Hello Vault Hunter!
Welcome to a breakdown of Moze’s health and shields!
Health:
To start it’s worth differentiating between Moze’s final health and her max health. For the purposes of this guide final health refers to the max number she can be healed to and max health refers to what her health is before we start reserving it.
Final Health = Max Health x Reservers
I’ll get to how the reservers work later on, but first lets dig into Max health and it’s components.
Max Health = (Base Health x Modifiers) + Additives
Base Health:
Base health is your characters health before any modifiers and is generated by your characters level:
Base Health = 80 x 1.09 ^ Level
The outputted value is then rounded down, hence 103.6 becomes 103 and not 104.
Modifiers:
Moze doesn’t have any health modifiers in her skills tree’s, however guardian rank and % health increases from shields fit in here. The Loaded Dice Penalty is multiplicative to all of it and can be replaced by 0.25 if equipped, otherwise you can ignore it as a multiplier.
Modifiers = (1 + % Health increases from Shields + Guardian Rank Max Health + Health Anointments) x ( 1 / (1 + turtle shield penalty) ) x Loaded Dice
Be aware for shields with an adaptive part. The card value lists 8% max health increase, the actual value is 7.5%.
Additives:
Additives are just the sum of all non percentage based health boosts received from gear.
Additives = Max Health from COM + Max Health from Artifact
Reservers
Reserving health comes from two main sources Thin Red Line and Deathless artifacts. If you equip a deathless artifact, or any combination of Thin Red Line and a Front Loader that reserves 100% health or more, you can simply set Final Health to 1 and be finished with this calculation. For the case of less than 100% health being reserved:
Reservers = 1 - ( (0.2 x Points in Thin Red Line) + Front Loader Penalty )
Shields:
For the most part Moze’s health values play nicely, and gear calculations fit in where one expects them to. Shields however play very differently, for instance at face value most would expect 3/3 Thin Red Line and a Front Loader shield to work the same way, unfortunately as we’ll see this is not the case for shield boosts.
A high level view of the Shield calculation is as follows:
Shields = ( (Base Shield Capacity + Thin Red Line) x % Capacity Buffs ) + Additive Capacity Buffs
Base Shield Capacity can be read off the item card and plugged straight in.
Thin Red Line
Here we see the value of Thin Red Line as due to it’s location in the formula it will benefit from all shield buff that we can apply.
Thin Red Line = Max Health x (0.2 x Points in Thin Red Line)
% Capacity Buffs
Here we have all % based increases to our shields.
% Capacity Buffs = 1 + Vladof Ingenuity + Phalanx Doctrine + Guardian Rank + Deathless Bonus + Shield Anointments
Additive Capacity Buffs
These are all bonus that are fixed numbers and not of the form +x% max shields.
Additive Capacity Buffs = Shield Capacity from COM + Shield Capacity from Artifact + Front Loader Bonus
I was disappointed to see that the Front Loader Bonus fits in here as it makes it substantially less valuable than Thin Red Line. Furthermore the Front Loader does not benefit from additive health bonuses like Thin Red Line does.
Front Loader Bonus = 0.6 x (Base Health x Modifiers)
Iron Bear Armour
Iron Bears armour values are entirely dependent on Moze’s health. Luckily though they are unaffected by gear and skills that reserve max health, so running a 1hp build isn’t necessarily detrimental to Iron Bear.
Iron Bear Armour = 8.4 x Max Health x ( 1 + Stainless Steel Bear )
Be aware due to the nature of rounding when predicting Moze’s max health this formula can be up to about 10 hit points off.
Author’s Notes:
- For those looking to experiment and min max their gear around Health and Shields you can find a handy spreadsheet I cooked up over here.
- A big thanks to @13igTyme for spotting multiple mistakes in the originally provided spreadsheet and alerting me to the fact turtle shields aren’t merely a negative adaptive bonus.
I want your input!
Please if you have formatting advice let me know as these formulas are not easy on the eye. If you catch any inconsistencies in these formulas let me know, It’s no help to the community for this thread to be listing false information.