This is tough, mostly because of how we're defining "worst."

If we're prioritizing combat usefulness, swift may be the worst, but it's awesome for farming and scroll running. Every other trait has some usefulness in combat, but if you put swift on while fighting, you're sacrificing something.

However, if you're a solo player, harmony is the worst--it will do nothing for you because you don't play in groups/dungeons/trials.

However, if the "worst" traits are those whose effects can be replicated in other areas (ex. gear,sets, champion points, Mundus), then protective and the trait buff ones (healthy, arcane, robust, & to a lesser extent triune) are the worst, because you can build around never needing their effects.

And if you're a tank or healer, bloodthirsty is the worst, because you aren't doing enough damage for the trait to matter at all (not counting offtanks and healers pushing trial leaderboards).

I think I just arrived at what is likely the best (Infused), but "worst" seems really situational. I'd say harmony if I was forced to answer, even though I use it a lot on my trial tanks.

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

I’d say Bloodthirsty, Infused, and Protective are the best 3. Followed by Triune and Swift, then Harmony. The 3 original traits are weakest and lowest priority.

In my experience, I don’t find this to be the case at all @WrathOfInnos.

Is this maybe because you’re speaking from a pure PvE end game perspective?

I’ve made plenty of Healthy, Robust, and Arcane jewelry pieces already ... most recently a set of blue quality Healthy Willow’s Path for my low level Health Tank.

That’s why I used the disclaimer that it depends on the audience ... because not everyone plays PvE end game.

@Taleof2Cities I don’t believe my analysis is restricted to end game PVE. In that one setting, the answer is Bloodthirsty and Infused are on top for damage. Infused or Triune seem popular for tanks, with Harmony or Swift also being used sometimes.

I don’t see a lot of protective in PVE (although it can be used is other sources of defense are lacking), that is more of a PVP thing. For PVP damage, Infused pulls ahead of Bloodthirsty in most cases, since the hard part is typically getting an opponent into execute range. Infused is also better for self-heals, which Bloodthirsty does not affect. Swift has some uses in objective based BG’s and Cyrodil scroll running. And Triune can be nice on Magicka builds that need a little more stamina and health.

I did say that healthy was used by the pure health stacking builds, but IMO these builds are not particularly great. In PVE they end up making things hard on the healers, and in PVP they have a hard time sustaining due to a lack of other resources.

I still fail to see a case where Arcane or Robust are desirable over all the other options. My impression is that they are only used because they are the easiest to obtain (no transmuting required). Keep in mind that this was not the case when Jewelry Crafting was released. Back in Summerset, Arcane was a good option, often better than Infused. It was the recent removal of racial multipliers, and the change of the 20% resource bonus from CP’s to be additive that reversed this trend.

Swift is by far my favorite, but it's probably the least useful in actual combat. That being said, most veteran players have several loadouts for each character, myself included. My farming loadout, which I use nearly all the time outside of dungeons/trials/PvP, focuses purely on movement speed and stamina regeneration making swift ideal.

Probably Healthy, since Triune vastly outperforms it. You rarely stack health while ignoring your other resources. All other traits are just niche and very specific use.

Harmony for example, is good for Group PvP (Nova synergy + 3 Harmony is OP I'm telling you), even PvE tanks can run it. Swift is still useful for certain builds that rely on mobility/kite to survive, like Stamblade or MeleeMagblade, although it's not as popular. Protective used to be pretty bad, but since light armor is meta, running protective to compensate the armor loss is very popular now.

Overall all of them are in a good state, you just have to use them right.