If I had 20k armor

How much physical damage reduction would I get if I had 20k armor and 30k armor?

Depends what you're trying to tank! Armour doesn't provide a static amount of damage reduction, and don't let that "estimate" in the character sheet convince you otherwise. The percentage of damage blocked decreases the bigger the hit. It's a lot of maths, but there are two rules to remember that make it easier to think about:

1. You will take half damage from a hit of size 1/10th the amount of armour you have. So if you have 20k armour and something hits you for 2k physical damage, you will take 1k.

2. Either side of that, you prevent a larger percentage the smaller the hit and vice versa. A hypothetical infinite damage hit would be mitigated by an amount equal to 1/10th your armour - and that is the absolute maximum raw damage that armour can mitigate. So If you have 20k armour, the maximum amount of physical damage that will be absorbed by your armour in a single hit is 2k. In realistic circumstances of 5-10k damage hits, it will be more like 1.5-1.8k getting absorbed.

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viperesque wrote:

Depends what you're trying to tank! Armour doesn't provide a static amount of damage reduction, and don't let that "estimate" in the character sheet convince you otherwise. The percentage of damage blocked decreases the bigger the hit. It's a lot of maths, but there are two rules to remember that make it easier to think about:

1. You will take half damage from a hit of size 1/10th the amount of armour you have. So if you have 20k armour and something hits you for 2k physical damage, you will take 1k.

2. Either side of that, you prevent a larger percentage the smaller the hit and vice versa. A hypothetical infinite damage hit would be mitigated by an amount equal to 1/10th your armour - and that is the absolute maximum raw damage that armour can mitigate. So If you have 20k armour, the maximum amount of physical damage that will be absorbed by your armour in a single hit is 2k. In realistic circumstances of 5-10k damage hits, it will be more like 1.5-1.8k getting absorbed.

Alright so lets just say how much damage does merc vaal slam do?

Surprisingly hard to find the answer to that. It's half fire damage though, so armour is not going to be your only defense.

Some numbers I can find: Merc Voll slam is 5000 pure phys damage, and merc Dominus slam is 8.5k each of phys and lightning.

EDIT: Oh man - just for entertainment, Maze Vaal does something like 18k EACH of phys and fire. That's great. Didn't even know there was such a high-damage boss skill out there. (It's about double Shaper's slam...)

There's actually a very simple EHP formula to find out how much EHP benefit you're gaining given hit size, but nobody ever uses it in these forums because they don't like using EHP for some bizarre reason (rational functions are misleading).

Every HitSize you have in Armour grants +10% EHP-from-Armour against hits of those size.

I guess that's kind of unintuitive to use to calculate one-shots thresholds precisely, though. You'd kind of have to work backwards. For example if you were facing a hit of 5000 physical and had 5000 armour, that's 10%. So you would ask "what, times 1.1, would equal 5000?" and that would be 4545 or something silly like that. If you had 5000 Life it would be like having 5500 Life, meaning you'd be left with 500/5500 * 5000 Life afterwards, or, again, 454 or something silly like that.

It works great for finding out how much benefit you get against lots of small hits, though. For example 10,000 Armour gives you literally double the EHP against hits of size 1,000 (10 times of +10% is +100%, or double), so 5,000 Life becomes like 10,000 Life + 0 Armour against those hits. Against those same hits, 5,000 Armour would be like 7,500 Life, 2,000 Armour would be like 6,000, and so on.

EDIT: In any case I still like it because it's so elegantly simple for mental math.

EDIT2: Actually, I'm an idiot. It is still easy/simple to calculate one-shot threshold, just not as easy simple as just plugging in EHP benefit. You simply divide by the percent EHP benefit multiplier! In the above example, you divide by 1.1, adurr.

So you can think of AR as a reduction of max Life (or technically ES) necessary to survive a one-shot by division. OK, so enemy hits for 1234 damage. That means 1234 Armour lets you divide by 1.1, 2468 lets you divide by 1.2, and so on. Neat!

Ok, it's good in theory. But what about practice? How much armour do I need for endgame content? What is the common amount of damage hit from T15-16 white monsters for example? Or from Minotaur who seems to have more physical attack then everyone else and so on? From what amount of armour it's more effective to stop increasing it in favour of increasing life, maximum endurance charges and so on?



Second question: in which cases Granite Flask is better then Basalt one?

Third question: how important block is in second question, is it making Rumi is better then any Basalt flask due to additional block?

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fwd wrote:

Spoiler

From the question I asked early in another topic, what is better:
8320hp/6930arm or 8298hp/7200arm ?
Assuming I constantly have fortify on, 3 endurance charges and 30% block chance.

Those are very small differences... in my personal levels of play, I would consider them "about the same" and thus not worry about the performance difference

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Second question: in which cases Granite Flask is better then Basalt one?

Vipermagi mathed it out in another thread long, long ago, and the answer, use per use, is "practically never." However, I do prefer Granite over Basalt sometimes because it consumes fewer Flask Charges per use, and you can stack both at the same time, of course :P

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Third question: how important block is in second question, is it making Rumi is better then any Basalt flask due to additional block?

Block only addresses DPS and not one-shots, so it depends on your needs. Block and Spell Block are quite strong against Attack DPS and Spell DPS, respectively.

I don't realy worry about that difference by myself, it's more about understanding. Because I have no idea how much Hit damage/DPS monsters have. So it's more about how much EHP do I have againt this certain pack of T15 monsters, and with different life/armour balance, and assuming how often monsters have physical kind of damage in general, and so on.

I think it's more important to discuss DPS reduction then oneshot reduction, because oneshot is not a really problem for armoured builds, and if you will eat some bosses big hits you will die regardless armour you have anyway.

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fwd wrote:

Ok, it's good in theory. But what about practice? How much armour do I need for endgame content?

Armor without any other mitigation? Hell, it's useless. Even merciless Malachai can hit you for >5k with 50k armor (in 3-people party). You need some other sources of phys mitigation in addition to armor, like charges and basalt.

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silumit wrote:

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fwd wrote:

Ok, it's good in theory. But what about practice? How much armour do I need for endgame content?

Armor without any other mitigation? Hell, it's useless. Even merciless Malachai can hit you for >5k with 50k armor (in 3-people party). You need some other sources of phys mitigation in addition to armor, like charges and basalt.

You should read more carefully. I said nothing about using armour withour any other mitigation. May be I should not put my remark about endurance charges and fortify in the spoiler though.

All I need to hear is some math, no common talks. Ok some says merc Voll has 5k hit, but it's his ramming strike, isn't it? And Voll is not end-game content, even to hear how his ramming attack is comparison with UberIzaro same attack, for example. Or Minotaur single hits (not ever underground attack, which is kinda deadly with any armour I suppose).