How much HP should I aim for?

[|Nick]

When I played in 2018 Berzerker galss canon gear was the gold standart. Now I'm seeing lots of gear with vitality used. How much HP is a good value to go for? 15k? 16k?
I'm playing a guardian with pve content in mind

[Nico]

Weird, I can't remember seeing anyone recommending vitality gear in PvE. All I know is that we now have more vitality thanks to our jade bot. But I don't know why anyone would want to use vitality gear.

[LSD]

Berserker for DPS, Viper for condi DPS. The only place vitality gear comes in is WvW, where Marauder and, to a lesser extent, Trailblazer are the primary choices.

If you're struggling, go for Marauder, but for anything structured (fractals/raids/strikes) you'd be expected to be in full DPS gear.

[Tasha Vulpine]

Go condi with ritualist gear

[Xxanno]

As far as I can tell are vitality in solo play heavly dependent on healing power in order to remain effective in prolonged fights. Power/condi however can work perfectly fine on its own and all other additional stats is a bonus.
The fact that you play guardian means you should have a ton of mitigation in aegis rendering a lot of attacks usless and as such making vitality usless. It's most of the time better to kill fast, and if that for some reason won't work can you just equip more aegis skills. You can't really circumvent the lack of attack/condi power when dealing with too beafy opponents.

[Nibbie]

An actual HP value isn't very helpful, because there are several HP ranges depending on your class; Guardian has among the lowest for example, but they have both passive and active ways to defend themselves instead. It also depends on what "PVE content" you have in mind. Solo/open world content wants more health than group content like raids and fractals, which typically want full DPS, unless you are serving a specific purpose like healing or tanking.

[Hefutoxin]

Damage stats have a greater impact on your DPS than defense stats have on your survival due to Dodge, Block, Evade, Blind, Stun, etc.

It's really up to you, but the more Vitality you add, the longer the fights will last and the more incoming damage you will need to dodge or use skills to mitigate.