Been running the Arcane Torrent and Orb build comfortably and quickly on T2. Currently have 152K Dmg with 841K Tough unbuffed and 167K Dmg with 876K Tough buffed. See link for armory. Question is, what should be my focus as I continue to outfit this toon, damage or toughness, or is the answer a happy medium? Any suggestion(s) for improve are indeed welcome. Thanks in advance.
The answer is, of course, a happy medium. If you are dying get more toughness. If you are not, get more damage. If you are killing things too quickly/easily increase the torment level. And again, if you are dying get more toughness, etc. etc.
I like to keep all the items I find with an increase in either toughness or damage, and swap them on according to the situation.
Longer answer: Neither. The toughness rating in the long run is not the important thing for Wizards as @level 70 we are relying on shields rather than health regen.. So we probably will have to focus on damage reduction. It makes Life regen/LoH/LoK/shields more "potent" rather than making them "weaker" like getting more health does.. For example having 90% reduction and 100k health makes your toughness 1 mil and 95% reduction and 50k health makes it also 1 mil, but your shields are 2 times more "potent" with 95% reduction than with 90%. Ofc getting good amount of health is important, but just on a secondary status in my mind come RoS. Long story short: Shields/LoH/LoK/life regen do not scale from your HP, so you simply cannot stare at the toughness rating, as sometimes it will end up being worse for you if you don't have enough healing to keep your HP from not dropping too fast so shields and regen cannot keep you up anymore.
@Drgreenthump:
I agree with most of what you said, but 1) I don't share all the hate that the toughness stat is getting. It's not the one-size-fits-all stat, but it definitely helps to keep toughness up. If you feel that your mitigation is low just try to switch some HP to allres/armor/dmg reduction while keeping the toughness rating the same, as simple as that. 2) I personally found shields to be completely useless on higher difficulties. I'm a tank wizard for life and spent most of beta trying to build a melee wizard; I tried almost all imaginable combinations of "tanky wizard builds", stacked up many different combinations of defense stats but in the end most of the shields turned out to be not very useful on higher Torment levels. I personally think that some of the OP amulets or other good defensive game-breaking legendaries are our best chance of getting into higher difficulties.
But I wholeheartedly agree that stacking up damage reduction is critical for wizards in RoS.
Yeah... no. Come RoS, these days are finally (unless you are fine with dying all the time on Torment 1 and not making any progress). There may be some edge cases but 99.999% of wizards who think they don't need to care about defense/toughness/EHP/mitigation will not make a lot of progress in Torment difficulty.
I agree with Bagstone (usually do, I think) and Drgreenthump. Toughness has too many factors to be of much use, imo, but that's another debate. I prefer to use mitigation and EHP. EHP is for how much damage you can survive and mitigation is for sustainability against mobs.
Damage only displays some dps stats, so it doesn't take into account other factors, like +elemental damage (the post 2.0 version) and +skill damage (like +disintegrate).
The idea of balancing is to have enough EHP to survive what you want to survive (molten explosions, bull charges, maniac explosions, etc), have enough mitigation to sustain against frequent damage such as poison pools, elite attacks, desecrator, and others, and then have enough damage to kill things at a pace that is reasonable for your play style. If you like to face roll through the game, then you probably want higher dps. If you want more challenge, you'll need higher EHP to survive. In the end, it's about playing the game how you want to.
Also, like Bagstone and Loroese already pointed out, toughness =/= damage reduction, EHP
I'll take 95% damage reduction and 1 million toughness over 80% damage reduction and 2 million toughness any day.
In other words, "toughness" is a casual-friendly term. Green numbers? Yay. I've already seen enough people flood to the forums wondering why their 1M+ "toughness" still end up getting melted in Torment-#. Oh, look. You have a total of 700 AR on your character and 150K HP? Yeah, whoopee. I'll take my 1300 AR and 75K HP, thanks, even if that "lowers" my "toughness."
If you want to analyze your character's survivability more, you'll have to dig a little deeper.
I like to weigh the changes I get from a new item. If the thoughness hit way greater than the damage I would gain, then I ignore the item. The same applies to an item that would give me more thoughness. I usually go with a 5 to 1 split. So if an item would give me 5% damage, but take away 1% thoughness, then I would quickly equip that item. This of course doesn't apply to items with special effects like cold skills dealing X% extra damage. So you have to use good judgement on that kind of thing. I'd say for torment 1 you wanna try to hit about 150K damage or more, and 1.5million thoughness. Skill can offset lacking thoughness up to a point though. So do with that what you want.
I'll take 95% damage reduction and 1 million toughness over 80% damage reduction and 2 million toughness any day.
I disagree. Toughness is a fine stat for a ranged class who is supposed to be avoiding damage anyway. Having more toughness will keep you alive longer than not having it. The only case where this isn't true is if you are stacking a lot of +healing. If that is the case you are right, pure mitigation will probably suit you better. But with my character I find the +healing stats to be rather weak. A larger health pool means larger heals from potions and health globes are more than enough to keep me alive even in the higher torment levels (torment 5 is where I like to play). I tend to go for the higher toughness, and only favor +healing if I'm getting a lot more than the value that I would get from the toughness.
@deleo
Toughness is going to give you a higher chance to survive a hit from one of those guys over pure mitigation.
Edit: I was mixing EHP and Toughness up in my head. In actuality you want a higher EHP, since toughness includes dodge. But still, EHP is more important than pure damage reduction, imo. For a wizard this isn't too big a deal since I don't think you will be equipping gear with dexterity on it.
Also, like Bagstone and Loroese already pointed out, toughness =/= damage reduction, EHP
I'll take 95% damage reduction and 1 million toughness over 80% damage reduction and 2 million toughness any day.
In other words, "toughness" is a casual-friendly term. Green numbers? Yay. I've already seen enough people flood to the forums wondering why their 1M+ "toughness" still end up getting melted in Torment-#. Oh, look. You have a total of 700 AR on your character and 150K HP? Yeah, whoopee. I'll take my 1300 AR and 75K HP, thanks, even if that "lowers" my "toughness."
If you want to analyze your character's survivability more, you'll have to dig a little deeper.
I'll take 95% damage reduction and 1 million toughness over 80% damage reduction and 2 million toughness any day.
I disagree. Toughness is a fine stat for a ranged class who is supposed to be avoiding damage anyway. Having more toughness will keep you alive longer than not having it. The only case where this isn't true is if you are stacking a lot of +healing. If that is the case you are right, pure mitigation will probably suit you better. But with my character I find the +healing stats to be rather weak. A larger health pool means larger heals from potions and health globes are more than enough to keep me alive even in the higher torment levels (torment 5 is where I like to play). I tend to go for the higher toughness, and only favor +healing if I'm getting a lot more than the value that I would get from the toughness.
@deleo
Toughness is going to give you a higher chance to survive a hit from one of those guys over pure mitigation.
You only need enough toughness to survive bursts of damage, after that having more hp just makes every healing resource less potent. For example 80% migitation gives a 10k shield the absorb of 50k.. Now 95% migitation gives that same 10k shield the value of 200k. 4 times more potent. Every healing/shield resource that does not scale from HP acts the same way. Sure health potions do still give you 60% hp, but you need to survive the next 30 seconds without and on high torment, that will probably mean waiting a bit till going at it again, unless you are kiting a lot. It just makes way more sense to use high migitation atm, The story is a lot different if we would have reliable healing resource outside of Health Globes and Potions, but sadly we don't.
Appreciate ALL the valuable feedback, definitely opened my eyes to some things I was unaware of or disregarded as inefficient. Still need to wrap my head around the EHP thing and I see that there are numerous topics discussing it. In the end though, it doesn't appear that patch 2.x has changed the display of DPS vs Survivability too much other than the way it's visualized and breaking out some stats on the detail page.. Please correct me if I am misguided.
Been running the Arcane Torrent and Orb build comfortably and quickly on T2. Currently have 152K Dmg with 841K Tough unbuffed and 167K Dmg with 876K Tough buffed. See link for armory. Question is, what should be my focus as I continue to outfit this toon, damage or toughness, or is the answer a happy medium? Any suggestion(s) for improve are indeed welcome. Thanks in advance.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/jakeman66-1918/hero/41124891
I like to keep all the items I find with an increase in either toughness or damage, and swap them on according to the situation.
Longer answer: Neither. The toughness rating in the long run is not the important thing for Wizards as @level 70 we are relying on shields rather than health regen.. So we probably will have to focus on damage reduction. It makes Life regen/LoH/LoK/shields more "potent" rather than making them "weaker" like getting more health does.. For example having 90% reduction and 100k health makes your toughness 1 mil and 95% reduction and 50k health makes it also 1 mil, but your shields are 2 times more "potent" with 95% reduction than with 90%. Ofc getting good amount of health is important, but just on a secondary status in my mind come RoS. Long story short: Shields/LoH/LoK/life regen do not scale from your HP, so you simply cannot stare at the toughness rating, as sometimes it will end up being worse for you if you don't have enough healing to keep your HP from not dropping too fast so shields and regen cannot keep you up anymore.
That's my 2 cents at least.
I agree with most of what you said, but 1) I don't share all the hate that the toughness stat is getting. It's not the one-size-fits-all stat, but it definitely helps to keep toughness up. If you feel that your mitigation is low just try to switch some HP to allres/armor/dmg reduction while keeping the toughness rating the same, as simple as that. 2) I personally found shields to be completely useless on higher difficulties. I'm a tank wizard for life and spent most of beta trying to build a melee wizard; I tried almost all imaginable combinations of "tanky wizard builds", stacked up many different combinations of defense stats but in the end most of the shields turned out to be not very useful on higher Torment levels. I personally think that some of the OP amulets or other good defensive game-breaking legendaries are our best chance of getting into higher difficulties.
But I wholeheartedly agree that stacking up damage reduction is critical for wizards in RoS.
Yeah... no. Come RoS, these days are finally (unless you are fine with dying all the time on Torment 1 and not making any progress). There may be some edge cases but 99.999% of wizards who think they don't need to care about defense/toughness/EHP/mitigation will not make a lot of progress in Torment difficulty.
Damage only displays some dps stats, so it doesn't take into account other factors, like +elemental damage (the post 2.0 version) and +skill damage (like +disintegrate).
The idea of balancing is to have enough EHP to survive what you want to survive (molten explosions, bull charges, maniac explosions, etc), have enough mitigation to sustain against frequent damage such as poison pools, elite attacks, desecrator, and others, and then have enough damage to kill things at a pace that is reasonable for your play style. If you like to face roll through the game, then you probably want higher dps. If you want more challenge, you'll need higher EHP to survive. In the end, it's about playing the game how you want to.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
Also, like Bagstone and Loroese already pointed out, toughness =/= damage reduction, EHP
I'll take 95% damage reduction and 1 million toughness over 80% damage reduction and 2 million toughness any day.
In other words, "toughness" is a casual-friendly term. Green numbers? Yay. I've already seen enough people flood to the forums wondering why their 1M+ "toughness" still end up getting melted in Torment-#. Oh, look. You have a total of 700 AR on your character and 150K HP? Yeah, whoopee. I'll take my 1300 AR and 75K HP, thanks, even if that "lowers" my "toughness."
If you want to analyze your character's survivability more, you'll have to dig a little deeper.
Armory | YouTube | Twitter | Clan Site
Also what Jaetech said,
@deleo
Toughness is going to give you a higher chance to survive a hit from one of those guys over pure mitigation.
Edit: I was mixing EHP and Toughness up in my head. In actuality you want a higher EHP, since toughness includes dodge. But still, EHP is more important than pure damage reduction, imo. For a wizard this isn't too big a deal since I don't think you will be equipping gear with dexterity on it.
Thanks again..