+28 Health vs +4 Armor?

So I have two sets of daggers and was wondering which was better, mathematically:

+28 Health

or

+4 Armor

Same reqs and damage.

Advice? Opinions? Unintelligible rants?

personally i would take the health because most of the time its like +5 armor vs ele attacks and health bonus is always there no matter the situation

I don't have Factions, so I don't know what Assasins are like, but I would go with the health +28 as well. Neither the health +28 or the armor +4 are max, but the health would help better.

thing to do is use Gurus damage calc, put in you 70 armor stat and some avergae dmg you may receave. The put in 74 AL and see how much it reduces your dmg. If it reduces more than 28 then use the armor.

Hp. No arguement here.

Another thing you have to take into consideration with this though, is degen. Health helps against degen, but armor has no effect against it.. The same thing goes with skills that go through armor.

Personally, I would choose the health.

Look at it this way: Health mods pad your bar, giving your monks more time to heal more health, while defense reduces the damage you take, making your monks heal you less often (for lower amounts)
For an assassin I'd prefer Defense.

For every 100 damage you take the 4 armor will reduce damage taken by 6 which absolutely rapes 28 life in a long fight in a short one the health is better.

Get a +5 armor for cheap

Armor is better in every situation but spike and degen. Since they arent max I am assuming its not a pvp character...ruling out spike. Degen can be devistating...but chances are you are the average assassin who takes a lot of hits, which points to the armor because it will help you more in the long run.

Armor is better for nearly everything, unless you have vamp daggers.

I was actually going to post an almost identical question, so if you dont mind hellboy i'll ask it here instead of a new thread.

I have the same querey with regard to a 30hp or +5 armor bow grip for my ranger. The genereal consensus here seems that the extra hp will be better, but is being able to take 30hp more damage (which isnt really that much) a whole lot better than reducing by 5 every time? My thoughts being that health goes down in a fight but armor dosent.

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+5 armor does NOT decrease your damage by 5. This isn't Shielding Hands, people. Otherwise, earth eles with Kinetic Armor (Armor +84) would be unkillable. So I plugged some numbers in the Guru Calculator and came up with some data.

At 60 armor, base damage = real damage. 100 points of damage will hit for 100 HP.

At 65 armor, the following base damages yield their respective real damages.
36 --> 33.01, 72 --> 66.02, 144 --> 132.05
From these, we can assume that the armor-to-damage is a linear function. That is, +5 armor will help the same against forty hits that do 100 damage each, as they will against one hit for 400 damage.

So, to be simple, let's just assume you will take 420 damage all at once.
420 damage against 65 armor --> 385.14 damage. The +5 armor just decreased the damage by 34.86.

Against normal damage, Armor will help you more than 30 HP

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Now it's armor penetration time! Assuming 25% armor penetration, and that same 420 damage figure...

With 60 armor, 25% penetration of 420 points of damage: 544.67 damage
With 65 armor, 25% penetration of 420 points of damage: 510.40 damage
The difference is 34.27. Still, the armor protection is better than 30 HP

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Final conclusion: against normal damage, and even low levels of penetration (Sundering or Lightning Orb, anyone?), Armor > HP. However, Armor offers no protection against straight degen or armor-ignoring spells like Obsidian Flame or Blood Magic.

Personally,I adore the armor, only because I love seeing two warriors hack at my monk and get nowhere. XD

Thanks Redly, those sums are exactly what i hadnt tackled yet to come up with the answer my self. Confirms my thoughts though

Armor. no argument here.

Assasins have 60 armor, AND are in frontline "tanking" all the time. The least thing you want is it to take a lot of damage all the time!

He didn't say the armorupgrade was vs elemental attacks, you also have +5 vs ALL attacks.

Anything but Monks should use +5 Armor over +30 Health. Monks have to able to stand a full Knockdown spike, while all others can get healed by Monks during Knockdown spikes.

I'm gonna go against the grain here. If you're a warrior and doing random arena, then you should take the +30 hp, because you'll be the continuous target of degen. You probably wont take a single physical hit, you probably wont have a monk around, but you WILL be degened - and armor helps exactly zilch against degen.

As for assassins, I've not played one, so I don't know if they've got more problem with physical damage (if so, take armor) or degen (take hp).

Actually, assassins have 70 base armor, so they're a little more resilient than casters. Any assassin who tries to do anything resembling tanking, however, is going to die no matter what mods are on his daggers.

Still, I'd take +5 armor over +30 health. From my experience playing an assassin through the Factions campaign, most of the damage I take is affected by armor. (Elementalists, rangers, and ritualists make up a large part of it.) And if I am being hit by enough armor ignoring damage to kill me, it's usually well in excess of 30 HP more than my max health. There've only been a few times where the added health would've saved me, whereas the extra armor reduces a lot of the damage I take from incidental hits.

I agree in that W's should take fortitude over armor.

Something else that needs to be mentioned (again :P) is that the more HPs you have, the more it takes to heal you--it's more efficient to take less damage and heal for less bulk (like the Prot Spirit 55 concept).

Both. Your max health only matters when you're low on health, so weapon switch when your health gets low, and get both benefits.