Guild Wars 2

I am a bit confused about Toughness: sometimes i just get destroyed by some skilled players, from 100% health to 0 in 6 or 7 seconds before i realize what the hell has happened to me lol, no matter if i have zero or 1200 Toughness. So looks like that Toughness doesn’t help my survivability at all. Is it completely useless stat or what?

I am a returning player btw. I played Warrior in PVP and was doing (tanking) well about 2 years ago. I was able to survive for quite a long time 1vs1 and kill opponents slowly, but now it seems that Warriors have zero defense. I can get much better results on my Necromancer. At least i can stay alive much longer.
I don’t have HoT yet, but i hope this is not the case?

What have they done to Toughness and more defensive oriented Amulets? I can’t find those Amulets with Toughness and vitality any more … How can a Thief or some other Warrior sometimes completely destroy me in a matter of seconds? I have no idea how to react on such a huge burst. That’s why i take 1200 Toughness to help me survive longer but it doesn’t help at all.
Sorry for english …

In your chat box there is an option for a combat log. Read it and figure out what’s killing you. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s condi damage that ignores toughness, or physical damage that is affected by toughness. The important thing is you don’t know why you’re dying so you’re just eating all the damage.

I feel it really depends on healing/cc removal. I personally run the demolisher amulet over marauder on engi since they have good base hp and lots of healing. Guardian on the other hand has like 11k base hp and if you marauder is the most damaging thing you can run without getting one shot.

You can also run cavelier/valkyrie on some necro builds, but there’s no point in doing that in solo q

Toughness is useful if you have enough skills to clean conditions.
But after every kind of statistic, the best way to protect yourself is Stealth, Evade, Block and Immunity skills. Or basicly everything that Prevent you from take damage. Also a good mobility to flee is good.

There’s a powerful Guardian Build that is called “Full Block” and essentially is based on use all the defensive ability of the Guardian (Dragonhunter) plus the powerful damage of mender amulet (Power-Healing-Vitality-Precision), that is basicly the new “Cleric”, but with no toughness and only a little fo vitality, but with much more damage.
They have low hp and no toughness, but they can survive to everything, simply why you will never be able to hit them and they have a passive/active self heal that make them able to heal with more or less any button thei press. passive heal by Virtue 2, Regen, dodge heal, simbol heal, meditations heal, buff other players heal, block heal. Sometimes I think that even a player fart is a heal for the guardian ingame.

I can also make you the example of the Necromancer, that have the higher HP of the game, with also the Life Force that virtually increase your hp pool. I play a necromancer and I can say that any good dps can kill me in 10 seconds (sometimes lesser) if focus me and have his skills ready. That’s why the necromancer don’t have Defensive skills. No block, no evade, no immunity, no powerful heal traits or skills. That make a class with (necro, forgive me) virtually 40k HP die really fast and a class with 15k die really slowly.

About the Amulets, ANet chose to remove the Tank amulets to reduce the amount of Bunker builds from the game. Now the only classes that can be “bunker” are the one that have a high amount of defensive skills (like the Guardian) and there’s a lot of classes that can kill you in 5 seconds without problems.

About the Warrior, there’s some builds that you can try, but none of them are a Bunker build. Actually there’s a build that use mace/shield and longbow to inflict a insane amount of condition while in Berserker and is at the top of the class tier. But without HoT you will be unable to use it why you need the Elite Traitline Specializzation.

The best bunker build out of HoT is the Engineer bunker/decapper build, if you want to try. But it’s not good like the other builds.
That’s the old warrior build, still more or less good:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Warrior_-_GS/Hammer

If you like the Necromancer playstyle, you can try that build:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Necromancer_-_Vanilla_Condi_Necro
It’s the old build, the best one for necromancers before HoT. Boon corruption and condition damage. Really good to Team fights, really bad for 1vs1.

I do think this game has a serious defensive balance problem, and their recent trend of amulet manipulation is just a cheap patch on the problem. The issue is, if they give players enough Toughness to survive extreme burst, then it allows bunker builds that can become impossible for even two concerted DPSers to drop. On the other hand, if they reduce Toughness options to the point that perfect bunkers become impossible, then it means that many builds just implode when a glass cannon sneezes in their general direction, much less in a 4v4+ pile-up.

They need to figure out a better way to make it so that

1. It’s nearly impossible to kill another player in under ten seconds, no matter how much damage you pile onto him, so that ever player has a chance to pull something out and either escape or recover, while

2. it’s nearly impossible to survive a 1v2 for more than a minute or two, or a 1v3 for more than about thirty seconds or so, so that the match can move forward even with the bunkiest bunkers available.

I think maybe they need to have more “when you practically die, a miracle occurs” traits, and/or reduce the CD on the existing ones so that they almost always go off.

Remove some bunkers after a “bunker meta” of 2 years isn’t a bad thing, the problem now is that you can find players able to burst you down in 6 seconds if you are a necro without LF or have your defensive skills in cooldown.

There’s a large amount of things done in the right way, but still the skills are unbalanced and grant to some classes 15+ seconds of total immunity with a insane dps and to others only the dps or even nothing of them, compared to the others.
Actually a berserker DH can inflict a insane amount of damage with 10 seconds of directional Block (Virtue 3, traited and double activated) while still able to hit you for a incredibly high damage, with a heal that block for 2 sec (but yes, not everyone use it), a elite that make him invulnerable for 3 seconds and recharge the virtues and a Shield that Block AoE for 4 second all the projectiles and make him harder or impossible to hit with melee weapon skills.

The problem of that game balance is that, for example, tha guardian have to be the main tank of the game by class definition, and a large amount of skills protect or heal him, following that trend. But that skills grant him now not to be only able to become immortal if used into a total block build, but also make him insanely hard to kill still if using a dps setting.
If they was able to defend with only low damage (like the old support build) there’s not a single problem, is only a role well builded. But if a pure dps class can be untouchable for 15+ seconds, while half of the tome is able to fight, that make it OP.

Toughness use to be good, but not now. It doesn’t really make a difference. I’ve tried just to be curious.

With Dragon Hunter I ran knight amulet, signet of judgement with perfection inscriptions (12% dmg reduction), hunter’s fortification (10% dmg reduction with no conditions on you), scrapper rune, shield with honorable shield trait (250 toughness while using a shield) and retributive armor (250 toughness every time you block, it doesn’t stack).

So I had crazy physical damage reduction and guess what? I still melted like butter. Damage is so insanely high at this time that I can’t recommend investing in toughness. Its no longer worth it.

Thank you very much for all your replies:) Looks like i need to focus more on offensive playstyle.

I tried (for fun) on my necro a similar way to stay alive a little longer.
I tried that build:
-Death magic with Putrid defence (-10%damage from poisoned foes) and Corrupter’s fervor (up to +300 toughness and 20% condi damage reduction)
- Soul reaping with marks that generate LF, Spectral skills that last longer (then my Spectral armor grant me 9 sec of protection and LF recharge) and breakstun when enter in Shroud
-Reaper (basic -10% damage from chilled foes)
With a lot of Weakness spam with the corrosive poison cloud and offhand dagger (grant 50% damage reduction and no critical, then the enemy inflict onlky 25-33% of damage when hit me if is a direct damage why don’t crit, if the weakness proc. Then is more or less a 66% damage reduction).
Then there’s Protection that reduce by another 33%.
They don’t make a single damage reduction, they reduce a little by a little, making the enemy still inflict a minimum damage.

Resoult: The practice mobs in pvp area inflict me 750 damage instead of 2800, when the weakness hit. It’s a Huge damage reduction!

Effect in sPvP match against other players: i melt just a little slower than before, but not even so slower. Warriors have Resistance up all time, making my strategy useless and there’s so much condiclean that is hard to keep them on some enemies. Also the dps classes inflict so much damage that have a 75% of (occasional) damage reduction don’t work at all. Expecially why the necromancer is a free hit for the enemy why don’t have any single defensive skill.

The only things that work in that game is Block, Blind spam, Stealth and Invulneravility.
if you can spam these things you don’t need to play a bunker, you’re already a bunker, still with a berserker amulet.