[New Support Gem] Armour Penetration

Yet another extra melee gem? wtb 8 link...

+1

I like the changes and agree. Time to add this gem GGG! Sounds perfect for 1h/dw builds to me, would balance things out a good bit. Its still good for 2h's as well, so I don't see a downside really, would add more melee flavor.

that would be awsome for build that want to go fast attacks and physical damage!

just like kripp mentioned in one of his last vids fast attacks are for ele dmg only but this could change things

I'm not really convinced that something like this is needed. Armor already scales down in effectiveness with more damage, and I seriously doubt most monsters have anywhere near enough physical mitigation from armor for it to be worth reducing (in comparison with how common it is for monsters to have high elemental resistances), except for special monsters with "reduced physical damage taken".

The obvious solution to bypassing monster armor is to do more damage.

And anyway, the mechanic for this doesn't really exist in the game yet, I think. Pentration as its implemented is a reduction of the effective resistance to an element, and since there's no such thing as "physical resistance", there's really nothing to penetrate. You'd have to change the armor mechanic for this one gem.

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realatomicpanda wrote:

I'm not really convinced that something like this is needed. Armor already scales down in effectiveness with more damage, and I seriously doubt most monsters have anywhere near enough physical mitigation from armor for it to be worth reducing (in comparison with how common it is for monsters to have high elemental resistances), except for special monsters with "reduced physical damage taken".

The obvious solution to bypassing monster armor is to do more damage.

Technically, no additional support gems are needed. The game could exist without any further additions.

However, this gem is cool because it gives an alternative to the standard way to bypass armour. The standard method perfers strong hits, the stronger the better, which in general encourages the "big heavy mace" style. This gem is more tailored to the "thousand tiny daggers" style, thus making physical damage relevant on those damage types.

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realatomicpanda wrote:

And anyway, the mechanic for this doesn't really exist in the game yet, I think. Pentration as its implemented is a reduction of the effective resistance to an element, and since there's no such thing as "physical resistance", there's really nothing to penetrate. You'd have to change the armor mechanic for this one gem.

You're wrong, it does exist. Each endurance charge adds a flat 5% physical resistance in addition to the physical resistance you get from the armour formula. You can think of this support gem as negative endurance charges.

Well, I don't know. Most people already feel that the problem with melee physical builds isn't so much that they lack damage as that they lack survivability and are very vulnerable to reflect. Support gem sockets are so valuable and having another one that is essentially "make me do a bit more physical damage" doesn't solve any fundamental problems.

Even the thousand tiny daggers style is already viable as made clear by invalesco's crit dagger build, and it's clear that the solution to inherently low damage lies in crit stacking, something that's already well supported and has benefits that extend beyond simple armor penetration.

It's not that i'm 100% opposed to it but sometimes adding new support gems that don't provide any kind of utility or enable any new builds just ends up in people saying "well, that's a cool addition, but we already have things that work better." It's like, people wanted a new melee skill, so they added cyclone. It seemed neat to provide a new active melee skill to use and provide people with more options, but it's inferior to most of the melee active skills that are already in the game while putting the player in greater danger and being far more susceptible to desync, so there's just no reason to ever use it over something like ground slam.

Crit stacking works great for Shadows, and I agree they don't need that much support. However, I wasn't being that literal about the daggers thing; this is more for melee Rangers/Duelists than anyone else, including those that decide to combine Attack Speed with Resolute Technique.

In principle it is a good try to fix the physical damage lack in the game. However, the proposal really breaks the underlying armor mechanic and that Physical damage reduction contrary to elemental must always be between (0% and 90%).

Basically OP wants a similar mechanic for physical damage as that of elemental damage...which in my opinion is just dumbing down the damage mechanics in the game.

Physical damage with the associated support skills should be enough and should also be higher than elemental damage, this is what we as players should argue for. I think GGG is already taking steps into fixing that in their announced overhaul of damage type. I prefer such an overhaul to having to use a precious gem slot.

In addition to the above, there is an underlying consistency in the game that players and monsters have access to the same spells and buffs...I for one wouldn't like to see monsters applying armor penetration on me :-).

+1 on this and id like to see something like this as passive nodes in the near vicinity of templars/marauders/duelists