So is Armour useless or not?

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jiussa 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.

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.

Hear hear. I mean, if it was supposed to model real life, then sure the toothpicks vs trees argument would work. But then, to be fair, resistances should work the same way. You could come at a guy in a fire suit with a thousand matches and do nothing, but if that guy in the fire suit got hit with a napalm strike or a meteor, you'd be damn sure he'd burn to a crisp just like everything else.

For me it feels that armour doesnt do enough. That is very frustrating and in my opinion the real problem with melee chars, not being able to take the hits the definitely will get. To survive you have to put a lot more in tankability than in damagedealing stuff, therefore you are weaker than a witch who nearly never gets hit.

The elemental resistances are straight forward, you have a value between -60% and 75% (not including increased max resistance), so you know exactly that you will receive 160% or 25% of elemental damage. Every time. Regardless of actual height of damage. A big hit will still cost you more life than a small one, but the reduction is linear and with a high resistance even high damage peaks are not so much of a deal. Less gambling.

But avasion and armour doesnt work that way. Both are depending on the values of the attacker. accuracy, for evasion and damage for armour.

Evasion lets you completely evade an attack and there is kind of gambling. You can evade high damage attacks without a scratch or get smashed by them. Although that can be frustrating it seems fair and logical that it works that way.
The formular from the mechanics thread basically says, that you need about 4 times the attacker accuracy to have 50% chance to evade.
chance to hit = attacker_accuracy / ( attacker_accuracy + ((defender_evasion/4)^0.8))
accuracy itself stays the same, there are no critical hits that increase accuracy by an insane amount. so it is a quite reliable defence system if you accept the all-or-nothing gambling.

Usually high armour chars are getting hit by everyone. So they have to take every damage. Armour reduces small hits by a high amount and high damage hits by a small amount.
The formular is in the mechanics thread:
reduction = armour / (armour + 12*damage)
Very similar to the evasion formular, but in that case you 12 times the amount of armour to have 50% damage mitigation. 12 times! That is an insane amount. you will never get the 75% damage reduction as with elemental resistances. And in the contrary to evasion the attack damage can be very irregular, with all the critical hits, curses, bosses, etc. So, small attacks dont do much, but the damage spikes, which you could completely avoid with evasion, still are powerfull damage spikes, only reduced by meager 10% or whatever. It just doesnt feel as if you were armoured.

Having a softer armour when hit by a tree instead a toothpick? Then why not imaging the tree made of millions of toothpicks.

Look at your armour and dps, you can probably one-shot yourself. ^^

Evasion works as i would expect it. High-risk-high-gain. But from armour i would expect to flatten and dampen the incoming damage and especially the damage spikes. That you can jump in a group of enemies and of course loose health, but more like constantly reducing instead of nothing-nothing-nothing-nearlydead-omgwhatidonow?.
The system for itself can stay, but the formular should be altered that higher damage is more easier to mitigate. To have a reliable protection against damage spikes. Gambling is for evasion, realiable protection is for armour.

Idea: Maybe the unmodified damage should be taken into account for calculation of the damage reduction. Meaning before critical hits, so a critical hit is calculated as normal hit, and the resulting reduction (whatever 30%, instead of 10%) is applied to the damage of the critical hit.
so everything stays the same, but the spikes are reduced.

I think there might be a lot of ways to solve that, maybe altering the factor from 12 to 4, like evasion is all that is needed.
Regardless. GGG please attend that issue, nothing is more furstrating than having a great game with a core system that feels flawed. It doesnt matter if the actual approach is logical or makes sense, it has to FEEL right. And right now armour mechanics doesnt feel as they should be.

IRL if someone catapulted a tree at me, it would have like a 90% chance to miss because catapults are highly innacurate, and even of the shot was accurate, Id simply jump out of the way it coz its a freaking massive tree that will have a slow travel speed and be easy to see and dodge.

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bhavv wrote:

IRL if someone catapulted a tree at me, it would have like a 90% chance to miss because catapults are highly innacurate, and even of the shot was accurate, Id simply jump out of the way it coz its a freaking massive tree that will have a slow travel speed and be easy to see and dodge.

In POE it would desync out of your world, you wouldn't see it coming even if it was point blank ;)

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And yeah, talking about realistic armor in a game where there's spirits, zombies, magical attacks/defences and mutants (bioengineering wut, high tech, like energy shields and teleports)...yeh, not buying it. How can a ring protect me from lighting for example then? Doubt you can build a faraday cage or something with 1 ring.

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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).

argh..time to reroll freeze pulse me thinks...

I'll be honest, I was on GGG's side with regards to how armor works. I accepted it and was fairly content with the idea. But some of you guys make allot of sense.

Like this guy:

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Mithsploit wrote:

But then, to be fair, resistances should work the same way. You could come at a guy in a fire suit with a thousand matches and do nothing, but if that guy in the fire suit got hit with a napalm strike or a meteor, you'd be damn sure he'd burn to a crisp just like everything else.

Being able to withstand physical damage is one of the perks of wearing heavy plate.
That's why there are always drawbacks (or should be), like movement speed reduction and very high strength requirements.

A guy in a wedding dress stacking HP should not be able to do the same.

The main problem lies with the skill system. Really powerful armors should have much, much higher armor in general and require much higher stats. When most endgame characters can literally use almost every type of weapon and armor it kind of defeats the purpose of requirements. Skills need to be made weaker and nodes need to give higher damage output. My EK Shadow has 1 spell damage node and 6 total cast speed nodes and he does 4k dps on aoe which pretty much one-twoshots everything in maps under 70 level. Freezing pulse does even more simply because how multiple projectiles work with the spell.

Increase requirements on high armors and increase the values on them, reduce damage on spells, improve the damage nodes and for the love of god please rework enduring cry. Having to recast the spell every 10 seconds is absolutely atrocious for gameplay.

Can you Evade the vaal slam if you got alot of evasion 0_O?

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Trapperkeeper 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?

Mechanics post helps just fine. It allowed me to put this together:

Thanks, good summary :D

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moijamie wrote:

Can you Evade the vaal slam if you got alot of evasion 0_O?

He is an epic mob (boss), you shouldn`t be able to tank him anyway. Simply bait his slam and dodge it with an escape mechanism skill.




Anyway, can we have an official answer with a real solution about this? I want to know either if I have to start a new character or not.