Musings about Armour Scaling

After seeing the patch 0.1.1 interview, I understand that GGG wants to keep Armour Damage Reduction (DR) to continue scaling with the damage dealt. Though it also sounds like the intention is for it to be better against white mobs than against magic/rare/unqiue ones. Thus, here are some musings on how the formula could be adjusted with those two things in mind.


0. General DR formula

DR = Armour / (Armour + X)

With X being a scaling factor to adjust the DR to the damage of the hit.


1. Current State

X ~ Damage

Currently DR scales proportionally (~) to the damage dealt by the hit. Thus, armour is better (more DR) against small hits than large hits. However, in the current iteration of the game, we have white mobs that hit for large enough amounts of damage to make armour ineffective in the endgame. Whether white mobs are intended to deal hits similar to bosses is the main question. If not, then this might lessen the issue with armour in endgame.


2a. Scaling DR with Damage and Power (I)

X ~ Power * Damage

If DR would scale with damage and power (power level of the monster, as used by some skill/support gems), then the scaling values could be adjusted in a way that even large hits from white mobs are less serious than smaller hits from bosses. For example, a white mob might have a Power of 1, while a boss has Power of 20. Thus, DR from armour would be the same for a 4000 damage hit from a white mob and a 200 damage hit from a boss. However, this solution would have the highest swings in armour efficacy due to the multiplicative scaling with power and damage.


2b. Scaling DR with Damage and Power (II)

X ~ (Power * MonsterLevel) + Damage
or
X ~ (Power + MonsterLevel) + Damage

Decoupling the scaling with damage and power would allow to put a higher focus on either of the two factors. With this formula, there would be a minium amount of armour needed to get the same baseline DR against a monster depending on their level and power. Whether power and monster level are combined in an additive or multiplicative way would then also determine how big the difference is between white mobs and bosses. However, damage would have less of a direct impact on the DR compared to the previous formula.


3. Scaling DR with Power only

X ~ Power * MonsterLevel
or
X ~ Power + MonsterLevel

We could also remove the scaling with damage altogether and simply focus on the power level of the monster. This way the DR would be a constant value against individual enemies regardless of the damage dealt by the hit. Thus, the values could be tuned to make armour highly effective against all types of white mobs, while making it weak against bosses.


Personally, I'd currently tend towards option 2b) though the individual weighting factors would need finetuning to make armour feel good enough during mapping (against mostly white/blue mobs) and bring it to a level of the other defenses in terms of preventing sudden deaths.



Extra: Armour as a Damage Buffer

One idea to give armour some extra interaction besides percentage DR would be to also let it act as some kind of buffer to physical damage. This could function similarly to the Blood Mage's Grasping Wounds Ascendency and be an inherent feature of armour (with possible scaling in the passive tree).

Prevent Life loss from physical damage equal to 4% of Armour rating, then that much Life is lost over 4 seconds instead.

While this would not increase the amount of damage prevented by armour, it would enable secondary options to mitigate overall loss of life. Of course, the 4% value is just some initial guess and would need to be adjusted according to what amounts of armour are realistically attainable.