As I started to work with All Attack Numbers vs. the, by all loved, HP this topic would have been all about: “Why HP is useless” but as I created new Skill Descriptions for the Force Shielder – including Base Values and Scalings – I found something really strange!

After my first calculations for different skills I wanted to check those numbers by letting another Force Shielder with a certain Physical Attack value test it for me. After a few hits I thought about his damage being abnormal as he hit for around 50 damage less per hit, on the same target, than me. We went into a detailed comparison about our stats and we found out that the only difference between us was that he had only 100 points in All Attack instead of 120 like me. So we asked a third Force Shielder with only 40 points in All Attack to do some testing for us. This Force Shielder had more Physical Damage than me but he dealt around 200 damage, same target again, less than me.
As this made my curious I started to do some calculation on this and after a Restat Kit and a few hours of work I found the solution.
My testing on adding Magic Attack (because All Attack also increases our Magic Attack) did not show any change in damage!

Please note: This does not make sense, at least not to me, but it is proven, points in All Attack by the Stat Growth System increasing the Base Damage of every skill while still adding up to the scaling!

What does this mean?
While increasing your Physical Attack with items only gives you higher damage because of the Scaling of the skill, a point in All Attack in the Stat Growth System, is increasing your damage twice. On one hand it increases, as your items, the damage due to the Scaling of the Skill but in addition it does also increase the Base Damage of the Skill.

Conclusion:
A point in All Attack in your Stat Growth does increase your damage by a much higher number than the Physical Damage on your Equipment.

//Note
I am currently testing this for Magic Attack and Healing Power as well as for the other classes.
The first clues on Healing Power have already shown but they need to be confirmed!

As this already is enough to always choose All Attack over any other Stat in the Stat Growth I know that currently everybody is telling how strong he is by posting his HP.
Well this was the original Post I wanted to made and so I will fit it in here just to give full information regarding the All Attack topic.

Before we start lets us clarify different things:
eHP = effective HP
Your effective HP are multiplied with your DMG Mitigation. This value shows you how much raw damage you can tank before you are dead.

eHealing = effective Healing
The healing is multiplied by your DMG Mitigation like eHP.

Why do I need eHP and eHealing?
For this let us take a look at two Force Shielders:
A has 5000 HP and 75% DMG Mitigation
B has 8000 HP and 50% DMG Mitigation

eHP of A = 20000
eHP of B = 16000

A can take 20000 DMG without healing before he dies while B can take 16000 damage without healing before his life ends.
Lets add Healing into this:

Priest C heals for 500 per heal.
eHealing on A = 875
eHealing on B = 750

After 10 Heals A has 1250 more effective Healing received than B and C saves 2 1/2 Heals in terms of Mana. In addition the HP are holding longer because A can soak another hit before C needs to heal him again. C can use this time to heal another party member or to deal DMG.

What do we need this for?
This is to show that Mitigation is stronger than HP in terms of tanking. We will use this later.

Do we need to add Evasion in here?
No, we do not need to add Evasion as the reduction is 100% and so it is the same for any build regardless of the class or your other stats.

What is HP for in general?
We have already cleared this: HP or better said eHP is the amount of damage you can take before you will die so basically the more HP you have the longer you life. In this case I totally agree – the more HP the better as you will life longer before dying. However the moment we add Healing and HP Regeneration into this you need to add those as well.

Adding Healing and HP Regeneration?
Yeah, the moment these are added you only need as much HP to survive the period before your HP Regeneration or the Heal of your Priest hits you.
Let me give you an easy example:

You have 5000 HP and every 2s your target is hitting your for 1000 DMG.
I think we all agree that you will die after 10s of doing nothing.
But you Priest heals you for 1100 HP every 2s as well. In this case you will never die as long as your Priest has mana.
If we say the Priest can only Heal you for 2500 HP every 5s we are still cool as in 5s you only got 2000 DMG.

What does this mean?
This means, you only need as much HP to survive a certain amount of damage before your Priest can heal you again / your HP Regeneration kicks in.

As long as your Healer heals you for more than the DMG of your target your HP only need to be as high as to survive the time before the next heal.
There are two situation in which HP become important:
Situation Number One:
You Priest has to Heal your party so you need to survive for a longer period of time before you gain your next heal.

Situation Number Two:
Your Priest heals for less than the damage you receive. In this case your HP are slowing drowning. The more HP you have the longer you survive this Situation.
This situation happens more often to high HP / low Mitigation players than high Mitigation / low HP players as the damage they are receiving is lower than of the high HP builds.

Adding Killtime
The higher your DPS the faster the target is down.
>less damage received
>less mana used on heals

By increasing your damage you receive overall less damage from your target as the time to kill your target decreases in addition your Healer do not need to spend additional mana for heals.

Light at the end of the Tunnel!
If we add everything up we got until we found out that we only need as much HP (eHP) to survive until we can heal the received damage. We also found out that increasing our DPS as well as our Mitigation is increasing not only our survivability but also giving the Priest a chance to add even more DPS in the fight. Of course we want to have some extra HP in terms something happens and we have to wait for our next heal (Situation Number One) but we can also increase our eHP by increasing our Mitigation instead of our HP (making Situation Number Two unlikely to happen). However we cannot put Mitigation in our Stat Growth (sadly/only in PvE (PvP Defense)). We could put points into HP increasing our eHP or we would add points in All Attack decreasing the damage received (Mitigation).

So we want to increase our eHP by Mitigation and not by adding HP as we gain more benefits from doing so (e.g. DPS (faster clear times as well), Stable Mind of your Healer ;)). As we still want some HP for unknown Situations and as we cannot have Defense on our Jewelry this is the perfect for adding more HP. (7x ~250 = 1750 HP) with our Base HP of 3950 we hitting ~6000 HP (9000 eHP at 50% Mitigation).

Once our Mitigation increases we can remove even more HP as our eHP will still raise/hold for adding another offensive Stat for further DPS increase/received DMG decrease.

This added to the higher damage resulting for All Attack in Stat Growth for PvE should bring down all discussion about All Attack vs. HP in the Stat Growth.

As I know if I do not add the following as well everybody will say:
“But what about PvP? That’s something completely different, isn’t it?”

My answer would be: mmh not really…
Still I will explain 😉

Basically PvP is the same as PvE yet normally the damage is much higher. While in a 1on1 situation HP are more useful as they increase the time before you die, and as HP is much easier to achieve than Mitigation (1 Stat vs. 2 Stats), HP will clearly help a lot in a duel. Still this game is a group based game – the smallest Battleground is for 6 players – and most non PUGs will have Healer. Adding the Healer add the same stuff as in PvE yet we have to deal with a higher potential Burst as we face 6 (5) targets instead of just one. We also have to deal with hard CC on the Healer and other things that can happen in PvP. Thus you want to have higher eHP in a PvP fight than a PvE fight.
Still, Mitigation and increased DPS to decrease the received damage becoming more valuable than eHP once you can survive the initial Burst of your enemies.
Killing an enemy reduces his damage to zero!

As Stat Growth damage is higher than Attack on your equipment you could e.g. switch your equipment removing Attack from your weapons/armor and adding HP for that (8×250 = 2000) resulting in ~8000 HP with our Jewelry while sacrificing less damage than putting our precious points in All Attack.

Adding CC, tactics etc. would result in further discussion thus I want to stop here in terms of PvP while adding one more thing:

People who really want to PvP and PvE on the same character will always need to have two different Sets to be 100% efficient both – PvP and PvE. A full PvP players will slack off with his gear in a PvE situation against a dedicated PvE players with his PvE gear and vice versa.

I hope I could help some people with this post!

Feel free to ask my further questions if anything is unclear to you or you want further information. (The more specific you ask the more specific answers I can give you!)

Final Note:
While I was clearly talking about a Force Shielder in the PvE part of this posts the eHP is for all classes, DPS and Healers as well, once you survive a situation until you are healed your HP are fine and you should add more DPS (Attack, Crit, Attack Speed) instead of HP.

If you PUG a lot you want to add more HP as you want to counter more failures that happens in PUGs!