Guild Wars 2

I know that toughness = armor and vitality = max HP. What I don’t know is at what point it becomes more beneficial to boost toughness over vitality, or vice versa. For example, if I want to make my guardian more durable overall and I’m only focusing on one stat, should it be toughness or vitality? I’m having trouble understanding the difference between the two because they both have the same general effect, i.e. increasing the amount of hits you can take before you die.

Several factors need to be determined before this question can be answered.

• Are there more than one damage type in the game? (are spells counted as a different damage than physical abilities?)
• How much mitigation does toughness provide per point?
• Is there a cap on the benefits of Toughness, or does it suffer from diminishing returns?
• Is Toughness value based or percentage based, and does it calculate additively or multiplicatively?

I’m at work so I can’t test to answer these questions, but these would be necessary facts to know before min/maxing length of life.

MoJoe, I am in the same boat with my guardian. The way I understand it works Toughness prevents physical/projectile damage received. It doesn’t stop bleeds, burns, or any other debuffs. You can use Condition Removals to stop the conditional damage. Having high Vitality helps with Conditional Damage. The arrow carts and siege weapons are considered Conditional Damage and not projectile (from beta reading). So hammering down the wall as a guardian, Toughness has no protection at all, having high Vitality gives me a chance to res a fallen comrade or smash the wall down with my hammer.

So I am stacking Vitality, Power and Healing Power right now and some Toughness on my accessories.

Would love to hear other’s point of view.

Best bet honestly would be both. Your Toughness is best suited for burst damage whether it be in PvE or PvP. Vitality on the other hand is best suited for Condition damage since Toughness only affects the ability to withstand direct damage.

I think it would be better to just pump vitality. From what I can tell, toughness doesn’t have much of an effect at all.

My thief just switched from a ranged build to a melee build with his toughness trait maxed and a bunch of toughness on his armor (instead of pumping damage stats) and I honestly didn’t notice a difference in incoming damage. Hyenas in the area still hit for 800+ damage per hit. I still get hit for half my health or more by any group event boss’s attacks (and even some tougher veterans).

I had a similar experience when I switched from a toughness-based guardian to a vitality-based guardian: the damage I take didn’t noticeably change, but my survivability actually went up dramatically from all the extra health.

It’s almost like armor is completely broken and doesn’t do anything, but I find that hard to believe. But on the other hand, a lot of things would suddenly make sense. Whatever the case may be, the lack of effectiveness combined with the fact that it doesn’t affect condition damages makes vitality the best choice by a large margin.

From the calculations i have seen, and to put it very bluntly:

Toughness is best for long sustained low damage, which doesn’t include conditions.

While vitality is best for soaking up burst damage and conditions.

Make of that what you will, but if you are trying to build a defensive survivor build, it will always be best to have lots of toughness and vitality, not just only pumping all your stats into one.

I would imagine it’s a case to case scenario.

Toughness for fast hitting abilities. For arguments sake, let’s assume 2x daggers, reducing fast but smaller damage would be more beneficial for toughness, while having a huge 2 handed hammer smashing into your face, I’d take vitality.

Also, the problem is GW’s isn’t like other games, having high health would benefit a character getting healed a lot, but there’s no real healers.

Picking one over the other isn’t really going to help you, they both benefit against different things, so unless you’re dedicated to fighting a single mob type then just play around with it and see what suits you best.

Keep in mind!

If you have high toughness but lower HP, an incoming heal will be more effective.

draeath.8536:

Keep in mind!

If you have high toughness but lower HP, an incoming heal will be more effective.

and if it overheals? then it’s wasted.

i am cranking up my Ele’s Vitality, because the self-healing skills take awhile to recharge, forcing me to try to run away, so extra HP is always needed.

Izziee.8392:

draeath.8536:

Keep in mind!

If you have high toughness but lower HP, an incoming heal will be more effective.

and if it overheals? then it’s wasted.

There’s no spell this strong in GW2, I think. Even your main heal skill heals for about 30% of your HP, more or less, if I’m not wrong. Higher HP means less % healed, higher armor means a more effective healing.

So toughness + healing power/ regen builds should be pretty good in theory, but they’re weaker against bursts and condition damage than vitality.

stacking one of any stat in this game is a brutal nono.

If you stack all toughness, you’re going to kitten your power, if you stack all power, you’re going to be a glass cannon.

Best way is to put some points into a few trees that you find best suited to your playstyle.

I personally put some points into my power, arms, defensive and discipline tree for Warrior. I still hit fairly hard, and can survive a lot longer than any glass cannon.

As long as I know, in short, it’s like:

Toughness makes you take less damage. Taking less damage values your healing, because you will take less damage to heal; taking less damage and healing more will make your drop drop slower in percentage. But toughness does not increases your HP, you will have less HP and then die easy if have no healing.

Vitality increases your HP, making you last longer when you have no healing. But healing would not take the same effect as if you have toughness, because you will take more damage(then, obviously, you need more healing).

I recommend toughness for longterm battles, you will take less damage and will be more easy to heal and stay alive. It’s more “tank like”. Stable. And even better with you have much healing attribute.

Vitality is good for shortterm fights, you will last longer then you have more time to kill your foe until you die.

And remember CC also helps when tanking. You can survive a little more with a HP build if you can always knokdown your enemy to avoid taking damage. As well as you can also tank even more with a toughness build + healing + CC.

Toughness is better versus raw damage, Vitality is better against conditions. Its as simple as that.

So if you have a build with tons of condition removal, go for toughness. However, if your condition removal is lacking, vitality is your best bet.

Also when you have a ton of hp, and you lose that health very quickly, you will need to heal for more. With toughness, you lose health slowly, and you need to heal less. So its more efficient to heal targets with high toughness

People keep saying that toughness is better against raw damage, but I’ve only seen evidence to disprove that.

I have a thief in his 40’s. My thief went from being totally about precision and vitality in traits, armor, AND accessories, to focusing on toughness and power in his traits and gear. Despite the huge increase in toughness, the difference in enemy damage was seriously minor. So minor, that I can’t be sure that it wasn’t just variations in damage. My guy has 3600 life with all that toughness. The first event boss I tried around my level, a Queen Bee, hit him with an attack (and not like a special charge-up high damage move) for more than 1800 damage. If I took everything in toughness and threw it into vitality, I could probably reach around 6000 hp (5600 just with 20 points in Acrobatics instead of 20 in Shadow Arts), which would at least allow me to survive two hits.

My guardian tells a similar story. My guy was trying to be a tank, going for toughness on almost everything including traits. In his 40’s, I decided it wasn’t working out and respec’d him from max toughness traits/armor/accessories to vitality-based traits/armor/accessories. Again, I didn’t notice a big difference in damage received when going from one extreme to the other. But my health pool was much larger, which translated into much greater survivability in almost every aspect of PvE.

And yeah, I’m talking strictly PvE. Maybe toughness works better in PvP, but I don’t have any experience with that yet.

Toughness improves your heal efficiency

But a nice health gives you more survival

But in the end it depends on your build, i seen a 12k elementalist so bulky that i couldnt belive that he could tank the master npc at heart of the mist

Personaly i always run hp build with berseker in sPvP with 20k on my ranger and 17,5k on my thief and i do just fine, mostly because i rely alot on tons of dodges

When i die, most of the times is after a long fight with tons of condition damage

I found this site incredibly useful .. maybe it’ll help you all out as well:

http://en.gw2codex.com/

For testing I’ve run pure Vit, pure Toughness, and pure DMG all with exotic gear sets. One thing ive noticed, pure dmg will easilly double your effective DPS, while pure toughness will not make you take half dmg, in fact i was disappointed as to mow much dmg it mitigated. As to whether i think Vit is better then toughness, i’d take Vit since i last twice as long in fights with vit over toughness.

Sneakier.9460:

Toughness improves your heal efficiency

I don’t really think so. Toughness might improve healing efficiency when you consider healing amount versus damage dealt by enemies, but the ineffectiveness of toughness means the difference will be minor to the point of not being worth considering.

On the other hand, after taking a good hit or two, there’s a good chance the guy sporting toughness is going to be eating dirt, whereas a guy with vitality would likely still in the fight. I’m pretty sure in that case, the healing efficiency on the vitality guy is infinitely greater. I’m not sure healing even affects downed people.

Thadren Calder.1397:

One thing ive noticed, pure dmg will easilly double your effective DPS, while pure toughness will not make you take half dmg, in fact i was disappointed as to mow much dmg it mitigated.

I noticed it too and I was disappointed too. =/

Ya full defense doesnt offer that wow factor for survivability unlike going full DPS and being amazed when you start doing 10k+ crits.

Assuming you are splitting a fixed number of attribute points between Vitality and Toughness (where the cost for a point of each is the same), and that 1 Vitality = 10 Health, and that damage is proportional to (Power / Armor) then:

The biggest burst you can survive is when 10 * Armor = Health.

You would err on the side of 10 * Armor > Health when you have enough burst survivability to give you time for healing to take effect. In general, if you don’t feel like you are surviving damage bursts, use 10 * Armor = Health to determine whether to raise Vitality or Toughness. If you handle bursts fine, then you could possibly transfer some points from Vitality to Toughness to sustain yourself better.

shingui.4197:

From the calculations i have seen, and to put it very bluntly:

Toughness is best for long sustained low damage, which doesn’t include conditions.

While vitality is best for soaking up burst damage and conditions.

Make of that what you will, but if you are trying to build a defensive survivor build, it will always be best to have lots of toughness and vitality, not just only pumping all your stats into one.

Actually it’s quite the opposite.

Thoughness is your anti burst stat, and Vitality is your anti sustained/condition dmg stat.

But Toughness really seems to be a tick to weak atm, so a big health pool boosts the survive ability alot more than Toughness (which is also completely ignored by conditions).

Generally i’ve found that when in doubt, go vitality. It’s served me much better. Especially in pvp. The amount of health you get from increasing it is surprisingly large. And in pvp the amount of condition damage you receive is almost always ludicrous, especially with bleeding.