Why is armor designed this way?

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Thanks for your Precious advices, mate :) I will try to tweak my build :) Problem is: this game encourages not to be hit at all, and so discourages building non VP tanks :/

The issue is that there aren't real tanks, the game should in general discourage tanks, because they should suffer the worst fate that is possible, iE they should not be able to kill something.

Right now almost every character has a balanced approach in terms of offense vs. defense and here is were ES is so offending, exspecially considering builds like HoWA which scales both in one shot. An ES build needs very little to get very much in terms of defenses.

So if we have tanks, iE characters that put almost everything into defense, they shouldn't be able to deal damage, we had the issue that they are with Incinerate and that isn't healthy as well. Overall a character should spend a balanced amount of points in offense and defense and the choice for the player isn't so much about spending offensive or defense the decision is much more about which defense to choose and which offensive option to choose.

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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

Just going to give my two cents to the OP.

I think the logic is basically so that you can't over-rely on stacking any one game mechanic to "win" it. And to an extent, that does work. You don't need 20k armor, when 10k armor is just fine but you have endurance charges, Fortify, Basalt Flasks and 5k or more life.

IMO, you don't actually need more than 10k or slightly more before you see diminishing returns. That's usually good enough that trash mobs have most physical damage halved even into the highest tier maps. Even really large hits might see 20% or 30% mitigation from armor. After that, it's a lot more valuable to stack End Charges or some other flat source of mitigation. A very large hit that you Basalt flasked or procced Immortal Call for is an acceptable state of affairs in that you're not as dead as you could be and probably have an amount of life left over that doesn't result in you being "executed" by some trash mob right after.

By endgame, achieving 10k, 11k or 12k armor isn't very hard. You can do it with as little as five armor nodes, a shield and a good chest piece and shield. Or if you drop the shield, then you'll probably want to use something like Juggernaut or just get more armor nodes to make up the difference. On the whole, it's not that big of an investment in anything but currency.

Now from a designer's perspective doing this makes sense, since you want to encourage the players to engage with active mechanics like Enduring Cry, Immortal Call, flasks and so on rather than just being a passive participant that is content in having one all-powerful stat.

Armor is useful, but is much like Endurance Charges. You could get nine Endurance Charges. But most of the time, it's acceptable to just have five or six and spend your gear slots and points on something else that'll see less of a diminishing return.

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Emphasy wrote:

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Thanks for your Precious advices, mate :) I will try to tweak my build :) Problem is: this game encourages not to be hit at all, and so discourages building non VP tanks :/

The issue is that there aren't real tanks, the game should in general discourage tanks, because they should suffer the worst fate that is possible, iE they should not be able to kill something.

Right now almost every character has a balanced approach in terms of offense vs. defense and here is were ES is so offending, exspecially considering builds like HoWA which scales both in one shot. An ES build needs very little to get very much in terms of defenses.

So if we have tanks, iE characters that put almost everything into defense, they shouldn't be able to deal damage, we had the issue that they are with Incinerate and that isn't healthy as well. Overall a character should spend a balanced amount of points in offense and defense and the choice for the player isn't so much about spending offensive or defense the decision is much more about which defense to choose and which offensive option to choose.

No sure, the damage, even if only acceptable, must be there, i agree :) Simply, seeing also the great number of other players that every now and then complain about armor, the sensation is that armor does not "sufficiently" rewards the player, in comparison to all the points invested :/ But i repeat: only my humile opinion. As a matter of fact btw, i always prefer go to my alternate account and play Arc. Feels much safer ^_^

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Zeorymer_Of_The_Heavens wrote:

No sure, the damage, even if only acceptable, must be there, i agree :) Simply, seeing also the great number of other players that every now and then complain about armor, the sensation is that armor does not "sufficiently" rewards the player, in comparison to all the points invested :/ But i repeat: only my humile opinion. As a matter of fact btw, i always prefer go to my alternate account and play Arc. Feels much safer ^_^

Any ranged/caster should feel safer than playing melee, but to have ES as the broken stat (+ VP and GR interaction) that makes melee tanking feasible is the worst balance decision that plagued PoE since the rework of leech mechanics and VP node new position on the skill tree...

The armour works fairly well for the smaller hits, but could mitigate a bit more of the larger ones, and really, the fact that it's counter-intuitive for new players to layer more defensive mechanics and travel along the Skilldrasil to patch the holes of every type is the biggest issue...

You could get by with 5K HP, 20K armour, 7 endurance charges, capped ele res and a healthy 20-30% to Chaos resistance, if you have enough leech, regen and damage, as my Juggernaut was invested in a healthy amount of damage, so the boss fights would amount to a cool <1 minute (managed map tier up to 14 with ease), and just the overtuned Volatiles or DD were feeling broken - 6.4K HP, 15K armour, 8 endurance charges and 19% evasion feels just a bit better, as the damage went down too, but at least later, GGG adjusted the one handed weapon damage better than I expected...

If armour would be at least partly effective against weapon elemental damage, it would improve it's utility a lot - spells should kill you then, either elemental or chaos - and give evasion a flat 1% reduced damage taken per 1/2K capped at 20%.

Make Fortify implicit for 1-2 seconds on any melee skill that reaches in a 16 radius, everything with a larger AoE/movement skills should grant only half effect, and give Guardian a 50% increased effectiveness of Fortify.

And untankable damage should be untankable even for >50K ES pools.

Those changes would improve the consistency of armour and evasion as reliable defensive mechanics, and the Fortify band-aid, as giving you a decent tankability, but still requiring piloting skills and decision making...

The problem really is less about armor well it's sort of armor's flat cap versus it's counter parts. The bigger issue is the game has shifted from mitigating damage to just instant life restore after a hit.

Point being is ES has zero mitigation takes the full hit but it can easily do so and then get instantly refilled .004 seconds later.

Life and Armor can't take that same hit. Cause their values don't scale high enough. That is the main problem.

Because of that armor has very little value. Cause you are screwed either way.

Point in example with 6k life around 15k armor, and endurance charges. I can still get one shot killed frequently. Add a mod for monsters do 100% extra damage as cold and you just screwed in all forms. Sure you can usually manage to eek by and complete a map, but it's rough. Also to pull that off that life and armor and endurance. I have to invest: almost 40 skill tree points, that is not counting any travel nodes. I also have to ensure I have life on every item, OR I have to do the dreaded kaom's setup. Granted belly of beast is a possible less horrible option. OR you get a lighting coil. That isn't even including the 13 or more nodes to reach vaal pact. OR the 20 some needed for fast leech, or regen option for life restore

so I invest 40% of my skill points for life and endurance charges, another 10% really just traveling all over to get them. And the result ends up being a character that gets one shot pretty frequently. Most melee weapons leave you screwed on your player skill to get away from damage, no instant portal or quick whirling blade, no we get a leap slam that still lets you get hit while leaving the area, is slow so it requires to be hooked up to faster attack to be at all useful for escaping. And map mods with monsters do X% more damage as elemental just make you shake your head in pain, cause you know that crit enemy / boss is going to just roll you.

Meanwhile, on the flip side, I need approximately 20 nodes if that. I've done 14k ES with about 10 nodes, easy depending on build and not just HOWTA. So i get double to triple the defense value, for half the investment, this allows my builds to spend more focus on doing damage, which means I get the flexibility to do a ton of damage. I get 3 quick escape skills that work well into any build. I don't have to travel some 30 nodes to get my defense mechanic back aka vaal pact, is nice and close for almost all builds. Even if you have to travel it's worth the travel cause it's all good traveling.

I don't care that i take twice as much damage, cause i still have enough ES to just absorb it and instantly recover that because my build is all damage.

Not to mention I don't have to try and run some means to keep / maintain endurance charges just to stay alive. It would be like asking ES that their shield auto depletes slowly when not at 3 power charges. Which reminds me ES doesn't have to deal with vaal pact's side effects cause they don't care.

For me the main problem is life just doesn't scale well enough to counter ES's advantage. I can't get a melee shield with 400 life on it. I can't get a helm with 400 life on it, I can't get a body armor with 800 life on it. I know the idea / concept is you have your defenses offsetting that damage, but as we mentioned in this thread

Armor doesn't stop elemental and game loves to add elemental damage to everything, HP pools are much lower than what is easily done by ES, Armor doesn't remove enough damage to be meaningful UNLESS you invest nearly your whole tree, carry defensive flasks, waste a curse to generate endurance charges or use a meh unique, stretch your gear to perfect rolls, Carry life flasks, etc. OR you just grab some garbage gear, a handful of nodes, and call it a day with ES.

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sofocle10000 wrote:

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Zeorymer_Of_The_Heavens wrote:

No sure, the damage, even if only acceptable, must be there, i agree :) Simply, seeing also the great number of other players that every now and then complain about armor, the sensation is that armor does not "sufficiently" rewards the player, in comparison to all the points invested :/ But i repeat: only my humile opinion. As a matter of fact btw, i always prefer go to my alternate account and play Arc. Feels much safer ^_^

Any ranged/caster should feel safer than playing melee, but to have ES as the broken stat (+ VP and GR interaction) that makes melee tanking feasible is the worst balance decision that plagued PoE since the rework of leech mechanics and VP node new position on the skill tree...

The armour works fairly well for the smaller hits, but could mitigate a bit more of the larger ones, and really, the fact that it's counter-intuitive for new players to layer more defensive mechanics and travel along the Skilldrasil to patch the holes of every type is the biggest issue...

You could get by with 5K HP, 20K armour, 7 endurance charges, capped ele res and a healthy 20-30% to Chaos resistance, if you have enough leech, regen and damage, as my Juggernaut was invested in a healthy amount of damage, so the boss fights would amount to a cool <1 minute (managed map tier up to 14 with ease), and just the overtuned Volatiles or DD were feeling broken - 6.4K HP, 15K armour, 8 endurance charges and 19% evasion feels just a bit better, as the damage went down too, but at least later, GGG adjusted the one handed weapon damage better than I expected...

If armour would be at least partly effective against weapon elemental damage, it would improve it's utility a lot - spells should kill you then, either elemental or chaos - and give evasion a flat 1% reduced damage taken per 1/2K capped at 20%.

Make Fortify implicit for 1-2 seconds on any melee skill that reaches in a 16 radius, everything with a larger AoE/movement skills should grant only half effect, and give Guardian a 50% increased effectiveness of Fortify.

And untankable damage should be untankable even for >50K ES pools.

Those changes would improve the consistency of armour and evasion as reliable defensive mechanics, and the Fortify band-aid, as giving you a decent tankability, but still requiring piloting skills and decision making...

Yes vaal pact should be changed asap ^_^''' ES instead not: i have lost the count of how many times ggg has upped mob's damage, so i hope that in 3.0 we'll have a reworked VP, untouched ES, and upped base life ^_^

As for armor, and for evasion, they need a rework like you rightly say. A +x% max ele resist every X armor for example....

Easy way to make vaalpact a proper notable: cannot leech energy shield

ES+ vaalpact is so good because ES already doesnt have regen(for most builds anyway), so you do not get the downside from vaalpact, its just free instant leech for ES builds. The main idea of notables is that you gain something and lose something, but by going ES+VP you only gain instant leech and lose nothing, which is ridiculous, and another thing that makes it OP for ES builds is that it isnt even far apart from the main ES clusters/CI on the tree

This affects the game as a whole, the boss fights, the slams and telegraphed attacks, the monster damage, is made to kill characters that build in such a way, since they do not look at armor and the necesarry defenses for life to be able to handle the same situations, they are pretty much screwed, thats why armor needs a buff, because just nerfing VP+CI wont make melee life builds good, it would just make ES+CI less effective.

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VictorDoom wrote:

Easy way to make vaalpact a proper notable: cannot leech energy shield

ES+ vaalpact is so good because ES already doesnt have regen(for most builds anyway), so you do not get the downside from vaalpact, its just free instant leech for ES builds. The main idea of notables is that you gain something and lose something, but by going ES+VP you only gain instant leech and lose nothing, which is ridiculous, and another thing that makes it OP for ES builds is that it isnt even far apart from the main ES clusters/CI on the tree

This affects the game as a whole, the boss fights, the slams and telegraphed attacks, the monster damage, is made to kill characters that build in such a way, since they do not look at armor and the necesarry defenses for life to be able to handle the same situations, they are pretty much screwed, thats why armor needs a buff, because just nerfing VP+CI wont make melee life builds good, it would just make ES+CI less effective.

And even easier way - just remove Vaal pact from the game (and any other source of instant leech).
PoE has splendid default leech mechanics, that is quite balanced. Why should we ever have instant leech in PoE?
It wont actually fix armour/evasion, though - they will STILL be inferior to ES. Because game still loves to add elemental damage to everything (armour is useless VS it), and evasion still suffers from diminishing returns (stacking over 10k is pointless), is still RNG-based (even with entropy) and dont save from non-attacks and near-oneshots.
To make armour and evasion viable PRIMARY defences (that's how they're called in game), they should protects against ALL dangers, not just some of them. Until that moment, they'll ramain trash, or (in best case) situational defences for certain encounters (Uber Izaro, for example).
And a claim that ES cant have mitigation is total bullshit! ES can use flasks to get any mitigation it needs (be it physical or elemental), except MoM. And CI has 100% chaos mitigation for free...

Oh, and remove reflect/volatile as well (at least, non-telegraphed), or make it non-instant as well (aka corrupting blood).

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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VictorDoom wrote:

Easy way to make vaalpact a proper notable: cannot leech energy shield

ES+ vaalpact is so good because ES already doesnt have regen(for most builds anyway), so you do not get the downside from vaalpact, its just free instant leech for ES builds. The main idea of notables is that you gain something and lose something, but by going ES+VP you only gain instant leech and lose nothing, which is ridiculous, and another thing that makes it OP for ES builds is that it isnt even far apart from the main ES clusters/CI on the tree

This affects the game as a whole, the boss fights, the slams and telegraphed attacks, the monster damage, is made to kill characters that build in such a way, since they do not look at armor and the necesarry defenses for life to be able to handle the same situations, they are pretty much screwed, thats why armor needs a buff, because just nerfing VP+CI wont make melee life builds good, it would just make ES+CI less effective.

And even easier way - just remove Vaal pact from the game (and any other source of instant leech).
PoE has splendid default leech mechanics, that is quite balanced. Why should we ever have instant leech in PoE?
It wont actually fix armour/evasion, though - they will STILL be inferior to ES. Because game still loves to add elemental damage to everything (armour is useless VS it), and evasion still suffers from diminishing returns (stacking over 10k is pointless), is still RNG-based (even with entropy) and dont save from non-attacks and near-oneshots.
To make armour and evasion viable PRIMARY defences (that's how they're called in game), they should protects against ALL dangers, not just some of them. Until that moment, they'll ramain trash, or (in best case) situational defences for certain encounters (Uber Izaro, for example).
And a claim that ES cant have mitigation is total bullshit! ES can use flasks to get any mitigation it needs (be it physical or elemental), except MoM. And CI has 100% chaos mitigation for free...

Oh, and remove reflect/volatile as well (at least, non-telegraphed), or make it non-instant as well (aka corrupting blood).

I totally agree, removing vaalpact would be even better, its just OP any way you look at it, since regen, especially for life is not that good(i know, i used 12% regen on my marauder and eventually went for VP because it simply gives more survivability) then vaalpact is a no brainer, especially when you are able to stack a lot of dps, it just gets better with more damage, you become immune to reflect, immune to high damage anything, so only thing that can kill you is a 1 shot.

This is the reason for which they introduced crappy arcade game telegraphed attacks to kill any build that has VP, sicne it cant die any other way, in turn these 1 shots affects all other builds and just become frustrating since they pretty much make you see the only way to go is indeed vaalpact+high dps because doing anything else that you like will still getting the same punishment of a 1 shot, might as well be almost immortal and clear 10x faster than go tank with low dps and die to the same shit designed to kill vp.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

And a claim that ES cant have mitigation is total bullshit! ES can use flasks to get any mitigation it needs (be it physical or elemental), except MoM. And CI has 100% chaos mitigation for free...

I agree ES can layer the same type of defenses if not even better than life.

For example legacy taste of hate which is currently available in legacy league you get 30% phys dmg taken as cold conversion which is like a lightning coil. Plus the addition of this beautiful nice flask:

gives 20% ele penetration and 10% reduced elemental damage taken in the right setup id say preeetty good. With a high enough block rumis (available in legacy league) you pop that rumis and get up to 65% block without a single node investment just a shield with 25% block.

The elemental damage mitigation is excellent with flasks and optional purity auras. On top of that you add CI (= 100% chaos resist) with 12kish ES which is ez to achieve on medicore ES gear and amulet/ring enchantments and takes not more than 18 or less ES nodes on the tree. Now people might say that its not possible to have flasks up all the time which is only true in particular. Speed clear builds and pathfinders are very good at keeping up the flask time.

And is it possible to add Blashpemy with Enfeeble or a Basalt Flask or Fortify or some Endurance Charges on top of CI? - Of Course its possible.

The left over Skillnodes can be happily spend on utilty and damage nodes - dont worry ES cluster are all surrounded by them goodies so there is no big cost for travelling.

With the correct use of mechanics this defense and offense scales massive with ES. Looking at the bigger picture ES technically has full access to all defense mechanics a life build has except for life flasks which are totally irrelevant with instant leech in the game. But not all defense mechanics are required if you are ES/CI. As the ES Pool can get double as high or tripple as high as a normal life build can get with 40% of skillnodes invested in life (plus traveling) not using a legacy kaoms.

I think what makes ES very interesting are the vast amount of possibilites in terms of min/maxing. It feels easier to tech uniques or other gear into the build as the ES pool is very forgiving. Does it matter to drop from 12k to 11k ES with the above mentioned defenses? - Not at all.

What matters most at the moment is to have enough oneshot resistance i.e. enough static defenses to tank a volatile or slam hit from a boss (of your desire) and being able to leech it all back while also being able to deliver endgame worthy damage. Once there is no oneshot that can kill you (or almost), you reached immortality with instant leech and CI plus enough static defense. This state is extremely hard if not impossible to achieve for life builds.