16% Max Life or 80% Reduced Critical Damage Bonus From Hits Against You?

I have 8 open rune sockets on my armor items.

All of my resists are maxed, including chaos.

Fire resistance is at 90%. Lightning and cold at 77%.

I have 3,322 life, 126 energy shield, 618 armor, and 279 evasion.

With these 8 open rune sockets, any opinions on whether 16% increased max life or hits against you have 80% reduced critical damage bonus would be better?

Life would also increase my life regen a bit. I'm currently at 290 life regen.

I'm thinking the life bonuses are constant whereas the critical protection only helps when I get hit and it's a crit. However, those may be the hits most likely to kill me, so if taking down the damage bonus from say 130% on Xesht to only 50% could be really beneficial as well.

I'm converting 45% of physical damage taken as fire damage with a corrupted Cloak of Flame.

Any help would be appreciated since I just spent 80% of my currency on purchasing all new gear and this is the last step, which cannot be undone.

the flat +% to the HP will give you better survivability across all damage sources. the 80% Reduces crit damage only helps if whatever your fighting has high crit multiplier. like in keystones with +200% increase monsters crit multiplier. and those keys you should avoid using on boss maps.

and remember your resistance is capped at 75% unless you have modifiers that increases the max resistance

so witch one is better?

the flat increase to HP is better since the crit multiplier is situational.

With that low life pool, there is no question
Also you get plenty of great crit mitigation nodes in the passive tree, but you don't get any %life increase nodes

Or, split the baby, 8% life and 40% crit mitigation.

There are many situations like this in POE of diminishing returns, where the right answer is to balance investment in different things, because they compliment eachother, wheras deep-ending into one thing makes you good at once thing but weak at another.

I would look at whether you can pick up the crit-mitigation nodes in the passive tree, and if you can, then go 16% life, and if you can't, then split half and half.

If not SSF: Magic find in all sockets, then find a comfortable level of maps/content to farm until you can buy much better gear. Then put MF gems in that too.