Author Topic: More Important, +HP or + Resist?  (Read 23290 times)

brothermutant

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More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« on: September 27, 2015, 08:39:00 PM »
As the title suggests, which is better to get on a toon, highest possible Health or Highest possible Resist for a specific damage type? What I mean is this, if slotting allows a 3% increase in resistances OR a 3% increase in overall Health, is the Health a better choice because regen is based off of your Max health? If you know and respond, please feel free to cite an example (with numbers and math even would be great).

Reason I am asking is, I once thought +Health would be the way to go as it is more damage that can be taken from ANY attack, but lately I am not so sure. Is there a happy balance? Obviously, many things play a part overall: Regen/Defenses/Resistance/Health. But I am curious what others thought/found.

Vee

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #1 on: September 27, 2015, 09:55:03 PM »
I don't have the math but I generally would go the hp route all other things being equal. The resist bonuses were crappy enough that they were planning to buff them in i24 to make building for resistance through IOs somewhat viable. If i were trying to get extra resist in the i23 world I'd probably do it with enhancement boosters rather than set bonuses. Had a buddy who did that to get his stone brute the last 3% to the cap and he saw a definite increase in survivability.

Microcosm

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #2 on: September 28, 2015, 05:27:39 AM »
Yes, a static regen rate provides more hp per second if your hp is higher, so in that way it's better. I believe, though my memory is a little foggy, that resistance also resists resist debuffs (say that 5 times fast), meaning that, against an enemy that hits you with -resist, having higher resist might be better than hp. Someone will correct me if that's wrong, I'm sure.

Otherwise, there are a couple of other factors to consider. With certain archetypes, accolades and the random +hp you would get from other set focuses would get you near their cap anyway, so building for it was not necessarily helpful. You should also consider how often you would expect to be hit with +hp vs +res when teaming, so you are less likely to waste that outside buff. That said I usually just went for +hp in that situation for the extra regen.

ricodah

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #3 on: September 28, 2015, 07:43:06 AM »
I think only Masterminds would truly benefit from damage resist over hp.  Supremacy + defensive mode divided the resisted damage between MM and pets.  So if a boss hit you for 600 smashing damage and you're capped at 75% S/L resist, equals to 150 damage divided by 6 = 25 damage to you and each pet. 

I24 would have helped a lot with damage resist.  IO set bonuses with mez resist (immobilize, hold, sleep etc) were going to be combine with types of damage resist.  A lot of players who slotted several Mako/Touch of Death/Obliteration/Scirocco's IO sets to softcap their defense would get quite a bit of S/L/E/N damage resistances as well: 



Image taken from here:  http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancement_Sets#Resist_Damage

Vee

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #4 on: September 28, 2015, 12:39:31 PM »
That's nice that they were going to up the mez resist and made it general instead of untyped. Also nice that things like 2 slots of titanium or impervium would give a bit of extra resist on the way to slotting for hp or defense. The numbers still stink as far as any real ability to build for resistance though. I had thought they were supposed to up the %s of the resistance bonuses more but I guess this was the compromise point. Seems like it would've been more some bonus resistance on the way to slotting for the things we normally slotted for, but who doesn't like a bonus.

chuckv3

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #5 on: September 28, 2015, 03:18:31 PM »
As the title suggests, which is better to get on a toon, highest possible Health or Highest possible Resist for a specific damage type? What I mean is this, if slotting allows a 3% increase in resistances OR a 3% increase in overall Health, is the Health a better choice because regen is based off of your Max health? If you know and respond, please feel free to cite an example (with numbers and math even would be great).

Reason I am asking is, I once thought +Health would be the way to go as it is more damage that can be taken from ANY attack, but lately I am not so sure. Is there a happy balance? Obviously, many things play a part overall: Regen/Defenses/Resistance/Health. But I am curious what others thought/found.

+HP is useful across the board, since heals and natural uptick are done as PERCENTAGES of the HP (higher total means that the same % is a higher amount of points recovered). Not only that, but it applies regardless of what you're being hit with. Regen is also better to slot than resistance (usually) for the same reasons.

Auroxis

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #6 on: September 28, 2015, 05:07:49 PM »
Keep in mind that with each point of HP you get, the next one becomes less impactful on your effective HP due to diminishing returns. The opposite is true for resistance.

So for example, if you have no existing hit point modifiers and add a 1.5% hit point buff that's +1.5% bonus to your effective HP. If you have a +30% existing hit point bonus (20% from accolades and 10% from IO's) then a +1.5% bonus becomes a +1.15% bonus to EHP. And with resists, the opposite is true. Say you have a 1% resistance bonus, with no base resists it's just 1% extra EHP while with 50% base resists it's 2% extra EHP.

That said we rarely get that choice when building a character, since defense is so much more superior than resistance and comes in bigger numbers.

Arcana

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #7 on: September 28, 2015, 08:53:53 PM »
+HP is useful across the board, since heals and natural uptick are done as PERCENTAGES of the HP (higher total means that the same % is a higher amount of points recovered). Not only that, but it applies regardless of what you're being hit with. Regen is also better to slot than resistance (usually) for the same reasons.

Regeneration is based off of current maximum health meaning +MaxHealth increases regeneration in total points.  But heals are based off of original base health: buffing +MaxHealth does not increase heals in total points per heal.  The old Dull Pain guides did the math and the testing to confirm this.  Slotted Dull Pain did something like 78% heal but visually it looked closer to 50% heal because that was 78% of the base health bar, not the boosted one.  If you have 1000 points of health and apply a 50% heal, that would be 500 heal.  If you boosted your health to 1200 points, that same heal would heal for the same 500 points, or visually something closer to 40%.

The reason for this is because actually heals didn't heal percentages at all: they actually healed based on a table calculation similar to how attacks dealt damage.  Those tables were calculated per archetype to make heals come out to nice percentages (most of the time) but they did not change when players buffed MaxHealth, so there was no way for a MaxHealth buff to make heals scale up.

The question "all things being equal what's better, +MaxHealth or +Res" is a tricky question because the premise - all things being equal - is never, ever true in CoH.  It can't even easily be engineered to be true on paper in an academic question, because of the question of what does it mean to be "all things being equal."  All we can really do is compare incremental benefit, which means given a specific set of circumstances, we can ask whether +X MaxHealth buff is better, equal, or worse than +Y Res.  Outside of those specific circumstances, any comparison is likely to be conditional.  Sometimes this is better, sometimes that is better.

Because players sometimes thought about things in terms of points, and sometimes in terms of percentages, and game effects sometimes conveniently worked in ways that appeared to be simple in points and sometimes in percentages comparing effects can be difficult.  To "normalize" the comparisons, I came up with a system for directly comparing a specific amount of resistance and a specific amount of +MaxHealth by converting the +MaxHealth buff into an effective resistance.  Basically, it works like this (warning: math inbound).  Take your total MaxHealth buff.  Say its +40%.  Calculate this number: 1 - (1/ (1+buff) )).  In other words, if the buff is +40%, then first you calculate 1/(1+0.4) = 1/1.4 = 0.714.  That's actually the apparent damage admittance: damage will appear to be hitting only 71.4% as hard.  Then you calculate 1- that value, which is 0.286.  That's the effective resistance: the amount of reduction in the damage.

So +40% max health "looks like" +28.6% resistance.  Note that you can't add or subtract these numbers: you cannot "stack" any true resistance on that apparent resistance value: that requires more complicated math.  Now, there's one big catch to this.  In this comparison system, you have to assume that your effective resistance value - in this case 28.6% - is not only your resistance to damage but also your resistance to heals.  In this system, all of your self-heals will heal for 28.6% less.  This is due to the fact that heals do not scale.  They heal for the same amount with or without +MaxHealth, but in this new system where we are making +MaxHealth look like +Res, heals are stronger for +Res for mathematical reasons. 

In a perfect idealized world without debuffs and the like, +40% Max Health looks exactly like +28.6% resistance in all respects except it will seem like the maxhealth character is getting exactly 28.6% less benefit from heals.  However, the max health character has that effective damage mitigation against all forms of damage, even unresistable damage.  If I took all Real Numbers and combat spam away, and the only thing you could see was your health bar, outside of heals, if the only thing that happened was something attacked you with damage of the resisted type, you couldn't tell these two situations apart.

brothermutant

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #8 on: September 28, 2015, 09:58:57 PM »
Thanks all for the info and responses.

The way I am looking at it is this:

If I had say 1000 HP base, what would be better, +4% Resistance to an attack (flaw here is that you rarely get resistance to ALL attacks, and unresistable damage would be where +HP would definitely shine) OR +4% to Base HP (adding 40 HPs basically). On my paper, both would allow me to survive a 1000 points of damage (either all at once or many hits adding up to 1000 damage) leaving me with 40 HP. HOWEVER, only the +resist would allow me to survive another 40 points of incoming damage (40x0.96=38.4 points of damage taken, means I have 1.6 HP left), whereas the extra HP did nothing to make me survive the next 40 point attack (unless it made me heal FASTER).

So what I am saying is, does +HP increase Health recovered by Self Regeneration, and How long till a health tick is regened by my toon?

Obviously, you NEVER get universal resistance to all (except that one PvP IO I think). BUT, what is the way you guys focus on your toons when playing? Do you try to Hard Cap your Health if at all possible? It makes a huge difference to me because many Epic PPs have +Res to 2 to 4 types of damage, but only one or two have a +HP power (usually Ice, sometimes Earth powers). And I want a toon that will survive after all. If that means I got Ice or Earth powers, I will build toons where the theme makes sense. E.g. I made a "Tanker Mage" toon that had Illusion, Storm, and EARTH powers because...he was a Mage, he can do whatever he wants. I am not saying I would ignore things like Tough or +Res choices on IO sets for bonuses, but I would say the following is how I like to survive things:

 Extra Defenses and/or To Hit Debuffs > Extra Health> Extra Regen and/or self heals> Extra Resistances and/or damage debuffs. Is this the wrong way to think about this?

Auroxis

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #9 on: September 28, 2015, 11:42:02 PM »
So what I am saying is, does +HP increase Health recovered by Self Regeneration and How long till a health tick is regened by my toon?

Since regen is percentage based then max HP increases health gained per tick.

As for the exact tick percentages and their frequency, according to the wiki it's 5% max HP every 12 seconds with regen bonuses increasing the rate of ticks. So if you have a 400% regen rate (+300%) you get 5% of your max HP back every 3 seconds. If your HP is at 3000 as well then that's 150 HP (3000*0.05) regenerated every 3 seconds (12/4).

Back to resists, the significant resistance bonuses from IO's are so few and far-between that it'd be easier to just list the ones you might want to actively try to get:

1. PVP +3% Res IO (unique).

2. Impervium Armor +3% psionic Res IO (not unique, but rule of 5. Wouldn't use this on a main build, but perhaps on an alternate build for psi-heavy content).

3. Aegis +3% psionic and status resistance IO (unique).

4. Scirocco's Dervish +3.13% negative energy resistance set bonuses (3-slot bonus).

5. Might of the Tanker ATO set 2.21%/2.52% S/L resistance bonus (6-slot bonus)

When choosing the build to place these in, go with ones that already have some levels of resistance but not quite enough. For example, Elec Armor Brutes have low levels of negative energy resistance so one or two of those Scirocco's Dervish bonuses really help out.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2015, 12:06:33 AM by Auroxis »

blacksly

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #10 on: September 29, 2015, 12:08:29 AM »
If I had say 1000 HP base, what would be better, +4% Resistance to an attack (flaw here is that you rarely get resistance to ALL attacks, and unresistable damage would be where +HP would definitely shine) OR +4% to Base HP (adding 40 HPs basically).

Arcana gave out a detailed math analysis. I'll try to put it in description with less math...

The same value of +Resist as +HP (say, 4% to each) would allow you to survive more damage if you put it as Resist. In addition, it's easier to heal someone who has lower HPs but is resistant to damage, than to heal someone who takes full damage but has high HPs. So, in a base scenario, +Resist is better than +HPs. In addition, +Resist has a higher effect as you start stacking Resistance buffs (because what's really relevant is not Resistance, but "Admittance", how much damage is actually getting through the Resist, and that has the same increased effects as a mob's ToHit chance being dropped to the floor).

So you want % points of Resistance more than HPs, if you can. The catch is that the Devs knew that, and you see that powers that give +MaxHPs have much higher values than powers that give +Resist(All). So 4% Resist > 4% MaxHP, but that doesn't mean that chasing Resist is better than chasing +MaxHP... it's easier to get higher values of +MaxHP.

brothermutant

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #11 on: September 29, 2015, 12:27:02 AM »
Since regen is percentage based then max HP increases health gained per tick.

As for the exact tick percentages and their frequency, according to the wiki it's 5% max HP every 12 seconds with regen bonuses increasing the rate of ticks. So if you have a 400% regen rate (+300%) you get 5% of your max HP back every 3 seconds. If your HP is at 3000 as well then that's 150 HP (3000*0.05) regenerated every 3 seconds (12/4).

Back to resists, the significant resistance bonuses from IO's are so few and far-between that it'd be easier to just list the ones you might want to actively try to get:

1. PVP +3% Res IO (unique).

2. Impervium Armor +3% psionic Res IO (not unique, but rule of 5. Wouldn't use this on a main build, but perhaps on an alternate build for psi-heavy content).

3. Aegis +3% psionic and status resistance IO (unique).

4. Scirocco's Dervish +3.13% negative energy resistance set bonuses (3-slot bonus).

5. Might of the Tanker ATO set 2.21%/2.52% S/L resistance bonus (6-slot bonus)

When choosing the build to place these in, go with ones that already have some levels of resistance but not quite enough. For example, Elec Armor Brutes have low levels of negative energy resistance so one or two of those Scirocco's Dervish bonuses really help out.
Thanx Aur. Problem I have is, if I have like 50% S/L Res, and say 30% Energy Res, should I really put effort into getting any Res for Neg/Fire/Cold/etc on a squishy? Reason I ask is I would imagine, with lowish defenses (circa 30+%), I would think universal +HP would be the way to go as some, if not many, attacks are gonna hit me. I certainly do make alt builds just for Psi protection for instance, but that is assuming I remember I can switch to the alt build while getting ready to fight Psi heavy attackers.

Problem with altitis is it makes it harder and harder to remember what you have on any given toon.

brothermutant

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #12 on: September 29, 2015, 12:30:44 AM »
So you want % points of Resistance more than HPs, if you can. The catch is that the Devs knew that, and you see that powers that give +MaxHPs have much higher values than powers that give +Resist(All). So 4% Resist > 4% MaxHP, but that doesn't mean that chasing Resist is better than chasing +MaxHP... it's easier to get higher values of +MaxHP.
Thanks sly, I kinda figured it was +Res ideally but that +HP was easier to acquire. Hmm, may need to see how close I can get my squishies to (near) max HP on an alt build and run some numbers on how much that gimped my toon by forcing the +HP thing. Will do the same for +Resists I think to have something to compare to along with a "normal" build where I primarily focus on what my toon needs (Damage/+Recharge/High Defenses/etc.).

Vee

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #13 on: September 29, 2015, 12:39:11 AM »
On a squishy there's no way you're going to get enough resist from set bonuses to matter significantly. Try to raise your 'lowish defense' instead.

Auroxis

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #14 on: September 29, 2015, 07:49:07 AM »
Thanx Aur. Problem I have is, if I have like 50% S/L Res, and say 30% Energy Res, should I really put effort into getting any Res for Neg/Fire/Cold/etc on a squishy?

On ANY toon, squishy or otherwise, it'd be safe to ignore all resistance bonuses from IO's except for the 5 I listed above.

Not just because HP bonuses are better, but because defense, recharge, recovery, damage, regen and HP bonuses are better.

Arcana

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #15 on: September 29, 2015, 03:40:39 PM »
Thanx Aur. Problem I have is, if I have like 50% S/L Res, and say 30% Energy Res, should I really put effort into getting any Res for Neg/Fire/Cold/etc on a squishy?

Short answer: probably not.

Slightly longer answer: it depends on how much effort.  Which is to say, if I was building a squishy for survivability I would focus on defense first and regen second not because defense and regen are better than resistance and +HP, but rather because those two are much easier to acquire in large numbers in the invention system.  I think +HP is also good, but I usually assume I'm going to get some of that through accolades on any character I'm trying to min/max for mitigation.  +HP and +regen synergize, which is to say it tends to be better to get some of each rather than all of one (+HP boosts regeneration for one).  If I'm getting a lot of +HP in accolades I can get away with focusing on +regen in the build more.  Squishies also tend to have low max health caps and its possible to run into those and have capped benefits if you have other +HP buffs in play, such as hoarfrost.

Defense tends to be the best thing to go for in the general case for two simple reasons.  First, defense has accelerating benefit which means (up to the tohit floor) the more you have the more benefit you get from getting even more.  And second, there's lots of opportunities to get it.  And since it is very difficult for squishies to fully reach the tohit floor for all attacks, you usually don't run out of ways to improve your defense.

I wouldn't sneeze at other benefits, but I wouldn't over-thrash my build to get them.  I'd consider, in an I24 world, looking at some of the resistance bonuses in things like melee sets where I might not be sacrificing much, particularly in builds that were not loaded with purples and ATIOs.  But I'd consider them nice to have bonuses, not something to build for explicitly.

However, here's a really, really, really big caveat.  Don't overlook the fact that one way to improve survivability *a lot* in an indirect but very powerful way is to build for at least moderate if not high recharge.  Recharge has no direct mitigation benefit but recharge is the tide that lifts all boats.  It improves the strength of aid self.  It tends to increase DPS which indirectly reduces incoming damage.  It increases firing speed itself which tends to increase the amount of secondary effects like mez and debuff you are cranking out.  Half the damage mitigation in my main came from things like defense and regen, but the other half came from having really fast cycling Energy attacks that just spewed out knockback in ridiculous amounts.  That plus enough recovery to power those attacks meant most things not knock-resistant were not standing up long enough to generate enough damage to threaten my moderate damage mitigation.

Also, if the squishy in question is an I24 blaster, recharge would tend to improve any blaster whose I24 mitigation bonus was a click.  My main, at over 160% global recharge, was going to get *a lot* of mileage out of Energize.  Lots of squishies, like most defender/controller/corruptors with self heals, Kins, Rads, most Controllers and Dominators (particularly those going for perma-dom), and lots of others, would gain sizeable survivability benefits from having high global recharge.

brothermutant

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #16 on: September 29, 2015, 09:32:40 PM »
yeah I really wish I had Energize on my old Blapper. He really could have used it. And I agree that low HP caps for squishies make it easier to come close to cap if you get things like earths embrace or Hoarfrost (both epic sets that have these have a +Defense toggle too, which I would also grab). It is just one of those min/max things I always worry about: do I have enough Health? Did I get enough Def and/or Resist? How do I survive if I don't have Mez Resistances (one of the reasons I really like certain Defender Primaries/Troller secondaries is if they have some kind of Mez Protection). Otherwise, I get Combat Jumping + Super Jump + Acro as a minimum protection set (a "waste" of 3 power choices IMO).

Arcana

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #17 on: September 29, 2015, 10:07:43 PM »
How do I survive if I don't have Mez Resistances

Carry break frees.

No seriously, making builds that can survive without inspirations is an interesting exercise, but in practice ignoring your inspiration tray is like ignoring your secondary.  There's even an entire school of build-craft that says if you can't get to 45% defense as a squishy, then build for 32.5% so that a small luck (12.5% defense) will get you to 45% (minus some padding to account for debuffs).  In the days of Defiance 1.0 I used to pack oranges on my blapper - because even though oranges were weaker than purples (lucks), the oranges allowed my blaster to get to lower health and still survive which was in effect a free damage buff due to defiance scaling upward with low health.  People used to talk about the best tactics to complete the STF when the best tactic period was for your tank to pack a tray full of purples and everyone else just go to town.  Repeat as necessary, guaranteed to work for all teams (in a pinch, teams without tanks could have anyone be a tank with enough insps).

My regens pack purples, my invulns pack greens, my blasters pack rainbow sherbet.  With inspiration combining, you're rarely without the thing you need.  I tended to build for the majority case and let insps handle the corner cases, because if your build only needs them occasionally you'll likely never run out (as opposed to needing them all the time, in which case eventually you probably will).  You won't likely find another MMO that allows you to carry twenty unrestricted stackable thermonuclear strength temporary buffs. Builds should serve playstyle and everyone plays differently, but most of us at least occasionally use insps.  If the mitigation hole is deep enough to worry about but also uncommon enough to not want to waste too much time trying to negate with special builds, fill it with insps and continue building for the rest of the day, is my philosophy.

Vee

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #18 on: September 29, 2015, 10:19:18 PM »
There's that, plus clarion, plus in most cases ranged defense is your best mez protection.

brothermutant

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Re: More Important, +HP or + Resist?
« Reply #19 on: September 29, 2015, 11:31:52 PM »
I suppose the Insps is what I always try NOT to use, I should be popping those things like skittles. And like you said earlier, recharge helps a ton. And its the one thing that Insps can't do. I should remember that when building a toon. Thanks all for the help.