Replace Armour with Physical Resistance Percentages

Given Kripp's videos and the research posted on Reddit, I'm sharing my suggestion for how to fix armour once and for all in PoE 2.

Replace it with physical resistance percentage, the same way damage mitigation is done for elemental and chaos resistance.

Instead of an armour number, there should be a physical damage resistance percentage on the item that doesn't count as an implicit or one of the six affixes.

Could also make the armour number translate into an actual %phys reduction number, so that you can still get the same kinds of scaling only there's no point once you go past the cap, 80% or whatever it is, add max phys reduction from armour nodes to the tree to get it higher, and also to give players who hit that max the ability to start refocusing out of defenses and into offences. I've been solely playing Warrior with HP/Armour, it's quite time consuming as you really have to farm and craft hard to cap resistances, maintain damage (good weapons are necessary to do damage) and on top of it fitting enough HP and armour to not get clobbered before you can react is kind of tight. Currently my character sheet says 42% mitigation from armour, obviously this is a meaningless number, but you could definitely have it be the real mitigation % against monsters at your level.

I wouldn't have a problem with Phys Resistance just being another resistance. Some things would need to be rebalanced but I'd be OK with it.

Now whether the DEVs or others have a problem with it is the bigger question though.

Honestly I don't necessarily mind diminishing returns with armor BUT I would want to have better access to PDR [potentially on any piece of armor .. not just shields by default] ; PDR on endurance charges ; or other flat sources of PDR so we can augment armor to better manage mitigation seeing that Armor + Life is all about mitigating damage to a small "HP" pool

Imagine if elemental and chaos resistance weredone like armour.

Would we be stacking gear that effectively gave 3% mitigation knowing that a big hit makes it worthless anyway?

As a player who went after armour stacking and being sadly disappointed, this is how I see it. Instead of X armour, it really means about 3% resistance, which isn't even a true 3% because it's more than 3% on a small hit and less than 3% on a big hit.

Can we please lose the complexity of the armour formula?

If elemental and chaos resistance were done like armour, no one would bother with resists either. They would just stack life, energy shield, evasion.

I second this. It can be capped at 75% like all the others, with some exceptions that increase the max phys res. But armour as it is, isn't really practical right now. In PoE1, armour was useable, because players could achieve brutal amounts of armour thanks to Determination and Armour-Flask. It was easy to achieve 5 digits armour values without having any armour piece at all. But in PoE2, the flask and aura are missing, therefore armour value is quite limited to gear and some passive nodes. Best you can achieve is around 70% phys damage reduction, BUT we know that big hits bypass this alot, so armour gets less effective against bosses and strong rare mobs.

Another option would be, to buff armour gain from equipment and that the estimated phys damage reduction is changed to a definitive phys damage reduction.

They won't do shit, because everything is balanced around energy shield + armour or energy shield + evasion or energy shield by itself.

Well.
GGG has hated melee builds since day one.
The one big promise before launch was that they finally had "fixed it".

And by "fix" they of course meant bricking armor even worse, removing all life nodes, and rendering the warrior melee skills so slow it's unusable for the majority of the game.