Need help choosing attributes

I'm at a point where I'm getting some exotic gears and I have some questions regarding which attributes to choose.

I'm not a hardcore player so I likely won't be doing raids, high tier fractals, or even dungeons (dungeons take too long for me). I'll mostly be doing world contents and sometimes lower level fractals. I will most likely go with offensive power or condition damage gears depending on prof/spec, but I read that for some world contents, glass cannon isn't always the best choice.

I was thinking about getting full damage gears, but getting 3~5 spare gears that focus on defense. What defensive stat should I choose? Armor, health, or healing power?

EDIT: Doh! Posted in wrong section. Can a mod move this to Players helping players section?

It's pretty easy then for open world, either Berserker for a power build or vipers for a cond. build

Depends on your Profession. For example, if your Health is low but wear Heavy armor (Guardian), go for Vitality.

Investing points in toughness is often a bad idea, as toughness is used as an aggro-mechanic. For example if you are fighting a champion with three other people and you have the highest toughness stats, the champion is more likely to focus on you. Toughness also scales not very good. You need to spend a lot of points to see minimal results, in most cases you gain 1-2 extra hits. Investing points into healing-power is also questionable. It also scales not very good. Same problem as with toughness, you need to spend a lot of points to recognize a visible effect.

If you want to increase your survivability, you can put some points into vitality. It scales excellent and significantly increases your life-span. One point spent in Vitaliy equals an increase of your max. HP by 10. You do not have to mix armor-stats. If you pick a good rune-set, you can stick to damage-gear and get your vitality from the runes. Also do not forget about foods. Here are a few examples:

Rune-Set for condition-damage that boosts your Vitality (= max. HP)Superior Rune of the LichFood for condition-damage that boosts your VitalityBowl of Fancy Creamy Mushroom SoupIn total you can get 175 (runes) + 50 (food) = 225 Vitality which equals ~ + 2,250 HP

Rune-Set for direct-damage that boosts your Vitality (= max. HP)Superior Rune of the WarriorFood for direct-damage that boosts your VitalitySlive of Ice Worm SashimiIn total you can get 175 (runes) + 60 (food) = 235 Vitality which equals ~ + 2,350 HP

Note: There exist other runes and foods with similar or better effects. I have just picked a few cheap examples, which are quite easy to get.

Depending on the build, its usually not necessary to invest in much strong defense gear if your class offers good defensive traits. Most of the time you can mix in a defense minor (like Maunders) to add a buffer. Or you can go with substitution builds that can swap Precision for toughness or vitality without giving up high secondary stats (both Guard and Necro can do this fairly easily). Some builds (like Holo) can go with Knights or Cavaliers stats since their offensive kit is strong enough to keep a high water mark.

Classes that can best handle off-meta builds are Guardian, Necro, Engineer, Revenant and Ele..... but Ele's off-meta builds have been hit hard over the years. Classes which can run glass stats, but get their defense through traits, Warrior and Ranger. Depending on which class you want to run, there are ways to mix damage and self sustain to lower personal risk without damage falling too far below practical levels.

Mesmer and Thief are odd ball cases as their defenses come from mechanical understanding; so they typically run full glass, since they rarely take hits if played well, and don't have much recourse if their active defenses fail. In general Memsers suffer against large groups of mobs, but excel against stronger single targets. For thief, they need targets they can drop in one burst, and can drive through multiple targets as long as the can be engaged one by one. For stronger targets they need full focus, and the risk factor is a lot higher then that felt by mesmer.

Easy version for power build, go full berserker for weapons + armor + most trinkets. Add soldier stats amulet + 1 or 2 rings.

Test out how you like it, and change out more trinkets for either Berserker or Soldier as you feel you need to stay alive.

Open World is generally considered the "easiest", as such it has the least demands for defensive stats in general, so just take enough that you feel comfortable that you can survive. You will usually get better defenses out of Traits, Skills and active defenses that you will get out of defensive gear anyways.

I would say the strongest Power stat combinations to use for PVE are Bersekers, Marauders, and Valkyrie in that order. I do like to use Valkyrie for higher damage on professions which don't need as much Precision, but Marauders is generally better since it has a stat advantage.

I would avoid using Toughness since it will aggro enemies, but if you go full Marauders and need more survivability you can mix in Soldiers. This should not happen in PVE, but if you go full Soldiers and need more survivability you can mix in Sentinels. I wouldn't recommend using too much Soldiers or Sentinals since the game gets annoying when you can't kill enemies quickly. You also make the game more difficult for yourself since enemies are more likely to target you.