Guild Wars 2

It’s just amazing how I could have over 2k toughness being over 3k armor and still take as much critical damage as if I had low toughness.

I think I agree with the title.

It’s not really just toughness though.

You benefit way less from having high vitality/toughness/healing power than you do from having high power/precision/ferocity.

Vitality and toughness start to be purposeful in PvP/WvW, but they are pretty terrible in PvE and you should avoid making use of them in that game mode.

It’s good that it’s this way because this game is supposed to be about active defense. If toughness did enough so that you didn’t need to use dodges/evasions/blocks, this game would be even easier than it already is. Be thankful for it!

TBH I’ve noticed this too. I once tried (in sPvP) a build with over 4k armor and perma protection. I still saw a 7k eviscerate in my combat log. I could have shoved all those stats into vitality and gained ~10k HP and traded that 7k evi for 10-12k and been better off, not to mention more buffer for condis. Toughness is a joke.

I see toughness as an absolute must with the latest living story releases. During breach events, I often see zerker babies waiting just outside of champions’ range as if they are afraid to use their highly lauded attack prowess. Being that my guardian is full knights, it’s always me running in Leeroy Jenkins style to get the fight started.

In PvP, I’ve had a zerker thief ambush my rabid mesmer with backstab, only to take half my health instead of one-shotting me. He didn’t live long enough to regret it. I’ve also gone toe-to-toe with a proficient celestial elementalist using the same build and won. I barely won but a win is still a win.

I also have a bunker mesmer in cleric gear whom I made specifically to support my friends whom aren’t as skilled as I am. While it takes her forever to kill anything in pve, her HP level falls below 75%, even though I never use her heal skill. Her phantasms can heal themselves too, if standing close enough to each other.

Toughness works. You just have to know how to work with it. I find supporting it with passive heals to be highly effective.

Without toughness you’re to squizzy. Ofcourse toughness works.
At least in PvP and WvW.

I am going to guess you don’t know anything about condi builds.

Nevermind. Only readed the title tbh

Toughness is good only against auto atack’s reason its good on blob fights, but in general is a wasted stat, this is a game where u dont need to think much(only need to see mob/player animation as any other game) since player only need to get the higher damage possible as fast as possible.

The thing with all the defensive stats is that they scale well, but only when you increase two of them. Let me give an example.

Lets say you’re a necromancer. You have 1846 armor, and 18472 health. You have 1000 points to spend. If you put all 1000 into vitality, you’ll end up with 28472 health, which is a 54.1% increase in how much damage you can take. Put that into toughness, and you gt 2846 armor which is a 54.2% increase. But, if you 500 into both vitality and toughness, you’d get 2346 armor and 23472 health. That is 27% reduction from toughness, but that also applies to all of the extra health, so you would, to scale, have 29830 HP (a 61.4% increase overall).

It’s a concept called effective health. Because the two stats multiply each other, the best way to invest stats is so that health is roughly 10x higher than armor, then increase them at the same rate. This is where toughness kind of gets the shaft. For you see, the necro is already at the golden ratio of 1:10. Every other class… not so much. They all need a certain amount of vitality to reach the golden ratio.

Warrior: 290 Vit
Guardian: 1046 Vit
Ranger: 472 Vit
Engineer: 472 Vit
Thief: 899 Vit
Elementalist: 756 Vit
Mesmer: 328 Vit

Overall, players will end up getting more from Vitality from sheer statistical efficiency alone.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The thing with all the defensive stats is that they scale well, but only when you increase two of them. Let me give an example.

Lets say you’re a necromancer. You have 1846 armor, and 18472 health. You have 1000 points to spend. If you put all 1000 into vitality, you’ll end up with 28472 health, which is a 54.1% increase in how much damage you can take. Put that into toughness, and you gt 2846 armor which is a 54.2% increase. But, if you 500 into both vitality and toughness, you’d get 2346 armor and 23472 health. That is 27% reduction from toughness, but that also applies to all of the extra health, so you would, to scale, have 29830 HP (a 61.4% increase overall).

It’s a concept called effective health. Because the two stats multiply each other, the best way to invest stats is so that health is roughly 10x higher than armor, then increase them at the same rate. This is where toughness kind of gets the shaft. For you see, the necro is already at the golden ratio of 1:10. Every other class… not so much. They all need a certain amount of vitality to reach the golden ratio.

Warrior: 290 Vit
Guardian: 1046 Vit
Ranger: 472 Vit
Engineer: 472 Vit
Thief: 899 Vit
Elementalist: 756 Vit
Mesmer: 328 Vit

Overall, players will end up getting more from Vitality from sheer statistical efficiency alone.

Very informative Thanks!

Toughness might look worse than vitality in most cases if we look just at the effective health you get, but there’s an important difference: toughness increases sustainability while vitality doesn’t (unless you’re using guardian tomes).
If you have 15k HP and 2k Armor and you receive 1k direct damage each second, adding 1k toughness will make you last for 7.5s longer, while 1k vitality would provide 10s.
However, if we have a 400hps on top of that, 1k toughness will provide 31,25s of additional survival, which is more than the 16,67s you would get from vitality.

Crossplay.2067:

I see toughness as an absolute must with the latest living story releases. During breach events, I often see zerker babies waiting just outside of champions’ range as if they are afraid to use their highly lauded attack prowess. Being that my guardian is full knights, it’s always me running in Leeroy Jenkins style to get the fight started.

In PvP, I’ve had a zerker thief ambush my rabid mesmer with backstab, only to take half my health instead of one-shotting me. He didn’t live long enough to regret it. I’ve also gone toe-to-toe with a proficient celestial elementalist using the same build and won. I barely won but a win is still a win.

I also have a bunker mesmer in cleric gear whom I made specifically to support my friends whom aren’t as skilled as I am. While it takes her forever to kill anything in pve, her HP level falls below 75%, even though I never use her heal skill. Her phantasms can heal themselves too, if standing close enough to each other.

Toughness works. You just have to know how to work with it. I find supporting it with passive heals to be highly effective.

As much as it makes me happy to see people using these other stat sets, Berserker is still king in the silverwastes, I myself generally engage the champions first in full zerker, griffs all just need a cripple before getting nuked with straight damage, thrashers no longer require you to attack from the behind, instead they take in larger amounts of damage when attacking from behind playing more into power and less into bleeds and torment, trolls? inherently low health and low armor still making power ideal as power kill it faster before the bees start to move, husks with their tough bark? arguably you can kill them at the same rate, I’ve done it faster in a power build even with the ones with higher health pools, dogs don’t buff retal anymore either.

Still I salute you for appreciating the other options available and look forward to see you take the charge in the open field.

Vargamonth.2047:

Toughness might look worse than vitality in most cases if we look just at the effective health you get, but there’s an important difference: toughness increases sustainability while vitality doesn’t (unless you’re using guardian tomes).
If you have 15k HP and 2k Armor and you receive 1k direct damage each second, adding 1k toughness will make you last for 7.5s longer, while 1k vitality would provide 10s.
However, if we have a 400hps on top of that, 1k toughness will provide 31,25s of additional survival, which is more than the 16,67s you would get from vitality.

We also need to consider the active play modifiers that determine overall toughness effectiveness. Looking at toughness without considering protection, weakness, regeneration, and different trait modifiers, and so forth is like looking at power without considering ferocity, 25 stacks of might and 25 stacks of vuln, and the related trait modifiers.

Purple Miku.7032:

I think I agree with the title.

It’s not really just toughness though.

You benefit way less from having high vitality/toughness/healing power than you do from having high power/precision/ferocity.

Vitality and toughness start to be purposeful in PvP/WvW, but they are pretty terrible in PvE and you should avoid making use of them in that game mode.

It’s good that it’s this way because this game is supposed to be about active defense. If toughness did enough so that you didn’t need to use dodges/evasions/blocks, this game would be even easier than it already is. Be thankful for it!

+1 exactly.

Crossplay.2067:

I see toughness as an absolute must with the latest living story releases.

I do fine as a zerker warrior in the Silverwastes and will gladly engage champs by myself, knowing that I can dodge their highly telegraphed attacks. I once soloed the Amber boss to 50% and could have killed him had it not been for the time limit.

I haven’t been in a situation in open PvE where berserker gear didn’t suffice.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The thing with all the defensive stats is that they scale well, but only when you increase two of them. Let me give an example.

Lets say you’re a necromancer. You have 1846 armor, and 18472 health. You have 1000 points to spend. If you put all 1000 into vitality, you’ll end up with 28472 health, which is a 54.1% increase in how much damage you can take. Put that into toughness, and you gt 2846 armor which is a 54.2% increase. But, if you 500 into both vitality and toughness, you’d get 2346 armor and 23472 health. That is 27% reduction from toughness, but that also applies to all of the extra health, so you would, to scale, have 29830 HP (a 61.4% increase overall).

It’s a concept called effective health. Because the two stats multiply each other, the best way to invest stats is so that health is roughly 10x higher than armor, then increase them at the same rate. This is where toughness kind of gets the shaft. For you see, the necro is already at the golden ratio of 1:10. Every other class… not so much. They all need a certain amount of vitality to reach the golden ratio.

Warrior: 290 Vit
Guardian: 1046 Vit
Ranger: 472 Vit
Engineer: 472 Vit
Thief: 899 Vit
Elementalist: 756 Vit
Mesmer: 328 Vit

Overall, players will end up getting more from Vitality from sheer statistical efficiency alone.

Nice most don’t know this. I knew about the ranger and warrior but didn’t know about the others. thanx.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The thing with all the defensive stats is that they scale well, but only when you increase two of them. Let me give an example.

Lets say you’re a necromancer. You have 1846 armor, and 18472 health. You have 1000 points to spend. If you put all 1000 into vitality, you’ll end up with 28472 health, which is a 54.1% increase in how much damage you can take. Put that into toughness, and you gt 2846 armor which is a 54.2% increase. But, if you 500 into both vitality and toughness, you’d get 2346 armor and 23472 health. That is 27% reduction from toughness, but that also applies to all of the extra health, so you would, to scale, have 29830 HP (a 61.4% increase overall).

It’s a concept called effective health. Because the two stats multiply each other, the best way to invest stats is so that health is roughly 10x higher than armor, then increase them at the same rate. This is where toughness kind of gets the shaft. For you see, the necro is already at the golden ratio of 1:10. Every other class… not so much. They all need a certain amount of vitality to reach the golden ratio.

Warrior: 290 Vit
Guardian: 1046 Vit
Ranger: 472 Vit
Engineer: 472 Vit
Thief: 899 Vit
Elementalist: 756 Vit
Mesmer: 328 Vit

Overall, players will end up getting more from Vitality from sheer statistical efficiency alone.

It’s a bit more complicated than that.

It is true that vitality is better for increasing your EHP, but EHP is not the only factor of survival, because of healing. In general, the “main” heal skill for many classes does not scale well with anything so sometimes increasing toughness, and thus your effective heals can be more effective. With additional toughness, each unit of health recovered means more. Increasing health relative to this makes it harder to recover your health.

EHP can be useful for withstanding the biggest hits so you don’t die instantly, but in bigger fights where you can use your healing skill many times over the course of a fight, then toughness starts to win out. Obviously if your base health is too low then none of this matters.

So naturally the context matters. A necromancer that relies on a death shroud that scales with health and has rather poor healing and mitigation abilities is going to approach this a lot differently then an ele or engineer who have constant ways of healing and main heal skills that have short cooldowns.

Of course, in pve, it tends to be superior anyways to pick offensive stats because of the massive enemy damage and health making long battles quite a hazard.

Elsewhere, I feel vitality is good for mostly damage builds that need to increase their EHP so they don’t instantly die, but toughness to be better for those that want to be an tanky leading character.

Still, it is very true that if you had to pick for some, vitality would be pretty wise.