Guild Wars 2

It seems that both work equally for survivability?

Would you rather have twice more armor and take twice less direct dmg or take bigger hits but have twice more health?

As far as I’m currently aware:

More toughness:
You get less damage but more aggro.
Meaning that if you want survivability and you use toughness in a group with 100% Berserker’s it will be counter-effective. You’ll be the tank.

More Vitality:
Your health pool is greater, yet your healing power does not scale.
If you had a 13K Health Pool and a 6K heal.
You’ll still heal for 6K when your Health Pool is 16K.
Yet I believe you do not get more aggro. (not sure about this though.)

In short: increasing your vitality would be safer than increasing your toughness if you don’t know the composition of your team.

if however, you’re a Scholar (Elementalist for example) in the team with a guardian, warrior, revenant or anything else bound to have higher toughness…
You can get a bit more toughness and vitality from stats like Celestial without any fear to become the tank..

Vit increases your time to kill (ability to handle burst damage), toughness increases sustain because a lot of the time toughness will increase the effectiveness of a heal at a better ratio than healing power.

If you are looking for most effective health then you need to balance HP and toughness, no vit. You use vit to balance HP with toughness.

Without any ability to heal yourself or for groups to heal you, vit is just better, since you have no sustain. If I had to pick, I would just go for more armor to support my sustaining power.

I run celi though, so I appreciate both. When I’m learning a champs attack patterns, having the extra vit helps me survive the first mistake. My toughness and healing power then allow me to fill back up my HP.