Guild Wars 2

I’m looking to build my full tank/support armor set, so naturally I looked to Clerics, but after examining a few builds and reading forum posts, I saw that most builds tried to maximize Boon Duration. So I was wondering if the Giver’s exotic armor (Toughness, Boon Duration, Healing Power) would be more appropriate than Cleric’s (Healing Power, Power, Toughness). Essentially trading 244 Power for 6% Boon Duration, and swapping the HP and Toughness stats.

Has anyone tried the Giver’s armor and can comment on its effectiveness?

Unless you wanna play support with a staff don’t use the Giver’s set. Like what Christos said the 1% boon duration compromise your stats and make you hit like a little girl inside a dungeon. I used to play the 101% boon duration set with the Giver’s it’s good but definitely not for tanking purposes.

6% boon duration at the cost of hitting like a paper bag (one with holes in it) simply isn’t worth it in my humble opinion. If you so much as trait into the Virtues line, your boons will last plenty long enough. If you run Monk’s and/or Water runes—or anything similar—they’ll last even longer.

cleric’s is much more versatile. you can do the healway build or you can do full support with it.

Thanks all for answers. Will start crafting my Cleric’s.

Pre/Vit/Heal may be superior to Cleric’s depending on what you are planning to do with it. Your damage is going to be bad regardless and vitality is generally superior to toughness, especially for heavy armor classes like Guardian so you might as well get the higher crit so that you can proc more Might and Vigor and food buff heals.

Another plus is that the gear is easy to get from AC and/or Karma vendors so you can save quite a bit of gold.

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

Clerics. Having no power is no good.

KensaiZen.3740:

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

Indeed; not so much “worthless” but rather risky. I would mix and match Cleric’s with Magi’s myself, if I wanted to do full Healing Power (I actually have a Magi’s armor set with Cleric accessories.)

Full Cleric’s is actually doable and works (low hit points is not a problem with a decent final armor value), but less versatile due to very low precision, in case you wanted to play any build with somewhat decent critical chance.

KensaiZen.3740:

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

Yaki.9563:

KensaiZen.3740:

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

Unicorns are real.

The more Toughness you have, the more effective your self healing abilities become, as your healing stays the same while the amount of damage you take decreases. Conversely, if you have a lot of Vitality you’ll start strong, but it doesn’t make your self healing abilities any more effective. That’s simply obvious.

And seeing as though most Guardian builds have a lot of self healing, Toughness > Vitality.

Ok in normal WvW I have about 3000 armor and about 17k health. In Spvp I have 2500 armor and 19.5k health. I feel equally tanky in each. Where toughness really helps is vs theives who absolutely hammer you when you have none and vs range who just fire autoattacks. But generally they feel about the same. If anything the 19.5k health feels tankier at times.

Giver is NOT worth giving up the power.

Alarox.4590:

Yaki.9563:

KensaiZen.3740:

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

Unicorns are real.

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The more Toughness you have, the more effective your self healing abilities become, as your healing stays the same while the amount of damage you take decreases. Conversely, if you have a lot of Vitality you’ll start strong, but it doesn’t make your self healing abilities any more effective. That’s simply obvious.

And seeing as though most Guardian builds have a lot of self healing, Toughness > Vitality.

Funny, didn’t realize we were soloing.

Here’s how most fights go: you sit at near-full health, take big spikes down, get back up near full health, etc. All that toughness is worthless if you keep resetting to full health. Toughness is good when you never attain full health for an extended period of time so that the damage reduction becomes greater than the extra health gained from vitality. This is often not the case. I don’t care how “efficient” you think it is, that efficiency gets tossed out the window every time you get back to full health.

Not to mention you spat out a ridiculous hyperbole in the first place.

Yaki.9563:

Alarox.4590:

Yaki.9563:

KensaiZen.3740:

Vitality without toughness is worthless. Choose wisely.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

Unicorns are real.

---

The more Toughness you have, the more effective your self healing abilities become, as your healing stays the same while the amount of damage you take decreases. Conversely, if you have a lot of Vitality you’ll start strong, but it doesn’t make your self healing abilities any more effective. That’s simply obvious.

And seeing as though most Guardian builds have a lot of self healing, Toughness > Vitality.

Funny, didn’t realize we were soloing.

Here’s how most fights go: you sit at near-full health, take big spikes down, get back up near full health, etc. All that toughness is worthless if you keep resetting to full health. Toughness is good when you never attain full health for an extended period of time so that the damage reduction becomes greater than the extra health gained from vitality. This is often not the case. I don’t care how “efficient” you think it is, that efficiency gets tossed out the window every time you get back to full health.

Not to mention you spat out a ridiculous hyperbole in the first place.

1.) If you keep resetting to full health, then that’s good. That’s the point. If you mitigate enough damage that you can out-heal it in a fight without getting too low, then it’s doing its job. I don’t see why vitality w/o Toughness would be better.

If we assume that 500 Vitality = 500 Toughness in terms of raw survival, then 500 Toughness works better the more healing you have (which Guardians obviously have a lot of). This is because you get to your maximum health sooner.

Ignore numbers and look at this in terms of %. Vitality and Toughness do the same thing in a different way: they decrease the % health lost from X damage. Toughness decreases the incoming damage, and Vitality increases your overall health; both have the same proportional effect.

The advantage of Vitality: condition’s % effect on health is not affected by Toughness. Meaning, Vitality is the only alternative of the two.

The advantage of Toughness: healing’s % effect on health decreases with Vitality. Meaning, Toughness is the only alternative of the two.

It is never an advantage to take longer to go back to maximum survival (full health). If you get the same proportional affect from Toughness and Vitality, then as a Guardian you want the one that allows your healing to bring you to maximum survival sooner, and that’s Toughness.

2.) You saying “you couldn’t be more wrong” to him without any reasoning or evidence is the same as me saying “unicorns are real” without any reasoning or evidence.

Alarox.4590:

If we assume that 500 Vitality = 500 Toughness in terms of raw survival, then 500 Toughness works better the more healing you have (which Guardians obviously have a lot of). This is because you get to your maximum health sooner.

That assumption is wrong.

Ignore numbers and look at this in terms of %. Vitality and Toughness do the same thing in a different way: they decrease the % health lost from X damage. Toughness decreases the incoming damage, and Vitality increases your overall health; both have the same proportional effect.

If they did, it would never be worth taking Vitality. They don’t have the same proportional effect. Vitality adds far more to survivability in the short term because it has a much larger increase to your health pool than Toughness does damage reduction. This is even more the case for heavy armor classes.

The advantage of Vitality: condition’s % effect on health is not affected by Toughness. Meaning, Vitality is the only alternative of the two.

This is not the only advantage.

The advantage of Toughness: healing’s % effect on health decreases with Vitality. Meaning, Toughness is the only alternative of the two.

This would only be true if the game were a race to full health via healing, but it’s not.

It is never an advantage to take longer to go back to maximum survival (full health). If you get the same proportional affect from Toughness and Vitality, then as a Guardian you want the one that allows your healing to bring you to maximum survival sooner, and that’s Toughness.

Again, you don’t get the same proportional effect from T&V. That’s the biggest flaw in your reasoning.

Toughness would be great if the game were consistent small amounts of damage that kept you below full health, so that as time progressed the efficiency of toughness would come into play. That’s not how the game’s damage actually works though. Yes, you’ll get to full health quicker with Toughness (less damage taken + lower max health) but it is usually the case that Vitality will also get to full health. Vitality also protects far better against short, large bursts of damage which the majority of danger in this game come from.

2.) You saying “you couldn’t be more wrong” to him without any reasoning or evidence is the same as me saying “unicorns are real” without any reasoning or evidence.

You mean like him saying Vitality is useless without Toughness? I have better things to do with my time than write multiple paragraphs in response to an ignorant troll’s one-liner.

I’m in full clerics everything. I have 14225 hp, 3202 armor, 1336 healing power, and 50% boon duration. I never die from anything unless I screw up which is my own fault.

With the heal on dodge and swap sigil for endurance alone I can heal myself back up in 2 seconds. I rarely ever have to use my heal. Mace blocking and boons make it so I don’t need any more HP. My regen and Virtue of resolve heals me for hundreds of hp every second if I do get low.

Condition damage is no problem either since every 10 seconds 2 conditions are gone. If I do need one gone I have the Virtue of Resolve trait to get rid of 3 of them.

KevinEvo.7061:

I’m in full clerics everything. I have 14225 hp, 3202 armor, 1336 healing power, and 50% boon duration. I never die from anything unless I screw up which is my own fault.

With the heal on dodge and swap sigil for endurance alone I can heal myself back up in 2 seconds. I rarely ever have to use my heal. Mace blocking and boons make it so I don’t need any more HP. My regen and Virtue of resolve heals me for hundreds of hp every second if I do get low.

Condition damage is no problem either since every 10 seconds 2 conditions are gone. If I do need one gone I have the Virtue of Resolve trait to get rid of 3 of them.

out of curiosity, how much does your VoR passive heal for and do you have the Absolute resolution traited?