Guild Wars 2

I’m using Flamethrower build (before that Grenade’s with Carrion, but switched over to Rabid and stayed with that) due to people saying Rabid is better, but I don’t see why because Toughness is kinda “meh”, but Carrion has Vitality, which 5% gives you more condition damage. So why is it exactly the reason?

Because Toughness is againts power damage with is our weakness. We can clean condi by many ways so we dont really need so much Vitality.

Thank you sir. c:

Uhm power damage is strong against anything without defense , and C.dmg anything without cleansers…i wonder what made you say its Engie’s weakness when we have soooo many ways to mitigate it

Well maybe weakness ist right word but we still better handle condi than direct . Ofc we can get defensive abilites and handle it really well (with diferent gear and diferent builds) but reason why you take Rabid is deal huge condition damage and you use it mostly in HGH/condi builds where you must sacrifice all defense abilites for damage/selfsupport ones.

Because player prefer toughness much more over vitality without understanding the maths behind. In most fights, vitality is more effective then toughness – only long fights (30sec +) profits more from toughness.

Make your own decision about it – this game is so instransparent that ppl start creating their own philosophy about how things work – not doing maths and not all along true.

Precision procs.

Forestnator.6298:

Because player prefer toughness much more over vitality without understanding the maths behind. In most fights, vitality is more effective then toughness – only long fights (30sec +) profits more from toughness.

Help us understand the math behind then. I`m Interested from a WvW point of view where a fight Rarely lasts over 30s.

If you can cleanse all damage condition you receive, then you can go full toughness. If you can cleanse most of them but not always the damaging ones, get some vitality. If you have terrible cleansing, then…. you’re doing it wrong, and more vit probably won’t help you.

It really depends on what else you are running. Personally I run carrion because I like the direct damage.

However, with engineers rabid can make some sense. You get less durability out of it, because the engineer needs vitality more than toughness. However, the engineer has some really good procs (4 second burn, 30% for 3 second bleed), and the flamthrower/grenade kit dole out so many hits at once that the procs fire off like mad if you have the precision.

More for the precision. Sharpshooter and Incendiary powder. Power does not affect condition damage.

Toughness vs vitality matters more if you have some sort of healing/regen/large amounts of condi cleanse.

Precision

Why pick one over the other? Mixing different statcombinations and balancing it all out can turn out way better then going all out on one statcombo.
It just requires more work (and gold) because of experimenting.

rogerwilko.6895:

Forestnator.6298:

Because player prefer toughness much more over vitality without understanding the maths behind. In most fights, vitality is more effective then toughness – only long fights (30sec +) profits more from toughness.

Help us understand the math behind then. I`m Interested from a WvW point of view where a fight Rarely lasts over 30s.

Okay I try. Not that easy for me because english is not my native language.

Let’s do a simple example: If u add 1000 toughness to your basic stats, this will increase your armor which means -33% less damage taken (according to R= 1- T0/(T0+ T) with R = multiplicator in damage formula, T0= toughness before, T= additional toughness).

But if you add 1000 vitality to your basic stats, your health is increased from 15k to 25k which means 66% more effective health)

So, not including healing, vitality is at first twice as effective then toughness. Of course this is not that easy, Toughness increase your healing indirectly (in our example 33%) and both stats affect each other from perspective of efficiency. Means, the more vitality you add, the more effectiv toughness gets compared to it. And the more toughness you add, the more effective vitality gets compared to it. It’s a differential equation which gives you the best result.

But let’s make it more easy again: for our example, when 1000 toughness become more effective then 1000 vitality ? This is the case when the reduced damage is more then the 10000 health from vitality. That’s the case by receiving 30000 damage (which is reduced to 20000 in our example).

Most of your fights your will be already dead after receiving 30k damage. Only in longer fights where you are able to use some healing skills it is possible that 1000 toughness to your basic stats are more effective then 1000 vitality.

In real, no one would add 1000 of any of those stats without adding nothing to the other stat for sure. There is somewhere a point between where your stats of toughness and vitality are balanced for your usual fighting scenes.

The propensity is always the same as it is in our example: vita for short fights, toughness for middle or longer fights.

Hope it is understandable what I want to explain.

why would you use condition gear with FT? FT = zerker.

“Better” is subjective. Some people prefer Rabid because it works better with condition damage. Carrion is condition damage, power, and vitality. Power is (nearly) useless if you intend to do most of your damage with conditions. On the other hand, rabid is condition damage, precision, and toughness. We’ve got a decent selection of on-crit traits, not the least of which being a 5-point minor trait that can apply more conditions (bleed) on crit.

In most of the cases, it has nothing to do with preferring toughness over vitality. Rabid isn’t better than carrion, it’s just another option.

Cures.7451:

why would you use condition gear with FT? FT = zerker.

^ this. If you are spending the majority of your time in FT then you will deal more damage in zerker than condtion gear. FT only dishes out burning, which stacks only duration, and is extremely easy to maintain 100% uptime anyhow. If all you use FT for is the burning, you’re probably just as well off using Rocket Kick and Pistol #4.

I use rabid armor and carrion trinkets. They both have condition damage as primary which is what I want and I get to round out the rest of my stats with the secondaries. Precision is great for incendiary powder, sharpshooter, and sigil of earth along with sigil of accuracy. Toughness/Vitality for extra survival and you can get 5% condition damage from both depending if you use runes of undead or blood injection trait. Power in general is good since relying purely on conditions to kill isn’t good when players can cleanse.

For me, its just for Incendiary powder to cast more burns
And, to a lesser degree, Sharpshooter for more bleed stacks.

R A M P A G E R