belt of health vs belt of defense

Most of the belts are meh, it's not like there are big advantages or disadvantages either way.

The exceptions are:

* Guard belts for warriors
* Pact belts for mages
* Max health belts for everyone (assuming you have gain guard on hit)

Max guard is calculated from max health, so a max health buff belt is the equivalent of a guard belt on a warrior, it buffs guard. Plus the extra health doesn't hurt.

There are also a couple of unique belts that are pretty useful, like The Bind That Guides and the Belt of Urgency.

Finally, if you are fighting a dragon or Hakkonites, it's worth using an elemental defense belt. Like a fire belt if fighting a fire dragon, or a cold belt if running through JoH.

Defender Belt gives +5% to all defenses. Superb Belt of Health gives +200 health.

Say you have 600 health and 50% to all defenses without a belt. That's 1200 effective health, i.e. equivalent to having 0 defense and 1200 health.

Defender Belt would increase your defenses to 55%, which gives an effective health of 600 / .45 = 1333. Meanwhile, adding 200 base health would increase it to 800/.5 = 1600.

Since defenses are capped at 80%, the best case for the Defender Belt would be if you had 75% in all defenses, and the belt increased it to 80%. In that case, the Defender Belt would increase your effective health by 25%, while the +200 health would increase it by a proportion of 200/health. So in theory, the Defender Belt *could* be better if you had more than 800 health and 75% in all defenses. But I'm pretty sure 75% without temporary buffs is impossible.

Another thing is that defenses apply to barrier, but health has no effect, so the only way to increase your effective barrier is via defenses/resistances. But 5% is still not a very big increase unless you stack defense on other gear.

I've been looking to my attributes today and discovered that the enhanced guard belt is bugged.
I explain:

my character has 765 max health, and 191 guard amount when it reaches the max.
cassandra has 718 max health and 179 guard when at max as well.

We both don't have any passive abilities that increase the amount of max guard.
the only difference between my inquisitor and cass is that my char is wearing an enhanced guard belt (+20 max guard)
i discovered after some testing that the belt doesn't make any difference, and that the only reason why my char has 12 more guard than Cass is because she has 47 more health points.
So, as you (papacharlie) mentionned in your previous post, the higher your max health will be, the higher your guard cap will be. So max guard amount seems to be around 25% of the max health of the character.

So, as soon as i get a superb belt of guard i will do the same tests and find out if it's also bugged or not, but for know, the only thing i'm sure of, is that i sell immediately my bugged enhanced guard belt and relplace it with anything else i find.