Guild Wars 2

I get it, the bunker elite spec meta was the worst time in the game’s history lol but there really isn’t a point to toughness now. Blocks and invulns are the way to go.

I decided to mess around with a few characters and see how toughness actually works when it comes to taking a hit. I went really high on the toughness warrior, decent health and toughness was around 3700. I pushed it further by taking RR boosting it up to 4700 for a limited time.

Me and a friend tested this out in an empty room, he took his DH. The burst did almost the exact same damage regardless of if I was running meta berserker warrior or this made up trash lol.

To me, it really shows why the typical build just goes full berserker, yeah the damage is nice, but toughness has no real value anymore. You’re better off just swinging your sword around with invulns with max damage because it doesn’t matter. If toughness doesn’t scale to that extreme, put a cap on it at like 2500-3000 because when I see 3700-4700 toughness I think “wow this can sure take a hit.”

You don’t have to test anything just do that math.

Fluffball.8307:

You don’t have to test anything just do that math.

That’s the problem though, there isn’t really any math. A DH is still hitting normal damage as if it ignores toughness entirely

doesn’t seem to work anymore since hot came out. In wvw u atleast got damage reduction food. But the raw stat on it’s own is useless without protection, damage reduction, blocks, evades and invulnerabilities.

Its just the HOT effect,

99% boon up keep with stability, might, protection, regen and apply some vigor in there and boom toughness/vitality become WAY OP.

Anet says how do we fix it?

Remove any amulet that could potentially give build diversity.

Seriously ive gone back to playing other games for PvP and man i miss core GW2.

yesterday for dailies this mesmer went a good 20 sec straight and didnt take any damage with shield 4-4, dodge roll, sword 2, dodge roll- distortion, dodge roll and at the end of it he blinked away and took a portal some where.

We are in S5 now, why has Anet done anything with Spam Wars HOT edition?

This game has too many classes with active immunities/evasions that also allow them to build extremely offensive.

Warrior, DH, and thief are the prime offenders. They have so many immunity/block/evasion tools that they rarely need to invest on some toughness because of their high baseline survival tools.

This in turn make the classes who do not have such wealth of active immunities be forced into bunker builds to cope with these three classes.

The problem as well is that there is no stat to amplify toughness the same way ferocity and precision amplify Power, or condition damage scales with condi duration and precision procs.

I have to disagree with OP due to my ranger build. A lot of toughness built in and survival is MUCH better when facing hard damage. I can break stun, heal and get back in the fight with 1/2 to 3/4 health until help arrives. Without the toughness I am lucky to if 6 gets cast before death.

Toughness definitely works, and it’s particularly noticeable when used by light armor classes. Yes active mitigation is stronger than passive mitigation, but that’s always been true.

i actually agree with OP i go full glass or Vit on my necro now…. if im going to die its due to chain CC not high damage.

Its true. Toughness is pointless and so is vitality. The power creep is such that the only way to survive is to have op healing and blocks and invulns.

A solution is the reduction in the effect of might, regen and prot in pvp. And addition of the tanky amulets back. This is what they should do

NeXeD.3042:

i actually agree with OP i go full glass or Vit on my necro now…. if im going to die its due to chain CC not high damage.

I believe it to be the truth, an example for me is condition damage. On some classes I can get it as high as 1700 condition damage, some of those condis do not have extended durations but if you get damaged by conditions with that much power behind them, it really hurts. This is why Chrono just runs carrion with scavenging, it has around 1500 which is a very high number for condition damage and it hurts, you can feel what you invested.

With toughness, there is no reason a DH, warrior, thief, etc. should be hitting 6-8k on a heavy class with 4700 toughness lol. If someone wanted to give up other stats such as power, precision or ferocity for vitality and toughness, they shouldn’t be getting bursted as if they were running marauder.

When we had soldier’s amulets, I remember I could rez or stomp people without fear about cleaves.

Even now, I feel difference between paladin and carrion when I rez or stomp.

DrDivine.5378:

NeXeD.3042:

i actually agree with OP i go full glass or Vit on my necro now…. if im going to die its due to chain CC not high damage.

I believe it to be the truth, an example for me is condition damage. On some classes I can get it as high as 1700 condition damage, some of those condis do not have extended durations but if you get damaged by conditions with that much power behind them, it really hurts. This is why Chrono just runs carrion with scavenging, it has around 1500 which is a very high number for condition damage and it hurts, you can feel what you invested.

With toughness, there is no reason a DH, warrior, thief, etc. should be hitting 6-8k on a heavy class with 4700 toughness lol. If someone wanted to give up other stats such as power, precision or ferocity for vitality and toughness, they shouldn’t be getting bursted as if they were running marauder.

Warrior, DH, and thief have incredibly high base damage values on their attacks, and their autoattack damage is among the highest of the classes as well so they can pressure out your cooldowns even with autoattacks unlike a mesmer who tickles you once his shatters are down.

Thief PvE rotation is basically autoattack spam in between bounding dodge because their autoattack DPS is virtually higher than any of their initiative spenders on staff. With daggers the only initiative spender used is CnD to get a backstab in, and the vast majority of the damage is still autoattacks.

If I recall, ANet has always been opposed to toughness and healing power simply because they wanted your survival to be based off of active application of dodges, blocks, and other such abilities.

Ofc, this sounds hilarious considering so many classes now get passive defenses in varying forms, but at least they aren’t persistent defenses like stats. Also, if I’m not mistaken, toughness reduces damage by a % that scales multiplicatively with other damage reduction sources. Toughness itself hits a soft cap at a certain amount and then is likely hard capped past another. I’m sure they meant for you to want to stack toughness with other sources of damage mitigation and HP.

Ya’ll do realize that toughness is a % mitigation and as such scales with damage taken. Any power creep real or imagined is irrelevant because % reductions scale with damage.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-June-23-2015/first#post5217689

This update is what messed up the game balance and diversity. Only reason it seems like damage is out of hand as they placed traits that gave stat increase baseline into gear… but not too often used vitality gear stats or even toughness stats in gear and they got those stats from the trait lines..
A good example of this is necromancer. Before this build the power necro build put traits in deathmagic and blood magic which boosted toughness and vitality attributes each by 200 which allowed them more room to make builds. This is only one example i can think of at the moment to make my argument that removing the stats from the trait lines really messed with things. Another thing with the new trait system is the over abundance of damage increasing modifiers along with this extra stats into Power (from the merger of roughly 300 Power into gear from this trait update) resulting in a double wammy of damage increase from everywhere.
Then when this occurred might was left alone so stacking 25 Might gives out 300 MORE power at a pretty extended duration. I know many wont agree with me but if they wish to keep traits how they are.. they need to cut Mights power/condi increase by probably half or maybe 25% but that’s up for discussion… as well as cut all the damage modifiers on traits by half. (WE got a Mesmer trait Mental Anguish which gives 30% dmg increase… a prime example of over done dmg modifier) Boon durations on skills easily given out… such as rangers resounding timber trait which makes sport of boon durations along with protect me and heal as one and protective ward combo on a very short cooldown period is obscured.

But yah rant over lol just so much that needs to be done but it probably wont.. i Just hope some of these things i said are heard.