Guild Wars 2

I read somewhere somebody’s analysis that said that to mitigate the most damage, health and armor should be balanced at 10:1 ratio. Following this mostly leads me to taking no toughness at all and as much vitality as I can get, because getting better armor as I level up scales up the armor faster than I can get vitality. The only class I have that needed to add toughness to make the ratio was warrior.

I wanted to check if this was still (or ever was) good advice. I’m not sure I understood the logic even when I read it the first time, but it seemed legit. The trouble is there are a lot of self-appointed experts that either aren’t right, aren’t right for me, or can’t be bothered to update their advice when the game changes.

I’m doing 100% PvE at the moment, but have 3 chars to level 80 (warrrior, ranger & ele) and need to start doing dungeons to get exotic equipment — the level 80 areas are tough for me to solo with the builds I have.

Thanks for all constructive opinions

i go for toughness rather than vitality,
rather than having a huge pool of life but squishy, i’d better have a small pool but persistent

Mind you, I haven’t done the math, and I’m no expert on the topic, so with that said:

I see an immediate problem with announcing any sort of golden ratio for armor/toughness, largely because they’re only part of the total equation. If we’re talking about survival rates within a vacuum then, sure, you can maximize survival at a certain ratio. But that doesn’t take into account a lot of other mitigation factors such as healing, condition removal, endurance regeneration, blocking, blinds, and control abilities.

If you want to maximize your character’s survival, you have to gauge how the most applicable of these factors will blend together. For instance, skill sets with multiple applications of healing generally benefit more from high armor than high health pools. But high-armor, low-hp builds also necessitate multiple condition removals to not get wrecked by dot stacking… et cetera.

It’s probably not that “10:1 vit:armor” is bad in concept. As a launching pad, it’s likely a good place for a lot of people to start testing. But you shouldn’t consider it definitive in any way.

I would much rather go for toughness than vitality too. Having large pool of health but without any or with low damage mitigation is not most efficient way to go. I prefer to have as much toughness as I can afford with current build because that gives me damage reduction and much more efficient heal (its much more efficient to have smaller health pool which heal skill can fill up to 3/4 and to have a lot of damage reduction then to have large pool that you can fill to 1/4 and still receive a lot of the damage due to lack of toughness).

I prefer Vitality over Toughness because I find that I often die due to degen from conditions like Burning, Bleeding or Poison which Toughness doesn’t seem to help against whereas the extra health from Vitality certainly increases your survivability against both types of damage.

I know Toughness doesn’t mitigate falling damage either but I’m not sure if falling damage is fixed or based on a percentage of your health, if it’s the former that means Vitality also increases your survivability in jumps.

Also most of the time I die to direct damage the source of that damage is a very powerful attack which unless dodged, will 1-hit or 2 -hit anyone anyways, which leads me to believe Toughness, while it certainly makes a difference, is somewhat overrated. This is based on my PvE experience mind you, I’m not much of PvPer but I imagine Toughness is more useful there by comparison.

You should also take into account your class mechanics, for example traits that consider health in %ages. They tend to trigger/activate at very low or high thresholds, and vitality affects how large the margins are between those thresholds and death/full health.

If to keep that ratio you have to stack vitality then you’re probably an elementalist, a thief or a guardian.

I saw the math behind this reason and that is the simple “rule”.

The complete one consider also the amount of health that you can heal (adding it to total health) and the % of condition damage that you think you’ll take in the area you’re going (removing it from the total health).

The point of the formula is that vitality= 10 health points and the damage you take from an attack is inversely proportional to the amount of armor.
Double the armor is the same as double health, so you can compare them finding out that if the health is less than 10 times the armor i gain more hp from vitality because the equivalent hp from toughness are less than 10.
If the health is MORE than 10 times the armor 1 point of vitality is still 10 hp but with one point of toughness the equivalent hp you gain are more than 10 hp.

Low hp class like eles, thief and guardians will surely benefit from vitality more than from toughness, (and vitality gives more resistance to condition damage also) so if you use one of these class and you have to choose between toughness and vitality choose vitality.

With medium hp classes like mesmer, ranger and engineer you have to balance it around also considering the eventual condition damage vs normal damage ratio.
Warrior can also be grouped with medium hp classes because of high hp pool and high armor.

With Necromancer (high hp pool, low armor) you’ll likely benefit more from toughness rather than vitality.