Hey uh armor sucks

It's pretty terrible in my opinion anyway.

Considering you can get perma immortal call I don't see why you need armor anyway.

Domination days: I use to think armor is overall mitigation across all types of phys damage so I relied on it and get just the right amount of hp. Then they said, it doesn't do shit against big hits/crit strikes so its all in your HP, later on they nerfed %hp... wtf.. Welp, pure evade or ES build it is then :D

I still remember times when most of the people went for IR.

fun fact:

nothing changed regarding armor/ev mechanic in like a year

year ago:

IR is THE way to go scrub

now:

armor sucks

it seems that some people really didnt know what were they saying. do they know now or if they are spreading another 'theory' around? not surprising given that most copy builds from others not thinking for a second on whats and whys

@sidtherat:

Nothing changed directly but cdwt+IC and coil were introduced. Both do a better job vs. phys than armor.

Evasion never sucked, it just had no convenient tools to deal with phys spells. Again, cwdt+IC and coil changed this.

check build guides, streamers and in general what the 'loud' people have been saying long after CWDT/coil got introduced - "IR or GTFO"

EV has always been the best "core defense," old pre-"life2.0" CI withstanding (because after that ES ceased to be a core defense, imo, in the same way life is not a "defense," but the value "defenses" protect). AR has always been a tad underwhelming except to compensate for EV's deficiencies. It always amused me that people would turn their strong defense into a much more limited one.

The problem is the scope. AR mitigates against far too few types of damage and for far too great of a cost (perhaps less so now, the latter, with hybrid nodes). If AR also mitigated damage converted from phys (i.e., the elemental portion of an attack) then it'd be a different story. It'd be on par with the scope of mitigation provided from EV.

Also, some sort of Templar notable that allows a percent efficiency of AR versus spell elemental damage while you have some threshold of ES, to breathe some life into AR/ES.

IMO, the problem is not IW or Lightning Coil (or AA/MoM), it's that AR does far too little to be an alternative to these.

Armor is not a viable single line of defense against any damage.
But neither are Evasion or ES.

Armor provides very reliable comfortable mitigation against all sorts of "normal" monsters with physical damage.
And if you stack it, it also helps quite a bit against bigger hits.

Against really seriously big hits, you are supposed to stack another defense on top of it, be it IC, Lightning Coil, Flasks, manual dodging, Block, MoM or whatever.

People seem to care only about late-lategame these days.
And not only this, they also want it to be a smooth-sailing, comfortable farming experience.
That content is supposed to be hard, so monsters are supposed to hit hard and kill you.