This is one part of the meta I forget. Does armor matter much, or just resists and hit recovery? I know armor is king in Diablo I but I recall it meaning less in D2.
My werewolf does seem to have the most trouble with blood lords. I have chain mail with + resists and fhr, but I’m wondering if one of these expensive ancient armors with 300 armor makes more sense?
Also, side note, how does one get mana leech? Not being able to run fury and feral rage is killing my attack rating. I could put a perfect skull in my weapon (unique maul), but since it is quite good I wanted to wait for a shael rune.
It matters but not as much as the other things you mentioned imo
if you stand in place a lot yes i guess.
it’s negated as soon as you move (armor value becomes “–” when you move)
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Armor does matter, but it depends on how much you have.
If you have a ton of it, it is a lot better than having a lot of it, as an example.
You always want more armor if you can help it but unless you can stack it to the point where it becomes hard for enemies to hit you (which takes some pretty serious investments to get there so not worth on most characters) then other things are going to be the priority.
Edit:
That’s a good point as well. If you are trying to for a lot of armor as a melee you should definitely toggle run off in combat unless you need to retreat or dodge something.
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Makes sense. I have a frenzy character too, an walking is a lot easier with the huge boost to speed.
I’m guessing then it will be easiest to make armor matter AND max resists on my frost zealot. Does higher armor also stop incoming hits before block? Block lock is a pain and interrupts fury. Doesn’t matter now because I have Bonesnap and will probably upgrade to an Insight polearm, but if a good enough one handed weapon drops I can see the benefit in reducing block animations. Or is fury basically unusable with a shield due to the auto miss? I don’t play enough for elite gear so Insight had always been my go to, never used a shield outside frost and shock paladins, or maybe if I ever make a jav zon.
I’m wearing plate and I’m still getting spanked by mobs, so I’m unsure how effective armor value really is.
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I think barbarian is probably the easiest to get to levels of armor that make it nearly impossible for enemies to hit with melee.
You get natural armor passive as a one point wonder, 30% extra armor for one skill point and any +skills only makes it better. Then that stacks with the armor shout. Then that stacks with a defiance merc.
I’m pretty sure the game checks to see if you got hit before it checks to see if you blocked the hit, but I could be wrong on that. Block lock is the reason people don’t typically go for high block chance without also having a ton of FBR. I think druids usually don’t use a shield at all, but I have never really played one myself much.
Edit: had the name wrong, it is Iron Skin on barbs not natural armor. I was thinking of natural resistance 
Makes sense. Or WW stops block lock, or at least it did the last time I played a sword and board barbarian way back in 1.09. 75% block plus being able to swirl through mobs freely rocked, plus Honor was still a good enough rune word to beat Hell back before they spiked monster HP; melee seemed a lot better then.
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1.10 made it a lot harder for physical chars in general. They balanced physical synergies with the new op runewords in mind so phys builds got significantly less synergy. The amount of health monsters gained vs how little extra damage we got from synergy…
Then you look over at elemental builds where they get over 10% from one point in synergies, it hardly seems fair.
But then if they had made synergies for physical stronger things like grief would be even more gamebreaking. 1.10 was not a patch I liked.
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Little bit of column A , Little bit of column B.
There is an aspect of damage mitigation that goes along with avoiding damage when you consider full coverage for mitigating damage through avoiding / blocking / dodging (if it applies) but there are also a set of abilities in the game that will hit you regardless of defense. If anyones played a smiter they’ve probably realized that Lister and his gang seem to always do a ton of damage despite having a ton of defense through max Holy shield / defiance on exile / and max block.
When you get to the point where your considering something like an Archon Plate Runeword with 1500 defense vs the same runeword in a higher strength armor because it might provide 2000, or something, you won’t often get a ton of benefit from that higher armor peice.
Once you hit a point where the mlvl in an area is unlikely to hit you each % after that is less effective and in Act4 / Act5 when the Frenzy Mobs can only be blocked, or Lister will hit you regardless, while its not easily quantified, it is in its own way less effective past a point.
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Did they also up monster armor a lot? Hitting stuff is a huge pain now.
I don’t mind the extra challenge of melee, but bosses do become a huge pain and it feels a little bogus that spells hit 100%, but your well leveled character who hits mobs 80% of the time suddenly has to deal with 50+% miss rates on Diablo or Baal. Or how you can clear Nightmare Baal fine and then Hell zombies in the Blood Moore are unhittable.
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1.10 increased monster defenses across the board. They also greatly increased elemental resistances, to the point where using immunities was how they were trying to balance elemental builds.
There is a lot about 1.10 that old players don’t like, which is why quite a few were asking for a 1.09 server before d2r came out. That was a pipe dream though.
Edit: in the patch notes for 1.10
- Increased difficulty for high-level players to reduce future exploitation of the game system.
- Made monsters tougher
- Beefed up monster difficulty in [Act V], [Nightmare], and [Hell]) difficulties. This was accomplished by improving monster stats (hp, ac, etc.) and by boosting their AI/behavior in Nightmare and Hell difficulties (that is, by making decisions more often and by simply moving faster). In Nightmare and Hell difficulties monster damages have generally been increased – dramatically in some cases.