Guild Wars 2

Currently I’m running a d/p s/d build for wvw and can’t really decide what gear to use.

I have taken shadow’s embrace as a trait for condition removal so I was leaning towards toughness for damage reduction but I also want to run dungeons and I heard vitality is preferred over toughness in dungeons. So I’m kinda stuck on what to do.

I’m mostly undecided for what ascended jewellery to pick as they require much more time to acquire. So advice on which items provide best stats for both pve and wvw would be much appreciated.

Both. Invader set is the way.

Berserker + Invader equip is the most balanced equip a thief could have. Buy full zerker and full invader sets, and combine them as the situation requires

What about the ascended jewelry?

Caom.9251:

What about the ascended jewelry?

Get all the jewels.

If you’ve invested in Shadow Arts, go Toughness all the way. If you have some self healing and a reasonable amount of condition removal then Toughness becomes the better option.
Otherwise, choose Vitality.
You should only stack both if you want to trade offense for extra defense, simply because you can’t choose double of one of those stats instead. Same reason direct-damage builds take Power/Precision/Crit instead of just stacking the crap out of Power.
One will always be better than the other based on your traits and skills.

I have absolutely no idea what would make anyone say Vitality is better in dungeons. Between the extra heals coming from your party members and the general lack of heavy condition damage, Toughness should be a far better option.
CoF’s burning, specifically, can get ugly, but Shadow’s Embrace will let you just laugh that off completely.

As for trinkets/jewelry. If you want any critical damage, get it on the trinkets. It is inexplicably granted far better itemization value on trinkets than anything else. The two accessories grant the least, so if you have to skip critical damage on any trinkets it should be those.

Caom.9251:

Currently I’m running a d/p s/d build for wvw and can’t really decide what gear to use.

I have taken shadow’s embrace as a trait for condition removal so I was leaning towards toughness for damage reduction but I also want to run dungeons and I heard vitality is preferred over toughness in dungeons. So I’m kinda stuck on what to do.

I’m mostly undecided for what ascended jewellery to pick as they require much more time to acquire. So advice on which items provide best stats for both pve and wvw would be much appreciated.

In my opinion, this is the king of D/P builds (for wvw):
http://no.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/17zx77/slayer_ultimate_wvw_daggerpistol_thief/

Watch the video. The beginning shows the gear piece by piece.

for WvW ya that build is awesome easy to survive. but if u want more deadly but less survival id recommend my build. 10/30/30/0/0. valkyrie armors. berserker trinkets and weapons.

cuz 30 on critical strikes (hidden killer trait) very deadly 100% crit on backstab. and its up to u if u can survive . use ur shadow refuge wisely . u shud always know when to engage or retreat

Vitality. Toughness is crap, and it seems worse on thief. Full toughness and no vitality will leave you still at 10850 HP, and you’ll still melt just as easily from a BS thief/100B warrior if you don’t watch your back. Toughness also does nothing against condition damage, where as vitality does.

As a thief I feel you need to have a mix. Pre-stealth nerf I was running Valk gear (P/V/CritD) and zerker jewels. Build 0/30/30/10/0 so 200 toughness from the trait line plus 100 toughness/70 crit food. Now with the stealth nerf I feel I needed a bit more defense so right now I traded out earrings for soldiers stats. I try to sit around 15k hp and 1500 toughness, this gives me a lot of room to play and my HP doesn’t get drained by random damage.

Yes toughness won’t help you against CD but Vit will only delay the inevitable. If you don’t have proper CD removal in your build it won’t matter if you have Vit toughness or neither.

So both toughness and Vit are both important, you just need to find a balance for your play style and build.

Generally vitality is more effective in surviving burst damage while toughness is more effective in surviving smaller but continuous damage.

For example, lets say you have 10k hp and 2k armor and you can choose between 500 vitality and 500 toughness. 500 vitality will increase your hp by 5000 and 500 toughness will reduce the damage you take by 20%.

A thief comes up and backstabs you. If you take vitality he backstabs you for 13k, but you have 15k hp so you survive with 2k hp to spare. Now if you take toughness he hits you for 10,400 damage. You’ve reduced the damage by 20% but you only have 10k hp so you die. Taking vitality means you survive the burst.

Now you’re fighting a longer fight. You take damage but heal when you can so over the course of the fight you take 30k damage. The opponent needs to deal 5k extra damage to overcome your extra health if you take vitality. However, if you take toughness you only take 80% of the damage for 24k damage. The opponent has lost 6k damage due to your toughness and this will only increase as the fight goes on while vitality will only ever mean they need to deal 5k more damage. Taking toughness here will mean you can survive longer.

Mathematically (taking the extra survivality from adding to each atribute based on original HP and armor) Vitality is a better atribute on most professions except Necromancer (for some professions, in some builds based on getting constant heals or lasting too long Toughness becomes more important but from scratch Vitality is better).

In a Thief which is low tier HP it’s a necesity so if you have to chose between Vitality and Toughness go for Vitality. Specially if you already got some Tough from SA trait line.

Ah, yeah. I forgot that you should take enough Vitality to survive the initial burst regardless. It doesn’t take a lot.

has to do with how many ppl are targetting you
16k hp 2700+ armor then you’ll live when 5 people pressed their buttons on you
10 people on you, it’s instant down

srsly though, i dunno what tiers you guys playing. cuz in t1 it’s only zergging. I run around bl maps and find like 3 or 4 fights an hour, 1/2 of that had to abandon cuz scrubs just kept rushing in. The handful of small fights would be better off with more dmg oriented gear.

Doomdesire.9365:

Vitality. Toughness is crap, and it seems worse on thief. Full toughness and no vitality will leave you still at 10850 HP, and you’ll still melt just as easily from a BS thief/100B warrior if you don’t watch your back. Toughness also does nothing against condition damage, where as vitality does.

Actually, both Toughness and Vitality have more or less the same return on investment in survivability (Effective HP) against armor mitigated damage. Vitality is better here than Toughness for thieves cause we start with a very low HP pool. But that’s not the only factors.

Toughness is better than Vitality when you expect to heal a lot, Vitality is better than Toughness when you don’t heal a lot and face conditions or other damage types that ignore armor.

If as a Thief, you go full vitality and no toughness, the BS combo will do 6k, 6k, 10k and all that vitality wouldn’t have saved you anyway. Same for a Toughness build you’d say.

But if you save yourself from the Backstab somehow, once you apply your heal skill, at this point, the Toughness build will be in a slightly better position than the Vitality build.

From a purely PvE perspective, I would only advise Toughness on a build that is structured to generate constant sources of healing. For example, my S/P Venomous Aura character does run Knight (Power/Precision/Toughness) gear and it works great. The healing output of my venom healing procs and my “heal on crit” procs are usually more than enough to meet my needs. However I live in fear of conditions. Even with Sword #2, Lyssa runes, and Hide in Shadows, it’s sometimes still not enough. (There’s a reason why I put a condition removal proc on my Shortbow.)

On a side note, also remember that Toughness is actually one of the semi-hidden aspects of Threat management. From all that I’ve been able to learn, increasing your Toughness score also quietly increases the modifiers that affect when a mob will target you. If you’re built to be more of a tanky character, then that might not bother you. But if you’re not built to take hits and survive, then it might be something to think about.

I’ve got an odd mix, personally. Rabid trinkets (sans the Ascended Divinity spec necklace I snagged last night), Knight’s weapons, Shaman/Soldier’s for most Armour (with one piece that’s -IIRC- Prec/Vit/Healing.) I ended up with about 17-18k hp and 2500 Armour.
Build’s 0/30/0/25/15. My idea of “condition management” involves full Superior Runes of Melandru and -Condition Duration soup. And the occasional Shadowstep/Shadow Return chain.
Heal goes between Signet of Malice (Zerg combat) and Withdraw (solo roaming).

Any build that’s setting up gear to primary passive heal (through Signet of Malice, assassin’s reward, etc. stacked together) tends to get better effective survivability from halving between toughness/vitality due to the way armor interacts with constant passive healing. Less incoming damage makes your heals a bit more effective in the long term. Essentially, limiting the rate at which you take damage while leaving the rate of heal constant results in more constant effective HP when using stacked passive heals with SoM. This sort of setup is also the one and only reason to consider healing power as a gear stat as otherwise the ratios and cooldowns on the heals just make it a bad investment.

This isn’t true for active healers using withdraw or HiS, as those heals benefit much more from having enough vit to soak accumulated damage between heals which prevents overhealing and ensures a greater ability to withstand accumulated small amounts of damage between burst heals since the damage reduction from accumulated defense numbers isn’t enough to increase thief EHP more than you’d have if you just stacked vitality in the timeframe between heals.

First of all, Toughness is ALWAYS better than Healing Power for Thieves. Healing Power is only useful for improving heals to teammates, and Thieves have jack for group heals.
Second, Vitality is not better than Toughness for large heals either. Even with the base 10k health you won’t over heal unless you do something stupid like popping the heal with over ~60-70% health still left.

Get a nice balance of toughness and vitality, and throw in a full set of Melandru Runes and Lemongrass Poultry Soup.

^ this makes for .2s immobilizes and things of that nature.
not 2. (POINT)2.

just walk out of blurred flailing.