Guild Wars 2

Say, we focus on getting Vitality+Toughness+healing power just to tank everything. Do we still go down fast by standing on the red circles?

Many of the attacks in the raid deal %-hp damage. With that in mind, you’re better off not stacking vitality at all and focusing on toughness and healing power, as you’ll be able to heal through the %-hp hits easier.

That being said, I think you probably have a pretty poor idea of how raids and tanking actually works in this game, so it would be worth your time to perhaps watch some videos of it being done.

Raids have unique mechanics that must be navigated properly. Many of these mechanics instantly down you, or do a percentage of health damage if not properly navigated. When you combine that with the fact that raid bosses have soft time limits called enrage timers, it means that defensive stats are not nearly as useful as offensive ones. Raids heavily leverage active defense (dodging) and relying on teammates over just facetank damage you can otherwise avoid.

There are some exceptions where viable defensive gear is tied to a specific role (Magi Druid, Minstrel Chrono) but generally speaking, you do not want defensive stats.

Vitality has nearly no use in raids. Bosses have differerent types of skills:

- instant kill/down mechanics (vitality is useless, toughness is useless)
- percentage damage (vitality is a detriment, toughness is neutral)
- normal damage (vitality is a slight benefit, toughness is a benefit)
- tanking mechanics (vitality is useless, toughness is required)

As of right now and since raids are designed with minimalistic tank builds in mind, all it takes is varying amounts of toughness on some fights. Vitality will actually be a detriment since the buffer in hit points it provides needs to get healed back and there is enough mechanics which bosses use to make this a problem.

The only benefit vitality has is, it does not mess with tanking mechanics which theoretically means it could provide health point buffers for some of the low health point classes against regular attacks (at the expense of damage since we are most likely talking dps raid spots). This is usually not needed in the current raid meta and can be managed by practice and better team support and/or positioning.

“Meta builds are builds that offer optimum performance in an organized party” ..is the mindset of most.

“So when was the last time your pug was really organized?” is what I ask.

Vitality is a stat somewhere along these lines. Normally you don’t need it. What you need is to avoid wipe/big damage mechanics in a fight and leave rest to tanks/healers.

Back in real life however too many a pug wipe beautifully after something goes wrong and certain squishy one didn’t make it back to the group on time, or everyone got scattered like rabits.

There are %hp attacks indeed, so they’ll hit high hp targets harder and it’ll be harder to heal you. But when kitten hits the fan and you need to get back to your healer before becoming a floor decoration, that extra few k hp might make all the difference. My condi ranger often would be much happier with 5k extra hp rather then pure baseline.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

“Meta builds are builds that offer optimum performance in an organized party” ..is the mindset of most.

“So when was the last time your pug was really organized?” is what I ask.

Vitality is a stat somewhere along these lines. Normally you don’t need it. What you need is to avoid wipe/big damage mechanics in a fight and leave rest to tanks/healers.

Back in real life however too many a pug wipe beautifully after something goes wrong and certain squishy one didn’t make it back to the group on time, or everyone got scattered like rabits.

There are %hp attacks indeed, so they’ll hit high hp targets harder and it’ll be harder to heal you. But when kitten hits the fan and you need to get back to your healer before becoming a floor decoration, that extra few k hp might make all the difference. My condi ranger often would be much happier with 5k extra hp rather then pure baseline.

In theory that might sounds good. In practice, the dps you’d sacrifice would really slow down the fight. That additional time would mean several more chances of someone making an unrecoverable mistake. And with a group so unorganized they’d need that vitality that chance would be significant.
In the end, by going more tanky, you’d increase your chances of surviving any single mishap, but also decrease every member’s chances of not doing any mistake, and thus negatively impact your group’s overall chances of succeeding.
Also, the enrage timers.