Guild Wars 2

And why?

Which one is more important to itemize?

I’m about to construct armor and I’d like to know what would be better to invest into I already have 30 into Honor for the vitality, but I’m not sure if I want more vit or if I want more toughness.

If you want to hold aggro in PvE then you need toughness. If you want to just survive, get vitality.

Toughness also lowers the physical damage you take but it scales off pretty badly in high levels. I personally only grab this stat so I can hold aggro in dungeons. You can even test it out. you will notice that monsters target you much more often if you have a decent amount of toughness on your armor.

I personally run both pretty high, try to aim for 15-16k hp and then invest the rest in toughness.

I’m interested in being immovable… Which is why I considered balancing my crafted armor between Cleric and Carrion for the Toughness and Vitality.

It depends on what you want and which content you run, but for survivability you’ll need both.

both important yet i would give toughness more room in your setup. vitality is important to handle condition damage. If your build is setup to remove a lot of that anyways toughness is the way to go.

I personally go with Toughness. We have enough condition removers, so Vitality isn’t that big of a deal for me.

I suggest both.

Get yourself a set of AC/hotw armor. Those two dungeons have armor sets with power, vitality, and toughness. A good rune set is full soldier’s.

If you can remove conditions quickly with your build, definitely toughness. If not a more balanced approach tends to be useful (like get around 17000-20000 Health).

if you want to be immovable, you should look into stability =)

Onza.7165:

I personally run both pretty high, try to aim for 15-16k hp and then invest the rest in toughness.

This i agree with as for some reason 15k seems to be the sweet spot on our HP. After this focus on your toughness. Depending on your build you can get fairly high stats pretty much straight across the board. I think the only stats i consider low on my guard is attack at 2.5k, condition damage at 150, and crit damage at 30% but i run an AH build that buffs my might and as such i average around 2.8k-3k attack with like 500-750 condition damage. Now my crit damage stays around 30%. But i have a 45% crit 3k+ armor and 18k+ HP. So over all i think the low crit damage is fine when you consider i have over 500 healing power added into the other stats i have mentioned.

Toughness starts to scale more slowly the higher you go. The difference between 2600 armor (what I would consider poor toughness for a Guardian) and 3000 armor (what I would consider nominal and appropriate) is 13.3%. The difference between 3000 and 3400 (roughly what full Knights gear plus full Valor would give you) is 11.8%. So it’s still nice the higher you get, but it does slow down and become less valuable. 3000 armor is good and tanky with decent (15k) hp.

You can get around not having a lot of toughness on gear by pumping up Valor a good deal, same thing with vitality and Honor. You can also get a ton of extra health from runes that give 25/50/+90 Vitality – that’s a total of 1650 more HP, which is glorious. Guardians tend to struggle at getting HP and have plenty of extra toughness.

People who have a lot of health, in the range of 20k or so, tend to do so at the expense of toughness or damage. If it’s at the expense of damage, you’re not doing anyone any favors, including yourself. If it’s at the expense of toughness you can cheat by using Signet of Judgement and stacking Protection-granting abilities to simulate having more armor, but ultimately 20k health is just not needed for Guardians in most situations. You have so many drip heals coming in that it gives the illusion of having much more health than you actually do.

3k armor and 15k HP is a reasonably sturdy Guardian. More is nice but the tradeoff is always damage. Personally I have more but I’m always a little sad at my crit chance and unspectacular power.

Edit: semantic correction

when u say 3k toughness u mean armor not actual toughness

I do, thanks for catching that. It’s 2am and I’m sleepy.

i’m of opinion if you want to take multiple hits, go tough. if you want to take big dmg, go vit

KevinK.9182:

i’m of opinion if you want to take multiple hits, go tough. if you want to take big dmg, go vit

would you mind elaborating on that? i could never grasp the concept of that differentiation.
under the assumption that one has enough HP to initially survive the big hit and armor lowers the damage by a specific percentage it should make no difference whatsoever if you for example mitigate 10% from a 10k hit (1k damage) or from 10x 1k hits (10×100 = 1k damage).

if you stack vit, you won’t have same mitigation as ppl stacking toughness. you can’t use 10k vs 10×1k example.

“People who have a lot of health, in the range of 20k or so, tend to do so at the expense of toughness or damage. If it’s at the expense of damage, you’re not doing anyone any favors, including yourself.”
I must say this doesn’t necessarily hold true in every type of content. In sPvP I have low damage, but I can keep one (or two, if I’m playing well or they’re playing poorly) enemies busy for over 2 minutes if need be, which is a lot longer than if I would just kill them.

craygz.6143:

KevinK.9182:

i’m of opinion if you want to take multiple hits, go tough. if you want to take big dmg, go vit

would you mind elaborating on that? i could never grasp the concept of that differentiation.
under the assumption that one has enough HP to initially survive the big hit and armor lowers the damage by a specific percentage it should make no difference whatsoever if you for example mitigate 10% from a 10k hit (1k damage) or from 10x 1k hits (10×100 = 1k damage).

you are right but also wrong.
This would only be true if you would recieve 10 hits all at once. We can assume that 10 hits are applied in some timeframe that lets you react to the source of the damage like avoiding it, healing it, pumping defense whatever.

in addition the topic is about tough vs. vit. vit eats the damage tough mitigates it.

KevinK.9182:

if you stack vit, you won’t have same mitigation as ppl stacking toughness. you can’t use 10k vs 10×1k example.

you seem to misunderstand my question.
your argument seems to be that somehow for single big hits vitality is superior to toughness while it is the other way around for a high number of small hits.

in my example i was comparing a person stacking toughness and receiving a big hit vs. the same person stacking toughness receiving multiple small hits.
in both cases the damage reduction is to my understanding the same – which in turn means the number of hits and/or whether they are high or low damage is irrelevant.
that’s why i asked you to clarify what you mean with your statement.

as far as i can see the only interesting metrics in that calculation are whether a) you have or have not enough HP (and/or mitigation) to survive an initial burst b) the scenario features a lot of conditions and/or condition removal and c) the scenario is a short or prolonged battle, which influences the effect of health regenerating abilities.

Asmodal.6489:

you are right but also wrong.
This would only be true if you would recieve 10 hits all at once. We can assume that 10 hits are applied in some timeframe that lets you react to the source of the damage like avoiding it, healing it, pumping defense whatever.

that is not an issue with single big hits vs. multiple small hits then, but burst vs. pressure.
big hits are generally telegraphed, so nearly all avoidance tools apply to them just as much as they apply to multiple smaller hits.

KevinK.9182:

if you stack vit, you won’t have same mitigation as ppl stacking toughness. you can’t use 10k vs 10×1k example.

you seem to misunderstand my question.
your argument seems to be that somehow for single big hits vitality is superior to toughness while it is the other way around for a high number of small hits.

in my example i was comparing a person stacking toughness and receiving a big hit vs. the same person stacking toughness receiving multiple small hits.
in both cases the damage reduction is to my understanding the same – which in turn means the number of hits and/or whether they are high or low damage is irrelevant.
that’s why i asked you to clarify what you mean with your statement.

as far as i can see the only interesting metrics in that calculation are whether a) you have or have not enough HP (and/or mitigation) to survive an initial burst b) the scenario features a lot of conditions and/or condition removal and c) the scenario is a short or prolonged battle, which influences the effect of health regenerating abilities.

Asmodal.6489:

you are right but also wrong.
This would only be true if you would recieve 10 hits all at once. We can assume that 10 hits are applied in some timeframe that lets you react to the source of the damage like avoiding it, healing it, pumping defense whatever.

that is not an issue with single big hits vs. multiple small hits then, but burst vs. pressure.
big hits are generally telegraphed, so nearly all avoidance tools apply to them just as much as they apply to multiple smaller hits.

I think what he was pointing out is for big hits your better off to have vit because even with max toughness most big hits are over 10k (more than our base hp). Where as if your only taking small hits over time between toughness and your self healing it will be mostly mitigated.

When making gaurdian crafted Rare or Exotic armor, you should focus on the following insignias

Carrion – vitality, power, condition damage
Valkyrie – vitality, power, critical damage
Cleric – toughness, healing power and power
Knight – toughness, power, precision

The three best are Valkyrie, Cleric and Knight for a gaurdian but Carrion can be good too. Choose the best mix of those insignias, you might want to double up on one such as Knight or Valkyrie.

I like to mix both. AC/HOTW gear for instance (power/vit/tough). More tanky but gets the job done for me.

Basically what I have is, full toughness, vitality, power, then on help I have vit tough and healing power and boots precision toughness vit. For guardian we naturally have low crit so no point in berserk set.

My approach on this is that if I have enough HP to survive a big hit and some condition damage long enough to get the regens and heals flowing, then toughness is the way to go.

Sitting around 14K HP in WvW and PVE with Dwayna’s karma set and knight jewelry, I am not easy to kill.
Condition removers are a must in that case, ie Smite is your best friend. Traited its even better.

Which one do you guys prefer

power,toughness,vitality or power, toughness, healing power

Maybe a mix of both?

I personally roll full Clerics.
Healing power is vital to survivability backed by high toughness, and power always comes in handy.
I focus on using shouts to clean conditions and buff my team, so healing power helps keep those bars up via regeneration and mace base attack heal

Sinanju.8456:

Which one do you guys prefer

power,toughness,vitality or power, toughness, healing power

Maybe a mix of both?

I go for a mix and it works well for me. I went for 3 pieces of of the HOTW gear for Armor, specifically Chest/Legs (For largest values of Viality) and then boots. The rest of my gear is all Knights, with all weapons being Berserker (minus the staff which is Shaman purely since I only use that if I need to pop out some heals)

Using Soldier runes for more Tough/Vit, and Condition removal on Shouts. This keeps me pretty sturdy with a “good” health pool and defense amount, and my damage is still pretty high even though it’s a more defensive based gear.

Thanks guys I appreciate it.

Sinanju.8456:

Thanks guys I appreciate it.

Always good to help out a brother gaurdian

I go for a similar build to exphryl.3857’s

Full Soldier armor. Beserker weapons. Valkyrie Earring and Ring. Knight Earring, Ring and Amulet. Do whatever for the back. Mad King Tome is okay. Maybe throw in a Ruby Exquisite Jewel for some extra oomph.

For WvW I stack high toughness and few vitality. I have better result with toughness than vitality. Just feeling.

Running 3.3k armor and 15k health + self health regen.

And a reminder: There is a trait that copies 5% of toughness into precision. This is EXTREMELY useful. 2000 Toughness is mirrored into 100 precision, which is about a 5% increase to crit chance.

Toughness helps reduce the burst while Vitality makes it so you can soak up condition damages more, but +Healing is also a form of Vitality because of your constant self healing.

So much misinformation in this thread.

As for toughness scaling falling off, it doesn’t. Each point of toughness adds the same amount of survivability against direct damage.

Consider a Guardian with X armor that reduces direct damage by 50%. Now, if he got 2X armor, he obviously wouldn’t reduce damage by 100%, but he would reduce damage by another 50%, resulting in 75% damage reduction. Guess what? By adding another X armor, you reduced the damage taken by another 50%.

Also note that healing scales with toughness. More toughness means that each life point is worth more against direct damage. Thus, each point you heal has a greater benefit.

The point of vitality is to survive condition damage and have enough to soak a burst.

TLDR: Vitality is an “enough of” type stat whereas Toughness is a great stat to stack, considering all of the condition strips Guardians have.

I’ve been using this food here and it’s really amazing.

-20% less damage taken while knocked down, stunned, or knocked back and -20% less condition damage taken. It improved my survivability very noticeably especially when I’m using stand your ground.

I personally go with toughness over vitality. Having a high HP is nice to absorb burst damage and conditions. After I reached about 16k HP I started focusing on toughness. Removing conditions is easy as a guard and our heals and any other heals from any source are never going to fill that 20k+ HP bubble.
Considering that we can removed conditions and most heals will come from regens, the toughness is a better stat to stack..everyone has a different play style though..you may find comfort in having a 20k+ HP bubble.