Survival math
Damage gets the guides; deaths get the blame. But staying alive is its own arithmetic — EHP, armor curves, and a damage budget you can actually plan around.
Quick answer
Convert life, armor and resistances into effective HP with the toughness calculator, then size that number against the content: you want roughly 2–3× the raw damage of a typical elite swing before pushing higher Pit tiers.
EHP is the only fair comparison
"Should I take Life or armor?" is unanswerable in isolation — they multiply into the same currency: effective HP. Life is its own bucket; armor and resistances are mitigation buckets. As with damage, grow whichever multiplier is currently smaller.
Why you're getting one-shot
- Elite swings carry multipliers — your EHP floor is set against those, not trash hits.
- Enemy level scales with content tier — armor's mitigation shrinks as you push; re-run the calculator with the real enemy level.
- Resist caps exist — stacking past the cap buys nothing [VERIFY current caps per season].
- Some mechanics partially bypass mitigation — no EHP fixes those; movement does.
The toughness budget
- Farming tier: survive comfortably, drop toughness for damage.
- Push tier: 2–3× elite-swing EHP, or accept that death timers cost more than the stats would.
- Trade deliberately: every toughness affix is damage not taken — use the damage calculator to price the trade instead of guessing.
Armor curve constants shift between seasons — the model's K is editable and flagged [VERIFY]. Methodology.