Guild Wars 2

I was thinking of farming a set of armor from SE for the Power/Prec/Toughness stats. It is basically identical to CoF gear but you sacrifice Crit damage for toughness.

How much does toughness really help for thieves? Any of you stack it and see a noticeable difference?

Any clue on a good toughness rune for our thief armor? Or BiS toughness accessories?

Thoughts and opinions? I am thinking that we might be able to still run glass cannon builds, but have more survive ability with a little stacking of toughness.

I believe the general consensus is that Vitality is the better survival stat for Thieves. It works against Bleeds, unlike Toughnessand you’re more likely to survive burst.

That said, mathematically a little Toughness goes a long way. Somebody crunched some numbers saying that 500 Toughness reduced incoming damage by roughly 30% for Thieves, so it’s not a bad stat.

That really depends on the build you are using. Dee Jay is right about Vitality being better against conditions, but remember that you can remove a lot of conditions through a shadow trait everytime you stealth – with dagger/dagger you can do it pretty much always. It synergizes beautifuly with the traits for healing while in stealth, stealths that last one second longer, and regeneration when stealth.

Even if you don’t like stealth you can pretty much play a vampire build with tons of toughness. Traits that heal every time you spend initiative and our “heal on hit” signet works beautifuly with toughness because you have a higher effective HP, while your healing power doesn’t scale with vitality. If you know what you’re doing you can have your health bar full most of the time, and out-heal most of conditions as long as you keep hitting the target (unload shines in here).

That said, I find out that toughness works better with most of our defensive traits and we have enough endurance to avoid bigger hits, so that would be my 2 cents. Consider that, once your traits have been mastered, most people tend to totally invest in Berserker stats and rely in dodges and stealth to lose aggro when needed.

I use the same jewelry always, Beryl + Valkyrie (critical damage and vitality); Then carry around 2 sets – a Knight’s (tons of toughness) and Berserker (squishy, full dps). Unless heavily AOE’d, I can stay alive with the second one and it feels more satisfying. In general, I use Knight’s head, coat and leggings and the rest Berserker. Since I got my new set I didn’t feel the need of having full Knight’s set at all.

It really depends on your build but if built correctly gear with toughness can be amazing on the thief, however vitality is still important (but you don’ need a lot…I just spec’d 25 into Acrobatics and find the 16k hp was enough and focused my gear on Power/Prec/Tough)

Asan.6257:

I was thinking of farming a set of armor from SE for the Power/Prec/Toughness stats. It is basically identical to CoF gear but you sacrifice Crit damage for toughness.

How much does toughness really help for thieves? Any of you stack it and see a noticeable difference?

Any clue on a good toughness rune for our thief armor? Or BiS toughness accessories?

Thoughts and opinions? I am thinking that we might be able to still run glass cannon builds, but have more survive ability with a little stacking of toughness.

Just a warning, The damage loss is great from dropping +crit damage, you will feel like your attacking people with a wet noodle, if you are used to glasscannon high crit numbers, thougness is gonna disapoint you.

I bought exactly the whole set of gear that you are thinking of.. i salvaged it the next day. Because you dont feel that much tougher but you feel weaker.

The thing is, for example shortbow clusterbomb crit people normaly 4-5k and above.. but with the toughness gear i crit 2-2.9k that really made me feel useless.

You can try it out, maybe you like it, seems like some do

Your damage will be reduced, but you will still hit glass cannon specs hard and you will manage to survive being focussed in WvW. It really depends on your style of play.

I run about 1750 toughness and around 18k health – glass cannon thieves are very easy to deal with.

Consider that it’s hard for thieves to get any toughness save from gear/speccing into shadow arts trait line and it makes sense to invest in some toughness gear/knight’s armor.
Vitality is important, but remember that if you’re stacking precision, which most thieves do anyways, the 10-point trait practiced tolerance can give you an extra 1k+ health.

The toughness gained from a full set of Knight’s armor goes a long way and is definitely noticeable in game. It is usually the difference between being 1-hit by many boss fights/mobs (thinking graveling stalkers in AC) and evading out alive.

You’re more useful alive than dead in a party or WvW, even if you’re not hitting those giant crit numbers.

It’s not really a glass cannon if you are adding toughness…

If you want to make yourself hardier, then it’s not just adding toughness but probably choosing some different specs or traits to accent. That would be much more effective than making a glass cannon build……and kitten the only thing it’s meant to do (damage) by choosing toughness.

I roll with a mix of zerker and valkyrie gear in WvW to add Vitality but I suffer some precision. I’m not even full decked out in exotics because I’m a poor kitten. Running greens and yellow weapons. My vitality is about 16k and about 34% crit with…I forget it’s like 72-78% crit dmg. I think once my gear comes into play and I’m fully orbed up I’ll be packing a punch.

Berserker Weapons w/ Emerald Orbs, 1/2 Valkyrie 1/2 Knight Armor w/ Emerald Orbs, 1/2 Valkyrie 1/2 Berserker Accessories (Valk Amulet/Berserker Back) with Ruby Crystals in all. Runes are over-rated, with their prohibitively expensive cost for “good” ones.

17.2k Health (w/ Practiced Tolerance), >300 Toughness, 48% Crit (w/ Sig of Agil) and ~75% Crit Dmg.

Healthy balance of everything I need, and very survivable (S/D).

Okay, here’s how toughness works. The damage you take from a skill is calculated by:

[Enemy weapon damage] x [Enemy power] x [Skill coefficient] / [Your armor]

The skill coefficient is different from each skill, and it determines how much damage a skill does. Backstab has a big coefficient, lotus strike has a small one. Armor is toughness plus armor (from gear).

Here’s what this means: if you have very low toughness and you raise it, you’ll notice a big difference. Let’s say you have 2,000 armor and you take an attack that does 1,000 damage to you. If you’d had 2,200 armor, that attack would only have done 1,666 damage to you. That’s a pretty good boost (-9.1% damage) for a pretty small investment.

So getting yourself a little toughness is very worthwhile. However, if you stack a lot of toughness, you’ll notice diminishing returns. If you had 2,500 armor and got 200 toughness, you’d get -7.4% incoming damage. If you had 3,000 armor and got 200 toughness, you’d get -6.3% damage.

One other thing to note. If you don’t have a lot of self-healing, vitality is better than toughness. Vitality works against condition damage as well as direct damage, and it gives you better short-term defenses. 100 vitality will help you more in a single attack than 100 toughness. Toughness only gets better if you self-heal constantly throughout the fight. So if you don’t have regeneration while in stealth or something like that, I’d actually take vitality for more defenses.

toughness reduces damage. if you are taking enough damage to justify the use of toughness then you are probably playing it wrong.
Tiny investment in vit with tiny investment into defensive traits outperforms even 1k additional toughness. That is what I learned the hard way.

“toughness reduces damage. if you are taking enough damage to justify the use of toughness then you are probably playing it wrong.
Tiny investment in vit with tiny investment into defensive traits outperforms even 1k additional toughness. That is what I learned the hard way.”

In dungeons though you will get hit, guaranteed. Energy is limited and some mobs you simply cannot outrun. Remember: You are beating on a hard hitting boss with mountains of HP, you need to survive the impact long enough to win. Heck, even the trash, but not as extreme as bosses obviously.

Glass cannons will only ever be glass. If there was a way to stack Vit or Toughness and keep the cannon thief would be over powered.

If you want to be a cannon, you will be glass. Thats the trade off

If you want to be soaking up the damage, try a condition (carrion armour) build

/thread

You need 870 toughness to reduce incoming damage by 30%, which isn’t exactly practical for a Thief.

That said, Thieves are so naturally squishy, and have such naturally high damage, that you can gain a lot of durability, relatively, while giving up only small fraction of the damage.

As a rough guideline, you can double your durability at a cost of less than 25% of your damage output.