Yeah, but you face a lot more of them. Especially in a high tier push. You might take more total damage from that orbiter than one stray arrow, but those 50 stray arrows all coming at you at once will probably add up to more total damage than the orbiter.
My preferred setup is life% on shoulders (hard roll to get, but int/vit/life%/cooldown) and armor on chest. That setup maximizes your toughness vs. everything.
Elite reduction will maximize your toughness vs. elites, but I don’t like the tradeoff.
In a typical setup, 775 armor on chest will give you something like 10% toughness vs. everything if you run topazes, and maybe 8.5% toughness vs. everything if you run rubies/emeralds for extra armor (dilutes the value of 775 armor on chest).
11% elite reduction gives you 12.4% toughness vs. only elites.
If you are running topazes, I strongly prefer 775 armor on chest over elite reduction. 10% toughness vs. everything is better than 12.4% toughness vs. only elites. It’s not worth taking 10% more damage from trash just to gain 2.4% toughness vs. elites in my opinion.
There’s more of an argument if you are running emeralds/rubies, because then it’s ~8% toughness vs. everything compared to 12.4% toughness vs. elites. That’s a little more enticing.
It’s not enough of a difference either way, so it’s more personal preference than anything.
Where it really gets interesting is when you have extremely high paragon (5000-10000+). Then you’d drop vit off your chest and run something like int/armor/elite reduction, int/armor/life%, or int/life%/elite reduction, since you can take some vit from paragon, you start avoiding vit on gear to grab % based stats (life%, elite reduction) or stats you can’t get from paragon (armor).
But I’m not anywhere near the amount of paragon where that starts to make sense. At more sensible paragons, the best options are int/vit/armor, int/vit/life%, or int/vit/elite reduction. And those are all viable rolls.
Secondary rolls can play a factor here too. You have an inv/vit/armor/physical res chest vs. an int/vit/life%/melee reduction/ranged reduction chest? Normally I’d favor the armor over life%, but a chest with melee + ranged reduction is better than one with just a secondary res.
So yeah, I would say for most regular players, any of armor, elite reduction, or life% are viable rolls, and it comes down more to personal preference/playstyle than anything. And I would also factor secondary rolls into your decision if you are comparing between a couple different chests, since chests have some pretty powerful secondary toughness stats.