Which type of armour is best?

Energy Shield
Armour
Evasion Percentage

All of these are related to your defense in PoE, and they're offered to varying amounts, and sometimes in combinations of two in a piece of armor.

My highest level character currently is a lvl 16 Witch. Her weakness is sure to be physical damage, but what is the best form of defense?
To begin with, I thought Evasion Percentage, because for armour she doesn't have the STR to rank high enough to cover heavy damage, but then there is Energy Shield but that is quick to burn through the around one hundred points of that.

Is there any recommended type per class, is there a flexibility, or is it down to play style to decide how to equip armour types?

None of these are the best, you really want a combo of at least 2 of the 3. Going pure armor is the best out of the three.

If you load up all evasion, you can get one-two hit killed very easily.

If you load up all on ES, once you lose your shield there is no way to refill it leaving you an easy target.

So Pure armor>Pure anything, but as I said you really want a combination of everything.

I believe the answer is to build damage reduction into Evasion as well as Armor. Some may say this makes no sense, but let me explain the logic behind it.

If someone comes swinging a club at you and you're wearing armor, the armor obviously absorbs a lot of the shock, causing you less damage. However if you have no armor on you'd be much quicker and would be able to dodge it. If you aren't able to get 100% out of the way, you are still going to be able to move enough so the blow only glances off you instead of making a solid impact. With this theory, you are still going to take more damage than if you were wearing armor, but still enough to take less damage.

so my proposal would be to allow up to 125% combined evasion+Damage reduction. If you want to go 75% reduction/50% evasion, or 75% Evasion/50% reduction, then it's your choice. Maybe make it so Evasion gives 50% damage reduction as armor does, and see how that works to start. (So say 1000 evasion= 25% DR, then 1000 armor should give 50%.)

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Isobar wrote:

If someone comes swinging a club at you and you're wearing armor, the armor obviously absorbs a lot of the shock, causing you less damage.

I think that this makes good sense, although I'm not sure about the gameplay impacts of giving evasion straight damage reduction.

I think that there is a chance that things become too homogenous that way. I think a better way of implementing it would be to give you chances to avoid certain %'s of damage from a blow. Like 75% to avoid 25% damage, 50% chance to avoid 50% damage and 25% chance to avoid 75% damage. That would be on top of regular evasion, and of course scale around depending on your evasion rating.

Glancing blows, managing to redirect blows to less vulnerable body parts etc

Although, such a system still presents the problem of getting one-shot as a pure evasion character...