-10% Damage Reduction vs. 100 Toughness

[Tzozef.9841]

What's better?

And how much toughness is -10% damage reduction worth, and how much damage reduction is reduced with 100 Toughness?

[Shirlias.8104]

Toughness has its reduction percentage decreased the more you incrase it.

[Zephire.8049]

Keep in mind that with how aggro (generally) works in GW2, the more toughness you have the more likely mobs will focus on you. If you're doing PvE content, you generally want to avoid toughness unless you're a tanky character.

But it really comes down to what content you're playing and what item/gear/trait you're debating between. There's no one size fits all approach for stats and gearing.

[Khisanth.2948]

It depends on how much toughness you have to begin with and what other forms for damage reduction you might have. Most percent based damage reduction is multiplicative but some are additive.

[Ardenwolfe.8590]

Generally speaking, damage reduction is better because condition damage eats past toughness, but not damage reduction. Damage reduction affects all damage sources. Also, as mentioned, toughness increases mob aggression toward said character. Toughness also suffers from diminishing returns while damage reduction does not. Because of all these reasons, damage reduction is the better of the two.

To read more on these differences and effects, please note this thread: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/24023/toughness-questioning-its-value

Hope this answer helped.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

Keep in mind that with how aggro (generally) works in GW2, the more toughness you have the more likely mobs will focus on you. If you're doing PvE content, you generally want to avoid toughness unless you're a tanky character.

It's a bit more complicated. Unlike other games, there's no universal rule-of-thumb for aggro in GW2, especially not in open world. Some bosses are designed to focus on high-toughness targets, specifically to enable the party to control where the foe goes. However, other bosses latch use a different set of priorities: farthest away, lowest health, nearest, first to have hit them, most recent damage, not to mention a combination of two or more.

One easy place to see the AI at work is in the Tomb of Primeval Kings, where opening the chests randomly spawns a ghostly defender. The foe will latch on to the target nearest in their line of sight and sometimes, while running towards that player, notice a character who is closer and change direction. If the two players want to, they can tie the defender up in knots by approaching and then backpedaling in sequence.

So while it's true that there are plenty of mobs who will focus on the "toughest" player, there are plenty that don't.

---

As others have said, "toughness" offers diminishing amounts of protection as it gets higher, so more isn't always better. And every point you put into toughness is a point less that you can devote to aggressive stats: more damage means shorter fights, which means you don't need to mitigate as much incoming damage.

[Khisanth.2948]

@"Ardenwolfe.8590" said:Generally speaking, damage reduction is better because condition damage eats past toughness, but not damage reduction. Damage reduction affects all damage sources. Also, as mentioned, toughness increases mob aggression toward said character. Toughness also suffers from diminishing returns while damage reduction does not. Because of all these reasons, damage reduction is the better of the two.

To read more on these differences and effects, please note this thread: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/24023/toughness-questioning-its-value

Hope this answer helped.

Unless the source of damage reduction mentions conditions it only applies to physical damage as well.

[Mormegil.2345]

Partially both will result as the best: because of one will reduce the reduced damage by the other. So there is no best one; but the best way of it.

[ArchonWing.9480]

-10% damage translates to about 11% more armor.

Damage is simple; it's just Damage/Armor = Final damage.

With 10% damage reduction, we take 90% damage.

So how much armor would we need to match the -10% damage reduction?

That would be

Damage/Armor *x = 0.9 Final Damage.

But that doesn't help at all. We want to know how much armor.

Now intuitively speaking, you would think you just get 10% more armor, but sadly that's not how multiplication works. 100% isn't 10% more than 90%. 10% more than 90% is 99%! (90*1.1 =99). Instead you need to go backwards and divide by 0.9 instead. (yay algebra :/)

Example: Base damage is 2000000 and base armor is 2000

2000000/2000= 1000

With -10% damage reduction it is 900 damage.

2000000/x = 900x = 2222.22~ armor needed

But why calculate such big numbers; just divide by 0.9 for the same result.Also, 2000/0.9= 2222.22~ armor needed

2222.22~- 2000 = 222.22~

So you need 222~ armor in this case to reduce damage by 10%

1/0.9 = 11.11~% more armor (10% damage reduction)1/0.8 = 25% more armor (20% damage reduction)1/0.7 = 42% more armor (30% damage reduction)

etc

But eh, damage reduction is pretty much always better.

Warning: I have no idea, but most modifiers in this game are multiplicative. Eg (2 10% modifiers are not 20% but rather multiplied +10% twice. I dunno if that applies to damage reduction) But the difference shouldn't be that huge and this is far longer than anyone wants to read.