Guild Wars 2

So, I have a pretty basic question. I’ve been getting mixed responses on this so I thought I’d turn to the forums for aid.

I’m looking to give my warrior some decent defense to work with while having semi-high critical damage and nearly 50% chance to crit. My question is, is Vitality necessary in combination with Toughness or could I completely ditch Vitality and still hold out just fine?

Thanks folks!

I’m no expert but generally I’ve read that you take vitality to handle condition damage. So basically, one focus can be Melandru or Hoelbrak runes, some lemongrass, and dogged march so you’ll have 90%+ on immobilize and 75%+ on other conditions for removal speed. So then you can skip vitality and focus on knight’s gear.

Now if you want to be in the front lines wielding a hammer and laying the smack down as your friends follow you behind then vitality is necessary.

Me? I’m all knights and I have about 3k armor, 60% crit and like 45% crit damage without fury up. I’m satisfied as a greatsword, hammer warrior that likes to stay on the skirmish side.

Ah yes, I should have specified earlier. I’m more of a solo-player on WvW.

You’d have to do some math, but I would be cautious about completely ignoring vitality at the expense of toughness. There will come a point where you will actually receive better survivability against direct damage by improving your vitality instead of improving your toughness.

Some build websites will use a made-up attribute called “effective hitpoints”, which is your hit point total combined with your damage reduction from your armor rating. I’m not sure exactly how they calculate it, but I think it assumes that your opponent has a particular attack rating (i.e. 2600).

It becomes a bit more complicated since your damage reduction through armor is not dependent on its absolute value but is instead dependent on its relative value when compared to your opponent’s attack rating. It also scales in a logarithmic fashion, so the build up of diminishing returns in toughness may make it so that it’s better for you to invest in vitality.

Here’s an example:

Assuming my opponent has 2600 attack, and I have 2800 armor and 24000 hitpoints, my effective hit points are 24000 * (2800/2600) = 25846

Now let’s say I am replacing a piece of equipment, and I can choose from either an additional 100 toughness or 100 vitality. Choosing the toughness would give me 2900 armor, so my effective HP is 24000 * (2900/2600) = 26796

If I choose the vitality, I gain an additional 1000 hitpoints, so my effective HP is 25000 * (2800/2600) = 26923

So in this case, I am better off getting the increased vitality instead of the increased toughness. My overall damage reduction will be less, but I will have additional HP that will more than compensate for the loss in damage reduction.

The rule of thumb that I use is that HP/armor should be as close to 10 as possible. This ensures a good balance that will help keep your effective HP higher than if you dumped everything into one stat. So if I have 26000 HP, I should try to have around 2600 armor.

Obviously, if I can get additional armor from an external source, then there’s no harm in that. For instance, if I eat food to gain an additional 100 armor, I now have 26000 HP and 2700, but that’s fine, but if I’m later faced with another choice to increase vitality or toughness, I should increase vitality to keep the ratio around 10 (although the food will obviously wear off eventually). The key is that I didn’t have to sacrifice HP to get that increased armor from the food, but you face this choice when it comes to picking gear stats. If you have to choose between vitality or toughness, you have to do the math to see which would be the best option (although the HP/armor ~= 10 rule work alright for that).

It’s also worth noting that armor has no effect whatsoever on condition damage, so stacking vitality will always help you against condition damage. However, conditions can also be countered by removals, so if you have good condition removal that can compensate for a lower vitality. Condition duration reduction can also help against this, but I’d caution against relying on that completely since they can still hurt.

This can get even more complicated when healing comes into play. Toughness tends to synergize better with healing since toughness reduces the actual damage you take, whereas healing will restore a constant amount. If you have more vitality, your healing abilities will heal a smaller percentage of your health pool, and you will require more healing power to stay at the same effective HP% than if you had higher toughness.

An example:

Let’s say the attacker has 2600 attack rating. Defender A has 28000 HP and 2321 armor for an effective HP of 25000. Defender B has 22000 HP and 2955 armor for an effective HP of 25000. Both defenders will have the same effective HP and are both equally durable against direct damage.

Now let’s say that the opponent hits each defender with an attack that does 1000 base damage. Defender A will take 1000 * (2600/2321) = 1120 damage per hit, whereas defender B will take 1000 * (2600/2955) = 880 damage per hit.

Each defender will be able to sustain 25 hits (28000 HP / 1120 HP per hit = 25 hits, 22000 HP / 880 HP per hit = 25 hits). This means they will die in 25 seconds if the hits are made 1 each second.

However, if both defenders have a healing skill that can heal 5000 HP every 20 seconds, things change. The difference is that the healing skill heals actual HP and not effective HP. Assuming each defender uses their healing skill once during the “fight”, this effectively brings their actual HP totals up 5000 each, but does not affect their armor.

As such, defender A will have 33000 HP and 33000 * (2321/2600) = 29459 effective HP. Defender B will have 27000 HP and 27000 * (2955/2600) = 30687 HP.

As you can see, defender B now has higher effective HP if you take the HP from the healing skill into account. Every time defender B uses his healing skill, he gains a larger amount of effective HP than defender A does. This is due to defender B having a higher armor rating (and presumably higher toughness) than defender B. This assumes, of course, that the healing skill heals for the full amount each time (i.e. they do not heal for 5000 HP when they are only missing 2000 HP)

So to summarize, I like to use the rule of thumb that dictates that your HP/armor should be close to 10 because it’s very straightforward. However, that simplifies a lot of the complexity that is occurring beneath the scenes. In general though, I’d recommend trying to find some sort of balance if you want to be adaptable. If you have stronger healing capabilities, it may be worth it to put more emphasis on toughness, although sacrificing vitality makes you inherently more vulnerable to condition damage.

Atomsk.3481:

So, I have a pretty basic question. I’ve been getting mixed responses on this so I thought I’d turn to the forums for aid.

I’m looking to give my warrior some decent defense to work with while having semi-high critical damage and nearly 50% chance to crit. My question is, is Vitality necessary in combination with Toughness or could I completely ditch Vitality and still hold out just fine?

Thanks folks!

ok I can give you some advice. For a solo roamer, the most important thing is being able to disengage and run away and get away. You need to have mobility followed by condition mitgation things like immobilize chill and cripple will prevent you from runing away. I recommend you use melandru or hoelbrak runes. I have Hoelbrak runes in my small ops and solo gear, when I run with a zerg I run melandru runes. Those with dogged march and lemongrass prevent you from getting shut down.

Next thing is mobility, If you plan on roaming it is recommended to use GS as one of your weapons and bulls charge on your bar. Some people like to use sword warhorn but those two things alone wont give you enough mobility to escape. I prefer using a shield and a axe and a gs…. with bulls charge and signet of rage with the signet mastery for a faster cool down.

The point of what I am telling you is neither Vitality, or toughness is as important of mobility. You can have all the vit, and toughness but if you get in a bad situation it wont save you, only thing that can save you is the ability to escape.

Vitality is helpful, but toughness is just as important if not more important. Having massive HP with no damage mitigation it only going to help you with condtions like bleeds and fire etc, it will do nothing to stop getting hit for massive melee damage. And you will get hit extremely hard without toughness even by other players who arnt playing glass cannon. I dont spec vitality except when I’m zerging and Im getting hit by arrow carts and all types of other kitten that I have no idea where the damage is coming from. When you are solo and your only dealing with what you can see its better to use things like dodging shield stance endure pain to mitigate damage than rely on high HP alone. My point is play smart, don’t rely on toughness or vitality, but playing smart is more important than either one.

You want to do something like knights helm, knights coat, knights leggings zerker shoulders, zerker boots, zerker gloves like that. Then for trinkets you want Calvary and Zerker trinkets mix and match to get the best combination of power, crit chance, crit damage and toughness. Dont worry about vitality if you are in a situation where you need some vitality swap out your rings etc. Change your rings to PVT or somthing if you need more vatiality, 2 Ascended rings will give you 2k + HP.

Your problem is you want a high crit build, High precison and vitality dont mix in the same sentence. So my suggesiton would be build hybrid knights/Zerker/Calvery then If you need vitality change a couple rings or somthing.

TLDR

What works well on some other professions isn’t necessarily needed on a warrior. You need to remember that a lot of other professions only have like 10k HP with no vitality, and in some cases they can heal a lot better than warriors.

Use runes of divinity as a test runes. Easy to understand and use, then make lots of random builds and die lots of times.

Theory craft playstyle and make the process fun for yourself.

This is my advice to build a warrior

Honestly, the best advice somebody gave me is to spec for damage. So I’m full zerker with a few cavalier trinkets. IMO, toughness is way better for a war then vitality. We already have enormous base HP, and besides surviving initial burst, vitality doesn’t add anything DURING a fight. Off course it helps versus conditions, but lemongrass and melandru give you 65% reduction on those already.

Skill determines survival for the most part.

a lot of people only know about melandru but hoelbrak is actually good too. Especially if you just want more damage, and condition mitigation with it. hoel brak is -60% and -93% movment stuff. Its still very viable.

That is true, hoelbrak is great as well. I just play with only one stunbreaker on a long CD so I like the stun reduction as well.

Yamsandjams is referring to the “Golden Ratio”. You can read more about it here if you want.

I’ve never advocated vitality; not even to deal with conditions. I consider 200 vitality (2k HP) a pretty substantial investment, and a true condition build will strip that in just a couple seconds. I’m going to echo some of the previous posters; if you want to handle conditions, use cleanses, runes, or food.

Veritas.6071:

Yamsandjams is referring to the “Golden Ratio”. You can read more about it here if you want.

I’ve never advocated vitality; not even to deal with conditions. I consider 200 vitality (2k HP) a pretty substantial investment, and a true condition build will strip that in just a couple seconds. I’m going to echo some of the previous posters; if you want to handle conditions, use cleanses, runes, or food.

vitality is strong on a warrior if the warrior has enough toughness and condition removal

all zerker traits and zerker gear and then let a cat walk around on your keyboard.

oh then go to gw2lfg.com and read stuff like this:

“LF1M———WARRIORS only————RUNNING FULL ZERK BOTH GEARS AND TRAITS——————- speed runs kitten $$$$$$$$$$$$LINK GEAR thnx”

“LF2M ZERK WARRIOR PING GEAR FAST RUN $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$”

“lfg/ zerk. warrior/ multiple runs.”

“LFM zerk warrior speed runs ping on join minimum of 1 hour run!?