finally realised just how worthless armour is

some background first:
I have two characters in Cruel difficulty right now.
the higher-level is an evasion-build Ranger, and the lower-level one is an HP + armour Marauder, with a giant two-handed club.
the Ranger is the better survivor because she doesn't let anything get into a range too close, and uses evasion to dodge projectiles. so playing through Act 2 I managed to gracefully take-down most heavy-hitters from a safe distance.

one such heavy-hitter is the Blackguard Captain guarding the path back to Act 1.
my strategy as a Marauder was simple: use Granite Potion, Leap Slam on him, and take him down with Infernal Strike (roughly 500 mixed fire+physical damage) while drinking health potions.
it worked on Brutus, Merveil and The Weaver, so how hard can a unique mob be?

and then he used Cleave and Double Strike.
2 quick shots and my Marauder is dead. Granite Potion and all.
come back fresh from town, do it again, die again. repeat until the bastard died.
1 death him. 8 deaths me. he wins.

I had roughly 870 HP and 150 energy shield. that's over 1K of a meat-shield. should be quite enough for melee tanking. Granite Potion combined with my armour aura gives me ~9000 armour, which is ~87% physical damage reduction in that level 45 area.
and I got 2-shot again and again.
not to mention the regular melee mobs in that area deal Chaos damage, so armour is worthless even before you reach that Captain guy.

this is just ridiculous.

if anyone from Grinding Gear is reading this, you should definitely fix this absurd situation in an upcoming patch.
I have no intention on making my big bad Marauder shoot arrows or cast spells.
armour should be as good as it sounds. melee characters should be able to tank 90% of all possible threats, and "kite" the rest.

"

johnKeys a écrit :

some background first:
I had roughly 870 HP and 150 energy shield. that's over 1K of a meat-shield. should be quite enough for melee tanking. Granite Potion combined with my armour aura gives me ~9000 armour, which is ~87% physical damage reduction in that level 45 area.

I think my HC ranger has about 1700HP at level 45. Were you using enduring cry for endurance charges? Armor is much more effective with endurance charges on top reducing physical damage by a flat amount. I agree the armor formula is a bit wonky though.

I use this for endurance charges:
and this is my main weapon:

but again - 87% physical damage reduction from potion + aura (without endurance charges) and I get 2-4-shot by melee enemies? that's not "a bit wonky". that's hopelessly broken to a point, you can't really play a pure-melee character beyond Cruel Act 1.

also, I have no idea how you have 1700 HP on your Ranger at level 45. my Ranger just didn't have as many health nodes available in the passive tree at this level, even if I wanted to go all-HP.

I gambled on more armour and damage output than HP with the Marauder. it's a pretty safe bet in any game besides Path Of Exile apparently.

The more higher the damage the less effective the armor is, the lesser the damage the more effective

The 87% isn't a flat reduction

If your interested I'm sure it's on the forums somewhere, I know kripp talks about it quite a bit

As has been pointed more and more frequently is that a lot of the skills as mechanics that are poorly explained or understood, they desperately need to have someone review and edit these as necessary

87% reduction is misleading. Since the armour mitigation scales down with bigger hits, any mob that does a ton of damage and crits will reduce your mitigation a LOT. You need 12 times as many armor as the incoming damage to mitigate 50%.

The value of that mechanic is debatable, but the main thing is that it's very sensitive to scaling. And ACT 3 just has mobs dealing enormous damage, compounded by the act scaling.

In your case, your REAL mitigation was probably something like 20% or less.

And yeah, that makes armor of very little value compared to flat HP.

"

Skjuld a écrit :

87% reduction is misleading. Since the armour mitigation scales down with bigger hits, any mob that does a ton of damage and crits will reduce your mitigation a LOT. You need 12 times as many armor as the incoming damage to mitigate 50%.

The value of that mechanic is debatable, but the main thing is that it's very sensitive to scaling. And ACT 3 just has mobs dealing enormous damage, compounded by the act scaling.

In your case, your REAL mitigation was probably something like 20% or less.

And yeah, that makes armor of very little value compared to flat HP.

if that is true - then there is something seriously wrong here. more than I thought.

armour, evasion and HP should be of roughly equal importance. that is how it was in every single RPG and ARPG I have played since Diablo 1. it was true even in Zelda (now I really feel old).

if you and people like Kripparrian are right in saying you only need to stack HP and nothing else - while things like armour, evasion and damage output come from equipment and level - then Path Of Exile is just a completely broken game right now.

Since I have a similar-level character and dont remember fighting these blackguards ever, I decided to run a test for OP.

Here be my character. More HP, but by no mean has the kind of armour OP does. All those pots have low roll ironskin, btw.


This was what I found at the end of the road


A bit later, it became like this. Terrified by his onslaught, I couldnt fight back.


His back massage was about 100 ish on normal hit and 200-300 on skills/crit. Not exactly the end of the world, but he was slowly whittling me down, so my ancestors sent help.


Eventually he died touching my shield inappropriately. I confirm that this is a very broken monster!! Please nerf!!

"

rephikul a écrit :

Eventually he died touching my shield inappropriately. I confirm that this is a very broken monster!! Please nerf!!

no need to be so sarcastic.
also, notice your over 50% chance to block attacks.

I said nothing about down-toning that particular monster. it's just a very special case of inability to take-down with a pure-armour, damage output non-blocking/dodging melee character - while pretty easy to do so with a ranged, evasive or blocking one.

what I want is a complete overhaul to the armour mechanics.

when some enemies hit hard enough to kill my Marauder though a more-than-adequate amount of armour, and others just ignore it by dealing pure Chaos damage - it really does make game-play with a non-ranged character frustrating to the point, of wanting to quit the game altogether after Cruel Act 1.

If you looked around a little or used the search function you would know that they have plans to change how undervalued everything but hp stacking is

Thanks for making a moot point 99% of the player base is already aware of

Alright, NOW I finally got your point. To help with your understanding, armour isnt worthless. It provide damage reduction equal (roughly) to between armour/20 and armour/15, depending on how heavy you get hit for. You have 8k armour? That's a crapload for your level so around 400 damage shaved off every physical hits. Considering how you have only 1100 HP, take 3 hits and the armour has already paid for itself. And it IS paying for itself. The relative defensive strength between armour and HP is already excellent. The problem is that monsters later on hit too hard for the HP+armour combo to tank adequately, and that need addressing.

They are working on that btw, so keep yourself tuned.