Impale and Armour Interaction

- First something important to note with impale. Because ideally you'll be stacking 7 impales on enemies, all being released with each hit, you are technically hitting enemies 8 times every single hit (6 times without watcher's eye). The damage from impale is stored BEFORE mitigation, and when its released it is affected by mitigation, but as reflected damage (meaning it doesn't trigger on hit affects). Instead of one big hit, its several smaller ones. This is important.

- ARMOUR DOES NOT GIVE FLAT PHYSICAL DAMAGE REDUCTION. There is a very big reason that the 'physical damage reduction' stat in your character sheet explicitly stats ESTIMATED. The percentage of damage armour will mitigate depends on how much damage the hit is trying to do. Armour can generally be somewhat effective for smaller hits, but without a LOT MORE armour than the damage its trying to mitigate, armour can be entirely uneffective against big hits, even if you have 10k+ armour. This is the reason why I dont scale armour in this build. Its just not useful when it matters.

- For context, through raw armour ASSUMING NO OTHER MITIGATION, you would need 85,000 armour to survive with a sliver of life from a shaper slam when you started with 6k health, even tho the shaper slam 'only' does 17,067 physical damage. (I ACTUALLY DID THE MATH, CHECK OUT THE WIKI FOR FORMULAS) This is VERY important, as most builds don't grab ANY physical damage reduction whatsoever.

- Whether its your armour, or a monsters armour, the calculations are the same. The highest armoured monster in the game as of 3.8 had a whopping 983 armour. Thats not a typo. It is so hilariously low that the devopers had to buff monsters by 3,000% to make it anywhere near relevant. (It is worth noting some players stack 10s of thousands of armour in order to make it functional, and some of those players can be found in the hall of grand masters)

- With this build able to get well over 100,000 damage PER HIT, armour values of monsters simply cant mitigate anything relevant since monsters will have a maximum of 30,000 armour. HOWEVER, impale doesn't hit quite as hard individually.

- In this build, with 20/20 banner and impale support, 21% of of physical damage from each hit is stored (PRE ARMOUR) then released in a later hit (WHERE ARMOUR IS THEN APPLIED). with a 20k average hit with buffs being lower than the 30k armour of a monster, it can mitigate some small percentage. The less damage you do, the higher percentage of your impale is negated. This is why the monster armour doesnt affect normal hits, but is an indirect nerf to impale.

- Something important to note, is armour is calculated into a percent mitigation (CAPPED AT 90%) then other increases/reductions to physical damage are added/subtracted to get a final mitigation value. So even if armour were to mitigate 90% of your impales damage, (IT WONT) with the -20% from the tree and -30% from impale support, assuming monsters have 0% physical damage reduction (which everything does unless it has buffs like %phys mitigation map mod or endurance charges) The impale will still do 60% of its full value of damage. Its when monsters have 40% physical damage reduction (Red tier map mod) That your impale only does 20% of its full value. (AGAIN, ONLY IF YOU HAVE DREADFUL DAMAGE)

- In other words, assuming your damage is garbage, impale will worst case scenario do at least 60% of its damage (since with 5 impales, its basically 105% more damage, its instead 63% more damage) which is hardly build breaking.

- Stacking armour as a player in an attempt to get tankier literally is useless for values below 40-50k, at least for raw armour mitigation. When it comes to molten shell mitigation, you need to have ~10,000 as a minimum to push out steelskin, and 20,000-50,000 to actually scale it properly, although if you do its actually very good. (basically armour only exists to scale molten shell in the games current state)


GGG DEVELOPER EXPLICITLY STATING THE HIGHEST ARMOURED MONSTER IN GAME HAS 983: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/12056/page/492#p3321134

http://www.twitch.tv/fireknight747/b/401083276

WIKI FOR ARMOUR CALCULATIONS IF YOU REALLY DONT BELIEVE ME:
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Armour