Guild Wars 2

i mainly play open world content and mid-tier fractals (21-50), i’m currently using rabid gear on my berserker, but every build guide i’ve seen uses viper or sinister.
should i switch my stats to one of those, or is toughness useful?

Toughness in this game is not very useful. The harder your enemies the lower its overall usefulness.

Yes.

Toughness is what mitigates the hits in the first place. Vitality just gives them someplace to go.

For PvE no, you should pretty much always use a purely offensive stat spread unless you are tanking.

For PvP/WvW Toughness can be useful but it depends on your class. Generally speaking if you are vulnerable to Power based attacks, your priority is Toughness, and if you are vulnerable to conditions your priority is Vitality.

I use a full cavalier armor/trinkets (with scholar runes) with valkyrie weps on my Reaper, since I can get 100% crit chance via traits, so I hit somewhat hard and take less damage, compared to a full berserker I have like 300 less power, but my armor is around 3100ish, with a 22k hp pool and “rise” can lerroy miself in to melee and survive, then add deathshroud coupled with warhorn #5 for crazy life force regen and you have a nasty bruiser for pve maps.

Nemitri.8172:

I use a full cavalier armor/trinkets (with scholar runes) with valkyrie weps on my Reaper, since I can get 100% crit chance via traits, so I hit somewhat hard and take less damage, compared to a full berserker I have like 300 less power, but my armor is around 3100ish, with a 22k hp pool and “rise” can lerroy miself in to melee and survive, then add deathshroud coupled with warhorn #5 for crazy life force regen and you have a nasty bruiser for pve maps.

Special case. It isn’t the norm.

toughness is only useful when staying alive is hard, and killing your attackers instantly isn’t an option

That is very rare in this game, especially since you can just recruit more people for open world PvE

Yes, toughness is useful.

Kyzonu.7504:

i mainly play open world content and mid-tier fractals (21-50), i’m currently using rabid gear on my berserker, but every build guide i’ve seen uses viper or sinister.
should i switch my stats to one of those, or is toughness useful?

In all PVE content (raids being the exception) its not worth it to use any defensive stats (toughness, vitality, or healing power). The reason goes back to the original design philosophy of Guild Wars 2 going away from the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) in an mmo. In order to make this work every class had to have access to tools to both mitigate damage (every gets dodges. depending on class —> blocks, blinds, invuln, etc) as well heal themselves. You’re better off to use those defensive tools and player skill (learn the encounter, watch for attack animations and dodge) than tank any hits.

The second reason defensive stats aren’t worth it is because the original ‘hard content’ (i.e. dungeons and fractals) was based on a design philosophy of massive bags of hp monsters able able to one shot players. The best strategy in this situation is to maximize dps output on all players and end the encounter as fast as possible. The less damage output your group has the longer the encounter lasts and the more swings the big bad gets to take at you. And because bosses hit so hard that you can’t tank a hit anyway you actually hurt your team by trying to play GW2 in as a support or tank type role.

Players very quickly learned the above two items and the game immediately was distilled down into one build/playstyle for all PVE content: do more damage. aka the berserker meta. As the dev’s pushed and prodded to make condi dmg a thing you now have builds use viper or sinister stats – but are still based on the ‘dps or gtfo’ that is hardbaked into the game’s design since launch.

it seems armor is tied with vitality , for example i tried rabid gear and my damage taken dropped by around 12% but then i tried soldiers i believe it was and the damage dropped by 50% ish

Necrotic.7820:

Toughness is what mitigates the hits in the first place.

Dodge roll? Blocks? Blinds(for trash mobs)? These are tools that mitigate the hits in the first place.

Toughness reduces the value of incoming hit, sure. But because their isnt a holy trinity and PvP and PvE share stats/skills damage has to outpace defensives for conquest to work (see last bunker meta), so toughness is, by design, a diminishing returns investment. i.e every additional point of armour gives less and less damage reduction. So outside of corner cases such as raids (which are brand new) and wvw skill groups (which are now playing either BDO or The Division) its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Rezzet.3614:

it seems armor is tied with vitality , for example i tried rabid gear and my damage taken dropped by around 12% but then i tried soldiers i believe it was and the damage dropped by 50% ish

This isn’t true or how defensive stats work in this game.

Let’s say you got hit by a direct damage attack (i.e. not condi tick). If you were all rabid or all soldiers gear you would have the same amount of toughness and its toughness that reduces incoming damage. So the hit would do the exact same damage to you in either set.

Now let’s say you got hit by a condi (say 1 tick of 1 stack of burning). Toughness does not reduce condition damage so the burn tick would do the same damage in either set of armour. Sure with soldiers you have a larger health pool, but the condi is still ticking for the same damage regardless of rabids or soldiers stats (or any stat set for that matter).

reapex.8546:

Yes, toughness is useful.

For managing aggro in a raid, yes. Anywhere else in PvE land: no, it is not useful unfortunately.

Naix.8156:

Rezzet.3614:

it seems armor is tied with vitality , for example i tried rabid gear and my damage taken dropped by around 12% but then i tried soldiers i believe it was and the damage dropped by 50% ish

This isn’t true or how defensive stats work in this game.

Let’s say you got hit by a direct damage attack (i.e. not condi tick). If you were all rabid or all soldiers gear you would have the same amount of toughness and its toughness that reduces incoming damage. So the hit would do the exact same damage to you in either set.

Now let’s say you got hit by a condi (say 1 tick of 1 stack of burning). Toughness does not reduce condition damage so the burn tick would do the same damage in either set of armour. Sure with soldiers you have a larger health pool, but the condi is still ticking for the same damage regardless of rabids or soldiers stats (or any stat set for that matter).

something must ve been bugged then because i w as testing with direct hits only against a rifle npc wich was critting me for 2300-2450 damage with rabid it dropped to about 1900-1800 and with vit+armor damage taken dropped to 1400-1300 crits and 800-700 non crit, this was last year so maybe it was a bug or something got adjusted

Toughness is good against sustained attacks, power enemies and long fights. Vitality is good against burst attacks, condi enemies and short fights. If you want to be tanky you kind of need both. In general vitality is the better stat except maybe on necro (high natural health, low armor) Be careful in PVE though, Too much toughness and you’ll become an aggro magnet, As a rule of thumb in PVE try not to go over 2500 for your armor stat (toughness+defence). In PVE I personally use zerker armor on all my toons with either zerker or soldier’s trinkets depending on how squishy they naturally are.

Yes. Wait until you get to HOT. Mobs hit like Mike Tyson.

Its barely useful, even in HoT. Until you learn the mob patterns in HoT, stack some toughness. After that, back to full glasscannon.

In larger scale events though (which many of the HoT maps are), you’re gonna get one shotted either way, no matter what your toughness is against a high scaled boss from so many people being around.

ie. you have toughness, someone does not. You both have 2300 Hp each.
Boss hits you both for 2500 damage, you take 2400 because of toughness, the other guy takes the full 2500.

You’re both still down.

The ONLY main thing for toughness right now, I believe, is dictating who is the tank in raids

The way to check whether toughness is useful FOR YOU is to run a full zerker build v running a slightly less zerker build with some toughness.

If you can run full zerker without dying, you didn’t need that toughness.
If you can’t then add some toughness via trinkets until you can.
If you still can’t, start swapping in armour pieces until you can.

Personally I run full zerkers on all toons and I’ve got one of each and they all have their elite specs and play quite happily in HoT. Some play better solo than others sure but I take that into account when deciding when and which one to play.

As stated earlier, it’s better to have a quickly dead mob so you can move on to the next one than still be standing there hitting it in ten minutes time. It’s a bit of a waste of your time for a start and you run the risk of something else spawning nearby and coming to join in. Finding the middle ground if you can’t run full zerker is up to you. Trinkets are easy to swap in / out whilst testing.

I think it depends on how you play.

I like to have some toughness in my builds because I’m not the best player to begin with and I don’t want to have to be at 100% all the time. In most situations if I time a dodge badly, or I’m trying to follow chat as well as fight and don’t notice an AoE right away, or I get attacked while speaking to an NPC and want to finish the conversation before I fight back that extra armour will help keep me alive. It means that the only fights where I really have to concentrate and go all-out are the ones that are supposed to be that hard.

Also I like to make my own builds which I know aren’t ‘meta approved’ optimal, max DPS so fights are going to take me longer anyway and it makes sense to plan for that.

(I realise that to some people this is going to sound like I’m deliberately crippling myself and then making it worse in an attempt to compensate, but you’ll just have to trust me that it suits how I want to play the game and the overall result is I have more fun.)

I’m trying out full beserker on my thief and I find I keep having to remind myself that I cannot do things I’m used to doing on my other characters. I can’t run through an AoE, or ignore attacks while I rally a downed player and I have to make sure I’m using my dodges and heal skill only when they’ll be most effective. It’s a lot more work and I’m not sure I’m going to stick with it.

I think most people covered the basics here. If you want to go by simple stat description and base your opinion off of that, sure toughness sounds useful.

On the otherhand, if you’ve spent more than a couple of minutes ingame and actually strive to improve your gameplay (and actually know what toughness does besides reduce damage in small increments), toughness is pure trash for pve (except for raid agro balance).

Now there will be the crowd going: " No no no, toughness reduces the damage you take and it helps." To them I’ll say this: any where, where damage is so high that passive damage mitigation might be interesting, toughness will do diddly squat for your survival. All the other places though, it will put you way up high in the enemy agro meter making you the prime target for all those npcs to focus down first.

It is kind of funny. There is this vicious cycle:

1.) bad player puts on toughness gear to make life easier ->
2.) bad player now does less damage making fights take longer ->
3.) paired with other players and upscaled enemys our bad player is now the prime target from most enemys around taking big chunks of damage ->
4.) bad player stacks even more toughness
5.) go back to step 1, rinse and repeat

If you want more survivability, rework your build and learn how to deal and which attacks to evade from enemys. Best thing you can do long term for your GW2 gameplay.

I use Soldiers for WvW and with that and stealth (on Mes) I rarely die, unless I am seriously distracted, or led into a complete trap.

Not dying often, to me, is far more important than maximising DPS.

In PVE it may be different and I think it’s fair to say that most people expect you to maximise your damage in group PVE content.

Which is partly why I avoid it – especially as I don’t want to lug around two sets of gear and have to switch each piece, one by one, all the time.

I would still stay that it is far more relaxing to take your time and die far less (especially in HoT content), than it is to do more damage, kill things faster, but have to keep waypointing because you die more.

Especially if you suffer from very poor FPS and/or lag, as I sometimes do.

There again, I’ve never really struggled to do decent DPS in games, so maybe that is partly why I don’t mind losing some for survivability.

toughness and vitality will be usefull with nearly same effects. A whole Knight b uild for example will half the amount of damage u take while a whole statsbuild based on vitality doubles the amount of health u have which is stronger against conditions. Toughness is therefore best for builds with high selfhealing effects as the reduced damage is nearly negated by the amount of healing u get.

People often will tell ya that only offensive is good in the game but there are different builds and playstiles that allow u to have a high defense and good offense on the same time and making u better suited for the job (u will get less damage from most sources and have more time to deal damage yourself without the fear of get down easely) Also there are fun ways to play like fighting 30 enemys the same time something not possile with full offensive stats as u will kill them faster but not while fighting all of them at the same time but one after another. Therefore i prefer toughness based builds with aoe characters as it is really fun fighting enemys normally no one would do on there own. ( red and green enemy at begin of the raid are also soloable with toughness (of course just for fun)

In the end u need to find youre own way of playing rather than let others force u to play with the metabuild and stats. If u feel comfortable with it it is the right choice

Cyninja.2954:

To them I’ll say this: any where, where damage is so high that passive damage mitigation might be interesting, toughness will do diddly squat for your survival.

Wyverns. Multiple Mordrem snipers. Multiple anything with immobilize.

Naix.8156:

its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Never say never.

There are situations where defensive stats can be worth the investment.

Gotta love the PvEBros in this thread. On the one hand people complain about being BTFO in HOT zones, and then on the other you get threads like this where people claim that an excellent defensive stat is useless because pros gotta DPS. Your DPS is junk when you are downed or dead. Being able to survive one hit instead of no hits means that one tiny mistake that none of the pros ever make won’t get you killed.

tl;dr: Don’t get toughness if you’re a pro and don’t mind putting other players at risk to rally you when you inevitably get disintegrated. For everyone else, you might consider tanking up a wee bit.

Ashen.2907:

Naix.8156:

its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Never say never.

There are situations where defensive stats can be worth the investment.

Yup. Here’s how that looks if you had cheery picked at least a whole sentence from my post instead of what you did

Naix.8156:

So outside of corner cases such as raids (which are brand new) and wvw skill groups (which are now playing either BDO or The Division) its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Reading is hard, but stick with it. You got this.

Ashen.2907:

Naix.8156:

its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Never say never.

There are situations where defensive stats can be worth the investment.

The investment in toughness is not good, pve does not it much and on WvW anything over 3k-3.2k is lost sacrifice in all stats, the trade to bet on defense stats is awfull compared if player boost for damage outout mostly.

Best defense is kill target, faster than he kills you.

Ticky.5831:

Cyninja.2954:

To them I’ll say this: any where, where damage is so high that passive damage mitigation might be interesting, toughness will do diddly squat for your survival.

Wyverns. Multiple Mordrem snipers. Multiple anything with immobilize.

Any of those things you just mentioned are exactly things I was refering to. Toughness will at best give you 1 extra hit you can take, for a huge damage reduction trade off.

Anything from defensive skills, talents, situational awareness will bring more to the table than wasting gear on toughness. Especially if those mordrem snipers decide to focus you because you decided to have a higher toughness score than every one else around you.

Cyninja.2954:

Ticky.5831:

Cyninja.2954:

To them I’ll say this: any where, where damage is so high that passive damage mitigation might be interesting, toughness will do diddly squat for your survival.

Wyverns. Multiple Mordrem snipers. Multiple anything with immobilize.

Any of those things you just mentioned are exactly things I was refering to. Toughness will at best give you 1 extra hit you can take, for a huge damage reduction trade off.

Dying in two hits is a LOT better than dying in 1 hit.

Anyway, there is gear with defensive stats that you can use without destroying your dps.

Marauder’s is the most notable. Especially for ele, thief, and guardian. You can get 6x as much in health as you lose in damage. ie gain 30% health lose 5% dps. Crusader’s is also nice if you really want to tank it up.

Then there’s carrion, rabid, and trailblazer’s. A condition damage build only needs condition damage and duration to do a lot of dps, leaving you free to use some defensive stats.

My warrior rocked toughness armor all the way through HoT. Heck, I’ve used it on my main warrior since the first year of the game. Rest of my gear is zurker, but for my personal open world play, I fine it awesome for warriors. But that’s just the way I play on my main. The rest of my melee classes use zurker(including 3 other warriors), but he also has zurker armor on him at all times, 2 sets in fact.

Aeolus.3615:

Ashen.2907:

Naix.8156:

its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Never say never.

There are situations where defensive stats can be worth the investment.

The investment in toughness is not good, pve does not it much and on WvW anything over 3k-3.2k is lost sacrifice in all stats, the trade to bet on defense stats is awfull compared if player boost for damage outout mostly.

Best defense is kill target, faster than he kills you.

Depends what your priority is.

If you’re lurking around, trying to jump out and gank people from behind, in WvW, that may well be true.

But if you’re running to the zerg and just trying to get there alive (while avoiding fights), without being one or two-shotted by a ganking Thief, or insta-stomped by their zerg (before you can even stealth) and your main priority, once with the zerg, is to survive, while tagging as many people as possible and have time to escape, when it all goes pear-shaped, then that is obviously a different matter.

In the latter case, the more defence (i.e. both Vitality and Toughness) the better, pretty much.

Certainly, that is my feeling as far as Ranger and Mes go, anyway.

Might be different for heavy armour classes.

It depends on what is attacking you. In most cases, yes, toughness is useful. But if it’s condition damage? No. Effects like burning and poison bypass toughness and go straight to your hit points.

This is a big reason many take vitality over toughness.

Aeolus.3615:

The investment in toughness is not good, pve does not it much and on WvW anything over 3k-3.2k is lost sacrifice in all stats, the trade to bet on defense stats is awfull compared if player boost for damage outout mostly.

Best defense is kill target, faster than he kills you.

Again, depends on the mob. Against basic mobs, this might be true. Against champions and boss level mobs, not so much. I’ll even include decked out players in this equation. In the long-term, stats like toughness, vitality, and/or healing can make a world of difference . . . especially in a long fight.

Remember, your damage ain’t squat if you’re dead.

Toughness is garbage. The DR on % is way too harsh. You can stack up to 2650~ armor but anything above that is literally a waste of stats. Zerker is the only way to go unless they buff toughness. General rule is “kill it before it kill you”

For PVE? Nope. Toughness isn’t that useful. There’s several problems with it.

#1: It scales horribly. The actual stat that reduces damage is armor, not toughness. But, toughness increases armor. So, if you put get 700 points of toughness, you’ll be taking 73% of the damage that you used to. This gives you roughly have of what you would normally expect from a stat (which would be 59% damage).

#2: It is inferior to vitality basically everywhere. The most efficient spread of stats regarding the overall durability of your character is when HP = Armor x 10.. Long explanation short: the maximum area given a set perimeter is a square, and effective HP is an area. If you look at the classes, only one class (necromancer) starts out in the sweet spot. Every other class is very far. For example, the elementalist has 11k health, so to hit the sweet spot where a point of toughness is equal to a point in vitality, you’d need to have invested 755 vitality. Basically, every point you’d get from an armor set anyway.

#3: Killing things faster is always a better option. If you reduce your damage to become more durable, then the enemy lives longer and does more damage in exchange. Because of this, doing 36% more damage is roughly equal to taking 73% damage, because the enemy is only going to live 73% as long. Offensive stats scale quite a bit better than toughness, though, which makes them actually do more damage than toughness would buy. The second advantage is that faster kills = faster loot, which means more money earned overall.

#4: It isn’t even necessary to survive most enemies. You can already beat nearly everything on the overworld just by running up and auto attacking them in glass cannon gear. Should you need to survive, you’re better off going with more defensive utilities and traits than you are changing gear. Remember: gear costs money, utilities and traits are free.

#5: Upscaled enemies will just power through it anyway. Though damage is expressed as a large set of numbers, in reality what you have is a “meter” of sorts. This “meter” is how many attacks by a specific enemy you can take. When fighting upscaled enemies, you’d be amazed how many of them can do 1.5x to 2x your entire HP bar. Here, taking 73% as much damage doesn’t even buy you a single strike. Or even a second strike, if they take off 90% of your health.

#6: It doesn’t do anything for conditions or fractional health damage. When the priest of Grenth drops you from the roof, the armor does nothing.

Cyninja.2954:

Ticky.5831:

Cyninja.2954:

To them I’ll say this: any where, where damage is so high that passive damage mitigation might be interesting, toughness will do diddly squat for your survival.

Wyverns. Multiple Mordrem snipers. Multiple anything with immobilize.

Toughness will at best give you 1 extra hit you can take,

Yep. In the first two situations you face damage fields that will 2 shot you without toughness or vit. That means if they overlap fields you will get killed. With toughness that means you’ll survive.

And this is especially true against Legendary Wyverns, where DPS isn’t the primary concern.

Against multiple enemies with immobilize, you either have to sacrifice DPS for multiple condi cleanse skills or eat all their immo attacks and then cleanse, which is where toughness or vit helps.

DGraves.3720:

Toughness in this game is not very useful. The harder your enemies the lower its overall usefulness.

I retract this comment since I have to solo Sorrow’s Embrace. Toughness is great.

Naix.8156:

Ashen.2907:

Naix.8156:

its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Never say never.

There are situations where defensive stats can be worth the investment.

Yup. Here’s how that looks if you had cheery picked at least a whole sentence from my post instead of what you did

Naix.8156:

So outside of corner cases such as raids (which are brand new) and wvw skill groups (which are now playing either BDO or The Division) its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Reading is hard, but stick with it. You got this.

As the OP had pretty clearly excluded the content you mentioned, making your reference to such irrelevant, there was no point in addressing it. Add to that the fact that defensive stats can be (not will be) worth the investment in every bit of combat oriented content in the game and your inaccurate reference to limited circumstances becomes further worthy of discounting.

But hey, if you need help reading or understanding starting posts in threads such as this so that you can make accurate, and relevant, responses, feel free to shoot me a PM. Happy to help.

Naix.8156:

reapex.8546:

Yes, toughness is useful.

For managing aggro in a raid, yes. Anywhere else in PvE land: no, it is not useful unfortunately.

There are more game modes than just pve.

High toughness on a low health pool class will make you a monster magnet. You are very likely to catch aggro from pretty much everything in sight in PvE. learn to deal with that or you will not be able to use the benefits of high toughness.
Toughness is probably used best in WvW, when you can get in AC fire or AoE fields and you have to escape (because you won’t have double dodge & blocks/evades ready).

I agree that a majority of builds in PvE are functional for the majority of content a person faces. However, there are champions and whatnot that either hit like a truck or have way too many hitpoints to dps down before they squish you if you’re running a glass-cannon build (such as all zerker).

It’s that situation that I often structure my builds around… if the trash mobs and veterans don’t matter, then it’s the things that do matter that I consider when trying new builds.

Because of all that, yes I do consider toughness. Yes, I like using it in many situations, especially paired with healing power. Many of my builds have toughness as a primary or near-primary stat.

For my play style I don’t care how long it takes me to kill something. What matters to me is that when the dust settles I’m the one victorious. And, for the situations when that really counts, glass cannon builds don’t work (at least for me).

~EW

P.S. I’ll also admit that I get a bit of schadenfreude when I see other players going down around me during events and world bosses, yet I’m still at 3/4 hp or higher.

P.P.S If you think about it, having some players with higher toughness on the field who are ‘aggro magnets’ and can take hits means that the glass cannons on the field stay up and killing stuff for longer…. definitely a win-win all around, I think.