I'm pretty new to this game, but it seems to me (Unclean Beast: Ooze) that the extra 5hps is pretty important.

That's because the Unbreakable Boots are just ridiculous. Hauberk is fine to replace something like Banded, once you run out of room.

Do the minion stats on items only apply to Generals?

Thanks, I wasn't sure if the creeps counted as minions in the terminology or not.

Well I get both of them anyway, they are great together, even though I never need mana.  Basically it is whatever one I can afford first, but 250gp for an extra 5 hps is pretty good imo.

With ooze at least it's important to have enough hps so you are not LOSING health per second.  And with unbreakable boots and hauberk you actually gain hp per second even with ooze.  And it's a lot more than 300 hp.  Your math is right but a second when it comes to hps is a lot faster than an actual counting second.  With the Hauberk at least, if I am not being attacked, I'll refill 1k health in about 30 seconds of not being attacked.

Boots aren't better if you are running a no mana build with UB (well, ok, Foul Grasp, but he has a base mana of like 4 of those [including recharge time for regeneration] anyway, so one extra doesn't hurt); the Hauberk is better. It all depends on how much money I have when I first head back to the health crystal; if I have  1750, I buy Hauberk, if not, Boots, and I get the next item on the next run.

Also, saying 250 is half of the way to banded armor is useless; isn't banded armor like the #1 starting item for people? I mean, if you already have banded armor, saving 250 because it is halfway to the bonus of banded armor is... dumb, and if you don't have banded armor, it's dumb anyway.

alot of Demigods use damage sources that are mitigated by Armor. i do not consider it accurate to say that most DG's use skills as their primary damage source. 

Minion attacks of any kind are reduced by armor. Oak Spirits, Erebus Nightwalkers Queen Shamblers, Sedna Yetis (not that i've seen one of those recently), and all of the Idol summons. 

Rook's Towers and Shoulder Turrets are reduced by armor. Pretty significant against Tower Rook. 

Torchbearer's Pure Frost build uses a whole lot of auto-attacks for damage. Fire or mixed Frost/Fire are mostly spell damage, but pure frost only has Rain of Ice as a real heavy damage spell, the rest is from regular attacks.

Queen of Thorns and Erebus both rely heavily on auto-attack damage to supplement their nukes. Bite and Ground Spikes have armor reducing effects so you need to auto-attack (or minion attack) to rely get the full benefit of these skills. 

Sedna and Oak both deal equal if not greater damage with their autoattacks then they do with their spells. 7 second cooldown on Pounce and Penitence each. time for about 5 autoattacks (or 6 or 7 if you've got attack speed boosting stuff). even at only 200 damage per attack (which is a low number, its usually higher) you'll exceed the damage done by the skill with 5 attacks. 

your statement is either grossly oversimplified or just wrong. regular attacks generally account for MOST of the damage you'll receive. spells are just the primary form of BURST DAMAGE you'll recieve. thats a relevant point for sure and having a high health pool will help you survive bursts, but still, lets not go pretending like spells are the majority of damage. they aren't. 

Pounce is 900 at higher levels, when it starts to be effective to have armor (at low levels, HP is always better anyway). Her attacks probably deal... 200? So about 50% of her damage is going to be from pounce, maybe a little less, unelss she specifically focused on buffing her autoattacks.

Ooze, at high levels, deals a massive amount of DoT, very comparable to UB's base attack. HP matters a lot more than armor there, because half of the damage is being dealt from Ooze. (which by the way, isn't burst damage, it's still over time.)

Hammer smash deals absurd amounts of damage on a Rook. Tower rook doesn't do much to armor, yeah, but a good rook build stops towers at like level 7 when they start being less of a threat to enemies than a long stun + a big hammer smash. Granted, he also does a lot with his wrath of the gods ability, but it's still a great deal of unmitigated damage.

Erebus, with his weak autoattack and fast cooldown on bite, especially with the celerity flag (which you should always, always have), deals a good mix of bite and melee attack damage. With the bite nerf, it probably swung back to melee damage, but its still a lot.

The thing is, even if they are onily dealing 30% spell damage, which is rare for most demigods (even Regulus, when built with mines, does a lot of damage from mines), you have to factor in that spells are frequently the "opener" of an encounter, and so that figure may significantly increase (after all, it doesn't matter if you can get in 8 melee attacks before the cooldown on bite if the enemy can flee after the first two). And even if you only get that 30%, that is still 30% less health than the "effective" health everybody uses to measure whether or not to buy armor or HP.

And once again, you still manage to entirely skip demigod skills in your calculations, which is exactly why I was saying the calculations were useless. And they still are. Of course synergy gets you more of your "effective" health, which works great if you feel like suiciding yourself on towers (which, by the way, don't move, so you shouldn't ever get hit by one unless you mean to, making most of your paragraph about towers worthless) or not attacking grunts (who do so little base damage it takes a 5% change in armor just to take 1 point less per hit).

 That is still totally unrelated to my posts, and you are still ignoring that. All I'm saying is that your "effective health" calculations could be anywhere from spot on (QoT early game with only bramble shield, who can't be killed by any other level 1 demigod anyway), to 100% wrong (Torchbearer, any stage of the game), to somewhere inbetween (Spit UB, Ooze UB, dual spit/Ooze UB, and... basically all demigods but Tower Oak and AA Regulus). But you keep ignoring that to tell me more about your "effective" health calculations. They are about as "effective" as a drug that works 50% of the time. Sure, I could say it's 100% effective on the people it cures... but that's still ignoring a huge part of the data, which you and most people on the forums seem to love doing.

Also, the Demigods themselves are a bigger threat than towers at low levels... they are mobile, and skills can deal about the same damage. So if you would rather ignore the possibility of being attacked by a demigod and figure out which build is the best for attacking towers at level 1, be my guest. But all that armor doesn't mean a thing when I attack with an Ooze UB (which deals more than enough damage with just Ooze to kill... well, anybody, with melee being the icing on the cake.)

EDIT: To clarify and shorten this: Your calculations are nice. They work against very specific demigod builds, Creeps which deal almost no damage, minions (which are probably the only credible threat Armor helps against, and they can be countered by simply moving because none of them have a moving attack), and suiciding yourself on towers for a few more hits before you die. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying you are willfully ignoring the large factor that Skill Damage plays in how fast you die, and you respond to each of my posts by ignoring this argument and posting yet another nice piece of theory about how you can get more effective health with synergies that break down as soon as skills are used.

Not all skills are burst damage, and furthermore, even with high "effective health," if your opponent has high actual health, he can easily get off two bursts, or even three, or however many it takes to kill you (TB, in particular, can essentially chain all his relevant skills together constantly, and his mana lasts a lot longer than your health without health + items).

It's not relevant to ignore effective health. It's relevant to weight it, though. Even if you have enough health to survive burst damage, then what? It's still gone through all your armor calculations. If you have 4000 HP, but an effective armor health of 16000 (not even possible, but still) and get hit by a standard TB blast... you have 200 real health, or 800 effective health left to take from melee attacks. Compared to 6000 real health, 7000 effective health... and you have 2200 real health, with about 2600 effective health to survive melee attacks.

 It is clearly not threshold based; every point of skill damage actually affects your "effective health" as much as your effective health is multiplied times your displayed health; in other words, while armor makes each health point "bigger" for most attacks, skills don't care at all. You know this, but you ignore what that means. There isn't a threshold of "TB kills you with one combo" or "I have high armor and enough HP to survive," It's "TB kills you with one combo," to "TB leaves you with 1 HP, GL with your armor modifier" to "Ok, I have enough HP to get away after a TB burst combo."

Your effective health, by your calculations, is far less complicated than it really is, and what I'm talking about. Your effective health is just math assuming all damage comes from one source, with some lip service paid to skills by saying you have to have X amount of HP to live, where X is the damage the skill does. What you don't get, or at least seem to be willfully ignoring, is that there is no threshold, or clear-cut answer. A TB obviously requires a high HP build because armor is useless (and not, as you seem to think, useful after you can survive one burst of TB fury; it's completely useless unless you have a LOT more HP than his mana pool can drain you of.) Pure Tower Rook (which is dumb for levels ~12+ anyway) lets your effective hp calculations shine. But there is a big scale. If a UB goes pure Spit, his damage might be 60% skill and 40% AA, while if he goes ooze it might be 50/50 or 40(Ooze)/60(AA). And depending on which one of these, armor is more or less useful. You don't just say "Ok, I have 3001 HP so I can survive 2 spits, load up on the armor" because that armor is useless once the spit has brought your current HP down so low that any amount of armor fails.

To summarize once again: There is no threshold. Effective HP is totally useless when calculating against skills, and no, being able to survive "burst" damage (airquotes because stuff like Bite and Pounce, which get used a lot per fight, and especially Ooze and Spit, which are constantly damaging) with just enough HP is not a free pass to add more armor.

Transitive, you can't just make up the health of the enemy.  If you have 4k health but 5 ka billion armor it's not going to do squat.  Most demigods have a burst damage spell they can and will fire off every 6 or 7 seconds.  For those that stack health, you aren't even taking into ammount their massive regain compaired to yours.

Let's use your example, although an ooze UB would do some more damage to ya.  If that level 7 UB's spit is in fact rank 3, and you really do in some amazing way kill him in 10 seconds, taking the cooldown time alone, that's an extra spit added to your calculations, making it 2680-something damage.  This, however, is from spells alone.  If he does 100 damage per second from auto attacks due to your sheer armor value, it will be 3680 damage done.  Don't you think that in this situation, judging by your armor stacking, it is really close to death?

Of course, imo this is all pretty pointless.  Mil's a pretty smart player, Transitive is a pretty smart player, I'm a pretty.... uh.... well I think I know what I'm doing sometimes, but there's really not enough items in the game to judge going armor over health.  Many of the items I pick for pure health have armor as well, and there's pretty much only scalemale and a few other, but sucky, pure armor pieces.  If I had to choose between scalemale and hauberk though, I'd definately choose the hauberk.

While there may be a threshold, it is still a fairly huge amount (to the point where calculating effective HP without compensating for skill damage becomes near-useless). For example, if you go head to head with a Spit UB at early levels, it is easy to wind up getting spit on 3 times. If he's level 4, that's 2400 damage dealt. That's a whole lot of unmitigated damage for that level (even if it is over time). While the threshold varies widely depending on the Demigod, you have to remember that it's easier for almost all demigods to fire a skill and run than it is to fire a basic attack and run, and nobody smart actually (tries) to stay in a fight to the death they are losing, so I tend to err on the side of HP because it's a lot easier to survive fire-and-forget skills with a higher base HP pool.