Dear GGG: Armour is trash! If you are going to fix it do it better than PoE1. here's how!

Armour has some major problems in PoE2 right now:
1) Armour is too weak against larger attacks that shouldn't be 1 hitting tank invested characters.
2) Armour is the only 1 of the 3 defence stats that is worthless against elemental and chaos hits.
3) Armour doesn't mitigate nearly enough physical damage in general.
4) Armour break from enemies wielded against the player is crippling and dis-proportionally lethal.
5) Armour currently is lacking for keystone/spirit gem support and variance.

Armour in PoE1 had awkward, but functional solutions to most of the above problems:
1) The armour formula in PoE1 I believe is less diminished against higher damage inputs on top of additional physical damage reduction having no drop-off against larger hits.
2) There are modifiers that make a percentage of armour apply to non-physical damage from hits. Endurance charges also reduce elemental damage taken.
3) Sources of additional physical damage reduction and more armour are easily acquire-able and act as a force multiplier.
4) Overwhelm is a terrible reference unfortunately since it's also similar to armour break and painfully counters tank characters.
5) Armour keystones such as Imbalanced Guard and Divine Shield enabled more viable options for using armour, especially for hybrid defence builds.

While it would be better than keeping things as is, I don't believe copy pasting EVERY PoE1 armour related mechanic into PoE2 is the best way to go about this. PoE1 should still be referenced though and new more balanced variances should be smoothly implemented to lay an intuitive and clean groundwork for PoE2.

I HEAVILY suggest that instead of having a multitude of shopping list stats that armour builds need, the way armour itself mitigates damage should be changed so that players can simply focus on building more armour in the same way evasion and energy shield builds invest into defence.

By changing the way armour damage reduction is calculated and adding a few other tweaks most of the major issues can be resolved in a surprisingly efficient manner:
1) The formula for armour should be adjusted so the diminished effect against larger hits is not as severe. This is rather simple and easy to re-balance and was already done in PoE1 before and could simply be repeated here. A few more sources of additional physical damage reduction being added over EA development will also naturally give players more high end defensive options too.
2) Armour should innately defend against all damage types while still being most effective against physical damage. The damage reduction from armour should apply before resistances instead of after like it did in PoE1 so that it isn't influenced by maximum resistances. Having 35%(ish) of armour apply to all non-physical hits calculated before other mitigation sources would be ideal. Passives like the "Heatproofing" notable could be changed to modifiers such as "defend with 20% more armour against elemental hits".
3) The above formula changes would ideally make armour functional as an independent defence that isn't reliant on other stats to do it's own job properly. Armour should be in a state where it's more convenient for average builds to seek more armour instead of chasing after scarce sources of additional physical damage reduction or damage taken conversion.
4) Just remove armour break from enemies for the love of melee... Limiting armour break so only a percentage of a player's armour can be broken would also do the trick.
5) The keystones Imbalanced Guard and Divine Shield from PoE1 should be reintroduced into PoE2 again either as keystones, spirit gems or even notables passives depending on how their values are balanced.

I also have a similar longer post about resistances and how they really need a straight forward overhaul:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3629096

mentioned in a similar thread, Armor insulates itself from the effects of Break in two way: it reduces inflicted physical damage (the determinant of Break magnitude) and increases the amount of Break required to Fully Break.

I suggested that Blocks could mitigate/nullify any Break that would be suffered.

Warrior problem right now, unfortunatly, low life, low regen, armor mitigate almost nothing. The class is under developed and unfortunatly needs a huge buff to come near the others atm, just ignore the class and go to any of the others. You know the class is in a bad spot when Alkaizerx is not playing it.

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LeFlesh#9979 wrote:

mentioned in a similar thread, Armor insulates itself from the effects of Break in two way: it reduces inflicted physical damage (the determinant of Break magnitude) and increases the amount of Break required to Fully Break.

I suggested that Blocks could mitigate/nullify any Break that would be suffered.

Wait block doesn't stop armour break? That's really dumb!

I'm not sure if ALL sources of enemy armour break scale on their damage dealt. The player at least has multiple skills that break a set amount of armour regardless of the post mitigation damage dealt.

The main problem with armour break is that it can essentially remove 100% of a players investment into defensive stats. Armour break is also not exclusive to the monster(s) that applied it since it is a debuff on the player so all enemies in a fight will ignore potentially 100% of your defence stat from a singular randomly generated enemy modifier. That is just absurd. Imagine if there was an enemy that completely disabled your chance to evade or energy shield while you are fighting a large pack of enemies.

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

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LeFlesh#9979 wrote:

mentioned in a similar thread, Armor insulates itself from the effects of Break in two way: it reduces inflicted physical damage (the determinant of Break magnitude) and increases the amount of Break required to Fully Break.

I suggested that Blocks could mitigate/nullify any Break that would be suffered.

Wait block doesn't stop armour break? That's really dumb!

I'm not sure if ALL sources of enemy armour break scale on their damage dealt. The player at least has multiple skills that break a set amount of armour regardless of the post mitigation damage dealt.

The main problem with armour break is that it can essentially remove 100% of a players investment into defensive stats. Armour break is also not exclusive to the monster(s) that applied it since it is a debuff on the player so all enemies in a fight will ignore potentially 100% of your defence stat from a singular randomly generated enemy modifier. That is just absurd. Imagine if there was an enemy that completely disabled your chance to evade or energy shield while you are fighting a large pack of enemies.

Just get yourself some damage reduction and suddenly armour is not trash anymore.

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NiceGuy69#1759 wrote:

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

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LeFlesh#9979 wrote:

mentioned in a similar thread, Armor insulates itself from the effects of Break in two way: it reduces inflicted physical damage (the determinant of Break magnitude) and increases the amount of Break required to Fully Break.

I suggested that Blocks could mitigate/nullify any Break that would be suffered.

Wait block doesn't stop armour break? That's really dumb!

I'm not sure if ALL sources of enemy armour break scale on their damage dealt. The player at least has multiple skills that break a set amount of armour regardless of the post mitigation damage dealt.

The main problem with armour break is that it can essentially remove 100% of a players investment into defensive stats. Armour break is also not exclusive to the monster(s) that applied it since it is a debuff on the player so all enemies in a fight will ignore potentially 100% of your defence stat from a singular randomly generated enemy modifier. That is just absurd. Imagine if there was an enemy that completely disabled your chance to evade or energy shield while you are fighting a large pack of enemies.

Just get yourself some damage reduction and suddenly armour is not trash anymore.

Uhhh.... That doesn't match the quote... At all. I assume you meant to quote something else from the OP instead?

Sources of additional damage reduction in PoE2 are nearly non-existent so far. I have only come across up to 8% on a shield and the Warbringer exclusive Jade ascendancy so far.

Also additional physical damage reduction doesn't change the fact that armour is the only defence stat that is worthless against non-physical damage by default.

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

Also additional physical damage reduction doesn't change the fact that armour is the only defence stat that is worthless against non-physical damage by default.

Evasion is worthless vs all AoEs by default. The Keystone work-around Acrobatics applies a severe nerf to overall Evasion Rating to the point that it cannot be your sole defense. Energy Shield seems to have the nicest startoff with only Poison (I think?) being able to bypass it (and Chaos dealing 2x to it). Bleeds first require breaking through the shield so I guess those 'don't count'.

armour is trash because it doesn't fit Warrior themes.. mages have dump-stacking one thing and warriors need to make conversions for conversion of conversions and stack layers instead of stack HP+Armor.. when it's mages suppossed to have more technical stuff.

armor + hp stacking should be easy like es and mages should be glass cannons.. but no. We have 20k mages that can survive nuke

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LeFlesh#9979 wrote:

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LVSviral#3689 wrote:

Also additional physical damage reduction doesn't change the fact that armour is the only defence stat that is worthless against non-physical damage by default.

Evasion is worthless vs all AoEs by default. The Keystone work-around Acrobatics applies a severe nerf to overall Evasion Rating to the point that it cannot be your sole defense. Energy Shield seems to have the nicest startoff with only Poison (I think?) being able to bypass it (and Chaos dealing 2x to it). Bleeds first require breaking through the shield so I guess those 'don't count'.

Indeed each of the 3 defences should and do have strengths and weaknesses mechanically, regardless of current numerical values (ES is too big right now as we all know). Evasion by default works against all damage types equally, but has an innate blind-spot for AoE damage. ES is basically additional effective HP, but is by default weak to chaos damage, bypassed by poison and cannot be restored with life flasks or leech. Armour right now has the majority of and biggest weaknesses and blind-spots that aren't in line power-wise with evasion or ES. With my recommended changes armour would still be weaker to larger hits and non-physical damage. The weaknesses would just be more fairly in line with the other defence mechanics by default before keystones enter the equation.

As for keystones I honestly wonder if Acrobatics is going to get buffed? Apparently it was originally only going to have a 50% evasion penalty instead of the current 70%, but GGG did a last minute nerf before EA servers went live. I could see it being brought up to only a 65% or 60% penalty after playing with and without it myself.

Also while bringing up keystones since armour is lacking keystone support compared to PoE1. Having something like Imbalanced Guard brought back as a keystone and maybe Divine Shield as a spirit gem would be nice to see too and I added that to the OP.

The Energy Shield problem could be solved by letting Bleeds get applied regardless of ES being intact. It would force CI builds to take MoM.