Armor is bad, and it should feel bad.

Hi all

So my first character was a Marauder, and I can't imagine playing anything other than a Blood Magic (health as a resource) build.

I know melee is inherently less safe than ranged, because you're putting yourself right next to the monster, which makes dodging mechanics more difficult (at best) or impossible (at worst) and so I've been building 100% tanky. My elemental resists are all between 76-80% and while my chaos resist is -%60, I can just play carefully if they do chaos damage.

What am I complaining about? Armor is garbage. It feels weird playing a purely armor based character who finds killing physical monsters so difficult, and ranged magical monsters so easy. I can ignore any magical boss mechanic at least once, and most for the entire fight. Meanwhile any given pack of trash mobs has a really good chance of killing me, provided they do physical damage.

From a mechanics perspective, sustained damage really isn't dangerous at all in this game because healing is so easy to get (I regen ~5% of my life each second) and escape is so easy. Okay, so the game needs to have high burst in order to be challenging. But with the armor mechanic how it is, you can protect yourself from magical burst (resists stack really nicely) but armor is useless against physical damage.

The mechanics behind armor (the more damage they deal the less % of it you reduce) means that it can't protect you from big hits, and when big hits are what kills you, that is a problem.

I feel like the big issue with melee in this game is that the damage they can usually/often avoid (many spells can be dodged) can be reduced, but that the damage they can't avoid (good luck never getting hit in melee when you can only deal damage in melee) really can't be properly mitigated.

Switch it around! Make it so that resists are less useful, so all characters, ranged and melee alike, need to be on their toes, then make armor actually GOOD, so that armor characters can actually melee.

/rant



tldr - fix melee by buffing armor.


EDIT 1- I don't think people are understanding that damage reduction from armor isn't linear, it is based on the damage you take. Lets say you have 5k life, and are fighting a monster that does 4999 physical damage each hit. No matter how much armor and endurance charges you have, you're going to die in two shots, someone with 100 armor and someone with 5k armor + 7 charges are BOTH going to die in two hits.

That isn't the case with magic. A 5k hit on a naked target will one shot them. A target with 80% resists will take five hits. Essentially, stacking armor is poop.

Here is a spreadsheet with some info about "hits to die".
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Am6TRSFYA1tTdFJIY2pOc3pMN3VoM2d1Tk82ZTc1a1E&usp=sharing

Edit 2- Some people are saying that a buff to armor would also be a buff to ranged classes, which is technically true. However, the way I see it, if you're stacking armor, you should see physical damage as less of a threat. This should be true for both melee and ranged. It is less essential for ranged however, because by nature they will take less physical damage (from being far away) than a melee class will.

If armor gets buffed, will ranged classes stack it? Yes. But they'll sacrifice some clear speed in doing so, which will bring them down closer to melee.

Edit 3- The armor you see in your character sheet is based around taking a hit of a specific amount of damage. The damage reduction in normal mode feels about on par. In merciless, it is waaaaay off. With a granite flask on, my lists 90% damage reduction and brutus still hits me for ~65% of my life. Without it on, it lists ~30%, and he hits me for around 70% of my life. If you're wondering how useful armor is, check the spreadsheet I linked.

Edit 4- Wow, thread still alive! Unfortunately my marauder is not. RIP level 61, died to chain flicker strike crits (physical damage) while +100% granite and 6 charges up. Guess I should have played better. 80% resists made magical enemies a joke, while roughly 14-16k armor and another -30% physical still resulted in a death. Why? Because big crits can't be mitigated by armor.




I've taken a break from melee at this point. I'm hoping with the duelist changes and the promised melee fixes that melee will be more fun/viable. Personally I think the big change needs to come through giving melee specs more armor, and making armor more viable, but what do I know?

How many Endurance charges do you fight with? Are you drinking Granites whenever you try to tank a strong melee monster?

I'm sceptical about Blood Magic, to be honest. It pretty much nixes Determination, which makes a huge difference to how much Armour you can muster.

The ladder seems to indicate that melee are not at a disadvantage.

"

Incompetent wrote:

How many Endurance charges do you fight with? Are you drinking Granites whenever you try to tank a strong melee monster?

As of now, I usually have 3 endurance charges up, and use a +100% armor granite flask against anything physical whenever possible.

My problem is that if you're taking a big hit, say 6000 damage, you can reduce that to 1200 damage through magic resists. To even reduce it to 3000, you need to have like 20k armor, which isn't (am I wrong?) possible.

"

FacetiousTomato wrote:

"

Incompetent wrote:

How many Endurance charges do you fight with? Are you drinking Granites whenever you try to tank a strong melee monster?

As of now, I usually have 3 endurance charges up, and use a +100% armor granite flask against anything physical whenever possible.

My problem is that if you're taking a big hit, say 6000 damage, you can reduce that to 1200 damage through magic resists. To even reduce it to 3000, you need to have like 20k armor, which isn't (am I wrong?) possible.

6k per hit is pretty extreme though - the white trash mobs you say you're having trouble with can't be doing anywhere near that. 20k Armour with flasks is definitely possible from what I've heard.

As a tanky Marauder, there ought to be room in your build for at least 2 Endurance charges from passives, plus Oak's reward on Merciless. That takes you up to 6 charges, i.e. 30% reduction on top of whatever Armour gives you.

"

Kerchunk wrote:

The ladder seems to indicate that melee are not at a disadvantage.

There is no true melee in the top 20 of the ladder.

Ground Slam doesn't count, EK doesn't count, Lightning Strike doesn't count.

All "melee"s in the top of the ladder are all just ranged skill spammers.

melee is terrible.

only way to go is ranged

"

There is no true melee in the top 20 of the ladder.

Ground Slam doesn't count, EK doesn't count, Lightning Strike doesn't count.

So what counts? Heavy Strike spam? What a silly thread.

My tank-built Dualist (Build: Current | Planned) is currently having a tough time surviving in Cruel Act 2. Here are my stats: pitiful offense and should-be-awesome defense.

I have to agree that it's physical damage mobs that are always the biggest threat. I think the problem is this mechanic where heavy hits diminish the effectiveness of armor. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but I think "heavy hitter" describes about 90% of the physical damage enemies in this game. I just got done killing Great White Beast in Cruel and he was capable of taking off 30-50% of my HP even with that physical damage resistance and an additional 15% from 3 Endurance Charges. So like 87% physical damage reduction. And it was close, I almost ran out of potions. I have some nice gear with a lot of evasion (which gets turned into armor) coming up in a couple of levels, but how big of a difference could it make if I already have so much damage reduction and it's not doing it for me?

Edit: Yeah, and Cruel Brutus and Merveil weren't tankable for me. I threw fire traps under them (my main source of AoE damage, usually I sit in the fire while tanking groups) and then I'd repeatedly dodge their ranged attacks and immediately shield bash them and back off hit-and-run-style. Hardly melee, but it gets the job done and I take very little damage doing it. Same method I have to use to take down Vaal Oversoul and that stupidly overpowered Brutus clone in Lunaris.

Edit: Another problem is Leech, which seems to be ridiculously ineffective compared to Life on Hit and especially Regen.

"

Kerchunk wrote:

"

There is no true melee in the top 20 of the ladder.

Ground Slam doesn't count, EK doesn't count, Lightning Strike doesn't count.

So what counts? Heavy Strike spam? What a silly thread.

Cleave and sweep.