vitality, toughness
Depends on what your up against, Vitality is better against condition damage(doesn’t reduce damage so you have to heal more up), Toughness is better against direct damage(reduces damage so less healing needed).
Personally i just go for Vitality, im not too worried about healing myself up over time, i only worry about the surviving the burst.
Don’t take life too seriously, no one gets out alive anyway.
(edited by Eskali.1380)
If you go mostly for damage, and consider either toughness or vitality to keep you alive during your attack sequence, go for vitality (given low HP). Toughness shines combined either with vitality or healing power, depending on whether you want to survive insane burst or have a nice staying power in prolonged fight.
Other considerations: pick your weapons first, traits second, iterate - it may be that the traits & skills you chose are better suited for a certain gear combination than the others, despite your original idea on gear customisation.
Depends on your spec. If you recieve a lot of heals from wherever, toughness is worth more. If you only have your own heal and you don’t use anything else that heals, vitality is better. What gives the most effective heals nobody knows yet, as far as I know.
I go with Vitality for the theif just for the extra dodging you can get. That in its self is reduced damage and in certain fights where not having dodge up means death i shine in dungeons just cause of the extra endurance.
against regular attacks (not condition damage) you’ll get the highest effective health pool by mixing Toughness and Vitality. the exact formulas for the way Defense (the stat increased by both Armor equipment and Toughness stat) reduces Damage are currently unknown so i couldn’t tell you the optimal values yet. however, i’d suggest mixing close to 50/50. maybe 60/40 with more vitality than toughness.
Condition Damage (bleeds, burning, and poison) is totally unaffected by Defense so you’ll need raw health to survive this. Vitality stat has an edge here.
Healing received can be thought of as scaling with your Defense stat, which is another consideration. The most efficient way to increase your health gained from healing (including direct heals, the regeneration boon, and other effects) is to increase your +healing and toughness stats.
my personal preference is to mostly ignore toughness and healing though and just stack vitality. i avoid direct damage mostly by dodging it. its surviving area damage and condition damage that worries me more and Vitality is more useful for this in my experience.
+Healing works best for me, but I run signet of malice and assassin’s reward.
what is better? vitality, toughness or both 50/50
Vitality all the way for survival purposes.
I believe it was team legacy during beta that worked out that per 100 toughness on a 1000hp hit toughness will soak 30-40 hp and only from non condition-based damage.
The returns are respectable if you have decent healing and high toughness with a low recharge heal. Toughness gets better when you can heal more of the unsoaked damage. In this regard, if you stack toughness plan on using withdraw as your heal.
The major problem imo is in weapon and armor stat sets. Thieves need high damage stats like power/precision/cond damage/crit damage and you wont be able to get toughness high enough to see a benefit without losing a sizable loss in dps. You’ll live longer but take longer to kill stuff.
Another issue is that you have no idea what builds you’re going up against. Couple that with the fact that cond builds are among the most popular now for classes that excell in them (thief/necro) and toughness stacking=waste of stats.
Imo, in its current state, you risk too much taking toughness over vitality as your survival stat. At least vitality is effective against all forms of damage. You dont want to have useless stats going up against a build that bypasses your defences.
For me, I use a a +power,vitality,crit damage setup with my backstab thief. The damage is insane and I’m sitting at almost 24k hp in WvW. With the thief’s evasive playstyle especially vit is the way to go.
My 2c :P
For surviving burst damage, Vitality is better than Toughness when Health < 10 * Armor. If Health > 10 * Armor, then you could slide some points over from Vitality to Toughness to survive a slightly larger damage spike. As others have noted, Toughness does nothing for Condition Damage, but it does become more effective against direct damage as you get more healing.
+Healing works best for me, but I run signet of malice and assassin’s reward.
Eh?
How much healing do you get from that?
You can heal regen yourself pretty consistently with Sig of Malice and the Assassin’s Reward trait. If you have high Healing Power, the trait that regens you when you’re stealthed is also great when combined with Shadow Refuge.