[Guide] Moze's Health and Shield Calculation Breakdown

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.

10 Likes

I wonder if the Front Loader not benefiting from health additives is an oversight? It’s extremely odd for it to exclude additives considering the description says max health.

Yeah I was surprised by it too. However it is consistent with other gear effects which also ignore additives.

In light of all this I think the front loader is getting more attention than it deserves, even in 1hp builds. The fact it gets the biggest capacity possible doesn’t mean as much considering skills such as Vladof Ingenuity and Phalanx Doctrine don’t scale off it’s full capacity.

For simplicity I’ll assume the shields have equal base capacity. At level 50 in a fairly standard 1hp Bloodletter setup. A frontloader would end up with about 4000 extra capacity. The catch however is that the difference remains constant even after stacking Phalanx Doctrine. So while 4000 difference capacity is impressive when comparing 40000 vs 44000, it degrades quickly and once we add enough Phalanx to reach 60000 the other shield would be at 56000.

The only advantage a frontloader offers over something like a transformer is that it can get boosters.

Just a note for those interested in what happens when the shield capacities aren’t the same. You end up with about 4000 plus double the difference between the shields. Hence a 13000 capacity fronloader and an 12000 capacity shield will end up with a difference of about 6000.

3 Likes

Just a minor update. I’ve included where anointments factor into the health and shield equations and I’ve added the formula for Iron Bear’s Armour.

Nice breakdown but how do the multipliers stack or weigh out? For instance, if I have -10% hp multiplier and a +10% hp multiplier how does that calculation take effect? Is it negated by each other, do you do positives first then apply negatives or vice versa? Do the positives add together then all negs? Basically how does the algorithm apply the formulation?

I’ll just restate the relevant part of the formula for reference.

Modifiers = (1 + % Health increases from Shields + Guardian Rank Max Health + Health Anointments) x ( 1 / (1 + turtle shield penalty) ) x Loaded Dice

The only -10% health modifier I’m aware of is on shields with a Turtle part. This health modifier would fall under the turtle shield penalty.

1 / (1 + turtle shield penalty) = 1 / (1 + 0.1) = 1/1.1

The +10% health modifier would fall under the % Health increases from Shields, eg:

(1 + % Health increases from Shields + Guardian Rank Max Health + Health Anointments) = (1 + 0.1 + GR Max Health + Health Anointments) = (1.1 + GR Max Health + Health Anointments)

So in a situation where you have no guardian ranks or anointments then the 2 modifiers are going to cancel each other out. However if when any other bonus is introduced the turtle modifier will act on everything and reduce health more than the +10% will increase it.

Thanks again for another great breakdown on ingame calculations. I was already wondering, why the Frontloader gave me less shields than expected. Will stick to my Transformer, seems to be the best shield for Moze anyway, as it allows her to heal from shock damage and has a 40% chance to negate all incoming bullet damage thus lasting much longer.

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A shield with just 1 of the transformers 2 effects would still be among the best defensive shields in the game. With both effects the transformer is comfortably the strongest pure defensive shield in the game.

A recharger with the tenacious defense capstone is pretty good. I’ve also been messing with a Front loader and an Otto idol to have 1hp build that regens on kill. Still working out the kinks on that one.

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Nothing seems to beat the big boom blaster for me currently. Though I am trying others out, the 60% chance to make 60% shield heal is just rediliculous with 50k shields.

Funnily enough, using the Rough Rider while having points in Thin Red Line will in fact give you a somewhat decent shield capacity thanks to the way Thin Red Line works. With a Deathless Relic, 5/3 in Thin Red Line and Guardian Rank I reached more than 20k Capacity. With a Bloodletter COM and points in Vampyr it might even be a decent choice, considering you still get the 23% Damage Resistance.

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It sounds like you could make it viable, I’m not so sure it would be good. All of Moze’s top shields tend to have a mechanic that helps sustain it. The 23% Damage resistance is also going to have diminishing returns with Armored Infantry. I’m not sure Vampyr is good enough to sustain it considering you’ll have no natural regen.

Surely it would never recharge. The shield has no recharge rate.

I’m trying to theory craft a low health, health gate moze build that does not use bloodletter. would the best way to abuse health gate (out side of the level one stop gap, loaded dice, and bloodletter combo) be putting two points into thin red line and use vampyr/maybe some health regen passives on a COM or Artifact for healing?

Im doing this currently; working on both mindsweeper and blastmaster; the only problem is it needs some extra action skill cooldown as im using IB with FCoW to refill the (level 50)stopgap shield. For the artifact im using an otto idol with health regen passive; although it could work just aswell with a loaded dice, having to keep IB alive for a set amount of time would be detrimental with dice
Edited due to after thoughts as IB has extremely low health when using a loaded dice - and to note using this; im not specced into dw at all so vampyr is not being used nor relied on without MoD

No offence to the stop gap but it just takes too long to start recharging for what I have in mind. the build I wana do would use a fast charging nova shield (not sure which one still gotta do testing).

Thats right boys and girls I wana try a health gate abusing nova moze build.

Fair enough, but on that note… - with the added damage from desperate measures + tenacious defence; and either the guardian perk or that less than useful skill…it charges as soon as you get a kill, or is charged while bouncing around in IB; maybe try it with a recharge-burner shield? Would have the same idea, but you can break it twice with TD

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Band of Sitorak can spawn with Novas. I’ve got a double nova cryo version. That would proc way more than a recharge Berner.

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