Increases your max health temporarily but you lose the increase when you're hit?

What's the purpose of this power anyway?

it's a self-heal.

There are heals and other powers in the celestial set that use your health rather than your end. This power functions to increase your available health pool to enhance the effects of those related powers.

The description is misleading in that it doesn't say anything about the huge self heal that's included. The temp hp doesn't really do that much unless you're using Iniquity and not being hit by anything. Even then it's not all that big a help. However, Conviction is one of (if not the) best self heal in the game.

Edit: Read the tooltip and not the description for a better idea of what it'll do for you. :)

It's not actually a true heal, but works as one. Conviction fake heals you by adding 15% more health to your health pool. If you do not have full health when you use it, the extra heath is added to your existing health and its a "heal" basically.

Think of it like if you were at full health and gained 15% of your health. This health amount is the "heal" you recieve when using it as less than full health.

Some people have also said that this scales on Pre slightly, but not by much, so it's not going to be exactly 15% of heatlh. Also the more health you have the more the heal is.

The temporary hp and the heal are two completely separate functions. When you get the 15% bonus to your hp it keeps your current health percentage the same. It doesn't just tack on "empty" hp to your health bar that needs to be healed up to see any usage. You can test this by using Conviction at full health; you don't see any green numbers. It's the same as switching roles, Con gear, or w/e else might change your max hp.

The heal portion of Conviction is just like any other heal as far as I can tell. It scales with Pre, Seraphim, and Sentinel the same as any other heal. With no Pre the heal is roughly 500 at level 40, but with about 300 Pre in Sentinel it heals for 1.7k. That's more than a slight scaling with Pre in my mind. 1.7k hp every 5s is a very powerful self heal and is a lot more meaningful than a hp buff that bursts on damage.

So, the question is what use is an hp buff that breaks on damage. It's still not completely useless. Let's pretend that you have a max hp of 100 and you start at full health. You use Conviciton and take your hp to 115, then something hits you for 15dmg taking your hp down to 100 again but 100/115. Right after (and effectively simultaneously) you lose the temporary 15% and your max is 100 again. The game transates your 100 out of 115 into 86.6% hp and with your 100hp max that's 87hp (which is two more hp than if you hadn't used Conviction and since we're using 100hp max that's 2%).

Edit: I need to test and see if temporary hp buff is removed before or after the damage that strips it. If it takes away the buff first than you can ignore the previous paragraph, but still apply the following one.

So the temporary hp buff doesn't help a whole lot when attacked, but the real purpose is for this temporary hp to work alongside Iniquity. Iniquity (like Dark Transfusion and other self inflicted hp drains) doesn't count as being attacked even though you're suffering hp loss, so assuming you're not getting hit by anything else you get to keep the temporary hp.

Anyway, you're not all that likely to take no damage over a 20s timeframe, and the 15% hp boost isn't all that great anyway. It's the big heal (that doesn't scale with Con and is unmentioned in the description) that really makes this power shine.

This is good, detailed info, which needs to be documented somewhere because it corrects the way I originally thought it worked, or was led to believe. Didn't get much testing done when writing the guide because I didn't think to ask somebody to duel me and therefore didn't notice there was a separate heal effect.

Mind if I quote you for Conviction in my guide?

Sure thing Bron, you can trim it down. I just wrote down my whole thought process :p

Awesome, thanks.

It's still better than what I have up, especially since Iniquity got buffed to insane levels and used to be only marginal at best when I wrote that. I'm basically gonna take out a huge chunk from what I wrote for Conviction, and insert your quote, then add you to the credits.

You may wonder why I'm only adding your info and not others. It's cause this is a separate thread, so it's semi easy to lose track of. The other stuff I need to add is already in the thread itself.

I dunno if it will all fit though. There's a reason I reserved so many posts originally. ;) Hoping to migrate the guide to CO Wiki eventually, once it's more presentable. That way it's not constrained by post length limits.

EDIT: Man, I barely fit that in. Some of the other info was outdated anyway, so it gave me a reason to go and clean up that one post.

Except Conviction doesn't work with Iniquity, either. Your health will return to normal, then the damage from Iniquity will be applied. The >100% HP bonus from Conviction only effects Palliate, which heals a percentage of your life. For example, if you have 1,000/7,000 HP left, and you hit Palliate, it might give you 4,000 HP, leaving you at 5,000/7,000. If you have 1,000/7,000 HP and you hit Conviction, you will get a heal from Conviction and the 15% bonus to Max HP, so you will be sitting at, say, 2,500/8,000 HP. Now, when you hit Palliate, it gives you 4,500 HP instead, since it's a percentage of 8k instead of 7k.