HP mods are overrated.

Eh, even so, fortitude is still useful in certain PvE areas because a lot of places have hexes and degen. 4 reasons have been brought up.

1. Degen:

Yes there's a common misconception that degen makes extra HP useful. This is false, rarely is 30 HP something to save you from wipe, if you are that low, healers have failed anyway, and if you are wiping then you are probably doing it wrong anyway. The only difference HP mod makes in an area with lots of degen is wiping 2 sec later than usual after healers run out of energy. In 2 sec a monk might squeeze out another heal, but that is just prolonging inevitable.

2. Runes:

I don't know about you but I usually use 1 sup or 2 major runes so my HP is fine. Rarely do people need extra attributes that much to sacrifise HP. The sup fire major ES example is a nice one. Why sacrifise 35 HP to get 3 max energy when you already have around 60?

3. PvP:

Not much point in making pve characters for pvp with armor swapping disabled and all. And I know some enjoy pvping with their pve characters. But somehow I doubt that majority of buyers are making pvp ready characters.

4. Armor ignoring damage:

Here I once again can't see how 30 extra HP is much better than no mod at all. Better have +armor and have it work with the enemy warriors, rangers etc than to have HP mod and have it be a very slim advantage in case you run into a lot of armor ignoring damage. Armor ignoring damage is less of a threat in pve because mobs with lots of it are rare. Also enemies that are level 24 and 28 (practically all the second half of nightfall, all the hard areas) get bonus to their armor affeced damage because of level difference, while armor ignoring damage stays unaffected.

I switched all my weapons to +health when I was tricking out my PvE guys for PvP. Now, I'm slowly switching back to armor with little excitement. It's just a better mod in PvE, but the differences are small enough most of the time that it's hard to care.

Peace,
-CxE The difference in effect is small, but the difference in price isn't small. Or at least wasn't.

3. PvP:

Not much point in making pve characters for pvp with armor swapping disabled and all. And I know some enjoy pvping with their pve characters. But somehow I doubt that majority of buyers are making pvp ready characters. That would be a valid argument against fortitude mods if defense mods were better in PvE, indeed. But they're not (I'm going to explain after).

I don't have the numbers, but the conclusion was with 70 AL the fortitude mod was slightly better (+5Al appeared as the equivalent of a +29.xxx hp mod in this case). So from this point of view we can say there is no real difference. This practically proves AL is better. In the process of losing all your HP, it saved you 29 HP. But you do get healed normally right? In any battle characters take several times their HP worth of damage, and if you save 29 HP each time you take equivalent of total HP worth of damage then AL mod is vastly better. n times 29 > 30.

HP mod is like energy storage. It is a front-ended one time bonus when you enter a fight. Once you fall down to 30 energy you have to live off same regen as all other casters. You get no benefit from it, once that buffer has been spent. HP mod is the same. Except ES doubles energy pool and HP mod adds less than 10%.

So no matter if the battle lasts 1 minute or 10, with HP mod you can take exactly 30 damage more than without it.

Armor mod is like expertise the more it is activated, the larger its effects. The longer the fight, the more damage you are able to take with it than without it.

If that is a hard concept, here a fictional scenario that should show clearly.

So you have 1 monk with +60 HP weapon and +35 HP armor, base HP 480, let's say mobs attack him and he's able to squeeze 2000 HP worth of healing on a short notice. So to kill him mobs need to do 2575 HP worth of damage.

Now we have 1 monk with 10 AL weapon and 10 AL armor and base HP 480, same 2000 HP worth of heals. The 20 AL makes him take only 70.71% damage. So to kill him mobs need to do 3507 damage.

Ok now let's say half of damage is degen or armor ignoring(and that's a stretch with all the warriors, rangers, eles, paragons, assassins, dervishes, wand attacks).

So 0.5 * X + 0.5 * 0.7071 * X = 2480.

Now they need to do 2906 damage, which is still 350 damage more than the HP mod one.

And the longer the fight, more it goes in favor of armor mods.

In short fights it doesn't matter what you run, because monks won't run out of energy if you have armor mods or HP mods. Characters are equally functional at 100 HP and at 400 HP. You just need enough HP to survive spikes.

When monks start running out of energy then obviously a lot of damage has been healed and this is one of the longer fights. In logner fights, armor mods take a large lead. 2 monks should be able to output 4000 HP of healing or more, and that is thousand or more HP saved with armor mods even when half of damage isn't affected by armor. You'd need something like 90% damage be degen or armor ignoring for HP mods to be better.

Do the math.

you can ask yourself the same question, just with Energy/Armor, why do people wear full energy armor? why not + armor? same reason, most of them are just noobs. :P because it speeds things up? i don't see how that makes someone a noob