How Important is Armor?

[bloggyelf]

i see alot of talk about DA and getting that as high as you can, and i get why. but what about armor? not much gets said about that, does it matter what your armor rating is?

[mikhailtk]

Armor reduces the amount of damage you take from hits that land. By default, it's up to 66% of the damage, but there's gear/skills that can increase that further. Note that at ~1900-2000 DA you become immune to melee from normal Legendary monsters. Bosses will still be able to hit you though. Also, unless you're a certain build (Haruspex for example, Dream + Hunting), reaching 100% chance to avoid projectiles is difficult. Which means you'll still get hit by ranged attacks, and those can hurt a lot. On top of all that certain boss moves have physical damage components.

Now, if you had 2000 DA, 100% CtaP, and high resistances, armor wouldn't matter much, but that's hard to achieve.

Long story short, if you're a caster with very low armor ratings, there are monsters in Legendary that can 1 shot you. Also, defensive ability stat is mostly found on high armor rating armor, so even when you're going for high DA you still need to wear the "heavy" armor.

[Phantasy_snot]

well, not much can be done for AR, but DA can be boosted easily, and it only matters for melee characters for the most part. But i agree, armor is overlooked for the most part, but it is important. Without any modifiers it resists 66% of the rating it says in PD, meaning 600 armor means the difference between 1000 physical damage, and 604 physical damage

[Violos]

Actually it's even more than that. Tests showed that up to about 500 (i.e. most pieces) it absorbs twice as much as one would think, and above that it's roughly 66%*(500+AR).

So with 600 armor, you'd get over 700 reduction on every physical hit.

This amount will probably not save you from really heavy hits, which range in the 1000s. Especially since many boss abilities use mixed damage types. But in everyday use, it adds up to a lot of saved health.