Guild Wars 2

title says it all

For us, Vit by far if you choose one over the other.

if you get ganked like a group of people do you guys think toughness is more reliable than vitality?

well it depends what you gonna do after being jumped by a group. My bet would still be vitality as it would give you bit more time to use stealth or any escape ability. Mind that you might be stunned or whatever and in that case you need every bit of HP just to survive initial burst. Besides I don’t think that Thief could stack enough toughness to be very tanky (without loosing stats that define thief as dps class) but I may be wrong.

For a thief, vitality. No question about it.

Vitality is a better choice for starters but Toughness gets increasingly more attractive the more Vitality you have. Toughness also happens to scale with Healing incase you have a lot of that.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/113pjt/spreadsheet_for_optimizing_your_character_the/

Vitality up to a certain point at least. Toughness is worth more if you’re specced for healing.

It’s important to balance both.

An important thing to know about Toughness is that if you have zero of it, you will take exponentially increased damage. This means that the differance between 2000 to 2500 toughness protects a lot more than the differance between 2500 to 3000. For some other classes a good toughness score to aim for is 2500, at that score you avoid the exponential increase in damage.

As a thief though, almost everyone plays a glass cannon. If you are a glass cannon yourself, zero toughness and 14k health is what’s often aimed for. This gives you a bit more chance against bleed and burning damage, which are not mitigated by toughness.

If you are not a strict glass cannon thief though (condition thieves can afford to be more defensive), a good balance to strike is 2300 armor to avoid too much exponential damage increase, with 17k health.

Why do you say that “the differance between 2000 to 2500 toughness protects a lot more than the differance between 2500 to 3000” ?
Can you bring us some numbers?
Up to now the only formula I found is
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor) – from GW2 Wiki.
Armor= Defense+Toughness and there is nothing about hard or soft statistic cap.
If you have different info, please provide it.

It depends on who is attacking you:

Power / Armor (toughness + defense on armor) = damage multiplier.

1700 power / 1500 armor = 1.13
1700 power / 2000 armor = .85
1700 power / 2500 armor = .68
1700 power / 3000 armor = .56

As you can see vs someone with 1700 power, you get more improvement from 2000 to 2500 then going from 2500 to 3000. But if you were facing a higher power opponent you would want higher toughness to be in that “sweet spot”.

But if we just for simplicity say that 2K armor is a baseline. Then having 1500 armor effectively gives a 1700 power person an almost 30% dmg boost against you. This is why glass cannon thieves destroy other glass cannon people so fast.

It’s also why in a straight fight it’s impossible for a glass thief to win vs my Thief with over 21K health and over 2600 armor.

I would def say vitality-toughness is kinda pointless without the hp to back it up, 2.5k tough wont save you if you only have 11k health (condition dmg alone can ice you super fast)

how to reach 21k hp in PVE?

what are your gears, thanks

Oldgrimm.8521:

how to reach 21k hp in PVE?

what are your gears, thanks

A mix of Carrion (Power/Vit/Con) and the Badge set (Power/Vit/Tough). Every item has vit. You can’t effectively do it with a non condition based Thief.

edit: you can also get the same gear as badge (Power/Vit/Tough) from Karma vendors in Orr (not all pieces) and the Vigil or whatever the warrior’s guild is from the story quest if you chose that, I didn’t

oh, so that means in a power crit specced thief, i cant possibly reach 21k hp, >.<

Oldgrimm.8521:

oh, so that means in a power crit specced thief, i cant possibly reach 21k hp, >.<

Yea and that’s probably a good thing :P

You can look into sacrificing crit % dmg for vit or something though.

thanks for giving me an idea, but im not ready yet for a cond-type thief, ill practice and save that build later on.

Toughness by far.
You get roughly 30% damage reduction with just knight’s armor, it’s like having passive protection.

Red Falcon.8257:

Toughness by far.
You get roughly 30% damage reduction with just knight’s armor, it’s like having passive protection.

If you don’t have the HP pool to begin with to let the toughness work, it’s just not worth it. Also can’t ignore the fact that condition dmg ignores toughness completely.

I just don’t see toughness that viable outside of condition builds that have lots of healing who go for longer drawn out fights.

I’d say that it depends on your build.

For me, it’s Toughness once I reach the PvE level cap since I’m getting +300 Healing from my Venomous Aura trait spec and I’m also using Assassin’s Reward for constant healing. My goal is to negate as much of the incoming damage as possible, then quickly heal it back through Venom powers and my normal attacks.

Yet for something like WvW or PvP when you know that you’re going to get hit with a large amount of burst damage, I’d have to say that Vitality is probably better since you care more about surviving the first 10 seconds than you do about surviving the next 2 minutes.

Wiser with Age.3714:

I’d say that it depends on your build.

For me, it’s Toughness once I reach the PvE level cap since I’m getting +300 Healing from my Venomous Aura trait spec and I’m also using Assassin’s Reward for constant healing. My goal is to negate as much of the incoming damage as possible, then quickly heal it back through Venom powers and my normal attacks.

Yet for something like WvW or PvP when you know that you’re going to get hit with a large amount of burst damage, I’d have to say that Vitality is probably better since you care more about surviving the first 10 seconds than you do about surviving the next 2 minutes.

Good opinion but me for now i just change armorsets within vit and toughness if i roam on wvw i use the vit exotic set if on group scrimmage i use toughness coz i want to negate group gank damages

For PVE I like my Knight’s set since I use a lot of life steal and regen from traits/signet. I feel like a vampire and with P/P or shortbow my life is up whenever I need without any trouble. I don’t care a lot about burst DPS since most high level mobs, specially in dungeons, are really tough and won’t die in a sec anyway.

Vitality is kinda important to counter condition damage, and it’s worth to have some through upgrades/jewelry. But as long as I keep hitting the mob I can counter most DOTs thrown on me.

I go with toughness over vit. Couple reasons, for one, if you want strong damage you can either go with (power, prec, toughness) armor or (power, vit, crit damage) armor. I prefer to have the crit chance over the crit damage so I choose the Knight set. Also, we have crap HP no matter what, stacking vit will save you from 1 hit pretty much and healing skills dont heal as a percent. With toughness im tanky enough and when i heal it pretty much puta me at full health while i remain tanky. Gives me time to stealth away.

I made the expirience that good defence is around 2000 Toughness, if you invest more into toughness the defence doesnt raise significant. But for certain classes, especially with condition builds the class balance is not given currently when you see the incomming damage, guardians exclusive they are strong.

Hello, here is what I did:
a lvl 80 thief in his medium armor with no bonuses has 10805HP and 1980 defense.
Considering an opponent with exotic dagger ( ~ 952 weapon damage), 1800 power, using backstab skill ( 2.405 skill coefficient).
plain damage will be: (952*1800*2.405)/1980=2081 dmg/hit (if damage formula in the wiki and skill coefficient found in another topic on this board are correct)
so 5.2 hits are necessary to take down our poor thief.
Keeping untouched opponent’s weapon damage, power and skill coefficient I put all items+traits bonuses in vitality (that brings our thief to more or less 25k HP) and then I started to lower vitality by 10 points and increase toughness by 10 points.
Defense HP
1980,000 25005,000
1990,000 24905,000
2000,000 24805,000
2010,000 24705,000
2020,000 24605,000
2030,000 24505,000
2040,000 24405,000
2050,000 24305,000
2060,000 24205,000
2070,000 24105,000
2080,000 24005,000
2090,000 23905,000
2100,000 23805,000
2110,000 23705,000
and so on …
the chart shows number of hits needed to kill that thief.

If you want, check it.

Hope it helps.

Unless you’re running some sort of a healing build, I would recommend vitality. I’ve posted this before, but in PvE, you’re not looking to take several successive hits and survive. Your aiming to have an effective health pool high enough to allow you to survive those 1-2 really big hits which you may take if you miss a dodge and/or get unlucky. Vitality achieves this more directly, and also comes in pretty convenient stat sets for both condition damage AND crit damage builds. If you wish to go crit damage, mix Beserkers with Valkyrie. Condition damage go Carrion. I see no reason to get armor with toughness for PvE while these stat combinations exist. Only reason I could see to justify going Power/Vitality/Toughness is if you wanted to just facetank with Sword+Pistol.

PvP may have more of a use for toughness, but I would be surprised if it does.

I tend to use Vitality more, but I run with Lotus poison… 50% of hits do 50% damage. Dagger main hand means perma-weakness from Lotus Poison.

A bit of toughness does help though….