Guild Wars 2

For defense, what will I get the most out of, toughness or vitality?

Vitality, by a large margin. Toughness is only worth it after a certain amount of vitality, or if you have strong health regen.

Its this simple, you get more out of Toughness if you build for healing (traits, skills, etc) and you get more out of Vitality if you build for damage.

It depends entirely on what type of damage you are trying to mitigate. Conditions ignore Toughness, so if you’re in a PvP situation and you’re trying to survive bleeds and poisons, Vitality will do you better. If you’re in PvE and you’re trying to not get 2 shot, Toughness plays a larger roll mitigating big single target hits.

Ideally you want to mix both to be well-rounded, which is what the game is all about. You don’t want just a bunch of one and none of the other. That’s no bueno.

Apakal.5718:

It depends entirely on what type of damage you are trying to mitigate. Conditions ignore Toughness, so if you’re in a PvP situation and you’re trying to survive bleeds and poisons, Vitality will do you better. If you’re in PvE and you’re trying to not get 2 shot, Toughness plays a larger roll mitigating big single target hits.

Ideally you want to mix both to be well-rounded, which is what the game is all about. You don’t want just a bunch of one and none of the other. That’s no bueno.

If you’re going after conditions, you want CONDITION REMOVAL skills. You can’t stack vitality and expect that to be a defense against conditions. Conditions do more than just DPS you down, they hamper you in many ways as well. Vitality is your life bar. Once it goes to zero, regardless of how it got there, you’re down. Actually removing the 25 stacks of bleed is going to help you more than having 1 extra second of living while its on you.

Toughness does not mitigate big hits more than anything else. There’s an equation to Toughness that people haven’t found yet and Anet is being very mysterious about. The original idea about Toughness was that it was going to mitigate small hits more than big ones…that has since been tossed.

Redscope.6215:

Apakal.5718:

It depends entirely on what type of damage you are trying to mitigate. Conditions ignore Toughness, so if you’re in a PvP situation and you’re trying to survive bleeds and poisons, Vitality will do you better. If you’re in PvE and you’re trying to not get 2 shot, Toughness plays a larger roll mitigating big single target hits.

Ideally you want to mix both to be well-rounded, which is what the game is all about. You don’t want just a bunch of one and none of the other. That’s no bueno.

If you’re going after conditions, you want CONDITION REMOVAL skills. You can’t stack vitality and expect that to be a defense against conditions. Conditions do more than just DPS you down, they kitten you in many ways as well. Vitality is your life bar. Once it goes to zero, regardless of how it got there, you’re down. Actually removing the 25 stacks of bleed is going to help you more than having 1 extra second of living while its on you.

Toughness does not mitigate big hits more than anything else. There’s an equation to Toughness that people haven’t found yet and Anet is being very mysterious about. The original idea about Toughness was that it was going to mitigate small hits more than big ones…that has since been tossed.

Sure, but those all have cooldowns. You get caught on cooldown and a bigger health bar is going to help you last until your cooldown is up. And how viable is it to stack your bar with condition removal skills considering what other utilities you have to sacrifice to do so? You can cleanse conditions all day, but you’re going to be kited to death in the process.

Alright, so general consensus is to balance the two stats and if in doubt, vitality is generally better.

Thanks for the help everyone.

I’ve found putting Power/Vitality on all my gear along with the trait that automatically uses “Shake it off!” keeps me vertical in WvW. I tried a Vitality/Toughness build in WvW but I had to sacrifice too much power to do it. Figuring that most of my damage was indirect (Guardians and Necros, I’m looking at you), I opted for a larger health pool.

My slot skills are typically “Fear Me!”, “For Great Justice!”, Endure Pain, and usually a warbanner for fast rallying, though I tend to swap my elite skill a lot.

I have Shouts Heal, debating if healing banners would be worth it.

Vitality for short fights, Toughness for long fights.

From other games you may be used to the idea of stacking health as a bad strategy, instead stacking mitigation as much as possible, with only as much health as you need to avoid spike damage. However, in GW2 things are a little different, and vitality is better than it first appears. Healing in general is harder to come by, and there is no healer spamming 10 full health bars of healing into you, so you aren’t benefiting from your mitigation rate for 10x the value of your health bar.

In a prolonged fight, especially where your build is defensive and also focused regenning a lot of health (e.g. 15 defense trait, shout heals, etc.), or you are coordinating with others to create heals (e.g. blast finishers on water fields), then toughness can work really well. In general, if you are not focusing on these sorts of things, I’d go for vitality.

Vain.1029:

In a prolonged fight, especially where your build is defensive and also focused regenning a lot of health (e.g. 15 defense trait, shout heals, etc.), or you are coordinating with others to create heals (e.g. blast finishers on water fields), then toughness can work really well. In general, if you are not focusing on these sorts of things, I’d go for vitality.

This is a good point to take note of. Your build matters a lot in this equation. I build for the 15 point defense trait mentioned here, as well as down Tactics for the Shout Heal Trait. As far as I’m aware, healing effects all of these, not just your heal skill (someone please correct me if I’m wrong, I’m still trying to figure out exactly what effect heal has on some of these abilities, and how significant the effect is, but I’m pretty sure it does effect them).

Someone I think mentioned condition removal up above and I feel like it was dismissed out of hand. The Warhorn when Traited grants significant condition removal (and conversion) potential. Combine that with Mending and Shake it Off and you have pretty reliable condition removal on demand. This, in my opinion, makes Toughness the ideal stat for me on my Warrior build.

Vitality does not give much return, in terms of actual HP. With 30 points in the Vit tree you’re getting maybe 2k HP.

When mobs are hitting you for 5-6k, the extra 2k is definitely nice, but since the Tactics tree is a bit lackluster in terms of skills, and it seems that the majority of the skills that are useful in that tree are broken.

Empower Allies is great, however it does not actually increase the power of anyone.
Shrug it off is also another great ability, however it has yet to ever activate for me (tested this in a dungeon and outside of a dungeon)

For me, who uses a Greatsword/Rifle and Dual Axes everything else in the tree is very lackluster.

I prefer Toughness as that allows me to take more damage than Vitality ever will, and the Toughness tree actually has some decent (non broken) skills.

Gopher.4562:

Vitality does not give much return, in terms of actual HP. With 30 points in the Vit tree you’re getting maybe 2k HP.

When mobs are hitting you for 5-6k, the extra 2k is definitely nice, but since the Tactics tree is a bit lackluster in terms of skills, and it seems that the majority of the skills that are useful in that tree are broken.

Empower Allies is great, however it does not actually increase the power of anyone.
Shrug it off is also another great ability, however it has yet to ever activate for me (tested this in a dungeon and outside of a dungeon)

For me, who uses a Greatsword/Rifle and Dual Axes everything else in the tree is very lackluster.

I prefer Toughness as that allows me to take more damage than Vitality ever will, and the Toughness tree actually has some decent (non broken) skills.

I run 30 points in tactics and can say that Shake it Off works for me to great effect. I wonder if perhaps you weren’t using it while inside some fields that reapply effects (poison zones, etc).

Combined with the Shout Healing Trait in the Tactics tree, I find it to be a very useful, low cooldown utility skill. Keep in mind it also removes one condition from surrounding allies.

If you are a fan of either 1) Banners, 2) Shouts, or 3) the Warhorn, Tactics is actually a really great tree in my opinion.

I posted this in a different thread, but for warrior, I’d strongly suggest toughness over vitality. Warriors already have the highest base health pool, to the extent that — at least for direct damage, and starting at the base values of 916 toughness and 916 vitality — toughness is almost as good as vitality just in terms of raw effective health, thereby pulling ahead easily when you involve any healing at all.

Specifically, warriors have 18372 base health (with 916 vitality) and 2127 base armor (with exotic gear and 916 toughness). Due to the direct damage formula, effective health can be calculated as simply the product of health and armor. Thus, the first point of vitality (adding 10 health) will raise effective health by 1/1837 (.054%) while the first point of toughness will raise effective health by 1/2127 (.047%). Those values are close enough that with almost any amount of healing (specifically 3k or more), toughness pulls ahead.

Of course, if you already have a lot of toughness, then the comparison may start to favor vitality (depending on how much healing is involved). And as always, toughness does not affect condition damage.

I would say Vit scales better against conditions since toughness doesn’t effect these so its better in PvP, but toughness scales better against straight damage so its better in PvE, Toughness also scales better with any heals you receive.