Guild Wars 2

How effective is it to add toughness upgrades to armor and weps? Most of mine are toughness now more for pve stuff but I will be splitting my gaming time between PVE and PVP content. I would like to be a mix of both powerful and very hard to bring down in PVE as well as PVP. I’m open to all advice trait, slot and upgrade wise!

Thankyou!

I forgot to add, I’m using 2 axes at the moment as opposed to having a shield.

Toughness reduces melee damage and that works extremely well versus the many, many, many thiefs that you find while playing Thief Wars 2. However, there are some condition damage thiefs as well (and, albeit rare, other classes with condition builds) and toughness does nothing against that. So if you want to fight against direct damage opponents, toughness is great, pair it with insane healing and you’re in for a laugh. However, if you want to deal with condition damage builds as well, you probably want vitality instead of toughness. (and again, insane healing).

Thankyou Deathspike, that is exactly what I was needing!

toughness should be stat #1 for you as a skilled warrior for pvp

with most of our builds running around 20k+ hp without any vit equip, more vit is kinda redundant…

I feel that it is much better to deal with conditions by removing them rather than trying to endure the bleed duration (although we already do the latter better than just about anyone given our high base HP).

Healing power is our #2 stat especially when paired with toughness.

tl;dr: for gear, try knights armor with soldier runes running 3 shouts, works great for dungeon and wvw.

Wojohowitz.2581:

How effective is it to add toughness upgrades to armor and weps? Most of mine are toughness now more for pve stuff but I will be splitting my gaming time between PVE and PVP content. I would like to be a mix of both powerful and very hard to bring down in PVE as well as PVP. I’m open to all advice trait, slot and upgrade wise!

Thankyou!

Toughness at the moment reduces all non-condition damage. As a warrior, it is possible to theorycraft up to 70-90% damage reduction (~3700 Armor) in controlled circumstances due to how a particular trait combination works. Typically if you go this path, you will want the 6 piece Soldier rune skill, or the warhorn trait to give you a way to mitigate the weakness to conditions this leaves you with.

In general, it will never hurt to take toughness for PvE, and will help immensely in PvP. Most toughness gear features +Pow on it as well so you still have the third stat to focus into vitality or precision.

Anecdote:
In my case, I took toughness/vit stacking to the extreme to see how big of a meatwall I could become. What I found is that it sort of turns you into a ‘line-breaker’. Someone capable of charging an established battle line and holding your ground long enough for less disciplined players to rout and force a collapse.
Your personal damage isn’t amazing, but it’s not awful either. You still hit harder than an berserker elementalist with your melee weapons.

You need to base your build off direct damage mitigation AND condition removal in order to beat any competent thief.

There is a third type of thief that is not so talked about which is perma-stealth/culling abuse/latency thief but this thief build damage output is either total burst (use invulnerability or hopefully dodge correctly) and typically that thief will either draw (you or thief will run away) or the thief will win through time and you burning through all your cooldowns while there initiative regenerates faster than your cooldowns while they remain perma-stealthed near you. You may still get lucky swinging blindly into the air.

IMO, more important than toughness or vitality is condition removal/CC break and escape options.

couple of things:

1) also try the 200 toughness when crippled, chilled, stunned etc trait (either you got 5 conditions on you in wvw or your winning anyhow)
2) armor it seems seems to start scaling up HARD after ~3k or so, 3.4k base is a really solid build, 3.7k you ARE the 1 man turtle!
3) omnomm berry bread is your friend! (+100 toughness)
4) 30 points into defense tree please: the 50 toughness and 50 healing power are worth it even if the 30 point major trait isnt worth it (the 25 pointer is still worth it adding around 120 power.
5) for the record i do use soldiers runes, 3 shouts, and my weapons are typically hammer swaping to axe/warhorn, i get to use mending since between shouts and horn i can cure 6 conditions (actually more if you consider the fact that immobilize, chill, and cripple are automatically cured by warhorn before it cures another condition, 2 turned into boons, 4 cured through stun or knockdown or even while your resing an ally or doing somthing else, 1 stun breaker)
6) stunned, knockdowned, feared, knockbacked enemies arnt hitting you while they have these conditions on them
7) weakness decreases enemy damage by a lot

vs these perma stealth thieves: just spam auto attack and mele aoe abilities while moving around randomly, the glass cannon ones will become revealed typically in a downed state, the survival ones you just gotta ignore and go do somthing else (cant kill em but atleast they wont kill you unless you wait around for them to do so, the answer here is the same as for guardians, just dont play their game, dont 1v1 them, go do somthing else, if they wanna chase after you then fine, find a buddy and take em 2v1)

It’s not that effective as much as we think its suppose to be. Glass cannons can still burst you down if you have over 2k or 3k armor. The defensive traits are nice, but overall it is not effective.

Warriors start at around 916+1211= 2127 armor with full exotics and no traits/runes/etc.

1) To get to a point where you take 20% less damage, you need to add 532 toughness and get to 2659 armor. This is a reasonable amount of damage reduction to get (ie, all knight jewelry and some traits/runes)

2) To get to a point where you take 33% less damage, you need to add 1063 toughness and get to 3200 armor. That is a large amount, and will require +toughness on every piece of armor and jewelry and probably trait and rune for it.

3) To get to a point where you take 50% less damage you need to add 2127 toughness and get to 4254 armor. Theoretically impossible?

Usually somewhere between 1) and 2) is where people end up landing when they want to be defensive, but still have some offense

^^ That’s true from the perspective of the warrior, although things look a bit different from the perspective of the person attacking you. 2200 base armor already being what it is, going up to 3300 armor is a 33% reduction in damage compared to 2200, but in fact you’re going to be mitigating more like ~60% of total incoming damage.

Just in case people see 33% and think “that’s not all that much!” Basically warriors even specced as glass cannon are actually not all that much of a glass cannon when it comes to damage mitigation.

Cloth wearers have 1832 as a base armor with full exotics. So warriors take ~16% less damage than a clothy when both are in full zerker. That’s a decent amount, considering the stat value of ~300 defense/toughness.

Moderately more important to not being very glassy is the extra 8k health

Yeah, obviously the higher HP is the big difference, but the armor is significant too.

Wow thanks for all the replies, lot of good advice here. I would like to be tough to take down in PVP, but also have some decent damage! Thanks Again!