Guild Wars 2

How come Toughness does nothing in this event? Do the developers hate this stat?

i think a lot of people have some interesting ideas of about toughness.

let me put it plainly.

less then 2000 armor, don’t stub your toe or you might shatter
2000-2400 armor, pretty squishy
2400-2800 armor, chewy
2800-3200 armor, crunchy
3200-and beyond, just stacking toughness for fun.

Fiorrello.8126:

i think a lot of people have some interesting ideas of about toughness.

let me put it plainly.

less then 2000 armor, don’t stub your toe or you might shatter
2000-2400 armor, pretty squishy
2400-2800 armor, chewy
2800-3200 armor, crunchy
3200-and beyond, just stacking toughness for fun.

How much do I have to stack to be itchy tasty?

GW2 mob/boss mechanics are heavily weighted on one shot abilities that need to be dodged. So if that’s the case, better to wear full zerker and dodge the 1 shots. Toughness is a useless stat in PVE.

Levetty.1279:

Fiorrello.8126:

i think a lot of people have some interesting ideas of about toughness.

let me put it plainly.

less then 2000 armor, don’t stub your toe or you might shatter
2000-2400 armor, pretty squishy
2400-2800 armor, chewy
2800-3200 armor, crunchy
3200-and beyond, just stacking toughness for fun.

How much do I have to stack to be itchy tasty?

Enough that you’ll hit like a wet noodle and never kill anything in your lifetime.

guys, that is not what OP was talking about. He’s saying that this event does not favor toughness, not toughness in general. I kinda agree. timed fights = you need lots of damage. aoe barrage that hits for 6k/sec. sure, 3k armor helps there, but it really only extends your life from 3 to 5 seconds.
Personally, I keep running out of time in the gauntlets. that said, deadeye and his bombs are not 1-hit ko with high armor

It doesn’t favor vitality or healing power, either.

Some classes make toughness useless. Full soldiers armor in WvW. Thieves doing 5k+ (1/5 of my hp) with heartseekers and backstabs. Had one thief do 15k damage to me…

I’d love to see it become better for physical damage and then making vulnerability more desirable.

Well, a lot of toughness and healing power actually will let you survive through things that would outright kill you, e.g. Liadri, but given the time limit etc. it’s completely redundant.

If they removed the time limit people would probably consider some of the fights too easy, e.g. Strugar/Crew, but it would make toughness/healing a lot more viable.

Interestingly enough, the less toughness you have, the more valuable the marginal toughness you can get is in most cases (from a DPS reduction standpoint), unless you’re still going to die in one-hit anyway and that happens to be the case in these fights and most PvE fights in general.

Daecollo.9578:

How come Toughness does nothing in this event? Do the developers hate this stat?

Toughness ? how you use that? is that a new skill?

Armor seems to be that constant thing in games developers failed to implement properly. I seen very few games make armor/defense useful.

crestpiemangler.7631:

Interestingly enough, the less toughness you have, the more valuable the marginal toughness you can get is in most cases (from a DPS reduction standpoint)

Interestingly enough, I’d like to see your math on this.

ANet decided to move the zerker gear checks from CoF to the Gauntlet.

Leablo.2651:

crestpiemangler.7631:

Interestingly enough, the less toughness you have, the more valuable the marginal toughness you can get is in most cases (from a DPS reduction standpoint)

Interestingly enough, I’d like to see your math on this.

from the gw2 wiki:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

if the targets armor is the divisor, it obviously means the relative benefit in the lower spectrum is higher than the relative benefit in the upper spectrum. while the 100 armor points difference from 1900 to 2000 mean a 5% reduction, from 3100 to 3200 it only means an additional 3% reduction.

I disagree toughness being useless in pve, one person having higher toughness in the group can help sometimes, but that doesn’t mean going full useless PVT. some knights pieces on a guard work very well holding aggro without making him a completely useless addendum.

Boss one shoting mechanics aside. I find toughness to be the 2nd most useful stat after power. Really the only 3 prefixes you should be using in PvE are Beserker, knight or celestial.

100 armor always makes you the same amount tougher compared to a fixed baseline.
In the below example, we can see that 100 armor always increases the hits to kill by 5.

200000 damage / 2000 armor: 100 damage (100 hits to kill 10000 hp) (10k ehp)
200000 damage / 2100 armor: 95.24 damage (105 hits to kill 10000 hp) (10.5k ehp)

200000 damage / 3000 armor: 66.66 damage (150 hits to kill 10000 hp) (15k ehp)
200000 damage / 3100 armor: 64.52 damage (155 hits to kill 10000 hp) (15.5k ehp)

Sir Morgan Malory.2069:

Boss one shoting mechanics aside. I find toughness to be the 2nd most useful stat after power. Really the only 3 prefixes you should be using in PvE are Beserker, knight or celestial.

rabid has a decent enough power/precision rating for quickly clearing trash mobs and if you’re alone/the only condition player the condition damage is quite good against champs etc. the completely useless condition capping is the only reason not to go conditions in a pug.

if you need to generalize, I’d rather say stick to armor with preferably 3 or at least 2 offensive stats on them, independent on which.

Shoe.5821:

100 armor always makes you the same amount tougher compared to a fixed baseline.
In the below example, we can see that 100 armor always increases the hits to kill by 5.

200000 damage / 2000 armor: 100 damage (100 hits to kill 10000 hp) (10k ehp)
200000 damage / 2100 armor: 95.24 damage (105 hits to kill 10000 hp) (10.5k ehp)

200000 damage / 3000 armor: 66.66 damage (150 hits to kill 10000 hp) (15k ehp)
200000 damage / 3100 armor: 64.52 damage (155 hits to kill 10000 hp) (15.5k ehp)

exactly – the relative benefit decreases with each point of toughness spent, which is why it’s more useful at the lower end of the spectrum.

if you get killed with one hit, adding 100 toughness so an enemy has to hit you twice is great. starting at high toughness and adding another 100 so an enemy which would take 10 hits now takes 11 hits isn’t that great anymore.

Leablo.2651:

crestpiemangler.7631:

Interestingly enough, the less toughness you have, the more valuable the marginal toughness you can get is in most cases (from a DPS reduction standpoint)

Interestingly enough, I’d like to see your math on this.

Function of damage dealt is of the form K/X, implying the derivative with respect to X is -K/(X^2) implying that the greater the value of X the smaller K/X will change at larger values of X.

Similarly you can take the second derivative for 2K/(X^3), which means that the slope of the damage rate decrease is increasing with respect to X.

It’s very, very obvious. Like I pointed out this is for a continuous rate and not for the large, discrete amounts of damage that end your life abruptly in most cases.

By the way, why the hostility?

Oranisagu.3706:

exactly – the relative benefit decreases with each point of toughness spent, which is why it’s more useful at the lower end of the spectrum.

Demonstrably false. Compare +1 toughness to +100. +1 toughness will in the vast majority of cases make no difference to survivability, whereas +100 might. So 0/1 < n/100, where n > 0. The larger investment returns proportionally more.

if you get killed with one hit, adding 100 toughness so an enemy has to hit you twice is great. starting at high toughness and adding another 100 so an enemy which would take 10 hits now takes 11 hits isn’t that great anymore.

This is contrived because an enemy that took 10 hits to kill you is already dead and not of any real concern for a player. You do not stack toughness to live longer against dead enemies. You stack toughness to survive that first or second hit from a stronger opponent. The stronger the opponent, the more toughness that is required to make a difference. Assuming you are not a perfect dodger, the “benefit per point” argument is only so much theorycrafting unless you are willing to either accept an inability to progress at these points or require other players to carry you through them.

crestpiemangler.7631:

Function of damage dealt is of the form K/X, implying the derivative with respect to X is -K/(X^2) implying that the greater the value of X the smaller K/X will change at larger values of X.

Similarly you can take the second derivative for 2K/(X^3), which means that the slope of the damage rate decrease is increasing with respect to X.

And for larger values of K? You did not specify that K was constant. (The game doesn’t either.)

It’s very, very obvious. Like I pointed out this is for a continuous rate and not for the large, discrete amounts of damage that end your life abruptly in most cases.

The issue is that you assume ‘continuous’ and ‘large’ are mutually exclusive. This is objectively false.

By the way, why the hostility?

I dislike inaccurate theorycrafting being presented as facts for gameplay. It’s nothing personal. See my previous post for the correct interpretation of the effects of stacking toughness.

Leablo.2651:

And for larger values of K? You did not specify that K was constant. (The game doesn’t either.)

… You can’t be serious.

The issue is that you assume ‘continuous’ and ‘large’ are mutually exclusive. This is objectively false.

… You can’t be serious, once again…. continuity is by definition measurability of open sets (of the image of the function in question) with respect to the topology of the real line (the domain)

In more simple terms continuity simply means that the preimage of an open image is also open, or from rudimentary calculus for every value e there exists a value y so that |x-z| < y implies |f(x)-f(z)| < e

The one-sided limit has nothing to do with that.

I dislike inaccurate theorycrafting being presented as facts for gameplay. It’s nothing personal. See my previous post for the correct interpretation of the effects of stacking toughness.

It is quite personal if you don’t understand by now, because it means your high school math teachers failed. Please give me their names and addresses, so I can make sure they never hold jobs again.

Toughness certainly isn’t useless.

For example, if Halmi Hammerfell hits you, without toughness you’re dead. With high toughness, you survive. And also against various PVE mobs you just stay on your feet a lot longer.

But I do agree that with this gauntlet, a lot of the one-shot mechanics make toughness useless.

Leablo.2651:

Oranisagu.3706:

exactly – the relative benefit decreases with each point of toughness spent, which is why it’s more useful at the lower end of the spectrum.

Demonstrably false. Compare +1 toughness to +100. +1 toughness will in the vast majority of cases make no difference to survivability, whereas +100 might. So 0/1 < n/100, where n > 0. The larger investment returns proportionally more.

if you get killed with one hit, adding 100 toughness so an enemy has to hit you twice is great. starting at high toughness and adding another 100 so an enemy which would take 10 hits now takes 11 hits isn’t that great anymore.

This is contrived because an enemy that took 10 hits to kill you is already dead and not of any real concern for a player. You do not stack toughness to live longer against dead enemies. You stack toughness to survive that first or second hit from a stronger opponent. The stronger the opponent, the more toughness that is required to make a difference. Assuming you are not a perfect dodger, the “benefit per point” argument is only so much theorycrafting unless you are willing to either accept an inability to progress at these points or require other players to carry you through them.

yeah. of course you can construe ‘facts’ to support your argument if you try really hard =) I know math is not really intuitive for a lot of people, and even the term relative seems to be misunderstood a lot.
my examples are pretty accurate and a lot less complicated than the math explanation you also got, which says the same but in a more formal way.
one shot hits, while common mechanics, should be dodged in this game – basing your theorycrafting on facetanking such hits is flawed by itself.
most enemies have other attacks besides their oneshot mechanics. see alpha for example. you dodge his big bad circles. yet his standard attack is still very much a problem for squishies like mesmers. while I don’t even notice those on guard or warr, my mesmer can get down if the warriors don’t work fast enough. and one down person can start a chain reaction in CoE speedruns. thus the typical case of either you can take 10 or 11 hits is a lot more common in reality than facetanking a oneshot hit and surviving.
my (zerker as well) guard, with his inbuilt sustain, can eat a good 30 hits from alpha until he gets low and I have to resort to using my heal. adding any more toughness to survive 31 hits will simply not make a difference.

I felt like Toughness had a lot of value in some cases, and not much in others. That’s probably intentional, I suppose.

Liadri was probably the most extreme example of this. Doing the fight just to kill her, I think Toughness is of much less value; you can mitigate a fair amount of the damage of the Necrotic Grasp via movement, and heavy kiting can handle her pretty well in the second phase. Doing the achievement version flipped this around, and I found Toughness to be extremely valuable simply because I had little choice but to eat much more of her second phase damage. This also made any damage I took in the first phase much more meaningful as whatever health I started the second phase at made a big difference.

Guess I’ll try and simplify the math for all those who don’t quite get it (Leablo):

Whenever you increase any of your stats, you can think of this ultimately as a proportion of what you had previously. This is an effective measurement of damage and durability, since it accounts for individual circumstances and compares your performance against itself in any circumstance that you can comprehend. This is also important, since it represents the inevitable diminishing returns from your stats as you invest them.

Let me give some examples: for the first 916 points of power, your damage doubles. For the next 916 points of power, your damage increases by 50%. For the next 916 points of power, your damage increases by 33%. Because of this, eventually it is more productive to invest you stats into something else like precision and crit damage after you get enough power.

So yes, 1 toughness does have a higher effect than 100 toughness on a point by point basis. However, the difference each individual point of toughness has is incredibly small, so you stack multiple points of toughness to get a cumulative effect that you desire. But never forget that the more toughness you pile on top, the less effective it becomes. The same is true of nearly any stat.