Guild Wars 2

Still no point to toughness or any sort of armor or vitality in WvW. What is the point of this stat set at all when Critical Damage builds are running rampant. Honest question for ANet staff ONLY… When are you fixing or addressing the issue of a one-sided build type? You constantly set waves of information saying that you work to reward build diversity, yet there is still no reward for anything outside of Critical Damage.

I even have a Critical Damage build on 2 characters, a Warrior and Thief… it’s old. So when is the reward coming for something else? On top of that what the hell is being done about toughness? As I can see it, having 3.5k armor means nothing right now, especially when you get hit for over 9k on a single BS or 11k on a single Churning Earth.

Give us rewards for thinking outside your box please. Because at this rate this game isn’t doing anything, myself and 25+ others of us in my guild, will be out by December—uninstalled and moving onto a game that doesn’t reward one type of build.

Trolls (kitten ragers && L2P’ers), go ahead and post comments, I will either flag them to be removed or not even read them. If you post meaningful and mature discussion back, I am happy to talk. To the rest of you who have known of this issue, let me know your thoughts. I have tried posting this issue several times on forums only to have trolls take over. I know there are those of you that agree, I talk to you in game all the time. Now is the time to speak up!

And yea, ANet staff, this one is for you specifically. Why have you not addressed this yet?!

Toughness is an incredible stat. I use a great deal of it on my main builds. Don’t know what else there is to add.

let me get this straight. every player has zerkers and every player can easily burst you for 10k + while you have alot of toughness. usually, when i run my tank armor, i have 30k hp, and enough toughness that i dont ever take over 10k damage from anything non legendary enemies send at me. you are heavily underestimating toughness, especially since you are isolating it to WvWvW and PvP. i have PvP guard build based on toughness and support, and i can tank 2-3 guys for quite a while usually. in WvWvW it does not matter since in a zerg, damage is massive no matter what armor you have. zerkers, assasins, and other heavy burst builds are best for aoe, and tanky/bruiser builds are only good for roaming. iv had warriors who i as a zerker ele could not deal significant damage to with my staff. they could outrun me, and then turn around and dps me down, while i never got them below 75% because my main hits did not deal much damage. Anet has not adressed this because its not an issue. toughness is not meant to keep you alive when 20+ players are attacking you. bruizer builds crush zerker builds with skill. tanky support builds make your team redicuously more powerful. you just underestemate toughness

……what. Toughness and vitality Are a very important part of combat in almost every situation of this game(but insta kill mechanics). Especially pvp!!!!!!!!

Icarus.1728:

As I can see it, having 3.5k armor means nothing right now, especially when you get hit for over 9k on a single BS or 11k on a single Churning Earth.

So you’d rather be hit for 18k? You’re complaining about glass builds doing the only thing they know how to do.

I’m not sure if Icarus is trolling. . .

Toughness and Vitality are far the best stats for World vs World.

‘-’ . . .

He posted this about a month ago. I don’t know if he’s trolling or not.

A simple concept, I posted once before, and I state again.
Toughness and Vitality are doing nothing to solve the power creep outside of pure crit and glass canon builds. Building over 2k toughness and 600+ vit, makes me really wonder what the point is when I get hit for 14k by a rifle warrior.
Honestly it has boiled down the one simple mechanic and though. WvWvW is about who crits first, nothing less. If you think differently, than you either don’t play that often, or are running one of the crit builds and are pulling your gun first (quite literally).
What is honestly and truly being done to remedy this? Most classes health pools are trash too, not even beginning to remedy the power creep that has happened on ascended gear.
Full zerk builds or even blended zerk builds can get anywhere between 60-80% crit chance and 85-115% crit damage without really trying. What is the point though as a defensive builds or stats when on a Guardian even, I am getting hit for 8k Backstabs and Churning Earths? And yes, still getting hit for 10k+ by rifle warriors.
I know other people are having these issues, and are having a frustrating time. Please speak up.
Possible fixes:
- Increase health pools.
- Provide more weakness procs or protection procs for classes outside of the crit builds.
- Reduce overall ascended gear critical hit percentage buffs (the roof has raised over 25% since January, yet toughness and vit have not risen to scale), or raise the stat ranges on toughness and vitality.
- Reduce damage combos and procs for the known outrageous 1-hit combos – EX. Thief = Basalisk – C/D – BS – HS spam // I do play crit thief, and yes, even I think this is just 1 example of many outrageous combos (in this class and in many others).
- Provide better passive trait rewards to those of us wanting to build AWAY from critical builds and zerk.
Playing a few of the classes and having an 80 in every class but Engineer, I can tell you that minus 2 builds in 2 classes, every other build is far out weighed by just going flat critical & zerk.
This teamed with the issue of zerging still, it makes for a very sad steam-rolling wild west shoot-out.
Please feel free to leave comments or ideas as well. Comments with trolling, harassing, L2P spamming, and a just plain rude nature will not be addressed. And yes, ANet, please do feel free to chime in. You know this is an issue as well, so what is being done to fix it?
-Icarus
Best of luck on your shoot-outs!

But TS rights. Toughness useless in pve too. I play for necro, got Zerker gear, but trying to find some other. Now i testing Toughness\Vita\Condi + a bit Precision for passive Bleeding. Its good for necro coz he can do good damage from condi without power and much Precision, and got good tanky stats. But in real dungeon like Arah, it tanky =“tanky”.
Do toons of Toughnes save u from lupi? nope. He will kill u with 2-3 hits like Zerker. Do it help with skip? maybe, but not much, i even stop change gear for skips, coz it not worth it. Lupi range attack hit Zerker necro for 9-9,5k and full Toughness(all my gear now have Toughness stat) for 8-8,5k u really think its worth it?
Damage, crit. damage,crit chance = 10% less dmg, when 80% mobs and boss in high lvl dungeon hit u for 40% hp? I doubt it. And i think i not alone, coz i never saw tags like: “Group look for tanky 1 for arah; GLF1M, we on lupi be tanky pliz or Fractal group lf tanky ppl” No, all need Zerkers, coz all know Tanky = Zerker without dmg
I dont want to say it will good if u buy full tank gear and become undying. But now tanky stats dont work good too.
And sorry for my English :p

Although i dont find toughness and vitality to be useless per se, i do agree that they are a bit lacking. I mostly play pve and difficulty there seems to scale by giving you more mobs to deal with (which means killing them faster mitigates more damage) and bosses with more hp and damage making heavy damage builds again a more efficient route for dealing with it (not to mention defiance and how cc utilities seem to go with tanky trait lines more often than not)

Arenanet does not react to suggestions. They read them all (according to the sticky) but they NEVER react, so they wont do it here either. Also the whole purpose of suggestions are that the community can react to them and give their views and opinions. Asking people to not do so is rude and wrong!

So without reading anything I say that I’m against this suggestion and hope that Arenanet doesn’t implement it. If you want my opinion bout this then please learn to post in a civil and polite way to your fellow players.

I wouldn’t say that toughness is pointless but id say that it is underpowered as I believe that in most situations having the boon protection will be far better than having high toughness, I may be wrong but I cant think of any other boon that is better than a stat

toughness<protection precision>fury
Power>might
Power-condition damage (sorry I don’t know this one been a long time since ive run a main condition build)

The problem was stated poorly and titled to draw attention but the issue is in PvE balance encouraging berserker builds because toughness and vitality do not reward players well enough to compensate for the loss in dps.

This has been an ongoing topic of debate in the Necromancer forum along with condition damage on bosses.

Icarus.1728:

Still no point to toughness or any sort of armor or vitality in WvW. What is the point of this stat set at all when Critical Damage builds are running rampant. Honest question for ANet staff ONLY… When are you fixing or addressing the issue of a one-sided build type? You constantly set waves of information saying that you work to reward build diversity, yet there is still no reward for anything outside of Critical Damage.

I even have a Critical Damage build on 2 characters, a Warrior and Thief… it’s old. So when is the reward coming for something else? On top of that what the hell is being done about toughness? As I can see it, having 3.5k armor means nothing right now, especially when you get hit for over 9k on a single BS or 11k on a single Churning Earth.

Give us rewards for thinking outside your box please. Because at this rate this game isn’t doing anything, myself and 25+ others of us in my guild, will be out by December—uninstalled and moving onto a game that doesn’t reward one type of build.

Trolls (kitten ragers && L2P’ers), go ahead and post comments, I will either flag them to be removed or not even read them. If you post meaningful and mature discussion back, I am happy to talk. To the rest of you who have known of this issue, let me know your thoughts. I have tried posting this issue several times on forums only to have trolls take over. I know there are those of you that agree, I talk to you in game all the time. Now is the time to speak up!

And yea, ANet staff, this one is for you specifically. Why have you not addressed this yet?!

Funny because my T/V/P Guardian quite happily tanks all the DPS and heals to full every burst while happily killing anyone who is stupid enough to get in range or unlucky enough to get caught.

What class are you playing out of curiousity because that plays an important part of what set you choose. Not to mention your trait line.

Yes in PVE, no in PVP. This because in PVP there is a effective trade off between tank and spank (a straight up slugging match between two identical characters save their choice of stat set will result in the tankier build come out on top). But this do not exist in PVE because the mobs are in effect bags of health with nukes for fists.

As a personal anecdote, i was running half soldier, half rabid today. And during a event with a champion i watched 90% of my health vanish the moment i stepped into melee range.

Many good WvW guilds run a lot of Soldier gear.

A small critical avoidance bonus to high amounts of toughness would be nice. But, adding new combat mechanics like that usually leads to a path of never-ending class/gear imbalances.

Put a zerker Mesmer and a pvt warrior against a zerker thief. Tell me toughness +armor doesn’t mean anything.

Even though extreme, the point is valid. Toughness prevents bursts, and in some cases drains the enemy of any potential burst for awhile giving you the upper hand. On my power/condi dmg/vitality thief I used toughness runes, and went down the toughness trait line. For a thief, I had a lot of it and when against those silly HS spammers, I laughed. Even Hurr duur blades was a joke. Toughness makes a huge difference, I’m afraid you’re misinformed.

I have a tank of a Warrior that can regularly solo Champions by just standing in place and whacking away. Said Warrior can do this against a low-scaled Dwayna statue.

Toughness is hilariously awesome.

PART I

As I have stated before in other posts, the toughness build is not rewarding. I built 2k+ of it on several characters with 1600-2k+ vitality, with no avail of stopping 5k, 7k, 8k, 9k single shots or even 15k+ combos.

Yes toughness does negate it, a little bit. I played a full zerk thief and full zerk warrior for several months. I did see a very marginal difference in their ability to deal out big damage and also receive it. The issue is that the negation of those numbers, in WvW specifically, is not negated retrospectively for the % it states it SHOULD be in the full armor bar. It negates a little bit, but at the most 10% of the actual critical builds. Sure it negates about 50%+ (at least it seems like that) of most average attacks (NPC and players both). The issue is that there is still a massive ceiling here. I have 3.5k armor on 3 of my characters, and in the past 2 days I have been hit for a combo of 15k and 25k—with dozens of average crits landing for 5-7k for a spike. That negation is there; yet at the same point, some classes spam those 5-7k hits, constantly.

I played most of those classes for a while as well. I have an 80 in every class, I know how they work. I still have full zerk gear on my thieves, and warrior. The issue is the fact that there seems to be no reward for going truly tanky in WvW for some classes.

Anet has not adressed this because its not an issue. toughness is not meant to keep you alive when 20+ players are attacking you. bruizer builds crush zerker builds with skill. tanky support builds make your team redicuously more powerful. you just underestemate toughness.

I have been in SoR from launch up until this last month. I understand zerg mechanics, and got sick of it to move to a lower tier sever for smaller battles. Much happier down here. Issue still does come up in large fights with zergs. I agree that this is a bigger issue, but it still shows it’s ugly head even in 1v1 2v2 or 3v3 fights in WvW.

Cruril Darksbane.2318:

Funny because my T/V/P Guardian quite happily tanks all the DPS and heals to full every burst while happily killing anyone who is stupid enough to get in range or unlucky enough to get caught.

What class are you playing out of curiousity because that plays an important part of what set you choose. Not to mention your trait line.

And this my friend is the perfect way to put this…. the simple fact that since release ANet has made it a majestic selling point that the “holy trinity” of roles is gone. They wanted to grant all classes the ability to have a stable and even chance of success without having to be pigeon-holed into a role. I feel that they have done this fairly well but have really suffered in some ways. The main reason that some classes such as Mesmer, Elementalist, Warrior, and Guardian have gotten such success out of the use of toughness and vitality is not just the 2 single state bases… but it is because of boons as well. The two main ones being Regeneration and Protection.

These classes listed above have access to nearly and endless array of boons depending on your spec or builds. They can gain protection and regeneration on a whim, and sustain it for a while. I have a regeneration protection warrior that is condition. He can currently regenerate 1500 health a second without crit procs. If the crits proc, he can gain close to 2200 health a second. That is just stupid. I find it funny and play the class when I get bored. He can take 4-5+ people in WvW and not break a sweat. The reason is vitality + toughness + regeneration + protection. And he can have endless regeneration with nearly endless protection. But I find the class boring. I am more intrigued by a bow Ranger that goes condition, or a thief that is all condition and toughness/vitality.

The issue though lies in the fact that my Guardian at 3.5k armor can tank far more than my thief also at 3.5k. The simple reason in my opinion is the access to the array of boons—mainly protection too.

They made this the biggest selling point in the game when it started… the breaking of the holy trinity for any class to fulfill the roles of the player. Yet I feel as though there is not reward for building outside of critical for DPS, or for building toughness/vitality on classes that do not have access to the boons you need to make it worth while.

PART II below…

PART II

It is getting there with the last few patches. But it has a way to go.

Honestly I feel as though it is easy to try things, but difficult to truly go against the meta and win. Maybe that is what ANet wants, I am for that. I am still on a daily basis re-traiting 5+ times. But some classes seem to have more tools. They say they wanted the ability for classes to not be truly defined by roles…. then give us the ability to use all the tools that are in the game, not some. And I am not saying give every class access to everything at once, but at least give us the ability to reasonably trait into every boon or every condition in each class.

Hell, rename the title of this then to Boon/Conditions for EVERYONE! Maybe even put an Oprah gif with it… it might get a better point across than I can. But if I want to paint happy trees like Bob Ross told me too, and I don’t have green paint… then I can’t paint happy trees can I?

Sorry if I am frustrating to deal with, and sorry if you don’t feel the same way. Let me know your thoughts, cause I would love to hear. But at the same point too, I know some of you can agree… I like a certain class, so let me play it the way I would love to. And help me find a way that is rewarding for it.

And example of this can be how a Condi Thief using Perplexing runes has access to 4-5 conditions if he uses venoms too. The one (and the most powerful) that is missing is burning. And it breaks my heart. I have a burn/tanky warrior who rocks face. Yet he is just flat out boring in my opinion compared to thief. Yet, against what they stated at the beginning of the game release, I as a thief do not have access to the top 3 tools a warrior or necro does—fear, burn, and chill.

Obviously I don’t think that the class should flat out have all the skills a necro does, but give is a Venom called Firefly Venom. Make it burn the target for 5 seconds per a hit, with 3 stacks. Then we get our burn, and another fun venom.

Back to the boon discussion. The thief class, plus others, do not have ANY access to protection. Protection on a properly balanced DPS class with 3.5k armor and 25k health can make for a VERY good build and amazing character. (And yes, next time you all say “I CAN TANK LIKE MADZ!”… look at if you have protection up… you would be surprised how often you do.) So if as a thief I wanted to sacrifice almost all my pure DPS for conditions and tankiness, let me. Reward me for wanting to. As of right now there is a reward partially for both, but it leaves a lot to be desired with a nearly max life pool of 18k.

To the haters out there too for stealth, frankly I could care less about it. I think it should be reworked entirely. I know, I play thief, and yes… I said it. REWORK STEALTH! Now that that is out of the way…

With the above boon missing from our build though, I feel as though going toughness and vitality is not rewarding. At the same point, I have 4 pieces of toughness and vitality missing from my Warrior (and big ones too—chest, legs, amulet, and weapon) yet I am still a TON more tanky than my thief… simply because I have access to regeneration (stacked) and protection. I would love to play my warrior though too, but sometimes I feel his lack of poison in his kit makes him weaker than my thief in a way.

Anyways, I know that might open a big conversation, and I hope it does. I hope to hear back from you all soon. And thank you for those of you who gave me some solid and great responses.

-Icarus