Recently I got bored and decided to do far more research into extreme healthgating setups than is entirely necessary. I figure I’ll do my part and share this information with the community, regardless of how unimportant it actually is.
A quick disclaimer first, though. I came to these conclusions through my own testing, and my own program that I wrote to do a lot of the bruteforcing for me. While I tested everything thoroughly, this information still shouldn’t be taken as objective fact. I have no reason to believe that anything I’ll be presenting is wrong, but if anything seems even slightly off to you, please tell me. The last thing I want to do here is spread misinformation.
As for my method: I wrote a couple programs that compare every variant of a given shield to every varient of a given COM, and then spent two hours typing numbers into them.
PART 1: STATS, STATS, STATS.
In the process of getting all this info, there were a few interesting things I noticed to do with the stats of Pangolin shields, and the various health boosting COMs.
Starting with shields, Pangolin shields, regardless of parts, lose a flat amount of HP reduction per rarity above white, at OP10 it’s ~258550. This is off a negligable amount because of truncation, man I wish this game rounded instead.
Moving to COMS, the Survivor, Pointman, and Slab COMs all provide the same amount of max health, independant of rarity. As with all stats on COMS, Max health comes in 6 tiers, henceforth tier 0-5. Higher tier = higher HP boost. All of these COMs are tier 5.
Interestingly, the Legendary Pointman COM provides the same max health as the regular Pointman, but with negligably higher regen.
The Sweetheart COM provides notably lower health than the aforementioned three. Both of these COMs are tier 5.
Lastly, as far as I can tell any source of % increased health breaks healthgate abuse setups, even just 1% from Axton’s Forebearance skill will end up reducing your health to 1. I don’t know why this happens but if anyone does please tell me, it’s super weird.
Quick piece of primer info before I get to the good stuff:
I’ll be using this chart, from this thread, as a reference, and giving the total special boost, as some total special boosts can be reached with different combinations of parts.
PART 2: THE ACTUAL INFO
Okay, random rambling aside, here’s the scoop, and, to my knowledge, the best available healthgate abuse setups for all characters. Please note that all the shields I checked had a Maliwan capacitor, simply because there’s no reason not to have one, there may be numerically better setups with a different capacitor, but in practice they would be worse due to being weak to a given DoT. Additionally, all COMs shown have the max regen stat for their level, but can be slightly lower if you’re unlucky.
One final note before I spill the beans, All characters can use their Slayer COMs for this, but for everyone but Gaige and Salvador there’s no reason to, as COMs with regen are better, because of this I’ve excluded the Slayer setups from everyone but Gaige/Salvador.
Zer0
+4 special shield, tier 2 COM.
Axton
+4 special shield, tier 2 COM. Remember that a regular Pointman COM has the same health boost, and would work as well. 4871.2 Regen with Legendary Pointman, 4683.9 with regular Pointman.
Side note: Zer0, and Axton can substitute the shown shield with an OP9, green rarity, -2 shield, which has the same reduction
Krieg
+3 special shield, COM tier irrelevent, but this one is 5. This and Maya’s setup don’t get broken by % max health, probably because these setups don’t go into negative HP.
Maya
+3 special shield, COM tier irrelevant, but this one is 5. This and Krieg’s Meat setup don’t get broken by % max health, probably because these setups don’t go into negative HP.
Gaige
-4 special shield, tier 1 COM.
Salvador
+3 special shield, COM tier irrelevant, but this one is 5.
One final detail: Due to Gaige lacking a regen COM, she can reasonably use whatever COM she wants, combined with a Moxxi weapon, using this shield:
-4 special.
And that’s that! I’m painfully aware that this information is 100% useless, as functional healthgate abuse setups have already been found. Useless information is still information, though, and I believe in sharing anything of note I come across, no matter how irrelevant.
Please feel free to ask questions, lord knows I’d love an excuse to make more use of the damned programs that took a good 2 hours to write.
(EDIT) Changed the Salvador setup because I somehow managed to forget that Sal has a regen COM. Whoops.