Imbalanced Guard, can someone explain the use of this, with just % passives, not armour count.

Pretty much all the google listings about Imbalanced Guard, only talk about Armor count, 10k - 50k armor & so on. Even then they don't list in a simply manner, when to not get this node, be it you have 10k - 50k armor.

They said don't get it if your damage reduction goes above 50%, which still doesn't help, as an answer. I guess it depends on what enemy your fighting.

Still as a general rule of thumb. I'm not really interested in gear stats, weighing my decision to get this. I just want to base my answer, on the armor % alone, while throwing the type of gear out of the topic.

So, as a rough draft estimate. How much percent of armor nodes on the tree, is generally too much, for this node to be useful?

Let's say I'm building a dual wielder with 140% - 200% armor percentages on the passive tree, would this node be worth it? Or is it for people under 140% armor passive nodes? If so, how low? When's too high to get it?

Expecting a answer like this; " If you have over 100% armor on the passive tree, don't get it " ect.

Ultimately what, I'm getting at, is if anyone can answer this question, without throwing out 10k - 50k b.s. numbers / without mentioning gear values, & just tell me if it's useful, based on passive tree armor percentages % alone.

Even if the estimate is rough as heck. Without telling me " it depends on the enemy or depends on your gear ". Just tree percent % only?

You are asking the wrong question, so nobody will be able to answer it the way you want to.


The only important thing you need to know is this:

- Armor never mitigates more phys dmg than 10% of its numeric value.
So if you had 10k armor, it can only mitigate up to 1k phys dmg.

- The ingame tooltip shows the armor mitigation assuming you are hit by a trash mob and therefore cant be relied on. Anything that isnt a trashmob will hit much harder and since armor can never mitigate more than 10% of its numeric value, the tooltip %mitigation turns out to be wrong in those instances and will be way lower than the tooltip shows.

- Unbalanced Guard "doubles" your numeric armor value, so it protects better against harder hitting mobs but it also prevents any mitigation beyond 50% of the dmg, so its worse against trash mobs.


Thats the bottom line.

To understand the Keystone u first need to understand how armour calculation works which is kinda weird tbh.

I don't even know if I understand that keystone right, but I think it works that way:

Armour has a certain threshhold where it mitigates 50% damage of a hit, lets say for example with 10k armour u mitigate a 5k hit for 50%, so u only get hit with 2,5k.
Higher hits than that will get mitigated way less, like a 10k hit get's mitigated by 25% or something, resulting in 7,5k damage incoming.
If u get hit for 1k, u mitigate 100% of the damage.

Now with imbalanced guard, if u have 10k armour, u can mitigate 50% damage of a hit that's double than before, so u'd mitigate 50% from a 10k hit, resulting in 5k incoming damage.
But if u get hit for 1k damage now, it only mitigates 50% aswell, so u'll still get hit for 500 damage.

The numbers are not correct, just for explanation.

That's my understanding on how it works, but like I said it might be wrong.


So basically to answer ur question, kinda...

If u're planning on having alot of armour and u don't have a way to mitigate small hits like with "life on block" or flat -damage per hit I wouldn't use imbalanced guard.

If ur build is weak against medium and big hits, because u don't have alot of endurance charges or other ways of physical damage mitigation, imbalanced guard might be good for u.

"

Sadaukar wrote:

To understand the Keystone u first need to understand how armour calculation works which is kinda weird tbh.

I don't even know if I understand that keystone right, but I think it works that way:

Armour has a certain threshhold where it mitigates 50% damage of a hit, lets say for example with 10k armour u mitigate a 5k hit for 50%, so u only get hit with 2,5k.
Higher hits than that will get mitigated way less, like a 10k hit get's mitigated by 25% or something, resulting in 7,5k damage incoming.
If u get hit for 1k, u mitigate 100% of the damage.

Now with imbalanced guard, if u have 10k armour, u can mitigate 50% damage of a hit that's double than before, so u'd mitigate 50% from a 10k hit, resulting in 5k incoming damage.
But if u get hit for 1k damage now, it only mitigates 50% aswell, so u'll still get hit for 500 damage.

The numbers are not correct, just for explanation.

That's my understanding on how it works, but like I said it might be wrong.


So basically to answer ur question, kinda...

If u're planning on having alot of armour and u don't have a way to mitigate small hits like with "life on block" or flat -damage per hit I wouldn't use imbalanced guard.

If ur build is weak against medium and big hits, because u don't have alot of endurance charges or other ways of physical damage mitigation, imbalanced guard might be good for u.

The numbers are indeed very wrong, but your overall understanding is correct.

Imbalanced Guard makes you take more damage from all hits that you would mitigate by over 50% and it makes you take less damage from all hits that you would mitigate by less than 50%.

The point of greatest benefit from Imbalanced Guard is probably against the highest damage hits that still allow you to mitigate them by 50%, because the higher the hit damage goes, the less the armour is noticable either way, even if it is doubled.

So to give an example with correct numbers, 10k armour mitigates 1k damage hits by 50%. Hits that deal less damage than that are mitigated by more than 50%.

With Imbalanced Guard, hits that deal 2k damage or any smaller amount than that are mitigated by 50%, including the ones below 1k damage.

But without Imbalanced Guard, hits that deal 2k damage would only be mitigated by 33.3%.

As it was mentioned earlier, armour can only mitigate up to 10% of its value, but realistically you will only get around 7-9% even against high damage hits, so you should not assume that you will actually get 10% of the armour value just because 10% is the theoretical maximum.

It is worth noting that physical damage reduction can never lower the incoming damage by more than 90%. So for the previous example of 10k armour, hits dealing ~111.1 damage or less would not be mitigated by more than 90%, even without Imbalanced Guard.

Here is the wiki article for anyone interested in reading up on the actual armour calculation.