Question about armour and percentage based mitigation

As most of us know, armour's reduction of damage scales poorly against larger hits, with harder hitting attacks mostly ignoring smaller armour values (according to the wiki). I was just wondering if anybody knows for certain if armour protects against damage rolls before or after percentage based mitigation (like endurance charges and basalt flasks) takes effect. If the damage is reduced by a percentage first then surely smaller amounts of armour will hold up better?

Thanks in advance

In this link you can see the Order of Operations:

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Receiving_damage

Armour is in the same order as basalt and endurance charges. If you cant stack 30k+ armour from somehwere for free without speccing nodes you are better off stacking endurance charges and basalt flask.

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WTB_A_Reason_To_Live wrote:

if armour protects against damage rolls before or after percentage based mitigation (like endurance charges and basalt flasks)

Thanks in advance

During, as it is additive. The difference is that reduced phys damage taken doesn't care how big the hit is - it's always the same. This is the armor calc i sometimes look at for reference. Not sure if formulas got changed much since

Armour calculation happens "at the same time" as Physical Damage Reduction % calculation (because it contributes to PDR%). You can think of it as calculating before PDR%. But don't let this fool you into thinking that mixing Armour and PDR% is bad. Quite the opposite, due to mathematical reality. Reductions in rate have increasing proportional returns on amount asymptotically towards infinity, which is a bunch of words I made up to explain the fact that each 1% stackable damage reduction you get increases the defensive power of the next 1%. This is the same thing that makes "+x% maximum resistance" so low in value yet so powerful - going from 75% resist to 76% results in damage taken from 25% to 24%, which is 4% less, not 1%.

More relevant: "damage taken as" physical => Elemental has the effect you're looking for, which is one reason why Lightning Coil had its time in the spotlight for a short while and why people get excited about x% of physical taken as fire.

I can also walk you through the logic of why changing physical damage taken to elemental damage taken is generally an increase in defence but I think it's a fun one to puzzle out on your own.