Guild Wars 2

So i’m interested in the communities opinion on which of these stats is more important/Useful for a Ranger. Is it better to have a higher damage Resistance or higher HP?

My gut feeling leans towards Damage Resistance because lessening the blow coming in seems intuitively better. I have no maths/Calculations to back this up so was wondering what everyone else thinks, either from personal experience and investigation or some cold, hard numbers.

Yea i get it may be PVP/WvW/PvE dependant but i’d like to hear all sides for all game modes to get a feel.

Generally, vitality is powerful against condis ( more health> less % taken by condis) and toughness against direct damage. In reality both have their advantages, in my opinion stacking vitality in www if you’re not some kind of condi bunker is useless because you already have 2,5k health with guard stacks, so i’d say go with toughness, but i never ran the maths. Vitality also decreases your healing power ability ( more health> need more heal to regain it). In pve, toughness and vitality are selfish stats, start with knight if you need to and switch back to berserker, if you’re a team oriented player. PvP is really build dependant, having a bit of both helps ( celestial cough)

I think it depends on what you want to do, I always prefer running + toughness than vitality.

Toughness reduces the damage taken from direct damage, not conditions or falling damage.
Vitality gives you a greater pool of HP that work good against both direct and condi damage.

Ranger has a great source of regen, in this case armor/healing power works better than vitality/healing power because between regen and high armor you can mitigate most of the damage you take and in most cases you can refull your HP bar many times during a fight, but it’s hard to refill a high pool of HP (lets say 25k+).

Against condition specs like condi engi having a higher HP pool works better than having a higher armor.

Against power specs like S/D thief having a higher armor wotks better than having a higer HP pool.

That said, I never run less than 2.8k armor just because there are too many thiefs roaming around :P, Not sure if it’s true but I read somewhere that going for more than 3k armor is not has beneficial than spending your point’s in something else (like vitality)

This is the hardest thing about playing a Ranger. You can’t go berserker because you’ll become Thief food. You can’t go tank unless you go condi due to your stats being watered down.

The way I’ve approached this issue is I see what spec I run. If I decide to go for Empathic Bond, the Wilderness Survival tree gives you a ton of armor. With this, it’s not as large an investment to raise your armor to an acceptable level (2700 – 3k). If I go for Survival of the Fittest then Nature Magic will impact my health greatly and I can get upwards of 22-25k without a large investment.

With the changes next patch to signets, every Ranger in the world will be running Signet of Stone, which also gives a pretty good chunk of toughness.

When all is said and done this is something only you can answer. Do you have a harder time facing off against Thieves and Warriors or are condis your main issue?

For me, I shoot for about 3k armor and 20k buffed health. You can still get 2k power, 35% crit chance, and like 190% crit dmg which is respectable.

I’d personally prefer toughness. As someone pointed out, toughness works better vs melees, vitality works better vs dots.

I mostly play my engineer so I know to not take condition removal for granted. My ranger however, has access to wonderful condition removal (not in a broken way like ele imo)

Toughness counters direct damage only.

Vitality counters both condition and direct damage.

Healing Power counters both condition and direct damage.

There is a problem, though. Healing power and vitality will always counter condition damage proportionally but will be ineffective against direct damage when paired with low toughness. High vitality and low toughness will result in a large health pool that looses huge swaths of HP against relatively weak attacks. This will make it difficult to shake off direct damage with healing. So, every point of toughness makes vitality and healing power more effective at countering direct damage.

Rangers have easy access to regeneration, protection, and vigor which gives us flexibility in mitigating damage. Protection lobs off 1/3 the hp damage due to a direct attack. If you go 3 or more deep into wilderness survival, protection gets added to you on dodge roll. Vigor gives dodging, so vitality with this kind of combination becomes more appealing.

When all is said and done, Toughness is a very powerful stat so it’s a good idea to bring some along. My ranger recommendation is for both, but more into vitality. This is, of course, situational and depends on game type and strategy (do you rely on auras, weakness, etc). I hope this clears it up a bit.

I just balance them. IIRC, I have 2.6k armor and 22k health. But I balance everything out anyway, ~1.7k power (with food) and 1.5k condi (with weapon stacks). So yeah, not overly great at anything, but not terrible either.

Ideally you want both but if you can manage high protection uptime you can afford more vitality than toughness.

Toughness. Everything inflicts physical damage, not everything inflicts condition damage. For example, Necromancer scepter skill #1 will inflict bleed, as well as physical damage. All (or at least the vast majority) skills that inflict condition damage also inflict physical damage, and even if that damage is low, it’s still there. I say toughness is almost always better than vitality.

Thanks for the thoughts/feedback guys

It’s pretty simple:
Short fights: Vitality – If you are doing high damage and want to burst down the enemy, but don’t want to be one-hitted by thieves or warriors or die on a condition bomb of a necro or engie, take some vitality.
Long fights: Tougness + Healing Power – The longer the fight lasts the more effective becomes Healing Power. In combination with high Tougness and good Condi Remove you can outlast most enemies with a ranger easily.

Don’t invest too much in both. To have more than 20000 hit points or have much more armor than 3000 is not worth the investment. The scaling becomes pretty bad for defensive stats when they are high already. This is also the case for Healing Power. Also you might lack damage to bring down your enemy. The ranger needs less defensive stats than the warriors for example because he has good access to protection and evades. Also he has access to passive condition remove which allows a more passive gameplay. It’s all about timing.

..Why not both? Personally I run a bunker build and I utilize Soldiers Amor, Knight’s Weapons and a 50/50 split on trinkets. Great survivability, respectable damage. Just makes sure you can perma fury to keep your edge in combat.

my answer would be toughness. Ranger can get lots of regen, so he can keep the hp high…the higher your hp the less you get out of your sustain. But mixing some vitality to reach 19/20k isnt a bad idea either

PVE is about zerker anyways, so in other places…

The basic idea is toughness with a smaller health pool takes advantage of heals better. Each unit of health is worth more and because it’s hard to drastically increase your healing skill as opposed to your other stats is why toughness can be really strong. But it depends on what you want.

EHP, Vitality factoring in toughness, is basically factoring your ability to take masses of damage. Basically, if you stand still and take a beating or get bursted by a big heat, having a high EHP will save you. But over longer fights, your ability to replenish that bulb is determined by your effective healing. My point here is that you can actually be sturdy (able to absorb mass damage) but not actually tanky (be long lasting) and vice versa.

Speaking of EHP, rangers start out with 1980 armor (assuming exotics) and about 15k health. 10 extra health (1 vitality point) out of 15000 provides a bigger % boost than 1 extra toughness point out of 1980 armor. BTW, this is where people get that 10:1 thing. If your stats were 20k health and 2k armor, then increasing either by the same % would have an equal effect on total ehp. Not that I’d recommend you do such. But what we see here is the first points in vitality do have a distinct impact so it can’t be neglected totally.

So it really depends on what you want. Do you want to just be able to use a large buffer to absorb damage (more suited for damage oriented builds) while you take the enemy down, or do you want to win through attrition (more bunker)?

This is of course made further complicated by the deadliness of conditions, in particular poison which destroys your healing. If your condition removal is weak, then just going healing/toughness would give yourself a lot of trouble. On the other hand if you have healing spring, signet of renewal and empathetic bond (along with the easy protection of the WS tree), then investing in toughness is a very profitable venture. At this point you just have to figure out if your health buffer is enough to take a burst hit.

On the other hand say, you’re a glassy gs/bow ranger with a lot of zerker on. You’re not built to last. If you try to pad out your limited defensive stats and traits with toughness, then there’s a good chance bursts and conditions may eat you. Randomly putting in healing power pieces aren’t going to help either. If you want some survival as opposed to full zerker, padding in some valkyrie so you don’t just get randomly downed in 0.5 s will be of great help. Fitting in soldier pieces of course isn’t bad either.

If you’re a condition build, then you usually have to kill people over time. The strength of condi builds is their incredible attrition, so wearing dire (condi, toughness, vitality)/apoth (healing, toughness, condi) will make people rage at you, and for good reason.

Finally, in group play where heals and condi removal are common I find that toughness is easier to gravitate to. For example, if I’m running traited signet of stone, where I’ll be able to freely heal myself and be healed during that duration, toughness helps more, assuming if I didn’t die already. In very larger groups, such as zerg plays, then the bigger threat is from direct damage and toughness would win there too provided you position yourself intelligently. Yea, I know rangers aren’t adept at zerging, but hopefully the balance patch will shake things up a bit.

tl;dr Health is better at first, and then when you have enough, toughness helps more and healing power is the frosting.

Yes, PvE is all about zerker, but if you want a safe-net for some big attacks and bad-timed dodges, go for Vit, specially because there is a trait that 7% of Vitality is given as bonus to power, and more damage is always more damage , just don’t reduce your power for Vit, in my build I changed a bit of precision for vit, and in my ascended armor I added the WvW Vit infusions.