The Great Healer Debate - Armor vs. Wounds

[Omegus]

Exactly the kind of math I was talking about. Thanks! But I'm still taking those shoulder skins...

Keep dreaming

[jtj5002]

My dok, 843 toughness and 3 k armor/-5% armor pen:



Armor is overrated.

Me against the exact same WL with 4.4k armor -11 % armor pen

Toughness is overrated.

[Omegus]

My dok, 843 toughness and 3 k armor/-5% armor pen:



Armor is overrated.

Me against the exact same WL with 4.4k armor -11 % armor pen

Toughness is overrated.

Posting arbitary screenshots without knowing what buffs/debuffs were on either player is pointless

edit 1a: and if Whirling Axe is getting mitigated that much then the WL isn't even using Hack and Slash
edit 1b: neither of you were armour debuffed. second picture includes detaunt and some other source of damage reduction (either incoming or outgoing)

[R3xz]

Perhaps both of these players should work together to find a tester on order and test it in a controlled environment instead of gloating to each other about which one is better

[jtj5002]

My dok, 843 toughness and 3 k armor/-5% armor pen:



Armor is overrated.

Me against the exact same WL with 4.4k armor -11 % armor pen

Toughness is overrated.

Posting arbitary screenshots without knowing what buffs/debuffs were on either player is pointless

edit 1a: and if Whirling Axe is getting mitigated that much then the WL isn't even using Hack and Slash
edit 1b: neither of you were armour debuffed. second picture includes detaunt and some other source of damage reduction (either incoming or outgoing)

Mind sending me a copy of your super nice spreadsheet in alliance discord?

Also I was under the impression that detaunt will not affect the % mitigation as it reduces damage before it is calculated.

[Omegus]

Mind sending me a copy of your super nice spreadsheet in alliance discord?

Soon, just got a few bits I want to add to it

Also I was under the impression that detaunt will not affect the % mitigation as it reduces damage before it is calculated.

Yes sorry, I was referring to the overall difference in total damage done (Cleave Limb) when I said that rather than the mitigation %. Just trying to show they were in vastly different circumstances .

[Starx]

Armor tallies are busted because they are not adjusted for armor type and give a flat amount of physical reduction regardless bypassing what you would think are intended armor class restrictions.

Like others said you want to hit a certain HP pool to be able to survive a morale bomb somewhere between 7-9k hp is usually what people state.

WP is worthless because of flat scaling on abilities that already have ludicrous base values.

[Haasid]

As a note, you can easily reach 0% chance to be crit through certain armor combination (and with Futile Strike renown) without having to slot initiative talisman. Some people even go into the negative as a buffer against certain abilities, which isn't a bad choice.

This is not entirely true. You will always need a minimum of initiative to become crit immune. The chance to be crit on your character sheet is kind of misleading. If old internet posts about RoR math are correct the basic chance to be crit is calculated as 35 divided by your initiative (35/Ini). This means that as your initiative approaches zero (due to debuffs or a low initial value) your chance to be crit rises enormously. Likewise the higher your initiative the less value you get from the stat.

Initiative Crit chance
50 70.00%
100 35.00%
150 23.33%
200 17.50%
250 14.00%
300 11.67%
350 10.00%
400 8.75%

So basically you need to find a target number that will keep your chance to be crit from skyrocketing even when initiative-debuffed. 300 seems like a decent target.

Edit: Sorry for the bad editing - I am no good with html or whatever this forum uses

[blechkautz]

Perspective: RR82 Zealot, mostly pug and organised WB play in ORvR and Cities. Don't take this as being good advice for 6v6 or for anything other than the Zealot career.

For ORVR wounds is a no-brainer. You will be hit by every kind of damage from every source and by stacking armour you make yourself weaker to BWs and Engis who during any form of siege (attacking and defending) will be your main source of damage received.

For cities things are very different. The biggest threat to the Zealot is the order melee train (which works very well for the few groups able to actually pull it off). The composition of this melee train varies but it always involves at least one White Lion for the super strong armour debuff. The BW are usually bombing and I'm not standing near them and the Engineers... lol. Slayers, IBs, ASW (scary), WHs, etc, all form part of the train. To work out whether I would be better off stacking wounds or armour taismans in city I did a spreadsheet to work out what kinds of armour mitigation each class is likely going to do against me and worked out my EHP vs physical damage with armour talismans and then with wounds taismans. Wounds talismans won every time except vs something that had about 350 WS and no extra way of ignoring armour (I consider this to be the "baseline"). Note all calculations assumed I was debuffed by a WL because I likely will be.

This is the results: https://i.imgur.com/tx0ki4a.png. If anyone spots any errors in calculations please let me know so I can amend it. I *think* everything is correct but there are always things in this game that can catch you out. In addition, I know very little about ASW so had to piece together the spec based from Fenryl's posts (Assault stance plus double WS tactic). I have no idea if they stack extra WS on top as well; it seems they could come close to the cap if they wanted to.

The other thing to factor into this is that while damage mitigation increases your EHP, it can also be used to increase your effective heals. Based on a LOT of experience with city sieges I've found that the wounds + healing from me and other sources is enough to keep me alive long enough to force the enemy to switch target (especially if I'm kiting them away from the rest of their WB) or just keep me alive full stop. Usually when I die it's because I got hit by so many people that no amount of healing will help and/or the WB is wiping anyway (or I was half asleep and f**ked up... the usual reason tbh). The wounds also help out with getting tagged by a BW aoe, WH bullets, the token Swordmastrer deciding to hit me, etc.

The difference between armour talis and wounds talis is so small that even if it was a slight advantage for the armour talis it's still not IMO worth paying 4x-5x the price per talisman for a set of +180s.

When you make a call about Ehp you should also consider incomming hps vs incomming dps, because that's gonna decide if you die or not. What your spreadsheet assumes is the fact, that you don't get healed while getting hit, which is equivalend to getting bursted down while being cc'd. For that wounds is great, but let's take some fictional numbers for an example to show why that's not all that matters:
Let's say you get from stacking wounds +2000 hp and if you would instead stack mitigation (doesn't matter which type) you get an extra dmg reduce of 20% of total dmg. Then wounds is better for surviving dmg as long as you took less then 10k dmg (before mitigation), because you reduced the dmg you took by 10k*0.2 = 2k (20k dmg = 4k reduce for example) so mitigation wins here.
Why is this important? You get hit by some enemys and you don't die before you can start heal yourself or your allies can heal you, than the fact that decides if you die or not is how much heal do you get compared to how much dmg you get. If the incomming dmg is higher, your hp will go down tilll either you die or you don't get hit anymore. If your inc hps is equal or higher than the inc dmg (over time ofc) than you wont die (unless they manage to increase the dps or lower the heal).
Wounds will increase the amount of hp you can loose before you die, but they wont reduce the incomming dmg/dps (and not the incomming heal), so it only increases the time they need to take you down (or your allies have to get them of you) but it wont save you if they stick on you and overcome the inc heal.
Armor (and also toughness/resist) decreases the incomming dmg you take so there is more dps needed to overcome the incomming heal (which the enemy might not be able to do and than you survive with slotting mitigation while you would have slowly died with slotting wounds)
In short: You need as much wounds as you need to not get bursted before you can start healing (like kd or moraldump) but after that point it's way worse than slotting mitigation.

[Panodil]

As a Zealot i do like armor alot because i feel like it help me alot in smallscale. I did mix armor and wounds talis before, but feelt like my wounds where fine so swapped to armor only.
atm im at 3.5k armor, 8.6k health, around 320 ini and -7-8% to be crit.
Feel like healing is fine as well with 33% healcrit and 750 willpower without Discipline.
3 Sov, 5 Vanq, 2 genesis, sent jewelry, both rr45 weapons(because better than the rr61)
But stats dont matter if you have bad position and dont use detaunt, that is bigges issue for most healers i see.

I would not waste money on armor talis if you dont do alot of sc where you gonna be meleetrained, if you play in wb in orvr you can go what ever you want and still be fine or dead depending on your position.