How Important is 100% crit chance on raid/fractal builds?

[lLobo.7960]

I've been looking into some different builds and doing some myself, and was wondering how important is to reach 100% crit chance on builds.

While I can easily get there with my dps weaver (due to the 15% bonus against targets with weakness), and on catalyst (with the hammer orb bonus and elemental empowerment),  condi (and alac) tempest builds are not really there. 

What is the consensus (if there is one)?
Is it better to swap some viper for rampage and get relic of aristocracy to cover the condi duration?
Is 7% crit signet worth over bursting? Or maybe getting signet of agony to get 100% condi duration alongside the burning?
Runes of Lyssa for precision with the condi duration?

[Erenias.6947]

Maxing out your crit chance is extremely important on power builds. You want to make sure that every hit is a crit so you can make use of your high crit multiplier. 

As you noted, weaver and catalyst will get to 100% crit chance in full zerker gear. With tempest it's more complicated. Full zerker gets you to around 51% crit chance. Air gives another 5. Fury is 25. So now you sit at 81%. The remaining 19% can probably be covered by signet of fire and runes.

As for Condi builds. Ele doesn't care about crit chance on Condi builds. It's a bit of extra damage, but it's better to just focus on maxing out your condis.

[Dadnir.5038]

Like Erenias said, 100% crit chance is important for strike damage builds while it's merely a comodity for elementalist's condi builds.

Viper is the optimal condi dps gear on most professions because all it's stats contribute to damage but you usually don't really need to max out precision on condibuilds. The fact that crit chance is not really needed for condition builds have been a topic coming periodically since release of the game.

NB.: My personal opinion is that conditions on auto attacks should be "on crit" only.

Edited September 7 by Dadnir.5038

[Eekasqueak.7850]

There is one Condi build that has to max crit but that's on mesmer. 

[Guybrush.4762]

It is important-ish for power build not so much for condi except condi virtuoso.

For power dps : if you are looking for the best possible gear, then every meta power dps build is at least close to 100% crit chance but it is worth noting that some build would theoretically gain a tiny bit more dps by garbing a little chunk of power or ferocity instead of precision resulting in less than 100% crit chance but a tiny dps increase overall. For condi dps it is heavily build dependent so it is hard to give you a global answer. Generally speaking, build websites are trustworthy so try to run that however if you ever happen to have mismatch gear and want to know if it is decent until you grab better gear then the best advice is to go to the golem and see for yourself or at least check on the discretize gear optimizer to give you an idea of how much dps you are loosing.

If you do 30~35k+ golem dps and have good positioning you should be ok for most content in the game (except speed clear obviously but that is a different beast).

 

Edited September 21 by Guybrush.4762