I feel like stacking HP is the best way to go...

I am okay with the HP stacking requirement. As you lvl up in other games your HP goes up naturally. Here, while do get tiny HP adjustments just from lvling up, a lot of the HP upgrades falls on the player.

As for Armor/Evasion. I would imagine that it would be necessary for melee characters, but for ranged characters it is absolutely unnecessary because if you really know what you are doing you will never get hit by melee and only occasionally get hit by projectiles. There are few circumstances where you will face flicker or leap mobs but you can pot spam out of the one or two hits you get.

ES is just as effective as HP for ranged characters.

evasion will always be sketchy because even with 90% dodge chance youre going to get unlucky at some point.

Eventually, better items will come and then you can spec away from life and into damage. Save your regrets.

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CrystalisQualinthi wrote:

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amnes wrote:

Completely agreed.
The current damage reduction formula is: armor / (armor + damage * 12), which is insanely ridiculous. The rational formula IMO is: armor / (armor + damage)
I hope the developers stop saying they are a small team as an excuse. Fixing this broken formula can't be more easy.

What if the problem is that they don't think of it as broken? Perhaps they ascribe to the GURPS (I think this is the system that did it this way, don't crucify me, it's 4am in a 12 hour nightshift here) theory of armor? Basically armor in that system soaked a specific amount of damage, period. So even the toughest armor would only soak X damage each time, with X being a static number. Against small hitters, this made it to where half the time you'd get hit and not feel it. I can see a *somewhat* of a rationalization to this way of thinking about armor, as the armor is a static piece of something, with a static thickness/magic defense.

However, that being said, they may need to adjust the formula slightly as mobs that hit like trucks essentially ignore armor for all intents and purposes. If they want you to have to learn those mob's patterns and 'duck and weave' instead of stand up and tank it, they need to state this.

No matter they think it's broken or not, it's broken indeed. By this kind of formula, armor has completely become pointless in this game because players with heavy armor get almost no damage reduction as naked in Merciless but still get heavy armor penalty unless they spend 1 passive point on Armor Master node, not to mention that all the passive points put on armor buff nodes are totally wasted.
If they REALLY want you to have to learn those mob's patterns and 'duck and weave' instead of stand up and tank it, then they shouldn't make anything about heavy armor in the first place.

And dont get me started on +HP on gear

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Archfiend wrote:

And dont get me started on +HP on gear

People get moist just thinking of those rolls ;)


I think no more nerfing, in general should be a goal for the dev's the game is solid people like it but you have to pay some sort of attn when your playerbase has yelped for months your defenses are broken, it's like Brinks security calling you after people have come in and ass raped you to "check on your safety" it's a lose lose.

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Fivefingerheist wrote:

It's not just stacking hp nodes that annoys me its having to have high hp rolls on everything you wear.

This.

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C2487233 wrote:

evasion will always be sketchy because even with 90% dodge chance youre going to get unlucky at some point.

This is actually not true. Evasion is not a random chance mechanic. More information on the mechanics thread.

Let's say I have 6000hp and 1500 armour from vanilla gear which only has life mods. Chances are I'll end up with +100% local armour rating and +400 armour rating on those pieces of gear.
I'll be generous and call that 3500 base, +100% local, 7000 armour total.

If I am going to get one-shotted (aka 6000 dmg in one go) then my armour will work like so:
7000 / ((12*6000)+7000) = 8.8% mitigation. I will be left with 531hp.

If I sink 9 points into armour nodes and now have an additional +150% of the 3500 base, my armour rating is now at 12250.
12250 / ((12*6000)+12250) = 14.5% mitigation. I will be left with 872hp. A whopping 341hp more than I did before I spent those 9 points..

If I had spent those 9 points on more life nodes, I need +72% of my base life (nine 8% nodes) to equal at least 341 more hp in order to break even. That requires a base hp of 473 (72% of 473 is 341). If your base hp is under 473, you suck anyway. If your base hp is a reasonable 1500 then your hp will be 1080 higher as well as being left with the original 341hp (1421 total).

Conclusion from that is that I would sooner spend points on more life than armour in that scenario.


Let's go mad, add granite and 50% determination aura.
My 12250 armour goes up to 12250 + (250% of a 8000 granite flask) = 48375 armour.
48375 / ((12*6000)+48375 ) = 40% mitigation. I will be left with 2400hp.

In that scenario we ended up with 1000 more hp than just spending those points on life. So that's cool. However... we could have achieved xxx armour by using granite/determination and not spending those 9 points in life.
In which case the formula would look like this:
My 12250 armour goes up to (12250 + (100% of a 8000 granite flask))*1.5 = 30375 armour.
30375 / ((12*6000)+30375) = 29.6% mitigation. I will be left with 1780hp and have 1080hp more from spending those 9 points on more life. That's 2860, 460 more than the granite/determination and 9 points in armour nodes.

Conclusion once again is that even with high granite and determination, I'd rather take life over armour nodes.


And finally the life is better than the armour for elemental and chaos attacks.
I'll stick with my hp nodes.

ps - We cannot put evasion into a formula because it scales with an unknown - the attack rating of the enemy attacking you. With armour we have that value (the amount of damage they do, or more realistically, the amount of damage we know we can take before we die).

If I had to guess, I would guess GGG set it up in much the same way. Mobs that hit hard are likely going to have a high atk rate as well, so that for balance purposes, when we mitigate less of Brutus's 6k hit, we also have a lower chance to dodge it. Overall the average mitigation will be similar between armour and evasion, with armour mitigating more to begin with allowing for the fact that evasion can evade elemental attacks, , double arrow dodging, pick up phase acrobatics etc. Which imo is rubbish anyway, dodging 20% of something you're going to 80% resist anyway doesn't seem like a good investment to me.