Just how good is crimson armor?

qwerty3.14

qwerty3.14

Terrarian
Most regen items in terraria are simple, they provide a flat healing rate which is easy to compare. If you were to ask how good palladium is someone could tell you, it heals 3hp/s. It's simple and easy to compare. However with crimson armor you don't get a flat regeneration rate. When I've heard people talk about crimson armor some people say crimson armor is good, some say its the best prehardmode armor, and some people have even said its better than palladium! however I haven't heard anyone mention the actual healing rate of crimson. so here I will go in depth to see just how good crimson armor is.


A brief explanation of base healing rate and crimson armor

Before the game applies regen bonuses it calculates a base healing rate based on the following factors:
When did you last take damage?
How much max health do you have?
Are you playing expert mode and haven't eaten recently?
Are you near a campfire?
Are you moving?
Do you have a shiny stone? (this could also get a whole guide explaining what it does exactly)
Do you have crimson armor?
Do you have honey?

Let's make some assumptions
You have 400 max health since that is the maximum health prehardmode, you can also find life force potions in shadow chests but those are in finite supply, we can also rule out the shiny stone.
If you're playing in expert we'll assume you're staying well fed, if not your base healing rate is halved!
We'll say you're not near a campfire, if you are near one the add 10% to all the healing rates we've calculated.
We'll say you aren't honeyed. (yet?)

So we will be comparing the following:
When did you last take damage?
Are you moving?
Do you have crimson armor?

The player has a hidden stat know as life regen time this increases by 60 every second, once it hits certain benchmarks it will determine the base base healing rate.
After this step the healing rate can vary from 0-9
If you are wearing crimson armor life regen time counts up twice as fast
If you have the honeyed buff life regen time is 3x as fast normally, and if you have crimson on top of that it's 4x faster total.
Upon taking damage life regen time is set to 0!
This chart shows in seconds how long it takes to reach certain base base healing rates
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If the player is moving this rate will be halved if they are standing still it will be increased by 25%

If you are wearing crimson armor the healing rate will be increased by 50%

This is all applied to the player's life regen stat, every 2 points of life regen correlates to 1hp/s life regen.

So what all does this mean? Well how about some graphs!

The 'difference' in these graphs is the healing rate you would have with crimson minus the rate you would without, so it is effectively what crimson is actually adding.
Remember the x axis is the time since were last hit

Healing rate over time

The regen rate updates instantly upon reaching a certain time so if you between two points on the graph round down.

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Health recovered over time

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Comparing crimson to other forms of healing

Ok so having crimson armor is better than having no armor, but how does it compare to other regen items? We'll be using the difference trend line from the health recovered graphs since that's what crimson is actually adding.

Note: Leinfors said that the band of regen is getting buffed in 1.4.1 and that is the number I'm using
Honey also accelerate life regen time which isn't factored here.
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Here are some conclusions I've drawn from this graph.

Crimson armor is at its best out of combat where you don't move around as much and don't get hit.
If you haven't received damage in the past 25 seconds, and are standing still crimson armor is better than palladium. In every other situation palladium is better.
When in active combat crimson armor isn't as impactful as a regeneration potion
It takes 15 seconds of avoiding damage in active combat before crimson outperforms honey/heart lanterns/band of regen(after 1.4.1 buff)
Nebula armor is op


So how good is crimson armor then?

In my opinion crimson armor is a good armor set, however I wouldn't consider it overpowered and I wouldn't even consider it the best armor set in prehardmode.
Crimson armor's regeneration requires the player to avoid attacks to get the most out of it, if I'm able to reliably avoid attacks I'd rather have an armor set that focuses on damage output like the necro or wizard.
 
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Nice to finally know what exactly this armor does. I guess it really isn't overpowered.

Should be noted that Honey also reduces DoT from debuffs (straight up negating Poisoned and I think On Fire! as well), plus I think it adds more than 1 hp/s, but I'm not too sure
 
Bame Jouvier said:
Nice to finally know what exactly this armor does. I guess it really isn't overpowered.

Should be noted that Honey also reduces DoT from debuffs (straight up negating Poisoned and I think On Fire! as well), plus I think it adds more than 1 hp/s, but I'm not too sure
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Yep you're right honey is actually very strong it seems.
It adds 2hps/s life regen but if after that the player is still receiving net damage from DoT debuffs the players life regen is bumped up to 0.

Later on it on top of that it adds 1hp/s regen and increases life regen time. Since honey modifies life regen time that means it has an effect on the base healing rate and thus it has an effect on crimson's regen.

The think reason I didn't notice this is because everything crimson armor does is applied after the honey buff.

It's hard to say exactly how much it will end up healing but if you have no debuffs on you it will contribute 3hp/s life regen at least, so it's much stronger than I gave it credit for.
 
qwerty3.14 said:
Yep you're right honey is actually very strong it seems.
It adds 2hps/s life regen but if after that the player is still receiving net damage from DoT debuffs the players life regen is bumped up to 0.

Later on it on top of that it adds 1hp/s regen and increases life regen time. Since honey modifies life regen time that means it has an effect on the base healing rate and thus it has an effect on crimson's regen.

The think reason I didn't notice this is because everything crimson armor does is applied after the honey buff.

It's hard to say exactly how much it will end up healing but if you have no debuffs on you it will contribute 3hp/s life regen at least, so it's much stronger than I gave it credit for.
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And that, my friends, is why I always have a Honey Bucket in my hotbar.
 
qwerty3.14 said:
Yep you're right honey is actually very strong it seems.
It adds 2hps/s life regen but if after that the player is still receiving net damage from DoT debuffs the players life regen is bumped up to 0.

Later on it on top of that it adds 1hp/s regen and increases life regen time. Since honey modifies life regen time that means it has an effect on the base healing rate and thus it has an effect on crimson's regen.

The think reason I didn't notice this is because everything crimson armor does is applied after the honey buff.

It's hard to say exactly how much it will end up healing but if you have no debuffs on you it will contribute 3hp/s life regen at least, so it's much stronger than I gave it credit for.
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Sorry it seems I made a mistake.

I need to correct myself, I doubled checked the code and it seems honey only applies the inital 2hp/s to negate debuffs. it will be reset to 0 if it turns out to be healing after negating a debuff.

The life regen time is something I didn't know about before so I need to look into that. but it's fixed rate is still just 1hp/s

I'd need to make a whole new graph to analyze what honey does, since it tampers with your base life regen rate it messes with so many variables
 
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That's very interesting, and quite the deep research. Really cool! XD

Although while reading, I was kinda wondering "what if when several factors are present?" since some buffs like "cosy fire" (from campfires/fireplaces) stacks with the heart lantens regen boost, I think. so, what if you have a campfire, heart lantern, honey and...

What about sitting? I read it on the wiki that you regen HP faster when sitting. Pretty cool.

Anyway, the conclusion is pretty good too, I think. Crimson armor is awesome early-mid pre-hardmode, and can be alright maybe even in early hardmode, but the main problem is, that even with the awesome life regen boost, it lacks the defense stats to really protect you from most hardmode enemies, and if you were one-shot killed, then it won't matter how fast you would regen XD
And as you pointed it out as well, it regenerates more HP when you're outside of combat. which limits it a bit too, and means that you would try to focus more on dodging, and if you have good enough dodging skills not to get hit much, then regen isn't that important to begin with... kind of interesting XD
 
Sora_92 said:
Anyway, the conclusion is pretty good too, I think. Crimson armor is awesome early-mid pre-hardmode, and can be alright maybe even in early hardmode, but the main problem is, that even with the awesome life regen boost, it lacks the defense stats to really protect you from most hardmode enemies, and if you were one-shot killed, then it won't matter how fast you would regen XD
And as you pointed it out as well, it regenerates more HP when you're outside of combat. which limits it a bit too, and means that you would try to focus more on dodging, and if you have good enough dodging skills not to get hit much, then regen isn't that important to begin with... kind of interesting XD
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Also its offensive stats are not great, just +6% damage. It really is just good for retreating to a safe place and quickly recovering your health.
 
Storm Diver said:
Also its offensive stats are not great, just +6% damage. It really is just good for retreating to a safe place and quickly recovering your health.
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That's true, but it's class-less, so it's useful for everyone, right? It's odd that its counterpart, the shadow scale armor is not class-less, but melee...
 
Storm Diver said:
Don't forget that Pumpkin armour grants +10% damage.
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Yes, but its defense stats are a lot lower, and it doesn't provides the fast regen. So crimson is better if defense matters (on normal mode, it definitelly grants good enough defense against most pre-hardmode stuff.)
it's true that with good dodging skills neither defense not the fast regen matters much...
 
Bame Jouvier said:
And that, my friends, is why I always have a Honey Bucket in my hotbar.
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alright I did the math

Honey accelerates your life regen time but it doesn't actually increase the rate.
This means honey will let you reach certain life regen benchmarks sooner.
This means after enough time honey's base regen modification will add a fix amount of health.

Standing in honey without armor: 106.25 (60 seconds)
Standing in honey with crimson armor: 62.5 (30 seconds)
Moving in honey without armor: 42.5 (60 seconds)
Moving in honey with crimson armor: 25.0 (30 seconds)

This is just what comes from the base heal rate modification, there's also that fixed 1hp/s you can throw on.
 
I think most people should know that crimson armour is better than shadow, but I’ve never see someone go as in-depth as you did.
 
Well, there’s one exception. You can get Ancient Shadow Armor before fighting bosses. To get it, you’ll need corrupt.
I should know. I’m doing an expert mode run with a friend, and got super lucky with ancient shadow greaves.
 
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Geotree said:
I think most people should know that crimson armour is better than shadow, but I’ve never see someone go as in-depth as you did.
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Basically every armor is better than shadow, melee speed only substantially boosts the worst weapon type.
 
I'm not reading all that but crimson armor is pretty good at the time you get it, but you should try and get the next armor for whatever class you're playing as those suit your needs better than the crimson armor. The crimson armor is good only early game really.
 
Snapshot03 said:
I'm not reading all that but crimson armor is pretty good at the time you get it, but you should try and get the next armor for whatever class you're playing as those suit your needs better than the crimson armor. The crimson armor is good only early game really.
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Nah, crimson is more like a defensive alternative to the class sets
 
didn't read anything but the comment above

crimson armor is pretty good, I used it through out almost all of my journey mod play through
 
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