Fixing Armour - Global Damage Reduction via Resistance

Armour has been acknowledged to be in a bad spot. The current state could be remedied in many different ways. As someone who rolled a Warrior at league start I ended up sorely disappointed toward endgame and moreso as I rolled subsequent characters. It was trivial to get my Witch up to 8000ES/1kHP even with mid gear and no optimization with a focus on chaos skills (and excellent damage). Her relative survivability is so much greater than is my Warrior. In like manner, my Monk. But my crossbow Witch Hunter and Warrior both have very obvious downsides, with the Warrior being exceptionally bad.

Armour just doesn't offer much, and what it does appear to offer at face value is not realistic in practice.

I won't front like I know how much of the gross damage inputs are actually physical, but playing it feels pretty obvious there are some chinks in the armour class.

On one hand elemental damage is definitely ubiquitous, and other defense classes mitigate both physical and elemental simultaneously, whereas non-hybrid armour is sat eating it. I think it makes a good deal of sense both thematically and practically to add some degree of resistance directly for armour. This would shovel off the strict reliance on hitting resistance via every other gear line and may offer some meaningful defensive stats or run the risk of loading offensive lines up.

If you were really inclined this could either default to a buildup type system wherein exceeding certain fire/cold values decrease armour-derived resistance. E.g. upon receiving 10000 fire damage, the fire res falls to 0; receiving cold damage in this state proportinally re-establishes the fire res. Maybe even exceptional states where the physical damage is reduced e.g. brittle/melting and lightning res could be affected by these as well - plenty of space to work with it in the passive tree. Maybe even self-harm modalities where we can self-inflict damage to hit certain points (hardening via heat->quench)

I think this would make for a more interesting active system and increase build diversity by obviating the immense demands put on players to cap resistances through items without any alternatives present.

Biggest issue i think right now is that classes that rely on Armor don't get enough Life.

Because if you are playing an Energy Shield build: Your Energy Shield is protecting you from both physical and elemental damage.

If you are playing an evasion build, its protecting you from both physical and elemental damage (though not explosions).

But if you are playing ARMOR, you are only protected from physical damage. And against elemental damage, you might as well be naked, with only your HP and elemental resistances to protect you.

The best fix in my opinion would be to massively buff the amount of HP you get from modifiers on pieces of gear that give ARMOR as its defensive stat. Like 2x.

It's either that, or change Armor to also defend against elemental damage at like half effectiveness or something.

Or: Just increase the amount of HP you get from Strength from 2 to 3 so that Armor users (Strength stackers) will have more HP.

Because as it stands, Armor users at the moment have the least effective hp mathematically in the game against elemental damage or ailments.

I think just giving out life to armour users wont solve the problem because ghostwrithe exists. It actually makes the problem better because it makes es better with ghostwrite.

Ghostwrithe may be one of those items that just holds an archetype in a chokehold like pillar + howa gloves, replica alberons, voidforge/paradoxica. There is a lot of balance that could be done if you didnt have to balance around these types of items.

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On one hand elemental damage is definitely ubiquitous, and other defense classes mitigate both physical and elemental simultaneously, whereas non-hybrid armour is sat eating it. I think it makes a good deal of sense both thematically and practically to add some degree of resistance directly for armour. This would shovel off the strict reliance on hitting resistance via every other gear line and may offer some meaningful defensive stats or run the risk of loading offensive lines up.

Hard agree that armour needs to funtion against more than just physical damage like evasion and energy shield do. Resistances are also a messy system right now.

I also have a couple posts talking about how armour could be more well designed along with resistances.
Armour:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3667538
Resistance:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3629096

Hopefully GGG looks more into intuitive ways to make defensive scalings better than what they currently have.