Guild Wars 2

I’d like to discuss the stat “Toughness” in this game. And maybe even get some more information from the developers themselves.

Mainly, i would like to know how exactly stats are scaling and what the devs want us to be focusing on. So far it feels like power, precision, vitality, critical damage and condition damage are scaling fine. However, toughness seems to be either bugged or completely useless?

I’ve done testing with my warrior for over 3 weeks now, running different levels of toughness, and this is what i have noticed so far.

Going from 1000 to 1300 toughness shows improvement.
Going from 1300 to 1500 toughness shows improvement.
Going from 1500 to 1700 toughness shows no improvement.
Going from 1700 to 2000 toughness shows no improvement.
Going from 2000 to 2300 toughness shows no improvement.
Going from 2300 to 2500 toughness shows no improvement.

Is there a soft cap? It feels like you need a certain amount of toughness if you want to survive the big blows, but going beyond a point of toughness is completely useless.

With this in mind, i have to wonder if all out (read glasscannon) specs and builds are the only way to go here?

Remember, I’m talking stats here. Not defensive abilities that can either mitigate or completely avoid damage.

Could you elaborate your testing a bit?

Sounds interesting and if what you say is true I have to seriously reconsider my spec o O

A Risen gorilla is hitting me for 1600 with 2000 armor, but only 1000 with 2600 armor, 800 with 3000 armor.
I basically got 35% dmg reduction in the first case, 50% in the second.

Toughness has diminishing returns yes, but so does power.
In the end I wouldn’t go beyond the 3k mark for armor and power, you start hitting DRs.

I think this is to avoid people being too tanky or too damaging.

Arvin, I’ve mainly been testing in PvP, but i did some PvE testing as well. I would record how much on average i would get hit with the current toughness on me. After around 1500 i noticed that the damage i was receiving wasn’t declining, but remaining pretty much the same across the board.

Red Falcon, I’m at 3800 armor right now, so i guess I’ve gone way past at this point.

I’m honestly disappointed, since i really wanted to play a more defensive warrior. Also, everyone running around 1-shotting each other gets boring after a while.

I hope we can get confirmation or at least some more info about toughness and how it works.

This discussion comes up in every MMO The concept to study is effective health points, aka “how many hits can I take before dying?”

This is a copy paste from my guild-forums as this discussions is currently under way there too:

TL:DR
There are no diminishing returns, soft caps or hard caps on Vitality OR Toughness when it comes to survivability from direct damage!

Increasing Armor OR Health-pool by X% will increase survivability against direct damage by X%

Increasing Vit will also increase survivability against condition damage by the same X%. Toughness will increase received healing efficiency by the same X%.

Example:
Say you have 20,000 health points and 2000 armor (close to base stats of a Warrior). En enemy hits you for 1,000 damage on each hit. Disregarding your self heal you can take 20 hits before you go into downed state.

Armor-slots gives 224 sat-points for a secondary stat, trinkets (without jewels) gives 240 stat-points for a secondary stat. Lets round this to 200 each for the following example.

Adding 2,000 health, trough 200 Vitality on say armor-slots, will let you take 22 hits before downed, increasing your survivability by 10% against direct damage. As condition damage ignores armor you will also have increased you survivability against condition damage by 10%.

Adding a additional 2,000 health by putting Vitality as a secondary stat on your trinkets too (not jewels) will let you take 24 hits before downed, increasing survivability by an additional 10% from base.

Aka, each 100 Vit will let you take one more hit so no diminishing returns.

The same goes for Toughness.

Increasing Toughness by 200 make is so each hit will now do ~909 damage per hit, letting you take 22 hits before downed.

Increasing Toughness by an additional 200 will make each hit do ~833 damage and lets you take 24 hits before downed.

Each 100 Toughness will let you take one more hit, so no diminishing returns.

In addition. Toughness will make all received healing more efficient. In the 20,000 health/2,000 armor example being healed for 5,000 health negates 5 attacks at 1,000 damage. If you add 400 Tougness instead of 400 Vitality that 5k heal will negate 6 hits instead. Healing efficiency will in short be increased by the same % as survivability against direct damage when stacking Toughness.

Conclusion:
As you can see in the example above, the first 200 points of toughness mitigates 91 damage (from a 1k hit), and lets you take 2 more hits. The next 200 points mitigates an additional 76 damage, but still lets you take 2 more hits before you are downed.

This leads to the belief that there is a diminishing return on investment on armor as people only see that 91>76. This isn’t true. The first 100 points of toughness and the last 100 points of toughness will increase your time to live equally (as always disregarding healing/condi-damage).

Disclaimer:
What excat increase in % you get from each point of Toughness or Vitality depends on how much you already have and the ratio between the stats. So the example above is just that, an example. If you had 25,000 health and 3k armor 100 Vit would ad 4% survivability against direct damage and 100 Tough would add 3,33%.

The reason they don’t add the same %-amount is because the damage formula works on multiplication. 50×50 is bigger then 1×99. As you usually have more armor then health (1:10 ratio) Vitality gives more effective health-points per stat-point.

According to the wiki:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Defense + Toughness).

So, if this is true, doubling your Armor (= Defense + Toughness) should halve your damage intake. This would indeed mean that Toughness has diminishing returns.

Luxiom.8279:

This discussion comes up in every MMO The concept to study is effective health points, aka “how many hits can I take before dying?”

This is a copy paste from my guild-forums as this discussions is currently under way there too:

TL:DR
There are no diminishing returns, soft caps or hard caps on Vitality OR Toughness when it comes to survivability from direct damage!

Increasing Armor OR Health-pool by X% will increase survivability against direct damage by X%

Increasing Vit will also increase survivability against condition damage by the same X%. Toughness will increase received healing efficiency by the same X%.

Example:
Say you have 20,000 health points and 2000 armor (close to base stats of a Warrior). En enemy hits you for 1,000 damage on each hit. Disregarding your self heal you can take 20 hits before you go into downed state.

Armor-slots gives 224 sat-points for a secondary stat, trinkets (without jewels) gives 240 stat-points for a secondary stat. Lets round this to 200 each for the following example.

Adding 2,000 health, trough 200 Vitality on say armor-slots, will let you take 22 hits before downed, increasing your survivability by 10% against direct damage. As condition damage ignores armor you will also have increased you survivability against condition damage by 10%.

Adding a additional 2,000 health by putting Vitality as a secondary stat on your trinkets too (not jewels) will let you take 24 hits before downed, increasing survivability by an additional 10% from base.

Aka, each 100 Vit will let you take one more hit so no diminishing returns.

The same goes for Toughness.

Increasing Toughness by 200 make is so each hit will now do ~909 damage per hit, letting you take 22 hits before downed.

Increasing Toughness by an additional 200 will make each hit do ~833 damage and lets you take 24 hits before downed.

Each 100 Toughness will let you take one more hit, so no diminishing returns.

In addition. Toughness will make all received healing more efficient. In the 20,000 health/2,000 armor example being healed for 5,000 health negates 5 attacks at 1,000 damage. If you add 400 Tougness instead of 400 Vitality that 5k heal will negate 6 hits instead. Healing efficiency will in short be increased by the same % as survivability against direct damage when stacking Toughness.

Conclusion:
As you can see in the example above, the first 200 points of toughness mitigates 91 damage (from a 1k hit), and lets you take 2 more hits. The next 200 points mitigates an additional 76 damage, but still lets you take 2 more hits before you are downed.

This leads to the belief that there is a diminishing return on investment on armor as people only see that 91>76. This isn’t true. The first 100 points of toughness and the last 100 points of toughness will increase your time to live equally (as always disregarding healing/condi-damage).

Disclaimer:
What excat increase in % you get from each point of Toughness or Vitality depends on how much you already have and the ratio between the stats. So the example above is just that, an example. If you had 25,000 health and 3k armor 100 Vit would ad 4% survivability against direct damage and 100 Tough would add 3,33%.

The reason they don’t add the same %-amount is because the damage formula works on multiplication. 50×50 is bigger then 1×99. As you usually have more armor then health (1:10 ratio) Vitality gives more effective health-points per stat-point.

+1

Effective health is something that few people tend to think about.

nowitsawn.1276:

According to the wiki:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Defense + Toughness).

So, if this is true, doubling your Armor (= Defense + Toughness) should halve your damage intake. This would indeed mean that Toughness has diminishing returns.

Please read the post above you

It is the same confusion in every MMO. Armor does not have a DR. Each point of toughness will increase your time-to-live with an equal amount.

If 200 more toughness lets you take 22hits before dying instead of 20, 400 points of toughness will let you take 24 hits, 600 = 26 hits. Aka, one more hit per 100 toughness.

The confusion comes from seeing that the first 200 addition points of toughness takes the hit down to 909 from (91 decrease from 1,000 base), while the second batch of 200 points only brings it down to 833 (76 decrease). BUT in both cases you live for two more hits from the enemy hitting you!

Dice Dragon.4326:

+1

Effective health is something that few people tend to think about.

Thanks!

…and yes, this discussion have been a plague in every MMO I have ever played or read about

I have never really understood why this concept is so hard to grasp?

nowitsawn.1276:

According to the wiki:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Defense + Toughness).

So, if this is true, doubling your Armor (= Defense + Toughness) should halve your damage intake. This would indeed mean that Toughness has diminishing returns.

The formula isn’t right because it’s leaving out crits and conditions, but does seem correct for direct non-crit vanilla damage.

The formula also shows you that there’s no diminishing returns, but it’s not an additive/subtractive, but proportional.

To call that “diminishing returns” is absurd, because if it were straight up subtractive, at some point if you had enough toughness, you’d be getting healed by taking hits.

mulch.2586:

The formula isn’t right because it’s leaving out crits and conditions, but does seem correct for direct non-crit vanilla damage.

The formula also shows you that there’s no diminishing returns, but it’s not an additive/subtractive, but proportional.

To call that “diminishing returns” is absurd, because if it were straight up subtractive, at some point if you had enough toughness, you’d be getting healed by taking hits.

It is correct. It is just simplified (which isn’t the same as wrong)

You can expand it to include crits, healing condition damage, might, vulnerability and other stuff if you want.

But to conclude if armor has a DR or not against direct damage the simplified formula is more then enough. Like so (still not complete, just example, hopefully no errors as I did this on the fly, hard to format):

Average Damage done =
(
(
(weapon damage) * (Power + 35 * (number of might stacks)) * (skill-specific coefficient) * (1 – crit chance) +
(weapon damage) * (Power + 35 * (number of might stacks)) * (skill-specific coefficient) * (crit chance) * (crit multiplier)
) * (1 + 0,01 * (number of Vulnerability stacks)
) / (target’s Defense + Toughness)

I’m positive mulch is with me on this, I quoted this for others to see as I didn’t like the it being called “in-correct”

Interesting thread. I haven’t done any testing myself but I do notice that when im in Orr with 1,800 toughness, contributing to 3,000 armour, it still only takes a few short hits before im downed, similier to what it was with standard armour and a much lower toughness. There are other factors i suppose. Condition effects and critical hits, but i should at least seen some visual improvement, but perhaps its so small its unnoticeable.

@Luxiom.8279

Great post, it’s why i decided to go half and half on the Vitality/Toughness on my build. With more toughness you get better healing but with more Vitality you get better condition protection – going with half and half gives an equal bit of both.

mulch.2586:

nowitsawn.1276:

According to the wiki:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Defense + Toughness).

So, if this is true, doubling your Armor (= Defense + Toughness) should halve your damage intake. This would indeed mean that Toughness has diminishing returns.

The formula isn’t right because it’s leaving out crits and conditions, but does seem correct for direct non-crit vanilla damage.

The formula also shows you that there’s no diminishing returns, but it’s not an additive/subtractive, but proportional.

To call that “diminishing returns” is absurd, because if it were straight up subtractive, at some point if you had enough toughness, you’d be getting healed by taking hits.

Not sure what people mean here with the term ‘’Diminishing Returns’‘, then (to be honest it’s the first time I’ve seen it being used this much in an MMO community) . What I meant was that, in how I understand it, as your Toughness increases, adding the same amount of Toughness on top of that will yield less and less noticeable results in damage mitigation.

Like if you were to attain some absurd amount such as 10.000 Toughness, adding 200 more won’t really make a difference, but if you only have 500 Toughness, another 200 would help way more.

As for how that affects your survivability… well, I’m not going to pretend I know much about the math behind that :p

MajorMelchett.6042:

@Luxiom.8279

Great post, it’s why i decided to go half and half on the Vitality/Toughness on my build. With more toughness you get better healing but with more Vitality you get better condition protection – going with half and half gives an equal bit of both.

Thanks!

In short, do survive burst you want EHP (effective health points). You get the most EHP per stat point if the ratio between armor and health is 1:10. Aka it is better to take 400 Toughness + 400 Vitality instead of just 800 Toughness.

As most classes has a ratio in favor of Armor to start with, Vit usually gives to most EHP.

For prolonged fights you will most likely want healing efficiency. This means Toughness is more important then vitality as eventually you will out heal any difference in EHP you would have gotten from splitting between Tough/Vit.

In a prolonged fight you just need enough EHP to survive any burst and sustained condition removal to handle conditions as I belive this is more effective then stacking health.

nowitsawn.1276:

mulch.2586:

nowitsawn.1276:

According to the wiki:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Defense + Toughness).

So, if this is true, doubling your Armor (= Defense + Toughness) should halve your damage intake. This would indeed mean that Toughness has diminishing returns.

The formula isn’t right because it’s leaving out crits and conditions, but does seem correct for direct non-crit vanilla damage.

The formula also shows you that there’s no diminishing returns, but it’s not an additive/subtractive, but proportional.

To call that “diminishing returns” is absurd, because if it were straight up subtractive, at some point if you had enough toughness, you’d be getting healed by taking hits.

Not sure what people mean here with the term ‘’Diminishing Returns’‘, then (to be honest it’s the first time I’ve seen it being used this much in an MMO community) . What I meant was that, in how I understand it, as your Toughness increases, adding the same amount of Toughness on top of that will yield less and less noticeable results in damage mitigation.

Like if you were to attain some absurd amount such as 10.000 Toughness, adding 200 more won’t really make a difference, but if you only have 500 Toughness, another 200 would help way more.

As for how that affects your survivability… well, I’m not going to pretend I know much about the math behind that :p

Not exactly.

if you have 1000 toughness, and the attack does 1000 damage, then you get 1200 toughness, and you take 800, well, you took 200 less damage, or 20% less damage.

well, lets say you add another 200, and you take 640 damage, well, you took 160 less damage! but you still took 20% less damage, so while it appears to be diminishing, it infact is not.

These numbers are made up, but they get my point across.

Another game I played had stats “Intelligence” for each 250 INT one aquired, one would gain 100% damage from base.

This means, if you had 250 INT, and gained 125, your multiplier would go from 2.0 to 2.5

however, lets say base damage is 200, that means you go from 400, to 500, a 25% increase.

But lets say, 200 base damage, and you have 1000 INT now, well that makes the multiplier 5.0, if you gain 125, it becomes 5.5, but that means its now

200 * 5 = 1000, versus 200 * 5.5 = 1100

it is a mere 10% increase now, however how INT worked in the formula was NOT diminished, but what you see was, this does not mean INT has diminishing returns.

The key here is that these things generally look at it from base. But when you teir it, like rather then looking at 0→200 0→400 you are looking at it like, 0→200→400 which will skew results.

Other game systems may have diminishing returns and/or a soft or hard cap on certain stats. GW2 doesn’t have to worry about stats inflation, so they can stick to this simple system with no DR or caps.

You’re basically capped by whats available cuz there’s only amulet, traits, and runes (gear and traits in pve).

For GW2, DR on armor/toughness would put an exponent on it, so damage reduction would be less than proportional.

nowitsawn.1276:

Not sure what people mean here with the term ‘’Diminishing Returns’‘, then (to be honest it’s the first time I’ve seen it being used this much in an MMO community) . What I meant was that, in how I understand it, as your Toughness increases, adding the same amount of Toughness on top of that will yield less and less noticeable results in damage mitigation.

Like if you were to attain some absurd amount such as 10.000 Toughness, adding 200 more won’t really make a difference, but if you only have 500 Toughness, another 200 would help way more.

As for how that affects your survivability… well, I’m not going to pretend I know much about the math behind that :p

Read the long post from me and I’ll thing you’ll get it soon enough

And trust me, this discussion comes up in every singlge new MMO. WoW raiders debated this for years before it was “common understanding”.

As it is survivability we are after, it is the last part that is important to understand. In your “absurd” example going from 10,000 to 10,200 and going from 500 to 700 will let you take the same amount of additional hits. The red number on your screen will make a smaller jump downwards the more toughness you add, but the first point of toughness and the last point of toughness will add the same amount of additional hits you can take from the mob before you die.

Terms and concepts like diminishing returns is all bout perspective and asking the right question