Health vs DPS

[Khallid 110]

I know that "dps is everything" is the current mindset for all damage dealer classes, but I'd like some reasonable opinions for a small issue I have.

 

I have tons of high item level gear that "can't be used" because it breaks my tier set, but my optimal gear is still using Tier 19, because my Tier 19 is well optimized and highly titanforged, whereas my Tier 20 is so low level it's weaker than both Tier 19 and Tier 21 so I can't wear the build the top hunters use, and my guild is not going to keep running ToS, so that is not negotiable.

These high item level pieces of gear are all from Mythic+ weekly cache, so switching out my low level tier for these pieces gives me 11 item levels, which results in about 500k more health, at a loss of around 50k dps, according to sims (after reoptimizing legendaries and talents and all that). I feel like those 500k are not insignificant at keeping me alive in progress fights, but it's hard to tell in-game because a 50k dps difference in sims is lower than the RNG dps I see from one pull to the next. I got a few better parses with the weaker build simply due to RNG.

 

So, I'd like to hear some opinions, is it crazy to drop dps by about 3% for an increase in health of about 9% in the context of progress raiding?

[Shishikyu 11]

Hey first of all I am not a hunter, but I raid Mythic so I can maybe give you my opinion and thoughts on this one.

So my main question is, can your healers keep you up in raids? And what difficulty do you raid? Normal? Heroic? Mythic? 

My point is, if you have no trouble staying alive, do mechanics correctly and healers have no trouble keeping you up, I'd stick with the bigger dps build. If you do have trouble staying alive however, due to unavoidable damage and your healers get furious because they can't keep you up, then go for the higher ilvl/more stamina build. That's pretty much what it comes down to if you think about it in my opinion.

[Luthixx 138]

I'd honestly say it depends entirely on how much you suck at living haha!

It's not as effective of a health buffer as prydaz, but if you're going with the two in conjunction it's not an awful idea. A dead dps is worse than a bad dps. I think at the end of the day, for BM, sims aren't the most accurate guide to your dps because it's a lot more prone to RNG. 

Even if your healers have no trouble keeping you alive, if you're constantly having to be the target of heals and that's to the detriment of the raid then maybe you'd want to look at more survivability. But essentially the above comment is pretty much true.

[Khallid 110]

I mean for mythic progress. I don't need health for farm.

It's hard to tell if healers struggle or not, because maybe it's normal to struggle a bit during progress, which is why I want to know other people's opinions on how they value health. It's not that I die all the time for being dumb, but mythic bosses throw non-avoidable abilities that hurt a lot. It's like every ability deals half my health or something. My health is slightly "undergeared" for wearing lower level Tier 19, and an undergeared character dies more easily. So health is useful but I don't know how to value it. The situation here is that the health gain is much larger proportionally than the dps gain, which makes me think it's worth considering.

[Mascaron 40]

This is something I've thought about quite a bit these last few week in Antorus and I learned that Prydaz and Roots of Shaladrassil are both effective self-healing tools. I decided that I would wear both Prydaz and Roots if my BiS for damage output didn't sim at least 100k more than wearing both of them. Even then, if we were struggling at all I would switch to Prydaz and Roots. Self-healing for 71 million damage against a total of 103 million matters a lot. (Link to parse) In the parse I linked to that's 124k hps. 

Edit: I just finished simming out the new gear I got this week. The difference between BiS (Call & Soul) and best self-healing (Prydaz & Roots) is 126k. That's a big difference, but Prydaz and Roots have healed me for as much as 161k hps.

Edited January 7, 2018 by Mascaron

[Luthixx 138]

6 hours ago, Khallid said:

My health is slightly "undergeared" for wearing lower level Tier 19

What ilvl is your T19 for you to still be using it? 

Honestly, 50k dps for BM in terms of sim I feel is nothing, especially as it's so prone to RNG, if you feel it'd make a difference to your survivability I would go with it.