Guild Wars 2

Greetings,

I m just wanderting what is better to stack if i m planing on using DS for survivability?

I see many people saying that vitality is better because it increases the LF pool.
But on the other hand doesnt the extra tougness reduce the damage we take while in DS?

I dont want this to be a general tough vs vit discussion, i m just wondering what is different about these stats when talking specifiacally about DS.

Also i think that i ve read somewhere that condition damage is treated differently while in DS but i couldn’t find anything more about it. If anyone can shed some light i d really appreciate it.

Death Shroud is 60% of your HP (or that is what is currently believed to be true), meaning your vitality gets an extra 1.6 scaling, up to 1.78 scaling with 30 SR. In addition to that, LF gain is done via percentages, meaning high LF pools scale very well with LF generation. So, for example, a normal necromancer has about 18k HP, with 28.8k eHP with LF added in. Increasing your vitality up so you have base 28k HP (knight gear) raises your eHP up to 44.8k eHP. At that level, a 3% LF gain is an eHP “heal” of 500 eHP.

Toughness is going to reduce the damage while in DS, so it is going to have a similar effect to normal, but of course doesn’t have the additional scaling that necromancers get via DS.

Realize that there is no consensus as to which is better, it is merely how well you feel you can utilize each stat in your build.

Or don’t choose between the two. Soldier gear all day long =D

Thanks a lot for the reply

So if i understand correctly vitality ‘wins’ over toughness in DS because a high vit/low tough build can ‘heal’ (fill the LF pool) as fast as a low vit/high tough build, but the first scales better with points in Soul Reaping and can deal better with conditions.

Draehl,
since i m mostly interested in condition builds getting Soldier gear wont be a good option. Especially in tpvp where u cant mix different sets of gear…

Essentially speaking, yes. There is, of course, a lot more factors to the debate, but it boils down to whether the increased “healing” and vitality scaling outperforms the way toughness scales with healing.

I know that there are many factors to consider, and in order to simplify things i intended for my question to be about DS only.

Thank you very much for the replies! They were very helpfull

Bhawb.7408:

Death Shroud is 60% of your HP (or that is what is currently believed to be true), meaning your vitality gets an extra 1.6 scaling, up to 1.78 scaling with 30 SR. In addition to that, LF gain is done via percentages, meaning high LF pools scale very well with LF generation. So, for example, a normal necromancer has about 18k HP, with 28.8k eHP with LF added in. Increasing your vitality up so you have base 28k HP (knight gear) raises your eHP up to 44.8k eHP. At that level, a 3% LF gain is an eHP “heal” of 500 eHP.

Toughness is going to reduce the damage while in DS, so it is going to have a similar effect to normal, but of course doesn’t have the additional scaling that necromancers get via DS.

Realize that there is no consensus as to which is better, it is merely how well you feel you can utilize each stat in your build.

To shorten bhawb answer think about what you will utilize DS for. If you use it as damage source then its mostly preferences. But if you are for instance MM… and lack condition removal then you can utilize DS for soaking condition damage and in that case toughness would be useless since it does not mitigate condition damage in any way… but increased LF pool would. And if you are condition spec/condition juggling spec then you may not really care much for condition damage which does double damage in DS + you can already pass it over/remove in multitude of ways and just want something that is more generally beneficial like toughness. Lack of LF generation as condition spec could be a factor. And so on and so forth.
Think of context rather then the opinion of someone else.

Actually, from what I can tell. It’s a bit more complex.

Vit is 75% of your base stats, plus vit on gear, but -1% per 10. Tough ‘seems’ to work, but damage is rounded into 1% ‘blocks’ so it’s very rare it’s going to shave the diff from 2% to 1% less life force taken.

Also the trait line, for the bonus life force, only helps vs damage taken, it’s still always ticking 4% of your max life force (or 3 if trait’ed) so 0 points in that line keeps same amount of DS uptime 98% of the time.

Moil of the story, vit usually gives more DS uptime. Your better off focusing on Life Force gen. (Signet, 5points Soul Reap for 10% gen on weaps, 10points Path of Midnight also gives faster 4, with enough mobs will be free of charge)

Another wrinkle is this.

Toughness increases Healing and Siphon efficiency, but does nothing for LF gain efficiency. It also makes you take more Condition damage, as a percentage of your total.

Vitality reduces Healing and Siphon efficiency, but increases the amount of raw hitpoints LF you gain from skills. It also decreases the amount of Condition damage you take, as a percentage of your total.

It seems to me that a balanced approach is probably better, though there is a case to be made for using various weapon/utility skills to compensate for a more slanted approach. For example, loading up on Toughness and compensating for the weakness vs. Conditions with more cleansing/transfers. Also, loading up on Vitality and compensating for the lack of heal efficiency and armor by bringing more Protection/Blind/Weakness/Chill.

As a seasoned player of the soldier line of gear, I would say that you should worry more about adding toughness than vitality. If your character already has a BHP that suits you, as in, you have enough HP out of death shroud for your tastes, then your DS pool will only really need more toughness to compliment whatever you’re trying to use it for, whether it be conditions or power damage.

neither should have priority over the other though, so make sure you balance both.