Guild Wars 2

What you think is better me to run with? Equipments that give you Vital or Tough? And if you can i would appreciate whats the difference in game for these two stats at thieves?

For thieves, vitality is much better overall, at least that’s how I find it. Keep in mind toughness does not do anything against conditions.

Let’s put it this way: toughness is a “long term defense” stat, while vitality is more of a “short term defense”.

That’s because of how the game calculates damage. It’s always Power x Wpn Dmg x Skill coeff. / Armor, where Armor is the sum of Defence + Toughness. At lvl 80, with a full exotic set, we have Defence at 1064 and Toughness at 916, thus the base Armor is 1980.

Now, let’s say that you add 990 in Toughness (via stats, runes, traits). You increased Armor of 50%. Doing a simple equation, you reduced every single direct damage that you get by 33%. If you increase Armor of a factor of 100% (1980+1980), you reduce the damage by 50%. With an increase of 25% in Armor, you reduce the damage by 20%.

As you can see, there’s a diminishing return between the increments on Armor and the decrease of damage received on every hit.

But every single damage you receive is going to affect the HP pools, which in turn is linked directly to Vitality, since at lvl 80 we thieves have 10805 + Vitality * 10 HPs.

If you go all toughness and no vitality, the pool will stay at 10805. So, for example, if an enemy inflicts you a damage of 1000 HPs on every single hit against your base 1980 Armor, you’ll be downed after 10 hits. If you increased the Armor by 50%, the damage inflicted will drop to 667 HPs, so you’ll be downed after 16 hits.

If you instead raise your Vitality, let’s say by 458 (+50% of base Vit), your HPs will go to 15385, so against that same enemy, you’ll get downed in 15 hits, just 1 less than the same % increment on Armor.

So that’s why Toughness is a long term defense: on average, you’ll need more hits to get downed, BUT you need a large HPs pool to arrive at that “down state” point, and that’s what we lack as thieves – a large base HPs pool.

But, here’s the interesting part, you’ll need less absolute bonuses to get a +50%: 458 on Vit compared to +990 on Tough. And that increase will be effective even against condition damage. And you can increase other stats more easily.

So, as a general rule of thumb, for thieves it’s better to increase Vit. than Tough., except in some particular builds, like the ones who give you a steady return of HPs with the use of Signet of Malice and healing traits/bonuses.

As the guy said above, Vitality. Keep in mind that direct damage thieves have a short term fighting style. We don’t need to outlast whatever we’re fighting, we can just run when the fight doesn’t go our way, as long as we don’t get downed too quickly.

Thx guys. Very helpfull

I believe the ideal HP / Armor ratio was 10:1.

So if you have 2000 armor, you want to aim for 20.000 HP before getting more.

For me, it all comes down to what game environment (PvE, Wvw, PvP) that you’re talking about and what kind of character build you’re using.

As an example, my Thief is only getting around +95 Vitality from a T1 Major Trait in the Critical Strikes tree. Every single piece of my gear is using Knight stats (Power / Precision / Toughness). I’m running x2 Superior Sigils of Blood on my melee set for the crit proc’ing heal and using Omnomberry Pie for the crit proc’ing heal. Through the Leeching Venoms trait in my Venomous Aura PvE build, I’m getting a constant supply of healing. Conditions are removed through Sword #2, Superior Runes of Lyssa, and Hide in Shadows.

In my build, Vitality isn’t worth very much. I’m built to constantly heal, which means that investing in lots of Toughness is far better for me in the long term. However I would never use my gear choices for a character that has little to no healing potential.

Toughness is good for leeching venoms / venom share build (not so much after update, but still) but you will need vit still in some cases
Toughness is also good for undeath runes + crystals condititon/crit/tough build
For purely defensive purposes vitality is much better. With 10k base hp and 2k armor, every point of vit is is around 1% of a boost, while tough is about 0.5%.
Thief is mobile and with few condition removals = more important to survive single big hits between evades and lots of dots

Wiser with Age.3714:

I’m running x2 Superior Sigils of Blood on my melee set for the crit proc’ing heal

I’m pretty sure those don’t stack. The cooldowns on crit sigils lock out other crit sigils for their duration.

ASP.8093:

Wiser with Age.3714:

I’m running x2 Superior Sigils of Blood on my melee set for the crit proc’ing heal

I’m pretty sure those don’t stack. The cooldowns on crit sigils lock out other crit sigils for their duration.

You are correct in that they don’t operate as (2) individual heal procs on a 30% proc rate. Instead they combine together to create (1) heal proc on a 51% proc rate since they are multiple copies of the same exact Sigil. While I wouldn’t do this with a 10 second recast Sigil, the recast timer on Blood is only 2 seconds. I find that to be acceptable.

I’m inclined to say toughness but it depends. Toughness reduces direct damage, and while it doesn’t reduce condition damage, vitality doesn’t help against it either (not sure where that myth comes from). Vitality helps to reduce the losses on ‘over-healing’ (healing more then you need to restore full health) and the fast replenishment of health when out-of-combat favors the bigger health pool.

frans.8092:

Toughness reduces direct damage, and while it doesn’t reduce condition damage, vitality doesn’t help against it either (not sure where that myth comes from).

Let’s say you have 100 HP, and you have a condition on you that deals 1 HP/sec (basic numbers for easy math). Each tick of the condition deals 1% of your health. A direct hit for 10 HP will remove 10% of your health.

Now, add 25 health (Vitality). You have a total of 125 HP, and each tick of the condition now deals 0.8% of your health. A direct hit for 10 HP will remove 8% of your health.

Instead, add toughness equating to 20% damage reduction (ignoring the fact that 20% DR from toughness is more expensive stat-wise than 25% vitality increase, especially for thieves). You have 100 HP with 20% damage reduction. A direct hit for 10 HP is reduced to 8 HP, dealing 8% of your total health (same as with added vitality). A tick from the condition still deals 1% of your health (toughness does not help here).

Make sense now?

Vitality doesn’t reduce the absolute damage of conditions, but it does reduce the relative damage (the percentage of health you lose on each tick), so vitality does indeed help you survive longer when conditions are applied and it also helps you survive longer vs. direct damage.
Since Toughness only helps against direct damage and doesn’t scale remarkably better than Vitality it’s considered to only be helpful if you already have a decent health-pool and/or considerable healing & condition cleansing on a low cooldown (this is partly why guardians can be so survivable even though they have no more base health than a thief).

tl;dr: As a thief I would choose Vitality over Toughness unless for some strange reason you already have a lot of Vitality and don’t want more damage.

Mehknic.2904:

… each tick of the condition now deals 0.8% of your health. A direct hit for 10 HP will remove 8% of your health. ….Make sense now?

No reason to be condescending when you’re missing the necessary clues. Relative damage sounds nice on paper, but healing is absolute and not relative to your maximum health. 1000 HP damage requires 1000 HP healing to recover from, no matter how large your maximum health pool is.

A 20% reduction in direct damage means you’ll be taking less damage. It’s as if your effective health pool was enlarged by 25% (you can take 125 hits where you could take 100) and all your heals are 25% more effective, when expressed in hits.

An example, a 5000 HP heal, which could last 10 hits of 500 damage will last 12 hits (with some to spare) when damage is reduced with 20% to 400. For condition damage, nothing changes with either Vitality or Toughness,, the 5000 HP heal lasts through 50 ticks of 100 hp bleed, no matter how much vitality/toughness you add.

For fights where you get around to healing, Toughness helps and Vitality doesn’t really help at all. When you don’t heal much in combat, a larger initial health pool will help. A larger health pool will absorb your heals more easily without part of them being capped and lost. That’s why I said it depends; if your health-balloon is full most of the time, raise vitality (and/or lower toughness), if you find it is far from full most of the time, raise toughness (and/or lower vitality).

The limiting factor to me is gear choice. I’d gladly go for Vit gear, but I can’t if I want to play a build that relies on a high crit rate. Funny that in sPvP the Knight amulet has Power, Precision and Vitality whereas elsewhere you just cannot have decently high HP and an also decently high crit rate. This is currently annoying me a lot, because I too find Toughness to be impractical in many circumstances and would greatly prefer Vitality as my defensive stat, with any of my 3 professions I’m playing.

I’ll put it in really simple terms; if you have lots of self healing and some condition removal, go with Toughness. Otherwise, go with Vitality.

Grimwolf.7163:

I’ll put it in really simple terms; if you have lots of self healing and some condition removal, go with Toughness. Otherwise, go with Vitality.

This.
Also, Toughness makes your heals more powerful.

agree with the two above me.. if you have decent condition removal go toughness.. without a doubt..

i sometimes roll with 12.2hp in sPvP and im tankier than if i had 18k hp due to the higher toughness. basically, if you trait shadow arts for the heals and condi removal on stealth, toughness is way better.

if your not healing alot, and dont have decent conition removal then vitality

There is one other element to the picture that nobody has mentioned yet. You need enough base health to survive a big one-hit that you didn’t foresee, or fumbled your dodge timing, or in some rare cases, you get yanked in by an unavoidable pull from the boss or whatever.

In such cases, if you’re running with only 12000 health, you will be insta-downed from that one shot. If you’re running with 16000 to 17000 health, you’ll survive many such big hits that would otherwise have downed you outright.

So my modification to the above sentiments are:

1. You need enough vitality to have 16000 to 17000 HP as a baseline (at level 80).
2. After achieving #1, the preceding rules of thumb apply. And IMO the specific rule that applies is “more toughness at this point, because each additional point of toughness makes your heals relatively more powerful”.

I guess what I’m getting at is that the mechanics observation that “toughness doesn’t help against condition damage” is potentially misleading, as some posters above have tried to explain.

All that really counts is having enough baseline vitality to: A) Survive one-hits that would otherwise down you outright, and B) Give you enough time to react to heavy condition damage (via condition removal and/or running away from the source of the conditions). After you’ve achieved that baseline amount of vitality, from that point onward more toughness helps you far more than more vitality. It’s really that simple.

Warriors, for example, have such a high natural HP pool that they universally choose to focus on as much toughness as possible (assuming they understand the mechanics correctly). With Thieves, Guardians, and other classes that have incredibly low base HP pools, it’s a different story: they have to tweak their gear to ensure a baseline HP of ideally 17000 or slightly over, and only then add as much additional toughness as possible.

…You do realize that Toughness would reduce the damage of that single giant hit, and also prevent a one-shot, right?