I've been looking into defensive gem options as I'm finding I'm slightly too squishy for my liking. Was using a L70 Esoteric, but I've found an interesting interaction with Molten's. If you have Bone Armor for additional DR and use the Thy Flesh Sustained rune it gives you 10% extra HPS per stack. This means you can get 100% more HPS (or 150% if you've got Wisdom of Kalan) which is then doubled again when generating the shield effect from Molten's. I'll need to do some testing to confirm how the bonus effects stack with Draw Life and Rogar's Huge Stone.
With a rank 70 gem and 38,000 base HPS you can get a 468,000 shield from 234,000 HPS. Esoteric at L70 gives a 44.5% DR on Magic damae which equates to ~489,500 effective HP with 1,100,000 total HP.
Interesting thought. I always like the defensive gems - surely never an option for rank 1, but for more casual gameplay, or hardcore, or just more consistency in clearing rifts a great alternative.
In your table it seems you're neglecting Esoteric's secondary effect though: below 50% life you gain 75% increased magic resistances. So for the correct formula you also have to add all resist to the "settings" tab. What you then also need is the formula for all resist mitigation: resist / (5*level + resist), with level being 70 of course; for example it means 80% reduced damage at 1400 all res and 90% at 3150 all res.
It isn't a whole lot though; it comes down to about 170k effective HP at 1400 all res and about 85k at 3000 all res. So likely by just looking at raw numbers, Wildebeest might still win. The reason why Esoteric is so great though is that it is independent of time; for as long as you can get that life back (especially important if you have a monk in your group) there's no ceiling. Also, the high shield and LPS of Molten assumes to be surrounded by a ton of mobs when casting Bone Armor, which makes you insanely vulnerable in that very moment, so it's a bit of an "all in" playstyle similar to playing with APD bracers.
Moratorium still proves to be pretty useless. Even if we consider that in this 13 second time window on rank 100 all the damage is eventually removed instead of staggered (never happening of course) it would still be at best be a 25% effective damage reduction (but it rather comes down to an effective 10% or so). The gem is just so useless ever since Esoteric+Mutilation Guard arrived. But for solo play it looks like Molten Wildebeest is indeed a pretty awesome choice. Btw, the "not taking damage" condition on WIldebeest... is that violated by using life-consuming skills? That would kinda suck.
Also very minor mistake: gems start at rank 0, not rank 1. Insert one more row at the top
The primary effect is a separate multiplier, the secondary one is just a 75% multiplier of existing resistances. At least that's what the tooltip says. That's why you need to know the resistance values for the secondary effect.
Is there a formula I can use for calculating resistances? I'm assuming that it is taking the resistance stat, multiplying that by 1.75 and then converting that into a resistance percentage.
Should I evaluate Molten's after DR as well? ie: rather than 1 hps it's really 1/(1-DR) HPS and the shield is twice that
I'm not sure I understand the "Molten's after DR". In the end, this "comparison" is really nothing more than a ballpark figure because one is time-based (Molten) and one is pure damage based (Esoteric).
Missed that, have included the resist calculations. I guess the Esoteric vs Molten comparison should be about post DR effective HP for Esoteric vs the post DR effective HP of Moltens secondary effect shield, but after that I'd still want to try to convert the HPS increase into some sort of "effective HP" value and see how long it takes for the two to be roughly equal.
That last part is probably a bit of a moot point, tbh.
Have tested this in game, feel a bit squisher initially, but I've only got a a rank 30 gem so far. Shield isn't affected by HP spending abilities.
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I've been looking into defensive gem options as I'm finding I'm slightly too squishy for my liking. Was using a L70 Esoteric, but I've found an interesting interaction with Molten's. If you have Bone Armor for additional DR and use the Thy Flesh Sustained rune it gives you 10% extra HPS per stack. This means you can get 100% more HPS (or 150% if you've got Wisdom of Kalan) which is then doubled again when generating the shield effect from Molten's. I'll need to do some testing to confirm how the bonus effects stack with Draw Life and Rogar's Huge Stone.
I've got some rough math on it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WdazwciCFHLfUqRS8RFufhSgEQlPURZ1xxZfT4bCG0k/edit?usp=sharing
With a rank 70 gem and 38,000 base HPS you can get a 468,000 shield from 234,000 HPS. Esoteric at L70 gives a 44.5% DR on Magic damae which equates to ~489,500 effective HP with 1,100,000 total HP.
Interesting thought. I always like the defensive gems - surely never an option for rank 1, but for more casual gameplay, or hardcore, or just more consistency in clearing rifts a great alternative.
In your table it seems you're neglecting Esoteric's secondary effect though: below 50% life you gain 75% increased magic resistances. So for the correct formula you also have to add all resist to the "settings" tab. What you then also need is the formula for all resist mitigation: resist / (5*level + resist), with level being 70 of course; for example it means 80% reduced damage at 1400 all res and 90% at 3150 all res.
It isn't a whole lot though; it comes down to about 170k effective HP at 1400 all res and about 85k at 3000 all res. So likely by just looking at raw numbers, Wildebeest might still win. The reason why Esoteric is so great though is that it is independent of time; for as long as you can get that life back (especially important if you have a monk in your group) there's no ceiling. Also, the high shield and LPS of Molten assumes to be surrounded by a ton of mobs when casting Bone Armor, which makes you insanely vulnerable in that very moment, so it's a bit of an "all in" playstyle similar to playing with APD bracers.
Moratorium still proves to be pretty useless. Even if we consider that in this 13 second time window on rank 100 all the damage is eventually removed instead of staggered (never happening of course) it would still be at best be a 25% effective damage reduction (but it rather comes down to an effective 10% or so). The gem is just so useless ever since Esoteric+Mutilation Guard arrived. But for solo play it looks like Molten Wildebeest is indeed a pretty awesome choice. Btw, the "not taking damage" condition on WIldebeest... is that violated by using life-consuming skills? That would kinda suck.
Also very minor mistake: gems start at rank 0, not rank 1. Insert one more row at the top
Good point on the secondary effect & comparing with resist all. I'll work those in later today.
Question: The bonus 75% magic DR from the Rank 25 bonus, I assume this multiplies with existing DR from resists & the primary effect?
The primary effect is a separate multiplier, the secondary one is just a 75% multiplier of existing resistances. At least that's what the tooltip says. That's why you need to know the resistance values for the secondary effect.
Is there a formula I can use for calculating resistances? I'm assuming that it is taking the resistance stat, multiplying that by 1.75 and then converting that into a resistance percentage.
Should I evaluate Molten's after DR as well? ie: rather than 1 hps it's really 1/(1-DR) HPS and the shield is twice that
The formula for resist is in my previous post ;-)
resist / (5*level + resist) = %DR
I'm not sure I understand the "Molten's after DR". In the end, this "comparison" is really nothing more than a ballpark figure because one is time-based (Molten) and one is pure damage based (Esoteric).
Missed that, have included the resist calculations. I guess the Esoteric vs Molten comparison should be about post DR effective HP for Esoteric vs the post DR effective HP of Moltens secondary effect shield, but after that I'd still want to try to convert the HPS increase into some sort of "effective HP" value and see how long it takes for the two to be roughly equal.
That last part is probably a bit of a moot point, tbh.
Have tested this in game, feel a bit squisher initially, but I've only got a a rank 30 gem so far. Shield isn't affected by HP spending abilities.