Guild Wars 2

Is it affected by healing-power?
I mean when it is passive, not upon activation.

yes it is, but not enough to bother stacking it, like most thief healing. a full 30 points in shadow arts (300 healing power) raises the heal from 100 to 110 if I remember correctly.

Gungnir Grimm.7123:

yes it is, but not enough to bother stacking it, like most thief healing. a full 30 points in shadow arts (300 healing power) raises the heal from 100 to 110 if I remember correctly.

Which is a 10% increase just from traits alone. It should be noted that gear is the major contributor to stats.

I personally run a P/D condition damage build with Reyna’s gear set. This gives me a good 30% boost in healing that applies to each hit.

It adds up.

That all follows a basic lack of knowledge on the function and purpose of each attribute, though. Toughness improves self healing far more effectively than Healing Power.

Grimwolf.7163:

That all follows a basic lack of knowledge on the function and purpose of each attribute, though. Toughness improves self healing far more effectively than Healing Power.

Come in swinging, why don’t ya?

Oh and don’t bother to explain your answer for the betterment of the OP. He has fingers. He can google. Amirite?

I’m not your nanny, and I’m not going to waste a bunch of time posting specific math to help you better understand a very basic misunderstanding you have.
I told you what you’re doing wrong. If you don’t feel like believing me, then don’t.

Grimwolf.7163:

I’m not your nanny, and I’m not going to waste a bunch of time posting specific math to help you better understand a very basic misunderstanding you have.
I told you what you’re doing wrong. If you don’t feel like believing me, then don’t.

But you have time to take jabs and quibble. Charmed.

Grimwolf.7163:

That all follows a basic lack of knowledge on the function and purpose of each attribute, though. Toughness improves self healing far more effectively than Healing Power.

Is this true for signet of malice though? 1000 more healing power can increase the passive healing effect by about 50% while 1000 more toughness can reduce the damage you take by about 30% right?

edit: although i suppose this really depends on how much healing you’re receiving from the signet and whether healing power or toughness is more beneficial depends on the situation.

What Grimwolf is saying is basically this:

Toughness makes every bit of HP you get more resistant to be taken from you. So for example if we’re able to heal 1000 and we have the option to either increase that ammount we can heal by let’s say 30% (for 1300 healing), or receive 25% less damage than we normally do (which virtually forces our opponent to deal 1,33 times the damage, which is 1333) then we really get better use from the heal than with healing power.

Now I don’t know the exact numbers for healing powers compared to toughness so I can’t say if he’s right nor not. Even if heling power were a bit better than toughness I think toughness compensates for also making your base HP more resistant.

I personally run my P/D set with Carrion anyway which IMHO is the best option for condition thieves.

And I guess no matter the later discussion, the OP real question has been asked with a yes.

I’m doing the maths now, that signet passive indeed gets more out of hpower than out of Toughness BUT the active, as well as most heals in the game gets a huge more out of Toughness than out of Healing Power, not to mention the base health pool is more resistant with toughness but not with hpower. I would only recommend taking healing power if you’re really into tanking and you already took a lot of toughness to make the heals even better. And tanking through getting smashed isn’t what the Thief excels at anyway so I wouldn’t consider it too seriously.

Just to add further to unnecessary maths, signet of malice does seem to benefit a lot from healing power, relative to its base healing, compared to just about any other heal in the game and you will see a significant increase in its effectiveness by stacking it.

However, if we’re comparing healing power to toughness when considering signet of malice, then you also have to account for the highly variable nature of the healing it provides. While you could be healing for 50% or more from the passive heal by stacking healing power, if you’re fighting a single target for example and not getting many attacks in, then 50% more healing may not be much overall. In these situations toughness is more likely to keep you alive, although you probably shouldn’t be using signet of malice here anyway.

If you’re fighting groups of mobs and placing down caltrops and choking gas to receive a huge amount of healing, then more healing power here is going to be very effective and probably more so than toughness.

In general though, toughness is going to be the more reliable stat to increase your ability to stay alive and beneficial in all situations. As lokhiet said, healing power is generally only worth investing in if you already have a lot of toughness and want to increase your staying power further.

Yes. The passive healing increases by 5% of your healing power.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_malice

Lokheit.7943:

I’m doing the maths now, that signet passive indeed gets more out of hpower than out of Toughness BUT the active, as well as most heals in the game gets a huge more out of Toughness than out of Healing Power, not to mention the base health pool is more resistant with toughness but not with hpower. I would only recommend taking healing power if you’re really into tanking and you already took a lot of toughness to make the heals even better. And tanking through getting smashed isn’t what the Thief excels at anyway so I wouldn’t consider it too seriously.

I’m sure a lot of people will agree though, that if you’re activating your Signet of Malice, then you’re probably done for.

Now I had a set of Carrion gear first, but my guild and I were doing small teams ops with our thieves. Sacking dolyaks, flipping camps, wreaking havok, etc… But I wasn’t really surviving enduring a lot of the fights like I wanted to. When I switched to this Reyna’s gear, I found that I was able to take a guarded Dolyak from under 5 Jade Quarry Invaders with my P/D build. Granted, I may not be at the same skill level yet.

I was considering switching my Reyna’s for Apothecary gear though….I figured that’d give me a little more survivability to swap out the vitality for toughness.

Dang, I’m late.

Healing power, as a stat, does in fact effect SoM as others have stated. The Toughness/HP discussion is an interesting one, but with a passive healing setup like SoM the value of toughness tanks to drop off in favor of healing power if, like most thieves that use SoM, you’re running a very evasion or blind heavy build.

Essentially, while toughness will reduce the damage of the few hits you take, it won’t do it in large enough quantities to make NOT reinforcing SoM with some healing power effective. This is untrue for larger, more active heals, as the “tankability” of the HP they grant is a lot more important than the numbers on the heal.

Basically, when you’ve got an occasional input of damage, and an occasional heal, the act of mitigating the damage is more useful than buffing the heal because you’re only healing once in a great while, but you’re potentially taking damage much more often.

However, think of SoM as a constant stream of heals addressing a less constant source of damage. In the case of SoM (unless you’re doing some weird build that uses the active a lot.) You’re often increasing survivability more by buffing the heal, as your overall benefit in healing often vastly outstrips the utility of toughness the less you get hit, because you’re healing all of the time. That’s not to say toughness isn’t valuable to SoM, it very much is, but in my experience running D/D evasion build around SoM I can definately say that 500 healing power was much more survivable than adding 500 toughness solely due to the multiplicative effect of the healing versus the flat effect of the toughness.

However, I found that adding 250 of each (splitting the difference) was actually more effective overall, as the composite of slight damage reduction and slight heal increase was more effective when combined than dumping everything in to one stat or the other.

In short, the value of toughness to healing power ratios for Signet of Malice is very dependent on playstyle and build. if you’re aggressive and good with evasion, you might want to lean more toward the HP end of the spectrum. If you’re a bit more defensive and rely on soaking smaller hits, you might want to lean heavier on toughness.

Well for the toughness v healing power thing:
The more healing you have, the more valuable extra toughness is.
The more toughness you have, the more valuable extra healing power is.
So it’s not a straight up one is better than another because that depends on how much o the other you have.
It’s about finding a happy balance. (And I don’t know where is.)

Well, technically, I think once you have enough Toughness that Healing Power would actually start to be more beneficial, regardless of how much healing you have Vitality would then become a better attribute for overall survival.
Especially with Signet of Malice, since it generally provides a pretty massive amount of wasted over-heal.
And then there’s the fact that the Thief has so little base Health, making Vitality, which already provides the most raw defense, even more effective on the Thief than most other classes.

Grimwolf.7163:

Well, technically, I think once you have enough Toughness that Healing Power would actually start to be more beneficial, regardless of how much healing you have Vitality would then become a better attribute for overall survival.
Especially with Signet of Malice, since it generally provides a pretty massive amount of wasted over-heal.
And then there’s the fact that the Thief has so little base Health, making Vitality, which already provides the most raw defense, even more effective on the Thief than most other classes.

Actually, I’ve found that I’ve been more and more giving up vitality for more toughness. Basically, if you’ve got enough vit to withstand two or three attacks and your evasion timing is good enough to actually use SoM properly, you’re not getting very much out of the vit, and you’re wasting a LOT on overheals when you could be recovering from those hits you took a lot faster numerically by taking the toughness/HP rather than the vit. This is a thing that can vary a LOT due to content type though. VIT is more important in WVW, less in sPvP, and even less in PvE, due largely to factors including number of sources and amount of potential incoming damage.

If you’re bunkering up, toughness+healing power lets you take more total damage over an extended period. The vitality is really only to prevent bursts from owning you. But since most people will probably want to go for the kill your enemy before he kills you method, then vitality is more useful for general builds (imo), since healing power’s value increases with the length of a fight.

Something interesting is that while comparing toughness to healing power is difficult (depends on how much toughness / armor / healing power you already have, how do you account for condition damage in all of this, etc) comparing healing power to vitality alone can be pretty simple. Basically, add up the healing ratios of the heals you give yourself in a typical fight. Once a fight is long enough that that ratio adds up to more than 10 health per point of healing power, you’re better off putting points in healing power than in vitality.

So add as much vitality as you need to last long enough to get to that point, then put it into healing power. Obviously how much starting health you need varies from fight to fight, but the “best option” is always relative to whatever you’re fighting. If you’re up against something with a lot of poison application / uptime for example, you might as well change that goal ratio from 10 to 15.

Edit: This also assumes that you never over-heal, or that at the very least you don’t do it very much. I’ll admit that can be a questionable assumption.