Why is armor designed this way?

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Accro + phase accro do have the advantage of being pretty cost efficient, but it comes at a price.
I think that it does fit range gameplay pretty well.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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:

whatever tank you want to make with high armor 78/78 block will enocunter a situation where a 1 shot will happen(even by using legacy kaoms and stacking 11-12k life on a shield char) you may still get 1 shot, which in my opinion shuldnt be possible on a tank, you should be able to die but at least in forms of burst damage, not straight up 1 hit kills or 0.2 second bursts of dmg. And of course most of these 1 shots come from physical damage, thats where a change in armor would help

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Fruz wrote:

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VictorDoom wrote:

whatever tank you want to make with high armor 78/78 block will enocunter a situation where a 1 shot will happen(even by using legacy kaoms and stacking 11-12k life on a shield char) you may still get 1 shot, which in my opinion shuldnt be possible on a tank, you should be able to die but at least in forms of burst damage, not straight up 1 hit kills or 0.2 second bursts of dmg. And of course most of these 1 shots come from physical damage, thats where a change in armor would help

12k physical hit from a monster ????
And in what situation exactly ? With you wearing a 50% abyssus an no physical mitigation at all maybe ?

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Fruz wrote:

So you mean telegraphed hits that are supposed to be dodged ?
Those are different, those should be avoided, NOT be tanked.

Having a character that can survive anything in the game removes all need to do anything that would require thinking or such, we don't need that imo, really not.
So no thank you.



And if you get charge by a bunch of mobs ... there is an inatention mistake on your end there, it isn't instant ( it can be quick, but if it is that quick, part of it comes from the mods of the area and you should be aware that it can happen ).

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VictorDoom wrote:

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.

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Fruz wrote:

Because those fights are supposedly dangerous.
If you basically cannot die anymore .... it's not dangerous anymore.

The balance is at such point that most of the dps power can come from couple of items + gems, while still investing mostly in defenses ( what most melee do now, basically ), so we already do build defenses mostly, while having correct+ dps values.


The aberration atm is the fact that full ES + full dps gives basically more survivability than building a tank ....
I don't even know why we have plenty of [reduced life regenerated] map mods and we don't have the leech equivalent ... it's completely retarded.

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pneuma wrote:

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VictorDoom wrote:

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.

I don't think that changing to %DR is necessary to achieve those goals. Changing the nature of armor from antiprogressive scaling to flat scaling is far too big a change.

A simpler change that meets your desires would be changing armor to flat DR, like old Arctic Armour used to be. Still has the same nature of making small hits negligible while not providing much against huge hits.

It would be a sharper curve than it is now*, but it would also be completely transparent about how much your armor is helping you. And one can argue that it is truly a constant reduction.

*

Pretend you have "1k" armor (however much gear/tree investment is needed for that) and you're facing down two hits, a hit for 200 and a hit for 5000.

In the current system:
- "1k" armor is 1k armor.
- 200 damage: armor mitigates 33%, you take 133.
- 5000 damage: armor mitigates 1.9%, you take 4905.

In the suggested system:
- "1k" armor is a flat 100DR.
- 200 damage: armor mitigates 100, you take 100.
- 5000 damage: armor mitigates 100, you take 4900.

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Also, as Snorkle said, we already have resists that work that way and it sucks. It ends up constricting the design space a lot when big physical hits can be mitigated by a factor of 4 or more between two players. Having it be "pure" damage lets GGG tune the numbers to something that is always relevant.

Lastly, it's much more interesting to have different kinds of defense mechanics than %DR everywhere. I'd rather see each kind of defense get its own unique curve and mechanics than slowly roll everything into one giant "defense rating" blob.

I'm still lamenting Blue Life tbch.