Played my first armor-only character, and I'm disgusted by it.

Yeah, I gotta say this still isn't adding up. I went back to dried lake with my Chieftan character (called Iron_Sirocco_Shppy) that's got a bunch of increased armor and still these numbers aren't working out like they should. Even without Grand Spectrums, even just using nothing but either Brass Dome or Death's Oath for armor, I'm not seeing the reductions I should be seeing against the archers, still certainly not as much reduction as I get against the comparable base damage of the signature melee enemies in the area. There's something very funky about the way these damages are getting calculated somewhere along the lines.

The melee guys seem to be doing 500-700 damage while I'm naked (0 armor), and when I toss on Brass Dome to move up to 9500 armor, they never do more than 300... plugged into the armor formula, the expected amount of damage I should take when hit for 700 damage with 9500 armor would be just a hair over 300... that adds up.

Yet going over to a bow enemy (and again his regular attacks, not the Tshots), I'm seeing about 450-650 damage while naked. But when I throw on that same Brass Dome and nothing more, i'm legitimately not seeing *any* difference. It's the same 450-650 or so... at worst I should be taking less than 300 again, just like in the melee case. I swapped over to my Death's Oath too, which puts my armor at 4100, and should mean I take at most 400 damage per hit, but nope, still the same range.


This is really funky, cuz now this 3rd round of testing puts me right back to matching the results of my initial tests, while my second round of testing with my eponymous character *seemed* to work correctly. Now I've gotta go back and check things out on him.

Went back to my eponymous character, Shppy, for more testing, since he's the one that seemed to perform "normally", contrary to my first round of testing. Found some more interesting tidbits. So first of all he's Iron Reflexes. Now, with nothing equipped, he's still got 1200 armor rating, but both the melee and ranged enemies do pretty close to full damage, as expected.

So now, when I equip my normal gear setup of 13k armor, which involves Devoto's, Cherrubim's, and some pure evasion rares, I see a reasonable amount of damage reduction, enough so that I wouldn't question it even if it's not quite exactly right. However, when I take all that off and equip a Brass Dome, which leaves me at 15k armor, once again the bow guy seems to deal full damage. Switching to my Death's Oath, leaving me at 7.5k armor, feels no different.

Now, after equipping *only* my cherrubim's, leaving me at 8.5k armor, I'm seeing a little reduction in damage, down to about 400-450ish per hit, but still above the 300 or so i *should* be taking according to the formula.

Additionally, after taking off all of my gear and simply activating level 20 Grace, which puts me at about 11k armor, now the bow guys deal very low damage, a little over 200 or so, which adds up pretty much perfectly with the formula.

Finally, I tried simply equipping my Devoto's and nothing else, with no more Grace. This left me at 4.5k armor. It seemed like I was taking about 300-350 damage like that (although I saw one shot spike up to 500... probably a crit), which seems to roughly align with the proper armor formula.


So... idk. Armor derived from evasion via IR seems to work just fine, for starters. But at the very least armor derived from a chestpiece does not seem to do anything. It's hard to tell if the armor from my helm did anything, as over half of Devoto's is evasion which seems to work properly regardless of where it comes from, but...

...well, the fellow who also tested earlier in the thread said his tests showed armor working pretty much exactly as expected, but he used a shield for his base armor. The common factors I've been using to test have been Grand Spectrums (that have been pointed out to not be working properly) and chestpieces. And at least to some degree Cherrubim's, which is partly evasion, seems to help, while pure armor chestpieces are doing nothing.

So I'm thinking that armor (but not evasion converted to armor) from from chestpieces is not properly contributing to this 'armor vs projectiles' stat. Perhaps it has something to do with changes made to implement the Unbreakable notable in the Juggernaut tree? After all, that only applies to chestpieces, and only to armor (not converted evasion) from those chestpieces... sounds like more than coincidence to me.