+5 armor and +30 hp upgrade. Is this the truth?

NOTE: All damage calculations taken from:http://www.guildwarsguru.com/calculators/guru_armor.php

I'm actually thinking about which is more useful for my weapon. So here it goes:

Assume following armor against a meele target is total: 100 (gladiators armor)

If opponent has base dmg 40.24 (max hammer dmg + 15%)
You'll be hit for: 20.13

Now assume you requip your +5 armor weapon.
You'll have a total armor of 105 (gladiators armor + weapons armor)
Thus be hit for 18.45

Here you can see the +5 armor different is 1.68hp

A +30hp upgrade will thus last you 30/1.68 = 18 hits before being useless

Another example.
Assume your farming meele creatures, how many do you usually have around yourself?
I'd say 15. Now assume their minimum base dmg is 17.25.
Now each do 10 swings at the same time to you giving a total of 150 swings against you.

So...
Equip 1 (Armor 100 + 30hp): Total hp lose: 1264.5 hp (-30hp)
Equip 2 (Armor 105) : Total hp lose: 1186.5 hp

Can see that equipment 2 has less hp lose by 78 hp.
Of course i've neglected high damages and armor penetration, so a +5 armor becomes more useful.

In conclusion from this. a +5 armor upgrade is good if your being hit quite alot as a warrior.

Any ideas on this?

The +hp mods are helpfull incase you deside to use two Sup Runes to help offset the cost, Otherwise if you know what type of Damage your going up against (Elemental/Physical) + Armor mods are better for the long game.

The +5 armor upgrade is VERY good, and certainly rivals the +30hp. Another big thing that you did not take into account is the fact that less damage is usually better than more hp. Take the extreme case where you have double hp but take double damage. You will die very quickly because it is impossible to keep you healed, because you will need double healing in order to stay alive. If you have the option of taking double hp or half the damage, obviously halving the damage would be the better choice in most situations (because of the healing situation). We are dealing with much smaller numbers, but the same principle applies.

However, there are many situations where the +30hp can be better, but both have their merits. Personally, I can't afford 100k for that +30hp upgrade, so I stick with the cheap defensive upgrades, but I have a feeling now that this has been posted in 3 threads (in different sections of this site), the prices of these upgrades will start to go up.

Don't forget that some attacks avoid AL all together. Several mesmer skills come to mind...

-Diomedes

the attacks that ignore armor wont have an effect on the +30 grip/pommel unless you have less than 30 life after the attack.

I'm not sure I'm following the argument anymore. Darksci was using as one of his examples some critters swinging at him and calculating how much his hp would be effected by each one. Let me do the same. Imagine you have 10 energy and a 14+ dom mesmer uses energy burn on you. If you have ac +5 you take 80 damage. If you have +30 hp you take 50 damage (by Darksci's math). Hence one seems to be better than the other. It seems to me that you have to decide what kind of damage you're likely to take and tool to fight that.

-Diomedes

Say a memser casts 10 second conjure phantasm dealing a total of 100 damage. The armor won't do anything to help you, since phantasm ignores armor. In this situation the +30hp is better, but only by a very small amount. Unless you survived battle by 30 out of 560 health (or however many you have) or less, the +30hp didn't do anything for you.

Yes but... neither did the +5 armor.

I'm very unclear about how we're defining "useful" here. In Darksci's first example, if you're physically attacked 10 times then you'll save about 17 hp. Does that mean that unless you survived by only 17 hp your armor is useless?

-Diomedes

Don't forgot that you also have a shield adding armor, and that many people have a constant mending going healing that 30 HPs so that it is always useful. Then read this entire thread (espcially the posts by me and the ones with statistical analysis): http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=40093

In general, degen will make your life miserable. Try to avoid degen at all costs when soloing/farming. lol.

As for hp vs armor, I'd go with +armor any day of the week for reasons stated above. Also get yourself a collector shield with +45 hp and -2 damage while in a stance, and you are GOLDEN.

Armor > Health. I know random scrubs will tell you this is not the case, but who cares.
Or you can actually get a worthwhile mod like Enchanting or Mastery.

I would point out that this is fallacious logic, but there isn't any logic in there at all . . . No argument, no rationale, just an appeal to ignorance (and an ad hominem attack ). It is faulty logic to claim that armor is working all the time while health only works until its gone. Guess what? Armor isn't working at all against any attacks that ignore armor (smiting monks, necro curses, mesmer hexes, ranger poison, warrior's bleeding, elementalist's lightning), whereas extra life does help against ANY attack.

The real problem is that warriors aren't targeted by other warriors (warriors dont go toe to toe until the casters have been killed). Plus warriors and rangers have tons of armor already. Better to give your warriors and rangers a fortitude boost (which adds to their cushion, giving them a chance to survive spikes of damage and less likelihood of having healings going to waste, like a constant mending) since they are going to be targeted by all the casters and give your casters (monks, mesmers, and eles) an armor boost since they are going to be targeted by all the warriors (and have less armor anyway, so the boost is proportionally more significant).

Read the link I posted above. It will answer a lot of your questions. Both mods are good, and have their place. I'm not convinced at all about mastery or enchanting upgrades, though . .

My personal experience (as a warrior) is that + health is by far better than +armor, especially if you're facing mixed mobs in PvE. I don't know about the rest of you, but in late-game PVE (i.e. Southern Shiverpeaks / Ring of Fire), you tend to run into a lot of Mesmer/Necro opponents, which do DoT (ignoring armour). About 80% of the time when my health drops below 30%, it's always primarily due to DoT, and less melee attacks.

30 HP makes a difference in that it allows you more leeway for reaction by the rest of your team. It won't last long, sure, but 1 or 2 seconds might be the time needed for your monk to throw healing on you. Factor in the fact that in PvE, most players don't bring any hex removal skills, which means you generally have to let the degen run its course, and the HP bonus is even more apparent.

Stop comparing apples to oranges. In cases where armors have low AL (elementalist for example) and without a shield, then +5AL is better than health+30 against direct damages. But against armor piercing attacks and damage-over-time attacks, then health+30 is better than +5AL.

Conclusion:
1) if you know your opponent really well, then +5AL can be more effective than health+30 in some special cases.
2) Health+30 is better all around.

The +health mods do very little. People like to calculate their +hp mods as though they're the first health points taken, and that just isn't true. The bonus health is the *last* health taken away by damage. I think it's pretty clear why this is the case - it doesn't matter if you have 1 hit point or 100 when the battle is over, as long as you survive. 400 damage takes the same amount of time to heal whether you have 1 hit point remaining or 100. Thus it follows that +health *only* matters when you'd drop below your normal health total.

Armor is always working, reducing damage and making your Monk's life easier. Over the course of a battle a single individual can take thousands of damage. A +armor upgrade can translate into hundreds of hit points of damage prevented, damage that your Monk didn't have to spend time or energy healing. +health would have done effectively nothing with good Monk support, as you rarely dip that low.

Top that off by looking at spike protection - amazingly, +armor is better here as well - and it really is a no-brainer.

Things like DoTs and ignore armor damage really aren't too relevant to this discussion. Why? Because they're slow. Do you frequently drop down to double digit hit points from degen spikes? I don't. Degen is a tax on healing, it wears away on your Monk's energy as he heals up persistent, efficient damage. The entire party is likely to go through thousands of hit points of degen, and if you finally die it isn't because your Monks couldn't keep up, but because they were simply ground out of energy. Would +health be more useful against straight degen than +armor? Sure. But neither are going to make a difference, because ignore armor damage is part of a straight energy battle, not the spike/time battle that +health actually helps against.


That said, I don't really like any of the suffixes for PvP. +armor is always good, but Warriors and Rangers don't take heavy damage in PvP so neither has a lot of utility. Enchanting is still outstanding but a lot of builds can't take advantage of it at all. Weapon Mastery upgrades are about as useful as Sundering upgrades, which is to say that they are utter shit. +defense vs. physical/elemental are going to be worse than +defense in all but the most specialized of builds. I'd grab enchanting if you have even one skill that can take advantage, and +defense failing that - sure, you don't take a lot of damage, but you do take some damage and even a little bonus helps. If for whatever reason you don't want to use +defense, use Weapon Mastery and enjoy the ~1% damage bonus.

Peace,
-CxE

health + 30 would only be better against degen, and it makes it harder to heal because you have more life. It works better against attacks that ignore armor, but heals also ignore armor and it makes the monk have to heal 30 more hp.
+5 armor on the other hand will help stop almost every attack, and is already applied on the first non-armor ignoring attack. It makes life easier for the monks too.

That's a flawed view, too, though. Extra health is not the first or last to go: your analysis will be more accurate if you stop trying to conceptualize it as first or last, but rather simply as what it does. It adds to your total maximum heath. Pure and simple. It isn't fair to say that it is your last life to go, though it did save you when a spike of damage dropped you within inches of death. It isn't the first life to go, but it also played a critical role when a healing spell was not wasted in part because you had some more damage to heal than others. A fortitude upgrade ADDS to your total cushion; it gives your monks more options, it gives them more time, it gives you more time, it helps immensely if even a few points of healing might have otherwise gone to waste. It is invaluable against any kind of damage, but ESPECIALLY damage that ignores armor, of which there are dozens of varieties.

Ensign, I've been a big fan of your posts for a long time, but I'd like to discuss this in a little more depth. As I mentioned in post #8 of this thread, I'm having a hard time seeing how this armor is really that useful. If, as is claimed, that the +30 is the /last/ damage that you are taking, then shouldn't the damage /prevented/ from the +armor be considered the last health equivalent in the exact same fashion? In other words, if you saved 17 damage, then doesn't that not matter unless you only survived by 17 or fewer hp? Second:

Now let me start by saying that your monks may have strategies that are better than mine (when I'm playing a monk), but healing often doesn't work quite like that for me. If your HP is rarely dipping very low then it's probably because you're being over healed. I know I'm guilty of this (and I suspect that I'm not the only one). I'm sure it's not the most efficient use of energy, but I would suspect that I often heal people for at least a good +20-30 hp more than they need. This has a lot to do with the fact that I'm often trying to guess at a rate of damage when I'm watching health bars (i.e. "hmm, that guy is dropping pretty quick, I'd better toss a healing on him right now rather than waiting another 1/2 second even though that might be a more efficient use of my energy"). In this case, the + armor has done you no better than the + health. The only way you can consider saving your monk hundreds of HP over the course of the battle is if the monk is actually not over healing but efficiently using his/her energy.

So I can agree with you if you can tell me that your monks aren't healing you past your maxhp, otherwise I still fail to see one as better than the other.

-Diomedes


EDIT: Infact, more and more, I'm having a hard time seeing any difference at all between +5 al and +30 hp. I just keep seeing +5al as being "+ X hp CONDITIONAL on AL related damage".

30 hp is not a large enough cushion to let it consistently play such a critical role. Things being as they are, warriors are taking most of their damage in pve (I'm assuming warriors, since the OP using glad armor.). In PvE, a limited number of targets are being beaten on, thus for those purposes, unless you're in a very mesmer heavy area, which is often not the case, then armor makes life easier, since it works with your regular damage reduction and provides you with a fair bit of extra health over time.

In pvp, if you're a priority target, say a monk or a mesmer, unless your build is using something which benefits from +20% enchant length (ether renewal, for example), i'd stick with the +30hp, unless you're running spirits like fertile season, in which case you have sufficient defences to worry about conserving energy.

Seeing as the smiting groups that have been popping up love throwing out balth's auras, in the current pvp climate, i'd say that fort wins over armor.

I think you are exactly right conceptually, Diomedes. But you may have gathered that from my posts (like the one right above yours, which makes an almost identical point). And with fortitude not being conditional on types of damage, and a more rare and expensive status symbol to boot, it is my preference . .