Toughness Improvements In Season 11
Toughness on the Season 11 PTR was a confusing stat that often did not give the full picture of your defenses, and knowing how much Toughness was needed was nearly impossible. In light of these issues and community feedback, Blizzard has introduced two major changes to the stat.
When selecting each Torment difficulty, it will also provide a recommended Toughness level.
You’ll also be able to compare the Toughness of items between tooltips to help inform your decision.
With these improvements, players now have a goal to shoot for with Toughness as they move up in Torment difficulties, and can compare items at a glance much more easily, which will make the leveling and gearing process smoother at the start of the season.
Toughness as a stat can also be moused-over in the character window to get a more granular overview of each damage type, allowing players to shore up resistances of a specific type if necessary.
Remaining Issues with Toughness
Toughness still has many fundamental flaws that Blizzard should address going into future seasons. Just like with the Attack Power stat, Toughness is a VERY rough estimation of a very complex problem. How defensive or "tanky" a character is in an ARPG like Diablo is always a simple question with a very deep answer.
Like with most defensive estimates, Toughness is missing many powerful defensive stats and effects that could lead to a character constantly dying, rather than coasting through a difficulty without a care. Some of the things Toughness does not factor into include:
Barriers of all types
Damage Conversions/Redirects such as the new Melted Heart of Selig
Various passive defensives that rely on conditionals such as Aspect of Bul-Kathos
Additionally, the ugly truth is that adding up all defensive stats together does not give the complete picture of how "tanky" a character is. Having very high mitigation values from Armor/Resistances means very little if the character has no way to recover lost life, for example. Aspect of the Crowded Sage and Raider's Aspect are examples of things that can help fill defensive gaps, allowing players to take bigger hits from enemies since the missing life can easily be recovered again through various means.
At the end of the day, having a defensively strong character is not about a single stat on a character window; having a defensively strong character comes from smoothing out and mitigating incoming damage, followed by the ability to recover missing life afterwards.
