It’s impossible to hit the 85% cap or 9230 without at least one armor affix and none of the unique or mythic armor pieces relevant to the sorcerer (except the stupidly overpowered Shako 
) have armor affixes. Which means you need to use at least one regular legendary with an armor affix. Meanwhile everything has + to all resists which is absolutely useless to intelligence based characters and nothing in our paragon trees has armor either. I swear it’s like they only make this game for barbarians! smh
So should I just ignore the armor cap and instead use a unique or use a legendary with an armor affix? How important is that extra 1500 armor anyway?
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Best way to know is to test in the hardest content you can try. Try one with and without.
I remember back in the old NM 100s, the armor difference MAKES A HUGE DIFFERENCE. Not sure if that’s still the case.
I was initially hitting the armor cap by enchanting with percent armor and finding gear with armor. I got like 16K armor easily. I wasn’t aware they got capped last season to 9.2K lol.
Right now I am sitting at 9.3K I think. 5K of it is from my Shako thanks to MW. I’d rather have it in CDR but at least I got the cap with little excess
Do you use unique everywhere ? i mean boots + pant + chest + head ?
Yeah, I am. I can switch out either the pants (Tibault’s) or the boots (Rakanoth’s) but I would be losing out on a whole separate damage multiplier with the former and great stats including CDR which you typically can’t get in those slots with the latter. In the chest slot I have Tyrael’s so that’s not changing and then the helm slot is my build defining unique.
- Shako
- Skulls in Jewelry
- One piece with armor on it… There are a bunch to choose from.
- Stay under cap
If you’re not using ANY pieces that aren’t unique with your build - you’re making a choice to be squishy to physical damage. Good for you if you don’t die a bunch!
I currently have
1 +armor roll on gear.
1 %armor temper
2 Skulls in jewelry.
9.5k armor, 3resists at 84 with the other 2 capped at 70.
Not really. I tried it and noticed no real difference in survivability between ~8k armor and capped armor. That said, I still ended up swapping out one piece to a legendary but for a completely different reason. I didn’t realize how important the tempers that give a chance to apply cc on lucky hit were. The stagger generation is absolutely key for bosses, especially on a sorcerer.
Regardless, I stand by what I said. The armor cap needs to be reachable without needing a specific affix just like the all resist cap can be. The devs arbitrarily deciding to cap it at 9230 instead of a lower number that can be reached with just the base armor value of all 925 gear is just silly.
I just built a new sorc. After 9 hours, it’s about level 90. It’s Conjuration Sorc (not the LS/FO kind). I beat WT4 at level 43. I could do it at level 35 but by the time I was done in the capstone 2, I leveled up multiple times.
Anyway, for this sorc, to hit 9.2K armor, I had to find an armor with armor stat and had to temper it with armor as well. Then I added skulls. Once I got the max skulls, I could probably use an armor that doesn’t have an armor stat
I think the point’s been made. You can’t reach it just by existing.
That’s a good thing. It’s why we’re having this convo on trade-offs. You need to get something (uber, gems) or give something up (stat roll) to achieve it.
That’s what makes things interesting.
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Masterworking items will help quite a lot!
Well not when it comes to armor because the armor stat on gear is implicit and masterworking does not increase implicit stats or weapon damage like the old upgrading system did. So unless you have a piece of gear that has an armor affix or an increase to armor % tempering, masterworking it won’t make any difference. And therein lies the problem because no unique or mythic piece of gear available to the sorcerer has an armor affix (except the Shako).
ha… must be my masterworked Shako that fooled me! 
I even got the +25% augment to Armor at masterwork level 8! 
Time to re-masterwork that shako. I have shako with 0 crits on armor, 0 other armor affixes at all, and I don’t even need a single skull to be at armor cap.
Bah, I’ll wait for my second Shako for that!
This one has cooldown twice (at level 4, had to re-roll 6 times) and level 12.
But not gonna try to get all 3 perfect until I swim in cash…
(Which, granted, could already be the case if I was not trying to gear up 3 different characters and experiment with alternate builds! Little self-insert here, I managed to make an end game Axial Conduit build yesterday, yay me! 
)
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Yeah, I wouldnt give up a double cdr crit either even if the 3rd crit is basically useless.
If you have no access to shako, i’d suggest you to not use an “all uniques” build and put some armor affixes in any of your pieces. Skulls will get you 1500 armor, but you’ll need at least one piece of equipment with + armor to reach cap.
What worked for me was leaving chest as a legendary and the rest of defensive pieces as uniques, since chest is the least required for using as unique for optimized builds (except for tyrael, but as mentioned before, i’m speaking of a no mythic build)
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All you need is new version of Shako. I have Shako as my only source for armor and im at 1100 armor!
It is doable. I had 65k armor, killed Lilith and a torment Uber in order to get the sparks to craft a shacko.