Toughness - What exactly does it do?

[Smasher78]

Apologies if this has already been asked and/or answered, I couldn't find it on the board anywhere.

Basically, I'm unclear on the exact effects of Toughness - it doesn't 'show up' on mitigation, and the wording when you mouse-over is very confusing. I think I read somewhere that so much Toughness will effectively 'cancel out' so much of the attacker's primary attacking stat (Strength for melee attacks, Ballistics for ranged, Int for magic, etc). Is this true? If so, how does it scale? Is it one-for-one, e.g., will one Toughness cancel out one Strength and so on, or something else?

If I'm completely mistaken on how the stat works, then clarification would be greatly appreciated.

[Callibys]

Basically the answer to your questions is yes. It effectively reduces your assailants primary damaging stat at a 1:1 ratio. Most people believe it has a cap to its effectiveness, much like armor and resistances, but its hard to test completely without cooperation from both sides. And thats supposedly against the EULA/ToS from Mythic.

Some think that if you have a higher toughness rating than your opponents damaging stat, that the toughness would then remove the extra damage from their skill's base damage. Once again, it has to be thoroughly tested with coop from both sides.

Also to note, toughness is most useful when youre being attacked by multiple targets at once, doing more consistent lower damage rather than bigger spikes. Since most of the damage from multiple targets in RvR comes off in big bursts, it loses its usefulness somewhat when compared to wounds or initiative.

Edit: The exception is against auto-attacks. Since the primary damaging stat only adds half of what it normally would to auto-attacks, toughness cancels out the stat at a 2:1 ratio when calculations are made in relation to auto-attacks.

[Trump]

Toughness is primarily effective at mitigating DOTs (damage over time abilities).

As str/int/bal bonus dps (and also weapon dps) is applied over the total duration of the dot and not just the casting time. For example, going from 250 to 500 toughness would reduce all dot tics by 100 damage so 300 point dot tics would be 200 and 500 point tics would be 400.

The reason grenade spec engineers and immolation spec bright wizards are getting such huge scenario numbers is that nobody is stacking toughness.