Choosing gearEverything is based on level 80 exotics, unless otherwise stated.
Stat distributionThere are 3 stats on any piece of gear. One primary and two secondary stats. For armor, the primary stat will have 315 attribute points, whereas the secondary stats will both have 224 attribute points (less for crit damage). For trinkets (referring to back + 5 pieces of jewelry) the exotic stat total is 358 attribute points for primary and 255 attribute points for secondary stats. Ascended gear has 570 attribute points for the primary and 376 attribute points for the secondary stats.
Edit: Armor prefix table - top portion is craftable, the bottom is karma bought
When listing stats for armor, if necessary it will be in the form <primary stat>/<secondary stat>/<secondary stat>
Where to get gearThere are 4 ways to get exotic gear:
1. Drop it. Random world drops or from chests.
2. Craft it. The top portion of the list above is craftable. Takes 5 ectos + 5 T6 mats + other mats per piece. Jewelry takes 5 ectos + orb (from mining) + orichalcum (T6 ore).
3. Buy it from a Karma vendor. The temples in Orr sell Karma armor/jewelry when you control them. The cost is 42k per piece. You typically can only buy stat combinations you cannot craft (soldiers, rabid, cavalier, etc).
4. Buy with dungeon tokens. Cost varies from ~200 to 390 tokens per piece, depending on what you're buying. You can buy weapons and armor with these tokens, but not jewelry.
What stat combinations do I want?This is a complicated question to answer. The main things to consider are:
-what is your class/what is your base armor? (light/medium/heavy)
-what range do you typically fight at
-what is your primary focus in game (pve/pvp)
-is this your first/only armor set
-your build
(adding later)-class specific weapon sets/special circumstances
(adding later)
Simple answersIf you are getting your first armor set, you should consider first what is it you want to primarily do - PvE or PvP. If the answer is PvP you will undoubtedly want to go with more survivability while trying to maintain decent damage ouput. The 3 popular choices are: knights, soliders, and rabid (condition damage).
The next question is what range you play from. The closer you are, the more survivability you should have. Full glass cannon is not recommended for melee in most circumstances.
How well you can dodge is also another consideration. If you have issues reacting to and dodging attacks, I would suggest more survivability so you have more room to make mistakes and get hit every now and again. If you are not sure how "well" you dodge. Consider how often you get downed and/or die during a dungeon run. If the number if times is more than once or twice per boss fight, you should probably invest more heavily into survivability.
More in-depth considerationsRangeThe next thing do figure out is what range you typically are fighting at (usually depends on your weapon set choice(s).
If you are playing at 900-1200 range, you probably won't be taking much damage. So if you are a pve focused player who typically fights at range, you can pretty safely choose an armor set with little or no defensive stats. This would narrow your choices down to something along the lines of berserker (power/precision/crit damage) or rampager (precision/power/condition damage) sets. An alternative might be rabid if your build is primarily condition damage with little need for power.
If you are playing melee-600 range, and also have a pve focus, you have a choice of going more glass cannon or tanky. My personal suggestion is that anyone who is reading this as a guide will probably want to choose the more tanky route opposed to the pure glass cannon because you will most likely want more leeway to make mistakes and not get punished as badly for making them. Good choices for going the more tanky route would include: all knights gear (toughness/power/precision), all soldiers gear (power/vitality/toughness), mix valkryie (power/vitality/crit damage) and knights (toughness/power/precision), full cleric (healing power/toughness/power), or possibly full carrion (condition damage/vitality/power).
Melee ChoicesWhich stat combinations you choose would depend mostly on your class. For instance, warriors would most likely choose full knights. The reason is because warriors have very high base hp to begin with, adding more does not benefit them as much as adding more toughness, even at the cost of having lower power. For guardians, soliders is much more appealing since they start with higher base toughness, and also have considerably less base hp than a warrior. Thieves are special, and will be mentioned later in the class specific cases.
Full knights or mix in some valkyrie? Full knights is the universal better option. Mixing knights/valkryie gives you an overall "better" balance of stats, but in reality it will gimp you more often than not. There are 2 main reasons for this. The first of which is because crit damage as a stat is mostly worthless without high crit chance/rate (the exception is d/d thieves). You are essentially never going to have more than a 50% chance crit chance unbuffed (no fury/food buffs), and even getting to 50% is very difficult without ignoring adding survavibility (toughness/vitality). Realistically it'll probably be in the mid 30% range if you mix in survivability gear, maybe low 40% if your spec gives you precision. Fury is also becoming much more difficult to keep 100% uptime on as recent patches have been nerfing ways to keep fury up all the time. There are also a number of abilities that trigger off of attacks critting but nothing is based of how much you crit for. Essentially crit damage is just nice to see big numbers pop up, but in reality it's value compared to other stats is quite low (probably 4th? or 5th? depending - power > precision ~ toughness > vitality ~ crit damage).
The second reason is because vitality as a stat is not as valuable as toughness for the majority of classes (the exception are T3 classes). Increasing vitality is a similar anti-burst defensive stat like toughness in some sense, but in reality it is a lesser defensive stat except in the case where you need more to be able to reliably stay alive from some combo or condition damage (which ignores armor/toughness). Increasing vitality helps in the short term survivability, but doesn't help your sustained healing become more effective. You will still be healing the same amount as before you increased your max hp, and you will still be taking the same amount of damage. Whereas if you increased toughness you would take less damage and heal for the same amount, which is an increase in your effective healing.
How much HP is enough?You probably want at least 14k, 15k is a good number to shoot for. Less is risky, but doable if you fight from long range consistently. You probably shouldn't be above 20k, otherwise your healing will feel very insufficient.
How much armor do I want?If you're under 2000 armor, you will be pretty squishy. Something above 2000 is highly preferable. The highest you can get would probably be somewhere around 3000, but as long as you're floating between the two extremes you should be okay. Melee would preferably want ~2300 or so to be comfortable.
Armor prefix notesCleric gear? Typically only useful to Guardians or Elementalists. But honestly, your spec needs to take advantage of constant heal spam or something similar to justify this choice over higher dps or higher survivability options.
Carrion gear? Very situationally does anyone choose carrion gear. As far as I'm aware only Engineers would want this. Elementalists would prefer soldiers if they wanted to get more hp into their build.
Berserker gear. No question marks here. Everyone running PvE a lot will at some point want a full berserker set (armor and trinkets). Not every dungeon or thing you do will require additional survivability. Probably the highest dps set for most classes, rampagers might be a close 2nd.
Rampager gear. Good for classes that do a lot of hybrid damage and don't benefit greatly from high crit damage. Good choice for Mesmers, possibly Elementalists and Guardians too.
Melee and berserker gearI advocate to be careful about going melee in full berserker gear. Most melee classes don't spec into the defensive trees (up to a +300 toughness if you do spec into them). And you will most likely want extra toughness above the base amount to avoid being 1 shot. Warriors can sometimes get away without it due to their high base hp and higher base armor, but most other classes with find it quite difficult to do the same.
Build/Class specifics - to be added at a later date
