Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been messing around with a build editor trying to find the perfect build for myself. So is toughness actually worth it to gear towards? I mean, not as a major in anyway. But all I ever hear is that toughness does almost nothing and people who have 6k toughness (exaggeration) still get busted down by thieves and such in seconds. So would it be smarter to biff all the toughness and just go more with crit damage/power and boost up my vitality? Instead of giving myself some vitality, power, some crit damage, and toughness? This is what I’ve build in the build generator mainly disregarding toughness.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhMmkbzx4wjDAkHuYCLiCWUeQzM2A-j0CB4LBk+AkEBI5BN9hIasMMIVXRr8Ks6aYKXLqW9CQKgT1VB-w
Let me know what you think. I was trying to give myself some survivablity via hp, and go for power, precision, and crit damage. Note that this is going mainly towards roaming as a person who isn’t anywhere near advanced with an elementalist yet but not bad either.

I’m starting to wonder that too even my burst ele that has 3200 with rock barrier and 18k of hp still gets damaged real hard by a glass thief. Of course I win but the damage that thief does on one hit is still very high. The main survival tool on any profession is to be able to keep healing yourself back up. Without a good amount of toughness your regen/heal would be negated by the higher amount of damage you are receiving per second.

A thief is your hard counter, generally. So I would say that if you were going to fight a thief, better to use more damage and hope to burst him down.

But against other classes, and builds, toughness is vital(ity). Toughness means mitigation. Mitigation means a sustained presence in the fight. Obviously, it’s still dependant on build, but I would strongly advise to take both in equal measure, unless you have a specific reason not to.

IE. you have a tonne of healing skills (s/d) and you run signet of restoration… High toughness would be critical.

Toughness is an interesting stat. To use it most effectively, there are some things that you should know.

- Damage taken = Damage dealt / Armor. This means that armor is the divisor. In other words, the more armor you have, the less effective adding more armor is. You can read more about damage and algorithms here.

- You can generally improve your sustainability by adding more armor and healing power. The general goal is to heal more % of your health while taking less % of your health.

- Condition damage bypasses armor.

- The above points taken into consideration, it’s important to note that heavy burst damage still hurts no matter what. A zerker thief can backstab for 16k against another zerker thief. A zerker thief can still backstab for 7k against someone with 3.4k armor.

- The tooltips show damage dealt against 2.6k armor. (For lack of a better wording) This number, while largely arbitrary, is thought to be a good number to aim for.

- In sPvP, Valk amulet used to be very popular for D/D elementalists. As time went on, more and more people switched to Soldier’s amulet. While valk offers better overall sustain, because it has less vit (and more healing power), it is more susceptible to being bursted down, and because soldiers has more vit, it can handle a barrage of conditions better.

Personally, if I’m aiming for hybrid stats, I don’t bother going higher than 2.6-2.7k armor. Some people are comfortable at 2.4k armor. My current wvw build, with food, has 2066 power, 2596 armor, 86% crit dmg, 15145 health, 36% crit rate, 30% boon duration, 100 cond dmg, and 300 healing power.

It’ll help, but not nearly as much as it helps other professions.

Toughness helps mitigate direct damage, but for an elementalist, it’ll mean just being able to take one more medium strength attack at most. They don’t have stealth or illusions to distract summons and break targeting, and their invulnerabilities are short, so for them it’s still better to rely in movement and endurance to stay alive. Toughness will be like a cushion for a hit that slips by your dodges and evades.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Toughness will be like a cushion for a hit that slips by your dodges and evades.

and vitality is better for that

unless your build is full defense, toughness is a pretty weak stat

Generally Toughness is better than vitality as defensive stat especially if you have condition removel. As ele you need only enough vitality to survive bursts (I like having something around 15k).
The only profession that would take vitality over toughness are necros but even for them i would say that vitality and toughness are only equally good.

And so that you know zerker thieves can kill most professions really fast.

I like to aim for maximum effective HP myself. Your effective HP is the total HP you have multiplied by your total armor rating. It is maximized when HP and armor are roughly equal.

So, for maximizing effective HP on an elementalist, you’ll need to have about 18.3k HP before it is more profitable to invest in toughness than in vitality. So in general, vitality will give you a bigger bang for your immediate buck.

The basic law is What are u building

Tuffness and Vit are important as a ratio of 0.7 to 1

Then again we all dont know what is going to happen with the 18th of march patch with celestial changes.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I like to aim for maximum effective HP myself. Your effective HP is the total HP you have multiplied by your total armor rating. It is maximized when HP and armor are roughly equal.

So, for maximizing effective HP on an elementalist, you’ll need to have about 18.3k HP before it is more profitable to invest in toughness than in vitality. So in general, vitality will give you a bigger bang for your immediate buck.

You’re not taking into account healing or condition damage taken. These two variables, notably healing, heavily complicate the effective health algorithm. Simply armor*health is largely a useless number in and of itself.

Thanks for all the responses! Although I still find it hard to decide because everyone was back and forth on it, lol. Let’s just pray that the ele gets more hp on a patch here soon. I decided to go with vitality as my build in the first link shows. I just feel that my overall crit % is low for deciding to put my stats into that area. Because I know I can get plenty more power from might stacking. I guess my question is should I ditch the zerker gear and just go all soldier for power, vitality, and toughness? Or is having around 30% crit still worth it?

EDIT: Something like this – http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhMmkbzx4wjDAkHuYCLiCWUeQzM2A-jUCBoLBk+AkEBI7pIaslhBp6KalXhVZDT9iIqWKgLWGB-w

The PVT recommendation is a rough statement that’s made with the intent of encouraging you to play tanky initially, and as you feel more comfortable with the class, become more and more glassy.

You don’t need 21k health. Even a new ele should be quite comfortable with 17-18k health. Aim for that. I personally am comfortable with 15-16k health. You want more crit rate, and if at all possible, more crit damage. I’d recommend you aim for at least 28-30% crit rate.

If you purely want to maximize damage, I created a simple calculator that lets you figure out what’s best. It uses the algorithm on the GW2 wiki page for damage as a base line. http://jsfiddle.net/GNEFd/3/embedded/result/

Timebomb’s responses have been pretty good.

If you are new to building, an excellent rule of thumb is about 1600 toughness and about 15K HP. This gives you enough HP to respond to condi-bombs, and enough toughness to heal-up and counter-burst a thief.

Toughness is not a worthless stat as others have indicated, and personally I would rather have more toughness rather than more hp, as timebomb mentioned, because doing so increases the effectiveness of my hp. To understand, play a valks ele for a little bit and then compare it to zerker ele in pvp.

Valks has much lower health (~11-12K), in favor of toughness and healing power, which makes it great for sustained damage and even mild burst. A valks ele has a good chance (with the proper skill) to take down a full-glass thief, as it can withstand the initial burst and its combo of heals can take it from very low to almost full very quickly.

A Zerker ele will have more health, and offense, giving up all toughness and healing power. The health does almost nothing for a zerker ele, which is still pretty much 1-shot by any burst-thief. However, with proper play, a zerker ele can now out-dps Healing Signet (valks can’t). Also, when a zerk ele gets low, all combinations of heals (water scepter 3 + dagger 5 + heal skill) will not take it from almost 0 to full, and as such is not nearly as effective.

Those last 2 responses is what I was looking for. Thank you.

TimeBomb.3427:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I like to aim for maximum effective HP myself. Your effective HP is the total HP you have multiplied by your total armor rating. It is maximized when HP and armor are roughly equal.

So, for maximizing effective HP on an elementalist, you’ll need to have about 18.3k HP before it is more profitable to invest in toughness than in vitality. So in general, vitality will give you a bigger bang for your immediate buck.

You’re not taking into account healing or condition damage taken. These two variables, notably healing, heavily complicate the effective health algorithm. Simply armor*health is largely a useless number in and of itself.

Healing and condition damage are dynamic variables of the fight itself. You won’t always get heals off, and conditions can be cleansed/miss, so you can’t rely on those two factors.

if you go for Fire Traits and put some zerker trinkets, you can still hit pretty hard (10k firegrab/dragon tooth) while being able sensibly take less damage.

if you want to see how PvE and WvW looks like when doing so, I was using a full toughness build here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHG3tUPVrVw

and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBkeli62Lok

in general, I find it a good choice and one of the very few ways we have to stay alive while dealing decent damage.