Hey uh armor sucks

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The most interesting thing about the way armor works, for me, is GGG's conceptual justification for it.

Im sure some of you are familiar with the wrecking ball analogy they use/used(and no I cant be bothered to find the actual quote, but feel free to do it for me :D) but for those that are unfamiliar...

Basically, if you were hit with a recking ball IRL, whether you were wearing the Templar's toga or a full suit of plate armor, you're still gonna get rekt. So in the game, if you're hit with massive physical damage you get rekt no matter how much armor you stack.


Thats all well and good, a bit of RP that is kinda cool, kinda interesting, or would be if it was a constant within the game world. However, we have block.

Now theoretically it should function similarly to armor. In that, if you get hit with a recking ball IRL and try to block it with a shield, you're gonna get rekt, probably more than if you were wearing full plate. But in game, if you successfully block a huge physical hit the worst thing that is gonna happen is you get stunned, but you negate all damage regardless of the size or power.

Just some food for thought.

That's nothing; when you consider Unwavering Stance, if you block even the biggest boulders it doesn't even stop you for a millisecond. You've just become the unstoppable force. :p

"

My own personal conclusion from all of this is; scale the damage taken from large phys hits in the armor formula down a bit and apply the same formula to block, eliminate Block Chance and replace it with Block Proficiency. The more % Block Proficiency you stack the less damage you take on big hits when successfully blocked. Just off the top of my head, Im sure its quite flawed, interesting though.

I quite like this idea.

However, armour and block are not the problems. Evasion is still the elephant in the room here. The game is built around characters receiving certain amounts of damage. In order to make evasion "balanced" with armour, they've had to create a damage scale which basically allows the evasion player to survive whatever physical hit they take considering the "expected" life pool. In this paradigm, any more physical damage is the kind that is designed to out-right kill you and armour can never change that or it would make evasion into a mockery because your life would belong to the whims of RNGesus.

Thus armour is balanced against evasion and rendered gimpy, because let's face it, it's really silly to have a mechanic supposedly designed to increase your effective hit points when it's not actually allowed to increase your effective hit points.

More bosses should have block penetration.

It should be impossible to block something like the Vaal Smash.

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NeroNoah wrote:

More bosses should have block penetration.

It should be impossible to block something like the Vaal Smash.

Why on earth would you want to nerf block when your idea would do absolutely nothing against the even more egregious Immortal Call?

"

Im sure some of you are familiar with the wrecking ball analogy they use/used(and no I cant be bothered to find the actual quote, but feel free to do it for me :D) but for those that are unfamiliar...

Basically, if you were hit with a recking ball IRL, whether you were wearing the Templar's toga or a full suit of plate armor, you're still gonna get rekt. So in the game, if you're hit with massive physical damage you get rekt no matter how much armor you stack.

I feel the analogy falls apart even without the comparison point of block. The reason is that damage doesn't have a standard measure... which is a consequence of max health not having a constant value.

Here is a counter-analogy:
At level 5, getting hit by a wrecking ball is like 100 damage. At level 50, the wrecking ball is more like 1000 damage. The hit that does 100 damage does the same 100 damage to either character. But to one of them its like a wrecking ball, while the other its like a feathery touch.

Perhaps surprisingly, the amount of damage an attack does doesn't actually represent anything. Therefore there's no such thing as "wrecking ball damage."

"

NeroNoah wrote:

It should be impossible to block something like the Vaal Smash.

It used to be impossible once :)

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raics wrote:

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NeroNoah wrote:

It should be impossible to block something like the Vaal Smash.

It used to be impossible once :)

Used to? I quite recently (like in the last 2-3 weeks) face-tanked that boss on the maze map and managed to take no damage from those big smashes some of the time and getting one-shot whenever it seemed to connect.

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

I feel the analogy falls apart even without the comparison point of block. The reason is that damage doesn't have a standard measure... which is a consequence of max health not having a constant value.

Here is a counter-analogy:
At level 5, getting hit by a wrecking ball is like 100 damage. At level 50, the wrecking ball is more like 1000 damage. The hit that does 100 damage does the same 100 damage to either character. But to one of them its like a wrecking ball, while the other its like a feathery touch.

Perhaps surprisingly, the amount of damage an attack does doesn't actually represent anything. Therefore there's no such thing as "wrecking ball damage."

The measure of damage you take, in this context, is the armor formula which is a constant. A "wrecking ball" is a hit that exceeds the break point in the armor formula that results in diminishing returns.

"Damage" or a "wrecking ball" is the damage value the mob/mobs hit for, before any consideration of your characters defenses, not what ends up being taken from your health.

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Xarog wrote:

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raics wrote:

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NeroNoah wrote:

It should be impossible to block something like the Vaal Smash.

It used to be impossible once :)

Used to? I quite recently (like in the last 2-3 weeks) face-tanked that boss on the maze map and managed to take no damage from those big smashes some of the time and getting one-shot whenever it seemed to connect.

Yeah, his smash was changed from spell to attack in Vaal expansion. And it was much harder to get spell block during OB, for most chars it was impossible.

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raics wrote:

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CanHasPants wrote:

The reason IC "replaces" AR is because neither protect against really big hits (if CWDT) or requires ~str tree investment otherwise (if hard-cast). IC does not outright replace AR though, because a AR can protect against really big hits with sufficient investment, and hard-cast takes time (virtually no good str-accessible ICS), has a short duration without sufficient investment, and can be interrupted (by said really big hits).

Lightning coil protects against these big hits, as does AA/MoM.

None of the above pair well with AR; they pair much better with avoidance defenses--EV, block, and dodge. Any combination of these paired with any combination of IC, Lightning Coil, and/or AA/MoM, will be significantly better than anything one can do with armour.

Lightning Coil is the best thing for an AR char since sliced bread. It's calculated before mitigation so your armor value is compared to only 60% of incoming physical damage. So if you got a setup of lightning coil, high armor and 6+ endurance charges you can really go places even with big hits and if you also run AA (it's a bit unlikely to have both high AR and AA, though) you can be almost immune to small-medium physical hits.

Yeah, armor sucks enormous ass on its own but there are quite a few mechanics that directly synergize with it and can make it awesome. Evasion has no direct synergies whatsoever, every secondary defense method in the game works equally good for an evader as it does for a completely naked char.

I may well be wrong about Lightning Coil, and I certainly was wrong with my choice of words. What I meant is that anything that works well for AR, should theoretically work better for EV, maybe passive efficiency withstanding (e.g., you likely won't be running around with 6 EC as an EV character, certainly not 7 or 8).

In the case of LC, I didn't realize it chopped 40% off pre-AR calculation. AFAIK, AR was always calculated first, and the wording "taken as" reads to me as though you have to take the damage first, i.e., it had to go through armour first. Be that the case, that may change things regarding LC; I don't know off the top of my head ^-^

Most importantly, however, what do you mean by synergies? It seems abnormally vague in this application, because to me "not being hit" seems to synergize quite well with additional redundant avoidance mechanics and life regeneration and/or instant life recovery on hits (being an attack speed heavy portion of the tree) Any flat or percent mitigation on top of that would seem to synergize well with "not being hit"^3 as it allows regen/recovery more time to top you off before the next hit slips through, and raises the EHP threshold against one-shots.

AR on the other hand doesn't seem to have this synergy with life recovery as EV does, because AR is still constantly taking elemental damage--that is not a synergy, it's a necessity.

(Sorry if I'm babble-y or unclear, coffee is still brewing ^-^)

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Xarog wrote:

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NeroNoah wrote:

More bosses should have block penetration.

It should be impossible to block something like the Vaal Smash.

Why on earth would you want to nerf block when your idea would do absolutely nothing against the even more egregious Immortal Call?

Immortal Call will not help if it's not active first.