Guild Wars 2

Been playing and enjoying ele class since launch, but having troubles figuring out which one of ‘toughness’ or ‘vitality’ gives me the most survivalbilty bang for my buck.

Any thoughts?

The answer that you’re not going to like is “both”.

Vitality: extends your HP bar
Toughness: makes each point of HP worth more.

It’s not going to be about stacking a ton of one or the other, but finding an efficient mix of the two, especially since condition damage ignores defense altogether.

I’d say at lvl 80 you should get toughness up to 1100-1300 depending on how much trait points you have on Earth in your build, and leave all the rest for vitality. But generally this class can die horribly in any situation…

It really depends on a number of things.

Is it condition damage (vitality is better) or is it normal damage (toughness is better)?

Does your gear favor one or the other (superior rune of undead)?

Healing historically has always favored toughness (mitigation in other games) so do you have a support teammate or healing heavy build?

also toughness seems to suffer from very rapid diminishing returns.

as the lowest armor wearer (light) this means we get a little more mileage from points in toughness…

but we also have the lowest base HP, so vitality is necessary to move us out of certain “danger zones” for damage.

each hundred points of toughness gives 5 down to1.5% damage reduction (or at least appears to, these numbers are merely guidelines)

to survive fairly good, i have found that you want at least 2100 armor, this gives about 15% damage reduction.

from there getting your HP to over 15k is a very good idea. (playing catch up with other professions base numbers really…)

you can get those values without too much work,(e.g. either full points in earth or a couple of toughness jewelry for the armor ) and they are numbers you should try to aim for… any less and you can be rightly called “glass” +/- the “cannon”

HOWEVER there is another thing to consider on the elementalist…

we can get protection pretty good… which is 33% damage reduction.
if you build in a way to keep protection up as much as possible (auras, cantriping, team synergies, boon duration etc.) then you can pretty much ignore toughness if you wanted… (don’t. still aim for the minimums i believe are good, cause they you become warrior level tanky)

Imo you should push your life to ~16k and after that focus on toughness if you need more survivability. Less than 16k life is… dangerous.

Toughness/HPS builds are boss.

Stack toughness with regen/soothing mists/heal on cast signet, win. Not something I personally run, but it is quite effective.

Both with power (aka Soldiers Amulet). Run 30 points in water for lots of condition removal, and regen/vigor on cantrips. Run 2-3 cantrips. I run with 2500 toughness, 20k HP, and 3100 power.

I’ll try not to give you the generic both answer, so here’s how it works. 100 Toughness prevents about 34 damage per 1000hp you lose (saw the calculations on reddit, may want to double check). With an ele’s 10k base hp, that would mean 100 toughness is about equal to 340hp, or 34vitality. Of course, if you heal a lot, that would mean toughness comes into play again, but that would require a lot of healing. Assuming you heal once each battle for 5k hp, that would make 100 toughness worth 51 vitality. That means for your average ele, vitality is worth more than toughness. The worth of toughness will increase as your vitality and healing increase (because these things allow you to take more damage). When the damage you take each battle is around 30k, then they are equal. When it is more than 30k damage, toughness is more valuable. But again, for general pve, battles and mobs, vitality is better.

Toughness also doesn’t work on condition damage. As a general statement, vitality is superior for most classes and most builds in most circumstances.

That said, it depends to a large extent on what your build is. For example, if you have a water/arcane build that is heavy on clearing conditions and healing, toughness is weighed more highly because you don’t have to worry about condition damage nearly as much.

i am sorry to possibly cause offense, but i believe that within that reddit thing itself, it was proven that that calculation was false…

it doesn’t make sense just from in game stuff…

go hit the big golem verse the light one in the mists… they only have 200ish toughness difference (its armour, but armor is defense {from gear} + toughness, the golem i believe have no stats, so just provides a stationary benchtest against the different armor types)

the difference between the heavy and the light is at least 20 damage per attack… usually alot more.

a damage formula that gets closer to what numbers get reported (but may not be correct and i prefer to simply use it as a guideline) is

(power*weapon strength*skill bonus power thingy)/1000(defense+toughness)

no idea if that is right, but it so far gives numbers that seem so…
so using that as a guideline
varying levels of toughness give increased percentile damage reduction, with rapid diminishing returns…

2700 armor is about 33% damage reduction. (over none… or rather baseline {which is about 1800 armor- the minimum armor we can have, rounded down)
2100 is about 15%

i find using the idea of choosing how tanky i want my build to be in those terms helpful

about 15-16K hp with 2100 or more toughness is fairly survivable.

for ALL professions, the answer is both

you want to balance all building around what you are trying to achieve.
toughness will give you more bang for your buck compared to vitality… EXCEPT
1) doesn’t work against conditions
2) as you start stacking it, it becomes less and less effective

these two things are what encourage the idea of having both.
you need enough HP to survive things, and enough toughness to protect that HP. (stack 30K HP and no tough and watch a thief kill you in one heartseeker spam rotation)

Yeah, but on an ele there is very little excuse for letting a thief get a full heartseeker spam rotation off.

I prefer using Toughness in PvP. I’ve tried the Knight’s Amulet and got over 20k hp, but that HP was gone way to fast and your heal simply can’t keep up with the amount of HP it has to restore.

Toughness you can get in trouble against heavy condition builds yes, but with the current FOTM being quickness Warrior/Thieves I’d say you have to worry more about direct damage than condition damage.

i prefer water traits to earth, If you want a condition build go earth , if you want a survival build without conditions go water.