This is an old thread but for your info with 21 strength and 0 IF you would have 56 hp not 48
I don't believe that this has been confirmed publically. You're assuming HP starts at 38 by default. I was basing it off of starting at 30. I was probably wrong. But any way you flip it, you have ZERO ironflesh, and CHOSE to have a lower HP build. With 21 STR, I'm guessing that you probably converted 8 points. If that is the case, you could have altered your build by having 1 less Power X, and instead had 6 levels of ironflesh, which would give you 12 hp; 9 hp more than the conversions to strength gave you.
Those 9 hp would likely save you from being one-shotted by a loomed sniper xbow.
My biggest issue with people who whine about being one-shotted(not calling you in particular a whiner), is that the majority of the time, they don't design their build with surviveability/HP in mind, and just think that NO ONE should be one-shotted, even if they have a build with relatively few hitpoints.
My opinion? If you give up IF to get another 3 strength/agi, so that you can get more PS/PD/ATH/WM, then you're giving up all those extra HP, and should be conceding to the fact that by doing so, you are more likely to be killed more quickly by high damage weapons. It's a tradeoff. We should all learn to love tradeoffs, since that is the trademark of a good, balanced RPG character development system.
EDIT: And yeah, this thread is relatively old, but the arguments within it are still current, since there hasn't been a patch since it was started. And for the record, I'm not the one who resurrected it.