Guild Wars 2

Just curious what people feel is better for personal survivability Toughness or Vitality and why. I am just starting to properly play the game although i have owned it since before launch (pre-purchase) and have played several mmos prior to this one (WoW, Guild Wars, Rift, SWTOR amongst others) and so have a fair idea in general of playing but was unsure which would be better to take as a trait for my thief to boost survival but would prefer a more general response rather than profession specific so i have a better understanding when i play other characters later on.

Cheers for any advice.

Generally vitality. Toughness is good if you’re already tough. I.E you have lots of effects (boons/conditions/control) and effect removals, along with plenty of vitality. As a thief, vitality is likely to help you more.

Both. Ideally, your toughness should be around 1500, and your vitality should be around 20000. Then if you feel you are being downed by direct damage a lot, you add more toughness. And if you feel like you are being downed by a lot of condition damage, you add more vitality and condition removal. But you should always have a bit of both.

Toughness is ideal until you have 2800 armor, then you get half the damage reduction.
I feel Vitality is pretty pointless tho. Health pool is the worst way of negating damage.

I prefer toughness on my warrior. I think they have naturally high HP anyway, and my build relies a lot on regeneration, which makes toughness more valuable.

Imo toughness. Vit only makes you be able to take more hits, but the problem is unless your healing is high as well, you can’t really offset the damage you take compared to toughness (then ofc, you die less from conditions, but take alot from normal hits).

cheers for all the advice that explains a lot i think i’ll try toughness as it seems to match more with what i have done in previous mmos but will try both out now i understand them more

For a low hp class? Vitality.

Your toughness doesnt mean jack when monsters hit you for 12,000. At that point it’s vitality or bust. Especially if you play a low hp low armor class. Toughness works better against lots of small hits, as well as any direct physical damage. But vitality is critical for the larger hits, and condition damage, both of which are incredibly prevalent lategame (try melee’ing something that spews out poison 24/7 which does 2k damage a tick and tell me you dont wish you had more vitality. Or get smacked by 12K from a green missile and tell me you arent thanking your lucky stars you have over 16khp)

Also healing has the worst scaling in the game (300+ healing power on an ele makes our heals like 5% better. Whereas that 300 into vitality gives us far higher survivability) So dont worry about trying to match up healing power to vitality or toughness.

Zenyatoo.4059:

For a low hp class? Vitality.

Your toughness doesnt mean jack when monsters hit you for 12,000. At that point it’s vitality or bust. Especially if you play a low hp low armor class. Toughness works better against lots of small hits, as well as any direct physical damage. But vitality is critical for the larger hits, and condition damage, both of which are incredibly prevalent lategame (try melee’ing something that spews out poison 24/7 which does 2k damage a tick and tell me you dont wish you had more vitality. Or get smacked by 12K from a green missile and tell me you arent thanking your lucky stars you have over 16khp)

Also healing has the worst scaling in the game (300+ healing power on an ele makes our heals like 5% better. Whereas that 300 into vitality gives us far higher survivability) So dont worry about trying to match up healing power to vitality or toughness.

So, Cleric set its useless ;_;? almost finished for my warrior dont tell me that i threw 9g D=!!!!

As an Elementalist, I generally try to roll with ~14.9k health and 1.9k toughness in tPvP. Vitality doesn’t stop a Thief 2-shotting me with Steal > Cloak’n’Dagger / Backstab > Heartseaker, but toughness can pillow the damage a lot, and I can recover after the initial attack. Our off-healing can compensate for the lower health pool as well.

toughness reduces direct damage FAR better than vitality, however it doesn’t reduce condition damage.

A good rule of thumb is to have your armor rating equal to 1/10th your hitpoints if you can