Hey uh armor sucks

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Peterlerock wrote:

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.

The problem is that stacking armor is a humongous investment in terms of passive points, items and such; and IC, Lightning Coil/Cloak of Flame, etc, require virtually *no* investment, and completely blow it out of the water.

If I dump half my tree into armor I should be tankier than someone with 0 armor, but these items create a number of cases where the reverse is true.

As I said:
Stacking up Armor is bullshit.
Stacking up only Evasion is bullshit, too.

Why should someone want to "dump half the tree into armor"?
It obviously doesn't help, it isn't meant to help.

All those complaints about Armor seem to come from people who think "if I invest enough into armor, I deserve some payback for my investment".
No, you don't.
You made a stupid tree if you "dumped half the tree into armor". Better luck next time.

None of the things in my list stand in the way of armor.

You can build for armor and still have MoM. Still wear LC. Still use Block. IC. Even Dodge.
You can have serious armor rating without any passive investment, just ith gear, two auras and a granite of iron skin.

One single line of defense is not supposed to work in this game, no matter how much you invested into it.

CWDT EC IC made evasion based chars more attractive. And the fact that you get equally 1-shot without armor and with it.

The thing is that, armor has nothing else to give besides physical reduction on small hits.

ES is a life pool bis, with built-in 50% stun avoidance (and you can go to a sizeable amount of ES).
Evasion allows you to well, evade the added elemental damage of attackers, and makes you virtually immune to crits from monsters.

Also evasion, ES and block nodes have a noticeable effect as soon as you take them (smaller for evasion i agree) making them worth it to invest in them, armor nodes could pretty much be nonexistant because you can have 0 or 10 000 armor it doesn't matter when you need it.

And finally, CWDT+EC+IC makes armor by itself totally obsoloete with total immunity to physical. And you can make it permanent if you really want it.

It was just about 8 months ago when people were arguing evasion was useless and armor was the best form of defense. Nothing has changed with these 2 so why all of a sudden are people saying armor sucks?

Also don't forget the obscene amounts of armor you can get with Iron Reflexes and abusing both Grace + Determination or Jade + Granite Flasks. You can easily get a ton of armor just with the Jade + Granite flask combo with IR. Evasion users cannot do this.

People complaining about evasion + block as if block is exclusive to evasion users - any armor user can use max block builds, and there are many Aegis Aurora max block builds.

Also in regards to uniques, the majority of the strong unique chests are hybrid AR/EV - so they are optimized for Iron Reflexes builds. I'm talking about Lightning Coil, Cherrubim's Maleficence, Daresso's Defiance, Bringer of Rain.

Let's face it, armor is way more popular than evasion and gets so much more attention from supporters. I have yet to see any supporter make a strong end-game evasion unique, the closest we have got is Atziri's Step which was designed by GGG.

CWDT+EC+IC does not really benefit evasion users. Evasion is entropy based so if I get hit I am guaranteed at least a few subsequent hits will miss. There is hardly any point at all to proc EC+IC AFTER I get hit. CWDT+EC+IC was obviously meant for armor users (that take continuous hits) to help them mitigate more damage.

This combo synergizes very well with armor mechanic, Arctic Armor, Molten Shell (hmm why is there no active skill yet to help evasion users?). On top of that all the Endurance Charges are on the armor side of the tree.

So armor has more options to boost its defense through flasks and auras, has more end-game uniques than evasion, has active skills (Molten Shell, Arctic Armor), synergizes better with CWDT, and has better access to Endurance Charges than evasion or ES builds. But here we are saying armor sucks?

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It's pretty terrible in my opinion anyway.

I might agree that armor sucks actually, but relative to the other defensive options (EV and ES) it is the superior choice. ES is arguable but it gets stunned frozen shocked punctured and ignited for stupid damage and lengths of time, and EV is completely bypassed by several mechanics and so is simply inferior.

Armor is, in fact, the only defensive option that always reduces the type of damage it was meant to reduce while simultaneously reducing effects of those hits (puncture etc).

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Ceryneian wrote:

It was just about 8 months ago when people were arguing evasion was useless and armor was the best form of defense. Nothing has changed with these 2 so why all of a sudden are people saying armor sucks?

Because they're wrong :P But your analysis is correct, everything in the game synergizes better with armor, even if armor itself weren't already a superior choice in 99% of scenarios. There were actually some people who were saying armor sucks then too, it's just that those people were misinformed.

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Legatus1982 wrote:

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Ceryneian wrote:

It was just about 8 months ago when people were arguing evasion was useless and armor was the best form of defense. Nothing has changed with these 2 so why all of a sudden are people saying armor sucks?

Because they're wrong :P But your analysis is correct, everything in the game synergizes better with armor, even if armor itself weren't already a superior choice in 99% of scenarios. There were actually some people who were saying armor sucks then too, it's just that those people were misinformed.

Armour sucks because it, well, sucks. It's too weak and underpowered, and constant buffs to other defensive mechanics only make armour worse.

Evasion gets better with tree changes, that allow to pick much more evasion nodes (due to them being hybrid) than before. Changes to life regen on tree (str area only) make str-armour-build with VP suffer.

New ultra-powerful bow skill (Tornado Shot) made bow builds very popular, and standard bow build is evasion one. Atziri's Step, Vaal Grace, Rat's Nest only add value to evasion builds.

And list of changes goes on....

saddest part about armor is that the best way to gain a lot is to stack a ton of evasion

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Ceryneian wrote:

It was just about 8 months ago when people were arguing evasion was useless and armor was the best form of defense. Nothing has changed with these 2 so why all of a sudden are people saying armor sucks?

I'll repost from somewhere else

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I really hope chris isn't this naive to believe there hasn't been anything changed.

For one, endgame phys damage has been buffed a point where unless you invest HEAVILY into armour, you won't be mitigating shit. It's just way better to be able to avoid the damage altogether with just a handful of nodes worth investment (running grace, ondars, acro is literally all you need to be quite tanky with evasion). And if that's not enough mitigation for you, lightning coil and/or cwdt+IC make phys damage a complete non-issue. Not only is phys damage a non-issue, but evasion marginalizes pretty much all mob offense other than spell casters, to which evasion also gets mitigation through phase acro. There's also the fact that the right side of the tree is the area with all the crit nodes, which happens to be the home of evasion. On top of all this, you could pick up block with all the nodes you don't need spend on evasion and be nigh unhittable. And if you're in the areas where it's absolutely vital to avoid phys damage, the three generals for instance, you just run an IC setup with an extra endurance charge on a shitty belt and still get 7 seconds of phys immunity for no passive investment.

To put it into perspective, armor has the same formula way back when 4k life was only achievable through Kaoms. The endgame monster damage has increased, the player health pools have increased, but armor is the same as it was when monsters were tuned to hitting players with 3k life and no other layers of defense.

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Sa_Re wrote:

Evasion never sucked

XDDDDDDDD good joke

@OP: Gratz on waking up to what everyone already knows. *claps* But hey what am I expecting from someone who doesnt think RMT is disgustingly rampant in this game and that all streamers who are stinking rich in a new league in less than a week and just generally everyone with 1000 exalt in his stash is legit LOL.

Many suggestions to how the formula can be tweaked to make it slightly more effective, including my own - simple and effective ones, have been given. But GGG loves to leave it at path of oneshots so that the elitist 500exalt item rmt/jsp centric economy model can flourish.