Guild Wars 2

Anyone else feel like they stealth nerfed toughness? The people I’ve been talking with seem to agree that it’s just not as effective as it used to be say pre-patch. Was just curious on everyone’s thoughts.

I haven’t noticed any changes to it on my Engineer. As a matter of fact, I noticed the opposite… I was running a toolkit burst spec the other day and curious why I was able to stay up as long as I did in quite a few fights.

I think sometimes you just run into a string of players who have their point allocation just right and it makes it seem like things suddenly got harder, compared to most matches where players are either testing builds or are new and don’t know the mechanics of their class or build yet.

We were doing some thief burst damage testing on 1k, 1.6k, and 2.2k toughness. The mitigation from having higher toughness seemed minuscule to say the least. But hey maybe it’s just me.

Khalifahaze.6045:

We were doing some thief burst damage testing on 1k, 1.6k, and 2.2k toughness. The mitigation from having higher toughness seemed minuscule to say the least. But hey maybe it’s just me.

Interesting stuff. Do you have enough data to post it for a proper discussion? If your findings are right, they certainly make for a rather important change in build set-up. Would love to hear more about this.

Didn’t take screenshots on the damage done after death we were doing it during que downtime. I will do some more and post findings. I personally switched from 1.6k to 1k toughness on my necro and I noticed that I don’t die any faster. It’s my personal opinion that currently vitality > toughness.

If we are to believe the damage formulas derived back in the beta:

Damage = Skill modifier * Weapon Damage * Power / Armor

Then toughness has always scaled poorly at least compared to power. Since Armor is toughness + defense from gear. To double your armor you would need twice as much toughness, as you would need power to double your power.

EatThisShoe.5136:

If we are to believe the damage formulas derived back in the beta:

Damage = Skill modifier * Weapon Damage * Power / Armor

Then toughness has always scaled poorly at least compared to power. Since Armor is toughness + defense from gear. To double your armor you would need twice as much toughness, as you would need power to double your power.

Isn’t Weapon Damage added to power, not multiplied?

He is a necro; necros scale poorly with toughness, specially if they have low sources of healing. The impact of toughness on a high HP necro with poor healing is significantly lower than on a low health prof with powerfull healing. They are called guardians, by the way.

I would also like to see the supported tested numbers. I found a nice medium between high and low armor that I like around 2500.

Rottaran Owain.6789:

EatThisShoe.5136:

If we are to believe the damage formulas derived back in the beta:

Damage = Skill modifier * Weapon Damage * Power / Armor

Then toughness has always scaled poorly at least compared to power. Since Armor is toughness + defense from gear. To double your armor you would need twice as much toughness, as you would need power to double your power.

Isn’t Weapon Damage added to power, not multiplied?

Your ‘attack power’ stat is weapon damage + power. But testing during the beta seemed to indicate that this value wasn’t actually part of the damage formula.

Eduardo.4675:

He is a necro; necros scale poorly with toughness, specially if they have low sources of healing. The impact of toughness on a high HP necro with poor healing is significantly lower than on a low health prof with powerfull healing. They are called guardians, by the way.

I was testing this with a guardian also, he feels the same as I do.

I think toughness is quite useless nowadays its better to have better dps because thieves or haste HB warriors will one shot you anyway

Yeah that’s the general conclusion testing it with 2.1k toughness it takes a theif about 1 extra second to kill me then running with 1k. Better off just giving yourself more damage and less toughness.

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Jszv5.jpg[/IMG] – 1k toughness (8.8k backstab)

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/w2kTr.jpg[/IMG] – 2.1k toughness (5.7k backstab)

As you can see there is a damage reduction with toughness. It seems to be around 3k looking at backstab alone. The thief was still able to kill me in just about the same amount of time. The question is, is it worth it to nerf you damage output so greatly for such a slight reduction in damage.

Eduardo.4675:

He is a necro; necros scale poorly with toughness, specially if they have low sources of healing. The impact of toughness on a high HP necro with poor healing is significantly lower than on a low health prof with powerfull healing. They are called guardians, by the way.

Wouldn’t toughness benefit necros because they have high hp with low armor? It would provide them with a huge a lot more effective life.

Regardless of class, the right balance between vitality, toughness, and healing power will maximize your effective life. That being said, I haven’t noticed a a nerf in toughness.

Khalifahaze.6045:

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Jszv5.jpg[/IMG] – 1k toughness (8.8k backstab)

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/w2kTr.jpg[/IMG] – 2.1k toughness (5.7k backstab)

As you can see there is a damage reduction with toughness. It seems to be around 3k looking at backstab alone. The thief was still able to kill me in just about the same amount of time. The question is, is it worth it to nerf you damage output so greatly for such a slight reduction in damage.

That seems like a significant reduction in damage. The thief may still kill you 1 sec later standing still, but in a live fight it could be the difference between life or death.

While you may see this as a significant reduction in damage I have to disagree. You must take into consideration that to reach 2.1k toughness I have to reduce my own damage output by 50% or more. I just don’t believe that the reduction is significant enough.

Then again this is just my take on it. I only made this post because myself and the people I play with all feel like toughness suddenly became less important in pvp. It just feels like an unnecessary stat to me atm.

It depends on what class you play. From experience and the design, I think the necro is more fitted to a mostly offensive build.

Toughness doesn’t help a necro as much, because all necros have access to deathshroud which improves with vitality (and note that a fixed amount of life-force is drained per second regardless of the amount of toughness). And realize that the Necro is supposed to be “balanced” with consideration for deathshroud which is reliant on vitality. (Edit: I was assuming a playstyle that utilizes deathshroud for long durations. For very short bursts of popping in and out of deathshroud, maybe toughness is still quite useful. Albeit, note that armor does not improve linearly with toughness.)

In contrast, classes like Guardians and Elementalists can make better use of toughness thanks to their abundance of heals.

@ Stormy O
Thanks for the informative post – I never played a necro, so it’s nice to learn that.

@ Khalifahaze
True, that is a big loss of damage for damage reduction. The feeling depends on the class; I play an elementalist with healing and condition damage, so the toughness really helps and the sacrifice in power is ok since I’m burning enemies down with consistent condition damage.

But in relation to the topic, I find toughness has been consistent throughout.

Cirax.9231:

Eduardo.4675:

He is a necro; necros scale poorly with toughness, specially if they have low sources of healing. The impact of toughness on a high HP necro with poor healing is significantly lower than on a low health prof with powerfull healing. They are called guardians, by the way.

Wouldn’t toughness benefit necros because they have high hp with low armor? It would provide them with a huge a lot more effective life.

Regardless of class, the right balance between vitality, toughness, and healing power will maximize your effective life. That being said, I haven’t noticed a a nerf in toughness.

Toughness benefits classes with high healing capabilities. Since toughness reduces dmg, (vitality doesnt), if u have lots of healing, u can delay death easier if you reduce the incoming dmg, vitality is good against spike dmg, but then it fades away, as it’s initial advantadge is depleted by the burst, if against constant dmg, solid healing benefits toughness and makes it do its magic, plus, the best tughness amulets have usually atached high healing power, its intended hidden game design, thats why bunkers live off of shaman amulet. I play a thief,so ill put some of my magic maths here, as food for thought:
The starting point for this dissertation is this formula: Dmg=P*W*SM/A.
So, to theory craft what is better between toughness and vitality, we must generate a scenario where some damage intake is considered; let’s assume 1000 damage per second as the incoming DPS, and let’s use the thief, which is the profession that I am most familiar with. A thief has 10805 base health and 1980 base armor. What makes this thief more survivable? Without any increase in stats and without any healing, this thief will die in 11 seconds, as 11 seconds will do 11000 damage, 11000>10805. Now let’s add the most health heavy scenario: knight amulet set + 300 points in acrobatics + 5 pieces of warrior rune and 1 of sanctuary + maxed practiced tolerance; this will put the thief at 25865 HP, which will take 26 seconds to down. If I chose to go down the toughness path, I will have 5 pieces of melandru, 1 piece of doliak rune, shaman amulet set and 30 in shadow arts, which will put me at 3393 toughness and 10805 HP; according to the formula above, this amount of toughness is supposed to reduce incoming direct damage in 41.64%, or, I will take only 583.55 damage per second instead of 1000. This will make the thief last for 19 seconds. But what happens if we use our heal skill, which we are supposed to do? Let’s take HIS. In the first case HIS heals me for 5240+regen (130*5=650), for a total of 5890, which will make me last for 6 more seconds, now I die in 32 seconds; in the second case (with toughness gear), I will heal for 5240+944+992, for a total of 7176, which will make me last for 12 more seconds, I will die in 31 seconds. The reason for those numbers in the second case is the fact that the shaman set and compassion from shadow arts will add 944 healing power, and this healing power adds 944 points to HIS (1 point for each point in compassion) and makes the regeneration part of HIS tick for 248 per second, as per this formula: Regeneration=130+(compassion/8).

I don’t think toughness has been nerfed at least not that I can detect, but I do seem to see more people running condition based teams. Conditions are not mitigated by toughness, so vitality is better if you’re facing a heavy condition team. The better your healing and condi removal the more powerful toughness is in comparison to vitality. I would suggest carrying around a bunch of amulets with various gems in them and swapping them out until you find a nice balance between damage and survivability. Its hard to theorycraft the best mix and quite dependent on the rest of your spec and the opposing team.

Another problem for sPvP necros is that if you’re going for a condition based spec yourself, there is not good offensive amulet that will give you cond dmg, power and toughness, so you may be taking more of a damage hit than classes with different damage set ups that may take better advantage of defensive amulets. My impression is that Rabid is not a very good amulet for many classes – I dunno someone prove me wrong.

Continuing form my above post:
As it is obvious, at first glance vitality seems to be better than toughness, but as we add the healing factor, the power of toughness emerges victorious, whether it’s because the fight is prolonged and allow for many uses of slot #6, or the offender uses slow DPS mechanics. This is the basis of the bunker builds out there, lots of toughness stacked with blocks/protection, while the shaman amulet does its magic. But there is more: How do they afect time to kill? The way to calculate this is find the relation between ur HP, ur HPS (healing per second) and you dmg reduction. Imagine we wont to know how much dmg we need to kill both thieves in 10 secs. This will give birth to this formula: Needed Damage per Second (NDPS)=((HP+(10*HPS)/10)x100)/Dmg done.
Lets see with max HP: NDPS=((25865+(10*589)/10)x100)/100, which totals 3175.5, 3175.5×10=31755, which is the sum of 25865+5890.
Now lets see with second scenario, max Toughness:
NDPS=((10805+(10*(10*717.6)/10)x100)/58.36, which totals 3081.29, 3081.29×10=30812, since this dmg is reduced in 41.64%, we will have 17981, 10805+7176=17981…I think this concludes the show.

In continuation of my 2 previous posts, lets now give a balanced set to this thief, a soldier amulet, a doliak rune set, and imagine an incoming DPS of 1K.
with a stats allocation like this: 0/0/30/30/10, and using shadow rejuvenation, shadow protector, shadow embrace as traits in shadow arts, vigorous recovery, from acrobatics trait line, plus withdraw as healing skill, we can get something like this:
Damage reduction→ 35.90%, which means only 641 DPS taken;
Health pool → 20745 HP;
Regeneration from shadow protector → 6 seconds at 168 hp per sec, 75% uptime;
Regeneration from shadow rejuvenation → 323 hp per sec in stealth, 50% uptime;
Vigor from combo withdraw>vigorous recovery → 10 seconds every cast, 75% uptime, combined with feline grace allows for 1 dodge every 3.75 seconds whilst on vigor, plus the dodge every 15 seconds from withdraw.
Let’s see the time this guy takes to die:
Assuming the above conditions, and since the heal skill will be used constantly on recharge to fuel vigor, we can use the percentages above to conjure a formula that gives us the average HPS (heal per second)→ HPS=(75*168+50*323)/100+(4110/15) >>> 562 HPS
DPS-HPS>> 79, which means, this guy takes 262 seconds to die, if we don’t dodge … I’m pretty sure there are some guardians out there capable of better than this.