Why is armor designed this way?

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Emphasy wrote:

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Just to chime in again because its something people are apparently forgetting. Monster damage has been increased multiple times now since SOTV. What used to deal "small" hits dont necessisarily deal "small hits" anymore because all the changes (this isnt including buffs to skills monsters use either, or buffs to actual specific monster types).

The armour formula hasnt changed at all (seriously i cant remember the last time they touched it). Basically, when they increased monster damage multiple times without changing the formula and compensating for the new values, armour was directly nerfed as a result. On top of that life values were nerfed quite some time ago. This also means we are taking more elemental damage as well.

Actually the formula was changed not so long ago. But then again 2.0 is not that recent, but there were no major damage increases since then, all that happened since then is adjustments to some enemies that essentially weren't dealing damage at all (like the Fireball from the Goatman) and changes to mostly yellow mob HP. They could do another pass on it, but again they have to find a way to make armor work in a few more situations. I could imagine armor working on weapon based attacks in general regardless of the damage type. So it works against Physical damage and with half its efficiency against elemantal attacks (otherwise it would be straight out better than evasion, so it has to be less efficient). On the other hand evasion could provide a chance for taking reduced damage from spells, but right now it is better to wait how they change CI and those things before making changes to Evasion and Armor.

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Most top HC builds don't even use GR/VP builds at first when they transition to CI. It's usually ED and Flameblast totems, both which can break 15k+ ES.

But those builds are not really the issue. And if you look at the SSF leagues, it is mostly the same builds life based. Those builds are good because those skills are so good and of course they use the best defense and considering their place on the tree, they are natural CI builds. Those are also builds that still can die, easily. It isn't too hard to missmanage a situation and not being able to recover. Another thing is the same builds utilizing ZO for pretty much the same effect GR has, although not as dramatic. But a Build just using CI with neither ZO nor GR does have some effective weaknesses that a player has to manage. Which is the reason I don't think the amount of ES is the issue, it is the ability to refill it so easily.

Something I totally agree on is how easy it is to get a decent enough ES pool. Because honestly once you are getting 6k ES you might already be in a better position than an Life based build and you essentially need no good gear at all to reach that number.

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allbusiness wrote:

But who plays CI with neither ZO or GR? That's just dumb. You have support summoners with 10k+ ES with a Shavs on and overcapped purity res and max block. With that along with ZO, you'd have to do something real risky to die.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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allbusiness wrote:

But who plays CI with neither ZO or GR? That's just dumb. You have support summoners with 10k+ ES with a Shavs on and overcapped purity res and max block. With that along with ZO, you'd have to do something real risky to die.

You'd be surprised how many people who play can't-leech builds rely solely on recharge mechanics and items. Which I personally think is a bit silly when they work so much better with ZO, too.

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Starxsword wrote:

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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allbusiness wrote:

But who plays CI with neither ZO or GR? That's just dumb. You have support summoners with 10k+ ES with a Shavs on and overcapped purity res and max block. With that along with ZO, you'd have to do something real risky to die.

You'd be surprised how many people who play can't-leech builds rely solely on recharge mechanics and items. Which I personally think is a bit silly when they work so much better with ZO, too.

Off topic from armor, but with the change in Zealot's Oath's position. If you are a summoner that dabbles in some auras, you should pretty much always go for ZO, since it is right next to the Sovereignty cluster.

You might not be able to get that much regen, but even a little bit of regen helps.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

You can get 10-13% pretty easily, which is huge with the size of ES pools easily achieved.

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Starxsword wrote:

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TheAnuhart wrote:

You can get 10-13% pretty easily, which is huge with the size of ES pools easily achieved.

No, you cannot get 10 to 13% pretty easily. I'm not sure how that tree even looks like.
I'm thinking around 5% to 7% here.

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Starxsword wrote:

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TheAnuhart wrote:

You can get 10-13% pretty easily, which is huge with the size of ES pools easily achieved.

No, you cannot get 10 to 13% pretty easily. I'm not sure how that tree even looks like.
I'm thinking around 5% to 7% here.

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sidtherat wrote:

each time i read discussion like these it is always 'armor is bad' and then 'evasion is bad'

guys. these defences have holes in them ON PURPOSE. to make us make choices and accept consequences of these choices

AR has strong and weak points. EV has strong and weak points. ES has strong and weak points (sadly - Ghost Reaver + Vaal Pact ruin this system entirely removing all ES weak points)

so when i say 'try evasion' i mean 'try mixing AR with EV'. not 'try pure EV'


you know that you can build a ranger/raider/whateverRightSideOfTheTree with reasonable EV, minimal AR, ~50 dodge/spell dodge and reasonable phys reduction?

or a juggernaut with beefy AR + 6000 EV?

mixing stuff together works better than stacking one trough the roof. sure 74% -> 75% block chance is higher increase than 73% -> 74% but it is pretty expensive. similar gains can be made cheaper with different sources of 'defence'


problem lies in GR+VP making ES UNIVERSAL. this makes many (including some posters here) to think that ALL primary defences should be UNIVERSAL. unfortunatelly it is ES that is TOO GOOD (with GR+VP) - not the other way around. ES without leech is perfectly fine mechanic-wise (it is the STOOOPID scaling ES got for free from Elron rings and top-ES items GGG happiliy introduced that is the problem)

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Emphasy wrote:

The issue with armor is that it is hard to make it meaningful. Right now you get an easy 50% physical damage reduction without a single piece of armor if you are on the right side (iE the armor side of the tree). This would mean that if armor would work against all hits as good as it tells you in your char sheet every armor character could make him self pretty much immune to physical damage.

The thing is that the right side not only has access to more armor but also to more flat physical mitigation. This means that balancing big hits around flat armor scaling would leave pretty much everyone else in the dust. Because at this time even ES would be a lot weaker against physical damage.

People might have the wrong perspective on this. Armor isn't worse against big hits, it is a lot better against weak ones. Because against weak hits armor mostly reaches near 100% physical damage mitigation with Endurance Charges and a Flask. So if they would remove the scaling with damage armor would basically always work like it does against big hits, because it cannot always work like it does against weak hits.

Something they could do though is ignore enemies scaling and scale armor with enemy base damage not with increases, right now rolling increased damage on a map makes armor less effective, which is kinda odd. Another scaling option would be more individual and essentially allow enemies to penetrate physical damage. But just removing the damage scaling would only work if you would make armor a lot worse against small hits.

Right now they don't acknowledge any of the defense types as singular functional entities. Because if you actually do as they intended it and combine armor with endurance charges you have all you need, endurance charges protect well against big hits, armor helps with small hits. And again the weakness of armor is not physical damage, so this thing is completly meaningless anyway, armor only fails on big telegraphed attacks and most of those are part elemental anyway and guess what is the dangerous part of those.

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allbusiness wrote:

But who plays CI with neither ZO or GR? That's just dumb. You have support summoners with 10k+ ES with a Shavs on and overcapped purity res and max block. With that along with ZO, you'd have to do something real risky to die.

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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