I appreciate you typing this out for me. Thank you.
I just geared out my earth bear druid in a bunch of dmg reduction gear. I am noticing the improvement at 5k armor but now I want more armor!
Level 71 druid
Armor 5300
DDR All 14.7
DDR clo 33.5
DDR Dis 16.0
DDR Inj 31.8
DDR For 38.1
Does basic Damage Reduction reduce ALL types of damage or only a specific type?
Damage reduction applies to all sources of damage. Though, there are conditional types like damage reduction from poisoned enemies or close/distant.
Straight damage reduction % should always be better (I think).
I did some quick googling, and as I understand it, the DR you get from armor is only half as effective against elemental damage (Cold, fire, lightning, poison, and shadow) while you get its full effect against physical damage. Example: If it says you currently get 80% DR from armor, then you will only get 40% DR against elemental damage.
With the regular %damage reduction affix, I believe you will get its full effect against all damage types.
Xarrio made it in one of his videos. Very helpful guy. Watch the video on his effective health to understand it all too.
Itâs important to note on this video. They specifically mean a return of 10% DR. Not stat value.
In other words when youâre hitting diminishing returns on DR it makes a difference.
This is double why Barbs donât use flat DR. Challenging Shout is 40% base and armor is higher.
Also, to my knowledge thereâs no technical cap on Armor. Itâs a DR cap but that doesnât mean the values donât work on higher level enemies when the DR is reduced. Never did finish testing on that.
The tooltip is misleading and is for enemies of equal level. You are not going to hit the DR cap from Armor pushing high NMD.
So you need roughly 10k armor for max % armor to be better than max %DR
Im speaking in terms of NM dungeons with enemies much higher level than you
This is considering physical damage only
Even then, to reach this crazy conclusion requires level 154 enemies. 10k armor would completely cap against lvl 100 enemies and there would be no point to stack more if that was the only enemy level you fight
So overwhelmingly majority of time flat DR is better than Armor. This is exasperated in the early game.
If you want to tackle tier NM 85-100, and you play a class that can even stack this armor (sorry sorcs) then perhaps going with as high as possible armor is best but it really requires very high armor levels
My pants have perfect Dodge roll, perfect Damage reduced roll, 4/4 War cry and near perfect armor roll⌠they work good for most things
Make a copy of this effective health sheet and put in your stats then evaluate: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NBvo2iBJiJCTByunZNgZ5p2uOjephmbd/edit#gid=531701845
Just get a balance of everything.
My understanding is, when enemy hits you :
1st - the damage is reduce by your Armor, Dmg Close/Injured/vul/bleed/etc
2nd - after all that, then only the rest of the balance damage will be reduce by the flat % Damage Reduce Stats
So, have high enough stacks of the 1st ones and along the way, as bonus to reduce it more, stack the %Dmg Reduce since it will be calculated last.
Also factoring the diminishing return, stacking the flat % damage reduce, usually get around +/- 20ish % average from 3 gears
The Flat % Damage Reduce is calculated last after the all reduction
Yeah, going from 80% to 85% DMG reduction from armor can be as powerful as getting 25% âdamage reductionâ from affixes because both removes the 25% of the remaining physical damage.
However, with elemental damage itâs a bit different since armor will only apply half its DR to it, as I understand. If we use the previous example, it means you will be going from 40% to 42.5% damage reduction to elemental damage. This means that elemental damage taken will only be reduced by about 4%.
I would still say that an armor affix is more powerful in the example I used because of the physical DR.