Say I am a zeal vs zeal
My rare shield can have a choice of 30 life or damage reduced by 6

Normally, I’d hear of course life would be better

But say that 30 life is bo’d up to 50. So it adds 50 life
But dr by 6 would need just 9 instances of physical damage to be better than 50 life, right?
9x6 = 54

So wouldn’t dr by x be a more sought out affix in physical defense? Since they normally take many more instances of damage to kill you?


Just curious if the logic behind the math is correct.
This is the shield in question. Would 30 life or dr by 6 be better?



Curious your thoughts

I don't think that's the way you should look at it. When you take 1000 damage, 6 dr isn't going to help you anything. I don't understand where you get the 9 instances from. You have to look at the entire picture, how much damage you take, and in what frequence you take damage. I.e. if you take one hit with 2000 damage, 50% dr will reduce a lot. But if you take 100 hits with 20 damage very quickly, integer dr helps a lot and may be easier to obtain.

In low level duels, it may be more relevant, because you take less damage.

This post was edited by Taurean on Mar 5 2023 07:46am

max life on a rare shield is 40 iirc, so with BO you should be around 60 to 70 life i guess. dr could go up to 7
since 7*9=63, you are correct assuming that at 9 hits, the dr is more valuable than life. the question now is: can you afford taking 9 hits from your opponent or will you die before? like said: if you take dmg in small portions but very often, thats great for dr. but if your opponent deals huge amount of dmg with every single hit, thant you might just not live long enough to benefit from dr

Take into consideration RNG.
Low end non-crits can hit for 500~ health after calculation with a ok build.
If that lands a few times, then interger damage reduce will be superior.
But if you land your crits and max rolls, then going either way wouldn't make a difference and you should look for another stat besides health.


It's close that it wouldn't normally make a difference.
People prefer health over damage reduce because they get to show off their character screen with a bigger number.
Consider it the same stat really and would worry about the other stats on the shield itself.