>Having high dam leads to shorter fights and thus less need
>for hp. Thus if your dam is already high, you are better off
>taking chilling than soul.

I don't think that is necessarily true. I would think the advantage would always (or almost always) be to the stat that was relatively weak.

For example -
If a character normally has 40 dam roll, then +8 dam is a 20% improvement, while for a character with a 100 dam roll chilling is an 8% increase.

Alternatively, you could see how this could play out by thinking of these numbers as high damage dealer (100 per hit avg) vs low damage dealer (40 per hit avg). Prior to getting chilling the high damage character would need 10 hits to deal at least 1000 points worth of damage while the low damage character would need 25. After chilling the high damage still needs 10 hits (at 9 he only does 972) while the low damage character only needs 21 to get there, effectively gaining 4 rounds.

HP's from soul would be similar it terms of low hp character getting a bigger boast.