Comparison and analysis of the defense hierarchy

So we all thought for awhile that armour tducked, and GGG listened and buffed it a fair bit. But I've been thinking about armour as a defense and it still doesn't quite cut it compared to the others, and it actually has to do with elemental damage, not physical. Then I thought a bit about why energy shield is considered the best defense and came up with some interesting thoughts that may or may not reflect reality in the game.

Energy shield, for example, is basically an extra pool of health, which mean no matter what damage type hits you, you're harder to kill (except maybe chaos if you rely solely on ES and have a low health pool).

Evasion is similar. A chance to not get hit works against all damage types and all attacks except for aoe and ground dots. This is one reason why energy shield is the best defense right now (besides how easy it is to stack). It works against aoe skills, which evasion doesn't. The saving grace evasion has is that these characters are typically fast enough to not be there for the hit or ground dot if you're fast. If there are 3 rares spamming area denial everywhere then tough I guess.

Armour is the worst for a reason. Not only is it pretty hard to stack, it only protects against physical damage. You have no way to avoid elemental damage except for resistances, which you can get with evasion or es as well. And yeah, warrior has Passives in his area of the tree that allow him to increase max resistances, but you can get these stats on evasion or es builds as well. Not only does armour just not have any built in way of dealing with elemental damage, it also just doesn't work against the big hits. A bigger health pool like es and a chance to not get hit at all like with evasion works just the same with a small hit as it does with a big hit, but for some reason armoir stops working with bigger hits.

So basically, heres the situation in a nutshell. Ignoring resistances and assuming were standing still, for the sake of comparing base defenses alone, lets consider some types of damage we can take:

Small physical attack/projectile hits:
ES: no direct resistance or avoidance, but a bigger health pool still means this defense helps against these hits
Evasion: direct chance to avoid damage entirely
Armour: strong mitigation of damage

Large physical attack/projectile hits:
ES: same as above, more health means more health
Evasion: direct chance to avoid damage entirely
Armour: the bigger the hit the less it works, so yeah... some mitigation, but not lots.

Here's were armour really falls off though.

Elemental attacks/projectiles:
ES: same as above
Evasion: same as above
Armour: exactly nothing. No built in way to handle elemental damage. No mitigation. No avoidance. And no bigger health pool.

And here's where evasion also falls off:

Aoe damage:
ES: same as above, bigger health pool works against everything
Evasion: unavoidable, you're taking the hit unless you move
Armour: well, you don't avoid anything anyways, so it depends on the damage type of the aoe, but they tend to be elemental hits or big hits, so you get nothing, like above, or not as much mitigation as you should have

Ground dots:
ES: same as above
Evasion: can't avoid dot, so evasion does nothing for us here
Armour: same as above, but worse because armour doesn't mitigate dot, only hits

This is literally the only place where ES gets beaten out, but really only by evasion:

Chaos damage:
ES: takes double damage.
Evasion: can avoid hits entirely, but if it's a dot/ground effect/aoe, tough luck
Armour: can't mitigate it at all, but usually ES builds can get more than double the ES than an armour build can get life (at least from what I've seen).

So ES works against everything but chaos damage, evasion works against everything but aoe hits and dots, and both have an indirect way of mitigating elemental damage taken.

Armour works against small physical hits, barely works against big physical hits, and has no way of mitigating elemental damage taken, except for just getting resistances, which the other two defenses have access to as well.

For example:
Let's say we have 3 characters.
One has 6k es, one has 75% chance to Evade, one has 75% physical damage reduction from armour, and all three have 75% all resistances and 3k life.

Taking small physical damage hits:
-The ES character would need to be dealt 9k damage
-The evasion character would need to be attacked by 12k damage, since they would avoid 75% of it
-The armor character would need to be attacked by 12k damage, since they would mitigate 75% of it.
-Armour and evasion are tied, and es is the worst here, but still better than nothing

Taking large physical damage hits:
-The ES character would still need to be dealt 9k damage
-The evasion character would still need to be attacked by 12k damage
-Suddenly, the armour character would need to be attacked by significantly less than 12k damage, maybe even less than 9k damage making it the worst defense for this, but still better than nothing

Taking elemental damage hits:
-The ES character would need to by attacked by 36k damage, since their larger health pool is enhanced by the 75% resistances
-The evasion character would need to be attacked by 48k damage, since whatever makes it past the 75% evasion chance is then mitigated by 75% resistance
-the armour character needs to be attacked by 12k damage. Armour does nothing for us here, and we rely solely on our elemental resistances. Armour is the worst defense for this, and is actually not better than nothing.

Taking aoe damage or ground dots:
-The ES character needs to be attacked by either 9k damage or 36k damage, depending on whether it's physical or elemental
-The evasion character needs to be attacked by either 3k or 12k damage, depending on whether it's physical or elemental. Evasion does nothing for us here.
-the armour character needs to be attacked by either 3k or less than 12k damage, depending on the damage type. The reason I say less than 12k is because usually ape hits are also big hits, so armour either does nothing, or is not as good as evasion.

The now of course, in some of these categories, armour does win, or at least doesn't lose. The problem is that by end game you're killing things so fast that you aren't faced with a whole lot of small physical hits. Usually everything that would do that dies really fast and then all that's left is rares or magics that deal elemental damage or spam large aoes or ground dots, making armour not effective at all, and evasion not much better except that the characters are faster. And this is why armour sucks. Buffing the formula will help, but changing the formula and adding some kind of elemental factor to it is really the only way I can see it catching up with the other two defenses and making it feel like you're actually a tank.

TLDR;

the hierarchy of defenses exists because of how many varieties of damage they protect from, directly or otherwise. To balance this, buffing the armour formula is barely a step at all. It would, at the very least, need some built in way to deal with elemental damage.

Pretty much every class I've played I've had some kind of ES in poe2, it's stupid. You also forgot a point of how easy it is to stack ES regen and speed - like I think I had a Titan with 4.7k ES regen, it was nuts.

It's insanely hard to stack HP regen and health pool in this game sucks and you pair it with armour and its just suck on suck, sucking as united sucks.

Dunno how hard it would be for these tools to go - Hey why dont we just create another bar around HP called "armor condition" or something, then have it exactly the same as ES, extra life that damage needs to thrash before it goes into your life pool.

Literally no one can complain if its the fucking same as an ES except you have all the nodes for it on the left hand side where the armor and hp nodes are and keep the ES stuff on the other side where it is now.

Honestly the guys who come up with shit for this try over complicate everything to appear smart and end up looking dense when things fail horrendously.

If you think about it. There's actually no reason for ES to exist in PoE2.

Everyone gets life per level and only STR increases Life. ES was made as an alternative to life wheels. Instead INT types should simply be using damage taken as mana. ie Mana Shield.

Of course they're not going to get rid of ES even if it was a mistake. I just think it's funny.

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Xzorn#7046 a écrit :

If you think about it. There's actually no reason for ES to exist in PoE2.

Everyone gets life per level and only STR increases Life. ES was made as an alternative to life wheels. Instead INT types should simply be using damage taken as mana. ie Mana Shield.

Of course they're not going to get rid of ES even if it was a mistake. I just think it's funny.

I agree with this, it's a weird thing to have and on top of weird its way to strong