Comprehensive Guide to Perks on Armor/Weapons

After seeing multiple questions on Facebook and Discord, I also had it on my list to write a guide on perks on armor and weapons. Before I get into discussing perks, though, I wanted to briefly discuss the impact of the power level rating on gear for both PvE and PvP. Power level is an irrelevant statistic in PvP. There is no impact to damage output or damage resistance due to rarity of the item or the power level of the item, so the perks are all that really matter when it comes to armor. For weapons, all damage is scaled down to power level 0, so a 270 power level Faraday does the same base damage in PvP as a 150 power level Faraday. Power level is highly relevant when it comes to PvE, though. For armor, the power level impacts the amount of damage that you take from the enemy Torment, so the lower the power level of your armor, the more damage you take from enemies. For weapons, base damage increases as power level increases, so a 270 power level Faraday is a much stronger weapon in PvE than a 150 power level Faraday. What this ultimately means is that you will likely have two distinct sets of gear for PvE and PvP until you've been at 270 power for long enough to collect the gear with the ideal set of perks or infuse the gear you collected along the way while you were leveling up to 270 power. This brings up the point about what gear you should be infusing to upgrade its power level. As I will discuss in this article about what perk set to look for, you should only be infusing those Epic and Legendary rarity pieces that have a fantastic perk set AND are pieces you wish to use in PvE. It is very expensive to infuse gear, so choose those pieces wisely.

Please note that the discussion below generally excludes consideration of static perked items like the Kira's Basilisk and Midnite's Invictus sets, which have static perks specific to SMGs and MGs, respectively. Taken along with all of the other articles I've written, you should be able to make the appropriate decisions on what to use based on what weapon you choose to use and what mode you are going to play.

Shoulders:

Critical Damage: This is the most important perk on shoulders, hands down. The maximum combined crit value on shoulders that has ever been witnessed is 29%. For PvP, you'll see a lot of players with 26-27% crit damage on their shoulders. This perk is the only perk that is relevant to PvP, so you should always keep the shoulder piece that has the highest combined crit value as part of your PvP gear set. For PvE, you should be using the highest power level shoulders you have that ideally have a decent amount of critical damage on them.

Selling: This perk is pretty meaningless. It increases the amount of cash that Big Red and Willow will pay you for the items you sell to them, so if you are willing to deal with the hassle of always changing your shoulders before you sell unwanted gear, keep a shoulder piece at any power level that has a high combined value for the selling perk to put on right before you sell anything.

Loot chance: This is the second most important perk on shoulders, but only from a PvE perspective. With the drop rate being rather low to begin with, it's unclear how big of an impact that loot percentage on shoulders gives to your acquiring more rare pieces. I believe that the max total loot % on shoulders is 12%, but I am not absolutely sure about that. If you can find a good pair of shoulders that strikes a balance between crit and loot (I have an Invictus piece with 13% crit and 10% loot), these should be your go to shoulders for PvE.

Ideal shoulders for PvP: Minimum of 24% critical damage

Ideal shoulders for PvE: Blend of Critical Damage and Loot Chance (around 10% each), or a Minimum of 24% critical damage if speedrunning

Gloves:

Critical Damage: This is a very important perk on gloves in both modes. The maximum value is 15%, so ideally you would at least have that as one of your perks, though I prioritize base damage and elite damage perks first when it comes to PvE. For PvP, it's pretty necessary to have both critical damage and base damage.

Base Damage: This perk will appear either as an overall boost to damage regardless of weapon type or a boost to a specific weapon type. The maximum that you will see for an overall boost is 3% while the maximum you will see for a specific weapon type is 8%, so the maximum combined damage for any one weapon type is 11%. You should be collecting gloves that complement whatever your main weapon is going to be for a particular mode. So in PvP, it's best to prioritize the base damage of your primary weapon and in PvE, boosting your secondary weapon will likely be a bigger bang for your buck. As Machine Guns have the highest DPS of all the secondary weapons and can dish out the most amount of total damage, having a good gloves piece that has boosted machine gun damage is very, very nice to have, especially in Arenas.

Elite Damage: This perk is only relevant in PvE, but it is also a very nice perk to have for those dungeons and Arenas where there is a high concentration of elite enemies. Having elite damage, base damage, and critical damage all together is ideal for PvE.

Melee Resistance: This is more of a nice to have perk that is only relevant in PvE, but it is quite a nice perk to counter those annoying blinkers so that they don't just annihilate you.

Pickup Radius: This is a pretty worthless perk that only impacts how close you have to be to a dropped item to pick it up. There is limited application of boosted pickup radius in Ascendancy where some have shown that a high pickup radius will allow for grabbing trophies from large distances, but this is a perk that is ridiculously limited in value.

Reload Speed: This is somewhat of a rarer perk to have pop up on gloves, but it is quite useful in PvP to get your weapon firing before your opponent finishes reloading. It doesn't have an enormous impact in PvE due to the base reload time being under 2 seconds, but it's a very nice perk to find on gloves that also have Base Damage and Critical Damage. The maximum value is 10%.

Accuracy: Similar to base damage, there is an overall accuracy perk and a weapon specific accuracy perk that can appear on gloves. If your skill build contains the Marksman skill (3 points combat), this perk is really unnecessary, and even if your build doesn't contain the Marksman skill, you should be prioritizing the other damage perks over Accuracy.

Ideal gloves for PvP: Minimum of 7% primary weapon damage, Minimum of 13% critical damage, 8% reload speed (nice to have, but not common)

Ideal gloves for PvE: 6-8% weapon specific damage, 2-3% overall damage, 13% minimum crit, 8-10% elite damage

Chest:

Health: This is the most important perk on chest pieces with a cumulative value of 45% health being the max value obtainable. For PvP, having a minimum of 38% is really a must.

Autoheal activation: This perk decreases the amount of time it takes to start regenerating health after taking damage. The values are typically low on the perks, so while it's the second most valuable perk, it's really just more of a nice to have perk than a need to have.

Autoheal power: This perk decreases the amount of time it takes to regenerate your health back to full after regeneration has started. It's more of a nice to have perk than a need to have.

Damage resistance: Typically, you'll see this pop up as projectile resistance although for the static perked armor, you can have both projectile resistance and overall damage resistance. The maximum value for either resistance perk is 5%. While additional resistance is always welcome, for PvP the math works out to be that 5% projectile resistance is the equivalent of having 8 extra HP, so you should compare your chest piece with the highest amount of cumulative health with the chest piece that contains the resistance. If the chest piece with resistance carries more than 8 HP less than the chest piece with the highest cumulative health, you should go with the chest that has the highest health.

Ideal chest for PvP: Minimum of 39% Health

Ideal chest for PvE: Minimum of 39% Health

Legs:

Magazine Capacity: This is a very important perk to have to boost the magazine size of your weapons. Particularly when you use a weapon with a low base magazine size like Faraday, any additional bullets are most welcome. For SMGs and Auto Rifles, the maximum specific boost is 20%, while I believe the maximum for shotguns is 30%. There can also be an overall magazine capacity perk to increase magazine size of all weapons by a maximum of 10%. Ideally, leg pieces should have both magazine capacity and critical damage, but I regularly use a Bulldozer leg piece that carries a 28% cumulative AR magazine capacity boost in PvP to help my Faraday magazine size.

Melee Resistance: This is more of a nice to have perk that is only relevant in PvE, but it is quite a nice perk to counter those annoying blinkers so that they don't just annihilate you.

Support Ammo Capacity: This is a great perk to have for PvE that will increase the maximum number of bullets you can carry with your secondary weapons. The Midnite's Invictus legs carry a static 40% support ammo capacity perk that will increase the maximum ammo carry for any secondary you have. For something like Revenant, that's an additional 64 bullets that you can carry!

Critical Damage:  Similar to other pieces of armor, the maximum value of crit that will appear is 15%.

Ideal legs for PvP: Minimum of 18% primary magazine capacity, minimum of 13% critical damage

Ideal legs for PvE: Minimum of 18% magazine capacity, minimum of 13% critical damage, any melee resistance, minimum of 10% support ammo capacity

Boots:

Critical Damage: Similar to other pieces of armor, the maximum value of crit that will appear is 15%.

Knockdown Resistance: This perk will reduce the chance that enemy torment that perform ground pounding attacks will knock you to the ground, as well as reducing the chance that annoying blinkers in PvP will knock you down. The only boots that ensure that you won't be knocked down by Blink in PvP are the Kira's Basilisk boots, but this perk is nice to have in any value on boots.

Explosion Resistance: While less important in PvP now than what it used to be because rockets are no longer a one shot, this is a very nice perk to have for arenas and Hive Mind because of all the explosion damage you can potentially take there. The maximum for a single explosion resistance perk is 10%.

Cooldown: This perk will decrease the amount of time that it takes for your skills to be able to be used again. The maximum single value that you can get is 6%, and I believe the maximum cumulative cooldown I've seen on boots is 12%.

Ideal boots for PvP: Minimum of 13% critical damage, minimum of 5% cooldown, any knockdown resistance value (more important than explosion), any explosion resist value (less important than knockdown)

Ideal boots for PvE: Minimum of 13% critical damage, minimum of 5% cooldown, 10% explosion resist, any knockdown resistance value

Weapons:

Base Damage: This is hands down the most important perk on a weapon because it increases damage done to every single enemy type, as well as inherently increasing your critical damage because your base damage is higher. The maximum value of a single perk is 10%.

Fire Rate: I have an interesting relationship with the fire rate perk. For some weapons, I love having a fire rate perk on it, while on others (mainly for weapons that start to push above 550 rounds per minute) I don't necessarily like having the fire rate perk because it seems that I waste more ammo once the fire rate reaches that high of a rate and a fire rate perk only makes that problem worse. That being said, fire rate is another perk that is very important because it directly boosts the DPS of your weapon. The maximum value of a single perk is generally 10%, though we did see the Bandit released over Christmas 2019 with a static perk of 15% fire rate.

Critical Damage: This is another extremely important perk because critical damage is what will really make the difference in clearing dungeons/arenas faster and killing enemies more quickly in PvP. The maximum value of a single perk is 15%

Elite Damage: This perk is only relevant to PvE, but it is very important in PvE to boost your weapon damage against tougher enemies. It's great when you get both a base damage and elite damage perk on a weapon because they both factor into boosting your damage against the tough ones. The maximum value of a single perk is 10%.

Magazine Capacity: This perk is particularly important when your weapon has an inherently smaller clip, although the lower the value of the base magazine size, the lower number of bullets you will actually gain with a magazine capacity perk. For example, the maximum boost that a Faraday can get from a max value (10%) magazine capacity perk is only 2 bullets.

Reload Speed: This perk is not quite as important as the previous 5, but it can be a very valuable perk to have on your weapon. It is a direct boost to the amount of sustaining damage you can do to packs of enemies or a single tough elite, but it can also really make the difference in living or dying in an exchange in PvP. The maximum value of a single perk is 10%

Overall Accuracy: This perk is always welcome on any gun, but especially those that have lower base accuracy, although you still run into the same problem as magazine capacity whereby a maximum boost of 10% would only take an SMG with a base accuracy of 8 to an 8.8.

Iron Sight Accuracy: This perk is not particularly useful because of how rarely people aim down sight in this game. It has a maximum single perk value of 10%.

Iron Sight Damage: This perk is very welcome on sniper rifles, where you really are aiming down the sight quite a bit. If you run a skill build with 12 points in Combat, having additional iron sight damage is also very nice when your build encourages you to aim down sight anyways. The maximum single perk value is 5%.

Pickup Radius:  This is a pretty worthless perk that only impacts how close you have to be to a dropped item to pick it up. As noted previously, it does have limited application in Ascendancy, but it's the least important perk to concern yourself with. The maximum single perk value is 15%.

Ideal perk set for a legendary PvP weapon (listed in order of importance): 10% base damage, 10% fire rate, 15% critical damage, 10% magazine capacity, 10% overall accuracy, 10% reload speed, 5% iron sight damage

Ideal perk set for an epic PvP weapon (listed in order of importance): 10% base damage, 10% fire rate, 15% critical damage, 10% magazine capacity

Ideal perk set for a legendary PvE weapon (listed in order of importance): 10% base damage, 10% fire rate, 15% critical damage, 10% elite damage, 10% magazine capacity, 10% reload speed,  5% iron sight damage, 10% overall accuracy

Ideal perk set for an epic PvE weapon (listed in order of importance): 10% base damage, 10% fire rate, 15% critical damage, 10% elite damage

To further clarify this, the base damage, fire rate, and critical damage perks are of the utmost importance to maximize in either mode, and elite damage is of similar importance when it comes to PvE. If all you can get is those perks at maximum or near maximum, you will still have a fantastic weapon, so prioritize these four perks above the others before you even look at what the other perk values are.

I know this is a lot of information, and I tried to include all of the maximum perk values where I could, but I hope that this helps to clear up some confusion as to which perks to prioritize or even how to judge whether the perks on a piece of gear are even good. My suggestion is that there are plenty of people (myself included) that can help you make gear decisions by reaching out on Discord.