Guild Wars 2

DISCLAIMER: That build is extremely old and I do not use it anymore.

I was experimenting with my Thief, seeing if I could turn it into a super tanky damage sponge for PvE. My power and precision was already at acceptable levels and so I concentrated on Vitality and Toughness by playing around with Valkyrie and Knight gear.

With enhanced toughness and 4k more HP (close to 20k), I set out to test damage mitigation. For some reason, the damage I was taking before these experiments got a boost and I was taking 7-10% HP per hit like before.

After increasing stats (by 25%) that should have reduced damage, I see no change in survivability. Do mobs hit a set percentage of your HP no matter what?

This it my build as it stands. It is currently in beta.

My current build.

I played in some pretty bad group and I can say p/t/v is useful in those situation for my “guardian”. If anything more toughness cause more agro so I can get mob to hit me instead of other people.

That being said I have a dps set and a tanking set. I switch them depend on situation. Most of the time I use the dps set.

You never stated what kind of toughness you where talking about, just “enhanced”.

Get 2K toughness and I can assure you that you’ll be able to take noticably more hits than with <1K.

You might want to try the build calculator over at http://gw2buildcraft.com/ to see how much % damage reduction you get from your “enhanced” thoughness. Or you can give us actual numbers and we can give more informed feedback.

Dawdler.8521:

You never stated what kind of toughness you where talking about, just “enhanced”.

Get 2K toughness and I can assure you that you’ll be able to take noticeably more hits than with <1K.

My toughness as it stands is around 1850. It was 1500 but even that slight increase should have reduced the amount of damage I was taking. Instead I am taking an extra 300-400 damage. I would boost it above 2k but because I see no change in survivability it would seem like a waste of time and gold.

Just gonna say that some attacks do take off certain % off your max health, like ground projectiles from Dredge Fractal’s Dredge boss. And stuff like AC traps do fixed damage.
You will know you aren’t squishy anymore if you take an Uncategorized Fractal’s turret hit to the face and still lives. Need quite an amount of T/V to do that.

For PvE, yes, toughness and especially vitality are completely pointless.

Open world solo questing style PvP is easy enough glass cannon anything can solo with ease. You could probably level to 80 naked with the starter weapons if you really wanted to.

In dungeons/group content, everything does so much damage that it simply won’t make a noticeable difference – either you can dodge/kite/active defend (via utilities/boons) or you can’t. The passive meatsuit from vit/tough will only let you be a little bit more lazy and sloppy and maybe take one extra hit (sometimes, from some monsters) but it’s simply not enough to justify the 30%+ damage loss vs glass cannon gear.

BurnedToast.3781:

For PvE, yes, toughness and especially vitality are completely pointless.

Open world solo questing style PvP is easy enough glass cannon anything can solo with ease. You could probably level to 80 naked with the starter weapons if you really wanted to.

Wow. What a waste.

Zacchary.6183:

BurnedToast.3781:

For PvE, yes, toughness and especially vitality are completely pointless.

Open world solo questing style PvP is easy enough glass cannon anything can solo with ease. You could probably level to 80 naked with the starter weapons if you really wanted to.

Wow. What a waste.

No worries, it isn’t true. Play whatever works for you, DPS or otherwise.

Sure, play on the starter weapons and nude, see if you have a fun time leveling up. You will eventually get to 80, but it will be an unnecessary hell just to “prove” how “worthless” toughness/vitality is.

More likely, anything can down a glass-cannon with ease on PvE. I doubt any glass cannon will have any sort of easy time killing the Champion Baroness at Cursed Shore. Bring your “zerk warr” and solo her, and IF you do, let me know how do you expect that 90%+ of players will have an “easy” time with that type of build.

(In fact, I see the opposite all the time. :P People unaccustomed to using Berserker’s gear apart from CoF 1 falling all the time on the “easy” PvE map. Glass-cannon can be wonderful for many people, but it requires practice and liking the high-risk/high-rewards aspect of it. Not every player should just gear up that way because other stats “aren’t as good”, or because “everybody else uses it, and they tell me GW2 is all about DPS.”)

A Thief does have evasion/cloaking/escaping tricks, so I concede a more offensive set can work well with them, since they probably are not best played as Guardians or “tankier” Professions (even then, I’ve read that some people play “tankier” thieves any way.)

I have nothing against people not liking Toughness/Vitality, but it seems each and every one of this threads have someone claiming they are useless, when what that person really means is that they don’t fit their playstyle. These non-offensive stats are far from useless for many, many players, and claiming they are useless is an insult on those that do employ them to their advantage-“all things have a right to grow.”

If it doesn’t make sense for someone to tell you not to stack offensive stats (I never tell players NOT to go glass-cannon if that’s what they like), it also doesn’t make sense telling others they shouldn’t stack whatever they please. They are not inferior to you just because you don’t like their playstyle and wouldn’t use it at all.

In short, people should understand that it’s OK to be different and like different stuff, rather than excusing their preferences by belittling everything else they don’t like.

Zacchary.6183:

I was experimenting with my Thief, seeing if I could turn it into a super tanky damage sponge for PvE. My power and precision was already at acceptable levels and so I concentrated on Vitality and Toughness by playing around with Valkyrie and Knight gear.

With enhanced toughness and 4k more HP (close to 20k), I set out to test damage mitigation. For some reason, the damage I was taking before these experiments got a boost and I was taking 7-10% HP per hit like before.

After increasing stats (by 25%) that should have reduced damage, I see no change in survivability. Do mobs hit a set percentage of your HP no matter what?

This it my build as it stands. It is currently in beta.

My current build.

Sometimes, that extra % reduction and extra bit of hp is the matter of life and death and being competent enough in melee range or not.

I’m not sure how toughness/vitality is truly calculated against effects ingame, I’ve stopped the theorycrafting and testing ages ago but I would have assumed that it follows the same staples as most RPG’s so Toughness should help you deal with physical/magical attacks by reducing the incoming damage, whilst Vitality would be there to help against DOT’s (such as poison, burning) – having a larger health pool to play with.

Personally, I would have a balance between the two – other posters feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

They’re arguably pointless if you’re consistently running with a well built, skilled, and experienced group. They’re not pointless if you’re consistently the last one or one of two left alive to take out a boss because one guy is there, there, and there, another guy ignored all instructions and got himself stepped on well out of range of everyone else, another tried his best but failed, and another is downed and only able to contribute by throwing rocks. All of a sudden being able to take a few hits is a big deal.

After reading some of the comments, I think am going to try to upgrade my toughness and vitality again. If there is a difference at 2k+ then I am gonna continue experimentation.

Thanks everyone!

I feel bad for Anet. They have to build content that can be run and completed by any group composition, be it 5-man glass cannon, 5-man support, assorted builds, etc, and 5-man DPS/glass cannon will always be the fastest, riskiest, and to a majority of people, ‘best’ way of running content. Thinking about it, I don’t think there’s any way for the designers to fix that.

They can’t make content that is impossible for a 5-man DPS group to finish, but allowing a 5-man DPS group to finish content means it will always be the best way to do it, for the majority of players.

gfox.6501:

I feel bad for Anet. They have to build content that can be run and completed by any group composition, be it 5-man glass cannon, 5-man support, assorted builds, etc, and 5-man DPS/glass cannon will always be the fastest, riskiest, and to a majority of people, ‘best’ way of running content. Thinking about it, I don’t think there’s any way for the designers to fix that.

They can’t make content that is impossible for a 5-man DPS group to finish, but allowing a 5-man DPS group to finish content means it will always be the best way to do it, for the majority of players.

Go into high level fractals… Without a skilled group and a good organized composition you will have a very bad time. All glass cannon can work, same as all tank, but “possible”!=efficient. All classes and builds synergise differently, some better than others but at the end of the day all builds have a role.

tldr: be smart.

Zacchary.6183:

After reading some of the comments, I think am going to try to upgrade my toughness and vitality again. If there is a difference at 2k+ then I am gonna continue experimentation.

Thanks everyone!

Don’t. Toughness gets hit with pretty hard diminishing returns. Vitality scales much better than toughness. Unless you want to be a dedicated tank stop stacking toughness around 2800 armor, after that point you are wasting potential unless you couple your armor with vitality or healing power.

Also keep in mind that NPC agro is based on toughness. Enemies will most often attack the closest player with the highest total armor.

Zaviel.1245:

gfox.6501:

I feel bad for Anet. They have to build content that can be run and completed by any group composition, be it 5-man glass cannon, 5-man support, assorted builds, etc, and 5-man DPS/glass cannon will always be the fastest, riskiest, and to a majority of people, ‘best’ way of running content. Thinking about it, I don’t think there’s any way for the designers to fix that.

They can’t make content that is impossible for a 5-man DPS group to finish, but allowing a 5-man DPS group to finish content means it will always be the best way to do it, for the majority of players.

Go into high level fractals… Without a skilled group and a good organized composition you will have a very bad time. All glass cannon can work, same as all tank, but “possible”!=efficient. All classes and builds synergise differently, some better than others but at the end of the day all builds have a role.

tldr: be smart.

Well if a team is good enough to beat a particularly difficult content in both a DPS composition or tanky composition, which setup do you think would finish the content faster?

BurnedToast.3781:

For PvE, yes, toughness and especially vitality are completely pointless.

Open world solo questing style PvP is easy enough glass cannon anything can solo with ease. You could probably level to 80 naked with the starter weapons if you really wanted to.

In dungeons/group content, everything does so much damage that it simply won’t make a noticeable difference – either you can dodge/kite/active defend (via utilities/boons) or you can’t. The passive meatsuit from vit/tough will only let you be a little bit more lazy and sloppy and maybe take one extra hit (sometimes, from some monsters) but it’s simply not enough to justify the 30%+ damage loss vs glass cannon gear.

Completely untrue. My main is a thief with soldier armor and berserker jewelry. I found myself being the top DPS of my usual dungeon group so I swapped to all berserker(having tons of experience under my belt for dodging). The end result is that I spent FAR more time on the ground. I swapped back to my soldier setup and almost never hit the pavement. There is a VERY noticeable difference.

BurnedToast.3781:

In dungeons/group content, everything does so much damage that it simply won’t make a noticeable difference – either you can dodge/kite/active defend (via utilities/boons) or you can’t. The passive meatsuit from vit/tough will only let you be a little bit more lazy and sloppy and maybe take one extra hit (sometimes, from some monsters) but it’s simply not enough to justify the 30%+ damage loss vs glass cannon gear.

Never mind that with more armor, you’re more likely to attract the attention of multiple mobs, effectively negating any survivability gained. Honestly i will say that a high number of “trash” mobs are a higher threat than a single boss in this game. This because the boss is easier to spot the tells on (when not covered it particle smog), while the mobs will just be a mass of swinging limbs.

In a good group yes vit and toughness are underpowered (nothing is useless), you have enough utility and dodges to survive and if you do go down you’re going to be back up in 2 seconds. In fractal everything will 1shot you anyway and to survive 1 more hit isn’t worth the massive damage loss you get. I run a GC thief as my main, I have around 15k HP 3k+ power and 100% crit damage.

I would be useless if I ran a “bunker” thief in tourney even though a good bunker build doesn’t really exist for us. Especially since we need stealth and on point that is not helping the team, you can’t keep a point neutral or cap in stealth so may as well go 25/30/0/0/15 and actually be useful.

I run the same build everywhere, boring but efficient. And people wonder why thieves are all the same :/ I wish glass wasn’t the only option. I know this is for pve but wanted to shed light on both aspects.

While some people might say Vitality and Toughness is completely useless because Berserker is everything that matters, it is not true.

People who say Berserker is all that matters think they are god mode players but in reality they are those who lies downed on the ground most of the time.

Vitality and Toughness are really good stats, and the best way is to balance it all out with the kind of strength you need, either it be power, condition damage or precision.

I wouldn’t call myself a high end player in GW2 just yet, but I’ve played a lot of mmo’s and know a fair bit about how roles work. GW2 works to cater to many playstyles and roles. To say one stat comp is far superior and others are useless is an arrogant comment. From personal exp, I usually go for the 2 most beneficial DPS stats, and 1 defensive one. Knights being my personal favorite as I play classes that benefit from crit and power. The toughness granted from knights also stops me from being downed too often in harder content. I’ve had too many instances where people with that ‘beserkers or you’re noob’ mentality has done more harm than good. This is where my toughness (vitality also, if thats your thing) really shines. When these beserkers get downed, which happens often might I add, despite their claims of being able to dodge everything, I am usually one of the people frantically running around trying to revive them before it all turns to custard while they are busy saying “REV ME NOOBS OMG”. Toughness allows me to take those hits while I revive other players, and I would say considering the amount of glass cannons, that is a role in itself. Toughness also directly affects “threat” meaning the likelyhood hostiles will attack you over your team mates. Logically I would come to the conclusion that it would be better to have the big nasties chasing someone who’s a bit tankier, than glass cannons having to haul kitten and spend half the fight kiting just to stay alive. While it is indeed true that devs aim to make PVE content possible to complete by any composition of roles, it would be silly to say one build trumps all in all situations. Stack the stats you believe fit the way you want to play. High risk/high reward = go glass cannon. Decent but not optimal dps and a little survivability = 2 dps stats and 1 defensive. If you wanna be that unstoppable juggernaut who’s there to take the hits for the bros (and ladies, of course) in abundance, then pick majority defensive stats. However in saying that, this doesnt even touch on the idea of damage mitigation through condi removal etc, which is another huge aspect entirely, which I won’t get into now because I’m rambling. Moral of story: There is no optimal stat combo in GW2 overall, there are merely optimal stat combos to fill the roles you wish to fill. Hope this helps some people who are confused about “What stats are useless?” because none of them are.

Yeah when I first started my Mesmer I thought toughness/vitality would be a good idea because I heard how squishy they are at low levels. I was taking agro about 75% of the time. It was as if my clones didn’t exist. I kid you not, I was just standing behind and to the left of another player, not doing anything, nothing active, and they attacked an ettin. It ran right past the other character and attacked me. I gave up on t/v soon after.

I don’t really get this because it would seem that mobs would be more attracted to who was causing them the most damage. I don’t see how they could tell how tough you are just by looking at you.

The only way they could start making toughness/vitality pertinent is adding events where it’s required or your team wipes. IE, if you don’t have xx amount of HPs/Toughness you will die to persistent effects. No way to avoid em.

MakersMark.8420:

The only way they could start making toughness/vitality pertinent is adding events where it’s required or your team wipes. IE, if you don’t have xx amount of HPs/Toughness you will die to persistent effects. No way to avoid em.

There really should be more of this imo, and i do not think it needs to invalidate glass cannons even, but if you bring glass cannons… you need to bring some support to help carry them so that they can do the damage.

I also think there should be more need of control roles in group, like some effects that cannot be dodged and you ‘must’ inturrupt with CC abilities to survive.

Thus giving more reason for control, support and damage dealers in groups

To answer the question, toughness an vitality aren’t pointless in PVE. However, their use is limited.

First, they scale horribly compared to offensive stats. Damage reduction is based off of armor, which starts out being quite a high number. For thieves it is 1980. Now, If you were to add 300 points to it, you would only end up reducing damage by 15% where applicable. Those 300 points into power would increase power by 32% if you had no power to begin with.

But lets go with a real number. Say you had 1300 toughness and 2k power, and had 600 points you wanted to invest. Putting those 600 points into power would give you a 30% increase in damage. Putting those 600 points into toughness would give you a 25% increase in survivability. This might seem like only a slightly unfair trade until you look at how enemies act with each one. With 600 more power, enemies die quicker and thus they do less damage. A dead enemy deals no damage, after all. But with 25% decrease in damage done, enemies are content to sit and attack you for longer since they will survive longer now.

It is here where the beauty of glass cannon builds comes into play. The zerker build has so much offense in it that enemies die very quickly when compared to other builds, and this in part makes up the survivability of the zerker build: kill them before they kill you. The zerker build also goes through content quicker, and thus in the long run gets more loot than defensive builds. In higher end PVE, champions can drop players in 1-2 hits no matter what they’re wearing, so you end up having zerker gear be superior to other gear. This also emphasizes dodging and active defense, which mitigate damage well regardless of statistical fortitude. At the end, you have to make a case for using something other than zerker.

There are places where zerker does falter, however. In any case where there is a relatively high sustained damage over an insurmountable length of time, zerker builds will fall flat while more defensive builds won’t fall as flat. A good example of this is in the blizzard fractal where you have to fend off the son’s of svanir for a certain amount of time. In later fractals, there are dozens of them running about, and their combined attacks make dodging and active defense a moot point, since they will sustain damage on you regardless of what you do. Because of this, zerkers cave to the pressure while the really durable players survive.

But barely, if at all. Another thing is that some organized groups will have a player who is designated to take point and take the pain, absorbing damage while the zerkers get free hits without having to worry about their own damage.

Ultimately you don’t have to go pure zerker, since having some survivability helps. But you only need “some” since any more is just wasted excess in the majority of PVE content, and that “some” is also questionable due to how many things can be solo’d with a pure zerker build in the first place.

I think a lot of people posting above have missed a vital point. Every single player in this game has different levels of skill. Every single person. It’s unlikely any two players are equally skilled. They may be equally skills in one aspect, but no one is equally skilled in all aspects.

Some people also have more lag or worse connections or more latency, depending on where they live, weather condions etc. Try dodging if you have satellite internet during a storm. lol

I’d say there’s really really good players in the top, I don’t know 15%, that can probably wear full zerker gear and do pretty much anything they want. The problem is the other people see people saying this and think they too can do it. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in the party with that one zerker warrior who’s down so much it seems like I’m on permanent rez duty.

I’m not a young player and I’m probably not a skilled player. Yes, I got my dungeon Master, but I’ll NEVER be running Arah in half an hour. It won’t happen.

So for a player like me, vitality and toughness serve a purpose. They allow me to survive to continue to do damage. Dungeons WILL take me longer than other people, but then again, that’s true for most people. Most people don’t run CoF in 6.5 minutes. Most people find Arah a challenging dungeon that takes hours.

So if you’re in that percentage (and yes I did pull the number out of my kitten but you get the idea), then sure, toughness and vitality servers no purpose.

But that also means that for the majority of the player base, a build without toughness or vitality means a very high repair bill and possibly not finishing content.

Not worth it…

Soldier gear is just plain better than Berserker gear when fighting things that can’t be crit. You can use a sharpening stone to get a slightly bigger power boost compared to Berserker gear too, so it ends up hitting harder. However, I can’t really think of any fight against something uncrittable that’s actually hard.

I run 30 toughness on my ranger in pve and pvp, its a highly useful trait for stacking condition damage, and being tankier than hell.

FranBunnyFFXII.3508:

I run 30 toughness on my ranger in pve and pvp, its a highly useful trait for stacking condition damage, and being tankier than hell.

Stats are not the same as traits, and equipment gives more statpoints than traitlines. I think you’ve confused something there.

@topic: While I won’t go for full bunker, I prefer having some toughness and vitality in my build (more toughness, though). A damage reduction of 20-30% is quite useful, as it allows you to take a few hits without going down. And you will still do good damage; just not the extreme damage of a GLASScannon. And no, 20-30% damage reduction won’t bring you more aggro… you’d need much more toughness for that to be noticeable.

The only places where being a glasscannon is really recommended (imo) is if you want to go for speedruns with an experienced group, or if you play fractals 40+… afaik that’s around the level where everything begins oneshotting you anyway (I myself am not that high up, so I don’t know the level for sure).

MakersMark.8420:

The only way they could start making toughness/vitality pertinent is adding events where it’s required or your team wipes. IE, if you don’t have xx amount of HPs/Toughness you will die to persistent effects. No way to avoid em.

Nice idea, almost as nice the dps-check gate that was in arah4…oh wait…was…

I would’ve liked other stats than zerker to be useful, I really would. But unless you are dedicated “tank” don’t go for it. Maybe a wee bit of toughness, but that’s a bout it.

Rhysati.4932:

I found myself being the top DPS of my usual dungeon group so I swapped to all berserker(having tons of experience under my belt for dodging)…. I swapped back to my soldier setup and almost never hit the pavement.

Then perhaps you don’t actually have tons of experience for dodging like you think you do, and the pvt crutch was saving you all the time. A completely different argument.

And there’s no dps meter, you only assume you’re doing top dps, a rough estimation at best.

they are useless because you can dodge all damage in pve. perma vigor bishessss

toughness is not pointless.. it can work wonderfully as an agro magnet. keeping a certain level of agro from your squishy damage dealers.! and you can survive longer..
vitality on the other hand… its only useful for more health against conditions..

P/v/t gear seems to work well for my Guardian so far, also using knights accesoires. Though I never used berserker gear so I can’t really tell if theres a huge difference.

I’d say right now it is pretty pointless actually. Most people are looking for speed runs for everything and that means Zerker Zerker Zerker just look at the prices for Zerker build gear in the TP you’ll see what I mean.

Until they make CC and Support viable there really won’t be much need for them. Kaaboose put together a video about the problems recently.

Here is a interesting little observation.

If you locate the same mob in a starter zone and a high level zone, the starter zone mob is likely to loose more health to your attacks.

This indicates that the health of mobs scales non-linearly. Meaning that if you go for anything other than damage the fights will take progressively longer as you move from zone to zone.

This seems to be what ANet considers a challenge. By making the fights longer, you are more and more likely to mess up a dodge, heal, or some other action and end up downed and likely defeated.

I personally feel full berserker is the way to go other than maybe the guardian so mobs go for him/her first. If you know when to dodge and bring utilities that help keep you alive you should never die. Berserker gear helps with this because the fights become shorter

No dedicated healer is what contributes to this I think. As with more healing coming in toughness would become far more valuable, and even vitality too in terms of a bigger cushion.

Dodging is also too good, and mobs attacks too obvious. It’s understood they wanted fights to be dynamic and for you to react to monster’s attacks, but most are too slow and far too predictable. Many more faster attacking creatures, but doing less per hit, would make less of an all or nothing aspect to defensive combat, and up the value of toughness and vitality.

I noticed that when I went full Berserker on my Necromancer, I still didn’t really die or get downed that much in Fractals.

Toughness/vit has SOME value, but prevention is the best cure for the problem IMHO. Just learn to dodge… or something. Or reroll a ranged class.

gfox.6501:

gfox.6501:

I feel bad for Anet. They have to build content that can be run and completed by any group composition, be it 5-man glass cannon, 5-man support, assorted builds, etc, and 5-man DPS/glass cannon will always be the fastest, riskiest, and to a majority of people, ‘best’ way of running content. Thinking about it, I don’t think there’s any way for the designers to fix that.

They can’t make content that is impossible for a 5-man DPS group to finish, but allowing a 5-man DPS group to finish content means it will always be the best way to do it, for the majority of players.

Zaviel.1245:

Go into high level fractals… Without a skilled group and a good organized composition you will have a very bad time. All glass cannon can work, same as all tank, but “possible”!=efficient. All classes and builds synergise differently, some better than others but at the end of the day all builds have a role.

tldr: be smart.

Well if a team is good enough to beat a particularly difficult content in both a DPS composition or tanky composition, which setup do you think would finish the content faster?

If. Trust me, “majority of people” will get butchered running pure berserker dps build. I see those people everyday.

I’d rather they introduce a mechanic that better rewards survivability builds than just the dmg ones. For example, they could have a boss do a move that is an pbaoe 1-hit KO regardless of dodging unless you pass a certain tough/vit combo treshold, or if you have the protection/regen/vigor buff at moment of impact. This encourages the idea of a support or a balanced team, while giving all-dps teams a bigger challenge (i.e. it then becomes easier for a balanced team to finish it than an all-dps team).

Surviving in GW2 is all about active defenses: dodges, blocks, evades, invulnerabilities, heals (spike and sustain), Blinds, Weakness, Chills, condition removal, stunbreakers, positioning, boons, stealth, and probably a few others I don’t remember. No matter how much health and armor you stack, you can’t just sit there and let Lupi or Subject Alpha wail on you while you shrug off his attacks.

Passive defense in this game is intended primarily to buy you enough time to use your active defenses or for your active defenses to come back off cooldown. Going full glass on your thief is fine, but some of the Risen Priests (Balthazar and Melandru in particular come to mind) have massive, nearly-undodgeable AoE attacks that will leave a pure glass cannon on the ground. For a Sword+Pistol thief, however, you should be able to go glassy against most things simply because of your spammable blind, the evade on pistol whip, and the spammy stunbreaker/condi clear of #2. D/D, I prefer a bit of Vitality mixed in there so I don’t always die to enemy thieves who get the drop on me in WvW.

Basically, the question you need to ask yourself is: how much trouble do I have surviving until I can hit 6 and/or stealth?

V/T is different story for each class. I.e. warrior benefit from toughness alot while Vit is waste , guardian benefits alot from both etc. (this is in case someone decide to use some defensive stats)

Personally i wouldnt waste stat points getting toughness on thief, just take valkyre set which is ideal for thief.

I wouldn’t say that they are a waste at all. Everyone has a different style of playing, different areas of the game they focus on playing, and those things will alter their perspective on the subject.

I play a P/V/T Guardian and a tanky Necro as well and both have amazing survivability in a support role. The level of V/T I run is probably overkill for PvE but since I do a lot of WvW I leave it. Yea it takes me longer to kill enemies because I don’t have as much kill power, but I can stand and tank for a long time before I’m in any real danger.

Why is this thread still up? o .o

CoF, nuf said….

Dawdler.8521:

You never stated what kind of toughness you where talking about, just “enhanced”.

Get 2K toughness and I can assure you that you’ll be able to take noticably more hits than with <1K.

This. My personal minimum for none squishy builds is 1800 toughness. If i had a choice between taking toughness or Vit i’d go with toughness.

Evade/Stealth > armor.