Common mistake: Armor in NM pushing

PC General Discussion
1

I see this a lot, many pushing builds stacking armor like there’s no tomorrow. Here is the problem:

Each 10 levels difference with monsters, you armor effectiveness is halved, mutiplicatively. The devs showed a graph of how armor interacts with higher/lower levels monsters, and that’s the truth about it.

Say you have 8k armor and gives you 80% damage reduction (is a not accurate example), right? Well, that 80% reduction becomes 40% with 10 levels difference, then 20% with 20 levels difference, and so on… up to 2.5% DR on 50 levels difference, you can get 3.75% DR with disobedience… wow, that’s useless.

Here is a video explaining it: Diablo IV - Armor & Resistance Level Penalties (Diablo Quantum Physics) - YouTube

Anyways, if you aim for NM pushing you want to AVOID percent total armor affixes, and aspect of disobedience. Are utter trash in high level pushing.

Instead try to get anything more reliable: other aspects, the invul dome, cheat’s aspect, the barrier proc (if you don’t have a reliable barrier generation), and on affixes probably health or other DR forms, depending on slot.

Also, avoid armor in paragon, again, useless. try to get life or other DR instead, if possible.

EDIT: To clarify, armor is still the best defense of the game, and absolutely OP in any other content that is not NM pushing.

You’re welcome.

2

Have you tried this yourself? Have you noticed any significant difference in practice? I am really curious, this is a radical approach.

3

Armor rolls way too much life, majority of it should be flat increase after every level + life nodes on paragon tree

4

WTF?

I’m gonna look into this.

5

… then roll a sorc and get a single arrow railgunned at you from out of screen from a corpse bow or banshee and you die on the spot no matter if you are running a nm 39 while you usually can run far more than that (providing you don’t get anything ranged in it of course and you manage to avoid each and any cc from every single enemy with it), and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, but taking the loss of yet another sigil to bliz incompetence altar.

6

Someone did some math on this at https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/14kdk67/level_150_damage_reduction_armor_resists_and/. Came out to:

DR = armor^2 / (attacker_level^2 * 80 + 200) / 100

Somewhere around 12400 armor for 85% resists vs 150

The difference between 12400 and 6000 however is that 6000 is only 20% vs level 150 and you will definitely feel a x5 increased damage taken between those two cases.

Even with armor however, you still need to stack damage reduction affixes and debuffs to survive one shots because enemies just do that much damage.

1 Like
7

Nope, one thing is your armor efficiency based on your level, and another the armor PENALTY based on the level difference with monsters.

These are two different things.

That value applies if your level were 150, same as monsters. That’s why many buildS get one if not two shotted, because armor best case scenario gives 5-6% DR in lvl 100 vs l150 content.

8

It does not. Read the equation and you will see it is based on your armor and the enemy level not your own level or the difference; a level 150 enemy will do more damage both by virtue of their attack power and their effectiveness in diminishing the value of your armor, however 5-6% at the upper end is not correct.

If you are basing your observations on the developer supplied chart, keep in mind that is for a fixed value of armor at only 2000 vs level. This does fall off to less than 5% at 100 or less than 3% vs 150, but you should have way more armor than that by then.

I won’t say I’ve personally tested it, but the equations do come reasonably close to the graphs provided by the devs so there is reason to believe it’s the right form with some variation in the 80 and 220 terms. For example, the terms x150 and +200 might match the graphs a little better and would imply a need for ~17000 armor to achieve 85% reduction.

I do agree that you can’t get by with just armor however.

9

The diminishing return isn’t that bad, just keep stacking Armor.