Guild Wars 2

For non-“tanking” (in raids) purposes does anyone run defense stats?

I’m just curious.

Not in PvE no.

To a point.

Small events with few people around / soloing, its fine.

Big events that scale hugely since so many people flock to them? Pointless, you’re gonna die in one to two hits anyway.

I use toughness on my main character because I spend most of my time playing solo, and often literally solo with no other players around, so it’s useful. Especially since I don’t necessarily want to be putting 100% effort, or attention, into playing most of the time and if I can survive even a few extra hits that helps.

Of course it’s no use at all against some enemies, particularly big bosses, but I’m rarely fighting those.

Mostly it isn’t. In PVE if you want more survivability you’re better off going with Marauder or Carrion Gear, as in small amounts HP adds more durability.

If you run toughness in raids then you are cutting down on DPS. Anet has made it ridiculously clear that the zerker power/condi metas are here to stay indefinitely. If you are not the tank you should be carrying minimal if any additional toughness going into a raid.

Elsewhere for large events it doesn’t really matter too much. If you get hit at all you are going to get hit hard. For solo play it can help depending on your play style.

Serious.6940:

If you run toughness in raids then you are cutting down on DPS. Anet has made it ridiculously clear that the zerker power/condi metas are here to stay indefinitely.

Its too bad raids, aren’t like Dungeon Hard Mode in GW1. Maybe in Wing 2, Salvation Pass, maybe…who knows.

It mostly depends in what you beleive.

One section beleives in phrases like:
“More dps, we just need MORE dps.”
“If you want to support your party, go dps.”
“If all do dps, mobs/bosses die quicker and we dont need heal and tank.”
“Everyone who plays not dps, cuts the other players.”
… etc. you get the point

As you may notice, these people only think of one thing and one thing only – damage. If you belong to this group or want to satisfy them, simply don’t go for toughness. If you die in 1-2 hits from everything, they won’t hate you. This still gives you nearly direct access to most activities. While support characters normaly have to prove themselves, you just link your gear and are respected instantly. He does damage, he is good.

If you go for solo-playing, many people go for survival-builds. Those include thoughness, and vitality and sometimes healing-power. The entire aspect is to stay alive as long as possible, for exploration issues, soloing content or tanking issues. Survival builds are a little bit selfish, as they normally not focus on helping others directly. Those improve your own buffs, your own heals, your own defenses. It makes excellent tanks, which are hard to kill. Toughness does a big job at this strategy. I’ve done several hero points in HoT and the difference between glascannon and survival is worlds. They may lack the damage output, but when there is no time limit, the enemy is dead for sure.

The support faction focuses on helping the group, either with buffs, tanking or healing. As you may realize, the first group does not really like us. We are an absurd anomality of what happens if you think too much. Yet without supporters, big events and complicated bosses cannot be done. Some of us use toughness, others go for vitatliy. Toughness has one major flaw, the aggro-mechanic. If your tougness is the highest in the group and you did a certain ammount of damage, the boss will love you literally. Thats why some people rather focus on vitality than toughness. If you move quick and your skills allow fast regeneration, dodging and blocking even that is not such a big deal.

I play tank for like 2-3 years now. First survival, now simple pvt stats. Of what I’ve noticed, more people play with toughness nowadays. Not the majority ofcourse. On the other hand it is quite hard to determine who is the majority. The dps fraction appears a bit mouthy, therefor you do hear a lot more from them than from the others.

Toughness by itself won’t help all that much. If you take the glass-meta ultra damage, damage only traits, damage only skills, then a splash of toughness is less DPS and taking an extra half a hit.

You have to build in some sustain for toughness to really matter. Toughness effectively increases self-heal strength generally at a better ratio than healing power.

You want to try to do more than half the damage of a full glass build while having indefinite sustain. That should leave you satisfied with having some toughness.

I think its easy to sum up as this:

For soloing and dungeons, toughness is fine (as long as you aren’t in a speedrun group for the dungeon, they’ll want full dmg).

For large events (where there are so many players, the boss scales up super high), raiding, etc, go glass cannon. To put it simply:

Two players have 8000hp each
The boss deals 10,000 dmg
your toughness prevented 1000 dmg
The other guy took all 10,000 dmg.
Either way, you’re both dead, but the guy in glass cannon helped more with his dps.

I think toughness isn’t neccesary ingame, but if you do bring it make sure you have something else to add to party…

Full trailblazer necro will still kill very effective, and can keep aggro..
I have a mistrel.cleric guardian as well I used it before for WvW, but I am using it for fractals where we sometrimes have ppl who cannot stay alive. I use the build for perma protection and long regens on top of healing symbols, AOE virtue of resolve and healing dodges.
I’ll have aggro and can out heal most DPS sources as longa s I’m not spiked with conditions. If suffering a lot of conditions I need to take a secondary armor with soldier runes, allwoing me to clean ~26+ conditions/ min AOE. Losing only minor healing capability.

Toughness has use but in most cases I’d take a DPS, DOT or DPS/support build.

If I’m playing on HoT maps with my warrior, I use Knights, as I’m normally on my own mapping. If I’m on a core map, then full DPS gear. I personally find that range classes don’t need toughness. As they can generally kill everything before they get close.

In fractals in raids it would be easy to design encounters that favor certain levels of thoughness. But the devs are monotonous in design so far. That explains the current metas for raids and fractals.

In open world PvE encounters the relevance of toughness will stay low.

I don’t agree with Toughness being useless in big events… My main is a full Knight (aka max toughness) Necro and I am basically immortal. When lots of people die at big events I am one of the handful people who stay alive, in fact, my HP rarely goes under 50% because I can siphon / heal / shroud constantly.

Condi ele uses toughness as a main stat(dire stats) and with tempest I can pull off burns that can kill very fast with sustained dmg, even against bosses hitting my face. Easily 6-7k minimum per tick(gotten up to 15k), not counting the dmg I am doing from the skills themselves. I used to do bleeding but with tempest release burn is 10x better. Also while doing this I am breaking stuns, creating fire fields, and giving myself and everyone around me instant 25 might stacks. Whenever I join a fight it seems that I out damage anyone there. Pretty OP if you ask me. If you build straight tank don’t expect to do damage ever, but every build has a way around it.