(For the next patch) Toughness vs Vitality

[RedShark.9548]

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:Toughness will be more important than ever vs. power damage because healing was nerfed.

A person could have 50,000 health pool, but with healing nerfed and nothing to mitigate inc. power damage, that person likely won't be able to sustain in the long run and will die.

However, a person with 13,000 health who had a lot of toughness value, maybe protection when needed, and juuust enough heal stat to make sure they were always healing a bit more than they were taking damage in the long run, will ultimately be able to sustain and not die.

Vitality is actually irrelevant beyond having only enough to ensure you aren't 1-2SHOT from a burst. Past that, you need to stack damage mitigation mixed with just enough heal factor to realistically cycle and survive.

Post patch when damage goes down along with healing, vitality will be easy to come by. Toughness will be more important for balancing the mitigation of the power damage vs. heal factor being able to do its job and provide sustained cycling.

In our previous patching people were only ditching toughness/vitality because damage was SO $%^&ING HIGH that it didn't really matter. What mattered more was being able to 1-2HKO that person before they did it to you, in most cases anyway. And that's exactly why damage is being cut now. But yeah, you'll be surprised at how powerful toughness stat will be in the next meta. Toughness will declare which classes/builds are sustainy an which ones are not. This will be especially true because they are removing stun breaks and other defensive mechanisms left & right, so things that want to be sustainy are going to have to stat for being able to soak more raw damage, rather than avoiding it.

Toughness only helps vs power dmg tho, if everybody starts stacking toughness condi builds are going to have a comeback as counter.

[Zenix.6198]

@saerni.2584 said:

@Leonidrex.5649 said:

@saerni.2584 said:Imo, toughness often only matters when you are almost instagibbed.

If you die regardless (low Vitality/HP Pool or just a mega 26k hit) then toughness isn’t really in play because you will still be global’d no matter what toughness you have.

In a long term fight, toughness matters less than your net ability to heal. Sure, it will make you need to heal less over many hits but odds are your burst healing will matter more than how much you shave off in terms of damage taken from multiple smaller hits.

Post-patch I think toughness will matter more because bigger hits that used to global will now more often than not be risky gambles the target is more likely to survive (with toughness at least).

honest question, do you even understand how toughness works?

What exactly do you disagree with here? If I take a 22k without toughness now, and 18k with toughness, I’m dead either way so it’s a wasted stat.

Large HP pool professions can also get the largest potential benefit from toughness in extended fights because they can take the most hits and thus mitigate the most damage over time. But in most cases that extra toughness won’t matter as much as their ability to heal/generate life force/barrier over the course of a fight.

I’d see more opportunities in a damage reduced meta for toughness to matter more to those high damage scenarios and also for extended fights. You’re not just getting “two or three ticks” of a healing signet. That’s the wrong comparison.

The right comparison is, because you get that off each and every attack, how much HP that saves you over your whole HP bar plus healing. If you can‘t heal, because you got killed 100% to zero without a chance, that’s much less HP and comparatively much less HP wiggle room for toughness to help.

This is quite correct.Toughness makes Healing "more valuable" in a sense if you take EHPs (Effective Health Pool) into account.Effective Health Pools basically combine Armor and HP into a single stat that shows how much (raw) damage you can take before dying.

If we go with Necro as an example:

Necro A with 900 extra vitality and 0 extra toughness (carrion i.e.) has 28.212 HP.Necro B has 0 extra vitality and 900 extra toughness (rabid i.e.) has 19.212 HP.

BUT since 900 toughness equals about ~33% damage reduction, that means that necro B only takes 66% of every power damage flung at it. Thin in turn means, that the damage that is needed to kill necro B (100% of any one value) has to be 50% higher (150% * 0.66 = 100%) than it is for necro A.Therefore Necro B effectively has 28.818 HP against power damage. More than Necro A.

Now if both Necros would use their heal skill, Necro B would actually get more value (50% more value in this example) out of it, because heals restore a flat amount of HP and not EHP.

Then again, You would need pretty high amounts of toughness and healing to reach value-levels that beat flat out HP increases. (A stat combo the devs have gone down HARD on in HoT).Also, the fact that Armor rating does nothing against condies has to be considered.

Edit: Old cleric Tempest is a good example of Toughness beating vitality, since Diamond Skin took care of conditions and the earth traitline added extra toughness and damage mitigation, to the point were you could survive outnumbered situations on 11k HP simply because each of your heals restored a massive percentage of your EHP.

Edit#2: A calculation error for the EHP.

[Crackmonster.2790]

Toughness or vitality - against power hits its no change it won't change the balance between them since one just reduced % dmg taken while the other gives you more health nothing changing there and your total resistance to power damage is a calculation from both numbers and the optimal point won't change after patch.

But you gotta look to sustain balance and condition vs power balance. Condition gets nerfed less than power, so that makes vitality bit more important, and i'm not sure if heals get nerfed more than power damage but if heals are nerfed more than damage, then that will make sustain harder and thereby make vitality more important.

It also depends on classes base health/armor, builds, items etc, classes with a lot of heal available to them gets more benefit from stacking toughness, whereas classes who can't really heal much get more benefit from going for the ideal point between vita and toughness, don't know what that is but its probably stacking max vita if you don't heal much.

@Zenix.6198 said:

BUT since 900 toughness equals about ~33% damage reduction, that means that necro B effectively has 33% extra HP vs pure power dmg.So Necro B, effectively, has 25.552 HP.

THat's not exactly how it works, if you have 33%(1/3) dmg reduction, its like an effective 50% health increase. To give 100% dmg to someone who takes only 2/3 of the damage, you need to do 150% damage --> 150% * 2/3 = 100%. If you have a 50% damage reduction its like an effective health increase of 100%, you need to do twice his health in damage to bring him down if he takes only half.

[Zenix.6198]

@Crackmonster.2790 said:

THat's not exactly how it works, if you have 33%(1/3) dmg reduction, its like an effective 50% health increase. To give 100% dmg to someone who takes only 2/3 of the damage, you need to do 150% damage --> 150% * 2/3 = 100%. If you have a 50% damage reduction its like an effective health increase of 100%, you need to do twice his health in damage to bring him down if he takes only half.

Thanks for pointing this out.The number in my initial post seemed quite low to me to begin with. Couldn't put my finger on why tho.This makes perfect sense however.Edited my initial post accordingly.

[KrHome.1920]

Toughness increases the effectiveness of healing, but a lot of healing skills and traits are also nerfed in the patch.

Now it depends how much the healing was nerfed in the specific build you run.

All in all necro is the only class that will see amulet shifts. After years there will exist viable marauder builds for necro again.

[Tayga.3192]

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:30% is still 30%. armor doing less work does not equate to less value, unless you added time and healing to the equation and proved that vitality has more ttk. the numbers involved are irrelevant, whats important is the 30% that hasn't changed.

It's like this:I don't care if x toughness reduces incoming damage by y%, what's important is not percentages but flat values since what matters is, in the end, the damage you received.30% damage reduction is less value when the the skill hits me for 1k (it will absorb 300 damage), compared to when it was 10k (it will absorb 3k damage).

editmaybe we see a shift towards vitality amulets. armor along with other damage mitigation and healing will be strong tho.Excluding cmirage and core necro, I still expect same classes to run same amulets.

[mortrialus.3062]

@Shao.7236 said:Well, that's good to know.

My idea of Toughness however was always that it's useful if you don't have the means to heal back up a lot or want to invest in Healing Power while Vitality is when you have a lot of Damage Reduction modifiers anyway that it doesn't matter how much Vitality you have even with low Healing Power although that if you do have the means to heal up all the vitality invested into it's also a better choice for skills like Infuse Light or Defiant Stance.

Well my perception of it was that 560 Toughness amulets were effectively a 22% increase on effective health against power damage, and if you're on a medium vitality build 560 vitality was a 33% increase in effective health. However depending on the self healing it can radically change the value of toughness. Let's say you're a holosmith and during a fight you get two separate healing turrets off. This means your opponent isn't just punching through 15,900 damage but 30,000 to secure the kill. With a vitality amulet though means its effectively only a 15% effective health increase, since it'll bump you up to 36,344 damage the opponent needs to punch through. But the toughness on demolisher's is a 22% increase in effective health across all the 30,000 HP the opponent needs to inflict before they kill you.

Basically as long as you aren't fighting conditions and you're prioritizing fighting power builds, toughness let's you double dip into it's value compared to vitality to the way healing plays with it.

[Sikieiki.7403]

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