Armor vs Evasion vs Energy Shield - Help me understand

We have access to a pretty good table which shows percentage mitigation of physical damage by different armor values.

Now I'm not one who can easily parse percentage damage into actual values. Conveniently, I don't need to. I've transcribed the table above, and created two follow-up tables which calculate the flat damage reduction, and the damage taken respectively. I did the original transcription late at night, so please forgive any typos.

This is the damage reduced by armour in absolute values


This, among other things, shows the amount of energy shield that you'd have needed to mitigate the same amount of damage based on your armor, and the incoming hit. That means that, against a hit that does 7500 physical damage, having 100,000 armor is the equivalent of having 3975 energy shield.

This guy managed to get 80,000 armour. He's got 2237 life. I Googled for a MoM/CI build, and immediately found this video. This guy has 1 health. But he has 5063 energy shield, and an additional 4200 mana. He's also immune to chaos damage.

So the EHP against an attack that does 7500 physical damage that the caster has is ~9200. The EHP that the 80,000 armor warrior has is 2237. He needs around 4000.

Armour does not mitigate elemental damage at all, and when it does (with uniques and hard to get passive nodes), it currently tries to do so before your elemental resistances are calculated. ES will prevent any and all damage forever, with the exception of poison and bleed. But with MoM, those DOTs go to mana, which is very easy to overclock the regeneration on. To even get health regeneration, you need to wander hither and yon through the passive tree, or find it on items.

Now I did include evasion in the title, but I think that evasion is stupid and bad. Here is why: It doesn't work against several different kinds of incoming attacks, and has no actual damage mitigation built in. The Entropy system means you don't get unlucky streaks, but you also are guaranteed to get hit eventually. So against the things you want to avoid the most, it does nothing, it has no way of regenerating, and when it does fail, it fails catastrophically. Acrobatics sounds good, but 70% reduction may as well say "expect to die regularly"

Energy Shield is the only damage mitigation that is guaranteed. It's also got the most ways to alter how it works in the tree, all of which are very powerful. The way the other two defences work highly incentivizes going all in, since they are much less useful when not firing on all cylinders, but even maxed out, they fail at actually keeping you alive against the things that are most likely to kill you.

How is this the state of the three different defensive layers?

its just badly balanced atm.


what ur saying for the most is correct.




what i would say as a note tho is that typically defences in poe1 are rarely used alone in any defence setup considered remotely decent. evasion is a death trap if you use it on its own, but when its used in a mixed defence setup is extremely good.

evasion + energy shield as a combo is very strong. when armour is doing its job better than the current poe2 armour formula then evasion + armour is a really strong combo. evasion + phys damage taken as elemental is really strong in poe1. a lot of 'instant' deaths in maps are bursts of small to medium hits landing within a split second, 65% evasion is a 65% dmagae reduction in these situations and you can absolutely get that while also having a significant amount of actual phys damage reduction or energy shield buffer.

block is essentially evasion without it being reliable, plus you can get stunned off a blocking hit, but block is also considered really strong in practice because you wouldnt just go block, youd be block + high armour or block + energy shield.

then you are stacking other things on top of these, gain life/es on block, ghost shrouds, additional phys reduction, regens, damage taken as etc.




strong defence characters often have 3, 4+ things going on. its hard to really see the picture of how things will come together in poe2 cause we dont even have all the classes, skills etc in the game yet. but not being able to influence most crafting along with all flat defence coming from gear, no auras or passives for it, its definitely a different landscape and i dont rly have a picture in my head of what is realistically possible with layering in poe2 yet.

High ES is a good mitigation against high number flat damage but due to its slow ramp up time it's fairly useless against getting hit repeatedly, which is where armour and resistances come into play. However, PoE2 has for whatever reason, oversight or intent, ended up as the defense that's easiest to build up to enormous levels

Armour is usually married to a high life pool and without ways of hiking life or regen it has ended up feeling extra weak

Evasion is completely different, and is a bit annoying to deal with when its useless against an entire hit type that is very common save for grabbing one keystone well out of the way for everyone except dex and dex/int builds. Very unfair to str/dex builds I feel.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

what i would say as a note tho is that typically defences in poe1 are rarely used alone in any defence setup considered remotely decent. evasion is a death trap if you use it on its own, but when its used in a mixed defence setup is extremely good.

...

strong defence characters often have 3, 4+ things going on. its hard to really see the picture of how things will come together in poe2 cause we dont even have all the classes, skills etc in the game yet. but not being able to influence most crafting along with all flat defence coming from gear, no auras or passives for it, its definitely a different landscape and i dont rly have a picture in my head of what is realistically possible with layering in poe2 yet.

I did play POE 1 back in the day (last played Jan 2018), hell I played all of the non-Immortal Diablo games, Grim Dawn, and Last Epoch. I never spend much time in endgame, but I understand how mixing defences works.

That's not my issue. My issue is that the only defence that is viable all by itself is energy shield. IMO, going all in on any single defence should A) result in a similar level of survivability, and B) actually be viable.

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Paimon001#6701 wrote:

Acrobatics sounds good, but 70% reduction may as well say "expect to die regularly"

that's actually not true since i made a deadeye with ~14k evasion before acrobatics and i die maybe once every 20 or so maps in t15. 14k evasion isn't that bad in terms of cost either. having wind dancer(20% quality) helps since you cancel out 40% of the less evasion to make it become 30% less evasion. but i agree that it's far from being as good as CI/MoM ES builds.

2 words.

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DemonikPath#1311 wrote:

2 words.

Spoiler

Early access

You can and should forgive an awful lot during early access. But I put this together in ten minutes after seeing one explanation on how armour works. This is not small potatoes, this is the three main pillars of character survivability. If some random nerd on the internet can figure out the problem in five minutes, then the people designing the game should be aware of it too. I'm not special.

Is the intention for each defensive layer to function as a stand alone defense? If no, why? If yes? How did we get here?

Hell, just look at how much a non-MoM Witch can mitigate with only minor effort. 20% Damage to dog. 20% Physical to Chaos (which does take a bit of effort to max resist sure). You have 18% damage to mana in the upper left portion of the passive tree pretty close together, and another 16% at 1 O'clock-ish as well. It's absolutely insane how much damage mitigation and conversion Int Builds get compared to Strength builds.

"

Paimon001#6701 wrote:

"

DemonikPath#1311 wrote:

2 words.

Spoiler

Early access

You can and should forgive an awful lot during early access. But I put this together in ten minutes after seeing one explanation on how armour works. This is not small potatoes, this is the three main pillars of character survivability. If some random nerd on the internet can figure out the problem in five minutes, then the people designing the game should be aware of it too. I'm not special.

Is the intention for each defensive layer to function as a stand alone defense? If no, why? If yes? How did we get here?

Hell, just look at how much a non-MoM Witch can mitigate with only minor effort. 20% Damage to dog. 20% Physical to Chaos (which does take a bit of effort to max resist sure). You have 18% damage to mana in the upper left portion of the passive tree pretty close together, and another 16% at 1 O'clock-ish as well. It's absolutely insane how much damage mitigation and conversion Int Builds get compared to Strength builds.

It's not a trivial problem to solve without homogenizing them. And I doubt it was very high priority for EA. If anything I think starting too weak is better than starting too strong because even if defensive layer is as obscenely broken as ES right now people will complain when it inevitably gets nerfed.

"

Paimon001#6701 wrote:

"

DemonikPath#1311 wrote:

2 words.

Spoiler

Early access

You can and should forgive an awful lot during early access. But I put this together in ten minutes after seeing one explanation on how armour works. This is not small potatoes, this is the three main pillars of character survivability. If some random nerd on the internet can figure out the problem in five minutes, then the people designing the game should be aware of it too. I'm not special.

Is the intention for each defensive layer to function as a stand alone defense? If no, why? If yes? How did we get here?

Hell, just look at how much a non-MoM Witch can mitigate with only minor effort. 20% Damage to dog. 20% Physical to Chaos (which does take a bit of effort to max resist sure). You have 18% damage to mana in the upper left portion of the passive tree pretty close together, and another 16% at 1 O'clock-ish as well. It's absolutely insane how much damage mitigation and conversion Int Builds get compared to Strength builds.

You're not supposed to play melee/armor in a GGG game, never was never will. It's the first filter.

The problem I see with balancing armor, evasion and energy shield is that the first two are non-linear, while energy shield is.

Armor and evasion increase logarithmically, so at some point it stops being worth investing on them. With high investment, if you have to choose one of the defense layers only, this means energy shield will always win, at high enough levels and passives and gear.

Still, for low investments, it pays off to have armor and evasion. Each character class has a priority defense type, depending on which passive skills they choose.
At some point, though, the other defense layers will be more powerful than the one prioritized by passives. Every character should invest in all three to some extent, but by how much is harder to measure.

It seems to me also that the classes with two natural defense attributes benefit more from their passive nodes than the ones investing in only one attribute.
A node with
-> 12% increased evasion and 12% increased energy shield
offers a lot more value than one with
-> 15% increased energy shield.

Right now there are a lot of imbalances.