Armor rework

I think we can all agree that armor in its current state, is the weakest of the defensive traits for numerous reasons.

1.
Unlike E shield and evasion it only works against physical damage.

2.
You need to stack a lot of it to have any noticeable amount of damage reduction, and even then it barely helps against hard hits.

3.
Movement speed penalty. Need more be said about this?

So here’s what I propose.
Make armor a secondary life bar like E shield. I know, crazy right?
This will address the first 2 problems above.

It will protect against other damage types by directly adding to effective life pool. Poison, bleed, and ignite however will bypass this.

As for how to restore it when damaged.
A usable repair kit that works like life potions. However using it will put you in an animation, so best used out of combat and somewhere safe.

And for fixing the movement speed penalty, keep it. But make strength itself alleviate the penalty.
Every 25 strength alleviates 10% of armor movement speed penalty.

Whether this’ll work or not, meh.
Just had one of those eureka moments and felt like sharing.

So, I'll caveat my post by saying that Diablo 4 is a mediocre game... but the "formula" they use for armour is vastly better than PoE1 and 2. LE also has its own system which is vastly superior.

In D4, the last time I played, you needed 7500 armour to reach max physical resistance. Simple formula to work out. 0 armour, 0 resistance. 7500 armour, 75% phys resistance.

In LE, physical resistance is treated in the same way as elemental resistances. Certain pieces come with phys resistance built in. Armour is a stat that reduces damage from all hits. Its an extra layer you get on top of resistances.

My suggestion is to essentially combine both.

You get an armour base that comes with 300 armour and 20% physical resistance as implicit stats. Every 1000 armour reduces damage taken from hits by 2%, up to a max of 15%. Physical resistance can only appear on bases with the armour implicit stat.

Boom. Problem solved.

You get to keep Armour and still stack it and get benefits. The physical damage mitigation problem is also solved for armour based characters. This opens up an avenue for new bases in the future like in PoE1 with the sacrificial garb that has Armour, ES and EV. It would also encourage mixing of bases depending on what the players feel.

Basically your idea is to keep armor as physical resistance, as there are resistances against cold, fire, lighting, and chaos. So, why not just keep all them the same and just stack gear of physical resistance up to 75%?

There is a reason why evasion and energy shield combines very well. With some evasion and block, it reduces the rate to are hit, giving more room for energy shield to regenerate. However, armor never reduces damage to zero.

Armour should be one layer of defense in the same line as energy shield and evasion, and it should work along with the other two.

My idea is: There should be gear that gives you physical resistance, but armor should be something different. For example, armor reduces the total damage from hits by a fix number, so small hits barely scratch you, both elemental or physical.

It is not as effective against big hits, although there is some mitigation. This is where evasion comes as a second layer of defense and ultimately energy shield and life.

Armor can break down, this is mechanism that is already in the game.
A skill that empowers your armor, but slows you movement down. Basically making you a tank and let them come to you.

That is one idea. Another idea is armor basically nullify damage. All damage you can receive is caped and armor absorbs all until it breaks and you are exposed to full damage.

There we go again...

The problem with all those posts saying that armour is bad is that they lack actual numbers.

Armour is not the best thing ever, but it is currently fine. Nobody playing a well-built char using armour with some synergy is dying for physical dmg. They could buff it and nobody would say a thing against that, but for sure it doesn't need a rework.

It is true that it is useless against other kind of dmg without some synergy, but they added a lot of max resist nodes around warrior's area on passive tree for this reason. And there are ways to make it to apply to elemental dmg.

Whatever man, but the numbers are there. Nobody is using armor at the end game.

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B00b#4465 が発言:

Whatever man, but the numbers are there. Nobody is using armor at the end game.

Most Titans on SSFHC are using armour.

Just because ES is broken with OP gear, which is easy to get on trade league, it doesn't mean that armour needs a whole rework.

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DEvil27#6183 が発言:

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B00b#4465 が発言:

Whatever man, but the numbers are there. Nobody is using armor at the end game.

Most Titans on SSFHC are using armour.

Just because ES is broken with OP gear, which is easy to get on trade league, it doesn't mean that armour needs a whole rework.

No man it is a matter of numbers. At the end game, to mitigate 10% of damage you need at least 6.000 armor, which is a huge investment and only for physical damage. Be clever and get 6.000 of energy shield.

nah that will make armor es 2.0 the obvious solution is to make armor defend against aoe at 50% of its value and also make implicits on gear that use armor to defend against other damage types like a base body armor that has for example "defend with 35% of armor against chaos damage " or any other type. This way u will make armor actually fun to spec and make gear types actually matters players will then have to make a choice when gearing and they can also add some notes on the south side of tree like those anti crit nodes but for more aoe and maybe damage over time effects like poison also armor must make u immune to bleed after a certain threshold like when u reach 10 k for example u become immune to bleed that way we will have different defenses not just es clones

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B00b#4465 が発言:

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DEvil27#6183 が発言:

"

B00b#4465 が発言:

Whatever man, but the numbers are there. Nobody is using armor at the end game.

Most Titans on SSFHC are using armour.

Just because ES is broken with OP gear, which is easy to get on trade league, it doesn't mean that armour needs a whole rework.

No man it is a matter of numbers. At the end game, to mitigate 10% of damage you need at least 6.000 armor, which is a huge investment and only for physical damage. Be clever and get 6.000 of energy shield.

Firstly, 6k is far from "a huge investment". You can easily check that by visiting SSFHC section on poe2.ninja and you will see that most Titans with some investment on armour will have 8k-10k. And that is SSF on a off-meta build, which means people aren't really pushing that.

Secondly, 6k armour (which is a low number) would only mitigate 10% if it were a raw 5.4k dmg physical hit. Basically, the only thing that does that amount of physical dmg is Xesht palm slam. It is a dumb comparison, because you won't see this amount of physical dmg unless you are doing pinnacle bosses and it would be dumb to rely on armour for pinnacle bosses if you have only that amount. On T15/T16 maps, you wouldn't see more than 2k pure physical dmg except on some bosses. That low amount (6k) would be already enough to reduce 23% of that dmg.

Thirdly, it makes no sense to compare 6k armour with 6k ES. Not only because armour rating on gear is about 3x higher in number than ES (compare a white Vile Robe with a white Soldier Cuirass), but also because you need investment and synergy for that. If you are doing, for example, a two-hand mace build with you will have trouble to mix it with enough ES nodes to get a significant amount of that and some sustain. It is not like you can swift from armour to the same amount of ES like that. I mean, many Titans on trade league are building ES, but they are playing it with spears, spells, minions. Those playing with maces aren't getting much ES, for example. You can't just swift any build from armour to ES like that.