We need to talk about armor - This HAS to be changed.

[The Ironguard]

So, as someone who started the game as warrior, and enjoy tank builds, i have struggled rather hard on getting through the base game. After i read up on how armor mechanics actually work in the game (it's a lot more complicated than what it says in the in-game stats) i'm starting to understand why.

Quite frankly i have to ask: What drugs did they feed whatever baboon designed this?

Link so you can read this horror for yourself: https://www.poe2wiki.net/wiki/Armour#:~:text=Armour%20can%20reduce%20damage%20up,armour%20only%20applies%20to%20hits.


Here's the cliffnotes:

1. Armor can not reduce damage by more than 20% of its own value. Example: 1000 armor can not reduce an incoming hit by more than 200 damage. This means that it is very poor at reducing the damage of incoming large hits, exactly the kind of thing you would want a lot of armor for.

2. Armor is not based on levels, but on the size of the incoming damage. It also has break points, separate from the reduction cap.

To prevent 33% of damage of an incoming hit, you must have armor 6 times the size of the hit. Example: 100 damage with 600 armor reduces damage by 33

To prevent 50% of damage of an incoming hit, you must have armor 12 times the size of the hit. Example: 100 damage with 1200 armor reduces damage by 50

To prevent 33% of damage of an incoming hit, you must have armor 24 times the size of the hit. Example: 100 damage with 2400 armor reduces damage by 66

To prevent 75% of damage on an incoming hit, you must have armor 36 times the size of the hit. Example: 100 damage with 3600 armor reduces damage by 75

To prevent 90% of damage on an incoming hit, you must have armor 108 times the size of the hit. Example: 100 damage with 10800 armor reduces damage by 90

Even better, if the incoming hit exceeds your armor, it wont reduce the damage by more than 1/12 of the incoming hit, meaning that if you had 100 armor and you got hit by a 101 damage hit, you would mitigate no more than about 8-9 points of damage.

In short: you need an ASTRONOMICAL amount of armor to meaningfully mitigate damage, and the damage mitigation that you are shown in game is at best inaccurate, and at worst an outright fabrication. Combine this with the fact that warriors are based on melee attacks in a game that very much loves throwing area denial and heavy melee nukes at you, and you are in for a bad time.

This needs to be changed. As it is, there is practically no point in even using armor, particularly as the damage scales up later in the game. you'd be better off just stacking all the energy shield and resistances you can find, and go into evasion for dealing with autoattacks.

[CHAO$$$]

youre about 3 weeks late to the party if you wanna complain about armor
better late than never i guess

[The Ironguard]

well i dunno what happened 3 weeks ago. I just found out about this now.

[CrappyBark]

If you look at poe 1 before patch 3.16 you can see the armor formula aligns very closely. The timeline also aligns with when they started developing poe 2

Most likely they just lifted the damage and armor formula from poe 1 and ran with it here, which leaves out the improvements to armor that happened in poe 1 after 3.16

I'm willing to bet they're going to tweak the current poe 2 formula to become similar to the current poe 1 formula for armor, or their plan b is to see if they can find a new formula to make it different for poe 2 while still making armor effective

[Chibbs]

And still my warrior easily runs through t12 maps (I guess max lvl stones won’t be a problem either once my equip is a tad more upgraded).
That’s a lot of theoretical math which sounds very bad without context, but my own experience is, that I rarely get “one shot”. Maxed resistances, enough hp and as I play titan with dual 2h weapons I need tons of strength, so I couldn’t even afford to get super high armor and/or the biggest amounts of hp on my gear (yet), but it’s still completely fine.

[The Ironguard]

well that would certainly be very nice, because as it is now, it's practically useless, considering the necessary investment. Don't suppose you got a link to the POE1 armor formula?

Honestly, right now it feels like the devs just hate melee classes, warriors in particular.

Originally posted by Chibbs:

And still my warrior easily runs through t12 maps (I guess max lvl stones won’t be a problem either once my equip is a tad more upgraded).
That’s a lot of theoretical math which sounds very bad without context, but my own experience is, that I rarely get “one shot”. Maxed resistances, enough hp and as I play titan with dual 2h weapons I need tons of strength, so I couldn’t even afford to get super high armor and/or the biggest amounts of hp on my gear (yet), but it’s still completely fine.

So you basically just argued that going full damage build with high hp and resistances is the alternative to making a tank.

That is exactly my point. Tank builds don't work, you HAVE to play a high damage build so you can take out the opposition before they can do enough damage to you, because armor is BORKED.

[Nico]

Initially I thought you wanted to talk about the armor crushing feature, since that's basically the one big change from PoE1's armor system. It always has been a well known fact that you need a huge amount of armor to be able to reduce the incoming physical dmg from very big hits. And obviously there is no reason why they should make it different in PoE2. Unless you invest heavily into armor it will always only help against many small hits.

[This PC]

I mean, you have to play a high damage/high hp build regardless of whether armor works like poe1 before patch 3.16 or after. Nothing will save you in the endgame if you're taking an unreasonable amount of hits and you don't have any hp pool. Killing monsters fast is the best way to... you know, not take hits.

Even with capped resists, you'll get one shot all the time if you have low hp, regardless of armor. Armor only reduces physical damage.

And yeah, hmm... You always needed insane amount of armor, which is not really hard to do if you look beyond self-found gear.

[ZeroOne]

Originally posted by CHAO$$$:

youre about 3 weeks late to the party if you wanna complain about armor
better late than never i guess

Late ? in EA ? until Armor isnt changed its exatly the right time to talk about it DURING EARLY ACCESS ... till the point GGG fixed armor ..... even if someone else already wrote about it ... .. ..

[Elgareth]

Originally posted by Nico:

Initially I thought you wanted to talk about the armor crushing feature, since that's basically the one big change from PoE1's armor system. It always has been a well known fact that you need a huge amount of armor to be able to reduce the incoming physical dmg from very big hits. And obviously there is no reason why they should make it different in PoE2. Unless you invest heavily into armor it will always only help against many small hits.

The difference is that it's so much easier to get a big life pool along with a lot of armor via auras. These two things, a lot of armor AND big health pool, are a viable defensive layer.
However you can't get enough life in PoE2 along with necessary amounts of armor, that's why ES is so much better, because it's simply a big life pool.

[Chibbs]

Originally posted by The Ironguard:

So you basically just argued that going full damage build with high hp and resistances is the alternative to making a tank.

That is exactly my point. Tank builds don't work, you HAVE to play a high damage build so you can take out the opposition before they can do enough damage to you, because armor is BORKED.

Well to be fair, a tank build in general probably isn’t what this game is designed for. I too would’ve wished for real tank builds, even support builds which lead to more team play opportunities, but as it stands those things aren’t really working and probably aren’t intended. It is no mmorpg after all.

And no, my argument isn’t that you need to go “full damage”. Pretty much every character needs capped resistances in late game + other defensive layers. In my case that’s some hp and the default armor that I have plus some passives that correlate with hp/armor.
And as I stated before, I rarely get “one shot” in currently t12 maps. Aside from that, yes, you do need a build that clears fast enough. If you let everyone get close and all the mages got time to cast than your build isn’t strong enough yet. Defense is only there to give you time to react, not for you to face tank.
You might dislike that, I kind of do too, as I would love to play this game with a group of tank, healer/shielder/buffer and dds, but I guess that won’t happen.

I am in no way denying your claims and the armor systems might not be in the best state, but from my own experience I can tell you that it doesn’t seem as bad and warrior still works fine.

[This PC]

Originally posted by Elgareth:

The difference is that it's so much easier to get a big life pool along with a lot of armor via auras. These two things, a lot of armor AND big health pool, are a viable defensive layer.
However you can't get enough life in PoE2 along with necessary amounts of armor, that's why ES is so much better, because it's simply a big life pool.

Yeah well, I don't really trust feedback like these threads, they often look like they're born out of pre-set expectations from people who haven't really played PoE. ES does definitely feel better atm, and I don't know wtf is up with removing life nodes, honestly. :D

GGG is definitely gathering data atm, they will see what performs better than other things and will adjust, it's the whole point of EA. I'd rather they rely on pure numbers without the noise of the frustration and expectations of individual players and such.

[The Ironguard]

Originally posted by Nico:

Initially I thought you wanted to talk about the armor crushing feature, since that's basically the one big change from PoE1's armor system. It always has been a well known fact that you need a huge amount of armor to be able to reduce the incoming physical dmg from very big hits. And obviously there is no reason why they should make it different in PoE2. Unless you invest heavily into armor it will always only help against many small hits.

the problem is, that's the opposite of what you would want armor for. Many small hits is far easier to mitigate with just higher HP, or just killing the chaff. And sure, i don't expect armor to be a wonder mitigation on its own, but if it doesn't at least properly mitigate big hits, then you might as well not bother with it and just stack more HP and energy shield.

And again, i am not expecting armor to save me from my own stupidity in game, but i am expecting it to raise my life expectancy enough that i can go into a new encounter and survive long enough to adapt and overcome the encounter. As it is, i might as well just swap all that armor for energy shield gear, though of course, that then means i need to spec into intelligence and undercut the mace skills that warriors are encouraged to use.

This is just counter-intuitive design, and it should be changed. I mean it doesn't have to be complicated. Give armor a scaling damage reduction based on the number. To give you an example from a rather different game, in monster hunter World:

Incoming damage = 80/ (80+Player defence)

Basically 0 Defence: 1 (100%) damage. 80 Defence: 0,5 (50% damage) 160 defence: 0,33 (33% damage) etc.

You could easily make it something like that, and just have the damage scale with monster levels to keep up.

[Chibbs]

Originally posted by The Ironguard:

This is just counter-intuitive design, and it should be changed. I mean it doesn't have to be complicated. Give armor a scaling damage reduction based on the number. To give you an example from a rather different game, in monster hunter World:

Incoming damage = 80/ (80+Player defence)

Basically 0 Defence: 1 (100%) damage. 80 Defence: 0,5 (50% damage) 160 defence: 0,33 (33% damage) etc.

You could easily make it something like that, and just have the damage scale with monster levels to keep up.

Please stay rational in your argumentation. How is what you described in your OP not “a scaling damage reduction based on the number”? It is the same system, just with different numbers. Higher armor = less damage. You could easily take the MHW systems, tweak the numbers and your complaint would be the same.

I guess we can agree, that armor might feel weaker than other defenses, devs probably already know and hopefully will tweak it at some point, but (again, from my experience) it ain’t so bad that you can’t play with it.
Don’t get too hung up on this, pointing it out is a good deed, just don’t get emotional about it. :)

[Drake]

The problem with armour is simple, it's people going "I don't understand how armour work in this game, please change armour".

People have been fine working with armour in poe 1 for 10 years. New players please just get used to armour and build the game wants you to build, using several means of defence to protect you,

You use a high pool of life, life regen, life recoup and leech, and if you need to, even block with a shield. Also use defencive skills.

The enfeeble curse is also there if you need to lower damage even more.

[Tenzek]

This is similar to how POE 1 armor has worked for years, and there are people that have broken it defensively. Its up to you if you feel that you get more value on complaining on the forums or on working on your builds. Enjoy the game how it suits you.