The sad state that is Armor

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ElricOfGrans wrote:

Crazy, random idea with no basis other that pure conjecture: would armour be better if Determination gave a flat bonus (like Grace and Discipline)? Honestly, I have no idea what is best here, but it just looked weird to me that two of the three defensive auras work one way and the third completely differently.

It is like I said. Armor has received NO innovation since the games release. Determination has always been the same, the armor passives have always been the same, there are no interesting mechanics involving armor (except aegis aurora).

It is just something that needs some love.

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Wishuponastar wrote:

Armor is completely fine. Stop whining. There are many tank builds that use armor to get insane survivability. Check out Gellig Marauder tank build, or tinko's duelist old build. They can easily afk double Palace bosses with crazy mods. Also Havoc's cyclone Marauder - one of the first to do Uber Atziri in Invasion league.

The fact that the vast majority of HC players use armor and most end-game builds use Armor should speak for itself, but here you are asking for armor buffs.

do they use armor? or do they use granite flasks , block, endurance charges and immortal call?


everyone uses armor as a mechanic because there is only 2 alternatives , es or evasion . that is not much competition

we are talking about armor as a stat on items no armor as a mechanic.

It seems to me that armor is the best at mitigating the smallest hits; and that large hits have a natural armor piercing affect...

This makes me wonder then if armor should be broken into two systems: 1 for the trash mobs, and 1 for the big hits.


So Imagine if:

1) Armor reduces damage taken by 1 per 12 armor (12,000 armor would then reduce the first 1000 damage; or a hit for 10,000 damage would still be 9,000 damage.)

2) Armor reduces damage by an additional 2% per 1,000 armor (12,000 armor would then reduce the first 1000 damage, or a hit for 10,000 damage would be first calculated to 9,000 damage, and then get reduced further by 24%, leaving you with still taking 6,840 damage.)

Now Imagine having 24,000 armor. The same 10,000 hit would become only 8,000 before being even further reduced by 48% to 4,160.

(As a final set of examples, a hit of 5000 phys damage with 12,000 armor would be reduced to 4,000 before being further reduced to 3,040 under this dual system. (Or 24,000 : 5000 -> 3000 - 1560.))

This could perhaps be done as a keystone meant for melee:
- 75% less Ranged Damage
- 2% reduced physical damage taken per 1000 armor

These numbers are for example only, as if this is under powered or overpowered monster damage or these mechanics could be balanced to compensate.

Another alternative is to create some other uniques with 5-15% reduced physical damage taken.

maybe sticking a new keystone "gain block chance based on 'armor*x / 10*level', and an additional reduction to physical damage taken" x is 2% per gem level between avatar of fire and ancestral bond.

ex. char level = 75, armor = 7500, level 20 gem; results in (7500*1.4)/(750) = 14% chance to block, and 14% increased reduction to physical damage taken.

char level = 20, armor = 1400, level 1 gem; result = 1400*1/200= 7% chance to block, 7% increased reduction in physical damage taken.

In beyond, the lightning coil dropped in price recently; a week ago it was around 2 exa, now goes for 1.5

have a 5l goes for 5 exalts

6l, sincerely i don't care... will never have one.

the struggle with armor is real, but the new tree offers lot's of mixed passives so im fine with that; lightning coil is the answer to those who don't want to spend points in armor; but i'm sure that there's people who doesn't have a coil, and survives big slams with no shield in their hand.

bump time

all the 3k life bow rangers on reddit with their lightning coils downvoting me cuz they dont want their OPOP armor to get nerfed

i've actually always loved the id of going for a strong tank build with ofc lots of armour and life and then have a lower dmg output (or some dmg return system like reflect or the curse)

problem is in this game stacking armor doesn't cut it i've scrapped more then 1 char for not being able to tank on just armor full resists and a decent health.

in all honesty that is what a tank is supposed to be but its impossible here

armor mechanics need to be reworked, to bigin with as gregoriel said it has to be separated into a flat reduction and a % reduction, only thing i would change from his idea is to make the % part have diminishing returns instead of a flat increase.
not neccesarily this numbers but something along this lines:

500 armor = 10% phys reduction
1000 armor = 20% phys reduction
2000 armor = 30% phys reduction
4000 armor = 40% phys reduction
8000 armor = 50% phys reduction
16000 armor = 60% phys reduction

furthermore armor needs to have a way to mitigate elemental/chaos damage like eva has (dodge), otherwise is quite pointless to specialice in a defence that only works for 20%-30% of the monsters out there, was thinking of something like this:

imbued armor:
armor olso affects elemental damage
armor olso affects chaos with a 70% effectivness
cant block
resistances become cero


not only will make armor more viable but will olso give a good buff to 2h weapons.

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caboom wrote:

armor mechanics need to be reworked, to bigin with as gregoriel said it has to be separated into a flat reduction and a % reduction, only thing i would change from his idea is to make the % part have diminishing returns instead of a flat increase.
not neccesarily this numbers but something along this lines:

500 armor = 10% phys reduction
1000 armor = 20% phys reduction
2000 armor = 30% phys reduction
4000 armor = 40% phys reduction
8000 armor = 50% phys reduction
16000 armor = 60% phys reduction

furthermore armor needs to have a way to mitigate elemental/chaos damage like eva has (dodge), otherwise is quite pointless to specialice in a defence that only works for 20%-30% of the monsters out there, was thinking of something like this:

imbued armor:
armor olso affects elemental damage
armor olso affects chaos with a 70% effectivness
cant block
resistances become cero


not only will make armor more viable but will olso give a good buff to 2h weapons.

Two things:

1. Hell fucking no. Armor is meant to counter physical damage, and if it can counter elemental damage then there is no reason to have resistances. No resistances means a ton of wasted mods on a lot of items for a lot of builds, and armor will become more powerful than Lightning Coil and Mjolner.

2. How does evasion do anything against elemental damage? Oh, wait, it doesn't. Dodge does, but it is not evasion. Dodge is also a lot harder to get and is more costly than armor or evasion.

@caboom: I like the idea of having diminishing returns, more systems should consider having inefficiency at the top, as stacking a single thing crazy high shouldn't be too crazy good. But lets stick to talking about armor and phys damage reduction for a second.

500 armor = -25 phys damage taken + 5% phys damage taken reduction
1000 armor = -50 phys damage taken + 10% phys damage taken reduction
2000 armor = -100 phys damage taken + 15% phys damage taken reduction
4000 armor = -200 phys damage taken + 20% phys damage taken reduction
8000 armor = -400 phys damage taken + 25% phys damage taken reduction
16000 armor = -800 phys damage taken + 30% phys damage taken reduction
32000 armor = -1600 phys damage taken + 35% phys damage taken reduction

If armor normally works by approximately removing 10% of armor in damage (its actually 1 per 12, but I'm keeping the numbers simple), then I'm halving that normal effect but adding in it's place a percent reduction.

Effectively we're making the small hits less useless and making the large hits less fatal.

A big goal here is to make 10k armor less laughable in comparison to lightning coil and other items for defense against the biggest hits that matter most. Balancing review of exact numbers still needed.

Lightning coil should now contain a mod similar to Acrobatics "40% Less Armor", such that lighting coil and IR aren't too OP in this new system.


Completely separate and optional, but I kinda think it would be funny if you had -1% max lightning resist per 5000 armor or similar.