Toughness or armor ?

[Grunbag]

Hello , I wonder which stats is better for more survivability ?
Armor or toughness ?
Anyone can make those stats clear ? Thanks

[Osred]

Hoping its armor otherwise I've wasted alot of money.

[Thayli]

Without involving a bunch of math, it basically works like this:

If you get hit by repetitive low-damage attacks and/or magical AoE, toughness is better.

If you get hit by a melee train and/or physical burst, armor is better.

And to go a little bit out of the box here,

If you get hit by morale dumps, physical/magical burst and/or siege weapons, health is the way to go.

Toughness, armor and health stacking are all about equally viable. Just look what is killing you most of the time and itemize against that, really. Keep in mind that the more you stack one of those 3, the "better" the other 2 become. For example, after stacking some 6k health, getting some toughness or armor instead of more health will be better.

[Grunbag]

Ok so if you stay a lot in melee , you better stack armor ?
How much armor a def tank should get ? And how much toughness ?

[spikespiegel84]

6x180 ftw. Plus armor pot and Annihilation shield for the proc of armor (doesn't stack, but is 250 around more armor) and ruin set for armor increase. Minimum 4k armor, don't accept less.

[spikespiegel84]

I keep my toughness with tactic and aura around 890

[Grunbag]

Ok thanks , so at T4 having 4400 armor , 600 toughness (without aura) and 6k wounds is not bad ?

[Luth]

Armor and resistance stacking should be always more efficient against armor/resistance damage. Nevertheless you have to stack it further than the common armor/resistance debuff, or your armor/resistance is 0 in most PvP situations.

The higher the stat coefficient of an ability is, the better it scales with your DPS stat (strength, intelligence, ballistic skill) or heal stat (willpower).
Against high DPS coefficients toughness stacking is valuable, though afaik dots have only a ~ 0.5 coeffiecient, procs 0 etc.

Imo wounds stacking without high defense stats is useless in PvP, as it doesn't make it easier to keep you alive if, for instance, you get 1k+ damage from autoattacks. I could be that it has it's use in ZvZ morale battles, but i don't know.
It had it's use in PvE, as many instance bosses had a flat armor penetration on some abilities (50%, 75%...) iirc, but even there the tank had to stack defense stats & wounds.

[spikespiegel84]

You want more wounds. Around 7800 8000. Look for high defensive weapons, belts and cloaks

[gke96]

Speaing bout tanks:
Give armor priority.(at least 5500 with pot in my opinion)(or balistic will split u apart)
Toughness is smth like extra defense, cant say smth like "it has to be more than this value" or "this is limit to your toughness dont stack more(unless u hit cap)"
For wounds the more you stack it the worse it becomes so put a limit to that. dont go more than 8500-9k or smth unless you are a blackorc thats excesive.
Dont have initiative less then 220-250 *no matter what*.