All points into health??

I've been noticing that in most of the builds, guides, discussions out there that people are saying put all points into Health and "don't waste them on Magicka or Stamina". 

The tool-tips make it sound like putting points at level up into stats have further effect such as increasing damage and regeneration. In the various discussions however people say that it's the total pool of points that affect damage, etc. so put all points in health and then use enchantments to increase magicka and stamina pools for more regen and damage. Is that true?

I really hope that's not true. What's the point of having the 3 stats and giving us points to spend in them if everyone is just going to be putting them all into health? I find it terribly hard to believe they would design a system where distributing a limited supply of resource into one of 3 options has a much greater advantage than the other 2 options.

Want to be more tanky? Put more points in health. Want to be more magicky damagey? Put more points into health. Want to be more meleey damagey? Put more points into health. That sounds absolutely absurd and a complete waste of a game mechanic. Please tell me I'm wrong and that's been changed!

Investing in Health used to provide 20 points per level, while Magicka and Stamina only gave 10. Also, health, magicka and stamina enchants all gave the same amount, so it made sense to invest all points into health.

This was recently changed. Now investing in Health only gives 15 points per level, and health enchants provide 50% more points than magicka and stamina enchants. So there is now no mathematical advantage to putting all of your points into health.

I've been noticing this pattern too, Kalizaar. It sounds insane but, in a game that places heavy emphasis on pvp, maybe it makes sense? I have no idea.

Whew, thanks Orsan that makes me feel much better lol. So is it still true though that it's the total pool that determines skill damage, weapon damage, crits, and regeneration rates? Or are the tool-tips correct in saying that the stat that we put points into determines damage, etc?

As far as i know, its the total pool.

 You want too (  in my humble opinion ) Place your points where you need them as you level up.... WHEN you get to top levels when you have the gear and enhancments etc to custom your toon far better then you  respect points.  put them into health. an then you adjust your toon to the softcap of stam /magicka with all your gear etc.  Seems to me this is the smart route.

Yeah see that picture is saying, "I don't care how many centuries you've been focusing your mind and learning the secrets of the universe. Little Jimmy here who can barely count to 10 is a better wizard than you by orders of magnitude because I put this magic robe on him." Doh!

But Kalizaar that's really nothing new to Elder Scrolls imo; heck Skyrim really took them to the extreme so I really expected it here as well, am I right?

Also it looks like he is buffed up as well.

But I would have liked to see that one couldn't hit the soft cap without any points in a stat...

Yeah, I think there are some mistaken impressions caused by the few builds we have seen at high levels. The folks speaking out have buffed their armor and added mundus stones to give them all the magic they can possibly want. In a Magicka-heavy build the logical thing to do next is to focus on Health.

This says NOTHING about folks who put enchantments (and/or mundus stone) towards something else, like melee crit.

After the game has been released for a month or two, there will be a lot of variations that people will have tried out, and we will have a lot more information on how other builds work in practice.

I use to run a bit of pvp and chat on The Great House Hlaalu ts. I cant say for pve, but for pvp this was a popular build. Max out health and use buffs and an enormous amount of potions to keep magicka and stam regen going. Also you'll probably notice the large amount of spell resist, id guess that guy is building for AvA.

I wasnt able to test this build as it was around the same time the repecs were made expensive. But in any case, im sure there will be a paper to counter this rock build

Yeah after talking to many people such as Mystborn and others on various boards, basically maxing out your HP is still the most efficient use of your attribute points. There have been many suggestions to make the attribute choices of stamina and magicka more attractive than HP, but ZOS has not gone any deeper with them.

15 points per attribute point spent in health and 10 in stam or magicka. Enchants, food, and mundus stone effects can balance your stamina / magicka for your builds and you still maintain a large health pool.

Someone wrote a very sound theorycraft thread on this very topic a while back, but I can't remember which website I found it on. Had all the math to back up the max health attribute vs max stamina/magicka atribute choices.

I guess this thread just doesn't have all of the info for someone to come into this topic from scratch. The picture means nothing to me without something to compare it to. I know nothing of caps.

My strategy has been to have enough magika to use my magic and stamina to use my skills. I try to avoid taking damage and use magic to restore health when it happens. If I run out of magika, then it doesn't matter what the other stats are. Also, I try to keep everything functional without constant monitoring/upkeep. If it needs potions/food to keep it running adequately, then I won't go that route. I put ZERO points into health during the betas. The magika/stam balance was about 75%/25%. This thread doesn't say anything that would alter my approach, but it refers to material elsewhere that might.  It also suggests yet another broken mechanic (imho).

Links?

update... From doing my own research, I now understand the significance of the stat colors in the picture and therefore the issue with putting points into something that will cap regardless. I wish I could see my beta character to see how badly this impacted it. To be honest, this just makes me rethink which attributes are useful on the equipment I acquired. I was way too focused on magicka.

I hope the devs find a way to balance this if it is still the case, but I agree with Slevin somewhat on this. If I put all my point in health and have to continually run some wacked out potions and such to keep my going, I think I would stick with a build that doesn't require that.

Maybe I am just not hardcore enough for that kind of Min/Maxing lol.

Heck why not just make it 10 points for health? That way there is no key choice (unless the buffs for all three are that much different). 

regardless of how it plays out at the beginning, this max HP topic has been out there for a while and even though nothing has been done about it yet they surely will if all ppl do is max out there HP

I was shocked with the "all-in-health" strategy from the community as well, like you I didn't see the point in three stats if that was the case. Haven't read/seen any post 15-point nerf comments, but from what I experienced in beta (max-level 14) I found armor enchanted with stam and magica...but none with health, so at least for those first 15 points, I'm still putting them into Health.

Concerning the dev's intentions and if this is really a broken aspect of character design; even when health was at the 20-point mark though, I didn't plan on going all in. I know there's soft-caps and all, but was still going to have a VERY rounded character that used both stam and magika requiring abilities so planned on enchanting for 1 and putting some points into the other to have large pools of both.

In the end, for people that solely want to PVP, all health might be the best strat regardless as it's always ok to run away and fight another day ;)

Well from what I understand -and I am no theory crafter - before Vet ranks when you go into AvA - it all boosts to the same regardless of how many points you put into it.  So I'm not sure why this comes up for AvA?  You can also get food that will buff - one, two, or all three stats.  I guess what I am thinking is that it all really won't matter too much since you can buff up one way or the other and then hit soft caps on a couple of things. 

I've tried putting all points into health and then buffing up the other stats.  I killed slower and got hit more - thus losing health faster.  With buffing up stamina and not health - I was able to dodge roll and block more - taking less damage and then with points into  magika - I killed quicker and so I also took less damage...

I'm just going to do what fits my play style and call it good - I'm just not sure there is a "right" way - but if there is, I'm sure I will be doing the opposite :)

One thread I saw had a different spin on the max value versus recovery rate. Their recovery rate was soft-capped, but then they put points into the stat, boosting the max value and removing the soft-cap on the recovery as a result.

We may not yet completely understand how this all works. Plus, we may find that some things were tweaked to help level everyone out for beta testing, but work slightly different at release. Keep an eye out for more information during the first week of release and let us all know if there are any big revelations.

Personally I'm going to pretend that the 3 attributes directly affect damage, recovery, etc as well as increase resource pools and that the maximum size of a resource pool has no effect other than providing more resources to spend by resource consuming actions and go with that. I can't remember what exactly the tool tips say when you look at the 3 attributes, but it seemed like it suggested adding points to Magicka for instance would increase damage with spells and recovery speed along with increasing the max Magicka pool size.

So I'm just going to pretend that if I jack up my Magicka attribute that I'll be doing more damage with spells than a similarly equipped (and similar pool sizes) person that spent all their attribute points in Health.

And since the Stamina attribute tool tip suggested weapon attacks (or skills or whatever it said) would do more damage I would increase that stat for a melee DPS character while pretending the Stamina pool size is different than the Stamina attribute.

That goes with pretty much every other RPG-ish game out there. Attributes have passive effects (+damage, +dodge, etc) and then resource pools are only pools that are spent by doing some action. 

That's my story and I'm sticking to it dagnabit!!

I also would like them to tweak the opportunity cost of one point of stam/mag as well.  I ran two non-linear optimization models (pvp, imperial race) and both resulted in at least 83% of points dedicated to health.  There is a benefit to placing points in stam/mag, but it is marginal at best.  

i think the beauty of this game is that they struck a blow to the one way rules all idea, with the level of intelligence many gamers have being able to optimize and run percentages spreadsheets etc, being able to find the perfect race perfect class perfect everything is easily possible in most games.  this unfortunately leads to simply making your character how a build guide tells you to get the most out of your character. in eso however there are so many different factors (gear, different skill tree possibilities, guild skills world skills so on) that there may be an advantage to putting all points into health, but you can likely easily make ur character a different way to where stamina and magicka are a bigger advantage because of the unique combination of gear and skills and weapon etc.  

dont worry though, if you find you put too much into stam or magicka or whatever, you can respec and adjust based on how your fights are going.

I think it matters little what worked in Beta and PTS testing since these were not release versions.  Time will certainly tell us what actually works in the release.  I am of the opinion that putting all your cookies in one bag is not such a great thing.  I prefer to do more damage and focus my enemy down rather than stand there for 5 minutes slowly dying since I can not damage my foe effectively.  Certainly in story line quests you need all the damage you can get since they mobs during testing were so overpowered.  Dev responses of "carry more soul gems and potions" didn't really leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling.  Seemed to work better for me with higher stamina. We will see Sunday morning.

Caytlynne of Skye

@morigana: you are SO my hero(ine)!  Although, with the amount of common sense I keep seeing you display on the forums... what are you doing playing computer games? Lol

@Scarydrew: You pretty much nailed my argument as well.  I certainly won't be putting all points into health, as I level up at least, because trying to keep the 'perfect' balance of stamina and magicka with my gear (given how often I anticipate it changing) would just be a logistical nightmare.  Although I could probably keep 2 or 3 of the guild's enchanters in full-time business :)

Min/Maxing is easily done in many games.  I somehow doubt that ESO is going to make it quite so easy, which is great for those of us who (with apologies to Burger King for mangling their slogan) just want to "Play It Our Way".  For me, one of the most endearing features of the overall game system that ZOS has come up with is the fact that, with the sheer number of possibilities in skills, gear and everything else, uniqueness will be far more prevalent than cookie-cutter builds.

While I know this idea of putting all of your attribute points into health used to be the only efficient way of doing things, I still am going to abide to it partly.  Mainly because I want my health to be a permanent number and then fluctuate mana and stam.  Primarily because I can attest that throwing most of your health into your armor enchants or food can create a couple of issues.

 1) you now completely depend on enchanting your armor more or less at all times and have to make sure that none of your armor pieces break.

2)  I know that I can be forgetful in keeping up with food buffs.  

So for me personally, everything health point wise will get thrown into attributes.  That way if i have a couple broken pieces of armor or forget my food buff eh no big deal.  Now you could say that why not just repair your armor?  Well if it's a set of green armor 3 lvls below me and I'm almost going to level up, I would be wasting gold.  Also I have had a time where all of my armor was broken and I was probably 5% away from leveling up to 46.  I definitely had challenges with fighting mobs solo with a 0 armor rating but was able to pull through and get through that without repairing.  Can't say it would have been the same case if i didn't sink my 2/3 of my attribute points into health.

Here's how I understand the argument:

Naturally you want to maximize your health, stamina, and magicka. I take that as a given. If you assume that's the case, then the most *efficient* way to do this is to put all of your attribute points into health. Why? Because each point put into health gives you 15 extra health, whereas each point put into stamina or magicka only gives you 10 more of those resources. So from a standpoint of efficiency, it makes the most sense to put all of your attribute points into health, maximizing that stat (or hitting the soft cap), and using enchants and gear to maximize your other two resources.

Could you put, say, 29 points into Stamina and 20 points into Magicka and still maximize everything? I suspect the answer is "yes." However, what you'd be doing then is trying to juggle three different needs on your gear, where certain slots only help you with certain attributes. So while you *could* do this, it makes solving the problem of maximizing your health/stamina/magicka more difficult.

Realize that this is a discussion of what you do when you hit 50 - while you're leveling, you very well may put points into stamina or magicka, as putting points there will increase your damage as you're leveling - and since your gear is likely to change pretty rapidly as you find upgrades and craft items, you can't count on having the exact type of enchantments or gear modifications you need. So yeah, while you're leveling up, I would say put the points where you feel you need them.

I also agree with the comments above that this is very early in the game development, and it wouldn't shock me to find that next month someone comes out with the "best" mage build that has some other allocation of attribute points - complete with all the math to back it up.

So the bottom line to me is - when I get to 50 I'm going to think about reallocating my attribute points. Until then, I'm probably going to shore up my weaknesses and try to buff up the stats that need it as I'm leveling.

@charlatan 

There really isn't a most efficient way to use attribute points anymore.  Sure you get 15 health as opposed to 10 stamina or magicka, but it's also the same case for enchants.  Health enchants at the exact same lvl are 1.5x the strength of the magicka and stamina.  So that really nullifies the efficient argument. So now it's more of a convenience argument.  And plus I feel this game will be impossible to max all stats.  Diminished returns when you hit soft cap leave you with 50% value and then 25% value later on.  Armor, for instance, at vet10 you hit soft cap at 1870 (which is a 35% damage reduction) and the hard cap is 2600 (which is 50% damage reduction).  So hitting the bottom of a soft cap is a big difference than hitting the max.   As a caster I'm going to try to hit the hard cap on my Max Magicka and Magicka Regen while still having enough health to be fine solo.  I think if you soft cap on everything in one build you be a jack of all trades but a master of none.

I have some solid inputs on the topic I typed up, but decided to put them into a new post since I didn't want to hijack:

http://www.gaiscioch.com/tavearn/eso_guides/post_76201.html

Suffice it to say, I think for at least half the builds out there it makes more sense to go 49 points in health even with the change from +20 to +15.

@barren: if that's the case then I guess I don't understand why people do it - unless it's left over from when health was 20 points per attribute point and people just keep doing it because "that's what everyone else does."

@radgasken: I did see your discussion in the other thread, and thought it was interesting. Seems like you have some empirical evidence as opposed to the hearsay that everyone else (including me) is using.