Super item guide!

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

You buy both because they're two of the best health items for the cost money mid game.  Which you buy first depends on how mana hungry you are.  If favor items are on and you have the blade of the serpent, it's pretty obviously better to buy the hauberk first.

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

I use it quite often as Oak if my spirits keep getting nuked and I don't want to park them out of battle, but as any other character I don't touch it.

Do the minion stats on items only apply to Generals?

As only Generals can actually use minions, Ixothial, yes.

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

Yeah everybody knows the boots are better. But once i have the boots, then i buy hauberk of life. Shouldn't that have been obvious conclusion #1?

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.

I think the hp/second is pretty ignorable. 5hp/second is only 300 hp over an entire minute. Running to the health crystal and back is maybe 30 seconds and will refill thousands of hp and mp. HoL, of course, is even faster. The first level idol priests will refill you to 100% hp in about that same minute, from almost nothing. Oddly, Vlemish Faceguard, for the same $$, gives you 15 mp/second, and usually players have a much smaller mp pool than hp.

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.

As UB, since you're not using Ooze outside of fighting, and fighting doesn't take more than 10-20 seconds before someone runs early game, getting more HP instead of HPS is a more valuable investment early on. So I get Nimoth Chest Armor first instead of Hauberk or Boots because it adds more modified health due to armor mitigation (improving Hauberk and Boots modified health also, but more importantly, boosting my modified health from ~4000 to ~5800 by using Blood of the Fallen and Bander Armor). Then after Nimoth I get Unbreakable Boots, because the mana nets me an extra use of Foul Grasp. Then if I got the extra cash I get Hauberk, but sometimes I just skip straight to Narmoth's Ring when I get a kill or two.

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.

Modified armor only matters if you are dealing with autoattacks. Nobody uses autoattacks to fight [primarily], except UB himself, Tower Rook, and Regulus, and Regulus is dead no matter what at early levels and you don't fight a tower Rook as an Ooze UB until later. Not only that, but your armor modifier still doesn't affect the greatest source of your damage, your Ooze itself. At level 4, it deals enough to make HP/S and pure HP more useful than armor, especially if you are dealing with a skill heavy Demigod like TB or a Spit UB.) I mean, if you are fighting a general Oak, or a tower Rook, I can see the use of armor... but most all characters use skills for most of their damage.

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. 

Hahaha.  I love how this lie has somehow managed to propegate throughout the game.  People seem to think all damage is burst damage just because it is more noticeable.  Yet if you actually look at the DPS of most abilities compared to auto attacking (especially someone with low armor) it is pretty laughable.  Most classes do 100 Dps at level 1, before favor items.

How many level 1, or even level 2 abilities do that much?  Re-use time of 7 seconds at the fastest, You have to do 700 damage with an activated ability to match a level 1 characters auto attack.  Regulus does most damage in hand to hand, so does Oak.  I think it is actually pretty rare for the opposite to be true.  TB maybe?  Does sedna do most of her damage with pounce?  I rather doubt it.

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.

i mentioned in my previous post that I thought you were over-simplifying. thats very much what i'm seeing in your latest post as well.

map towers, creep waves, minions, and auto-attacks are all reduced by armor. thats a tremendous number of damage sources that armor is a more efficient protection against than just health stacking. additionally, you get the highest benefit by using BOTH in the right proportion. i think we ought to be realistic when we talk about item purchase decisions. generally you'll want to take the most efficient items just because those items are good. you'll usually get more benefit from buying Nimoth Chest Guard than you will from getting Hauberk of Life. you'll get maximum benefit by getting BOTH, the item synergy is quite good between Armor and Health/Regen items. 

i mean, why would you say "hp is always better at low levels"? just weigh your choices. Scale Armor (+600 armor) is one of the best game starting items possible. Banded armor is a good pick for the regen since it will increase your lane staying power, but what if you're a general and have Monks for that anyway? Scale Armor is of great assistance in mitigating tower hits in the early game. i consider that extremely valuable, since towers are the single most dangerous thing to you in the first few levels.

and once again, the synergy effect is strongly in place. Scale Armor combined with Banded Mail is good enough protection for most DGs to last for a LONG LONG time and it can be purchased with just starting gold. just to drive the point home, here's some numbers for a Level 1 Oak:

starting health and armor: 1700 and 400 = 1972 armored health

 health with just Banded Armor = 2100 (2436 armored health) 

  - net gain of 464 armored health

 health with just Scale Armor = 1700 (2380 armored health)

 - net gain of 408 armored health

 health with BOTH = 2100 (2940 armored health) 

 - net gain of 968 armored health

notice 968 is a bigger number than 872 (which is the sum of net gains of each item individually). synergy is the best. synergy is efficiency. its what you want. its just bad play to emphasize just health or just armor and neglect the other. the maximum benefit is by getting both.

later on you start thinking about upgrades. maintaining a mix of both armor and health granting items will still be the best approach. 

effective health (of Level1 Oak) with Banded Armor and Hauberk of Life = 3132

effective health with Scale Armor and Hauberk = 3220

effective health with Banded and Nimoth Chest Guard = 3796

effective health with Scale and Nimoth Chest Guard = 3740

effective health with Hauberk and Chest Guard = 4088

evidence of two things. one is that Nimoth Chest Guard is just a very efficient item. it outperforms Hauberk of Life by alot. two is that Synergy is still the best. the most efficient upgrade path sure looks like you start the game with Scale and Banded, and then as soon as you can afford it sell the Scale and replace it with Nimoth. your next truly good health/regen item isn't available for a long time.

the type of reductionist "one thing is strictly the best" approach to decision making that i've seen in your posts in this thread will not lead to the correct choices. maintaining item synergy by buying the most efficient mix of individually efficient items will lead to the best results. 

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.

fine, we can discuss your point. you're correct, but there's not alot of insight to what you said.

i agree, it is true that for the purpose of surviving Burst Damage from Demigod Skills it is good to have high health. 

kinda obvious. and not what i was refuting. i was refuting the notion that its ok to ignore the highly relevant measure "effective health" by concentrating narrowly on surviving a burst damage attack. its just threshold based. either you've got enough health to survive a burst or you don't. if you don't you need to get more, period. once you're above the threshold you start thinking about your effective health, which is a much bigger and more complicated topic. 

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.

but you just pretty much demonstrated the point i was making about a health threshold. 

here's another way of thinking about it. seperate all the damage you expect to receive in an encounter into skill damage and everything else. the threshold is the damage received from skills. once thats subtracted out you need to start thinking effective health. 

so just a quicky example:

my opponent is level 7 Unclean Beast and he's using Venom Spit 3 and Foul Grasp 1. checking his current health and based on previous encounters i know that i can kill him in about 10 seconds of sustained combat. i'll win an encounter if i can survive the damage he puts out in 10 seconds.

the threshold component of the encounter is the damage from one Venom Spit and one Foul Grasp. its 1633 damage. so i'm gonna subtract 1633 from my base health and then apply the effective health calculation to the rest. i need enough effective health after the threshold level to withstand his auto-attacks and maybe a couple of tower hits if i need to chase him near a tower. 

we can spend all night working on contrived examples where discreet time frames, ability uses, and stats are given in advance but thats just an exercise in tedium. whats more important is being able to do this kind of analysis intuitively during a game. having a good understanding of what the breakdown of damage received is like will greatly influence the types of judgments a player ought to make regarding his item purchases. 

thats what its about. item purchases. there isn't even that much to choose from, but you do get put in situations where you're wondering if you need to buy a slightly underpowered item like Hauberk of Life vs. a more efficient item like Scale Mail (which will help alot in sustained combat auto-attack vs. auto-attack) or if you can make due without either and save for something better like Narmoth's Ring or Plate of the Crusader or if you just say fuck it and buy consumables. 

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.

I think Transitive is making a good point.

During the course of a combat there is a certain amount of your total health that is being done by mitigatible attacks.  For instance, I play Rook and start with Blood of the Fallen. That's ~2700 hit points at level 1. There is only so much ability damage an opponent can dish out, all your HP beyond that point is effected by armor.  In the above example that's often 1500 or more damage.

You can also think of it another way, which is MIT=HP-DMG for both sides, where DMG is the ability damage dealt, HP is total HP, and MIT is the HP that will be mitigated against.  This may be obvious, but remember it is working from both sides.

So as your Hit Points increase, you get further past the DMG threshold, and it becomes increasingly valuable to have Armor. Transitive referred to this as 'synergy' but really these are two effects which multiply with each other.  The bigger one is, the strong increases in the other are. If you have high armor, it behooves you to get more HP, since armor multiplies with it, and vice versa.

Blindly assuming that more HP is always better is an almost sure fire way to look the fool in the end. This is why items that give both (Nimoth's Chestplate) are so incredibly good at what they do.  They both increase your ability to take damage from abilities, and give amazingly large boosts against characters with low DMG from abilities.

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.