Why is armor designed this way?

Ive always wondered why they would make armor weaker for bigger hits and better for small hits instead of just giving a certain physical damage reduction like endurance charges..

It would be nice to see it balanced in such a way that we dont have to look at charts to figure out how much armor we need for a certain amount of damage, also, life builds would get a nice buff from it having a constant reduction for all hits.

Currently to mitigate strong hits you need to stack about 20k+ armor for it to be worthwhile, life builds dont really have any other real defense(apart from stretching to acrobatics), maybe buffing armor to offer a proper amount of DR for a mediocre investment would solve some of the suvivability issues for life, especially life melee builds

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VictorDoom wrote:

Ive always wondered why they would make armor weaker for bigger hits and better for small hits instead of just giving a certain physical damage reduction like endurance charges..

It would be nice to see it balanced in such a way that we dont have to look at charts to figure out how much armor we need for a certain amount of damage, also, life builds would get a nice buff from it having a constant reduction for all hits.

Currently to mitigate strong hits you need to stack about 20k+ armor for it to be worthwhile, life builds dont really have any other real defense(apart from stretching to acrobatics), maybe buffing armor to offer a proper amount of DR for a mediocre investment would solve some of the suvivability issues for life, especially life melee builds

Hey man, love your sword unique.

I agree with you, the armour values are too low and the amount of investment needed to soften those blows is very off. Its quite literally better to use a Coil over any rare chest pieces still for physical mitigation unless youre a Juggernaut with a decent Astral/Glorious (but thats besides the point, you shouldnt need it to have reasonable scaling).

Personally i think that armour should mitigate any projectile/melee hits with whatever portion of elemental they also do on that hit. It would make alot more sense and itd actually give a reason to get armour.

I think the way armour works is phenomenal, it makes some logical sense, but I think the equation is little too harsh. A small adjustment would be nice. And yeah, armour should reduce all incoming damage, because currently it is the worst possible mitigation. ES works vs everything, evasion works vs all types of damages if evaded, but armour only reduces physical portion of it.

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VictorDoom wrote:

Currently to mitigate strong hits you need to stack about 20k+ armor for it to be worthwhile, life builds dont really have any other real defense(apart from stretching to acrobatics)

wut?

Acro? how is Acro dealing with 'big hits'? you just not get hit. and you do not need to 'stretch to Acro' to get something similar - it is called Evasion

yes, people still believe that Evasion is 'bad'

but it isnt

issue with AR is the values on nodes + Granite of Iron Skin - these two combines simply do not make much sense. same applies to Evasion. one flask gives you more base AR or EV than entire mid-range gear

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sidtherat wrote:

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VictorDoom wrote:

Currently to mitigate strong hits you need to stack about 20k+ armor for it to be worthwhile, life builds dont really have any other real defense(apart from stretching to acrobatics)

wut?

Acro? how is Acro dealing with 'big hits'? you just not get hit. and you do not need to 'stretch to Acro' to get something similar - it is called Evasion

yes, people still believe that Evasion is 'bad'

but it isnt

issue with AR is the values on nodes + Granite of Iron Skin - these two combines simply do not make much sense. same applies to Evasion. one flask gives you more base AR or EV than entire mid-range gear

i didnt say acro is a way to mitigate big hits, i said its a defense, which it is

then - if that is what you meant - you might check the Evasion defensive mechanic. it works and it is pretty damn strong.

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sidtherat wrote:

then - if that is what you meant - you might check the Evasion defensive mechanic. it works and it is pretty damn strong.

I know i use acro and some evasion on my main char, a 2h marauder, because armor is so bad, its best to go eva/acro so at least you have some form of defense before life

Heres what I think is going on, if armour was a consistent % reduction it would either be broken strong or worse than it is right now.


Say you have a load of armour, then with ur endurance up you show 75% phys reduction, now we all know if thats what ur showing on your lvl90 character than yeah, against the average lvl82 white mob youll be getting 75%, but against the big hits that matter its going to be substantially lower.

Thing to consider though is that chars with no armour like evasion and es builds exist and must be viable, and that while armour should mitigate phys it shouldnt make you immortal to it. I hope we can agree on those 2 points at least.


So look at ele resist. You run around in maps with 75% capped all res on all your chars. What would happen to you if you ran around with 0% elemental resists? Youd get totally fucked, you woudl take 4x the damage of the 75% builds, a hit that deals 2k damage to them would deal 8k damage to you, thats the difference between not caring at all about the hit and being outright 1 shot.

So if an armour character has 75% phys resist and the evasion character has 0%, the evasion dude is going to get obliterated by stuff that the armour char wont even care about. Oh you just got hit for 10k phys damage in 1 hit? Ok, well I took 2.5k of my 6.5k life pool, popped a flask and just carried on dancing. So you couldnt let them actually have 75% phys reduction like the stats show in the char sheet, you would have to bring that down to something reasonable where its taking off a lot of the damage but its not the equiv of phys becoming "armour chars has 75% all resist and evasion chars have 0% all resist".

So you would have to nerf the % down to something more reasonable, say when you have your armour and your endurance up you are mitigating 45% of the damage, not 75%, otherwise that gap is wayyyyy too big. But heres the thing, thats already what it does against the big hits, you might not be getting the 75%, 80%, 90% you are showing against those hits, but you are getting the 40%, 45%. So if you make it a flat % reduction, you end up having to balance it down to the same sort of reduction were getting already from the big hits, but then the little hits where you really are getting 75, 80, 90 etc, youre now nerfed against those hits and you start having 40, 45% against those too.


I dunno, thats how Im seeing it anyway for what its worth.



I think armour could be a little more effective tbh, its just a little too hard to stack, too investment intensive. If they made the formula a touch more forgiving then that tackles it in a round about way.

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VictorDoom wrote:

Ive always wondered why they would make armor weaker for bigger hits and better for small hits instead of just giving a certain physical damage reduction like endurance charges..

It would be nice to see it balanced in such a way that we dont have to look at charts to figure out how much armor we need for a certain amount of damage, also, life builds would get a nice buff from it having a constant reduction for all hits.

Currently to mitigate strong hits you need to stack about 20k+ armor for it to be worthwhile, life builds dont really have any other real defense(apart from stretching to acrobatics), maybe buffing armor to offer a proper amount of DR for a mediocre investment would solve some of the suvivability issues for life, especially life melee builds

You're thinking about how armour works the wrong way entirely. Think about it in terms of physical damage prevented and you'll see it works the only way it reasonably can. Please bear with me while I go through some middle or high school level math to prove this.


Here's the equation for how much physical damage is reduced: R = D*A/(A+10*D) where D is the physical hit's damage and A is the armour.

Let's look at what happens when D is very large (infinity actually). A+10*D looks like 10*D.
Now R = D*A/(10*D) = A/10. You can see that against very large hits armour scales 10% of it's value as flat physical damage damage. There is another mechanic that scales linearly: energy shield.

That being said, I agree that armour is lacking but only because it does not protect against elemental damage at all and basically nothing important in the game is pure phys. Also the factor of 10 is too harsh probably since you can not reach equivalent defense compared to energy shield with the equivalent investment even in the absolute best circumstance.

TLDR: Armour works exactly the way it should.

guys try to learn Victordoom the legend, first 2h to down uber atziri how this game work lol.
Doom have more insight about how much armor suck than any of us.