Guild Wars 2

I know that without any toughness you are squishy as hell let me just say I know this. I take traits that give me +300 toughness first off. =P

Right now my character is in almost full berserker.
I have a couple pieces of soldier in there for a small boost to vit and toughness.

My question is this… is dropping my damage considerably to net me about 200 extra toughness really that noticable after a certain point? I am already in heavy armor with +300 in traits + another 100 or so in armor already.

With 1400 toughness my armor sits at 2400.
With 1600 toughness my armor sits 2600
With 1800 (Drop my damage IMMENSLY) is 2800.

Is that 200-400 armor going to really make that much of a difference?

I love to wvw and pve ankittenrying to find that perfect hybrid build but am having trouble trying to figure out how much berserker/damage gear I drop for a stat that I honestly have no idea if its doing that much in wvw or even pve.

Assassins still drop me almost as fast no matter what unless I am paying attention and thats all based around my skills anyways.

Anyone got any input on armor where maybe you have tried a mix and come to certain conclusions?

Thanks for your alls time.

I think an increase in 100 armor would give you about 3% damage reduction. I think.

Personally I get a little uncomfortable running around in WvWvW with less than 3000 armor.

Yea, the difference to you between 2500 and 3000 armor is that noticeable to you?

the difference between 2500 and 3000 armor against opponent with 3000 attack is 20% damage.

which is huge…

very simplified formula: damage= (opponent attack/your defense )*weapon damage

simplified example: enemy attack=3000, weapon damage is 1000 crit damage =1.8 (150%+30%)

in 3000 armor you will receive 3000/3000*1000=1000 damage or 1800 on crit
in 2500 armor you will receive 2500/3000*1000=1200 damage or 2160 on crit

the higher is your opponent attack compared to your armor, the more damage you will get.

EDIT:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

Since the main use for toughness is to add to your armor, I will mainly focus on armor for the rest of this post.

The damage you take is inversely proportional to armor. In other words, armor acts as a damage divider. Thus every X% increase in armor (not toughness) is equivalent to an X% decrease in damage taken from direct damage sources. This relationship is not affected by your opponent’s attack rating.

So to use your example:

• 2600 armor nets you an 8.3% decrease in damage taken compared to 2400 armor
• 2800 armor nets you a 16.7% decrease in damage taken compared to 2400 armor
• 2800 armor nets you a 7.7% decrease in damage taken compared to 2600 armor

As for how much armor/toughness you need, that all depends on the way you want to play and what you’re comfortable with. Nobody can tell you what the “right” armor value for you is. However, I will say that armor is not the only way to mitigate damage. Correct use of positioning, dodge rolls, boons/conditions (protection, aegis, blind, weakness), etc. all potentially can avoid a lot more damage than simply increasing your armor rating by a few hundred points. Armor is simply your very last line of defense.

Lalangamena.3694:

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aznricepuff.5086:

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Your values are not damage reduction but damage increase.

Anyone know how stacking Toughness compares to stacking Vitality?

After all, toughness has no effect on conditions.

I just wanted to add that with Signet of Judgement you have 10% damage reduction, which at 2600 armor is equivalent to +288 toughness.
This may help you have offensive gear without being too squishy.

Stacking toughness vs stacking vitality has tradeoffs both ways. Toughness doesn’t mitigate condition damage, but has better synergy with healing power (and healing in general, even if you aren’t stacking HP). To make it even more complicated, the effectiveness of toughness or vitality also depends on the value of the other stat. Adding more toughness is more effective if you have high vitality, and vice versa.

You can calculate an “effective health” based on your listed health and armor. Just multiply health by armor (or if you don’t like the super big numbers this gives you, you can peg it to an arbitrary armor value, but that tends to complicate the math). Then you can compare how adding X points of vitality compares to X points of toughness by seeing how much your effective health changes.

haviz.1340:

Your values are not damage reduction but damage increase.

Ah, you are correct. Damage reduction should be 100-100/(100+X)%. But the point I was trying to make was that adding X% more armor has a constant benefit in terms of % damage reduction regardless of how hard your opponent hits.

DreamOfACure.4382:

Anyone know how stacking Toughness compares to stacking Vitality?

After all, toughness has no effect on conditions.

I’d say it depends on how much condition removal you bring. If you bring a lot, Vitality becomes somewhat less important, but if you only have limited condition removal, Vitality becomes more valuable.

DreamOfACure.4382:

Anyone know how stacking Toughness compares to stacking Vitality?

After all, toughness has no effect on conditions.

Generally speaking, Vitality scales considerably better than Toughness does, but that doesn’t mean that Vitality is always the better choice for a build. Typically you want some Vitality, but how much you want in relation to your Toughness comes down to your class’s base HP, how susceptible you are to conditions, and what sources of healing you have access to.

Toughness becomes more valuable than Vitality as your HP rises – you probably already have a good idea about this, but if you’re rolling a Necro, you want to invest in Toughness before Vitality, and if you’re rolling a Guardian, getting some Vitality needs to take priority over Toughness. In either case, investing in the wrong stats will lead to incoming damage taking much larger chunks out of your maximum HP. Typically, a balance of the two stats is optimal for survival.

One other important point that you touched on is that Toughness doesn’t affect condition damage. This seems to swing things in favor of Vitality, but something to also consider is that Toughness makes all of your passive and active heals worth more, since damage can’t come in as rapidly when you’re stacking Toughness. Healing doesn’t synergize nearly as well with HP – more HP just means that your heals aren’t going to top you off when you get low, and that you may have a couple extra seconds to hit your heal button before an enemy downs you.

One of the best examples of the defensive power the Toughness/Healing Power combo can yield is the D/D Ele. Ele skills/traits scale very well with Healing Power, so after an Ele picks up some Vitality and drops 600+ points into Healing Power, they’ll probably want to go pouring points into Toughness. Toughness and Vitality both help keep them from being spiked down in one go, but since Toughness slows down incoming damage, their many sources of healing can help to erase damage as quickly as it can be dealt. Their strong condition cleansing and anti-spike tools (e.g. Mist Form) complement this defensive setup perfectly, so you’ve got a character that can’t be spiked easily and which is also resistant to most forms of sustained damage. Some Vitality is still important for the Ele, since a good burst will drop a character with 10k HP regardless of their armor, but Toughness plays a far more important role in their defense.

In the Guardian’s case, the balance you strike really comes down to how much cleansing you have access to. If you don’t have much in your build, higher HP might be a good option for you, but if you’ve got good cleansing and many sources of passive healing, Toughness can be an absolutely fantastic stat for Guardians. In the S/TPvP scene, the popular bunker builds are currently cleanse-heavy, high-armor builds with around 16k HP, a Cleric’s Amulet, and plenty of different sources of passive healing, so that might tell you something.

As you said you’re full berserker. Try switching your breastplate to soldier (better than knights), it’ll give you more +% tankiness than the +delta% damage you get with berserker. Just don’t overkill it with soldier pieces after that or you’ll miss your damage ^^

My Thief has 2600 armor. My Guardian has 3200 armor.

The passive survivability difference is much more noticeable. My Thief can’t sit there and take a beating in WvW, but I have more tools and mobility at my disposal to get away from players. On my Guardian I’m always on the frontlines and I don’t take nearly as much damage as my Thief.

In PvE I can tank on my Guardian, but can’t even try it on my Thief.

Check this site to see armor to damage reduction values = http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/

Let me throw another wrench into the works, while we’re at it. Consider protection, which nets you 33% damage reduction. It’s entirely possible to get permanent (or at the very least, extremely high uptime) on protection, which nets you a flat 33% damage reduction.

How much toughness this is worth varies based on how much you already have (due to diminishing returns), but generally speaking… it’s a lot. Several hundred toughness at the least; certainly over 300. My Guardian runs with a base 2531 armor, and relies on protection to boost that value into the realms of acceptable durability.

Lots of good stuff said in here but i thought i should post something i made during BWE.
http://i50.tinypic.com/24uzr6w.jpg
I made a chart (by actually equipping stuff and trying to find different levels of armor and what they did) just to figure out how to compose and abuse toughness.

I have similar charts for other stats as well but this one i can display since it really common knowledge.

Just a disclaimer i dont know if protection and SoJ is purely additive but the reason why i post is still valid so focus on the right stuff when reading.

Many state that armor has diminshing returns and as you can see in the 6th column it seems like that is the case, the more you invest the less mitigated damage you get in percentage.

The same goes for the 4th column since the curve when you gain armor is slightly degressive, so far so good, it seems like it is diminshing returns indeed.

The issue here, which i might be absolutely wrong about, is that mitigated damage has nothing to do with it, its infact the damage you didnt mitigate thats important. You know the damage that actually kills you.

To me it seems really weird that we look at mitigated damage when estimating the value of toughness, its comparing apples and pears. What we should look at is what actually directly influences our healthpool and that is non mitigated damage.

If you check the 7th and 8th column you will find that it also appears to be diminshing returns even here but very slighty. But its here we go wrong imo.

Now if you go to the 11th and 12th column i have a fictive HPS, its infact much higher when playing.

Heals are a form of mitigation, just like armor is and they also are influenced by armor once they are applied and become a part of the active healthpool. As you see the HPS percentage actually increase with armor.

And when i put in soldier armor in the chart i actually dont get as high effective healthpool as with pure knights and especially over time there is a rather big difference.

This chart, along side extensive gameplay has led me a couple of conclusions:

1. Armor>Vitality as long as there some sort of heal
2. Armor improves heals and vitality reduces heals
3. As long as you build for condition removal Armor>Vitality
4. The ideal armor for a guardian would be crit/toughness and either healing power or critical damage. Both would be beasts when a guardian use them and i cant see Anet ever introducing them but one can hope.
5. Armor>Vitality vs bursts, as long as you stack passive SoJ and have protection in utilities/virtues.
6. Vitality are for children and elderly that want a slower gameplay and dont have time to react to incoming damage :-) Joke aside, vitality only benefit, an opinion ofc, is that its less cd depedent and fully passive and can from time to time be nice to have versus bursts.

In short if you can get the amount of stats you want and at the same time stack thoughness, by all means do it but it requires some skill to handle the small healthpool but overall survivability actully increases compared to a pure vitality build.

Toughness makes a very noticeable difference. I run full knight’s with no +vit gear and I rarely miss not having the extra HP. All you need VIT for is to survive bursts, particularly condition damage bursts. As long as you pack a bit of condition removal you won’t miss higher max HP most of the time. With 3300 armor, sig of judgement, shelter, renewed focus, aegis, etc, direct burst damage is not a big problem. The great thing about toughness is that each extra 10% of mitigation essentially increases the effectiveness of all your heals by 10% (except against condition damage.).

Brutaly.6257:

This chart, along side extensive gameplay has led me a couple of conclusions:

1. Armor>Vitality as long as there some sort of heal
2. Armor improves heals
3. As long as you build for condition removal Armor>Vitality
4. The ideal armor for a guardian would be crit/toughness and either healing power or critical damage. Both would be beast when a guardian use them and i cant see Anet ever introducing them but one can hope.
5. Armor>Vitality vs bursts, as long as you stack passive SoJ and have protection in utilities/virtues.
6. Vitality are for children and elderly that want a slower gameplay and dont have time to react to incoming damage :-) Joke aside, vitality only benefit, an opinion ofc, is that its less cd depedent and fully passive and can from time to time be nice to have versus bursts.

Very interesting considerations!

I pretty much agree but…
4. I don’t know enough about healing power but from my math precision should be just enough to trigger on-critical effect reasonably often. Past this point power is better for DPS. This makes critical damage too not so over-the-top to me.
5. Even with SoJ and protection it seems to me that +100 vitality with 16k total health is a 6,25% resistance increase to burst, while +100 toughness with 3k armor is only a -3,33% to damage. To me vitality must be handled in the same way as precision: it’s useful until it make possible to survive a burst, but past this point toughness is the winner.

Given these considerations I go for a mix of knight and soldier.

Codo.2860:

Brutaly.6257:

This chart, along side extensive gameplay has led me a couple of conclusions:

1. Armor>Vitality as long as there some sort of heal
2. Armor improves heals
3. As long as you build for condition removal Armor>Vitality
4. The ideal armor for a guardian would be crit/toughness and either healing power or critical damage. Both would be beast when a guardian use them and i cant see Anet ever introducing them but one can hope.
5. Armor>Vitality vs bursts, as long as you stack passive SoJ and have protection in utilities/virtues.
6. Vitality are for children and elderly that want a slower gameplay and dont have time to react to incoming damage :-) Joke aside, vitality only benefit, an opinion ofc, is that its less cd depedent and fully passive and can from time to time be nice to have versus bursts.

Very interesting considerations!

I pretty much agree but…
4. I don’t know enough about healing power but from my math precision should be just enough to trigger on-critical effect reasonably often. Past this point power is better for DPS. This makes critical damage too not so over-the-top to me.
5. Even with SoJ and protection it seems to me that +100 vitality with 16k total health is a 6,25% resistance increase to burst, while +100 toughness with 3k armor is only a -3,33% to damage. To me vitality must be handled in the same way as precision: it’s useful until it make possible to survive a burst, but past this point toughness is the winner.

Given these considerations I go for a mix of knight and soldier.

If you’re using the Greatsword and are relying primarily on Critical Proc’s to heal yourself for AH than Precision will be your better bet because AH scales rather poorly with healing power.

If you’re trying to be a Tank and are using the Mace as your primary weapon than stacking Healing Power with Toughness gives you much better effective health than straight stacking Vitality and Toughness.

Vitality is still useful for Guardian’s to help give you a buffer against heavy burst, but it’s not the best stat to be straight stacking.

Nice work. I think we all agree that stacking vitality is useless but my opinion is still that having 1 or 2 soldier pieces is useful to survive burst damage or when fighting a conditionstacker in pvp.
I’d like to note in realistic PvE scenarios though that I never have problems outsustaining the damage from mobs with mostly berserker gear so only a few knights pieces are indeed necessary as well.

Codo.2860:

5. Even with SoJ and protection it seems to me that +100 vitality with 16k total health is a 6,25% resistance increase to burst, while +100 toughness with 3k armor is only a -3,33% to damage.

The first part is correct but the last part isn’t necessarily correct. That is in fact where we mostly go wrong, toughness increases the relative value of healing. I had a column i didn’t post where it was displayed how fast the healthpool was restored on different levels of toughness and the differences are significant with the same healing power in both builds. Also why i favor clerics over magi from a pure survival perspective.

Codo.2860:

4. I don’t know enough about healing power but from my math precision should be just enough to trigger on-critical effect reasonably often. Past this point power is better for DPS. This makes critical damage too not so over-the-top to me.
To me vitality must be handled in the same way as precision: it’s useful until it make possible to survive a burst, but past this point toughness is the winner.

Given these considerations I go for a mix of knight and soldier.

Well in a pve environment that might be true but in pvp you want them to trigger as often as possible and as reliable as possible. The same is true in precision the more often it proccs the more reliable and predictable it becomes which is key in pvp.

One of the biggest healing sources is also omnomberry pie which seems to have no internal cd and that is huge on a high crit/toughness build.

I realize that i was unclear about my intention when posting, sorry for that, i dont think one excludes the other. And personally i find these armor vs vitality and precison over power discussions a bit moot. The reason why i think so is that we infact have three different stats on each set so we are infact forced to combine stats and cant stack one or the other to excess. The only stat we might be able to stack in excess are toughness since we have a gear that combine pre/pow/tough and ofc clerics that are also useful when stacking toughness and heal power.

But no one in there right mind can say that a 100% soldier setup does more damage then a 100% knights set up, ofc depending on traits but if we run a regular ah (0/0/30/30/10) build then its a no go.

My point was that with 100% knights its my firm belief that you have a bigger effective healthpool then with a 100% soldiers setup and a smaller healthpool when compared to a 100% clerics.

This is also the reason why i claim that there are tanks in this game, a knights guardian has very small healthpool (aggro) extremely high toughness (aggro) and with a hammer (proximity generates aggro) has 100% uptime on protection. With SoJ we are close to, or over, 80% of all direct damage mitigated, ofc depending on how the additive “mechanics” is executed on toughness/SoJ/protection. This in combination with over 1k heals from hammer chain/AH alone, 16k health and 50% crit, 30% crit damage for dps makes it pretty hard to beat when it comes to survivability in combination with dps.

Alvik.4207:

Nice work. I think we all agree that stacking vitality is useless but my opinion is still that having 1 or 2 soldier pieces is useful to survive burst damage or when fighting a conditionstacker in pvp.
I’d like to note in realistic PvE scenarios though that I never have problems outsustaining the damage from mobs with mostly berserker gear so only a few knights pieces are indeed necessary as well.

I agree that adding in other pieces based on personal preference is the way to go, me i add in valkyrie, berserkers and soldiers mostly, just to add more damage while keeping toughness on a reasonable level.

Brutaly.6257:

Codo.2860:

5. Even with SoJ and protection it seems to me that +100 vitality with 16k total health is a 6,25% resistance increase to burst, while +100 toughness with 3k armor is only a -3,33% to damage.

The first part is correct but the last part isn’t necessarily correct. That is in fact where we mostly go wrong, toughness increases the relative value of healing. I had a column i didn’t post where it was displayed how fast the healthpool was restored on different levels of toughness and the differences are significant with the same healing power in both builds. Also why i favor clerics over magi from a pure survival perspective.

Yes, I agree, my statement was only related to burst damage, where healing cannot help you. Here a bit of vitality maybe useful, depending on player skill. I know I sometimes make mistakes in avoiding big hits so I go with 17,5k health.

Brutaly.6257:

Codo.2860:

4. I don’t know enough about healing power but from my math precision should be just enough to trigger on-critical effect reasonably often. Past this point power is better for DPS. This makes critical damage too not so over-the-top to me.
To me vitality must be handled in the same way as precision: it’s useful until it make possible to survive a burst, but past this point toughness is the winner.

Given these considerations I go for a mix of knight and soldier.

Well in a pve environment that might be true but in pvp you want them to trigger as often as possible and as reliable as possible. The same is true in precision the more often it proccs the more reliable and predictable it becomes which is key in pvp.

One of the biggest healing sources is also omnomberry pie which seems to have no internal cd and that is huge on a high crit/toughness build.

No ICD on omnomberry pie??? That’s huge, I thought it was 2s!
However if you stack precision for on-crit effects predictability I can only agree.

Brutaly.6257:

I realize that i was unclear about my intention when posting, sorry for that, i dont think one excludes the other. And personally i find these armor vs vitality and precison over power discussions a bit moot. The reason why i think so is that we infact have three different stats on each set so we are infact forced to combine stats and cant stack one or the other to excess. The only stat we might be able to stack in excess are toughness since we have a gear that combine pre/pow/tough and ofc clerics that are also useful when stacking toughness and heal power.

To me soldier+knight is perfect because they work very well together. Power and toughness are primary on one and secondary on the other, so you can go quite high in these attributes, which are the ones that more benefit of high values. Mix and matching the pieces you can get the only other 2 things you need: enough precision for on-crit effects, enough vitality to survive burst, and the best balance depends on player skill.
Condition damage on guardian is garbage to me, critical damage is meh at best (apart when you get 1% for 5—7 stat points like in jewels, runes or food).
Healing power maybe really good but I don’t use it very much, so I can’t say.

Codo.2860:

No ICD on omnomberry pie??? That’s huge, I thought it was 2s!
However if you stack precision for on-crit effects predictability I can only agree.

To me soldier+knight is perfect because they work very well together. Power and toughness are primary on one and secondary on the other, so you can go quite high in these attributes, which are the ones that more benefit of high values. Mix and matching the pieces you can get the only other 2 things you need: enough precision for on-crit effects, enough vitality to survive burst, and the best balance depends on player skill.
Condition damage on guardian is garbage to me, critical damage is meh at best (apart when you get 1% for 5—7 stat points like in jewels, runes or food).
Healing power maybe really good but I don’t use it very much, so I can’t say.

Grab the torch with sigil of blood and omnomberry pie and a high crit build and use skill 5 or ww on gs of mb and SoP on hammer.

Do this with half healthpool and a high crit build (full knights) and its beyond OP and even more so with multiple opponents.

I agree, its not about whats best, its about what you are comfortable with.

Crit damage is underrated imo, in premade setups you can have considerable amounts of crit damage and with food and fury from teammates you can have some amazing statcombinations. In my premade setup i have about 70% crit damage and about 30 crit chance and with food and fury i have over 60% crit chance, with 3k attack it starts to hit really hard and also tankish with over 3k armor and about 18k health.

haha, Brutaly, i am trying to hard to hit those stats! i can only get close though. ; ))
though i have to say, i’ve started experimenting (on a spreadsheet) with a mix of emerald and ruby orbs as armor ugprades and the results seem extremely promising. while using knight’s, valkyrie, some berserker and soldier for actualy gear pieces, you can come up with a LOT of stat combinations as long as you’re not hung up on certain rune bonus or special effects.