Buran.3796

Fought all of them this afternoon; had success except against Ignis and Diwaana. I'm uploading the videos, this is a sinopsis: * Initially had the idea to make every fight with three builds (power Vindi gs + swords, power Vindi gs + sb and celestial Vindi with mace & axe + sb) but some of those fights are hard for the power build and you're trying to fight them alone and you need a bit of luck with the unstabilities... That's plenty of permutations and after the first three fights I chose to just focus in the celestial build instead. * First two fights against Zawadi with power Vindi using blades were "interrupted" by other players so didn't count, but allow me to notice that the spec has almost perma access to fury, protection and regeneration but the 25 might stacks can easily drop to 10 when you're under pressure. Zawadi had Polluter which are easy to deal with but also Propagator which grants protection to allies which is a problem since the greatsword cleaves less than before. Damage felt low and survability weak. * The third fight against Zawadi with power build was finally a solo, with gs + sb, but thios time has Ley Buildup + Phase-Shifted. Phase-Shifted used to be killer to pure mele builds, because halved the amount of time the foes were vulnerable, and on paper with short bow now the things would be muvch better. And ther are: just not against this bounty. Zawadi respawned in a crater at the mountain which didn't give much room to move; even worse: when forces to fight from distance tries to reach you so you spent energy to move which limits your spending in attacks. The combo of location, bounty and unstabilities were too much and my power Vindi died. Moved to celestial. Results: Zawadi: 5'04" Zommoro's Weapons: 7'08" Pekknik: 7'37" Lady Kahraman: 7'13" Aszar: 5'38" * Zawadi again, this time in the fields with Polluter and Exploiter; with his Shadow Demons can put a lot of pressure but my HP never fell below 50%. She doesn't have cc and dies quite fast so this match is mostly a sustain test unless She spanws with very bad mods. Cele Vindi facetanks. * Shield of Disdain & Sword of Grounding: I only had this fight before twice and my only remembering was that they had different abilities but the health was shared. I don't known if there's specific, optimal way to crush them so I was a bit erratic chosing the targets (in theory you should mele the shield and hit the sword at range, but learned that later seing the video)... The had Sniper and Spinning Lasers; their burst were nice but the fight a bit long due the movements... The open location was perfect but they have a lot of visual cluttering and sometimes was hard to see what was happening. By the way, the description of Disdain says "resistant to range" but in reality reflects projectiles so the biggest burst I had were from myself : ( Anyway, was fun, and quite easy. I think that now I can easily crush that time. * Pekknik: Ley Energy + Signaler; fun place to fight a boss with push! Fight took a bit because the blinds from the Signaler I ignored and because the cc circles from gyros/grenades? were barely visible (again, the orbs). Outside when I chose to facetank at the end to hurry the most it hit me was like 4k, so the fight was very easy. * Lady K: another foe I don't see oftenly; in the first attempt a Mechanist and a Deadeye joined to the party so was invalid; in the second fight Kahraman appeared with Sniper and Restorer, which makes his minions (dolls) very tanky to power damage (not so much against condis). This champion feels a lot like Butch in Crystal Oasis, just that Butch moves slower but has more cc and his minions are WAY more dangerous. I canceled my heals a couple of times and got too much confussion to my good around the middle of the fight so was dangerous at moments, but given the mobility the time was okish... It forced me to go blue! = D I could only imagine how much would suck fighting this lady with a power mele build ^^ * Aszar: Restorer + Ley Energy; not too bad, the worst part was the visual cluttering from orbs + the lightning deluge. Good mix of cc and AoE damage, quite fun to play, quite fast to die. Oh, yes, some fellas joined at 28% so they "helped" but.. I think that the scaling made it worse (the final blasts of lightnings were huge) and two of them ended in downstate 50 seconds later (loved the Guardian coming to rescue with the staff like a bishop just to melt almost instantly). Very fun, indeed. Ignis: As I said this is one of the few bounties which never finished alone; best to date was 2%; in my try the placement was far from the bounty panel and spammed with Restorer, so the attempt was doomed from start. Diwaana: two attempts; in the first one two players joined so was invalid; in the second one I soloed down to 15%, but that vicious worm has two attacks: mele stomp and ranged stomp, and literally spams it. Since Song of Arboreun was nerfed and Vindi no longer has trait access to vigor unless using Energy Meld evading to evade even more is way more difficult. Still, I think I can do it at will try again. There's also the alternative of using Jalis but I think that it would tank the condition damage. The other two videos are in upload; will add them later. Edit: done.

Good work! But you killed the chak in 34 seconds because your main condition source is fire, which is bursty as hell. Takes me ~1'22" to do the same with the Hzen build, but even If I wore full viper and damage traits I won't be able to do the same, since most of the Rev condi damage comes from torment, then burns and bleeds. At some moment I stack 42 torment, 2 confussion and 5 burns yet takes more than double to do the task. Now, with viper condition damage would go from 1265 to 1798 (+533), so ~40% more, and replacing Salvation would provide more damage... but not x2 more! And I'll lose cleansing and healing on evade, plus barrier on boons, and boons will last less since not cele stats and also 759 less healing power and 639 less armor... So hard bounties I can solo would probably break my skull. I'll stay at cele stats, thanks...

With the introduction of relics, weapon masteries and the 6th rune stat buff most of Hizen's builds hit 17-22k dps. Even playing average hitting 10k is easy, since are optimized to self generate 25 stacks of might and large amounts of vulnerability. The value for the casual player is that most of them get frustrated when they die facing a champion, a hero point, bounty or general event. Those builds provide enough sustain to remain alive and recover after making mistakes, and more time fighting allows players to learn the patterns of the attacks of foes. Over time fights become easier, damage goes up and they end soloing those foes. That cycle oftenly doesn't happen when players run World Bosses and similar events in glass canon builds and rely in team support to survive. The amount of players which go in downstate doing trivial things as Drakkar, Dragonstorm, Palawadan is sometimes shocking. I find amusing that people is worried because a event designed to be completed in less than 15 minutes takes sometimes more than 7 (because must be rushed), but at the same time they don't like the concept of players soloing content designed for larger groups. As some Starcraft players say "a good rush wins matches, a good defense wins championships".

I see. I thought you were talking in first hand. I've soloed ~95% of the bounties/leg bounties in the game with cele Vindi, ~65% with power Vindi and I'm quite sure I can rack at least 80% with cele Herald and cele Mirage, to say a few. I've tried a lot of other builds including power, condi and celestial variants of Berserk, Spellbreaker, Bladesworn, Firebrand, Willbender, Daredevil, Deadeye, Mechanist, etc. And in my test, didn't found any evidence of power builds or glass canon viper ones being any better at soloing things once you start to put in the mix hard targets as some bounties or large events (soloables, not the ones which require more than a single player to deal with the mechanics of an event). Yes, those full dps builds mow regular crowds like weed, but things take a different path when you try to solo Butch or Seneb in full berserker. That's why I was asking: I have tons of videos doing those things in cele or trailblazer or carrion stats (including from myself), but there's very little examples done with glass canon builds. I can put examples of a power DH soloing Queen Yidaxu in a bit less than 4 minutes, I can do it in cele Vindi around 4'45" (first attempt) but the time doesn't showcase the whole picture, since the DH player is very close to die plenty of times despite being a very good player, yet I'm fairly mediocre and my Vindi facetanks everything and my HP barely moves down. Moral of the story: celestial is underrated at PVE, definitely the best ascender gear to craft for a beginner. And is also meta in WvW, not only roaming: at the moment, the strongest largest zergs usually run 3-4 support x squad, and that means 1-2 pure damage dealers at most. I guess being able to support + endure damage + delivering decent damage is one of the reasons cele is also popular there.

^ I overall agree with your points. You're right on the money. Only one thing: I would like to known that build (and even better if you can link videos of that stuff working, like soloing hard bounties and similar), not because distrust but because I'm genuinely open to learn and change if I find out something more convenient. So please, enlighten me.

That word... I think that doesn't mean what you think. Most of the content in the game is OW PVE, and most of it is oftenly done alone (in my case, like 95% of the time). I don't see a reason to run anything but celestial in PvE, outside maybe playing power Bladesworn, at which power is an optimal choice, eclipsed by the fact that Bladesworn is a suboptimal choice of spec in first place. And is fine. The game has 99 runes, 95 of them are useless, as most of sigils and most of relics. On paper PvP has 16 amulets yet 40% of them are never used and the meta uses only 4-5. The game is full of amazing permutations of stats that do literally nothing, with gear which is instantly salvaged as drops because has atribute points wasted outside the 5-6 combinations considered "valauable", and can be argued that that number could ever be halved with no impact. You could reduce the stats to berserker, viper and minstrel and the game would remain the same, yet in any place in which trailblazer or celkestial exist those would be arguably better, as long as you're playing alone... Which oh surprise! is what a lot of players do in MMOs those days.

So the players which are asking for nerfs in celestial are the ones which play instanced group content in which most doesn't even run celestial. Can you please go back to your grave of dead game modes? Here outside people are having fun...

Not sure if I understand... In the respawn point from the telepor tome of Sandwept Isles the NPJ will always rezz you...

Nah, just move to celestial: the today patch further nerfs Vindicator's damage an extra 5%. Instead of running a power build and trying to balance damage and sustain Crackofdawn should try the waters of the bruiser condi builds which grants sustain and still are able to kill most of the things at decent pace (including content designed to not be soloed). Power Vindi is for tryharding at PvP or even WvW if you did master the spec.

No. Some new things added to the game remained stable (better or worse) over time whereas some others were used as selling points to appeal the masses just to be throw to the garbage can once enough players bite the bait for a while. And I hate that. Some blatant examples: * Warclaw used to have a 20% incr¡eased speed while treveling in terrain under the control of your server, used to have 3 evades, was able to finish downed enemies on attack and was able to adquire camps and sentinel points while mounted. All of that was removed, so now is a feature which I use less than 50% of the time I move in WvW, since my main way to move is mount, spent two jumps, attack, use 2-4 movement skills while dismounted, then mount again and repeat the cycle. To me Warclaw adds nothing to WvW and is useless in PvE, so developing it was a waste of time and resources. * Engineer was my least used class, they buffed the rifle to make it a chaingun, I tried and liked it for like 2 months, then they nerfed it and my two engineers were moved again to the mule/alt parking status. Another example of overbuffing followed by overnerfing, what was the point? * Relics killed the runes: whe went from having 99 runes of which a dozen had some use (some very niche, but still allowed some weird and fun builds) to a status in which only 2-4 of the 99 runes have any use (Dragonhunter, Trapper, maybe Monk if you run a healer, maybe Surging if you want mobility). The rest are garbage (and I spent close to 400 gold coins recrafting the runes for the 54 gear sets of my 20 characters). Another insane waste of time and effort in rune variety entirely throw out the window... Then, there's some changes that were positive: * Weapon Mastery made core builds more complete and made specs more powerful. That didn't go away, and was a change for better. * The Wizzard Vault is a better system than the old dailies, is not only more rewarding bult also allows to level up a new character 1 to 80 in 3 hours, if you want. SAnd givers much more freedon in terams of which goals you want to focus on. * The HoT and PoF masteries were superb, whereas the ones from Icebrood Saga and EoD are garbage and SotO onmes are a hit and misss. Also, I don't care much about the numbers, I don't do instanced content or run instanced builds.

Thanx! By the way, any streamer of place to see the EU tournament? Tomorrow we will see some changes in the patch, with some nerfs to DE which could affect those choices.

A couple of months ago I manually leveled every core class from 1 to 80 just completing maps buying blue/green gear every 25/30 levels, no tomes nor buffs, no runes nor sigils, solo gameplay. It took me from 18 to 28 hours depending of which profession (knownledge of gameplay made some bias, for sure), and those were my results: Best experiences (in order): * Condi Mesmer, staff + greatsword; died twice and one was due fall damage. Lots of cc and safety poking at range while clones tank for me. * Condi Warrior, hammerbow; more powerful due the chainstuns and the burns from bow, was able to kill groups of foes up to 6 levels above, but more exposed than Mesmer due more mele involvement. * Condi Guardian, greatsword + scepter & torch; even more bursty than Warrior but lower cc and self sustain. Low base HP made things riskier. * Condi Necro (stafff + axe & warhorn) and condi Ranger (short bow + axe & torch); similar performance: Ranger had a bit better mobility but getting pets was a bit annoying so used basic options. Ranger was the only build which I would also level as pure power since greatsword + long bow works wonders. * Condi Elementalist, dagger + dagger was fun and bursty but vulnerable. Solid experience but not my fav. * Condi Rev with mace & axe + staff, Jalis + Mallyx. Power version with swords + staff and Jalis + Shiro as option. The condi build was safe and steady, but slow at moving. The power build was fast and bursty, but risky. * Condi Engineer with rifle; felt like a discount Elementalist. Not fan of. * Condi Thief with short bow + dagger & dagger: felt the squishyest and not very good vs multiple targets. Was the slowest to level up. So, is core Rev a powerhouse? I don't think is amongst the best at leveling: is a bit slow at moving compared to Warrior, Necro and Ranger (all of them have access to 25% increase pace) and if you want more mobility then you'll move from a tanky condi build to a faster but frailer power one. The AoE burst aren't as strong as with hambow and you don't have as much cc as Warrior or Necro, and Mesmer and Rangers have pets to tank and distract. Another interesting thing for leveling is that if the average time is around 24 hours doing through knwonledge tomes at PvP takes roughly x2 that time, and WvW is not advised due the scaling will rip you apart, so unless you're leeching inside a good zerg you'll be essentially a rallybot. But the fastest way to level from 1 to 80 with a new character/account is just creating a core Warrior, Guardian, Necro or Ranger, play unranked in PvP for a few hours and use the Wizzard Vault rewards to purchase for ~600 AA enough tomes to instantly reach max level. (with the daily + weekly PvP rewards). You can do this is less than 3 hours. The thing is: once you character is full 80 the ranking amongst core builds changes (and also if you have weapon mastery). Once at 80 I think that Rev rises steps and is amongst the best; but the thing is that if you have access to the expansions and already have masteries and mounts you'll unlock all the specs for a character in less than 4 hours. So at that point doesn't matter if core Rev is "so strong" because a few hours later you have all the specs available (assuming you don't have WvW tokkens to bruteforce the unlocks in a blink).

Saturday at the NA MAT both finalist teams were running DH. But you're not wrong about DE being good since i think it was one in one of the teams, also.

I've soloed those except Ignis which I usually crush to 5-2% (I need more finesse using my skills and moving). I'll try your list with both power and cele builds and I'll post the videos, but it will take me a few days. It will be fun 😃

This ones from 7 months ago portray fights against the Champion Bandits and some Season 4 bounties using the power Vindicator build: albeit 50-65% of bounties still were doable to me with the power build the differences in self sustain and damage over time were eveident. This probably became worse now that avaliability of vigor and endurance became lower after the constant nerfs to Vindicator over the last year: I remember that some in the forum said that He was able to solo Seneb with power Vindi with pretty much a raid build and I believe him (albeit I would like to see it to understand how must be done), but I don't think that going full berserker with no sustain would work well for most of players soloing those kind of targets. That's why I encourage new players which whant to start to play and do level 80 content on their own to craft cele gear as first choice which essentially allows you to mitigate the punishement from mistakes and keep fighting and learning instead of running a glass cannon raid build and getting one shooted every time you face a hard champion or a bunch of veterans.

This is from yesterady, I've completed almost every bounty in the game and this Saturday chose to solo some of the legendary bounties that lef behind to complete the achievements, so I did Yidaxu, Ishraa, Forged Rampager and Daol Brol Shiol in a row with the cele build; three of them I faced it for first time; gameplay is not that great but I had 0 troubles in terms of sustain: You can see that ther first minutes vs Yidaxu didn't even reacted to the stun from hammers, then I noticed the teal pillar cast before the wave, adapted and ccs were less frequent. Ishraa can be facetanked with cele Vindicator with little trouble. The Forged Rampager is a bit more annoying since moves a lot, has strong ccs and the place is full of spellcasters and snipers, so the short bow becomes more comfy that going full mele. I got a bit distracted trying to rezz some random players which join and at one point made the mistake of staying 4 secs in the wells so I got a 28k damage burst but outside that it was easy with my HP orb maxed most of the time. Daol Drol Shiol also ultra easy: got me with his burst once and did me like 10k damage, most of the time I was above 90%. To be honest, legendary bounties aren't even the hardest bounties: I find out the rabbit from Highlands impossible to solo since spents most of the time running away and I can't finish it in time. With Ignis I usually put him to 5%-2% before the time expires (obviously lack of skill from me since is doable) and Butch and some of the heavy cc bounties as Mandulis can be extremely annoying and impossible (for me) to zero in time if they have unfavourable magic unstabilities as Restorer...

Once you have the masteries and experience from another character Tangled Depths for alts is not that hard: you use the mud teleports and in 4 minutes you'll unlock most of the waypoints and from there you can easily navigate to any zone, specially if you have mounts of any kind.

Ok ok, a few things: 1) Celestial Vindicator probably sits in the highest tier of soloing Open World PvE builds, since has probably the best self sustain in the game while keeping near 19k dps in optimal conditions. There's other specs with higher dps output but none of them have the same mix of self sustain, variety of tools or easyness to be played. That build uses mace + axe as amins weapons and can run short bow as secondary for comfort and added range (other options are also available). 2) Power Vindicator is at least two tier steps below celestial Vindicator for solo OW PvE; is still decent and can do well a lot of things, but is nowhere as good as the cele build. The reason is because in order to do damage the Vindicator power builds need to heavily spent in damage traits, which greatly reduce the self sustain, or instead you can invest in better sustain but then your damage will be similar to the cele build or worse and still you'll sustain will be worse due much lower armor, healing power and boon duration. Power Vindicator can run greatsword with double sword for max damage output, or staff for more defense and cc or short bow for ranged damage and convenience. I would say that power Vindicator for solo "you do all" is a tier below Bladesworn (which also is a step below the top cele builds). Power Vindi has less room for mistakes since has lower armor and weaker regen and it last less, the same as protection and other boons and every time you get cced you stop doing damage. 3) WvW is an entirely diffrent beast: there you can run celestial Vindicator (I do with greatsword + short bow usually) or power build (can be gs + staff, gs + swords, gs + short bow) or a more condi oriented build with mace and axe and several legends can be used based on the goal (oftenly Alliance + Shiro for power builds but Jalis also works and Alliance + Mallyx for condi but Mallyx + Jalis or Shiro can also work). The main advantage of Vindi over other Rev specs in WvW is that the Alliance has very good access to condition cleansing and (until recently) to vigor. Playing celestial or condi Vindicator in WvW is easier than a power build, but in that game mode the power variant in hands of expert players can outperform cele due the burst (and because sustain is more linked to mobility and reactions than to facetanking a boss with millions of HP). The power Vindicator builds from Meta Battle or the raid power Vindicator builds from SnowCrows and Discretize aren't a good tools to play solo OW PvE; sure some players can solo some legendary bounties with them, but is not common and a single run played at perfection doesn't showcase the % of failures until the task was done. When I set a build for a character for solo OW I'm aiming to not die but still being able to do any task unless it requires more than a player for a specific mechanic. In my opinion power is not a very good option for solo OW PvE unless you run a Bladesworn and you mastered the spec, and even then there's tradeoff between the best offensive build with max dps and cc (which runs Unyielding Dragon trait) and the most surviable one (which uses Immortal Dragon trait). I would put an example: power Vindicator with gs + swords is my fav OW solo build, and melts regular crowds in seconds, albeit is a bit weak at crowd controlling; when I solo the Champion Bandits in the core Tyria maps with power Vindi the figths are demanding, and if the Legendary one appears it can be very, very hard/end in a dfeat. When I run celestial Vindicator to do the same task I can facetank all of them. The same happens with the PoF bounties and the SotO rifts: with power Vindi I can do some and only if the anomalies aren't extra bad. But if the anomalies are too strong or the bounty has too much cc I couldn't do the job. With cele Vindicator I can solo 95% of them. The celestial Vindi build from Lord Hizen listed above by Phokus is fantastic, the only change I do is swapping staff for short bow since I don't think I need the defense and the build has already very good cc without the staff. I also think that either Mighty or Malign infussions are better choices since you can use them at WvW (Mighty benefits both power and condi builds), whereas Expertise ones will be negated by cleanses in WvW. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmzAkeVlhQmsI6kJRpMIClBSqMBqkj2za0E-DyIY1oj/QKUVlrEoXhgC/AkgA2DvGQMtBqA-e For power Vindi at PvP I don't see the reason to run pure berserker when a Marauder + Dragon mix will cap the crit chance with 227% crit damage while having around 24k HP. Sure, a zerk build will provide higher base power values, but the problem is that you won't get the dps from a raid build because you won't have perma quickness, and if you go full balls to the wall in dps traits then prepare to have no re-sustain and die fast when mistakes are made (and you have less room for them since our current pst nerf access to vigor & endurance is mediocre). http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmjAEVlZSMsTqjhScsUyjpSksSign1kdsC-DSRYiRFH0cQvHSmSheFBVoAk5ZhEIwe4+7kAENgYaDUB-e In WvW as I said there's much more variation; this is is what I enjoy the most due the mix of mobility, tankyness/self-sustain and damage/pressure over time: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmgAUFlZSMsTqjhScsUyjpSksSign1UVsF-D2IY1o6/QiUBlpUtXRhIvEkgA+bxMzKA-w ...But as I said the amount of builds that work at WvW is much wider and the chances there of winning skirmishes rely more on skill gap than just in the gear and trait selection. I'll update this with some video exapmples later.

https://gw2lunchbox.com/IstanShipments.html Just start getting some of the time capped materials day by day, as the Provisioner Tokens, and farm volatile magic to buy trophy chest from the vendors in the Living Story Season 4 maps to gradually fill your materials in the bank. That would make it cheaper reducing the amount of stuff you'll need to buy. The main advantage of having a single legendary rune is that you can use it for all your underwater breathers and makes good sense since there's not legendary version of them. So you can get all your respirators covered and earn the legendary relic with a single rune. For the armors I think that going for the legendary armor pieces before the runes makes more sense since they allow you to reset stats, appareance, add and remove regular runes and infusions without damaging them.

Hizen had a celestial power Spellbreaker build with hammer + dagger & axe in his OW Spec Builds Part 1 from 4 months ago, but at PVE Spellbreaker in general is weaker at both dealing damage and self sustain compared to both celestial Berseker and power (assassin) Bladesworn: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PKzAIhflJwuYTMKWJO2O/veA-DyIY1omvMKsCqIFs8sQACZP8aowoFoC-e I tried it and for me was clearly at least 3 tiers below the other two: Bldesworn does much more damage (but is relatively hard to play) whereas condi Berserker is both easy to play, tanky and has good damage. I'm of the opinion thatin power stats for solo OW PvE Bladesworn is probably the only decent choice since the alternatives (power Vindi, Willbender, Dragonhunter... ) have large holes in self sustain unless you make some trait choices that ruin your damage and at that point running a celestial hybrid damage build is just superior. I have litle experience with power Reaper, tho, but if the build were really, really good for solo we should have plenty of videos showcasing it and I think is not the case.

He invented the 5 ele x team MAT meta. I think the loser (2nd) team was only running 3 ele iterations so obviously they lost to a fully balanced, synergized team of eles.

I've played core Warrior with quite success against DH since this build gets stability each time you use a movement skill or cc a foe, so they can't cc you and you avoid traps just evading or walking out: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PKwAIl7lJwSYKMMGKOSP/LfA-DaIPkMlC9KCCZBY1TAAA Spellbreaker should be even stronger since has full counter and main hand dagger (I can use the dagger due weapon mastery but did chose mace just to test how well a vanilla core Warrior could do in current PvP and I think is solid). Do you known how fast a 12k HP stunlocked DH dies?

You can unlock weapon mastery in the second mission of the SotO story; it will take you 60-90 minutes since you enter in the expansion (probable can be rushed, I'm talking about normal pace). I would do: 1) Rise character to 80. 2) Start HoT to unlock gliding. 3) Start PoF to unlock the basic mounts, then... 4) Start SotO to unlock Weapon Mastery then go back to 3 then to 2 then finish things in order. You can also re-start (and repeat) the story mode as many times as you want so you can first unlock what you want then do the staory mode from the basic game to today with no hurry.

Celestial stats are perfectly fine. You want power damage for niche, instanced team content? You run berserker, unless you don't cap crit chance so you add some assassin until you becaome aware that your class choice was wrong then you rerroll and equip zerk as expected. You want condi damage? Then you roll viper (who knowns why the hell grieving exist, is worse 98% of the time!). You want to support? You run Minstrel. Support and damage? Then Diviner or Ritualist. Want to be tanky but deliver damage? Then you have carrion, dire or traiblazer. Or celestial which overshadows everything else. Any other gear stat is useless, the same as 95 of the 99 runes, which ended being a waste of time in design and balance. An happens the same with most of sigils and 75% of the relics: they do nothing. And is worse in PvP where there's like 4-5 amulets and maybe 2-3 runes in use; everything else is redundant and traps for noobs. And the thing is that berserker is overall very mediocre at solo PvE: outside Bladesworn (which is tricky to play and inconsistent) most of the power damage builds are really lacking in self sustain. Yes, you mow regular crowds faster in zerker than in celestial, but you beat leg bounties better in celestial since you don't die, and players at downstate in berserker and viper stats left a lot to be desired in terms of dps...

If I had to re-start from 0 with a level 80 character and no expansions my first task would be farming materials in core Tyria (platinum, logs, etc.) and doing the Wizzard Vault goals from PvP and after a couple of weeks turn all the gold farmed into gems to buy the season 3 and 4 maps (starting from Bitterfrost and Dragonfall). Those maps would then provide all my trinkets in ascended quality for free and be also strong sources of more profitable metas. I would also use the PvP and WvW tokens to start crafting my fisrt legendary armor ASAP, since you won't need more than 1-2 sets of ascended armors for your main, at most.