Guild Wars 2

Many players seem to misunderstand the relationship between toughness and vitality, which leads them to make poor gearing choices when thinking about survivability.

When you reference your ability to survive an encounter, what you’re really talking about is your effective health pool or EHP for short. I’ve created a spreadsheet that will help you calculate what stat increase (toughness or vitality) will yield you the best mileage in increasing your survivability.

Most of this is based off of the excellent post by Beiufin on the Team Legacy forums. Credit to Beuifin for explaining this so well. If you want an in depth understanding of the math, I suggest you check out his post – it’s really great. Some of it is summarized below:

In addition to allowing for custom calculations, I’ve also included some examples of EHP optimization for base stats and accounting for one or two heal cycles during a fight. In order to do this I had to make some assumptions about the most popular healing skills used by each profession, but if you want something more specific to you just use the custom calculator at the bottom.

Instructions:

Download the spreadsheet. Open it up and input your characters HP, armor, and heal ability value (the amount of healing you get when you use your #6 ability). If you want to be more in depth and account for other healing sources (like heals from traits/sigils/runes) just figure out how much you estimate that healing to be and add it to your heal skill value before plugging the number in.

Now you just need to make sense of what you’re looking at. The golden ratio you’re aiming for is 1:10 armor to hp (not toughness:vitality). The sheet will tell you what your current ratio is and what stat you should add to get to that golden ratio. Achieving the optimum ratio means you have maximized your EHP and that is the limit for your survivability in that sense. Once you get there, each point of toughness and vitality is equal so you should aim to add both stats evenly beyond that point.

If it tells you to add just 1 to any stat, that means you’ve hit the golden ratio. The choice of whether to optimize your EHP for base stats, one heal per fight, or two heals per fight is entirely up to you. You have to make a guess as to which situation feels right. Do you think you only get off one heal per fight? Then optimize your EHP around that.

I hope this helps! Fellow theory crafters, feel free to double check my math/formulas. I think it’s accurate, but would appreciate your input. Thanks!

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Hi there, nice theory you built here.

Before reading the following comment, I want to say that I do enjoy theory crafting and this seems quite researched.
If you’re speaking of sPvP I don’t see how you can change the ratio but then again I’m a complete noob in that matter.

I do not understand the idea of golden ratio you speak of:

1. If your objective is to maximize EHP, then your aim would be to wear a stuff that gives you both Toughness and Vitality. Wearing any other set would require it to give enormous amounts of both those statistics.

2. There’s only one stuff with such statistics (by one stuff I mean one set of statistics: there is no difference between Karma set and WvW set). Hence your survivability is maxed when wearing it.

3. Is your choice only based on Jewelry then ?

As a Guardian I’ve chosen Survivability to run (most) dungeons (like most people I guess) and I currently have:
3095 Armor
16825 Health
For a total EHP of 52 millions (without jewels since I don’t wear full survivability accessories)

Given my stuff (Karma/AC set/WvW + 6 Dolyack Runes) I do not see how to get higher than this, since trying to improve the ratio will decrease the total amount.
If there’s something I’m missing please enlighten me.

Could i utilize this, as my playstyle is aiming for cond.dmg./toughness/healing?
One problem is that there’s no armor with these stats so i can’t focus on vitality with my accessories.

Hey guys, great questions:

For maximum EHP you would be gearing for toughness vitality all the way, but obviously you have to weigh this against your offensive desires. Most people will be building for offensive stats too, not just the defensive ones.

So can you use this sheet if you don’t want to invest in all toughness or vitality? Yes, absolutely.

The way to think about it is this: whenever you are considering which defensive stat to increase, consult the spreadsheet. Based on your current character stats it will tell you which you should invest in.

So for example I use primarily power, precision, crit damage on my WvW set. I still want to invest some stats toward survivability, so my weapons and jewelry give me a little flexibility there. I take my stats, put them in the sheet and the sheet tells me whether I would be better served by points in toughness or vitality. That’s how you should use the spreadsheet: as a guide for how you invest your next defensive points, not necessarily as a requirement that you invest all your points defensively.

Greatly appreciated.

I’ve been on the hunt for good vit vs. toughness math crafting. I’m running a heavy vit/toughness build and therefore it’s good to know when I’m sitting at a 1:10 ratio and can invest ‘extra’ points into crit.

Sorry but can you upload that file to a website that isnt dodgy as kitten, completely undermines this topic.

I have difficulty accepting the golden ratio theory when this just seems to make more practical sense.

Toughness
For every 1 toughness, incoming damage gets reduced by about .305 (I rounded down)

Example: let’s say you have base 20,000 health, and the enemy can do 1000 damage per second. You die in 20 seconds.

Another example:
Base 20,000 hp and 1000 damage per second incoming.

1388 vitality, 1159 toughness. Or 13,880 additional hp and 353.495 damage mitigated. So 33880 health, you die in 52 seconds.

1388 toughness, 1159 vitality. Or 11,590 additional hp and 423.34 damage mitigated. So 31590 health, you die in 54.78 seconds.

Of coarse the .305 mitigation ratio is now discovered to be .333 ……Not sure if that is because further test brought a more detailed number, or if there were slight changes in mitigation sense release.

Umm, as far as I know, toughness doesn’t mitigate condition dmg.
So using this kind of theorycrafting for sPvP or WvW is completely pointless.

I’m sure the math behind this is great if you take only normal damage into consideration.
Other than that, your survivability depends on which fights you pick and how well you do in them.

Survivability is not as simple as your chart implies. Mainly because you can’t increase one stat without increasing other things. For gear, each piece comes with three attributes. For traits, increasing one attribute increases another and gives access to trait slots.

Unless you consider the other things you get with the attributes you boost, you aren’t going to be producing good builds.

Robique.8279:

Umm, as far as I know, toughness doesn’t mitigate condition dmg.
So using this kind of theorycrafting for sPvP or WvW is completely pointless.

I’m sure the math behind this is great if you take only normal damage into consideration.
Other than that, your survivability depends on which fights you pick and how well you do in them.

I agree. That is why I favor condition removal with my toughness. For example my engineer uses fire forge trigger and my elixir gun does AoE removal of all conditions every 9s with fumigate, with two uses of super elixir. One use every 16s (removes 1 cond AoE, light field, initial heal on cast +10 pulse heals) and a second use of super elixir on a 20s recast with kit refinement. If that doesn’t cleanse conditions well enough, then I don’t know what will