Choosing a class for legendary armour.

[leunamsil.6742]

Hi. I'm a casual raider, clearing 4 or 5 bosses per week in pugs and i'm getting near to finishing my envoy armour 2 collection. With the end of the collection i need to choose what class i'm going to focus on getting the legendary armour. The problem is i'm a bit divided. Getting 300 li for another set will take me months, probably more then an year so i really want to choose wisely what class to choose the "free" refined set. I want to choose a class that can truly use the stat change mechanic of legendary armour so my options are: warrior, revenant or ranger. Warrior has condi and power bs. Revenant has harrier healer, diviner alacrigade and condi renegade. Ranger has power slb, condi slb and harrier druid. If i plan to pug raids and t4 fractals (no cms for now) what should o pick?

[Cyninja.2954]

This is an absolutely subjective issue.

From a pure build perspective, heavy and light win out over medium armor due to build diversity in pve being higher on heavy and light classes.

• Main contribution for heavy armor are all 3 classes, all of which see play as either power, condi or both. As well as support builds with diviner and harrier for firebrand and renegade.
• Least contribution here is the thief for medium armor, who sees play with almost exclusive berserker gear. Ranger and Engineer both see play as power, condi and support builds but need arguably less stats than heavy armors.
• Main contributor to light armor would be chrono who sees the most variety in stat use among all classes. Elementalist and Necromancer both have condi, power and support builds.

None of this matters though if the classes do not coincide with what you play.

The best recommendation would have been to make sure to NOT pick the same weight class with your first collection as the one you intend to make the legendary armor for, thereby gaining 2 different weight class sets.

[leunamsil.6742]

@Cyninja.2954 said:From a pure build perspective, heavy and light win out over medium armor due to build diversity in pve being higher on heavy and light classes.

• Main contribution for heavy armor are all 3 classes, all of which see play as either power, condi or both. As well as support builds with diviner and harrier for firebrand and renegade.
• Least contribution here is the thief for medium armor, who sees play with almost exclusive berserker gear. Ranger and Engineer both see play as power, condi and support builds but need arguably less stats than heavy armors.
• Main contributor to light armor would be chrono who sees the most variety in stat use among all classes. Elementalist and Necromancer both have condi, power and support builds.

Tyvmfor your input.This is part of the information i was looking for. I plan to have a "main" that can fill multiple roles. Thats why my top contenders were revenant and ranger. I already have a power dps geared in my power holo and a condi dps on my condi berserker (with the possibility of going bs if needed). Problem is, although revenant can fill quite a few roles as a healer or has a condi dps or a supp/power dps, are all those 3 builds viable in raids and fractals?

@Cyninja.2954 said:The best recommendation would have been to make sure to NOT pick the same weight class with your first collection as the one you intend to make the legendary armor for, thereby gaining 2 different weight class sets.

yes, for what is worth i picked leather armor to gear my harrier druid in the 1º collection,

[Safandula.8723]

Mesmer(mby rev as u mentioned)

[Cyninja.2954]

Raid viability wise you are in the unfortunate position that many PUG groups still run double chrono with druid support, while it is almost always better to run Chrono, Druid, Firebrand and Renegade.

Fractals have adapted to the new meta support composition better.

If I was a betting man, I'd put my eggs in the basket of the new composition. Then again I have all the classes, so if I was biased, I wouldn't know.

I still think the 4 classes which make the most use of legendary gear are: guardian, Renegade, chrono and ranger. Due to the simple fact that all those classes can run power, condi, support and heal builds (except for chrono, which is the class with the most gear set requirements due to tanking).

Either wait, or go with a class you play a lot.

[thrag.9740]

Alright OP, I'm about to craft my fourth set of legendary armor, so I can definitely give you an opinion with some hindsight/experience behind it. Legendary armor is actually terrible for frequent switching. For example, you mention power war/condi war. But think about how much clicking is involved in doing that. You have to click on each piece of armor, remember which stats go on which piece (Do all condi classes run full vipers now or do a couple still have a piece or two of sinisters?). Then you have to swap all your runes. Its actually much faster to have another set of ascended armor, and just directly click that in your inventory to equip it. Even if you want to save inventory space, its actually cheaper to do gold->gems to buy bag slots and also upgrade bag slots to 32 slot bags (unless you 15 different builds all with different armor, last I checked the numbers). However, the problem of slow swapping/remembering what to swap, is fixed if you are running arcdps build templates. I should point out, that even arcdps is slower at swapping legendary armor than it is at swapping ascended armor (twice as many clicks + Anet's imposed speed limitations).

So, first off, you should tell us if your using build templates. If your not, don't think of legendary armor as being good for frequent switching. Think of it as being good for the occasional testing of new/experimental builds. However, even in this regard it has limitations, as you also need to swap your trinkets and weapons to actually test an experimental build.

Let me give you an example of where legendary armor stat swapping actually was really useful for me. One of the achievements in wing 5 is to kill the 3 minibosses within a certain time limit. However, the time only begins when one boss dies. So one of our original strategies was to split up with 1 person going to one boss to solo it, and then the other 9 not starting the second boss until the solo was close to finishing, and trying to coordinate those 2 kills to finish at the same time. This way, we only had to finish a single boss after the timer started. I ended up being the person who would solo the one boss. So, in order to test if this was remotely possible, I swapped my warriors legendary gear over to trailblazers to give myself more suvivability (back then power reaper was quite a bit worse than nowadays, and so condi scourge for solo, then power reaper for final boss wasn't very viable). It was possible, but unnecessary and slow, so we ended up using a different strategy. So it would have been a waste to make a full set of trailblazers for my warrior just to use for that test.

If you are running build templates, then of the three choices you gave (warrior, rev, ranger), I think rev is probably the best choice. Rev has power or condi alicrigade, condi dps, and then the power variant of alicrigade probably runs slightly different builds for fractals/raids. Additionally you have the option of heal renegade or even heal rev. And finally, by choosing a heavy armor class, you can also throw that armor onto dh/firebrand or warrior later on if you think it would help them more. Both of them can utilize it as well.

[gateless gate.8406]

Guardian (power, condi, condi support, power support, heal)

[melandru.3876]

heavy armour uses the most stats amongst the 3 classes

warrior:

• berserker stats for instanced pve (fracs/raids)
• viper for instanced condi pve (raids)
• soldier for open world meme
• marauder for wvw roaming

guard:

• harrier for support fb
• berserker for power dh
• viper for condi fb
• minstrel for wvw blobbing
• celestial for fb wvw roaming

rev:

• diviner for instanced pve (raids/fracs)
• berserker for open world
• harrier for instanced pve (raids/fracs)
• viper for condi renegade
• marauder for wvw roaming/zerging

as you can see, you can use quite a bit of stat varaients amongst the 3 classes in total

far more then what light and medium can require

[leunamsil.6742]

Tyvm for all the replies, especially Thrag and Melandru. I decided that i will pick heavy armor and put it in my rev (still don't have a guardian yet)