any informed decisions.

It makes quite a difference, as a casual player anyway, whether a sub-optimal weapon choice is just a 10-15% loss, or if it's literally half the damage of an alternative choice. Among the various "bad" builds, it matters how they compare to one another. For example, ranged weapons are seldom discussed, but out in open world PvE you often need to use a ranged weapon even if it's weaker than melee. So, which classes have strong ranged damage compared to others? How do a ranger's longbow, a revenant's hammer, and a thief's dual pistols compare to one another? I've found no real way to compare them.

So, how do you all figure out what weapons are strong and what weapons are not? How do you judge the severity of it? Simply walking up to a test dummy with a stopwatch doesn't seem particularly accurate, as my own tests reveal such absurd results as that warrior does as much Power damage with a sword as with a greatsword, or that a berserker mesmer outclasses them both, so I really don't trust my own results anymore.

gw2skills is useful for playing with builds, though it takes a bit for it to update after a patch. That'll get you damage numbers for builds/weapons.

To get the dps of an autoattack (ignoring crits), add together the damage of all attacks in the chain and divide by the amount of time it takes to complete (the time can be found on the wiki). For the effect of crits, subtract 100% from crit damage, then multiply crit damage by crit chance, and add 100%. Multiply this number by damage, then add the individual attacks and divide by time as before.

For attacks with a cooldown, just divide damage by cooldown.

Now, this doesn't take into consideration things like cleave/AoE/range/accuracy/etc, but it provides a good gauge of how much damage something does on a golem.

I think I've gotten the hang of it. Thanks for the explanation, this makes it a lot easier to figure things out. :)

Also, there is https://kittymarks.com/ and the associated youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTkgkPXvoIfDHlszloPysNA/playlistsKitty does benchmark testing for most of the moderately okay builds for each profession rather than just the top builds per class that you see on Snowcrows. There's a lot of builds for Kitty to go through so it's still something of a work in progress which means you might not find the exact build you are wanting to run just yet. Also the rotations aren't 100% perfect or fishing for good RNG procs (usually about 90-95% ish) so don't expect Kitty's numbers to be as high as snowcrows's benchmarks, but they are still consistent enough with each other for an accurate comparison.

Thanks Aplier, that looks useful too! :)

The format of play is honestly the biggest factor here. Builds vary significantly between sPvP, WvW, open-world PvE, and especially raids being huge outliers as far as how elitist people can be.

Range is strong in WvW and open-world but usually wortheless in raids and its downsides in sPvP make it usually not worth taking since capture points are small. Utility means everything in the PvP formats but almost nothing in PvE.

Most things work in open world PvE. There are very few combinations that honestly have no synergy and where skill can't overcome the deficits. Play what you want and so long as the idea is logically sound it'll probably work. There are always "bests," but optimization means little if you're not in the competitive formats or raids.

If you want to start winning and doing better beyond a skill perspective, that's really the only time major build changes will prove totally necessary. I don't recommend playing something like berserker gear s/s warrior, and you can easily switch to carrion or viper's to do the same thing better, but it's absolutely doable in open-world.