So is Armour useless or not?

In other games i played health stacking was the "noobiest" thing u could do. Actually there is no "reward" to make a unique build , the only way is -> stack hp and thats really boring in my opinion. I respecced from 1h/shield with low hp to just health stacked 2h with more dmg and only a little bit of evasion and armor and its much easier in maps now.

There is a huge skilltree that is totally unused because everybody just stacks health. In my opinion the mechanics should be changed in a way that it makes harder to get high amount of armor/health/evasion and resists ! Right now the big skilltree is totally useless,there is no way to create unique builds and ranged classes are far FAR to strong. Just look at your friendlist or this pic ( it isnt accurate but melees shrinking very fast). I remember a stream there krip ( i dont like him but that doesnt matter in this case)said to chris that melees will not be played very much and kungen who only played melee died very much and quit weeks ago.

http://s14.directupload.net/images/130305/26v7anah.jpg

Sorry for that GGG but i think in your old times of diablo and titan quest all of u just played ranged classes and u dont have a "melee-player" in your house , also the mage only microtransactions proves this.

I really wished people would stop with - THIS IS TOO STRONG. Nothing is too strong, other things are just weak, the reason why CI was nerfed wasnt because it was too strong, it was other things were too weak, they the devs would rather kill one useful skill to make the rest work just as well.

Range is not too strong, melee is too weak

It shouldnt be harder to get armor/health/evasion/resists it should be less required to just pour things in to those nodes.



Weakening everything does not make more builds viable. Boosting abilities or nerfing monsters does.

They dont have to do anything to the tree at all, just take the monsters and reduce the spike damage, bosses, exploding monsters, ect.

Ms ranger u didnt unterstand my post.

I honestly hope something is done about this. Being a melee fan myself, I refuse to give up on my mara. Although it's getting tougher and tougher to justify why. You can say all sorts of things about why the armor formula "makes sense" in realistic, real life terms, but the fact remains that it's grossly under powered in game.

The only way i've been able to advance in 70+ maps is by dropping a bunch of damage nodes and stacking hp, just like every other melee character. The day I dropped all, yes ALL of my armor nodes for more hp is the day my character improved by a margin of (this is an estimate, according to how fast/how many hits i could take) 30-35%.

I definitely agree that there should be a trade-off between offense/defense, and I don't think this is a game-breaking issue either. I'm just giving my opinion. This won't make me stop playing the game, but I do believe it restricts GREATLY the diversity of melee builds.
Right now, this is the formula:
1. Stack hp
2. Stack resists
3. Pick a weapon type and get some damage nodes
4. Choose a skill that will allow you to do damage while not being in the thick of the fight
5. Put life leech on that skill

That's it.

In any case, this is all just my opinion. I love this game, and I love what the devs are doing with it. I think the armor formula should be looked at, so that people can come up with viable alternatives to melee builds. It'd be nice to have a mix of hp/armor, or have build utilize ES while stacking armor to minimize ES loss.

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VoodooB wrote:

They dont have to do anything to the tree at all, just take the monsters and reduce the spike damage, bosses, exploding monsters, ect.

Or just fix armor and evasion... Without nerfing shit.

Mob damage is fine...

Armor is shit... Evasion borderline shit.

No need to nerf crap... Just fix your broken ass formulas. And fix the desyncs which also screw over melee.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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.

I don't think the fact that the armor mechanic approximates real life physics should be used as a justification for it's existence. In general, I believe that game mechanics should work on their own terms, not on how closely they model real life. If a game mechanic happens to end up resembling some real life system then fine, but resemblance to reality should not be the main motivation.

I'll add that my opinion on the above only really applies to highly abstracted games like ARPG's. Obviously designing some sort of simulation based game would be different.

Had a dualwield dualist taking 50%/50% for defensive and offensive nodes. Tried some maps and failed hard time (even when beeing 4 levels higher).

Rerolled dualwield marauder, only taking HP nodes. And yey, the most boring build, but at least i don't get oneshot.

It just sucks that, if you want to play hack&slash melee, you are forced to ONLY take HP nodes, or you'll hit a wall around lvl 70.

Then funny to see on twitch how ranged still having a walk in the park.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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.

At this moment, someone with high burst on hit and huge HP is both more powerfull in pve and pvp then someone with high burst and huge armor/ress. This is umbalanced and physical dmg should not come with armor penetration, end of story.

PS: if you want to "translate" it to real-life physics, keep in mind that in real life you won`t be able to ressisst several trees hit while building HP either.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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).

Except there are a lot of big hits. Everywhere. In Merciless. And no, the realism argument is insulting. In that respect, the whole concept of health doesn't make sense, does it?

Armor is a joke. It's by far worse than HP and only mitigates physical hits. Having a bit of it won't hurt you, but consciously stacking (or even getting more than minimal) is death.

Mark's response in a nutshell:
Armor is useful when you have next to none.

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ocajavati wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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).

Except there are a lot of big hits. Everywhere. In Merciless. And no, the realism argument is insulting. In that respect, the whole concept of health doesn't make sense, does it?

This.

GGG really needs to stop throwing the realism card here, because if they truly care about realism, they can start redesigning all game systems right now.

Such an incredibly poor excuse for trying to be hipsters and failing horribly at it.

All the reasonable explanations in the world don't change the fact that every single toon out there (except for certain specific speciality builds, but most of those were nerfed anyway) greatly benefits from prioritising life over armour (or evasion, for that matter, but that's another story).

GGG, time to pull your heads out of your ehm… well you get the idea.