What is the point of armour with the way damage reduction is calculated?

It feels like armour is completely useless until you start stacking massive amounts of it, actively punishing anyone who uses it as their primary defensive layers against physical based hits (instead of evasion etc.)

Like...why is the weird "Your damage reduction is calculated based upon your armour value compared to the size of the hit" still a thing when it leaves players with zero ways to actually tell how much damage reduction they have in-game? The character sheet doesn't tell you since it's just taking a random guess and it could be totally wrong so it's just leaving you misinformed about your defenses.

Was really hoping armour would be a bit more straightforward in the sequel and very disappointed to see it's still the same weird calculation it is from the first game. And really feels punishing for warriors who are already slow as hell and absolutely need more defenses to be able to soak the hits during long attack animations instead of constantly dodge canceling out and doing no damage.

TRUE.
armor here is to help you mitigate a lot of weak hits. Or stack that much that heavy hits will be heavily mitigated also. Having medium-low armor values results in almost no damage mitigation.

Using armor/es is only viable if you have no hp at all (still pure es will be better in 99.9% cases).
Using armor/evasion is only viable if you can convert evasion into armor.

Yes, it feels kinda realistic, yet absolutely bad.

The general balance between Armor vs Evasion is that Armor is good against a lot of tiny hits, like bow skeletons shooting a volley in your face. Meanwhile Evasion is good against singular big attacks, like Colossus stabbing you with a dagger.

Armour helps a ton against normal hits, bosses and mobs.

This extends into mapping as well.

You just have to have enough of it to matter.

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Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Armour helps a ton against normal hits, bosses and mobs.

This extends into mapping as well.

You just have to have enough of it to matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1hfu583/psa_if_are_relying_on_armour_to_keep_you_alive/

If this math is accurate, 20K armour to survive a 4.6K damage slam on 2.5K life is...pretty silly and feels like we need far more armour than is reasonably available (even investing in armour on the passive tree to further support).

TBH the enemy attack modifier needs to be lowered significantly, from 5x to 2x tops. Armor only protects physical anyways why is it so restrictive comparing to all other forms of defenses

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edgecrusherO0#4497 wrote:

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Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Armour helps a ton against normal hits, bosses and mobs.

This extends into mapping as well.

You just have to have enough of it to matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1hfu583/psa_if_are_relying_on_armour_to_keep_you_alive/

If this math is accurate, 20K armour to survive a 4.6K damage slam on 2.5K life is...pretty silly and feels like we need far more armour than is reasonably available (even investing in armour on the passive tree to further support).

No.

If you are looking for enough armour to survive a slam you are asking for the wrong direction of this game. Boss mechanics need to be avoided not tanked.

You need to dodge those.

Evasion and block have their variance for this, theres a risk to standing in mechanics like that still. You dont guarantee yourself to not get hit by it with these defensive.

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edgecrusherO0#4497 wrote:

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Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Armour helps a ton against normal hits, bosses and mobs.

This extends into mapping as well.

You just have to have enough of it to matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1hfu583/psa_if_are_relying_on_armour_to_keep_you_alive/

If this math is accurate, 20K armour to survive a 4.6K damage slam on 2.5K life is...pretty silly and feels like we need far more armour than is reasonably available (even investing in armour on the passive tree to further support).

Thats by design. You're not supposed to tank that giant monster arm punching you in the face, you're supposed to get out of the way. Evasion can completely mitigate that attack and logically it makes sense. Why would your tiny plate armor protect you from a meteor bigger than you crashing on you? Meanwhile Evasion means the character does some invisible kung fu dodge move to avoid that same meteor.

Back in PoE 1 Duelist class could be surprisingly tanky when it had a little bit of both + tertiary defence like Block Chance on top of that. Not obviously Juggernaut levels but still.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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edgecrusherO0#4497 wrote:

"

Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Armour helps a ton against normal hits, bosses and mobs.

This extends into mapping as well.

You just have to have enough of it to matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1hfu583/psa_if_are_relying_on_armour_to_keep_you_alive/

If this math is accurate, 20K armour to survive a 4.6K damage slam on 2.5K life is...pretty silly and feels like we need far more armour than is reasonably available (even investing in armour on the passive tree to further support).

Thats by design. You're not supposed to tank that giant monster arm punching you in the face, you're supposed to get out of the way. Evasion can completely mitigate that attack and logically it makes sense. Why would your tiny plate armor protect you from a meteor bigger than you crashing on you? Meanwhile Evasion means the character does some invisible kung fu dodge move to avoid that same meteor.

Back in PoE 1 Duelist class could be surprisingly tanky when it had a little bit of both + tertiary defence like Block Chance on top of that. Not obviously Juggernaut levels but still.

Problem is dodge can also dodge elemental hits but armor does nothing against that. Mage can take CI and ignore any chaos damage then just MOM or ES tank since poe2 has pathetic amount of character HP anyways. Armor is by far the worst type of defense that has huge diminishing return and is only active in 20% of the content.

Armor has always had this core design flaw and it was a pain point in poe1, too.
Basically, you go ALL IN on armor, or you don't. If you go all in on armor, you will become VERY tanky and VERY safe from the worst kinds of boss abilities you can think of.

But if you don't min-max armor to the extreme, it effectively does nothing. Evasion is better if you just want a "casual" damage mitigation strategy. Or just do ES.