Lyssia Iceblood of Gandara – I sometimes win… but not often :-(
Toughness or health?
On every other class, I would say toughness, because HP’s effectiveness diminishes the longer you are in a fight. This is because HP is just an initial defensive buffer, if you have 20k HP they need to do 20k damage for you to die, so that is your damage buffer. If you have lower HP, that buffer is smaller, so burst damage hurts more. That said, toughness actually lowers the damage you take. If you extrapolate that over multiple heals (anything that raises your HP during the fight), then having higher toughness will actually be more effective.
That said, necro is the one class where HP is possibly better than toughness, simply because of death shroud. Death shroud scales with your HP bar better than with your toughness, because everything that gives you LF gives it based on a percentage. 10% LF is twice as much with 20k HP than with 10k.
In my opinion, stacking HP and taking advantage of the way DS works is much better than stacking toughness. So for a necro (and no other class) I would say HP>toughness for defensive stats.
Toughness = Less damage done by Direct Damage.
Vitality = More health to soak damage and larger Life Force.
Life Force in Death Shroud takes more more damage from Conditions than Health does.
Toughness does nothing against Conditions.
Necro’s have a bunch of ways to remove conditions (DS can be traited to remove them)
Toughness causes aggro to go your way in PvE.
There’s merit in going for either.
I know I went “Sod choosing” and use PVT gear so have both (At the cost of crits, but use extra high power + some high damage utilities to try and counteract this)
“Pull the trigger, move out ahead,
There’s two kinds of people… The quick and the dead”
There’s two kinds of people… The quick and the dead”
if you want to focus on 1 defensive stat so you can devote the rest of your stats to damage go with toughness over vitality.
well, just had a bs thief bust me down in 3 hits (seemed to be 8k each hit) which seems a little op
Lyssia Iceblood of Gandara – I sometimes win… but not often :-(
He’s also about as strong as paper when attacked.
That said, necro is the one class where HP is possibly better than toughness, simply because of death shroud. Death shroud scales with your HP bar better than with your toughness, because everything that gives you LF gives it based on a percentage. 10% LF is twice as much with 20k HP than with 10k.
To be honest, I don’t see why DS would scale better with vitality than with toughness… Taking your example: 10% will be more in the first case than in the second one, but the natural degeneration will be the same in both cases; so the only thing you improve is your capacity to take damage. But your normal armor also still applies in DS, so alternatively you might double your armor and you would get the exact same result.
Going into this a bit further: the interplay of health and armor is generally expressed trough an effective HP (eHP) through the simple formula eHP = health (per fight) * armor. Making some abstractions to keep it simple (like ignoring healing and condition damage), the ideal ratio is to have health = 10 * armor. As you already said though, long fights (with lots of healing) quickly lower the value of health (by increasing your health per fight), while lots of condition damage lowers the value of armor (because it ignores it).
The same can also be applied to Death Shroud, which changes the formula to health = 12 * armor (because your ‘hidden’ DS health is 120% of your normal health). Natural degradation in DS affects health and armor equally (as shown earlier), so we can ignore that. From this, you might think that health is indeed a bit more valuable in DS than out of it (keyword: a bit). On the other hand, healing (life force gain) is normally also readily achieved, so all in all the scales actually tip in favor of toughness for me.
TL;DR The same principles as normal eHP apply to DS: you should find a balance between health, healing and armor. All in all, it might be best to optimise it for your ‘out of DS’ parameters and your ‘in DS’ values shouldn’t be to far of their ideal case.
I agree that you should always find a balance between toughness and vitality, as it is going to give the best returns. That said, I still think because of how LF is built based on a % (therefore higher HP actually means higher healing), and just the general necromancer playstyle, that if you absolutely had to choose between vitality and toughness that vitality is a better option. It is completely up to debate though, and in the end falls down to personal preference.
Life Force in Death Shroud takes more more damage from Conditions than Health does.
Just to clear this rumor, its not “taking more damage”, but since the calculations are in %, it gets rounded up, so a condition ticking for 40 will take around the same amout of life force as one that ticks for 80.
When life gives you lemon, ask if its from a anime or manga.
I agree that you should always find a balance between toughness and vitality, as it is going to give the best returns. That said, I still think because of how LF is built based on a % (therefore higher HP actually means higher healing), and just the general necromancer playstyle, that if you absolutely had to choose between vitality and toughness that vitality is a better option. It is completely up to debate though, and in the end falls down to personal preference.
no not at all
the necro has many many ways to deal with conditions where vit is the better defensive stat
necros have very few ways to deal with direct damage compared to other classes and that is why we need toughness more than we need vit if you cant or dont want gear for both.
Vitality is also a much better stat against bursting, something we are definitely weak against (even more so if we have low DS pools).
I’m going to be unhelpful and sit on the fence.
If you choose Vitality, you’re playing to your strength. Necro has a high base health to begin with, and effectively a second health bar which scales further with Vitality.
If you choose Toughness, you’re covering a weakness. As others have said, it scales with healing and makes your existing health pool more ‘effective.’
Neither choice is wrong.