Avatar of Gazly #1514
Gazly #1514
Suvivability Guide: Why Life Pool Hoarding is BAD!(1)Category: GeneralApril-18-2014 10:24 AM PDT (10 years ago) Go to Blizzard forum post
So I have been playing for a very long time on softcore and recently have been doing a bunch on hardcore, where survivability becomes paramount (of course). I ran across someone in my clan the other day, and have actually ran across many people of a similar mindset so I decided to write it all down here so it could actually help someone.

Anyway, he could not understand why I am able to do 1 level of difficulty higher than him when my toughness number was about 40% of what his was. So we joined a game together and started killing some things and he began to wonder why my life pool was barely moving as I took damage, while his would drain a little bit, but not significantly to put him in danger.

The thing to remember is that your character survivability is a function of all 3 things, Damage, Toughness, and Healing.

Also, we are assuming no other damage reduction for simplicity. we are only considering healing, life, armor, and all resist.

Lesson 1: Kill Quickly
The faster you kill, the less damage you take, and thus the less you have to heal. This is pretty self explanatory, and not specifically the aim of this thread.

Lesson 2: Life is strengthened by All Resist and Armor
What is better?
    1. 5,000,000 Toughness with a 500,000 life pool
    2. 5,000,000 Toughness with a 200,000 life pool
    3. Doesn't matter, 5,000,000 toughness is 5,000,000 toughness


The answer, every time, is option 2. If you keep your toughness constant while simultaneously lowering your life, it means each life point becomes stronger which makes your healing more potent.

Let's do some math and assume we heal for 20,000 life per second and we are fighting monsters while taking 500,000 damage per second... How long will your character last?

1. 5,000,000 Toughness with 500,000 life pool
The enemy does 500,000 damage per second which is 1/10 of your toughness, so that means each second, those monsters are hitting you for 50,000 life. we are healing at 20,000 life per second, so we are at a net loss of 30,000 life per second.
In this case, we will survive for 16.67 seconds.
not too bad huh?

2. 5,000,000 Toughness with 200,000 life pool
Again, same as above... the enemies damage us for 500,000 damage which is 1/10 of our toughness... That means these monsters are hitting us for 20,000 life per second. But we are also healing for 20,000 life per second. That means we are at a net change of 0 life per second.
In this case, we will NEVER die!

3. 8,000,000 Toughness with 800,000 life pool (which is about what my clan-mate had)
Again, 500,000 damage which is 1/16 of our toughness, so the monsters are hitting for 50,000 damage. we end up in the same scenario as number 1 where we eventually die, but it takes a lot longer. Losing 30,000 health per second with 800,000 health.
In this case, we will survive for 26.67 seconds.

Lesson 3: Healing is more potent when stacking armor and All Resist
we saw above how someone with 3 million more toughness will eventually die when stacked next to someone whose toughness is more seated in all resist and armor. The reason is each point of life has a toughness value associated with it when taking into account all of the other multipliers.

1. 5,000,000 Toughness with 500,000 life pool
Each life point here accounts for 10 toughness, so when we have 20,000 healing per second, we are really only regenerating 200,000 toughness per second.

2. 5,000,000 Toughness with 200,000 life pool
Each life point here accounts for 25 toughness, so when we have 20,000 healing per seconds, are are actually regenerating 500,000 toughness per second

3. 8,000,000 Toughness with 800,000 life pool (which is about what my clan-mate had)
Each life point accounts for 10 toughness so again, we are only regenerating 200,000 toughness per second.

Conclusion
Suvivability is a combination of killing speed and toughness and healing. for the defensive aspect, the more you stack Armor, All resist and damage reduction modifiers, the more potent your healing becomes so you can survive much longer even with a smaller toughness number. This leads to people witnessing a sense of "false toughness" when stacking life. In actuality, it isn't "false toughness," but just diluted healing
Avatar of Wyatt Cheng
Wyatt Cheng
Suvivability Guide: Why Life Pool Hoarding is BAD!(14)April-18-2014 12:00 PM PDT (10 years ago) Go to Blizzard forum post
Thanks for spreading awareness! Great write-up.

Damage, Toughness and Healing are all designed to be rough guides to try and help players make gear choices, but knowledge of the underlying mechanics will always allow players to get the most out of your gear. Savvy players understand that mechanics like "+% damage to skill X" or "Cooldown Reduction %" can provide significant increases to your combat effectiveness. Equipping your character is about much more than just making an abstract number on your character sheet as large as possible.

Healing is currently an estimation of approximately how much Life the game thinks you probably heal per second. Obviously it's just an estimation because mechanics such as Life Per Kill and Life Per Resource Spent don't translate directly into a Life per second value.

We've been talking about changing Healing into a "Toughness healed per second" value. This unfortunately makes it even more of an abstract concept, but it would help take into account that your damage mitigation enhances the value of your Life recovery stats. The ultimate goal of the three summary stats is to provide a "quick gut check" of an item's effect on your character, and making this change to Healing could probably help guide people better.
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