ARMOR is useless until... when?

Dear GGG

AFAIK there should be 3 ways to build a tough character, based on: evasion or shield or armor. I started my mercenary as armor one.

I thought: ok, if i do evasion, then rare mobs or bosses will definitely oneshot me. But hey, i'm a ranged weaponed, so i will evade manually by WASD, just need to run fast and strafe. In rare cases when i fail, my armor should take a hit. So, i up my armor as much as i can, along with all resistances.



And now with great efforts I reached level 85. I have a quest for level 14 waystones. And it has become almost impossible. I'm like a squirrel in a wheel. As soon as I gain a bit of experience - oneshot and here we go again. And every mob, who is not lazy, oneshots me - with physical, chaos, lightning, fire, cold. Like if my character went out into the field in his underwear. The last time some ordinary centaur-jackal poked me with a spear and I fell face down in the mud.

I have 1800 health - this is not the worst indicator, I have seen characters much weaker. It seems to me that you should calculate the damage of monsters based on the average amount of players life and then it simply should be decreases by the amount of armor.

I don't know how exactly, but you need to balance the damage and the effect of resistances and armor. Because at the moment this is not a game, but a mockery.

Armor is useless against everything except the small hits you don't need the armor to take, pretty much.

Yes, but currently only broken builds can play and have fun. I don't want such build, so i must suffer? What is game that can be done only with broken build??

you have 1,8k life? If so you need way more than that.
at 2,5k life its starts to get little bit easier to survive but jeah armour is pretty much useless right now.

"

Alendos#5916 wrote:

Yes, but currently only broken builds can play and have fun. I don't want such build, so i must suffer? What is game that can be done only with broken build??

All 3 defensive stats are useless (armor, block, evasion), more or less. HP/ES/Mana (when using mind over matter) are the only ones that really count. Why? Because, well, everything uses slam attacks or has a 1 km-wide cold/fire/lightning aura, or both. I was 2-shot on Cruel by 2 beetles with cold aura/cold spits. Having 1.5k hp (at lvl 55), 50% armor, 83% evasion and ~50% to all resistances. Having had energy shield instead would've kept me alive. Or more HP.

They've unified hits, so it's no longer spell/melee/projectile. And then they pulled a fast one and added slam attacks. And made everything a slam attack or a half-the-screen aoe. Enjoy your high evasion vs that. Or high armor. Or both.

Average energy shield is 5 digit so 1800 deserves being one shot.

I just need some good boots. Apparently this world has 10 different types of death pools you can't stand in, also you can't see them, also if you're melee lol, also minions LOVE them and won't get out of them.

Even with 75% phys damage reduction, 1800 life isn't enough to stop the bigger hits from killing you. They still need to be avoided entirely. And if the map has any mods that add damage to monsters then even their milder hits are still a hazard.

Armour also pairs really well with block which isn't an option for ranged class (afiak).

With 65% phys reduction, 75% block and 2.8k life im able to survive being swarmed in t15 breeches fairly well.

You definitely want more maximum life than 1800 by the time you are doing tier 14s. If you are having trouble getting more on gear that is just an early access problem in general. Trading for item upgrades is dis-proportionally necessary right now.

Armour is also a victim of poor design currently. It has a lot of problems and just isn't practically functional for now. I made a post covering the problems and potential solutions if anyone is more interested:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3667538

Armor is busted vs. scaling damage from end-game mobs.

Several tests have been done and against really hard hits it protects about as well as wearing no armor at all.

So... give them some time to fix that I guess. But, don't forget GGG prioritizes updates based on taking away the most fun possible. So, if something is broken and not fun it'll generally be on the bottom of the stack of things to nerf. I mean "fix".