Sooo, is Avoron's Vanguard a useless talent or am I not understanding it correctly?

[Drax]

You have a chance to prevent damage. Damage block is equal to your armor divide by 100. This damage prevention occurs before reductions. (Chance: +10% Per Point)

If my armour is somewhere in the realms of 100-200, which seems to be the average amount for Avoron without trying to stack the stat, doesn't that mean I just have a 50% chance (with a 5 point investment) to block 1-2 damage prior to damage reduction? Isn't that extremely underwhelming?

Considering other talents can give you 10% experience, extra pull range, rerolls and alterations, etc. Isn't a 50% chance to block 1-2 damage entirely useless? Or is the entire branch just an extremely niche specialisation for the on-hit effects? And the Vanguard talent itself is just setup.

[Serendipitous]

Well, i have 600+ armor on him and that's definitely not maximum, so obviously the more you stack armor, the more useful it is. Especially since you can get other benefits from armor in his skill tree. But it doesn't seem all that much even with that, so yeah, kinda underwhelming.

Becoming exalted is pretty powerful tho.

[везнан]

Enemies don't do that much damage on individual attacks, the small number being blocked can be most of or the whole hit. Also this is a talent line that builds up to having your dash refresh with every block, so that's another thing to consider.

[Vegetable Vampire]

Originally posted by Drax:

You have a chance to prevent damage. Damage block is equal to your armor divide by 100. This damage prevention occurs before reductions. (Chance: +10% Per Point)

If my armour is somewhere in the realms of 100-200, which seems to be the average amount for Avoron without trying to stack the stat, doesn't that mean I just have a 50% chance (with a 5 point investment) to block 1-2 damage prior to damage reduction? Isn't that extremely underwhelming?

Considering other talents can give you 10% experience, extra pull range, rerolls and alterations, etc. Isn't a 50% chance to block 1-2 damage entirely useless? Or is the entire branch just an extremely niche specialisation for the on-hit effects? And the Vanguard talent itself is just setup.

The block in combination with retribution, the unique relic (Rose of the Desert or something like that) that kills any non-boss that hits you and all three of the act 2 bosses having rapid-fire attacks (Cursed has charge and poison cloud, Insect Queen has the light beam, Djinn has the fire breath) it can be very powerful. Each instance of damage from those beam-like attacks counts as a hit, triggering dozens of times. That means blocking like 5 damage per instance of damage can reduce the damage from an instance of damage from 10 to 5 (before reduction from armor and skills), while dealing damage to the boss with retribution.

With this setup on lower Darkness levels you can literally just stand around and do nothing. Even on high Darkness what will usually kill you is being overwhelmed by attacks. The insects that jump around deal a lot of damage with the spike they can summon underneath you. A few hits won't kill you, but if you lack the damage to kill them quickly, soon you have 6 of them swarming you and finding yourself unable to dash-dodge all of them, thus killing you. Being able to not give a sh*t makes that a whole lot easier.

Pairing the justice godess (whatever her name is) with freezing slows down combat, while giving you more time to regenerate with the legendary skill and not get overwhelmed.