I’m not exactly sure myself how armor stacking works exactly in detail.
Abilities and talents that grant Armor do not stack additively. The game will only apply the highest (or lowest) amount of Armor to a Hero at any given time.
I just tested with Medic/Morales hero, casting Safeguard (30 armor) will stack on Garrosh trait, up to the highest value of 75. However Uther’s and Morales’ armor don’t stack and the highest value will overwrite the lower one.
But I also tested Morales with Valla, who has a 20 passive (+active component) spell armor as a talent. If Morales uses Safeguard on her, it will not result in 50 armor, but her passive armor value will get replaced by the highest active armor buff, which for those 3 seconds is 30 armor.
Morales and Uther heavily rely on their armor giving abilities to play as intended, but at no time (even with Garrosh Double Up talent) will he be able to go over 75 total armor.
Since Garrosh armor is technically a trait it allows it to stack with other traits (Uther armor) and abilities (Safeguard) ? It must be intended otherwise picking any of those two heroes with Garrosh would be a waste of hero pick since the tank would not benefit in any way most of the game.
I’m not entirely sure if anything changed since the armor changes came in place last year but this could be an intended exception to the game mechanics.
I doubt it being an intended exception, because Garrosh isn’t the only armor-based tank. Recently we’ve had Imperius and Mal’ganis who have armor in their basic abilities, Anub’arak is very spell-armor reliant, and ETC also has an Armor trait, and none of those stack with other armor sources.
Garrosh is the only exception I’ve found since the change for armor to apply as ‘highest value’ rather than additive.
Valid points;
but Anub, MG and ETC have control over when they want to activate their bonus armor, all three have abilities that are on relatively short cooldown, and can coordinate easily with the healer so they never overwrite the buffs and maximize the armor uptime
Garrosh on the other hand won’t have any use from most external armor buffs unless he is near-full health, when his passive armor is really low.
Question should be; is it balanced? - and looking at statistics, they do not seem to indicate that Garrosh is performing significantly better when played next to a hero that allows him to stack armor compared to those that do not.
If it’s by design, it has to be mentioned in the tooltip since it’s an exception.