Question about Armour versus Max Resistance

Hey all,

I am a RF Inquisitor and had a quick question about the effectiveness of armour versus max resistance.

Basically I have a rare shield that will provide 600 extra armour (2% estimated physical reduction) and 2% max chaos resistance


Whereas my 2nd shield I will lose that 600 armour and 40 life, but gain 2% all maximum resistance.


For survivability won't the second shield be more effective in the end? I read that 2% max to each element is effectively 8% damage reduction from attacks using that element.

First and foremost, do not believe "estimated physical damage reduction" from Armour, or at least do not base your defences only on that. It is absolutely not effective to predict your survivability against endgame bosses who deal primarly physical damage.
Wikia offers an effective formula to calculate your DPS, and Path of Building Fork helps you by asking you exactly how much physical damage you'd expect to take it, in order to give you an accurate, reliable physical damage reduction whether you just want to survive a Porcupine Spike or a Shaper's Hammer Bash. GGG once said a very effective way to explain armour:

"If you are in a full armour it will protect you if I throw a bunch of toothpicks against you, but will help you little if you are hit by a train"

Seconds and even more important, Armour do not protect you against physical DoT. While it will indeed lowers Bleeding damage by reducing the physical hit's initial hit, it will help you not against Necropolis' Spike Debuffs from local boss, Corrupting Blood, Corrupted Ground from Atziri's Trio and any other source of pure physical DoT.

The most reliable way to get "Physical Resistance" is by stacking Physical Damage Reduction in its raw form. Usually you can achieve this by using Endurance Charges (which, by default, give you 4% each), but there are other ways for characters to increase this value (for example, Chaos Golem's buff).

So, unless you use the armour for other purposes (Molten Shell damage scaling or Aegis Aurora), you just have to consider whether you need more a +2% to max Chaos or a +2% to all Elemental Resistances.

I'd go for the second, since it will even aid you for lowering RF's damage (though I would expect you are going around with a Rise of the Phoenix or a Saffel's Frame for the time being)

EDIT: Corrected "armour lowers bleeding damage" part

"

Maxtrux wrote:

While it will indeed lowers Bleeding damage by reducing the physical hit's initial hit

I don't think this is the case due to ailment damage being calculated separately from hit damage. If ailment damage operated the way you imply, then non-Armor physical damage reduction would "double dip" on Bleeding damage, by reducing the initial hit the damage was calculated from, then the damage over time.

From wikia's page about Bleeding:

"

Potential damage from one bleed application is based on the base physical damage of attack that caused it: 70% per second if the target is standing still (10% if an enemy monster applied it), if the target is moving bleeding deals additional damage equal to twice the base, for a total of 3 times base damage while moving (210%) [2].

...

Bleed damage is not reduced by armour, but will be reduced by any other sources of physical mitigation, such as endurance charges or Immortal Call.

I stand corrected. Thank you ekaye

600 armor more or less won't make any difference as far as survival is concerned. You need at least 10k for it to start to matter. Better is 20k+. If you already have that much, good you don't need the 600 on top. If not then 600 armor won't save you from physical hits.

A big difference since armour protects against physical damage and resistance protect against all other sources of damage. Additional physical damage reduction is not a resistance. Armour also mitigates based on the strength of the hit, making it effective on several smaller hits but not so much on large 1-shot slams.

The only situations when 600 armor is better then +2 max resists, is if you already have 90% max resists, or if you are using Loreweave. For RF build, max resists is even more important.