A "which Is Better" Question.

Which would be better?
-The Arcanic chest plate
-Hero's Beginning

They seem to do similar things but Hero's beginning has double hp, but less defences and other different stats,

 

Hero's Beginning, easily. Not only does it offer significantly higher health, it also offers better identifications as the damage will affect all elements and neutral damage, not just individual elements, as well a raw melee damage and strength points.

 

Ah, thank you. I'm not really sure of how much 1 defence stat resists an element, so I thought defence > HP.

 

If you're referring to elemental defenses, don't worry about them. Elemental defenses only truly matter when they are very negative (in a select few instances positive ele defs can matter too, but it's kinda rare). You can effectively forget about elemental defenses on armor until endgame (and even then they don't matter unless really negative, as aforementioned)

More information about this can be found here

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Also, just for clarity's sake, spell damage% and elemental damage% is calculated at the same time, so %elemental damage is not more effective than %spell damage. Thus, %spell damage is objectively better since it can apply to any element.