Elites with crit: A no no

I've found this thread very educational. As a relatively new player, I tend to agree with Imbalanxd here:

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Imbalanxd wrote:

they need to increase the effectiveness of armour.

Armour doesn't seem that effective. I find myself avoiding high Armour gear in favour high ES and Life. Based on this thread, it appears Armour's current effect is by design so I must be doing something right! However, it is disappointing that Armour isn't more helpful.

With 16000 armour starting with 700HP, every 50 extra HP (or ES) gets you 65 points more damage resistance. whereas if you fix HP at 700, increasing armour by 50 points to 16050 only gets you 1.5 points more damage resistance.

So it's HP+ES all the way for big hitters I guess. Maybe armour is more helpful resisting minion/mob damage? At this point in the discussion, I may never bother with enough armour to find out! :P


Apart from that, I also agree with Imbalanxed that stats like Evasion are not a counter to this game design choice because they still leave you with a chance that a critical hit will land at full force, wiping out a High-armour-low-HPES build.

Having agreed with some of Imbalanxed points, I am however more inclined to accept that Armour isn't designed to be useful against heavy hitters in PoE and move on. I'll continue to question why Armour has been set up this way but hopefully it will become clear the more I play PoE and read the forums.

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With 16000 armour starting with 700HP, every 50 extra HP (or ES) gets you 65 points more damage resistance. whereas if you fix HP at 700, increasing armour by 50 points to 16050 only gets you 1.5 points more damage resistance.

You can't compare different armour values in terms of DR gain, you have to look at effective health. Look at it this way: how strong is a gain of 1.5% DR? It depends on context. Did you start at 80% or 40%? Talking about some arbitrary percent reduction gain is meaningless without a context; EH is an absolute scale, not dependent on context, much easier to talk about.

Effective health is actually meaningful under this armour system, even though some people in this thread have claimed otherwise. You just have to pick a useful frame of reference, IE - the amount of damage that a champion in your current content does. That can be a little tricky because you don't actually have an easy way to find out how hard mobs hit; you only see the reduced amount of damage you take. If you're clever, though, you can figure it out anyway.

The way you're describing it, armour gets less and less valuable as you stack more of it. This couldn't be further from the truth. Without endurance, armour provides linear gains to EH. With endurance, armour provides an increasing hyperbolic gain to EH. IE - in an armour build, with the proper skill and passive choices (heavy endurance focus) - armour grants profoundly increasing returns as your armour value gets reasonably high.

The very confusing part about all of this is the changing context. Sometimes you meet a bigger mob that hits harder and pierces your carefully planned defense. So how much armour do you actually need? That question is answerable, but not easily. I personally can say from experience, though, that builds stacking armour bonuses can be rock solid even against the largest hits in the game. That's thanks to the way granite flasks and determination work right now.

Looking at reduction most people will conclude that armour has diminishing returns. It's the wrong frame of reference. I've done the detailed math on this, but that doesn't usually convince anyone. Go ask Kripp, I believe he's explained it a few times in other games. Maybe he'd explain it again for PoE -- PoE's armour equation behaves almost like D3's, with just two very significant differences.

Taking into account the notion that armour and evasion are "supportive" defensive stats, here are some problems I perceive.

First of all, why? Armour and evasion tanks have always been a staple choice in RPGs like POE. Health stacking is simply put, boring, and represents the simplest and most brute force solution to the problem of taking damage. In a system such as this, health stops being a choice and becomes a prerequisite.

Furthermore, for a "supportive" stat, it doesn't seem to really support anything. There's no scaling to speak of. 70% reduction doesn't become more reduction with more health. You are probably better off just getting more health rather than any armour or evasion at all (which I think is what most people are doing). The effectiveness of health does not decrease the bigger hits you take, and as far as I can tell, bosses in this game only hit hard, so what use is armour ever?

Next is the imbalance of energy shield. The pattern says that evasion is the dexterity equivalent of armour which is the strength equivalent of energy shield. If evasion and armour aren't worth stacking, then why is energy shield? Why does energy shield get to be a pseudo health pool stat while armour and evasion do not? I think the issue with this inconsistency is already abundantly obvious with all the 10hp, 10000 energy shield builds running around. I've never seen a 10hp, 10000 armour build running around. Oh wait, yes I have, its mine, and it doesn't work.

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about imbalance in the sense that one player has an advantage over another. I'm talking about build viability. If one stat is even slightly, provably better than the others, then all subsequent builds will naturally gravitate towards it. This is death for a game like this, which relies heavily on diversity to create an enjoyable gaming experience.

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Imbalanxd wrote:

First of all, why?

It's pretty central to how all mobs are balanced in PoE. No one defensive system covers everything. That's hugely different than other games in this genre, that have simple defensive systems. PoE has defensive systems that interact in complex ways.

For any given defense, you have to ask yourself, "what does it protect me against?"

...........| Physical
Atk--->| Elemental
...........| Chaos
--------
..........| Physical
Spell->| Elemental
..........| Chaos

Evasion: Atk Physi, Ele, Chaos.
Armour: Atk Physi, Spell Physi.
ES: Atk Physi, Ele; Spell Physi, Ele.
Life: All, with a huge drawback: stacking life doesn't directly improve your recovery; all other defensive systems do. That's a profound disadvantage.
Regen: Again, all, but on the flip side modifies life to improve recovery slightly.

This isn't D3 where you only need two defensive stats because you only have two damage categories. It's much more complicated here. You have to plug all those holes with something. (kek)

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Zakaluka wrote:

It's pretty central to how all mobs are balanced in PoE. No one defensive system covers everything.

Why are so many people running around with incredibly low health (like sub 200), no evasion or armour, and huge energy shield pools?

I accept that in theory no one defensive stat should cover everything, but at the moment, in practice, that just isn't how its working.

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Imbalanxd wrote:

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Zakaluka wrote:

It's pretty central to how all mobs are balanced in PoE. No one defensive system covers everything.

Why are so many people running around with incredibly low health (like sub 200), no evasion or armour, and huge energy shield pools?

I accept that in theory no one defensive stat should cover everything, but at the moment, in practice, that just isn't how its working.

I know the reason why i see so many people with huge ES pools is because of CI. and I do have to agree with a past statement you made, I too feel that armor and evasion are lacking in comparison to health nodes or ES nodes.

Sometimes it feels (math aside for now) that total life gained in health nodes exceeds total dmg mitigate in armor and evasion.

All I can say is, if you run around with 800 life and 3k ES you're doing it wrong. One PA is going to demolish you instantly. So I think you're exaggerating, nobody actually does that.

Everyone will take CI with that kind of itemization, and CI is the only build out there that allows one defensive stat to address every source of damage.

Might be considered OP? "required" nodes have a history of taking substantial nerfs.

You can easily have 7k+ energy shield without getting chaos inoculation. grab CI, and you have over 12k.
The only weakness that a CI build has is getting stun locked because their effective HP used for calculating stun chance is so low, and even then having ES give you a 50% chance to ignore stunning.

I dunno. I don't understand how the defense situation got so far.

Edit: I just realized I'm feeding a tangent, oops

I personally ran into a 'how-was-I-supposed-to-know-that' build breaker on my first guy.
Turns out blood magic will reset the timer on energy shield.
There goes my 10 aura marauder.

I already explained why armor works the way it is.
again, think about that; who has more chance to survive in a explosion; a big guy with a strong body, trained and prepared, in perfect health, but with a normal armor, or a skinny, non-trained, unhealthy guy, wearing an armor thick as a wall?(how can he even walk with it lolz)
Thats obvious.
You need to think about it guys.






On the other hand, speaking of gameplay, yea it is a little boring; it's a mandatory request to stack life/es, and classes like duelist and templar wich are hybrid don't go well.
All the shadows just go CI or full hp; I really want to see the day some1 does a evasion/es/hp hybrid.

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kadrek91 wrote:

I already explained why armor works the way it is.
again, think about that; who has more chance to survive in a explosion; a big guy with a strong body, trained and prepared, in perfect health, but with a normal armor, or a skinny, non-trained, unhealthy guy, wearing an armor thick as a wall?(how can he even walk with it lolz)
Thats obvious.

I think you need to pick a better metaphor.
I'd put my money on the sickly kid surviving.

A better metaphor would be to compare it to those same two people getting stabbed repeatedly with a sharp wooden stick or getting shot with a high power rail gun.

Armored weakling is like to not even notice the stick, since it glances off the epic armor, whereas the buff dude has a bunch of stab wounds.

The rifle, assuming it goes straight through both people, will probably kill them both. but the buff dude might survive by stint of being healthier and able to recover from the massive trauma and bloodloss.