So is Armour useless or not?

So what do you do when you have an entire forest thrown at you?

It may very well be wise to tweak the multiplier, but I like the concept behind the current system. I do believe it is somewhat realistic aswell, but that doesn't matter to me.

To me it does the following good things:

- It makes it impossible to tell accurately how much mitigation you have. You have to rely on feel and preference, rather than just crushing numbers and multiplying armor with HPs.

- It makes sure that some mobs will always be dangerous.

- It prevents capping out the amount of armor you can use - I used to think that whenever I got 90% in my defence tab, any additional amount of armor would be wasted, and that sucked.
This could be achieved with traditional diminishing returns, but I don't mind seeing a new approach.

- Better armor with less HPs would boost the effect of flasks and life-leech, while making bloodmagic auras more attractive. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a factor when aim to get the balance right.


Then it does two bad things in my opinion:

- It confuses people, creating myths.

- It potentially makes armor worse than it should be. This is not the system itself, but obviously the way it is tweaked. If 1 passive node granted 10,000% extra armor, it would be OP, while 1% HP nodes would be worse than the current 8% ones.


Without being certain at all, it does seem to me that HP is a little bit too strightforwardly good compared to other stats (armor, ES, evasion, damage) but this is easily tweaked within the current format. The suggestion to change the *12 modifier to something a little less dramatic rings very sensible in my ears.

All defences in PoE are borderline useless, except for those that do flat reduction. (IE Resists, HP, End charges)

The reason is simple : GGG designed a system where defence can get "swamped". Armor absorption reduces with damage, Evasion is reduced by accuracy and is vulnerable to multiple hits, Blocking gets swamped by multiple high value hits through stuns.

Then they proceeded to inflate mob stats to the point where they would systematically "swamp" every form of defence. Leaving only those that are NOT subject to reduction by mob stats effective.

The base idea is interesting and "realistic". However, it's extremely sensitive to scaling. Which has been pushed, i think, far over the limit of what the system scales to.

Like someone else said, if GGG plans to add more acts of scaling difficulties, what headroom have they left the way mobs are scaled now ?

Closed Beta was very fun and allowed tons of interesting builds. It was nicely scaled too. OB is not. It feels like GGG tried so much to make the game "Hard" that they ended up sacrificing their own mechanics, build diversity and fun to reach that goal.

The result, IMHO is rather underwhelming. Hope they'll come to their senses some time.

Yeah, pretty much.
In CB everyone stacked armour and converted evasion to armour, because evasion was (seemed to be?) rubbish, but now it is the other way round.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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GameQB11 wrote:

i still dont understand armor in this game. its hard to tell who knows what they're talking about and who is just complaining. The mechanics post doesnt help either.


1. So you mean to tell me that armor doesn't do ANY damage reduction at higher levels? i thought it could do up to 90% damage reduction?

2. If it is true that armor doesnt reduce damage at higher levels, why did they do this? what is the logic behind making armor useless?

I'm not trying to shut down conversation, but there appear to be a bunch of misconceptions in this thread.

Armour does provided reduction against any physical damage hit. The bigger the hit, the less percentage damage reduction you get (but a small percentage of a big hit can still be a larger value of damage prevented than a big percentage of a very small hit).
If you put on your full plate mail, and I throw hundreds of toothpicks at you, you'll basically not feel it. If someone catapults a whole tree at you, don't expect the armour to prevent as much of the damage.

Armour is better against lots of small hits than against a few big hits - it works well in the case of getting surrounded by normal monsters in melee, but you still need to be quite careful around bosses.


Vaal's explosion/slam seems to keep getting brought up. Please keep in mind that this spell is half fire damage, which is completely unaffected by armour, and that it's very telegraphed and it's intended that you can learn to see it coming and avoid it if you can't tank it (and it's hard to tank).

80 fire resist, 12k armour, 1800 health, 1 shot by Vaal melee arm on cruel.

This shit needs to stop.

Watching ranged just holding down the button and not moving most of the fight.

Trying to spot a black arm in a dark room with all the other shit going on, with a fast telegraph that partially matches the other two.

armor is ok

problem is:

mobs HP too low
mobs DAMAGE too high

=

too many toothsticks throwing trees at you

why bother..

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Antigegner wrote:

too many toothsticks throwing trees at you

:) +1

Block + armor + endurance charges + high regen will make you nearly invincible vs everything but chaos and monster one shots like Vaal.

I played a full melee marauder to 83 in HC. I tried it with and without added armor. You can absolutely feel a huge difference between 10k and <5k.

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Antigegner wrote:

armor is ok

problem is:

mobs HP too low
mobs DAMAGE too high

=

too many toothsticks throwing trees at you

You can apply the armor issue in pvp as well. The idea of having 2 bonuses (damage and armor penetration) from AD is bad because it makes armor not worth it. The solution is simple: make armor block a flat % of damage (like in any other game).