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

Make a video of your tests and post it on reddit, then we may get an answer.

thanks for sharing. now that you mentioned it does seem ranged hits hurt bad but previously i just shrug it off as one of those high damage things. and just the other day i learnt that bleed ignores armor i mean wtf i see globs of blood and that's not physical damage? sure feels sad to see 90% phy dmg reduction health bar melt like butter makes me wonder why i even bother to stack so high armor might as well stack es. i'm armor but i still have to fight using totems and kiting lol. and ts your title seems rant should indicate if you have found a real bug or is this 'intended design'.

I have tried high armor. I have tried high es. I have tried high armor and es. They still splat me like a red-headed stepchild.

GGG really doesn't like melee types. Next league I'm going ranger/archer all the way. Screw this heartbreak of trying melee every which way. The game rewards ranged types and shits on melee. After a year and a half I've finally understood this.

Why keep beating your head against the melee wall? Go with the flow as the kids from the sixties used to say.

"

MFairfax wrote:

I have tried high armor. I have tried high es. I have tried high armor and es. They still splat me like a red-headed stepchild.

GGG really doesn't like melee types. Next league I'm going ranger/archer all the way. Screw this heartbreak of trying melee every which way. The game rewards ranged types and shits on melee. After a year and a half I've finally understood this.

Why keep beating your head against the melee wall? Go with the flow as the kids from the sixties used to say.

Yeah, I feel you. I enjoy playing melee more, largely because it's more challenging and less monotonous, and in particular I was really enjoying this build, but realizing just how useless all the defense I specced for really is was just deflating. I've got zero drive left to play this build now, unless I severely respec it over to armor/ev.


And now, looking into what build I'll do next, the only real thing I can think is "don't touch armor", which kinda leads to "don't touch melee". No wonder everyone just uses blasphemy curses and massive life/ES pools when GGG shafts armor (and evasion, with a ton of other mechs) so hard.

The thing is melee is not supposed to use a single defense. By this i am not implying that you need evasion. I am implying to need block. Specifically from ranged attacks. There are many ways to get it, and it is essentially mandatory to survival of melee characters.

It is one of the reasons i love Wings of Entropy as it provides a second 6L, counts as duel wielding (free 15% block base for dual wielding +8% from weapon) and allows capitalizing on several types of beneficial nodes (all dual wield nodes, 2h / 1h nodes, and axe nodes).

Until you record a video of this and post it on reddit you can expect no response for years, like the put base minion damage into gem description thread.

Anyway, it's amazing how balance currently biases CI so strongly. All the old downsides like status ailments and stun have been eliminated by new items (skyforth, valyrium, kiara's determination) and things like pathfinder. And the unique flasks have gotten so strong, rewarding players even more for carrying no life flasks.

Enemies that ignore armour? lol. GGG should at least add this to the text below the monsters name if it's true.

Edit:
The armor formula needs a complete rework. I was never happy with it being completely ignored by physical damage over time or physical secondary damage (damage that doesn't hit, which can't be blocked, dodged, or evaded either). GGG keeps adding all these immitigable damage sources (and giving enemies penetration now), pushing massive ES pool meta even more. CI just mushes that basalt flask which is often better than all the armor life characters get and laughs.

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Vhlad wrote:

Until you record a video of this and post it on reddit you can expect no response for years, like the put base minion damage into gem description thread.

Yeah, doubt I can do that tbh. My setup has a rough enough time just running the game, trying to record wouldn't go so well. Maybe someone else with a better setup can corroborate my findings and post said video in my stead.

Its interesting .... and it seems really disgusting.

"

SuicideAll wrote:

Send an email or pm to GGG.

They are seeing this, but they won't answer here most likely.

Just tested vs Merciless Dried Lake TS archer in EHC. I cannot verify the claim. My results indicate that armour does work vs such attacks.

Case a: armour shield + Determination => 8429 armour => I got a damage range of 79..307 per attack.

Case b: no shield + Grace => 1529 armour => I got a damage range of 198..571 per attack.

Tested with 10+ attacks per case.

Also tried with anti-bleed from flask on. Did not notice a difference.

Also made test with more block than what I got on the armour shield => 572 damage hit => no indication that block plays a role in the results.

Neither IR nor berserker - in case this matters.

"

Zrevnur wrote:

Just tested vs Merciless Dried Lake TS archer in EHC. I cannot verify the claim. My results indicate that armour does work vs such attacks.

Interesting, after seeing this I just recreated my tests on my other eponymous berserker and indeed now it appears that armor is working against said hits. I'd like to test on the character I originally noticed the issue with (which should be no different defensively, aside from having even more armor), but in my disappointment I warped his passive tree in testing alternative setups before ultimately deciding to delete (and in the near future reroll) him.


Still, tossed all his gear short of rings and amulets on my other berserker, used as many Grand Spectrums as I could (used Grace instead of Determination, cuz this guy's IR and doesn't have a Determination on him), and he's got the same ascendancies picked aside from having the stun immunity notable instead of the leech one, and found those Voll's archers to be dealing about as much damage as they *should*, much less than what my Abyssal_Shppy build experienced.


I'm not sure what to think now. Did something bug on a global scale for my character? Was there indeed an issue that's been silently resolved in last half a day since I posted a few threads about this issue?


*edit*: tested against mad gladiators too, the other enemy I specifically tested against last night/this morning, now working as expected. Well, whatever. In any case there doesn't seem to be an issue anymore, so I'm happy. Maybe I'll try out that level of armor again when I reroll the character, although I'm probably still gonna go a new direction after the bad taste it gave me the first time around.