Give the Armor stat a bonus to stagger buildup

[Plumber]

Armor is currently a fairly unimportant stat on Nightmare since the game is overwhelmingly polarized towards stacking as much damage (and to a lesser extent, movespeed) as possible, but it also isn't very impactful on lower difficulties because it has relatively diminishing returns and most of the most dangerous attacks will binarily kill you or not, so if you get any at all it's only really worth getting a small amount of it. It ultimately feels like a luxury stat if you already have heaps of damage and can afford to invest in it as a safety net.

In most cases, damage/crit stacking doesn't influence your stagger output very substantially and the goal of Nightmare is to get so much damage you don't even need to stagger heavies to deal with them in a timely fashion. If armor had some influence with stagger output, then damage/crit would be powerful against unarmored enemies and armor would be powerful for opening up heavies/crabs/gargoyles which have very high damage tolerance until they've been staggered. Functionally, where damage gives you leeway against minor enemies by obliterating them so you can focus on heavies, this take on armor would encourage you to risk going straight for the throat instead.

This would indirectly make Green Armor and Dragon Hide - currently some of the game's weakest items - much more appealing to use. We also currently have no items that directly improve stagger output; it's all Vajra shenanigans alongside stacks and CDR from purple items.

Characters that naturally get armor from certain actions/talents would get much more mileage out of them as well; Scarlet's wolf form Defense and Melusine's Shimmering Scales talent come to mind.

[Shard of time]

Originally posted by Plumber:

Armor is currently a fairly unimportant stat on Nightmare since the game is overwhelmingly polarized towards stacking as much damage (and to a lesser extent, movespeed) as possible, but it also isn't very impactful on lower difficulties

i like the idea of adding some stugger buff, but i compleatly disagree that armor is "unimportant" on nightmare.

survivability on nightmare is important, not everyone (me included) can dodge everything while maintaining the damage output

armor is leags above pretty much any source of survivability. it lets you tank more while requiring less healing for sustain and it also affects shields, practicly multiplying almost all sources of survivability on top of being a good one on its own, the only otlier being the chainmail that benefits only from rapid healing, but unlike vitality, armor doesn't hurt the chainmail

Originally posted by Plumber:

This would indirectly make Green Armor and Dragon Hide - currently some of the game's weakest items

the "you become imortal AND (in combination) powerful" items are "weakest"? now thats a fun joke

[Plumber]

Chainmail is the strongest defensive item in the game.

Yes, armor is a literal multiplier and can be useful, no it is not uniquely valuable because it is only useful when you have other sources of sustain and it has diminishing returns (especially whenever your armor is greater than your vitality). It does not prevent you from getting hit and it does not stop incoming damage; it just helps your effective health/shields without solving the actual problem at hand, which is usually solvable or comparable with more of anything else, and I stand by it being better to invest in many other items and talents. Whether you want to hairsplit over this, the reality is it does almost nothing for clear speed on its own and it’s the lowest priority stat accordingly next to Vitality which at least scales with Ogre’s Blood if you really want safe power.

I want armor to be appealing for some additional unique reason just like how damage and crit have their own subtleties differentiating them against each other with how they interface with certain talents and objective routing.
“It makes shields better” is moot when the best shields don’t need armor to shrug off moderate hits in the first place and the worst shields that need armor to be effective don’t confer mileage from your armor to your teammates, only their own. (Yes, having armor scale up outgoing shields could be cool too.) Even the heaviest single attacks won’t instantly kill you if you’re keeping up with healing wells and levels, just a standard amount of vitality. Multi-layered attacks and piles of heavies that you almost NEVER want to get hit by do not care very much about how much armor you have until you have hundreds of it.

I did not say everyone can avoid all damage but everyone must in order to get a run going in Nightmare; it’s the hardest difficulty and in 4P it makes no pretenses about being anything but. I’m saying it’s a fact of the difficulty that it’s tuned to put extreme time/XP stress on the player and in multiplayer scaling at least one, ideally all players NEED to prioritize damage initially or the run WILL fall behind.
On one hand, the more headway you make early, the faster you clear and the more of a lead you can play comfortably with. On the other hand, if you build too safe, you can make no real mistakes and still fail to keep up with how harshly enemy stats escalate; some objectives can become truly impossible, even in 1P if you get unlucky with corrupted heavies in grimoires. I expect the upcoming patch will alleviate this to an extent.

Yes, Green Armor and Dragon Hide are two of the weakest items in the game, though they’re not quite as sad as Voodoo Doll and Queen of Hearts.
Green Armor is only armor on its own, which as previously discussed also has minimal influence on clear speed on its own. Dragon Hide is only armor as well - until you get the 4x collection bonus, and then things get silly accordingly. However, having the stars align to get you 4x Dragon Hide as quickly as possible is rare, and in some runs may not be feasible at all. In those situations, you haven’t built up any momentum.
Bloody Mary’s Mirror is a very entertaining item to get early into a run and flips this on its head, but it’s the rarest type of item…

If you’re still hung up on me saying damage output is the most effective way to win in a game with a timer and snowballing - dying from mistakes is bad, but being doomed to fall behind is worse - please consider that wanting armor improved because it currently isn’t boosting clear speed is in favor of decentralizing the glass cannon shenanigans experienced players can and must get away with in 4P Nightmare.
And it'd be funny to stunlock problem enemies!

[Shard of time]

Originally posted by Plumber:

If you’re just here to badger me again over saying that focusing on damage output is the most effective way to win in a game with a timer and snowballing - dying from mistakes is bad, but being doomed to fall behind is worse - please consider that wanting armor improved because it currently isn’t boosting clear speed is in favor of decentralizing the glass cannon shenanigans experienced players can and must get away with.

no, i am not here for that nor i'm saying that survivability is more important (well, technically it is, but not in this sense so i digress). i'm providing a perspective to your feedback and opposing the idea that armor is useless like you made it out to be in the OP.

from my experience armor proven to be a useful asset for victory as is, and your buff for it would just overtune it, reverbing the situation from "glass cannon" meta to armor meta as a result. yes, damage centric builds would still be viable, but just in the same way as armor centric ones are right now.

Originally posted by Plumber:

Chainmail is the strongest defensive item in the game.

yeah, ok, i did worded that statement about armor a bit poorly. Chainmail is the strongest "defensive" item, but also the most suseptable to being made obsolete by your build (or it makes a part of your build obsolete), or use of wells alone for that matter (no, i'm not saying armor is better than it is, i just disregarded it during the "armor is leags above pretty much any source of survivability" statement).

Originally posted by Plumber:

Yes, armor is a literal multiplier and can be useful, no it is not uniquely valuable because it is only useful when you have other sources of sustain and it has diminishing returns (especially whenever your armor is greater than your vitality).

its precisely why it is the best (minus the chainmail, it is its own thing) source of survivability, it amplifies the effectivenes of everything else while being as solid on its own as vitality (or better in practice considering the healing orbs)

if we look at it in the sense "only useful when you have other sources of survivability" then only healing is <practical>, which is still not really, considering all the possible one-shots. survivability implies use of all the sources for it simultaneously.

"diminishing returns" only if you look at its res value at its low points, while in practice it can be summarised to "1% of effective health for each point". i dont have the exact values for each point of it to just prove (or disprove) it mathematicaly, but considering the flat 50% res at 100 points, it checks out for me.

Originally posted by Plumber:

It does not prevent you from getting hit and it does not stop incoming damage; it just helps your effective health/shields without solving the actual problem at hand, which is usually solvable or comparable with more of anything else

nor is vitality, healing, shields.

ok, i think i choose a wrong word to categorize this, i do not count intangible (which is still suseptable to great ground pounds for that matter) in "sources of survivability"

Originally posted by Plumber:

“It makes shields better” is moot when the best shields don’t need armor to shrug off moderate hits in the first place and the worst shields that need armor to be effective don’t confer mileage from your armor to your teammates, only their own. (Yes, having armor scale up outgoing shields could be cool too.)

the main point of this i already adressed above, but the idea for your armor to affect outgoing shields is a great one, now i kinda even wanna see that in some way in game (but i do think that it would be excessive to make it just passive for all shield sources)

Originally posted by Plumber:

I did not say everyone can avoid all damage but everyone must in order to get a run going in Nightmare; it’s the hardest difficulty and in 4P it makes no pretenses about being anything but. I’m saying it’s a fact of the difficulty that it’s tuned to put extreme time/XP stress on the player and in multiplayer scaling at least one, ideally all players NEED to prioritize damage initially or the run WILL fall behind.
On one hand, the more headway you make early, the faster you clear and the more of a lead you can play comfortably with. On the other hand, if you build too safe, you can make no real mistakes and still fail to keep up with how harshly enemy stats escalate

just to make sure i made my self clear, i do not say that armor is the best thing in the game and a must have, and is better than damage, no, i'm saying that its not as bad as you claimed it to be.

Originally posted by Plumber:

Yes, Green Armor and Dragon Hide are two of the weakest items in the game, though they’re not quite as sad as Voodoo Doll and Queen of Hearts.
Green Armor is only armor on its own, which as previously discussed also has minimal influence on clear speed on its own. Dragon Hide is only armor as well - until you get the 4x collection bonus, and then things get silly accordingly. However, having the stars align to get you 4x Dragon Hide as quickly as possible is rare, and in some runs may not be feasible at all. In those situations, you haven’t built up any momentum.
Bloody Mary’s Mirror is a very entertaining item to get early into a run and flips this on its head, but it’s the rarest type of item…

i have not implied that those items are strong in general, i implied that they are not "weakest", and again, your buff would overtune them.

Originally posted by Plumber:

And it'd be funny to stunlock problem enemies!

i already said that i like the possibility of a "stagger buff"


btw, why are you not using the reply function?

[Plumber]

Originally posted by Shard of time:

why are you not using the reply function?

lazy and it also lends itself to people fighting fragments instead of the big picture, but fine i'll do this instead of monolithic paragraphs

i don't have the exact values for each point of it to just prove (or disprove) it mathematically

the easiest way to understand the formula is each extra point of armor is 1% more effective health over the previous point; 0+10 is a much bigger jump compared to baseline zero than 100+10

nor do vitality, healing, shields.

reread what you quoted: "[armor] is usually solvable or comparable with more of anything else", meaning armor is competing with vitality/healing/shields at doing the same things but is lower priority because you can just invest in them instead for the same or better early results. Again, from maximum health and default vitality plus some wells, singular hits cannot kill you in this game, only cascades of them from multihits which require huge investment to facetank or stuns which are always slow to get hit by without any exception.
Stacking vit is the worst strictly defensive option among vit/armor/shields/healing if you have no ogre's blood and it's subject to the same issues of diminishing returns relative to baseline, but has far more potential for the success of the run because of ogre's blood and especially the refugee camp option to convert 10/30 vit to crit. I'll take maybe one armor upgrade through the entire run, often ending runs with negative armor and ignoring vit as long as I have 30 unless a bunch of ogre's blood falls on top of me in ch1.

i do not count intangible in "sources of survivability"

please reconsider; limiting or zeroing the number of attacks hitting you colors the entire purpose of health as a buffer for minor mistakes or attacks you want to consciously ignore since any standard attacks you REALLY shouldn't get hit by can be iframed.
Baba Yaga has an attack that is outright impossible to dodge UNLESS you iframe it; there's no way around considering it a core part of Not Dying.
The only attacks that pierce dodge iframes are extremely telegraphed AoEs from ch1 giant tree slams, ch1 tentacle master nightmare slams; ch2 Steropes' kicks; ch3 red claw master nightmare slams and the growing explosive laser combo attack; Baba Yaga's conal mortar spills in phase 2 and tentacle slam at the end of her 3-hit combo in phase 3. In addition to all dodge-piercing effects, the only attacks that pierce guards but not dodges (currently Beowulf Defense before being released and Sun Wukong Defense at all times) are terrain effects and Steropes' grab.

i have not implied that [Green Armor and Dragon Hide] are strong in general, i implied that they are not "weakest"

you rudely mocked me for saying they were which prompted me to substantiate my claims and now you brush off the explanation anyway

[Xleba]

Almost all my nightmare runs end with negative or close to zero armor and there was not a single situation in the game where I thought "Damn, I wish I had taken armor instead of damage/crit chance/crit damage or whatever that time". It's not useless in an absolute sense, it's useless because it competes with other stats or relics that are simply much better. You can literally fail a run with 0 damage but a lot of armor. And there's a useless mirror that swaps damage and armor, which literally forces you to collect armor to make damage out of it. And given the fact that damage is much easier to collect than armor, this relic seems more like a relic for achieving a huge amount of armor to me. But why you need 700 armor and 50 damage in a run, I don't know.

[Plumber]

pretty much - though like I alluded to, Bloody Mary's Mirror has some pretty niche applications when the game lets you take advantage of them. Scarlet's wolf form Defense gives 50 armor out of the box; if you get it earlygame, it can give you an enormous head start. Doesn't strictly mean you NEED to prioritize armor items afterward since you can go for crit too, and Horn of Plenty remains one of the best items regardless, but being able to take advantage of Green Armor / Dragon Hide is pretty nice in seeds that also have low amounts of shards.
It just goes to show that mechanically those items would not be poor options if they gave damage instead of armor, since they work just fine with BM Mirror.

[Shard of time]

Originally posted by Plumber:

nor do vitality, healing, shields.

reread what you quoted:...

i was answearing to the "It does not prevent you from getting hit and it does not stop incoming damage".

Originally posted by Plumber:

"[armor]is usually solvable or comparable with more of anything else", meaning armor is competing with vitality/healing/shields at doing the same things but is lower priority because you can just invest in them instead for the same or better early results.

i thought i made it clear in another answear, but ok, i'll repeat.

no source of survivability competes with one another (well, healing and shields do to an extent, but thats not the topic), they compliment eachother and should be used in correlation. they are not mutually exclusive, they have equal priority as sources of survivability.

Originally posted by Plumber:

i do not count intangible in "sources of survivability"

please reconsider; limiting or zeroing the number of attacks hitting you colors the entire purpose of health as a buffer for minor mistakes or attacks you want to consciously ignore since any standard attacks you REALLY shouldn't get hit by can be iframed.
Baba Yaga has an attack that is outright impossible to dodge UNLESS you iframe it; there's no way around considering it a core part of Not Dying.

i think i made it rather confusing, i am not disregarding intangible as a whole, i meant that when i say "sources of survivability" i only mean one's ability to tank damage because avoiding it is another topic.

Originally posted by Plumber:

i have not implied that [Green Armor and Dragon Hide] are strong in general, i implied that they are not "weakest"

you rudely mocked me for saying they were which prompted me to substantiate my claims and now you brush off the explanation anyway

"rudely"? "mocked"? ok, ngl this now made me chuckle. i guess sorry, but i think you should be well aware how "rude" and "mocking" i am when i actualy am "rude" and "mocking"

if you want me to bite that particular debate, then sure, why not

Originally posted by Plumber:

Green Armor is only armor on its own, which as previously discussed also has minimal influence on clear speed on its own.

if we look at "has minimal impact on clear speed on its own" then lets remember items such as: mermaid tears, dream catcher, leprichaun coin, ogre blood, fairy dust, unicorn horn, raven skull (some defence skills have "minimal" or no influence on clear speed "on their own"), adder stone and a lot of legendary items. i have obviously overexagurated, but again, it is the reasoning you yourself brought up.

Originally posted by Plumber:

Dragon Hide is only armor as well - until you get the 4x collection bonus, and then things get silly accordingly. However, having the stars align to get you 4x Dragon Hide as quickly as possible is rare, and in some runs may not be feasible at all. In those situations, you haven’t built up any momentum.

"high risk - high reward". and even so, its not that hard to get your hands on 4 rare copies unless rng really decides otherwise

Originally posted by Trema:

Almost all my nightmare runs end with negative or close to zero armor and there was not a single situation in the game where I thought "Damn, I wish I had taken armor instead of damage/crit chance/crit damage or whatever that time".

if the game had better feedback on how much damage you suffer then said situations would skyrocket, i assure you.

[Plumber]

Originally posted by Shard of time:

"rudely"? "mocked"? ok, ngl this now made me chuckle. i guess sorry, but i think you should be well aware how "rude" and "mocking" i am when i actualy am "rude" and "mocking"

I've been patient and almost pedantically thorough in explaining my thought processes to this point - it's enjoyable to discuss the finer points of a game and what makes it tick, whether for high or low level play - but I have no interest in continuing a discussion with someone so disrespectful and desperate for any single thing to fight over. You frequently twist and hairsplit any point you can in order to get one up over whoever you're talking to, even people replying to you in good faith.
I will not interact with you in the future.

[Shard of time]

Originally posted by Plumber:

Originally posted by Shard of time:

"rudely"? "mocked"? ok, ngl this now made me chuckle. i guess sorry, but i think you should be well aware how "rude" and "mocking" i am when i actualy am "rude" and "mocking"

I've been patient and almost pedantically thorough in explaining my thought processes to this point - it's enjoyable to discuss the finer points of a game and what makes it tick, whether for high or low level play - but I have no interest in continuing a discussion with someone so disrespectful and desperate for any single thing to fight over. You frequently twist and hairsplit any point you can in order to get one up over whoever you're talking to, even people replying to you in good faith.
I will not interact with you in the future.

well, you do you.
i tried to be respectful, so if that wasn't enough for you, nothing else i can do then

edit: honestly, really confused as to why would you decide to say this now of all times, i tried to do literally the same, more over pretty much always tried to do. i may be a dickish person, but as i said, its decently apparent when i'm a ♥♥♥♥ out of agression, and now wasn't one of such cases

[Shirei]

I do believe damage is important, but at the same time, I'll say that ending a nightmare run with more than 600k damage dealt is a good indicator and last time I did end up with over 700k having just 5 damage.

I also love to power up and nuke bosses before they can lay finger on me, but it's not always possible and stacking copies and cooldown reduction on a skill that I had all talents built around made enough on it's own without high damage.

But to do damage, either with high numbers, by spamming ability or combining both at the best scenario, you need to live. Nightmare as it is can be unforgivable and one mistake can cost you life, that's when armor comes in handy.

From red grimoire I will always take 32 armor over 12 attack. Green armor is also pretty useful and can be a source of damage too with either Bloody Mary's Mirror or Dragon Hide.

The thing is there are dimnishing returns and if you're not using armor to get damage, then it's usually good to stop at 40. And yes, it did save me from a mistake several times, where otherwise I would be dead and 12 more points in attack would not make me kill those enemies before that danger came upon me.

I like the idea of getting more stagger, but I disagree with armor being unimportant, especially that you do not need high investment to reach 32 or 40 points that can save you in a pinch.

[Plumber]

i agree that armor can be useful to help ward against getting instantly killed, but tl;dr for why it's "unimportant" is that you don't need much of it to be comfortably bulky (you actually don't need any period to survive OHKOs from almost all attacks as long as you tag enough healing wells!) and you can get similar returns for survivability from other options. Yes, getting ~40ish makes you very difficult to kill - but all you get out of piling it higher is just an increasing margin for error, not more power like sources of damage or more freedom to reconsider what "error" actually is like sources of healing or Golden Chainmail that widen the margin for error AND success.

Green Armor and Dragon Hides' scaling methods are mechanically fine which is why it combos well with Bloody Mary's Mirror, but that just flips the responsibility of 'armor bad' onto the damage stat instead where THAT becomes ineffective to invest in; in silly mirror runs I'll ignore most damage items by the same token that I ignore Green Armor / Dragon Hide in normal runs.

If you're stacking charges/CDR on abilities, I'd still consider that building for damage output even if it's not directly reflected in the damage/crit stats. Yes, you can get silly runs with most of the purple collection bonuses and extraordinarily broken runs with ten wings and dash talents or a bunch of stacks plus Balor's Eye on characters that can manipulate their CDs, so on and so forth... I also think effectively infinite mobility or invulnerability speaks for itself in regards to the "staying alive" side of the problem, too.

I don't like using the end-of-round statistics for a straight-faced indicator of performance because sneezing on Baba Yaga accounts for what would've been two minutes of fighting earlier in the run thanks to levels, items, and talents exponentially scaling our damage output. It's also not difficult to pad your stats in the waning minutes of each chapter by fighting random leftover fodder, and the game certainly doesn't mind factoring in overkill damage, nor the vast majority of shields conferred to teammates that expire without having blocked any damage.

[Shirei]

The thing is, what already was said by Shard of time, armor is just a part of all the stats. Just because stacking it higher than 40 doesn't do much, doesn't mean armor is unimportant.

We have cases where you want to stack more like for mirror and dragon hide, but otherwise you can stay at 40 and... that's good.

Having 0 defense and 40 defense can make a big difference and I'd say it is adviced to aim for this number. You do not need to go futher, so you can invest in other stats.

We have several ways of getting that defense, be it grimoire, green armor or set bonuses from other items. You do not need to aim for everything and stack armor to the moon so it finally does something. It's doing it job at 40 and so you need to just get a little of it from one/two things and then you can focus on damage.

Just because stacking it over some values doesn't make it much better, doesn't mean it's not viable. It's even better this way, where we can stop at some point and feel it's fine, as we can then focus on another stats, instead of going all in on that one stat.

And for the stats after the game, if you can't kill stuff and just do cheap damage in few places then you will have low damage dealt at the end. We have limited time, it's not like we will clear the whole map and then fight fodder enemies if we're doing low damage and do not clear as we should. 600k at the end are runs where I could realiably clear stuff and complete many POIs on map, while being below usually meant I either was carried by someone or "had to sneeze" by surviving long enough on a boss.

[Shard of time]

Originally posted by Shirei:

The thing is, what already was said by Shard of time, armor is just a part of all the stats. Just because stacking it higher than 40 doesn't do much, doesn't mean armor is unimportant.
.
.
.
Just because stacking it over some values doesn't make it much better, doesn't mean it's not viable. It's even better this way, where we can stop at some point and feel it's fine, as we can then focus on another stats, instead of going all in on that one stat.

btw, stacking armor above "40" is still a good option if one goes for a support build. If a player wants to focus on keeping his team alive he also will prefer his own survivability over damage, though it is a case for 3-4p coop mostly

[Plumber]

To reiterate, the reason I call it “unimportant” is because you don’t need armor for other stats to be effective and there’s little reason to build armor over them since they do the same things better. It’s something you only take if you need, and at high levels of play you never need it. Armor has no bearing at all on what you confer to your teammates; you only take armor to make your survival easier. Nice for chip damage, not necessary for big hits. You don’t need any at all to survive most major attacks except on red stance Sun Wukong (and he has the best Defense in the game, so there it’s just a safety net, not a necessity).

Everything is ‘viable’ because you can win with no items or stat boosts at all, just immaculate play (and ideally good talents…) since almost all damage is avoidable and what isn’t is survivable with base stats (but in normal play, having some sustain is very valuable for efficiency, not just survival). This isn’t about viability, just armor being an uninteresting stat. I want it to do something interesting. It’s nice on paper that we need little armor to get the most value out of it, and it’s not nice when compared to stats that are helpful with similarly low investment and end up even more helpful with further investment since they improve what you can do, not just save you from what you can’t do. I want armor to push the envelope in a way that other stats and items haven’t already, hence wanting it to bolster stagger output.

Yes, the damage total is irrelevant. The game does not care how, when, or where you get your damage, nor what you’re damaging, on top of the scaling making excellent performance in ch1/2 practically invisible. It’s a heuristic and little else. I’ve had many runs where my favorite, most helpful teammates had the lowest total damage, just from doing a fantastic job kiting or dealing with the actual threat enemies.