Guild Wars 2

I heard, that after a certain toughness level, there is not considerable different. This is ture? I have 2100 toughness ( +150 from trait, in all 2250) with my guardian (GS,Staff). Is it too much, useless? 1800-1900 ( +150) would be enough? Or how much worthy to use?

Thanks, (sorry if my egnlish is not perfect :S )

Direct damage ( ie non-condition damage ) is calculated by multiplying weapon strength, power and a skill specific coefficient and then dividing the result by your armour ( defense + toughness ).

Trait/Food/Passive multipliers are then piled on top.

While it’s true you’ll never reach 100% damage mitigation because of the way it’s calculated, there isn’t a hard cap on it – the REAL reason people talk about diminishing returns is quite simply because of the amount of stats you have to sacrifice in order to achieve very high toughness. There is no point in being able to survive in-fight if you also fail to defeat your enemy because you are severely lacking in dps ( unless you are bunkering points in sPvP, but generally you don’t soley rely on toughness to bunker effectively ), or your vitality is so low that condition damage eats you alive. ( which isn’t affected by toughness or protection )

At the end of the day it’s about striking the most effective balance for any given game mode – 2100 toughness would be acceptable in some builds for WvW, but be frowned upon in PvE ( where max dps is king ) and too wasteful in sPvP.

I would say try playing with 1800 and see how you go, you may not notice much difference to your defense and have better damage options as a result.

Most of a guardian’s “tankiness” comes from active damage mitigations like blocks, blinds, sustained healing and easy access to boons like protection and regen.

Your Egnlish is fine.
It isn’t true that toughness becomes worse the more you stack it. All what toughness does is increasing your Armor level; and Armor is Toughness+Defense Rating(found on 6 armor pieces, as well as aquabreathers and shields; full ascended armor set provides 1,271 defense).
And then Armor acts as a divider to normal damage. Keep in mind that it does not lower the condition damage you receive in any way, though.
Now, Armor being a divider, let’s talk a bit more in detail on that matter.
And by the way, all numbers are assumptions.
Let’s say a Warrior killshot hits for 20,000,000 damage(20 millions) before we divide it by armor(Weapon Strength*Power*Skill Coefficient)
There is a rabbit creature that has 10 armor. It would get hit by 2,000,000(20,000,000/10 = 2 millions) killshot.
Let’s say you are a newbie lvl 10 guardian who decided to go into WvW. Then you’ll have 916 base toughness plus whatever toughness and armor he scrapped on his items. Let’s be generous and assume he got 0 toughness and 84 defense rating on his items. That would mean he has 1000 armor. And he would get hit by 20,000(20,000,000/1000) killshot.
Then there is a berserker lvl 80 guardian that still only has 916 toughness, but because his gear level is ascended, he also happens to have 1084 defense rating, totalling 2000 armor. He would get hit by 10,000(20,000,000/2000)
And then there’s a cleric guardian, with 1916 toughness and same 1084 defense rating.
He would get hit by 6,667(20,000,000/3000)
Double your armor, and the damage taken is halved.
That’s about it. How much will you want in the game? Usually, that’s too many wasted stat points which could be better put into healing power and vitality to provide better survivability. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Toughness make Vitality and Healing Power better, and vice versa is also applied.
Even if you would have 10,000 armor, you would still melt to conditions with a miserable health pool. There must be a balance to everything. 2250 toughness is obviously too much. You will want 916 toughness for PvE(In other words, no toughness for PvE), and probably around 2650-3100 armor rating(1400-1850 toughness) in WvW.

Also note your skill or comfort level which was already said I believe. That makes a noticeable difference I’ve found. Trait, play style, and meta play all factor in. With each there is risk and reward.

If you see toughness from the point of percentage of damage mitigation view, it does get worse. But if you see it from your overall Effective HP, it goes up linearly (just like Vitality). If toughness percentage of damage mitigation went up linearly, your Effective HP would go up exponentially.

Some people have been spreading nonsense about how toughness has diminishing returns. These people need to stop or a bird should crap on their house or something.

Armor scales linearly. So sure, if you add 10 armor to 2000 armor, it means a lot more than if you add 10 armor to 3500 armor. 10/2000 is a bigger %. So people think it has diminishing returns. But this is no different from health— Adding 100 health to 10k health has a bigger affect than adding 100 health to 30k health. I’ve never seen anyone say vitality has diminishing returns, but that’s because they’re ignorant.

Toughness and Vitality don’t have any diminishing returns. If you’re trying to maximize survivability, then either helps your cause. What is true is that if you have low vitality and high toughness, then it is easier to increase the vitality by a certain % than it is the toughness. That’s why lopsided is bad— you need a balance.

Fortunately, with the existence of PTV gear, you can have your cake and eat it too, the problem is how to balance it with damage and possibly healing power but that kind of sucks.

It’s also the reason why in PvE instances, berserker gear is the best use of stats. Power, Precision, and Critical Damage scale with each other. Grabbing all 3 means your damage will scale a lot faster than you can stack defense. This is why dps builds do so much more damage than their tank counterparts. Though of course this is just one reason to use dps gear in pve.

ArchonWing.9480:

Some people have been spreading nonsense about how toughness has diminishing returns. These people need to stop or a bird should crap on their house or something.

Armor scales linearly. So sure, if you add 10 armor to 2000 armor, it means a lot more than if you add 10 armor to 3500 armor. 10/2000 is a bigger %. So people think it has diminishing returns. But this is no different from health— Adding 100 health to 10k health has a bigger affect than adding 100 health to 30k health. I’ve never seen anyone say vitality has diminishing returns, but that’s because they’re ignorant.

Toughness and Vitality don’t have any diminishing returns. If you’re trying to maximize survivability, then either helps your cause. What is true is that if you have low vitality and high toughness, then it is easier to increase the vitality by a certain % than it is the toughness. That’s why lopsided is bad— you need a balance.

Fortunately, with the existence of PTV gear, you can have your cake and eat it too, the problem is how to balance it with damage and possibly healing power but that kind of sucks.

It’s also the reason why in PvE instances, berserker gear is the best use of stats. Power, Precision, and Critical Damage scale with each other. Grabbing all 3 means your damage will scale a lot faster than you can stack defense. This is why dps builds do so much more damage than their tank counterparts. Though of course this is just one reason to use dps gear in pve.

If you had 20 armor and took an attack that has 1000 damage, you would take 50 damage.
1000/20 = 50
add 5 armor and the result is 40 damage.
1000/25 = 40
So adding 5 armor to 20 armor decreases damage taken by 10

if you had 40 armor, and took 1000 damage, you would take 25 damage, half of what you would take if you had 20 armor.
1000/40=25
If you add 5 armor to that, instead of decreasing damage taken by 10, it decreases damage taken by 2.77
1000/45=22.222222
The more armor you already have, the less each point of armor is worth. There are diminishing returns.

If you have 500 health, and add 50 more health, you get 50 more health.
If you have 1000 health, and add 50 more health, you get 50 more health.
If you have 10000000 health and add 50 more health, you still get 50 more health.
1 extra health is still worth 1 extra health no matter how much you already have. There are no diminishing returns.

Claiming that other people are ignorant will only result in your own embarrassment.
Please review the math.

This might help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns

When measuring the effectiveness of toughness you have to first do the math:

( tan( a * 3 ) / (v * 0.32) ) – ( ^5.254 * t ) = It’s completely worthless against condition damage.

Yes, too much is useless. Don’t focus on toughness, focus on your overall survivability. Toughness is only one factor to that. A guardian has many tools to migrate physical damage besides toughness.

Thoughnes is important but the most important is proper build and good balance between different stats . I got full PVT guard , I got 3500 armor 24k health and not much power (i think its around 2000 or less sry i dont remember) and I love my guardian . I hardly ever die and my party thanks me a lot , they can focus on dmg and most dungs/fractals are easy . On www I can survive long time in melee train and I enjoy being surrounded by enemies . But this build is horrible in solo roaming , it is team build .

I am too lazy to mess with all the fractions, so I’ll just leave this.

1000/20 = 50
If you double your armor to (40)
1000/40 =25
Which is half the damage you’ll take than someone with 20 armor
If you double your armor to (80)
1000/80= 12.5
Which is half the damage you’ll take than someone with 40 armor
If you double your armor to (160)
1000/160= 6.125
Which is half the damage you’ll take than someone with 80 armor

The person with 160 armor has 8x the person with 20 armor, and also takes 1/8 the damage. Someone with 100x the armor will take 1/100 less damage. Trust me on that!

So Magic Fly, adding 25% more armor means that someone with 40 armor should take 25% less damage than someone with 50 armor. What happens if you add 25% more (6.25 more armor). Would someone with 31.25 armor take 25% less damage than someone with 25? I’ll let you finish that off, maybe I’m wrong.

No matter what, if you have twice the armor as someone else, you take half as much damage! Diminishing returns where? Of course, this is assuming formula is really damage incurred/armor.

If you have 2000 health, you’ll be able to take twice as much damage as someone with 1000 health

If you have 4000 health you’ll be able to take twice as much damage as someone with 2000 health.

A person with 8x the health of someone with 1000, 8000 takes 8x longer to kill.

Etc…

Basically each time you double your armor value, you’ll halve the damage you take. Try plotting these things on a graph or something.

Which is pretty much the same as investing in total. Every time you double your total health… you take twice as much hits!

Of course in reality, it’s not feasible to increase one stat by that much, so you often get a bigger percentage increase by boosting whatever’s lowest at the moment. And of course conditions prove to be a huge handicap for toughness, but that’s dependent on your ability to combat them. There’s also kinks like base values which muck everything else up, which means to find the proper balance, you need to take base health/armor values into account which will mess everything up again! Guardians have the lowest base health and highest base armor. So it’s easiest it seems to increase health by a certain percentage. But there’s many other factors such as active defense and heals that make it way more complex beyond simple EHP.

My point is that at some point you are better off investing elsewhere, but I don’t want to hear “diminishing returns” but rather you could get more elsewhere. VOLTCIEAGE here has about 16% more defense than the magical 3000 armor Guardian. That’s basically half the protection buff on at all times and cannot be stripped without doing anything. Nothing to sneer at.

magic fly.2041:

snip

I’m sorry, but no. That’s not diminishing returns. Here’s why.

As already noted, doubling your armor doubles your damage reduction. That’s a proportional relationship based on the fact that armor divides the damage you take. As such, you can also say that Health * Armor is a meaningful relationship, because again – damage is proportional to Armor. If you double Armor, you take half damage, ergo your effective health (after damage reduction from armor) increases proportionally to your armor.

So when you say that 1000 damage / 20 armor = 50 damage, you also say that 1000 health*20 armor = 20,000 effective health.

Now I know that looks crazy, but it isn’t at all. Reason being: 20*1000=2000. Basically what 20,000 effective health is saying is that an enemy whose damage before armor is 1000 has to hit you twenty times in order for him to hit you for 1000 damage after armor.

Now double your armor.

1000 damage / 40 armor = 25 damage. 1000 HP * 40 armor = 40,000. Twenty points of armor is worth exactly the same amount of effective health regardless of how much you have, every time. If there were diminishing returns, you would have less than 40,000 EHP. But there aren’t, because it’s proportional. You can do this all day. Let’s pick a weird number, like 67, because why not. 1000 / 67=14.92. 1000 HP * 67 = 67,000. The difference between 40 and 67 is 27. 67,000 is 27000 higher than 40,000. An enemy would have to hit you 67 times at 1000 damage in order to hit kill you, 27 more times than at 40 damage.

All of this is to say that every point of armor is worth exactly the same amount of effective HP for any given amount of starting HP. Therefore, armor does not decrease in effectiveness the more you have.

So why doesn’t that jive with what you’ve said? It does make sense – the math isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t mean what you think it means.

You boiled it down nicely, but misinterpreted it. For each point of armor you have, the less each additional point of armor is “worth”. In other words, if you have 1000 armor and increase it by 1, 1000/1001 = .99 rather than 1 – .99 is less than 1. Of course it is. All you’re saying with that statement is that when you compare 1000 to 1001, each point contributes proportionally less to 100%. But that’s it. That’s as far as that statement extends. It’s not that armor contributes less. It’s that the more of it you have, the smaller percentage each individual point represents of the total because duh. To use your numbers again: 45 armor / 40 armor is an increase of 12.5%. 1000 damage / 45 armor = 22.22. 1000 damage / 40 armor is 25. The difference between 25 and 22.22 is 12.5%. A 12.5% increase in armor yielded a 12.5% increase in benefit, which in turn yields a 12.5% increase in effective health, and a 12.5% increase in the number of 1000 damage hits you can take.

No, armor never diminishes in effectiveness, because its actual benefit (increasing the number of hits it takes to KO, or increasing EHP) scales linearly. Any % increase in armor also increases the number of hits you can take before getting KOed by that same %.

To me it seems that theres a soft cap on toughness for Guardian at 1850 toughness. Anymore than that and you don’t see too much benefit and anything less you evaporate pretty quickly.

Reduction Dommage is calculated that way : ((Armor-1836)/Armor)x100.

Example: You have 2400Armor : ((2400-1836)/2400)x100=24% Reduction Dmg.
Now you decide to add 100 toughness: 2500 Armor = 27% Reduction Dmg.
See? 3% Reduction dmg gained for 100 toughness.

Now you have 3200 armor : ((3200-1836)/3200))x100=43% Reduction Dmg.
You decide to add 100 toughness: 3300 armor : ((3300-1836)/3200))x100=44% Reduction Dmg.
See? 1% Reduction dmg gained for 100 toughness.

Remember that 100 toughness isn’t worth the same at 2600 than at 3200.

As it’s already been stated there’s no diminishing returns. Toughness comes down to player preference and the situations at hand. People that do large scale wvw will probably need more then someone in a havoc group. PvE needs very little and relies more on dodges, since in high lvl fotm no amount of toughness will save you. In PvP a bunker will need more then a roamer because the different roles. Also it depends on the players’ skill level and also their playstyle.

It comes down to finding what you’re comfortable with and the situation at hand. So nobody can really tell you how much toughness you need. It’s something you get the feel for, and learn for yourself.

Anubis.9346:

Reduction Dommage is calculated that way : ((Armor-1836)/Armor)x100.

Example: You have 2400Armor : ((2400-1836)/2400)x100=24% Reduction Dmg.
Now you decide to add 100 toughness: 2500 Armor = 27% Reduction Dmg.
See? 3% Reduction dmg gained for 100 toughness.

Now you have 3200 armor : ((3200-1836)/3200))x100=43% Reduction Dmg.
You decide to add 100 toughness: 3300 armor : ((3300-1836)/3200))x100=44% Reduction Dmg.
See? 1% Reduction dmg gained for 100 toughness.

Remember that 100 toughness isn’t worth the same at 2600 than at 3200.

I explained why this is not the right way to look at it in my post, take a look at it.

Why I agree with both ? O_o

Effective HP scales linearly with Toughness and with Vitality.

Damage reduction does not scale linearly with toughness, but going from 0-1% damage reduction reduces incoming damage by 1%. Going from 98-99% damage reduction reduces incoming damage by 50%.

Toughness and Vitality both scale linearly with time to live without factoring in healing. As you add healing into the equation, the relative value of toughness goes up.

foofad.5162:

For each point of armor you have, the less each additional point of armor is “worth”. In other words, if you have 1000 armor and increase it by 1, 1000/1001 = .99 rather than 1 – .99 is less than 1. Of course it is. All you’re saying with that statement is that when you compare 1000 to 1001, each point contributes proportionally less to 100%. But that’s it. That’s as far as that statement extends. It’s not that armor contributes less. It’s that the more of it you have, the smaller percentage each individual point represents of the total because duh.

You have no idea what you’re talking about, because you just contradicted yourself. Every point being worth “less” is the definition of a diminishing return. You are asserting exponential growth in investments to yield identical returns, and then calling it linear. Exponential growth isn’t linear.

If you have a graphing calculator, this is quite easy to demonstrate. Armor acts as a multiplier, so its relationship with damage is geometric:

Damage = (Power X Weapon Strength X Skill Coefficient) / (Armor)

DDamage/DArmor = -(Power X Weapon Strength X Skill Coefficient) / (Armor ^ 2)

I"ll call that big part overall attack strength K, since it is a controlled variable.

DDamage/DArmor = -K/(Armor^2)

Essentially it is -1 / X ^ 2, so plot that on a graphing calculator and you’ll get something like this . This graph is the change in damage as armor is changed, and you’ll notice quite quickly that it isn’t a straight line. As you go higher up in values of armor, the change to damage is less and less For example, at double armor, each point of toughness does only 25% of what it used to.

To answer the OP’s question: Yes toughness has diminishing returns. All stats do. There is no easy way to see when how much is too much.

In PVE, you’ll want to go maximum damage (berserker, assassin, sinister). But in other game modes it is more complicated. Personally, when building defensively, I try to maximize something called “effective health”. It is basically armor times health. It is at its highest point when armor = HP x 10.

For example, lets take the guardian’s stats with no equipment. This is 11,645 health, and 2211 armor. Compared to light armor classes, you’ll take about 87% damage, so this comes to an effective health of 13,403.

Now, say you have 1000 stat points. If you put them into toughness, you’ll get 3211 armor. You’ll take about 59.8% of the damage, so this is an effective health of 19,473. If you put those stat points into vitality, then you’ll have 21,645 health, and including armor this comes to 24,879 effective health.

As you can see, you get more out of those 1000 points of you put them into vitality instead of toughness. This is the simple version: there’s advantages and disadvantages to both, and it really depends on what you’re trying to do with your build.

Toughness has linear returns on effective HP which means it doesn’t have diminishing returns.

Completely related to the thread … what is the thought process that a person has to go through to resurrect and respond to a thread that’s 1 year old?

I mean, do they randomly pick a page, click a thread and say “Yup, this is the one!”

At least this thread had relevant info, as opposed to some necro’d threads I’ve seen. “Buff swords” posted July 25th 2012 bumped Apr 3rd 2014

Wow I didn’t know this was a necro thread. I just spent awhile correcting a guy who probably will never see it.

Anyway, personally I don’t mind necro threads that much. I mean, the subject is still relevant today. You can either make a thread saying the same thing, or just respond in an older one.

Obtena.7952:

Completely related to the thread … what is the thought process that a person has to go through to resurrect and respond to a thread that’s 1 year old?

I mean, do they randomly pick a page, click a thread and say “Yup, this is the one!”

I actually have a theory about this. Since the forum search function doesn’t work, I’ll have to search in google to find relevant topics. What google returns isn’t sorted by date or relevance to current builds, so I’ll get a scattershot of both recent and ancient topics.

What I imagine happens is, someone does this too look up a question (I.E. the toughness one), but forgets that the topic is a year old, and posts their opinion on it.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I actually have a theory about this. Since the forum search function doesn’t work, I’ll have to search in google to find relevant topics. What google returns isn’t sorted by date or relevance to current builds, so I’ll get a scattershot of both recent and ancient topics.

What I imagine happens is, someone does this too look up a question (I.E. the toughness one), but forgets that the topic is a year old, and posts their opinion on it.

If you search “gw2 toughness,” this thread is currently the second result (just below the wiki page on Toughness), so I’m willing to bet that this is exactly the case.

Knox.8962:

Damage reduction does not scale linearly with toughness, but going from 0-1% damage reduction reduces incoming damage by 1%. Going from 98-99% damage reduction reduces incoming damage by 50%.

Toughness and Vitality both scale linearly with time to live without factoring in healing. As you add healing into the equation, the relative value of toughness goes up.

The reason people think it has diminishing returns is because they use 2 points of references to measure a relative scale, and then try to compare then as if the values were of a linear scale. So if +100 on 1000 is a 10% increase, and +100 on 1500 is a 6%, no **** that the relative gain is different. Its also hard to explain flat % bonuses to these folks, as THOSE are the ones don’t stack linearly in the system.

That aside, there are a couple key thresholds in PVP/WvW worth noting. 2500 Armor is considered the “Break even” point against most power builds (which typically reach 2300-2500 power without boons). At that point your incoming damage is mostly against the weapon strength (~1000) and the skill coefficient. This does add survivability against weak AOE fields, but isn’t high enough to survive most burst attacks.

Around 3100 the damage reduction over the “break even” point becomes noticeable, as its high enough to blunt most Burst attacks from taking “all” of your HP in one go. But without Vit, follow up attacks are still enough to push you over the edge.

In both cases, its recommended to have at least 18k HP, as it buys some time to activate your healing and cleansing skills. Less then 15k, and bombs will still take you out too fast. Obviously more is better, but you have to start sacrificing your own damage thresholds to reach those high defense numbers.

In PvE its considered a moot point, as most mob scaled at Vet or higher hits hard enough 1 or 2 shot you in most cases, and nearly all professions lose sustainable defenses over time. Thats a big reason Zerks meta is effective, as shorter fights ensure survivability.