A build with very high Armor/Resistance DR% but a small flat Life pool can still be one-shot by a single sufficiently large hit, because DR% reduces damage proportionally - a percentage of an enormous number can still exceed a small Life total. Community consensus at endgame Pit tiers is that a large flat Life pool (community figures cite needing on the order of 40,000+ effective HP at character level 70+) matters more for eliminating one-shot deaths than pushing DR% higher once you're already near the Armor/Resistance soft caps.
This resolves the common confusion of 'my Toughness number is huge, why did I still die instantly' - Toughness/EHP is an average-case multiplier on your Life pool, not a hard cap on the size of hit you can take. Two characters with identical Toughness but very different raw Life pools have very different one-shot resistance against a single outlier hit, even though their AVERAGE survivability against sustained damage is similar.
EHP = (Max Life + Barrier) / (product of all (1-DR) factors); this formula scales your Life pool by a multiplier, but the multiplier cannot turn a small Life pool into arbitrarily large one-shot protection the way more flat Life directly does for a single-hit scenario.
Community rule-of-thumb from player discussion: roughly 20,000 Life was considered clearly insufficient ('nothing') for high-tier Pit content at character level 70, with ~40,000+ cited as the target to stop incidental one-shots even with capped Armor/Resistance.
When two upgrade options offer similar EHP-on-paper (one via more DR%, one via more flat Life), prefer the flat Life option once your Armor/Resistance are already reasonably close to their soft caps, since it directly raises your one-shot ceiling rather than just your average mitigation.
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