Guild Wars 2

At what amount of toughness should I spec into vitality and offensive stats? Around 1500? (WvW and pve usage)

Trying to make a hybrid build useing Axe/focus or Axe/dagger with staff as my second weapon set.
Primarily thinking of useing celestial stats and maybe mixing in some carrion gear.

For.hybrids. i would go scepter, to me axe is more of a power weapon.
Also i like hight toughness builds for.some reason. Like one if my spvp builds has 2700
Im not sure what my wvw has

There is no such thing as too little or too much toughness. On Necro toughness and vitality have very comparable scaling over even extended battles (with slight variance due to things like what type of damage are you facing, how much healing, etc.). In a perfect situation you’d have the ability to actively change what you need depending on what you are facing (by having two sets), but otherwise just pick your personal preference.

I’d suggest you take however much of either or both that you need to just stay alive, and then full yoloswag#420blazeit damage for the rest.

alamore.1974:

For.hybrids. i would go scepter, to me axe is more of a power weapon.

If you want to play a hybrid build you need a power weapon. Having both scepter and staff is weak sauce unless your direct damage part of your hybrid setup comes from Life Blasting with Deathly Perception. But in that case you’re probably better off with a pure power build.

Bhawb.7408:

On Necro toughness and vitality have very comparable scaling over even extended battles (with slight variance due to things like what type of damage are you facing, how much healing, etc.)

They really don’t.
Unlike toughness, vitality scales linear. I wouldn’t go with no toughness at all, but in general vitality is straight up better for necros because of life force scaling and bad regular healing.

Troll.4237:

At what amount of toughness should I spec into vitality and offensive stats? Around 1500? (WvW and pve usage)
…
Primarily thinking of useing celestial stats and maybe mixing in some carrion gear.

In that case I would approach it the opposite way:
Gear up for the amount of damage you want to do. If it inclused carrion and celestial you’ll get defensive stats anyway.

Yes i know axe is a power weapon. But scepter is a ‘hybrid’ weapon able to do power and conditions.

The scepter is not a hybrid weapon. Even if you go full berserker, have Target the Weak and all 12 conditions on your target, Feast of Corruption will do laughably low damage (on a 10 sec cd!). The rest is even less hybrid material.

Its a fine hybrid weapon. Just because all u beleive is meta doesnt make.it so. I hit 3k with feast on corruption on a ten sec cool down. Along with poison on AA to deal with signet wars i will have to test in wvw( the build) ill have to buy some gear to fit the build, buts it viable.
6/6/2/0/0
II,VIII,XII (or parasitic contagion.
V,VII,XII
V
Consume. Conditions
Blood is power
Corrupt boon
Epidemic
Lich form,

Edit: fixed XII error.

alamore.1974:

Its a fine hybrid weapon. Just because all u beleive is meta doesnt make.it so. I hit 3k with feast on corruption on a ten sec cool down. Along with poison on AA to deal with signet wars i will have to test in wvw( the build) ill have to buy some gear to fit the build, buts it viable.
6/6/2/0/0
II,VIII,XII (or parasitic contagion.
V,VII,XI
V
Consume. Conditions
Blood is power
Corrupt boon
Epidemic
Lich form,

Sorry but you lose a lot of credibility when you say someone should take Lingering Curse over path of corruption in WvW. People run condition clears so it is a complete waste. Also, your in WvW without a stun break at all? All I can say is good luck.

Yes that supose to be XII path of corruption. Lol.
And yes no stun break. If you running with a zerg ( which every one does) you honestly dont have to have one.

For WvW i mix in Well of Power. It’s a stun break, offers stability and supports the group/folks on a ram. It’s always on my toolbar for these reasons. I also enjoy Signet of Spite to begin all fights. Excellent range and a great way to soften up the target and/or get them to burn some condi cleanse. This also dominates my toolbar regardless of power or condi spec. Good passive effect too and goes well with Epidemic.

alamore.1974:

I hit 3k with feast on corruption on a ten sec cool down.

Liar liar, pants on fire!

3k would be a best case scenario critical hit with 10 stacks of might, at least 5 conditions on your opponent who also happens to be below 50% hp at that time.

That’s just weak compared to what you could do with the axe.

Ive also heard alot of people say vitality over toughness for pve. Is that true?

There’s some truth to it of course, because the more life force you can generate (a lot in PvE) the better vitality becomes for your survivability.
However, you usually don’t need any defense in PvE at all. If you’re serious about dungeons you’ll want full berserker, or not a necro at all for that matter.

I hit 4.8k on my scepter 3 in sPvP with a build I threw together in like 20 seconds and using just three skills in a row. Basically instantly drop a golem from half to dead if you get lucky on crits. With the exact same build I only hit marginally higher with my axe 2.

If you want an actual hybrid build though you want scepter and axe. You’re also going to want at least 25 in curses, and probably some good sources of might. But it is still a very high damage build. Axe on its own just isn’t a great weapon to stay in for long. You’re going to want to swap weapons a lot, use their “power” hits along with timing your might/condi bursts. But you really need both.

Bhawb.7408:

I hit 4.8k on my scepter 3 in sPvP with a build I threw together in like 20 seconds and using just three skills in a row.

Please elaborate.

Eagle Runes, Zerker amulet, 6/5/0/0/3, force sigil, 50% HP target, activate signet of spite and blood is power, as long as scepter 3 crits it deals that much damage. Its 7 conditions on the target, 13 stacks of might, I think 2.3k power, 190% (ish?) crit damage.

Scepter doesn’t actually deal bad direct damage. Every auto attack hits about as hard as axe does. Nothing compared to dagger, but then again pretty much nothing is.

I know I’m not the first one to do this but I actually started using rampagers on the dhuum terror build… If you don’t get focused immediately someone is in some serious trouble

flow.6043:

alamore.1974:

I hit 3k with feast on corruption on a ten sec cool down.

Liar liar, pants on fire!

3k would be a best case scenario critical hit with 10 stacks of might, at least 5 conditions on your opponent who also happens to be below 50% hp at that time.

That’s just weak compared to what you could do with the axe.

Signet if spite gives u six conditions pop ds give fear pop sOs thats 7
8%damage boost per condition not to mention high crit chance.

Go try it out you will be surprised

So I tried it with Bhawb’s setup, I also added Tainted Shackles to get 2 more conditions.
I admit, I was surprised how high I could get the scepter to hit (first screenshot, 5.9k).
However, I was not surprised at all how much higher I could get with the axe. The screenshots of Ghastly Claws aren’t even all critical hits.
Also, when I used runes of strength and pre-stacked a little extra vulnerability, I got close to 10k with only 6 out of 8 hits being critical (3rd screenshot).

But since this is about hybrid builds, the extreme results of testing this rotation with a berserker amulet under perfect conditions is hardly what you’ll get with a carrion/celestial/rampager amulet against real opponents. Suffice to say, the axe will always do much higher damage than the scepter, because it’s not as dependent on the number of conditions on your target, plus you get all of this on a lower cooldown.

alamore.1974:

I hit 3k with feast on corruption on a ten sec cool down.

alamore.1974:

Signet if spite gives u six conditions pop ds give fear pop sOs thats 7
8%damage boost per condition not to mention high crit chance.

Btw, if you get 3k with this skill rotation then it’s hardly on a 10 sec cooldown.
On the other hand, 3k is a very average Ghastly Claws for me with a carrion amulet and pack runes. No Signet of Spite or might stacking required.

I’m not too good at using zerker amulet, however, you can just use Valk or cavalier, with intelligence sigil and it hits like a mac truck still.

I’ve tried with Runes of Infiltration, sigil of battle and intelligence, BiP and SoS, hit 5.5 with out tainted shackles, but with DS2.

Isn’t the rule Vitality if facing condi damage dealers, toughness if facing direct damage dealers? With an already high health pool, and DS spec’d, I favour toughness in WvW (2k) but then I’m a Terror Condimancer..

Bloodwort MacFangho.4638:

Isn’t the rule Vitality if facing condi damage dealers, toughness if facing direct damage dealers? With an already high health pool, and DS spec’d, I favour toughness in WvW (2k) but then I’m a Terror Condimancer..

The reality will always be that you’re facing both direct and condition damage.

But just to make a more specific example:
Let’s assume your current armor value is 2500. According to gw2buildcraft that gives you a 27% damage reduction compared to having no extra toughness on gear or traits at all.
At this point you’re presented with the option to go with either an additional 100 toughness or vitality. Picking toughness would increase your damage reduction by another ~3%. So the comparison you’ll have to make is rather obvious when you’re taking vitality instead:
Is 1k extra hp worth taking an additional 3% damage with every direct damage attack. Answer: if 1k hp represents 3% of damage not taken, then your opponent will have to do more than 33k damage before you’re getting more survivability out of toughness.
Now, this is assuming you’re only taking direct damage and you’re not using life force to mitigate any of it.

Like I said earlier, I’d rather not go without any extra toughness in WvW as it exposes you to burst damage, but at a certain point vitality gives you much better value in terms of survivability. Especially because it gives you an equivalent of 120% extra life force, which generates more reliably than we can heal regular hp.

Except, now you’ve assumed that you already made a large investment in thoughness to begin with (664 to reach 2500 armor). If you had started at base thoughness and 25k health, you’d have reached the opposite conclusion.

The basic rule, which doesn’t take into account healing (favours thoughness), condition damage (favours vitality) or death shroud, is simply “armor = health/10”

Arvid.3829:

Except, now you’ve assumed that you already made a large investment in thoughness to begin with (664 to reach 2500 armor). If you had started at base thoughness and 25k health, you’d have reached the opposite conclusion.

If I start at base value an additional 100 toughness is ~5% dmg reduction. In that case your opponent would have to do 20k direct dmg to make it worth not taking 1k hp instead.
2500 was just a random number, but the comparison shows that the more toughness you have the more vitality you actually want instead.

Like I said, I wouldn’t go without any toughness but if I had to choose just one then vitality is always the clear winner for necros.

Arvid.3829:

The basic rule, which doesn’t take into account healing (favours thoughness), condition damage (favours vitality) or death shroud, is simply “armor = health/10”

I would agree if we actually had decent healing, which we don’t. Once you lose a certain amount in combat you’ll probably never heal up full on your own.
Life force on the other hand does most of the work when it comes to our sustain. And since it always generates in percentages there is no magic sweet spot for healing power vs toughness, just one rule instead: the more vitality the better.

The armor = health isn’t valid for necromancers. In general, Necromancers have very low self healing, with only regen and their healing skill being the extent of it (sometimes dagger 2, but you prefer to not use it in a damage build). Which means that over a long fight armor doesn’t actually help you out that much. However, vitality on a necro not only mitigates conditions and is better in a very fast fight, but due to LF generation it tends to scale better over a long fight as well.

Then you also have necro builds which aren’t part of the “normal”, and have ungodly healing and as such toughness does a lot more work. However unless you are that build I’d always suggest vitality over toughness if you have to pick one or the other (not to mention Carrion is far more adaptable imo).

flow.6043:

alamore.1974:

I hit 3k with feast on corruption on a ten sec cool down.

alamore.1974:

Signet if spite gives u six conditions pop ds give fear pop sOs thats 7
8%damage boost per condition not to mention high crit chance.

Btw, if you get 3k with this skill rotation then it’s hardly on a 10 sec cooldown.
On the other hand, 3k is a very average Ghastly Claws for me with a carrion amulet and pack runes. No Signet of Spite or might stacking required.

I am glad to see you testing it.most people wont.
And 3k is my average i will not always have max.conditions on my target so i saw.no point to boast that i hit 6k all the time. The poison on the auto attack is so valuable, HS warriors melt to me.

Yes axe 2 hits like a freight truck.

Vitality for.necros.is.much more valuable then toughness.
Unless you have a high healing build were toughness matters more.
I have a rather fun build in spvp with 2700 toughness and 21k-24khp that is incredible hard to kill.
But in wvw go with vitality.

flow.6043:

If I start at base value an additional 100 toughness is ~5% dmg reduction. In that case your opponent would have to do 20k direct dmg to make it worth not taking 1k hp instead.

First of all, you’re completely screwing up your results by rounding here. Just adding 2 more figures, you’d get 5.17% dmg reduction, meaning you need to take 19342 direct damage (that’s before the damage reduction btw) before it’s advantageous. This happens to be lower than the 19372 you’d have from +100 vitality, so toughness is actually slightly better here.

I don’t know why you want to compare them in such an unintuitive manner though, why not just use eHP instead (which gw2buildcraft even calculates for you)? In that case, you see that the difference between +100 toughness and +100 vitality (starting from base) is actually crazy small, i.e. 19373 vs. 19372. As is to be expected when base itself has the closest ‘ideal’ ratio of any class: 18372/1836 = 10.007.

flow.6043:

2500 was just a random number, but the comparison shows that the more toughness you have the more vitality you actually want instead.

And vice versa. That should be common knowledge…

flow.6043:

Like I said, I wouldn’t go without any toughness but if I had to choose just one then vitality is always the clear winner for necros.

It may be a clear winner for you, which is fine, but it is not a clear winner for necros in general. The difference between the 2 (in pvp, which is the only place where you have to chose between the 2) is again extremely close before you take condition damage and healing into account (24806 vs 24802). Given that we handle conditions pretty darn well and I hope you have some team mates that heal you a bit from time to time, the decision is really not the no-brainer you’re making it out to be.

flow.6043:

Arvid.3829:

The basic rule, which doesn’t take into account healing (favours thoughness), condition damage (favours vitality) or death shroud, is simply “armor = health/10”

I would agree if we actually had decent healing, which we don’t.

Well, there’s nothing to disagree here. Given the approximations I said there, math simply dictates it’s right… Obviously, you have to try to add the other factors into your decision; which involves a considerable amount of guessing and which is something each has to judge for his own. But I didn’t do that exercise there… that’s simply the formula in first approximation and that’s all there is to it.

flow.6043:

Life force on the other hand does most of the work when it comes to our sustain. And since it always generates in percentages there is no magic sweet spot for healing power vs toughness, just one rule instead: the more vitality the better.

Or the more toughness the better? Seriously, the sweet spot for health vs. armor is still there… Just because vitality is less bad because of how the ‘healing’ works in DS, doesn’t suddenly make it the only sensible choice. The only advantage vitality has in DS is that it helps against conditions which toughness doesn’t… and then you realize tanking condition damage by going into a mode that basically adds a serious amount of DoT onto yourself might not be such a bright move to begin with.

Arvid.3829:

I don’t know why you want to compare them in such an unintuitive manner though, why not just use eHP instead (which gw2buildcraft even calculates for you)? In that case, you see that the difference between +100 toughness and +100 vitality (starting from base) is actually crazy small, i.e. 19373 vs. 19372.

Alright, I’ll give you that one.
With just 100 toughness or vitality the eHP is better with toughness.
But what does this mean, really? If you take nothing but direct damage, no condition damage, no healing, no life force, then you can take exactly 1 extra dmg with toughness instead of vitality. ONE. A single tick of any damaging condition means vitality takes the lead again.

So arguments like this…

Arvid.3829:

is again extremely close… (24806 vs 24802)
Given that we handle conditions pretty darn well and I hope you have some team mates that heal you a bit from time to time, the decision is really not the no-brainer you’re making it out to be.

…don’t mean anything. Handling conditions well doesn’t mean you’re immune.
You will take condition damage, period. If the eHP is that close, the decision is indeed a no-brainer: vitality, please and thank you.

And yes, your allies might heal you occasionally. But you will also generate life force.
Naturally, it’s hard to make a general statement here. If my DS is on cooldown, I’ll be happy to shower in the water fields of engineers. On the other hand, if I’m sitting in DS while I’m getting a hammer massage, I’d rather have Spectral Armor refilling me with every hit.

Arvid.3829:

Well, there’s nothing to disagree here. Given the approximations I said there, math simply dictates it’s right…
…
that’s simply the formula in first approximation and that’s all there is to it.

That golden ratio is bull.
Leaving aside that you can’t predict the course of every actual battle, there’s no math to support any of it. At best it’s a rule of thumb that someone made up a million years ago for classes without life force to give you a general idea for what to aim at when gearing your character.

And as seen in the eHP example, without any gear or traits at all you’re just 100 stat points off the breaking point before vitality starts giving you more raw defense. And not only is this assumption based on never taking any condition damage, but once you start mitigating with DS the difference becomes even more favorable for vitality. Don’t forget, 100 vitality actually adds an additional 1200 hitpoints to you life force pool.

Arvid.3829:

It may be a clear winner for you, which is fine, but it is not a clear winner for necros in general.

Like Bhawb said, there are some builds who can heal enough to make a difference. But other than that, yes, for necros in general: vitality is straight up better.

Oh god… this vitality vs toughness debate! Have we nbot wasted enough of our lives discussing this over the last 2 years?

People smarter than me have done the maths, you can dig around in the dark recesses of the forum to find their posts if you’re brave enough. Bottom line is as follows:
a. for other professions, toughness>vitality against direct damage, vitality>toughness vs conditions. However, because most condi builds (apart from necro) also deal decent(ish) direct damage, toughness is usually best (hence Knights is the go-to gear for zerg fights in wvw for most professions).
b. for necromancer, because each point of vitality is essentially 17HP rather than 10 (because it adds to your total life force), so it just about comes up even against direct damage too.
c. the statement above, however, is only true if you have a full LF bar and/or good LF generation. Most scepter builds don’t. Therefore, at the start of a match, until you’ve built up some LF, toughness>vitality.
d. the other reason to invest in vitality, conditions, isn’t as big a problem for necro due to our high number of transfers and the best cleanse in the game (consume conditions).

So, the tl;dr is: for necromancer, toughness=vitality (roughly), but only if you can build your life force before getting stuck in. I’m currently running Carrion, but those 5k FoC screenshots made my jaw drop to the floor so I might be convinced to try something different! :p

flow.6043:

Alright, I’ll give you that one.
With just 100 toughness or vitality the eHP is better with toughness.
But what does this mean, really? If you take nothing but direct damage, no condition damage, no healing, no life force, then you can take exactly 1 extra dmg with toughness instead of vitality. ONE. A single tick of any damaging condition means vitality takes the lead again.

So arguments like this…

… rely on you not cherry picking the circumstances. Where are the 2 uses of your healing skill that you should be able to rely on? Right, they would swing the balance more to the middle again, so you conveniently ignore them.

flow.6043:

…don’t mean anything. Handling conditions well doesn’t mean you’re immune.
You will take condition damage, period. If the eHP is that close, the decision is indeed a no-brainer: vitality, please and thank you.

Same as above. It’s not like our pathetic healing already easily equates to +50% health, no, just throw it out the window.

flow.6043:

On the other hand, if I’m sitting in DS while I’m getting a hammer massage, I’d rather have Spectral Armor refilling me with every hit.

Why do you keep hinting at some special synergy between vitality and DS that completely dwarfs toughness into none-existence? There really isn’t anything like that. Substitute vitality for toughness in this example and everything will be EXACTLY the same.

flow.6043:

That golden ratio is bull.
Leaving aside that you can’t predict the course of every actual battle, there’s no math to support any of it. At best it’s a rule of thumb that someone made up a million years ago for classes without life force to give you a general idea for what to aim at when gearing your character.

o.O … like seriously… o.O
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/
Nothing made up there, just simple math based on the equations the game uses… The full formula even incorporates healing and condition damage. Since one favors thoughness, the other conditions and both change from fight to fight, indeed the first approximation is to leave them out. And indeed that’s not the end of the story, cause you very much should try to guess how much healing you can expect and how much condition damage you will take. Factors that very much depend on your playstyle, your team, the way you handle conditions, etc. etc. etc. Thus making blanket statements that ‘in general necros want vitality’ nothing more than a jump to conclusions…

flow.6043:

And as seen in the eHP example, without any gear or traits at all you’re just 100 stat points off the breaking point before vitality starts giving you more raw defense.

More o.O
You know the ‘breaking point’ isn’t fixed right? The more vitality you have, the more use you get from toughness and vice versa? And thus the ‘breaking point’ constantly moves the moment you add a single point into either vitality or toughness?

flow.6043:

And not only is this assumption based on never taking any condition damage, but once you start mitigating with DS the difference becomes even more favorable for vitality. Don’t forget, 100 vitality actually adds an additional 1200 hitpoints to you life force pool.

Except it doesn’t. DS starts of at 60% of your total vitality, not 120%. I know there was a lot of confusion about that for a long time, but a dev confirmed it back in august and it’s now very clearly visible in game… https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/DeathShroud-is-now-base-100-HP/first#post2539415
And even that aside, it doesn’t matter (see below).

manveruppd.7601:

for necromancer, because each point of vitality is essentially 17HP rather than 10 (because it adds to your total life force), so it just about comes up even against direct damage too.

An easy mistake to make, but that’s not how the math works. The reason you want (in the approximated version) 10 times as much health as armor is exactly because every point of vitality gives you 10 health. If it would give you 5, you would want 5 times more. And if it gives you 17, then it’s 17 times more (but obviously ‘normal health’+’death shroud health’, since that’s where the 17 comes from). So while that may seem weird, 1 point of vitality giving you more health doesn’t actually mean it’s worth more and you should invest more in it. In the end, due to how the formulas work out, what you’re really balancing is points in toughness vs. points in vitality, and how much either of them gives you is not important. (Or in other words: toughness becomes more important the more health you have, so when vitality gives you larger chunks of health, the importance of toughness equally goes up and the rates of both even out.) Taking it back to DS: in the first approximation, adding DS thus actually doesn’t change the ideal stat spread AT ALL. The only difference is that healing works different in DS (percentage based, so doesn’t favor toughness) and you’re under a fairly high constant Damage over Time effect (which is again percentage based, so vitality doesn’t protect you better against it).

Seems like people smarter than you were not as smart as you or they thought, so you shouldn’t accept this so readily. If I made a mistake myself, then I’ll be the first to hear it and thank whoever can show me where. But obviously, if there’s a problem with my math, I want it to be proven with (better) math… It’s when you don’t that misconceptions as above arise…

The X toughness = Y HP has to do with with maximizing your defensive stats. The more HP you have, the more your armor effectively increases your survivability, and vice versa the more armor you have the more effective each point in HP is.

However this is just from the standpoint of very basic math based on assumptions that aren’t true on Necro due to how we actually play. For necromancers it is literally exactly equal over a long fight. Armor and HP both have an equal effect, since higher vitality gives you higher % LF gains, and armor gives the same thing by making the actual LF a % better. In the end it comes down to basically preference. My preference highly tends towards vitality because on necro it has none of the general drawbacks you normally have, and all of the benefits that toughness lacks.

@Arvid, umm, I’m not sure I’m reading your post correctly but I think we both agree that if you put conditional stuff like death shroud aside toughness is better? Though possibly for different reasons?

I’ve heard the “your HP must be ten times your total armour” formula somewhere before, but on a necromancer in pvp the only amulet that’ll give you that is Soldiers, and that’s no good for a conditionmancer.

manveruppd.7601:

Oh god… this vitality vs toughness debate! Have we nbot wasted enough of our lives discussing this over the last 2 years?

I know, right? ^^
Pure nostalgia in this thread!
I’ve always been a vitality proponent, I’m glad to see some people on my side of the argument as opposed to a year ago.

Arvid.3829:

flow.6043:

And not only is this assumption based on never taking any condition damage, but once you start mitigating with DS the difference becomes even more favorable for vitality. Don’t forget, 100 vitality actually adds an additional 1200 hitpoints to you life force pool.

Except it doesn’t. DS starts of at 60% of your total vitality, not 120%. I know there was a lot of confusion about that for a long time, but a dev confirmed it back in august and it’s now very clearly visible in game… https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/DeathShroud-is-now-base-100-HP/first#post2539415
And even that aside, it doesn’t matter (see below).

Oh come on Arvid, I know you’ve been around long enough to know this:

Yes, the devs “confirmed” it. But that was just another case of them not knowing what’s really going on.
In the July 23rd patch of last year, they introduced the damage overflow from DS to our regular hp. In that same patch the community discovered that our life force pool must be somewhere around 120% of our regular hp.

October 15, 2013 patch: this one confirmed everything the players had suspected all along.
Despite what the devs might’ve said, and despite what the 60% life force bar might indicate, there seems to be a 50% reduction on all sources of damage when in DS (except for overflow dmg), essentially making the actual value double.

So yeah, I assumed this was common knowledge by now: the life force pool is 120% of our regular hp. Or even up to 156% depending on how big your investment in Soul Reaping is.

Arvid.3829:

flow.6043:

That golden ratio is bull.
Leaving aside that you can’t predict the course of every actual battle, there’s no math to support any of it. At best it’s a rule of thumb that someone made up a million years ago for classes without life force to give you a general idea for what to aim at when gearing your character.

o.O … like seriously… o.O
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/
Nothing made up there, just simple math based on the equations the game uses… The full formula even incorporates healing and condition damage…

First of all, the only real math in that guy’s thread is the damage formula from the game. Everything else is based on assumptions and cherry picking situations that might come up, like you’ve accused me of doing earlier.

Secondly, this thread is a million years old and that guy’s calculations are not for necromancers.
At this point you would of course argue that this doesn’t matter, but it does.

1. Life Force regeneration is better and more reliable than our regular healing.

2. LF regen is always percentage based. That means you don’t have to worry about healing effectiveness.

3. Our LF pool is 120-156% of our regular hp, meaning that unlike with other classes 1 point of vitality actually gives you an additional 2.2-2.56 hit points.

I get that people counter argue with personal preference, and critical chance for procs and toughness also working in DS, and being able to handle conditions well enough.. and whatever else they think might justify taking rabid over carrion in spvp.
But the choice really should be obvious.

@manveruppd.7601: My point is more like Bhawb said, in that you would ideally try to achieve a balance between vitality and toughness. In scenarios where you can only pick one (pvp), both give pretty much the exact same benefit before you take condition damage and healing into account. So which one is better for you ends depending a lot of smaller factors: how much (team) healing can you expect; how do you deal with conditions; in those situations where the choice decides whether you barely survive or whether you die, do you die more often from condi burst or from being stunlocked by a warrior/backstabbed by a thief; etc. The take home message: they are close, it’s up to you to decide what you need more. NOT vitality, obviously, it’s a no brainer.

flow.6043:

1. Life Force regeneration is better and more reliable than our regular healing.

2. LF regen is always percentage based. That means you don’t have to worry about healing effectiveness.

3. Our LF pool is 120-156% of our regular hp, meaning that unlike with other classes 1 point of vitality actually gives you an additional 2.2-2.56 hit points.

And these are all points I can agree with (well, except 3 doesn’t actually matter; see above). Now please explain how we go from “in DS, vitality is more like toughness” to “in DS, vitality >>>>>>> toughness”. Cause that’s the giant leap that I take issue with and which sort of gets thrown out there all the time without anyone even knowing why that would be.

Arvid.3829:

Now please explain how we go from “in DS, vitality is more like toughness” to “in DS, vitality >>>>>>> toughness”.

Because even if you take nothing but direct damage (which you won’t), the extra amount of hp mitigates more than the damage reduction an equivalent amount of toughness provides.

I suppose we’re talking past each other at this point. Let’s just agree that if you can mix stats, you should.

Arvid.3829:

@manveruppd.7601: My point is more like Bhawb said, in that you would ideally try to achieve a balance between vitality and toughness. In scenarios where you can only pick one (pvp), both give pretty much the exact same benefit before you take condition damage and healing into account.

Yeah ok, that I can agree with. I certainly felt more survivable pre-patch when I was using Carrion with rabid jewel. But it might have more to do with the fact that there weren’t all those thieves running around with double air and fire sigils rather than that tiny bit of extra toughness :p

Toughness reduces damage taken. Vitality increases damage you can take. Healing increases… well, you know. More important is the skill traits you build around. V and T are much more equivalent than the trait skills that are associated. After that is how much risk you can handle.

The ultimate power weapon is dagger. Axe is a vulnerability applicator, scepter is a bleed applicator, and staff a field applicator.