Required Armour for physical resist cap?

Armor is good vs low to moderate damage coming in quick succession.

Its still useful vs large hits, but your probably better stacking more life/ES instead of armour vs the big ones, or actual % reductions, which armor is not.

Layering defensives rather than trying to stack one specific thing to the exclusion of all others is a better way of doing things.

Even non-leg lightning coil should provide more protection against dominus slam than 20k armor so i'm just thinking redressing all my melees in coils investing points in life, evasion, resists and charges instead of armor. Will be interesting to check this on practice.

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Lorginir wrote:

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Zybeline2 wrote:

Armour has always been good. The graph I posted shows it clearly, and the numbers are easy to achieve if you are realisticly investing into armor. It's just that some players complain that "with 4k armor I get hit for so hard, can't do maps, blablabla". It is like any other defense, you need to invest in it to make it good. I do not understand why they keep complaning about a defense they did not invested in.

And how much you propose to invest into it? Mandatory IR? Take entire lower half of the tree? Buy mirror class gear? Obligatory Grace+Determination? You would've be surprised how much it takes to be 14k unflacked if you ever tried.

And armor wasn't 'always' good. It was good up to so,e point in original closed beta, patch 0.9.qq iirc when it was changed to what we have now. Current armor is never good, because it never gives you protection from damage spikes thus rendering main point of it as defense useless.

Sorry, I did a mistake, +defense from shield is additive with +global armor, updated accordingly. The number are a bit lower, but I also took low value for chest and shield, so overall it doesn't change what I wanted to demonstrate.

Ok, I'll have to show it again :

1k2 chest : 1-3chaos
250 gloves : 1c
250 boots : 1c
1k shield : 5c
400 helm : 1c
250 belt : 5c

total : 16c

Assuming you have +200% Increased armor from tree (please don't tell me it is too much investment, because IT ISN'T, its very little you can get this much increased armour with 50 points while getting a lot of other good stuff and keeping it efficient) and + 120% increased defense from shield you will get :

((1200 + 200 + 200 + 400 + 300) * 3) + (1000 * 4.2) = 11.1k for super budget, meaning only the tree is real investment. If you use determination it goes up to 16k. Using determination is the start of real investment.

If you pop granit, then it goes up to 26k without determination and 39k with determination.

30k armor will reduce a 3k hit by 50%, making it do 1500 damage.

All this is without taking into account endurance charges that, as a melee, you should always keep up, and fortity.

WIth fortify and 4 endurance charges you would end up taking 800 damage (3000 with 50+16 % reduction)*(20% fortify).

So yes, armor is very good with a smart investment, and it is also very good against large hits.

This armor building strategy is totally dependent on that 2200 base AR chunk from shield.

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tm10067 wrote:

This armor building strategy is totally dependent on that 2200 base AR chunk from shield.

If you read carefuly what I wrote you would have seen that the base armour of the shield is 1000 and that with a few + shield defense from tree you get it to 2200. There are shield with 2k+ armor, making them 5k, 6k armor with this bonus.

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Zybeline2 wrote:

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tm10067 wrote:

This armor building strategy is totally dependent on that 2200 base AR chunk from shield.

If you read carefuly what I wrote you would have seen that the base armour of the shield is 1000 and that with a few + shield defense from tree you get it to 2200. There are shield with 2k+ armor, making them 5k, 6k armor with this bonus.

But its still a shield with 1200 AR, which means that the total AR will be cut in half if you decide to use 2H or less efficient unique shield for some reason. Also it will be a challenge to build up good DPS with just 1H and a considerable investment in armor and shield nodes. I only can guess catalyst or some leg soultaker for this purpose.

Yes this is true, but by going 2h you not only sacrifice armor, but you also sacrifice most of the time block, hp, evasion, resists, etc... You sacrifice overall defense for damage, it is not anymore about armor, it is a gameplay choice. But it is possible to get those same number with a 2h, but it will need a bit more investment in gear and tree. I took very low value in my demonstration, so it should be too hard to get that high.

But keep in mind that the best way to stack defense in poe is to invest into at least 2 kind of defense, like block + armor, or dodge + eva, or block + es, mobility, range etc...

With facebreaker you can do 50k+ dps while having 40k armor.

The big downside of going armor is that it is harder to go crit (due to its placement on the tree), but its still possible. Dps should not be a problem if you have an efficient pathing for the tree, some jewels and average gear.

The only viable way to build good AR for 2H is through IR/Grace up to my mind, because flat chunks of armor require too much % investment on the tree to compensate.

But my point is still that with the current armor system its more rewarding to grab some plain phys % reduction stuff and not to invest too much in the armor, taking HP, evasion or block instead.

Flat physical reduction coupled with some armor is very strong indeed. For people wondering why here is the demonstration : you add the flat reduction after the calculation of effectiveness of armor, so if you have 50% reduced damage from armor for a specified hit, then you add your %flat reduction, and it can go up to 36 % if I am not mistaken (7 endurance charge, notable + golem = 9*4=36) making it a 50% + 36% = 86% damage reduction


In the fast tree I did, I could get 272% increased armor and 130% shield defense, 12% block, 80% life, and other bonuses with ~50 points, leaving 50 other for a lvl 80 build to get some more life and damage. I am sure it was not optimised at all, I did it fast on my phone to see how much armor I could get with half the points of a build.

In the current stat of the game you can get a lot of damage without investing too much in the tree, leaving the possibility to get more defense. I think a vast majority of players got used to invest the majority of their skill points into dps to get a decent tooltip. But you do not need this anymore, you can invest less and have more dps. This leaves the possibility to get a lot more defense while retaining the same or more dps.

The meta is not yet established. I'm sure armor will have a place in it, its too good on paper and its a passive defense mechanic.