Armour and Evasion mechanics should be improved.

The way armour works is something that always boggles my mind and that is for a good reason.

It is very useful against small hits (as it should be) while being completely useless against big hits. It should be providing quite good defence against big hits if you have tons of armour. The design is flawed in my opinion.

The mitigation armour brings should be more of a flat damage mitigation rather than percent phys damage reduction. A hit that does not go past through armour shouldn't hurt the defender. If a hit is strong enough to go past through armour it should still be mitigated by the armour, but because it is higher than the armour can withstand, the hit should damage the defender as if defenders armour is crushed.

Ofc a hit should have its effect on the defender, and I will name that effect "shaken".

Here are some examples of what I have in my mind.

Let's say the defender has 100 armour. (the numbers are arbitrary)
The attacker does 20 damage. No damage is taken by the defender, no shaken effect is applied.
The attacker does 60 damage. No damage is taken by the defender, some amount of shaken effect is applied.
The attacker does 90 damage. No damage is taken by the defender, high amount (close to the cap of shaken) of shaken effect is applied.
The attacker does 95 damage. No damage is taken by the defender, maximum shaken effect is applied.
The attacker does 100 damage. No damage is taken by the defender, armour is crushed(-15% armour, not PDR, can't be stacked) for 4 seconds, max shaken effect is applied.
The attacker does 120 damage. Damage is taken by the defender as if the defenders armour is crushed (takes damage as if defender has 85 armour not 100). The defenders armour is crushed for 4 seconds, max shaken effect is applied.

You see that armour should still be a protecting factor against hits that goes beyond its protective capability. The balance is ofc the key point.

So what is the "shaken" effect. Let's say you are holding a strike pad/kicking pad and someone strikes. You don't take damage from it but the force is transmitted to you and you feel it. This force shakes you a bit. Depending on the force the effect can increase.

Now you are driving and your seat belt is on, someone hits you with a car from behind. That shakes you quite a bit.

You get the idea. Now what this effect does is as follows.

Shaken: Action speed is slowed depending on the effect with a maximum amount of 10%. When you are shaken you need a recovery time which is same as default stun duration.

Maybe shaken effect can be considered as prerequisite for stuns or instead of either you get stunned or not, you get stunned or shaken.

Effects that provide stun and block recovery now provides stun, shaken, and block recovery.

Now the problem with evasion imo is you evade, evade, evade, evade and bammmm you get one shot.
Evasion is a defence type connected to dexterity obviously.
The thing is, in real world best evasion you get is probably the one with no equipment equipped. You don't want anything on your body that can prevent you from moving the way you want. Then why wear a light/leather armour ? Because of the protection it still brings.

I think evasion shouldn't be a mech where you either take no damage or take full damage. I propose that evasion should provide protection similar to what armour does right now in addition the evading, but in a worse scaling way.

Current armour works like, you stack it, it makes you take very little damage from small hits, while not providing much protection big hits.

Evasion should provide (in addition to current effect), you stack it, you take little-medium damage from small hits, you take full/almost full damage from big hits.

If not the whole evasion mech provides this effect, then at least the evasion we get from our gear (not from dex and skill tree) should provide this effect.

problem with Armour (and to a much lesser part - Evasion) is that you can get 1.000.000+ Armour

while i do not believe game is balanced around this value, it certainly is around people getting A LOT of armour. that leads to Determination being mandatory. and various 'conversion' sources of Armour make AR/EV you get from gear 99% pointless

Aura Effect + things like 'mana -> Armour' + Aura(+levels) + flask (+%flask effect) - and you can get 50k Armour without any AR on the gear. on the other hand, you can wear ALL T1 Armour rolls on your gear and you MIGHT get 15k

most people get that value, while developers certainly assume you have the latter

and that again - Determination mandatory, AR on gear useless. it is a big mess

then, there is a thing that most likely killed 99% of AR stacker - 'mobs overwhelm your PDR'. you can have literally 1m AR rating, get hit by such mob and have effective 0 phys reduction. this mod is BS and alone is enough to not play AR but convert incoming phys damage and ignore this entire fiasco of a mechanic

I would like to not have all my armor coming from determination, granite flask, and basalt flask with the enchants for more armor multiplication. Any armor I get from my gear is just gravy. I also wish having that much armor felt like it mattered.

People do that because spell suppression is ridiculously powerful and very needed so anyone that can cap it will always choose to do so which also gets you some evasion in the process. Which who cares, its random. You either take no damage or all the damage. This isn't the sort of game where you can stop and try to wonder what kind of damage a monster is doing to you and why they're hurting so much. You're either barely being touched or you're being destroyed. No death recap either.

This isn't just limited to armor. I'm not a big fan of the state of defensive options that we have in the game. Most of the time and investment going into my build is spent on trying to live and its an arms race you can't really win.

Having 75% ele res for example is not very impactful nowadays. That acts as more of a base line, you can play the game and exist in a map now sort of thing.

As someone kinda mentioned the point and Affix value of Armor/Evasion is quite low in comparison to offense nodes. This is nothing new. It was like that before but we had more reliable defensive layers. Near every Ascendancy had flat DR for instance. More block, dodge, etc.

Wind Ward + Arctic Armor remains one of the highest point value Defense layers in the game and oddly most people don't even use it. 50% Less damage taken which can't be taken from you.

Besides the poor point / affix value. Armor & Evasion are designed to fail.
It's why no one used them even before the changes but now we're generally forced to.

No body use wind ward or arctic armor because they are very impractical.
Arctic armor only works if you are stationary and being stationary means 20 goats jumping on you and kill you.

Here's my issue with OPs idea:

He approaches it logically, assuming our armor is acting as real live "armor" against hits. But if that were the case, then once that armor is crushed ONCE....it should permanently break. Immediately, the illusion of reality is totally shattered. If we are thinking REALLY how armor works, then every successive hit should have greater and greater chance to just completely rip through our armor. Metal fatigues, and what might have protected us from 1000 damage at its peak form, would only protect us from a fraction of that much after a few hits.

It seems very nice and good to think about these things in terms of how they would actually function....but the game is fantasy, and as such these mechanics act "fantastically", rather than realistically.

And then there are the issues brought on by the folks above me: armor stacking, but ALSO defensive stacking. Armor needs to be balanced around avoidance and other mechanics simultaneously otherwise you end up with multiple total immunity to damage scenarios. That is an almost insurmountable task that GGG has set up for themselves.

"

B00b wrote:

No body use wind ward or arctic armor because they are very impractical.
Arctic armor only works if you are stationary and being stationary means 20 goats jumping on you and kill you.

Can't think of a single time I died to goatman jumping on me.
Probably because I often use that combo.

Arctic Armor might as well say 20% less damage when shooting.

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

Here's my issue with OPs idea:

He approaches it logically, assuming our armor is acting as real live "armor" against hits. But if that were the case, then once that armor is crushed ONCE....it should permanently break. Immediately, the illusion of reality is totally shattered. If we are thinking REALLY how armor works, then every successive hit should have greater and greater chance to just completely rip through our armor. Metal fatigues, and what might have protected us from 1000 damage at its peak form, would only protect us from a fraction of that much after a few hits.

It seems very nice and good to think about these things in terms of how they would actually function....but the game is fantasy, and as such these mechanics act "fantastically", rather than realistically.

And then there are the issues brought on by the folks above me: armor stacking, but ALSO defensive stacking. Armor needs to be balanced around avoidance and other mechanics simultaneously otherwise you end up with multiple total immunity to damage scenarios. That is an almost insurmountable task that GGG has set up for themselves.

What you are saying is very true. But yea, we are playing a game in the end, that's why armour does not break. And if it were to break we would have the same system we currently have pretty much.
The problem with armour and evasion right now is they are either strong or terrible. Armour protects from small hits but becomes less relevant as the damage gets higher. Evasion is just take no damage or get one shot. You can usually ignore both mechanics and go for phys taken as ele and get a much stronger and reliable way of protection from physical damage.