Guild Wars 2

For WvW roaming or pvp matches, which do you prefer more of? Which benefits you more?

I think as rule of thumb: vitality against condi damage, toughness against direct damage

depends on your class, specs and playstyle. Some people swear Vit > Tough because Tough has diminishing returns. It’s true, it does, but there is a long post on why it’s not entirely true. Ether way try them both out yourself and see which works best for you. Cause no one on this forum knows how you play.

How bout some1 running a split condi/cc spec in spvp…

CMstorm.8679:

How bout some1 running a split condi/cc spec in spvp…

Depends on who/what you are fighting. If they use conds as their primary damage source, then vit. If they are using direct damage, then toughness.

I don’t spvp nearly as much as I WvW, but overall I find toughness to be more useful… but not to the extent to where my hp is just ignored. Unfortunately spvp doesn’t give you a lot of ways to spread out your stats like WvW does. This is a very personal thing as classes/builds/playstyles vary greatly.

balance is king.

Depends on your class. Warriors/necro have high vitality so extra toughness helps. Guardian/Elementalist have low vitality so extra vitality helps. It is best to use http://gw2buildcraft.com/ to determne your best effective health. That website does not take into account conditions being able to cut through armor.

On buildcraft the effective hp also takes expected healing into consideration.

Guardians can put out a lot of healing, so while you don’t want to have such low hp to not be quickly burst down, you don’t need a ton of vitality to have good ehp. Increasing toughness also helps protect that hp and makes it more worth while to heal. However in this cond meta… poison would greatly reduce the ehp of a guardian… and I don’t really know how/how well they calculate it.

It is useful information for tweaking, but there still is a lot of personal playstyle/build/etc. involved even then.

Zackie.8923:

balance is king.

Unless you are running a 1hit wonder zerker while roaming wvw, I would go with balanced as well. Depends on class/build, but having a mix that includes toughness and vitality, for me, is good.

I did some math on this, but I could be wrong so take it with a grain of salt.

If damage is (as I saw somewhere) (Power * Weapon Damage * Skill Modifier) / (Armor + Toughness)

Then you want whichever is lower, Toughness + Armor or Vitality (You can see your toughness + armor stat on the character sheet)

Condition damage works differently however, this is only for direct damage.

Edit: I’ll try to find that spreadsheet, I forget the details.

Ulion.5476:

Depends on your class. Warriors/necro have high vitality so extra toughness helps. Guardian/Elementalist have low vitality so extra vitality helps. It is best to use http://gw2buildcraft.com/ to determne your best effective health. That website does not take into account conditions being able to cut through armor.

This.

Low HP (Ele/Guard/Thief) makes Vit better than Thoug.
High HP (War/Nec) makes Thoug better than Vit.

For the other 3 “Balanced HP pool” classes (Mes, Engi, Ranger) you should mix up the two.

As rule of thumb tho, Thoughness is slightly better than Vitality – except ofc the scenario of facing a condition build, but Vit alone will just delay your death, if you don’t have active counters.

Okay, found the spreadsheet. I took a steady level of damage (power, weapon damage) and increased toughness by 1, and took the percentage decrease in damage. I then increased vitality until I got the same percentage decrease in damage. Vitality was better for my character because he had low health, he was a Guardian, this fits perfectly with what was said above by others. The key thing to remember is that it is Armor + Toughness that needs to be equal to Vitality for maximum effectiveness vs direct damage.

Anthony.7219:

Okay, found the spreadsheet. I took a steady level of damage (power, weapon damage) and increased toughness by 1, and took the percentage decrease in damage. I then increased vitality until I got the same percentage decrease in damage. Vitality was better for my character because he had low health, he was a Guardian, this fits perfectly with what was said above by others. The key thing to remember is that it is Armor + Toughness that needs to be equal to Vitality for maximum effectiveness vs direct damage.

However regeneration and healing should be considered. A guardian has constant health regeneration which is more effective with a smaller health pool and higher toughness. There’s a great build post about this in the guardian forums. However this approach makes you more susceptible to dying from conditions.

I find that both should be sacrificed for damage on my toons since no amount of survivability will allow me to win if I can’t kill my opponent.

Balance is a good approach, but I find burst the most valuable asset in wvw for my characters.

juno.1840:

Anthony.7219:

Okay, found the spreadsheet. I took a steady level of damage (power, weapon damage) and increased toughness by 1, and took the percentage decrease in damage. I then increased vitality until I got the same percentage decrease in damage. Vitality was better for my character because he had low health, he was a Guardian, this fits perfectly with what was said above by others. The key thing to remember is that it is Armor + Toughness that needs to be equal to Vitality for maximum effectiveness vs direct damage.

However regeneration and healing should be considered. A guardian has constant health regeneration which is more effective with a smaller health pool and higher toughness. There’s a great build post about this in the guardian forums. However this approach makes you more susceptible to dying from conditions.

I find that both should be sacrificed for damage on my toons since no amount of survivability will allow me to win if I can’t kill my opponent.

Balance is a good approach, but I find burst the most valuable asset in wvw for my characters.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that. If you have higher toughness and lower vitality, then your heals are healing a larger portion of your health pool, which is getting reduced at a slower rate because of your higher toughness.

But on a very basic level, if you go from 25000 health to 25100 health, that’s a 0.4% improvement from 10 vitality. If you go from 3000 to 3010 armor/toughness, that’s a 0.33% improvement from 10 toughness.

Of course, it will also make you heal a 0.4% smaller portion of your health pool. Complicated stuff

Although I am not the OP, I want to thank all of you for the comments. This is an incredibly helpful thread for me. Thanks all.

awesome, thanks for all the input guys

AndrewSX.3794:

Ulion.5476:

Depends on your class. Warriors/necro have high vitality so extra toughness helps. Guardian/Elementalist have low vitality so extra vitality helps. It is best to use http://gw2buildcraft.com/ to determne your best effective health. That website does not take into account conditions being able to cut through armor.

This.

Low HP (Ele/Guard/Thief) makes Vit better than Thoug.
High HP (War/Nec) makes Thoug better than Vit.

For the other 3 “Balanced HP pool” classes (Mes, Engi, Ranger) you should mix up the two.

As rule of thumb tho, Thoughness is slightly better than Vitality – except ofc the scenario of facing a condition build, but Vit alone will just delay your death, if you don’t have active counters.

B.t. dubs, it’s toughness*

When you don’t know how many H a word have and where, just put them everywhere!

I want more Thoughness on my toons…

For WvW, I prefer celestial gear/armor/weapons…

For wvw/pve I run zerker armor, zerker amulet with knight trinks and it works perfectly for me, have very nice survivability and with PoV I don’t have to worry about conditions.

Anthony.7219:

If you have higher toughness and lower vitality, then your heals are healing a larger portion of your health pool, which is getting reduced at a slower rate because of your higher toughness.

This is misleading.

You health is reduced slower if you have higher toughness only in situations where you are facing Power damage. You vitality loss is not slowed by having higher toughness if the damage source is conditions. Also condi that reducing healing is more of a bane to low vitality Guardians.

GOSU.9574:

Anthony.7219:

If you have higher toughness and lower vitality, then your heals are healing a larger portion of your health pool, which is getting reduced at a slower rate because of your higher toughness.

This is misleading.

You health is reduced slower if you have higher toughness only in situations where you are facing Power damage. You vitality loss is not slowed by having higher toughness if the damage source is conditions. Also condi that reducing healing is more of a bane to low vitality Guardians.

Hrm… Yes, wasn’t trying to be misleading. Thanks for pointing that out.

GOSU.9574:

Anthony.7219:

If you have higher toughness and lower vitality, then your heals are healing a larger portion of your health pool, which is getting reduced at a slower rate because of your higher toughness.

This is misleading.

You health is reduced slower if you have higher toughness only in situations where you are facing Power damage. You vitality loss is not slowed by having higher toughness if the damage source is conditions. Also condi that reducing healing is more of a bane to low vitality Guardians.

At the same time though, guardians can have a truckload of condition removal. It all really just depends.

With 2 utility skills guardians can take all conditions from nearby allies then convert them all to boons. (cooldown on both is 60s)

In general, I prefer vitality for most things. One of the reasons being that increasing vitality is, point for point, more upfront survivability than toughness on every class except necromancer. The larger health pool does more for conditions as well.

The biggest flaw with vitality, though, is that it is ablative: it wears off and once the extra HP is gone, the advantage is gone. In longer fights where you’ll be healing multiple times against direct damage, toughness wins out because the damage reduction never goes away. Though I’ve found most PVP content to be rather short term, and in PVE you don’t actually need tough/vit.

My warrior(pve), who is a stability tank, who also needs a little improvement, currently runs sword/shield and longbow with healing signet, mango pie, and Dolyak Runes (I just like having all that regen, leave me alone!) and a weird setup of traits. something like 30/0/20/20/0 or 30/0/20/10/10.
Usually id use Berserkers Power, Slashing Power, and maybe Great Fortitude in strength; Last Stand, Dogged March in defense; Burning Arrows or Shrug it Off, and Stronger Bowstrings in tactics.

And I might also swap out sword/shield LB for axe/shield and gs every now and then. My armor would be split between soldier gear and clerics gear…and he would lack damage, even at full adrenaline, and with a superior sharpening stone, and bloodlust sigil on the gs… my attack would be around 3k, and my defense would be around 2.8k-3k. I mean i was tanky, but lacked a little dps compared to other warriors. its weird.

Maybe I just need to respect my warrior out of tankyness and put in a little crit+crit damage to help out, along with maintaining stability.

Also, I have an elementalist who i’d like to run d/f auramancer…how much hp and toughness should I have on him. Im not quite 80 yet, but when I get there, what’s good?

Aberrant.6749:

At the same time though, guardians can have a truckload of condition removal. It all really just depends.

This is where Theory gets trumped. Condition removal is typically not on a fast CD while condition application is typically every attack (the general load of conditions that is).

Not trying to build the “Ha, I counter your counter with a counter” argument, just pointing out while it sounds good, going into WvW with a low vitality pool is generally not good unless you are a 1hit wonder build.

GOSU.9574:

Aberrant.6749:

At the same time though, guardians can have a truckload of condition removal. It all really just depends.

This is where Theory gets trumped. Condition removal is typically not on a fast CD while condition application is typically every attack (the general load of conditions that is).

Not trying to build the “Ha, I counter your counter with a counter” argument, just pointing out while it sounds good, going into WvW with a low vitality pool is generally not good unless you are a 1hit wonder build.

You’re not going to be able to remove all conditions with it (i wasn’t trying to imply that). If you use condition remove wisely though you’ll remove the bulk of the damage (it removes the last applied condition) and not need as much vit. There are also runes, food, traits, sigils, and free vit from guard defense which can greatly help. It really depends on how you’re set up, how you play, and what situation you’re in as far as what’s better.

Neither vit nor toughness should be ignored though.

Even on a high dps thief I wouldn’t just go full zerk (1hit wonders are very easy to counter and you can gain a lot of survival without giving up much damage).

P.S. It would be silly if you could remove faster than they could be applied. That’s like if you could out toughness/heal direct damage.