Damage vs Health in Hunting

Ashar

I'm asking this question as a new jester, but unless there's something I'm not aware of it can really apply to all classes.

When hunting, is it generally better to try to do more damage, or have more health? In my particular case I'm attempting to decide on the best racial specialisation, but again this applies generally.

My first thought was that it would be better for me to specialise into strength, because there are not many ways to increase one's damage output, whereas one gains health with each level. However, it then occurred to me that the increasing chance of critical strikes was, in effect, a damage output increase over levels as well.

This question can also be applied to asking whether strength or constitution artefacts are more valuable for hunting, and whether offensive or defensive traits are more worthwhile (somewhat off topic I really don't know which traits to pick up as a jester).

Santar

Health.

Nim

It sort of depends on what you want, though health is probably the more conservative option.

More health means you'll be able to stay and fight longer. Health determines your healing rate for a lot of things, including health/vitality sips, moss/potash, and I think regen from various sources including boar and hunting runes. As a jester, it might also affect your tarot card healing, but I dunno for sure on that. It also determines how much damage you can take before dying.

If your healing rate is high enough, you can stay and fight indefinitely (as long as you don't run out of curatives), so you'll eventually win, no matter how hard or soft you hit. This means you can fight tougher things, and presumably get more EXP for each thing killed.

If your healing rate isn't high enough to survive indefinitely, you might have to heal up between each thing you kill, or leave the room/shield. This kind of hunting is risky since your risk of dying rises a bit, so if you want to do hardcore leveling, you may wish to avoid it - the element of danger certainly makes it a bit more fun, though. I do wish the reward matched the risk, but it often does not - conservative bashing usually gets better results.

If your damage rate is higher, then that means you'll kill things faster. This can be important against edge cases where they outdamage your healing rate, but may not do enough damage to kill you in the time it takes for you to kill them, and it'll certainly make bashing go a bit faster, but if your choice is damage vs health, remember that you'll be sacrificing sustainability - you'd essentially be picking risky over conservative, and, as stated above, it's not an often rewarded choice.

Now for @Penwize to either press the agree button or trash everything I just said~

Synbios

Would recommend extra health. There comes a point where some things are no longer one-shottable(barring a godly spree of consecutive world-shattering crits). At that point, you will appreciate the benefits of added survivability.

Sobriquet

Con. Go for health

Sena

If you plan on buying a few artefacts, I would go for strength instead. There are a lot of artefacts to increase survivability and several of them are cheap and effective, while there aren't so many choices for offense. Without artefacts, I'd probably go with con (though I don't have much experience with jesters specifically).

Araeus

I think human is a great race for hunting due to the increased crit chance you get. I was always told to focus on health because you will be able to stay alive longer, which, at least in theory, should give you a chance to cause more damage.

Alexandre

And as a human you have a chance of increased health sip gain.

Santar

To give a more technically correct answer:

You should continue to prioritize raising your health for bashing until you get to the point where you can tank the biggest thing you want to kill, which is typically going to be sidhe, vertani, or tsol'dasi. Usually the point where you'd change over to raising your bashing damage won't be achieved until you're at at least 5.5k-6k health, which is usually going to require artefacts.

Decan

even with the highest output damage, you will eventually have to run/shield/heal, So HP is where the most benefit for cost comes in when considering racial specs of str vs con

edit: also consider that when hit/dodging, the thing your bashing doesnt heal itself until it goes to sleep (which happens when it kills you) so its passive hp regain gives you the advantage when using that tactic. Only problem comes in when things follow you to continue the attack, but even then, you can dance around to give yourself the advantage. With HP spec eventually you will beable to not worry about the dodge and just sustain. Sustain > DPS unless your DPS is absurd (with arte's)