Armor is bad, and it should feel bad.

"

FacetiousTomato wrote:

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.