How effective is arctic armor?

Say you are getting smashed at level 60. How effective is it? How much damage does it prevent (in actuality)?

I am wondering if it's feasible to change from 15 life nodes to 15 mana nodes and use arctic for damage reduction rather than having a lot of life. In fact, I don't really have much life and I don't think wasting 15 levels on life is worth the effort. 6% just isn't enough per node.

it helps vs stuff like dogs in docks but not vs smash. its similar to armor.

So at higher levels how does it do? How much damage does it really prevent?

I wouldn't farm Lunaris or Docks without it. Well, I would, but it'd be much safer with. Is boss against lots of small fast hits.

I see. So it's effective. Okay.

I might consider gathering enough regrets to beef up my mana and remove life.

Actually not that massive but useful and quite important if your build otherwise has issues with certain monster types or damage. A lot of the power comes from the fire damage mitigation and physical. This combo works quite well vs snakes, titty flashers and void bearers. Considered by many quite dangerous. Depending on what armour you have the rule of thumb is that a high +17 (or was it 18) counts as 3 to 4k armour.

You can plot the stuff in excel to get the exact figures and graphs on returns and how it works with evasion/ armour etc. Anyways it is not spectacular for the huge cost it has, it does have spectacular effect against monsters considered very dangerous, but that is quite niche. The biggest thing it has should be the chill, but it pretty much won't chill anything. About 90% of the melee you phase won't be chilled.

My experience is that it hugely helps against fire dmg.
Without it, my ranger dies fast on 1 dog in docks, with it, i can tank 5 of them standing in their fire breath.
Although it doesn't help THAT much against phys dmg, i would not like to miss it anymore.
It's definitely effective yes!

I've got no armor.

My question is should I go lifeless (I spent 20 skill pts to get to the nodes for life), or should I switch to mana and take up arctic armor and try to sustain it (survivability) that way? I am battery so I have a base of about 700 mana with two ES items.

It depends what's giving you trouble. Arctic Armor removes a flat amount per hit, so it's incredibly effective against attacks with lots of hits - voidbearers, for example, attack something like 16 times per second, so even a tiny flat reduction will cause a major decrease in damage. It's also somewhat useful against massive packs (like monkeys or ribbons). It does next to nothing against slow, strong hits, though, so be wary. I would seriously not recommend speccing out of life and into mana.

I see. That sucks. Ok. I'll stick to my sub-par 1300 hp then.