Increasing armor's effectiveness by 15% is not enough
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90% armor problem is the fact its damage reduction value depends on damage from from the hit. So hard hit will overwhelm armor making it worthless. Poe 2 monsters hit a lot hard as you progress in your map tiers. Higher mobs should be dangerous but it makes armor have zero value.
Armor only reduce physicals damage so it should be good at one thing it does. However, it sucks at the only thing it does. Whatever they do they need to change armor damage reduction formula from being base on the value of the hit your taking. No matter how hard monsters hit the reduction should be the same. Here's one way it could be solved https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3691255 Last edited by CheezyMcnuggets#4244 on Jan 12, 2025, 9:39:11 PM
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Armour 'works' in PoE1 because there are plenty of other sources to boost its value, like Fortify/damage conversion/raw PDR/etc. Even before its buffs in PoE1, armour was always a decent secondary defensive layer that helped protect you from getting machinegunned by archers, porcupines, and lots of little imps whacking at you in crowds
A major part of the problem in PoE2 is that many of those small hits are actually not small hits - especially when you start slapping rippy map mods on like increased crits/extra elemental damage/etc. That, combined with the sheer number of ground effects and the many missing defensive layers that aren't in PoE2, is what makes melee feel so lethal in this game. I'm guessing Jonathan and co. don't want to commit fully to buffing armour yet because we don't have defensive auras and skills from Guardian, Druid, and Duelist that will help melee survive better. Maybe. |
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" yeah its complex. buffing armour might not be the play, adding other sources of additive PDR might be the thing, changing monster damage might be the thing, if they do buff armour do they buff the formula? the base amount of armour on gear? theres so many ways to do it and a game like this is so complicated. if you add too much PDR do evasion and es builds starting finding a way to use it? knowing the right solution needs a lot of time and thought. you cant rush these things, the game is going to be an ongoing balance puzzle for the next year until release, and probably many years after. in poe1 it was 3 years before they added basalt flasks that gave 20% PDR as a way to help armour. then they took it down to 15%. and then they changed it to 20% more armour 5 years after adding them. 'fixing' armour is not something that is gonna happen in 2 weeks while they are also fixing the rest of the entire game and simultaneously developing 6 new classes, 24 more ascendancies, 3 more acts, 60 more bosses, 80 more maps, 140 more skills. |
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Feels like we simply need more health. That's the main issue. If we're dying to one shots, the issue is a small health pool.
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" fair shout, another potential fix is simply more life per level? i think that would do a lot to help how extremely gear dependant the lack of life % on the tree has left people feeling. |
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" It goes beyond that, though. Like with ES, I can take a hit and, as long as I avoid subsequent ones for a bit, bounce back from it super easy. Less viable with armor. Flasks are capped kind of low in terms of how much they heal. HP% regen isn't great. Lifetap is tied to physical damage. So even with bigger hp pools, armour wouldn't feel nearly as good as ES. But they did cover that aspect in the interview as well. The GGG guys mentioned that part with armour is just the overall lack of things that interact with it, the lack of options. |
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" Exactly. Evasion and ES builds did indeed use armour on their builds through Basalt flasks, Determination, etc. because it shored up Evasion's weakness against multiple consecutive small hits. GGG is probably being very careful with how they balance armour, just in case it ends up becoming mandatory on non-strength builds - and those non-strength classes, as a result, end up using armour better than the classes meant to use it to its fullest.. |
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I haven't played an Armor based character yet but are players doing it right? As in going far beyond the cap? It's the rule of thumb the more numerical armor you have the less DR gets reduced.
Never understood why they're so fixated on the big hit modifier anyways. They could just make total DR much lower but reliable. Just be normal and have 40% DR that's reliable. That's pretty much what we did before the Armor/Evasion "fix". We got like 30% DR from armor and the rest can from other more reliable layers. I just don't get the obsession with making defenses intended to fail when you can just lower their values. "Never trust floating women." -Officer Kirac
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