Armour Break Mechanics, Theorycraft, and Discussion

Doesn't appear to be an existing thread for this so.

I'm trying to optimize my warrior build by taking advantage of the Armour Break mechanics in the passive tree and Warbringer Ascendancy.

As of the date of posting, it is generally understood that the "Imploding Impacts" passive on Warbringer does not function. Enemies' armour is reduced and the negative armour debuff is applied up to the enemies base armour, but no additional damage is calculated.

However, the other passives like "Pile On" which increases damage to enemies with fully broken armour does work correctly. After a break, the amount of damage enemies take from my attacks is noticeably higher. However the tooltip does not go into detail regarding what damage sources are amplified by this effect.

The tooltip provided only explains Armour Break and the means of applying the debuff.

I would like some clarification if possible, as to what damage sources are increased by this effect. As it appears to me, only physical damage hits do additional damage. Ailments like my ignite, do not appear to kill enemies any faster than normal, and the corrupted blood debuff does not appear to be amplified either.

If this damage amplification is supposed to be from all sources, it does not appear to be applying correctly. If it is supposed to only be from physical damage hits. As in, damage that would normally be reduced in the armour/damage reduction calculation, it is not adequately described by the tooltip.

If the latter is indeed the case, maximizing the benefits of this effect, would be to focus purely into physical damage and ignore ignite and instead focus on bleeds. Which brings me to the next portion.

The "Bleeding" tooltip goes into great length about how bleeding damage is calculated and applied and in summary, as described, the effects of armour break and increase damage to armour broken enemies does not in any way increase the damage done by bleeding, as armour only reduces damage from physical hits, and not provide damage mitigation.

After all this, as it appears to me, I have chosen a rather mid mechanic to put stock into for any kind of endgame success. Without a correctly functioning Ascendancy, and with no way for other effects to tap into the potential damage increase. Armour Break and its support offer little hope in tackling maps higher than T10 (at least in my case).

I have that feeling that warrior is unplayable in lategame

You can run T15 maps with a warbringer warrior.

I go Turtle charm with a Svalin shield and with a 2h in my hand. Super tanky and good damage. I just walk forward and kill everything. Trash is killed with mace strike and rare/boss with hammer of the god and sunder.

Good amount of armour and max resist and about 50 chaos resist. When the mods of the map are bad or if I see a lot of purple, I slow down a little and play more clever than brutish.

4 pts ascendency to turtle charm

2 pts to Anvil weight

2 pts to Jade heritage (my emergency button for when I lag in a breach or ritual)

You put armor explosion in mace strike, take almost every node of break armour and you get nice aoe esp when you can break armour completely on 1st hit (as you progress and get good weapon).

Hope this helps.