Armour's conceptual flaws

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KorgullTheExterminator#6479 wrote:

Armour is generally considered worse than evasion or energy shield, and while it is possible to make it work, whatever the numbers work out to don't change the fact that armour is by design less protective than evasion or energy shield.

Armour has the same protection from degen as evasion, none, and less than ES that gives additional hitpoints.

Armour has by far the worst protection from big hits. Evasion allows you to avoid any hit entirely with a constant chance, and with deflection you get a chance to get 40% damage reduction on top of that, ES allows you to survive hits scaling linearly with how much ES you have, meanwhile the amount of armour you need to survive a hit scales quadraticly with the damage of that hit. So if you want to survive a hit dealing twice the damage(assuming twice the accuracy) you'd need twice the evasion, twice the energy shield, or 4 times the armour needed to survive the original hit.
By rearranging the armour formula we get:
Armour = (10D^2 / life) + 10D.
By rearranging the evasion formula we get:
Evasion = ((125 * Acc / HitChance) + Acc)/0.3

It doesn't work as well as evasion in combination with ES since every hit disrupts the recharge, while evasion allows you to avoid hits, potentially letting you recharge while engaged with enemies. Even against big hits the deflection from evasion usually give more damage reduction than armour, even if it isn't guaranteed.

Armour only protects against physical damage by default. Evasion and ES both protect against hits of all types. Armour only protects against physical hit by default and the "armour also applies to elemental damage" has an additional cost in that it takes additional skill points/item modifiers. And even if armour had applied to elemental damage by default it still would have offered no protection against chaos damage.

I'd expect different defenses to have different interactions and different benefits and drawbacks, but armour doesn't really appear to have much in the way of benefits while it's full of drawbacks, the most painful of which being the scaling and lack of protection from chaos in general and from elemental damage by default.

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Ondrugs#1147 wrote:

The problem but is not armour, it is the way the other defenses work.
Evasion should be deflection and the base of evasion armours should give lower armour values.

Es should be nerfed in terms of values and CI should get nuked to only have...
- immunity to poison
- life is 1
- +15% to maximum chaos resistance
MAYBE
- chaos resistance is doubled

So that Es builds have again the same pressure as life builds for gear instead of just more freedoms, through not caring for life prefixes or chaos resistance at all.

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KorgullTheExterminator#6479 wrote:

...Right now if you're building pure armour there's a decent chance you're getting oneshot by regular map bosses, and not even by red flash attacks.

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KorgullTheExterminator#6479 wrote:

Right now if you're building pure armour there's a decent chance you're getting oneshot by regular map bosses, and not even by red flash attacks.

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karsey#2995 wrote:

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KorgullTheExterminator#6479 wrote:

...Right now if you're building pure armour there's a decent chance you're getting oneshot by regular map bosses, and not even by red flash attacks.

This is usually because armour is treated as a catch-all, when it's just a piece of a larger puzzle.

If you're getting one-shot as a life-based armour user by non-red low-tier boss moves, it's likely the map mods and ailments that are not being addressed, and armour is being blamed for the shortcoming.