Guild Wars 2

I’ve been seeing a lot of misinformation about the effective benefits of Toughness and Vitality with regards to Necromancers so here is some math that I stole from here.

According to the wiki, the damage formula is:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
or
Damage done = Base Damage / Armor

Based on this formula, Effective HP = HP*Armor (pick some numbers if you don’t believe me). There is a ratio that will help you decide if adding more Vitality or more Toughness will provide a benefit, and the ideal ratio is 10:1 HP:Armor (because Vitality gives 10 HP). The fact is that Necros, with their high HP but low armor are already at this ideal ratio at level 80 (with level 80 exotics).

HP = Base + Vitality (916) = 18372
Armor = Gear + Toughness (916) = 1836

So HP:Armor is 10:1 and therefore Vitality and Toughness give the same increases in effective HP. It’s easy enough to test in the mists. Compare effective HP with a Carrion amulet to a Rabid Amulet. This of course does not mean that Toughness and Vitality are identical, they each have their trade-offs. Condition damage is unaffected by armor, so it essentially takes off more effective HP the higher your armor is. Less HP makes healing more proportionally effective, so they essentially restore more effective HP. So basically, toughness is probably overall better for a necro given the abundance of regen and condition removal.

TL:DR Vitality and toughness do provide the same effective HP for Necros, but Toughness and Vitality have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Good post, I think this is good information any necro should have and I agree completely.

To be more specific for Necromancers;

Vitality will increase your HP and Death Shroud HP (20% of your max Health and then +0.21% per 1 Soul Reaping point of that sub total)

Toughness will transfer over as 5% for condition damage for using Superior Runes of the Undead and/ or 5% to power for traiting 25 points in Death Magic.

Ascii.9726:

To be more specific for Necromancers;

Vitality will increase your HP and Death Shroud HP (20% of your max Health and then +0.76% per 1 Soul Reaping point of that sub total)

Toughness will transfer over as 5% for condition damage for using Superior Runes of the Undead and/ or 5% to power for traiting 25 points in Death Magic.

Are you sure soul reaping increase’s DS hp. I know we had a tread about it and i believe they stated they could not prove it increased the DS hp at all.

Naaa they stated that the increase was not the 1% intended. I did alot of testing and it was around 0.21% after various tests with damage and condition damage.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Death-Shroud-HP-Pool/first#post583355

For all the workings out.

Wow a around .21%……..yeah they need to fix so many bugs before they balance any class’s.

If it’s as you say and armor and vitality give the same increase in effective HP, that would put vitality infinitely higher in priority simply becasue it mitigates condition damage, which Toughness does not do.

I can’t see any advantage armor offers if it’s a 1:1 ratio, because toughness doesn’t cover all damage, but vitality does.

That formula is too simplistic.
Whether you should take toughness vs vitality depends on other things such as how much healing you expect to receive before you die, and what proportion of damage you take will be condition damage. Things which vary from fight to fight and are hard to predict in advance.

Here is a more in depth formula/explanation:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/

My personal preference for pve and wvw is for toughness since necros have very good condition cleanse options and decent base hp. This being said I always felt more tanky with pvp knight amulet than rabid amulet. Also if you are using something like plague signet and blood is power and getting conditions on you constantly base hp feels squishy. I don’t think it really matters though, since pve you can use anything with success, and in pvp the stats are lumped and fixed, so that you get the simple choice of Amulet A vs Amulet B, which you can just try to see which you prefer.

Another thing to note is that vitality actually gives more to necros than other classes as it adds onto your DS hp. So if you have knigth amulet your DS hp is going to be a lot higher than with no vitality on amulet. (toughness also reduces damage taken in DS… when u consider “hp” in the equation it is worthwhile thinking about how much HP you get from DS in your typical fight as well rather than ignoring it. ).

My armor set focuses on Vitality and Toughness ( Hearty set )and some healing power.
My main weapon is staff ( got DD too > using it for siphoning in serious situations ).
now I’m level 66 and my hp is 21K, it’s rarely to drop to 10k(thanks to my minions which I rely on the to damage my foe and heal me all the time ).
I’m the last man standing in all dungeons and events because of that I got one of the biggest HP ever and much toughness too , death shroud helps me alot to avoid death.

True but how you spec can make one better then the other by a fair margin. DS does get a boost from Vit so I can see a DS build going the vit path.

As Ascii pointed out you can double dip toughness. Thats what I do, Deadly Str adds 5% to power giving +100 power and rune of undead gives +100 condition damage solid boosts.

The real problem is you actually do not have a choice of vit for some builds due to gear stats in pve/wvw. There is no Power + Vit + Crit options. So you are stuck with Knights gears that gives Power + Toughness + crit, unless you glass cannon in zerkers.

ostracize.8316:

If it’s as you say and armor and vitality give the same increase in effective HP, that would put vitality infinitely higher in priority simply becasue it mitigates condition damage, which Toughness does not do.

I can’t see any advantage armor offers if it’s a 1:1 ratio, because toughness doesn’t cover all damage, but vitality does.

You’re a forgeting that if you have high tough and small vit, your heal skill will more be effective.

In other words: vit make you tankier to condtions, and tough makes you tankier to direct damage.

Ascii.9726:

Naaa they stated that the increase was not the 1% intended. I did alot of testing and it was around 0.21% after various tests with damage and condition damage.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Death-Shroud-HP-Pool/first#post583355

For all the workings out.

You should really read through the rest of that thread. If your tests were done using a combination of condition damage + direct damage then your numbers are off.

Conditions and direct damage appear to affect life force differently, and every test I’ve done where condition damage and direct damage are isolated show soul reaping having absolutely no affect on effective hp in death shroud.

Ascii.9726:

20% of your max Health

120%

Ascii.9726:

Naaa they stated that the increase was not the 1% intended.

No… we (or at least I) claim it has no effect, because I can’t find ANY increase.

Vadren.9045:

You should really read through the rest of that thread. If your tests were done using a combination of condition damage + direct damage then your numbers are off.

Conditions and direct damage appear to affect life force differently, and every test I’ve done where condition damage and direct damage are isolated show soul reaping having absolutely no affect on effective hp in death shroud.

On top of that, I tried to explain to him at the bottom of my post here that he doesn’t take into account the range on his values and that this range is so large that he really can’t draw the conclusions that he did from them.

TL;DR He basically found that 1 point in soul reaping increases your DS-HP by something in between -0.17% (yes that’s a minus sign) and 0.67%. Notice how 0% is part of this range…

The simplest way to look at it is that toughness is multiplicative of vitality. If you spec into vitality you will have more resistance to conditions however direct damage will eat through you (8k crit from heart seeker). While toughness gives you greater and greater resistance to direct damage (especially criticals), but doesn’t do anything for conditions.

At it’s core, it’s basically if you want to survive crits more easily or conditions as power is basically a given in any build.

striker.3704:

The simplest way to look at it is that toughness is multiplicative of vitality. If you spec into vitality you will have more resistance to conditions however direct damage will eat through you (8k crit from heart seeker)

It would be more accurate to say that Toughness makes it easier to recover from damage through healing since the Heartseeker will cost you an equal percentage of your max HP either way.

Nuhj.8372:

striker.3704:

The simplest way to look at it is that toughness is multiplicative of vitality. If you spec into vitality you will have more resistance to conditions however direct damage will eat through you (8k crit from heart seeker)

It would be more accurate to say that Toughness makes it easier to recover from damage through healing since the Heartseeker will cost you an equal percentage of your max HP either way.

This is the main take away I want people to get from this. When people say that Toughness is better against direct damage this is not true (for Necros). They provide equal amounts of effective HP (i.e. same amount of effective damage reduction) but the two attributes have different strengths, i.e. Vitality is better vs. conditions and Toughness improves healing indirectly.

Vitality doesn’t give 1:1 EHP to death shroud. Toughness does. Vitality doesn’t scale with healing power. Toughness does. Vitality helps against conditions. Toughness doesn’t.

To solve this issue do as I do , I’m specialized on both vitality and toughness.

A little off topic – Do we know if Gluttony is bugged or not? Is it supposed to give 5% LF PLUS the 3% on say, staff 1? Or is it actually supposed to be 5% of the 3%, making it 3.15% per hit traited?

Well having toughness is great if you have the HP to back it up. I’d have to say Vitality > Toughness.

I spec fairly heavily into getting as much condition damage as possible, so the synergy off Undead runes are worth the investment there. Also some of the toughness-line skills like Greater Marks and Staff mastery I still place some value in.

The vitality-line, if they fixed a lot of the vampiric-siphon stuff to return health at a worthwhile amount, I’d try and look at doing again, but I dont use wells much or have a lot of use for the skills there otherwise.
But for pure hit-points, no, there is a tangible amount of damage reduction from running a lot of toughness.

It’s the same way mitigation vs. HP works in most games.

The best outcome in terms of effective HP is balancing the two, each point of one makes the other stronger, the same way crit and power do, each point of power makes your crits hit harder, each point of crit multiplies power effectiveness.

Well if you’re taking less damage, each point of HP you have is worth more.

The thing is for necromancers, we already have high HP, and toughness is weak to conditions, but most of us run builds heavy in removal. This increases the value of toughness for us pretty significantly, as does our self healing.

The question at the end of the day though is do you get enough mitigation from toughness to outweigh the amount of HP we get from vitality?

In my experience I feel hardier running vitality builds in SPvP. I think this is in part due to the fact that we can get so much HP, as much as over 30k with knight medallion, vitality runes and full Blood Magic, and part that despite our condition cleansing there’s still cooldowns and such, you still take damage from them.

We also already have access to protection which is 33% damage reduction, already increasing the value of our HP.

I think it’s also possible toughness just doesn’t offer a lot of mitigation

How much access to protection do we have? There’s Spectral Armour which is on an abysmal 90s cooldown, a 15 point trait in Soul Reaping to get SA at 50% health (not sure about internal CD), and a 20 point trait in Death Magic to make wells give 3s of protection.

All three are pretty iffy and not terribly reliable due to pretty long cooldowns, and fairly short durations . OH WAIT, I forgot spectral wall. Either way I feel the utilities that grant protection aren’t quite strong enough to forgo my well of power, well of suffering, and spectral walk/corrupt boon/bone minions