Effective HP?

[Valisha.8650]

My guard has 18000 hp and 2000 toughness (minstrels gear). My necro has 32000 hp and 1000 toughness (shamans gear). Which one of them has more effective HP? This really feels confusing.

[LuRkEr.9462]

Depends on how much you block with aegis

[Valisha.8650]

1 minute ago, LuRkEr.9462 said:

Depends on how much you block with aegis

i thought it's obvious by the question that i  don't include stuff like that 😛

[AliamRationem.5172]

38 minutes ago, SovietVixen.7396 said:

i thought it's obvious by the question that i  don't include stuff like that 😛

I thought it would be obvious that effective health is a fairly useless metric in a game where you can dodge, block, etc.  But if you must know the answer, you can either look up toughness on the wiki or wait for that guy who writes a doctoral thesis on effective health every time the subject comes up.

Generally speaking, vitality is only useful to a point.  That point being the amount of health cushion you need to avoid 1-shot and achieve equilibrium (i.e. not die before your defensive cooldowns can cycle).  Toughness decreases the amount of health required to achieve this.  The exception is condition damage, which ignores toughness.

[Shinja.3451]

For conditions it is easy because the hardness and armor do not reduce its damage so the effective HP is the same, for power damage it is already different since what "really" reduces its damage is the armor value not the hardness value as such, so for a guardian only with minstrel equipment he would have 17975 life and 3443 armor and the shaman's necromancer would have 33032 life and 1967 armor, if we compare the armor of the guardian it is like a X1.75 of the of the necromancer, so if we take the necromancer as a reference he would have an effective HP of 33032 and the guardian as 31456. Now you have to remember several simple things like they will continue to heal the same so a damage reduction also massively affects the healing indirectly, the above mentioned armor does not reduce condition damage and shield also gives base defense that is not added. If something is misspelled, it's the fault of the google translator XD

[Guybrush.4762]

Long story short your strike damage taken is directly divided by your armor rating (which is a straightforward addition of the base defense of your armor, the defense bonus of your shield if you have one and your toughness value). If you have double the armor rating you have double the effective hp against strike damage.

 

For the sake of simplicity I will assume you are wielding a two handed weapon and using ascended gear ; their is a negligible stat difference if you are dual wielding :

1. A guardian in full ascended minstrel gear have an hp pool of 17975 and an armor rating of 3443.
2. A necromancer in full ascended shaman gear have an hp pool of 33032 and an armor rating of 1967.

If my math is correct (and using correct value for gear) your necro have a bit less than 5% more effective hp.

EDIT : hey ninja up here 😄

Edited February 13, 2022 by Guybrush.4762

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

There's an easy but weird way to do it, and a slightly hard but more sensical way to do it.  The easy way is to multiply health by armor (not toughness), and whichever is higher has the highest effective health.  This will give you some large number with a weird unit that's hard to understand.

The other way is to divide the first number by a base armor value.  Now, you can argue back and forth which one should be the "base armor value" since it is all relative there, but I use 1920, which is the armor for exotic light armor.  I choose this because Anet said themselves that the game is balanced around exotic gear.  So the formula looks like this:

 

Effective Health = Health X Armor / 1920 armor

 

It works like this, because armor divides the strike damage taken.  So, having double the armor will cut the damage in half.  This is effectively the same as having double the health... for strike damage.  

[LucianDK.8615]

Toughness is also not the end all, be all. You gain more aggro from having higher toughness, and as already noted it helps zilch against condi damage. But its the agro thing you need to be aware of in group content if you are not a designated tank.

And some specs may derive extra stats from high vitality. Like Harbinger necros can trait Twisted Medicine which gives you extra concentration from 13% of your vitality.  As well higher vitality means a higher lifeforce pool.

[Teratus.2859]

I'm not doing the math, I hate math xD

But it's important to point out that Vitality on Necromancer also increases their life force cap so they can stay in shroud longer which basically functions as a secondary health pool.

So I am going to lean heavily onto the Necromancer having probably a lot more "effective hp" as you describe it just because of the inclusion of shroud.

Unless of course your necromancer is a Scourge in which case they loose that second shroud health bar, but in exchange gain a lot of access to Barrier which is arguably even better if you know how to play the spec.

Either way my money's on Necro having the better "effective hp" especially when you also factor in how much incoming sustained healing they can access as well.
But Guardian like others said has good access to Aegis and can straight up block all incoming damage with it so don't ignore that nice little survival tool either😄
Both classes imo are really good and fun to play.

Edited February 13, 2022 by Teratus.2859

[LucianDK.8615]

14 minutes ago, Teratus.2859 said:

I'm not doing the math, I hate math xD

But it's important to point out that Vitality on Necromancer also increases their life force cap so they can stay in shroud longer which basically functions as a secondary health pool.

So I am going to lean heavily onto the Necromancer having probably a lot more "effective hp" as you describe it just because of the inclusion of shroud.

Unless of course your necromancer is a Scourge in which case they loose that second shroud health bar, but in exchange gain a lot of access to Barrier which is arguably even better if you know how to play the spec.

Either way my money's on Necro having the better "effective hp" especially when you also factor in how much incoming sustained healing they can access as well.
But Guardian like others said has good access to Aegis and can straight up block all incoming damage with it so don't ignore that nice little survival tool either😄
Both classes imo are really good and fun to play.

 

Regarding shroud. Neither core or reapers can be healed by other professions while in shroud.  But scourges with barriers never have that issue, as barrier does not block incomming healing. So that is a plus in their book.

[Teratus.2859]

2 hours ago, LucianDK.8615 said:

 

Regarding shroud. Neither core or reapers can be healed by other professions while in shroud.  But scourges with barriers never have that issue, as barrier does not block incomming healing. So that is a plus in their book.

Aye true that 🙂

What about self healing? that's not blocked is it..
It's been a while since I played on my old Minion Necro, but im pretty sure minions still healed through shroud, could be wrong though.

[ZeftheWicked.3076]

Necro has more. With base tougness and armor the 1k toughness diff is around 1/3 less damage taken for the guard, which equals having around 50% more health when compared less "tough" necro. Still 18k * 1.5 = 27k, still under necro's 32k.

Also necro has shroud which scales off his vitality, so beefy necro = beefy shroud. So yeah, necro wins in terms of the hp pool
However there's still matter of healing it, as majority of heals are flat and don't rely on value of your max hp. So having less health but better damage mitigation make heals much more potent.

[KrHome.1920]

30k HP @ 2000 armor equals 20k HP @ 3000 armor if:

1. You are only hit by direct damage attacks (condi damage ignores toughness/armor)
2. You ignore unlimited damage mitigation skills (blocks, evades, blinds, mobility/outranging ...)
3. You don't heal yourself (because the more armor you have the more effective your incoming healing is as you take less damage that requires healing ; high vita + low healing builds can soak up a lot of damage for one time and then run out of gas as they can not refill their gigantic health pool that can't mitigate damage ; the effective bunker builds exchange some vita for toughness to boost their healing effectiveness, esp. since even most condi damage skills do also do a bit of direct damage that can be lowered by toughness/armor)
4. - ... stuff like condi cleanses, class specific access to damage mitigation via traits and whatnot ...

It's really pointless to speak about "effective health" in Guild Wars 2.