th3gatekeeper wrote:I guess I am just very curious as to why. My understanding on toughness is its direct 1:1 damage reduction meaning, that if I have -100 DPS from toughness, every hit on me deals 100 less damage, be it a DoT or a BIG hit.
This is a common misconception that comes from trusting the character sheet to tell you jack ****. I seriously hate it so much.
It's better to think of Toughness as a 1:1 reduction of the enemy's
damage stat. Different abilities scale differently with stats, and all scaling is modified by the cast time. If you only think of it as a damage reduction, you are often underestimating (in some cases over-estimating) it's effect.
So for example, Doombolt gets a 3x contribution from Intelligence (actually it's 1x from Int and 3x from cast time, but it's the same here), and so you get a 3x contribution from Toughness. If the enemy has 1050 Intelligence (+210 DPS x 3 = +630 DPS), and you have 600 (-120 DPS) Toughness, her damage will be calculated as if she only had 450 Intelligence (3x 90 DPS = 270 DPS).
So in short, your 600 Toughness isn't reducing your damage by 120, it's reducing your damage by 360.
When it comes to DoTs, the Toughness reduces the contribution of the damage stat before the ticks are divided up. It's not a straight reduction from each tick.
For example, Heavy Blow's DoT efect gets a 4x contribution from Strength, and let's say it ticks 3 times because I don't really know off-hand. 1050 Strength is (210 DPS x 4) 840 DPS for the total lifetime of the DoT, but that's +280 damage per tick. Your Toughness comes in as above, reducing the contribution by 4x, so it's 450 Strength (90 DPS x 4) 360 DPS, which is +120 damage per tick.
Once again, your 600 toughness isn't reducing the damage of each tick by 120, it's actually reducing it by 160.
Long story short, never trust the character sheet to tell you anything useful.