Best gear for renegade?

I know viper would theoretically be the best but there's no way I can make ascended gear and I don't raid or anything. so I guess that leaves rampager or sinister. Which one should I go?

I've been running full exotic vipers (rampager backpack only exception). Has been working good so far.

I'm running is rabid, power damage is low af but condition damages is fine. Also you get like 3k armor and it's actually quite tanky.I'm also considering switching to rampager (as I cannot craft vipers), anyone know how much of a difference there will be?

Condi renegade gear score:1 Entry level: Rabid2: Midterm: Sinister3: Good: Viper

The highter them better.

Crafting Sinister is even more of a pain than Viper's... So you should just rule that right out.

You could get a free Griever's set while unlocking your Funerary skins to tide you over tho.

@Kreed.2768 said:I've been running full exotic vipers (rampager backpack only exception). Has been working good so far.

Ditto to this. Except I slotted in 2 pieces of grieving gear from PoF achievements because I already had it. Of course, I already had 4 pieces of exotic viper's armor from HoT/LW3, so all I really needed to craft were the weapons. So I made an exotic viper mace/axe, and I picked trailblazers stats for my renegade shortbow for funzies.

Works just fine in open world PvE, though I do plan to get full ascended vipers...maybe after halloween is over.

Grieving is overhyped. Its worse than sinister and viper. It has ferocity, which to work need crt chance, with full ascended set u have like 34% because precision on grievers is secondary stat. Condi weapon skills have low power coefficients. Its just not effective.Craft 2 runes of trapper and do twilight arbor to buy 4 runes of nightmare for tokens

@LeSavage.1359 said:Grieving is overhyped. Its worse than sinister and viper. It has ferocity, which to work need crt chance, with full ascended set u have like 34% because precision on grievers is secondary stat. Condi weapon skills have low power coefficients. Its just not effective.Craft 2 runes of trapper and do twilight arbor to buy 4 runes of nightmare for tokens

Ferocity is not the problem but how op Expertise is. You get 40% crit during fury+spotter and you have very high crit on full Grieving. Expertise just adds so much more damage and hybrid builds do not excel right now vs pure builds. If shortbow would have better power scaling that might not be the case.

@LeSavage.1359 said:Grieving is overhyped. Its worse than sinister and viper. It has ferocity, which to work need crt chance, with full ascended set u have like 34% because precision on grievers is secondary stat. Condi weapon skills have low power coefficients. Its just not effective.Craft 2 runes of trapper and do twilight arbor to buy 4 runes of nightmare for tokens

I agree with @"LeSavage.1359" that grieving isn't optimal for condi renegade. However, this has nothing to do with low critical chance, since renegade can trait to have tons of crit chance, but it is instead because we deal damage through several conditions (torment, burning, bleeding and poison). There is no rune that would maximise our main conditions torment AND burning. The situation is different from e.g. firebrand who can just use +burning itemisation like rune of balthasar while wearing sinister/grieving. In order to boost all conditions we need expertise (which vipers has) and generic condition duration bonuses (nightmare and trappper runes). While wearing full vipers and nightmare+trapper runes something like 80-90% of the renegade's damage output is from conditions and only a little bit comes from power hits despite of the fact that power is a major stat in viper.

To the original question: Renegade+invocation traits can grant you so much critical chance that with rampager gear you would easily end up overcapped on critical. So out of the two options you stated, sinister is better, however you might be better off putting your resources towards crafting/pursuing viper exotics. In the meantime, you can get by in the open world wearing basically any armor with condition damage as the main stat. If you truly do not want to craft, consider that wvw and pvp reward tracks as well as LS3 achievements offer several options to get stat selectable armor pieces that have vipers. (wiki about gearing up)