Played my first armor-only character, and I'm disgusted by it.

*edit* So, repeated testing has brought up some interesting results. For starters, Mark_GGG has confirmed that Grand Spectrums are not applying properly to incoming projectile damage, but there's something more he didn't say directly. My continuing tests seem to be showing that armor from chestpieces also does not contribute to your armor rating vs projectiles. Evasion converted to armor with IR always seems to work, and it would appear armor from other pieces of gear seems to work, just the original armor from chestpieces doesn't seem to contribute. Very weird stuff. Hopefully these bugs will get resolved soon; who knows how long armor-users experiences have been degraded by this, it very well could be contributing to the common lament that 'armor is useless'. It looks like a fix will be upcoming, but until then if you really wanna do armor, go IR or don't count on your chestpiece's armor (or the grand spectrum route like i tried) against projectiles for the time being



Now, I've used armor plenty before, but most of my builds using it either tend to be armor/evasion or armor with endurance charges or whatever else... you know, layers. But for this particular build of mine, I decided I wanted to go just armor... mass armor. And so that's what I did, I equipped a Brass Dome, I used 6 crimson Grand Spectrums, I ran Determination, and I picked up a whole lot of increased armor in the tree. In total, I've got just shy of 40k armor without flasks... I could do better with more investment in gear, but all told that should be good for early/mid mapping, on paper. And you know what? It feels like shit, even in low tier maps.


Now here's the kicker, do you know why it feels like shit?

Is it because 'armor doesn't protect against heavy hits', i.e. the usual gripe against armor? No! Actually, that much feels pretty good against heavy hits. I ran uber Izaro at level 70 with 3.5k life and let him hit me plenty of times, even with his charge and his Radiant Slash... no problem at all. I've had issues with that kinda stuff before at 10k armor, but for 40k it was nothing. No, the problem isn't 'heavy hits'.


The real problem? Fun story, turns out there's a whole lot of enemy physical projectile attacks that IGNORE ARMOR.


What led to me realizing this? Well:





So now I wanted to figure this out. So I decided to test out some stuff:




Anyway, turns out I'm not just paranoid, many enemies really are just legitimately ignoring damn near all armor rating with their ranged attacks. I've never really noticed it before, probably because it seems physical resist from endurance charges and the like work on them and because I don't expect as much damage reduction on armor/ev builds when hits do get through, but on this 40k armor? Oh, it's extremely noticeable.


And, quite frankly, it's disgusting. What, armor doesn't already have glaring downsides like being far less useful vs heavy hits and offering zero protection against all things non-physical, it's also gotta do nothing against ranged attackers?

And why ranged attacks, of all things? You mean those enemies that get free attacks in on those (generally-melee) armored characters while they trudge into close range? So basically armor only protects against those melee enemies that you'll usually wipe off the map before they can even fight back, while it does nothing against the archers that stay alive long enough to hit you... makes perfect sense, what a well-designed concept.

It's funny, I've known for a long time that GGG has a massive bias in favor of ranged players, but to think that bias even extends into favoring ranged *enemy* attacks over melee ones? Geez...




*Edit: As it pertains to the physical/elemental/chaos nature of these attacks, I can assure you they're pure physical where I tested:

Can someone confirm this? Everyone knows armor is trash when it counts but for mobs to totally ignore it in the first place?

Armour reduces physical damage. There are chaos and elemental damage projectile attacks too. I assume the ones you're describing are one or the other. The problem is mostly in GGG's pathological aversion to disclosing information about the game.

Try the same mobs with ele resist flasks and purities, then with chaos resist. There should be a noticeable difference. If there isn't, it's fishy indeed.

I mean it isn't a conspiracy: mechanics of armour are well documented. Damage reduction for armour goes as:
dam reduction = armour/(armour+10*damage)


edit:I would assume Bars is right unless you are talking about high phys damage attacks.

"

Bars wrote:

Armour reduces physical damage. There are chaos and elemental damage projectile attacks too. I assume the ones you're describing are one or the other. The problem is mostly in GGG's pathological aversion to disclosing information about the game.

Try the same mobs with ele resist flasks and purities, then with chaos resist. There should be a noticeable difference. If there isn't, it's fishy indeed.

They are not. I should have added that I tested that case as well. Removing all my resist gear, leaving me -ele resists all around, made no impact on the results whatsoever in any test I ran.

Furthermore, switching to my CI character resulted in taking just as much damage as I did when naked, so no Chaos damage either. And also equipping double Ming's on my life character made no difference.


Additionally, most mobs that implicitly do a certain element of damage with their attacks actually do say it below their name. Tentacle miscreations for example say 'fire damage', and the thorn-throwing snakes say 'chaos damage'. These various enemies that are ignoring my armor say none of that.

Finally, I even used Immortal Call against them as well; while active, I took zero damage from them. It is indeed pure physical damage, it's just circumventing armor (but not physical resist).

"

ladish wrote:

I mean it isn't a conspiracy: mechanics of armour are well documented. Damage reduction for armour goes as:
dam reduction = armour/(armour+10*damage)


edit:I would assume Bars is right unless you are talking about high phys damage attacks.

Yes, and the melee enemies I tested indeed seem to align with that formula. The ranged ones do not. We're not talking heavy hits vs weak ones or anything, and the hits are all pure phys... if you check out my test, you'll see that the melee and ranged "Voll's" enemies from dried lake do roughly the same damage without armor, and therefore should get reduced to about the same degree when against armor, but this is not the case in practice... my armor legitimately does damn near nothing against the ranged enemies while shrugging off the melees.

This reminde me of time when i tried IR, coming to undergraund river i got insta nuke from some whit archers.

I know thos archers in dried lake can suprise even dicently geared character, unles heavy evasion. It hapen to me that cople of wite archers drop me 3k all of suden like they all crit and multy hit with TS... They are nasty bugers when you traing to get a sec to write something in chat.

"

nEVER_BoRN wrote:

This reminde me of time when i tried IR, coming to undergraund river i got insta nuke from some whit archers.

I know thos archers in dried lake can suprise even dicently geared character, unles heavy evasion. It hapen to me that cople of wite archers drop me 3k all of suden like they all crit and multy hit with TS... They are nasty bugers when you traing to get a sec to write something in chat.

Well, if they're ignoring pretty much all armor rating, that would explain why they can drop you so fast. Explains why those damned TShot beyond mobs are so disproportionately threatening as well.

"

Shppy wrote:

They are not. I should have added that I tested that case as well. Removing all my resist gear, leaving me -ele resists all around, made no impact on the results whatsoever in any test I ran.

Furthermore, switching to my CI character resulted in taking just as much damage as I did when naked, so no Chaos damage either. And also equipping double Ming's on my life character made no difference.


Additionally, most mobs that implicitly do a certain element of damage with their attacks actually do say it below their name. Tentacle miscreations for example say 'fire damage', and the thorn-throwing snakes say 'chaos damage'. These various enemies that are ignoring my armor say none of that.

Finally, I even used Immortal Call against them as well; while active, I took zero damage from them. It is indeed pure physical damage, it's just circumventing armor (but not physical resist).

All right, then we have a legitimate issue. Could it be a bug? We would need to hear from GGG on that.

Send an email or pm to GGG.

Interesting...

On a sidenote - i did that once too but added another layer - Aegis Aurora

Damagewise you will have a tough time tho :/