I understand your argument quite well: you are saying "well, if +X AC reduces your damage taken by 10% on average, that is inferior to +10% HP, because the worst case damage for the higher AC warrior is the same. Eventually in the CH chain you will hit that worst case". The problem is you are forgetting about two other effects. First, total damage is the sum of IID random variables, i.e. the individual attacks. This means that Central Limit theorem applies, and reduces the variance. Second, AC itself reduces variance by reducing the frequency of max hits. If AC simply reduced the value of max, interval, and min hits by X% it wouldn't be nearly as effective.
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