Is armour essentially just physical resistance?

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rifraf-_-#9478 wrote:

Very interesting stuff. Lots of helpful answers here.

From a fantasy POV (still an RPG, innit? lol), I don't like how a core stat like armour is frankly so shit
:(

in poe1 people made a much bigger deal of armour being bad than it really was tbh. ive not played with an armour build in poe2 so i cant really comment on how it works in practice here.



in poe1 there was a school of thought that said armour was the worst thing ever and had a bunch of reasoning behind it. there was another that said evasion was the worst thing ever with a bunch of reasoning.

there was some truth to the criticisms of both defences, generally if you just stacked some armour your characters defences were shit. same was true with evasion. but really while it might have been slightly closer to a complete form of defence on its own just stacking some energy shield was also fairly shit.

most characters only really got tanky when they had 3 or 4+ layers of defence going on and a lot of those characters had armour and/or evasion among those layers and it was doing a significant part of the job of keeping them alive.






armour is good at trivialising chip damage from groups of mobs and keeping medium hit damage in check. evasion is good at saving you from rapid bursts of multiple incoming hit damage. energy shield is pretty bad at dealing with a lot of those situations but its good at surviving 1 big hit.

part of the problem becomes broken builds where you 1 shot entire screens, when thats the builds you mostly play then surviving in combat for prolonged periods never happens. you only care about being able to take 1 massive chunk of damage because nothing is going to survive long enough to do anything else. that slightly favours evasion over armour but significantly favours es over both of them.

so you get this situation where people with the budget to do defences well probably have the budget to nuke the whole screen and will then gravitate to es if they care a lot about surviving and maybe glass cannon life + evasion if they dont, partly because bows and speed too. marauder type playstyle is often trash, its ineffective, slow and while armour suits that playstyle that playstyle itself is shit and when someone makes a marauder type build thats fast and boomy enough to have good clear then armour stops being a defence that suits the build cause it doesnt hang in combat it probably 1 slams the screen right?

like i said ive not played armour in poe2 and dont plan on any time soon, but in poe1 it was never that bad at doing what it was supposed to do its just like its friend melee, it does something that inherently kind of sucks from a power gaming perspective. if you have to go toe to toe with every mob your build probably sucks, if you have to survive prolonged combat with white/blue/yellow mobs your build probably sucks. thats the 'elite gamer' arpg mindset.




ppl always wanted ggg to 'fix' melee and armour, but im not sure it ever could be fixed. its identity is rooted in a sub optimal playstyle.

If only it worked like resistance....most physical 1 shots would stop happenning in an instant.

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EBYRWA#0971 wrote:

Energy shield on the other hand scales with the amount given via passive tree nodes and has no diminishing returns. Even at crazy high amounts, think 12,000+ energy shield, it is more valuable to get even more energy shield than even any small amount of armor.

Energy shield is for whatever reason not balanced.

We have 5 type of damage:
physical, cold, fire, lighting, chaos

We can make some subcategories of
bleeding, poison that bypasses energy shield
and we have slams that are considered aoe.

Block can deflect physical hits and projectiles only.
So physical slams still hurt you.

Evasion if I recall correctly can evade physical hits and any projectile.

But we have energy shield that makes your character a damage spongue.


So we have 3 characters:
a mage with 10k ES that have near 0 armour, but all res 75%
all res caped will be able to absorb any damage. Even if you get hit with a 2k melee attack you can take 5 of it. Possibly more with how regenerations are working endgame.
Slams? well... 10k hitpoint is 10k hitpoint...

Evasion is low hp, but able to dodge projectiles. Whenever you get hit it hurts.

Armour. It protects you only from physical. Its worthless against the other 4 elemental damage. having 14k armour and 75% block chance wont protect you from a flamethrower.
But the same enemy have a basic attack of 2k even with crit your 10k ES will absorb that damage.
But having 14k armour that same 2k melee hit will damage you 1.2k.

And what would you rather have. 10k energy shield 0 armour that gets 2k damage
If it crits you get 4k damage, still have 6k left. You have like 60% of life left.

or 2.5k life 14k armour that gets 1.2k hit from that melee. Mitigate around 40%
If its a crit, you're dead. XD Because according to the armour table the same 14k armour against a crit will only mitigate 25%.

This is why often players drop armour and gets ES or ES/armour instead once they get block cap.

I think dmg reduction or life stat should be baseline on armours.
That "absurd" STR requirement wont really help much. 300STr is en extra 600 life, but endgame that still nothing.

And its hard to find STR + Life items, because you MUST have resistance cap.
We go back to the part, where you can have big ES that compensate for lack of elemental res, but you can have all the armour it is worthless against 4 damage type.

You can have 5k ES with 0% lightning. If you get hit by a 3 kLightning bolt you're left with 2k ES.

If you have 20k armour but 0 lightning resist you're dead.

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Kraivan#1745 wrote:

Block can deflect physical hits and projectiles only.
So physical slams still hurt you.

Evasion if I recall correctly can evade physical hits and any projectile.

evasion and block work against any hit damage, it doesnt matter the damage type. im not sure if you are using the word physical there to mean somethings physically hitting you or if you mean physical as in the damage type physical which is different to cold, lightning etc. you can block and evade cold, lightning, chaos etc hits.


armour only works against physical hit damage, evasion and block work against all hit damage.





with armour in poe2, cause ive not played it im not aware of the numbers that are realistic. is about 14k armour what people who make a good shot at stacking armour are getting?

that seems like a problem if it is. in poe1 a life build who invested in life + armour to the same extent as an ES build that had 12k es might have 5-6k life with 30-50k armour.

if the numbers in poe2 are an ES build gets 12k and with the same investment in gear rolls and passives an armour build is sitting at 2-3k life with 14k armour that seems really far out of balance.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

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Kraivan#1745 wrote:

Block can deflect physical hits and projectiles only.
So physical slams still hurt you.

Evasion if I recall correctly can evade physical hits and any projectile.

evasion and block work against any hit damage, it doesnt matter the damage type. im not sure if you are using the word physical there to mean somethings physically hitting you or if you mean physical as in the damage type physical which is different to cold, lightning etc. you can block and evade cold, lightning, chaos etc hits.


armour only works against physical hit damage, evasion and block work against all hit damage.





with armour in poe2, cause ive not played it im not aware of the numbers that are realistic. is about 14k armour what people who make a good shot at stacking armour are getting?

that seems like a problem if it is. in poe1 a life build who invested in life + armour to the same extent as an ES build that had 12k es might have 5-6k life with 30-50k armour.

if the numbers in poe2 are an ES build gets 12k and with the same investment in gear rolls and passives an armour build is sitting at 2-3k life with 14k armour that seems really far out of balance.

I haven't played a full armour build in PoE2 yet, but from what I gathered 15-20k armour is what heavy investment apparently looks like.
The problem is, that they took PoEs armour formula and devided it's effectiveness I think by 5 or something stupid. I don't remember the exact value, but some people figured it out back in January.

On top of that there are several attacks in the game that just ignore parts of ur armour. I know there were some fixes, so not sure how many there are anymore. (I think the Breachlords attack got changed)

Theres also Blackbraid.

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Armour applies to Elemental Damage: This modifier causes your armour to also grant elemental damage reduction as well as physical damage reduction. Armour values apply to each damage type individually. Armour reductions are applied before elemental resistances and thus uses the full, pre-mitigated hit of the elemental damage when calculating damage reduction.

Internally, this modifier is actually 100% of Armour applies to Elemental Damage. This percentage can be altered through corruption.

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Sadaukar#2191 wrote:

I haven't played a full armour build in PoE2 yet, but from what I gathered 15-20k armour is what heavy investment apparently looks like.
The problem is, that they took PoEs armour formula and devided it's effectiveness I think by 5 or something stupid. I don't remember the exact value, but some people figured it out back in January.

that sounds rly bad.

i can maybe understand armour formula being a bit different because of a change in the average life pool and hence monster damage numbers in poe2. i seem to be at about 2.5k life most of the time in the 80s where id have been around 5k in poe1.

so some changes to keep it feeling the same i understand, but it doesnt sound like thats what theyve done at all. esp considering our hp has probably been cut in half? but 12k es was a good amount even in poe1 where it was fairly easy to get 4-6k hp with 25-35k armour.


i think my last remaining marauder in poe1 was sitting at 6-7k hp with 28k armour + 18k evasion last time i properly put him together? and that was with a 2H, no shield. an equiv amount of gear and passives into a ci char would be about 16k es.


these numbers im hearing for poe2 sound grossly out of balance.







ive pretty much given up on the marauder side of things with poe, 1 and 2. i think animation cancelling was the last straw for me when half my earthquakes stopped going off because i would stutter step myself out of the animation trying to move too fast... yeah no thanks.

im playing poe2 with a controller now, its a twin stick shooter with awesome build/loot/endgame systems. i have pretty much zero interest trying to make some slow bullshit marauder with tons of reduced attack speed who mains the worst of the 3 core defences.

i think they should have just given up on the melee nonsense entirely and turned the entire thing into some chaos engine steampunk shooter set 800 years after poe1. every time i see a melee still sucks thread i just despair of the amount of hours they waste trying to fix what will obviously never be fixed when they could just be making a really great balanced game where everyone shoots shit.

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Ojczyzna#1897 wrote:

Theres also Blackbraid.

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Armour applies to Elemental Damage: This modifier causes your armour to also grant elemental damage reduction as well as physical damage reduction. Armour values apply to each damage type individually. Armour reductions are applied before elemental resistances and thus uses the full, pre-mitigated hit of the elemental damage when calculating damage reduction.

Internally, this modifier is actually 100% of Armour applies to Elemental Damage. This percentage can be altered through corruption.

The problem is, as the quoted text says, armour is applied before elemental resistance. As elemental dmg is balanced in a way that it would have pre-mitigation values ~4x more than pre-mitigation physical dmg, which makes armour effectiviness even lower.

Also, it is a lvl 4 body armour. As body armour is usually the main source of armour rating on a char, it makes this strategy even less viable.

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DEvil27#6183 wrote:

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Ojczyzna#1897 wrote:

Theres also Blackbraid.

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Armour applies to Elemental Damage: This modifier causes your armour to also grant elemental damage reduction as well as physical damage reduction. Armour values apply to each damage type individually. Armour reductions are applied before elemental resistances and thus uses the full, pre-mitigated hit of the elemental damage when calculating damage reduction.

Internally, this modifier is actually 100% of Armour applies to Elemental Damage. This percentage can be altered through corruption.

The problem is, as the quoted text says, armour is applied before elemental resistance. As elemental dmg is balanced in a way that it would have pre-mitigation values ~4x more than pre-mitigation physical dmg, which makes armour effectiviness even lower.

Also, it is a lvl 4 body armour. As body armour is usually the main source of armour rating on a char, it makes this strategy even less viable.

Yes, just added info to show that different mechanic exists.

You are in fact mistaken; it's not physical damage reduction, it's trash to be put in the garbage bin.