Vitality vs Toughness

Having looked before at the offensive attributes Power and Precision, it’s time to turn the microscope on Vitality and Toughness. If you haven’t read the post on Power vs Precision I suggest you do as I’m going to be building a little on the theory.

A dose of reality

Vitality raises your character’s health by 10 per point, while Toughness reduces the effect of direct damage. Because they affect survivability in different ways, in order to compare the two accurately you need to take a different approach to just comparing raw numbers. Really, when it comes to survivability the only thing that matters is how many attacks your character can take before it is chomping on the dirt, and that means creating a hypothetical attacker. Our attacker will be similar to the one we created for the Power vs Precision article, with 1000 weapon damage, a skill multiplier of 2 and a Power level of 1500 (I consider this around average) with no additional Precision or Critical Damage. Just as before, actual results will vary!

The damage that this attacker does to your character is related to Armor, which is the sum of Defence (from your actual armor) and Toughness. As a result, the amount of damage taken by a character will depend on their profession type – Scholar, Adventurer or Soldier. The number of times a character can sustain damage will depend on character health, and therefore Vitality. Unfortunately, the amount of base health of a character isn’t broken down by armor class, but on the following table.

This means that Elementalists, Mesmers and Necromancers will all survive a different number of times for the same hit, so we’ll have to break down survivability by profession. And because no character is going to survive 100 hits before taking a dirt nap, we’ll have to break normal and critical hits apart.

Gear

When it comes to improving Vitality and Toughness, there are a few options available to players. The clearest ones are through traits, and it’s possible through sacrificing points in other lines to push both Vitality and Toughness to +300. There are also options through armor, jewellery, runes and more.

Overall I’ve calculated that any character should be able to get an additional 1095 Toughness through prioritising it through traits, armor, jewellery and runes, and an additional 751 Toughness through minor attributes on armor and jewellery and pushing the traits. In a similar way, it’s possible to get an extra 780 Vitality through traits, armor and runes (there are no jewellery pieces with primary Vitality) and 751 through minor attributes on armor and jewellery and with traits. You may be able to squeeze another 30 or so points somewhere but that’t nothing to write home about.

However, it’s important to note that just because you could push all your gear towards survivability it may not be advantageous to. The first line of defense is always to not get hit, which you can do for free by using appropriate positioning, skills and dodges. Also, if an enemy is dead it can’t kill you – it’s no good surviving if you can’t take anything down! But more on that later; let’s get to the maths!

Toughness

Here’s the data on how many hits all the professions can take from our imaginary attacker.

Profession	Health	Armor	Standard Attack	% of total	Hit count	Critical Attack	% of total	Hit Count
Elementalist	10805	1836	1,634	15.12%	7	2,451	22.68%	5
with Secondary Toughness	10805	2587	1,160	10.73%	10	1,739	16.10%	7
with Primary Toughness	10805	2931	1,024	9.47%	11	1,535	14.21%	8
Mesmer	15082	1836	1,634	10.83%	10	2,451	16.25%	7
with Secondary Toughness	15082	2587	1,160	7.69%	14	1,739	11.53%	9
with Primary Toughness	15082	2931	1,024	6.79%	15	1,535	10.18%	10
Necromancer	18372	1836	1,634	8.89%	12	2,451	13.34%	8
with Secondary Toughness	18372	2587	1,160	6.31%	16	1,739	9.47%	11
with Primary Toughness	18372	2931	1,024	5.57%	18	1,535	8.36%	12
Thief	10805	1980	1,515	14.02%	8	2,273	21.03%	5
with Secondary Toughness	10805	2731	1,098	10.17%	10	1,648	15.25%	7
with Primary Toughness	10805	3075	976	9.03%	12	1,463	13.54%	8
Engineer, Ranger	15082	1980	1,515	10.05%	10	2,273	15.07%	7
with Secondary Toughness	15082	2731	1,098	7.28%	14	1,648	10.93%	10
with Primary Toughness	15082	3075	976	6.47%	16	1,463	9.70%	11
Guardian	10805	2127	1,410	13.05%	8	2,116	19.58%	6
with Secondary Toughness	10805	2878	1,042	9.65%	11	1,564	14.47%	7
with Primary Toughness	10805	3222	931	8.62%	12	1,397	12.93%	8
Warrior	18372	2127	1,410	7.68%	14	2,116	11.52%	9
with Secondary Toughness	18372	2878	1,042	5.67%	18	1,564	8.51%	12
with Primary Toughness	18372	3222	931	5.07%	20	1,397	7.60%	14

So overall, raising Toughness by 750 points allows characters to take between 3 and 4 more normal hits and around 2 more critical hits. Prioritising Toughness will only help against 1 or 2 additional critical or normal hits. Considering the sacrifice in Power output, that doesn’t seem a very good trade off to me!

Vitality

Again here’s the data on surviving our imaginary attacker

Profession	Health	Armor	Standard Attack	% of total	Hit count	Critical Attack	% of total	Hit Count
Elementalist	10805	1836	1,634	15.12%	7	2,451	22.68%	5
with Secondary Vitality	18315	1836	1,634	8.92%	12	2,451	13.38%	8
with Primary Vitality	18605	1836	1,634	8.78%	12	2,451	13.17%	8
Mesmer	15082	1836	1,634	10.83%	10	2,451	16.25%	7
with Secondary Vitality	22592	1836	1,634	7.23%	14	2,451	10.85%	10
with Primary Vitality	22882	1836	1,634	7.14%	15	2,451	10.71%	10
Necromancer	18372	1836	1,634	8.89%	12	2,451	13.34%	8
with Secondary Vitality	25882	1836	1,634	6.31%	16	2,451	9.47%	11
with Primary Vitality	26172	1836	1,634	6.24%	17	2,451	9.36%	11
Thief	10805	1980	1,515	14.02%	8	2,273	21.03%	5
with Secondary Vitality	18315	1980	1,515	8.27%	13	2,273	12.41%	9
with Primary Vitality	18605	1980	1,515	8.14%	13	2,273	12.22%	9
Engineer, Ranger	15082	1980	1,515	10.05%	10	2,273	15.07%	7
with Secondary Vitality	22592	1980	1,515	6.71%	15	2,273	10.06%	10
with Primary Vitality	22882	1980	1,515	6.62%	16	2,273	9.93%	11
Guardian	10805	2127	1,410	13.05%	8	2,116	19.58%	6
with Secondary Vitality	18315	2127	1,410	7.70%	13	2,116	11.55%	9
with Primary Vitality	18605	2127	1,410	7.58%	14	2,116	11.37%	9
Warrior	18372	2127	1,410	7.68%	14	2,116	11.52%	9
with Secondary Vitality	25882	2127	1,410	5.45%	19	2,116	8.17%	13
with Primary Vitality	26172	2127	1,410	5.39%	19	2,116	8.08%	13

Overall, raising Vitality by 750 points allows characters to take 4 or 5 more normal hits than a normal character, and around 3 or 4 critical hits. Because there’s such a small difference between prioritising Vitality and having it as a secondary attribute (around 30 points, or 300 health), being attacked by someone with this amount of power makes very little difference and may only allow you to survive one more attack. Again, this seems like an extreme trade off.

Comparing the two

So it looks like points in Vitality go further than points in Toughness and in many ways this is actually true. Toughness only affects direct damage and has no effect on damage from conditions at all, so even if you do have several thousand toughness, you might not survive very long if you get bleeding, burning and poison stacked on you. This is where Vitality shines, because it will help you survive condition stacks for longer.

However, as your character face foes with higher amounts of Power and Precision, Toughness will reduce the damage these foes can do allowing what health you have to effectively go further. It’s not enough to only look to raise Vitality as you’ll find your health will disappear quickly against heavy hitters and you’ll be unable to heal effectively unless you look at raising Healing Power.

Choosing your equipment

Like so much in Guild Wars 2, you’re going to be making a compromise when it comes to choosing equipment and that brings up the big question of how much survivability is enough. Every second you’re fighting is a second you can use to cause damage and apply conditions to the enemy, move to a more favourable position, heal, remove a condition or get an ally involved to help. Your skill, the weapons you like and the utilities and traits you want to use will play into assessing this.

While I do play mesmer primarily which has lots of movement options, I consider surviving around 12 hits to be enough on any of the professions I play regularly (warrior, elementalist). This does mean that the gear I want will be different on all of them. For example I may be able to “get away” with just having offensive gear on my warrior, but since I like having money that isn’t spent on repair bills, I’ll have to consider something different on my elementalist.

Ultimately, the equipment you choose is going to come down to the options supplied to you by the game. And at this point I’ll bring up the post that started this all off which is designed to help you understand your options and make an informed choice – Attributes and Equipment in Guild Wars 2.

Hopefully you found this helpful. If you have any questions, please do leave me a comment below or stalk me on Twitter.