Lets talk armor (the stat)

Kind of a bad stat honestly; Helps great against hits that don't threaten you (the small ones), borderline useless against the ones that you actually care about (big ones), only protects against one damage type...

Half the nodes actually implicitly aknowledge this since they're giving you stats BESIDES armor to get you to buy them: Crit suppresssion, Life, or outright static % damage reduction (You know, a stat that actually WORKS). Plus, armor is balanced around having really high stats from Iron reflexes to really work well.
"But you can go with endurance charges!". Yeah, So endurance charges don't suck, and so you pick them up. All you're doing then is getting a DR system that DOES do its job to shore up the one that doesn't do its job.


Compare life or CI ES: Work against everything. Do their job. Don't require bribing you with other stats to take their nodes, they can stand on their own.
Like, if Armor is meant to work against only ONE damage type, it should be Really freaking good against that one damage type, but as things stand, its not even more than passable against physical damage.



Is there any plans to make Armor more attractive? And I mean ACTUALLY more attractive, not just putting another stat that works in armor nodes to distract from the stat being subpar?

ES is a buffer.
Armour is mitigation.
Those mechanics have nothing to do with each other, comparing them is pointless.

Armour is good against physical damage, the difference between 10k and 0 armour in endgame is already really big, no need to invest too much of it, but it needs to go with other layers, like the rest :
- End charges alone don't do well
- Evasion alone don't do well
- block alone isn't that great ( altho a bit better I guess, with all the things that give spell block from block )

etc ...

Armour is pretty good, but stacking only armour is not enough, like the other forms of mitigations, basically.

A correction for you. Armour does work against large hits. Repeating bad information isn't helpful. Go look at the equation for total damage prevented on the wiki if you don't believe me. You're right about its real downside though, that it only works on one damage type.

armour works well against big hits, I wouldnt pay to much attention when u see people saying it doesnt. They basically read someone else saying it like you read them saying it, and the person they read saying it read someone else saying it.


The thing with nodes is that es nodes are your defense and your life pool, so when armour and life are together on a node its sort of doing the same thing.

I rate armour, I stack armour on many chars, invest in armour nodes.

If you stack armour u should have 20k+. If we look at a 6k physical damage hit which is a virtual 1 shot for the majority of evasion chars who have no phys reduction then 20k armour is better than 6 endurance charges. It will reduce phys damage more than +6 max ele resists will reduce ele damage, it will reduce more than a basalt flask, more than a taste of hate, more than a lightning coil.

Just because against a 2k phys hit its more than twice as good as all those things doesnt take away from the fact its still better than all those things against a 6k hit.

Just wanted to pop in to verify the above post.
20k armour gives 25% mitigation against 6000 damage hit.
6 Endurance charges comes reaaally close to that armour rating tho at 24% effectiveness :)


Similarly, I do aim for 20k armour on all my melee characters as that separates a one-shot from going albeit low, still survivable hit. Combine the armour rating with some charges/basalt/fortify and you laugh at physical damage, but even if you can survive with the additional effects I listed I do want that armour rating as that is constantly up, leaving no downtime when you can be one-shotted.


It's a common misconception that armour is useless against big hits just because it works in a linear fashion, not exponential one as does against smaller hits.

My only problem with armor is that people are allowed to ignore it almost entirely due to Granites, Basalts, ToH/phys->X conversion, Endurance Charges, Fortify, and CwDT+IC.

I wish that builds that wear no armor gear and take no armor passives on the tree were more scared of physical damage than they are now.

(Primarily this is from being able to use flasks freely.)

Armor gives enough buffer.

If you have 7k HP, 20k Armor and Forty you can tank hits around 11k phys. Thats more then enough for the current content. Just because half of the people dont have an idea and the other half just copies other statements (buhu, armor is bad), we do not need a change there.

As a rule of thumb:
Armor/10 + Life Pool = one-shot pool

The only stat that actually should be a little bit reworked is Evasion, since it doesnt offer you a decent increase in 1-shot pool

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DurianMcgregor a écrit :

A correction for you. Armour does work against large hits. Repeating bad information isn't helpful. Go look at the equation for total damage prevented on the wiki if you don't believe me. You're right about its real downside though, that it only works on one damage type.

He isn't repeating bad information

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/126d5KRYZJpXICpwTzXCxUI7Ph2NQwiFeKys76yJbgxM/edit#gid=945032000


The example it uses is 10k armour vs a 5k hit. Only 16% mitigation. Compare that to elemental resistances 75%. I never did an armour build, but I would guess that 10k armour is much harder to get than 75% elemental resists, for about 1/5th the protection.

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SodanKerjuu a écrit :

Just wanted to pop in to verify the above post.
20k armour gives 25% mitigation against 6000 damage hit.
6 Endurance charges comes reaaally close to that armour rating tho at 24% effectiveness :)


Similarly, I do aim for 20k armour on all my melee characters as that separates a one-shot from going albeit low, still survivable hit. Combine the armour rating with some charges/basalt/fortify and you laugh at physical damage, but even if you can survive with the additional effects I listed I do want that armour rating as that is constantly up, leaving no downtime when you can be one-shotted.


It's a common misconception that armour is useless against big hits just because it works in a linear fashion, not exponential one as does against smaller hits.

20K armour is a lot, and 'only' for a 25% reduction.

The OP mentions health and ES. I believe he was trying to say it is better to stack a large life pool so you can take those hits without armour. I would agree with him. A big pool and getting evasion is far more beneficial, for a much lower cost (both passive nodes, and gear allocation). With much less evasion you can get 40% chance to evade, which is more dps mitigation (damage over time is the key point there) and it works against elemental damage as well.


The cost benefit for stacking all that armour just doesn't seem to be there compared to other defenses. You can easily do better than 25% mitigation with warlord's mark/enduring cry giving endurance charges, and 20% from a flask (and enjoy evasion on your gear instead). To contrast, a bismuth flask gives 35% elemental resistances which is defense from ONLY one or two pieces of gear, not giving you the equivalent protection of an entire build like the scenario I mentioned right before. To clarify: the flasks seem balanced, but how armour works seems to need a rework like the OP says.

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Lord_Tao a écrit :

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DurianMcgregor a écrit :

A correction for you. Armour does work against large hits. Repeating bad information isn't helpful. Go look at the equation for total damage prevented on the wiki if you don't believe me. You're right about its real downside though, that it only works on one damage type.

He isn't repeating bad information

Nope, he's right. Everyone who tried armour is aware that armour works well against big hits. In your example that mere 16% reduction is at least 20% more ehp. Realistically, you paired your armour with some endurance charge, basalt falsk etc end relative ehp gain is much higher. For a hit that is rare and you should avoid it anyway. Armour in this case serves only as extension of your ehp buffer and being able to survive at least 20% more damage for small investment is huge.

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Turbodevil a écrit :

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Lord_Tao a écrit :

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DurianMcgregor a écrit :

A correction for you. Armour does work against large hits. Repeating bad information isn't helpful. Go look at the equation for total damage prevented on the wiki if you don't believe me. You're right about its real downside though, that it only works on one damage type.

He isn't repeating bad information

Nope, he's right. Everyone who tried armour is aware that armour works well against big hits. In your example that mere 16% reduction is at least 20% more ehp. Realistically, you paired your armour with some endurance charge, basalt falsk etc end relative ehp gain is much higher. For a hit that is rare and you should avoid it anyway. Armour in this case serves only as extension of your ehp buffer and being able to survive at least 20% more damage for small investment is huge.

I agree that a larger extended health pool is always better, but is it needed at such a relatively high cost to get that level of armour?

I would argue that lots of smaller hits taken at once are much more common than big hits, and evasion is better there as it reduces damage taken per second a lot more effectively.


Granted, as I said I never did do an armour build, but I haven't had much of a problem with phys damage one shotting me. Usually the big phys damage is chasing you around to get close enough so they can make you taste it, as it were. For ranged/casters: temp chains/chilled ground/frost wall seems to work decent enough, and for melee fortify + flasks seem to be good enough. At best there is probably a handful of map bosses where armour+fortify+flasks+endurances charges is needed.