Strategy:Tough as Nails

Tough as nails gives a character a flat +1 armor. Generally speaking, this tends to a weaker defensive trait than hellrunner, but choosing between the two involves a lot more consideration than just the general case.

Situations in which a player could benefit from a little extra armor, but has the option of retreating to somewhere safer, are fairly common. In such circumstances hellrunner shines. A much less common situation is that which sees a player under fire, with nowhere to retreat to. Less common, though, doesn't necessarily mean less important to preclude. In fact, we're all *so* familiar with that unlucky caves level that we enter surrounded by arachnotrons, or the panic-inducing start in a room with a pod of mancubi, revenants, and archviles - all that's required is another pod on the other side of the nearest door, and the game could abruptly end! Sometimes our only recourse is just to kill the enemies as quickly as possible, and in those cases hellrunner will offer very little protection. So, while hellrunner is usually better, since the former case is more common, surviving the UNusual situation is often more critical to our success.

Another consideration is how tough as nails provides more benefit the more damage we're taking. While we always endeavour to take as little damage as possible, this can still be a factor in choosing defensive traits. For example, the technician, with an ability to use medikits almost instantly, will tend to carry a few more health packs and tank a little more damage (while a scout would be more likely to roll the dice of phase devices or rocket jumps). The very fact that we're playing a technician can encourage tough as nails per se.

Most importantly, though, I feel it needs to be mentioned that tough as nails is working at its best when our received damage after other defense is low, but greater than 1. 3 is the magic number here, where TaN will reduce it to 1, effectively *trippling* our hitpoints against such attacks. While in practice it may be incredibly unlikely to get this 'sweet spot', there is a case where it's a lot more common than might be expected - cerberus armor. Cerberus armor offers little protection from bullet attacks, which are typically in the range of 2-8 dmg, but if the cerberus armor is power-modded, that (2-8) 5 average damage is going to be reduced by the power mod down to, you guessed it, 3! Cerberus armor similarly fails to defend well against shotguns, which are significantly more powerful, but since they are shotgun attacks our TaN defensive trait is doubled in effectiveness here! Then we have the energy attacks, which hit hard (anything from 12(caco) to 20(archvile), perhaps about 16 damage on average?); Cerberus armor's resistance% hugely reduces these down to about 5 damage, and then the p-mod takes it down to that familiar sweet spot, 3! Put that all together, and it turns out that if we're wearing P-modded cerberus, that ideal three times as tough 'perfect scenario' actually occurs with surprising consistency! This is more than a little convenient, given that cerberus armor is pretty much the go-to late-game defensive goal if no fancy uniques are found!

I suspect that by the time players are building cerberus armor regularly, they have already judged and excluded TaN from their list of go-to traits (that was certainly what happened with me, anyway!) but I feel that the two synergise well enough to ultimately put tough as nails amongst the very top of the defensive trait choices. Sylph (talk) 17:14, 12 December 2020‎ (UTC)

Generally if you are not at the aforementioned range where your preexisting armor can already reduce most damage to below 5, and it's not a prerequisite for your desired master trait, then Tough as Nails should be a low priority investment. Sometimes damage is just unavoidable, especially so if you're a melee build, but often for TaN to have any effect at all is a result of bad play leading to you getting hit. Additionally, nothing reduces damage more than not getting hit in the first place, so investment in Hellrunner letting you outmaneuver enemies, better dodge enemy attacks , and allowing you to outrun faster enemies you couldn't otherwise, will often do more to limit damage than TaN will. You can also instead invest in DPS-boosting traits like Finesse and the various damage-boosting traits, killing enemies before they get a chance to attack prevents you from getting hit entirely (i.e. the reason why Angel of Max Carnage is widely considered to be easier than the standard game despite enemies hitting way harder there). Or you invest in Intuition to know exactly where enemies outside your vision are and avoid fighting them in a bad position to begin with. Not to mention that getting faster movement speed and better DPS is harder to get through equipment than just getting better protecting armor for when you do get hit.

Then there's the fact that TaN just doesn't provide much benefit once you start fighting enemies stronger than formers and Imps if your armor doesn't have the resistances to already drastically reduce damage. Once Hell knights and Cacodemons start showing up, their projectile does 7 damage on average and ignores half your armor's protection as a result of being plasma (or ignores it entirely if you have a single point of protection), so with two levels of TaN and no other armor, they're averaging 6 damage on you, meaning a Scout/Technician and Marine will survive just one more hit from them. You got Red armor on too? You'll reduce their average damage down to 4, which looks a lot better (Scouts/Technicians can now survive five more hits and Marines will survive six more hits), but high damage rolls will still deal significant damage (at max they deal 12 damage, so you'll be reducing their damage to 9, which is still a big chunk), and you're very unlikely to have Red armor before they start appearing on harder difficulties. It gets even worse once Barons start showing up, whose projectile deals 12 damage on average, and up to a whopping 20 at max; with no armor, two levels of TaN will reduce their average damage to 10, not enough to even let Scouts/Technicians survive an additional hit. With Blue armor, their average damage is reduced to 8, Scouts/Technicians now survive just two more hits and Marines survive three more hits. With Red armor instead, you reduce their average damage to 6, so Scouts/Technicians go from dying in five hits to nine hits and Marines in five hits to ten hits, a good improvement but not enough to make you comfortable taking repeated hits from them, while Barons can hit much harder than that (reducing a max damage roll from 20 to 14 hardly makes a significant difference, and we also haven't even consider the likelihood that the Red armor will get damaged and lose protection in those calculations). We haven't even gotten to the Former commandos, Arachnotrons, the VMR, and the bosses, where I can go on all day about how TaN does shit to help you survive against them without being supported by very good armor, but I think you get the picture now.

So in conclusion, Tough as Nails will never be useless, but is usually not a trait you should prioritize investing in, while investing in traits that improve your movement speed, DPS, or give other utilities will often reduce damage more than TaN will, and so thus only be picked as a filler trait at the end of the game after you gotten everything else more valuable. You also likely won't be able to get a very good armor with high resistances to get serious mileage out of TaN, like the aforementioned Cerberus armor, until it's already late into the game, so even in that case TaN will still not be a priority investment. It additionally should be noted that TaN seems tantalizing for melee builds, due to the unavoidable damage of melee combat, and how berserk gives +60% resistance to everything to get them into that sweet zone for TaN without needing very good armor, but Blademaster blocks it and Malicious Blades can't get Berserker to easily get berserked, so that rules out those two investing in TaN. This leaves Vampyre, but even a Vampyre, aside from the obvious Brute, will generally want to prioritize investing in Finesse and Whizkid before investing in TaN (again better DPS can still let them kill enemies before they get hit, while faster attacks makes it quicker to activate Berserker, and they can't even get Cerberus armor without Whizkid, while Whizkid also can allow them to improve every other statistical aspect of their equipment).

One final consideration is picking between Tough as Nails and Ironman for a strictly defensive-boosting trait, whether as an endgame filler trait or because you actually want to increase your hit-taking ability above all else. Generally Ironman fares slightly better with extending your survival against strong hits and doesn't have half its effect ignored by plasma enemies, in addition to boosting the effective HP you get from medkits and other percentage-based healing sources. However if you do got good enough armor to reduce most hits to around 5 or less damage, an extra point of protection will allow you to take more hits than 10 extra HP will, at which point TaN is the winner between the two (though if your armor is so good you're reducing most hits to 1 damage already, than TaN would be excessive). Additionally, if you're investing in Berserker, you should unquestionably invest in TaN first; aside from the massive +60% resistances of berserk letting you reduce most attacks to that =<5 damage threshold even without good armor, increasing your max HP with Iro greatly reduces or even completely eliminates the ability for Berserker to activate from taking hits that deal a third or more of your HP in damage (and considering Berserker activation here applies the resistances of berserk before the damage from those hits are calculated, investing in Iro in these scenarios actually makes you take a lot more damage than you would have without it). Omega Tyrant (talk) 10:27, 21 July 2023 (UTC)