Path of Exile Guide: What is Armour?

[@aweaselcannon]

Subtractem showing he cares by asking the questions no-one does: "How is the armour?!" - What a guy.

[@greentank1]

I’d like to know Who and When is the armour.

[@freshmaker0088]

But why is the armour????

[@reverie9358]

Now that I've beaten the game, there's no better time to learn how I did it. Thanks, sub!

[@DotAzam]

Wait, the game can be beaten??

[@reverie9358]

@@DotAzam well, if you consider doing all the content "beating the game" then sure. but it all depends on your goals, really. this was mostly a meme comment

[@joshrottschaefer5782]

FINALLY!!! This is the exact type of content I've been looking for. As a newish player I have been trying to find this sort of content where someone will take the time to break down core mechanics in a detailed way instead of the typical "just follow a build guide and get to maps ASAP."

[@stu.chainz]

Love your content man. Most well put together PoE content by far. Also love your positive attitude. Inspires me to try and be in a better mood more often

[@AvoidingthePuddle]

Great video idea. Not many channels focus so much on fundamentals.

[@RessG]

The "Estimate Physical Damage Reduction" in the tooltip is one of the biggest Jebait in Poe. So many people only go with 35k Armor + some Phy Red to hit 90% "Estimate" Phy Dmg Red. Got slammed by High Phy dmg, die and then wonder why it's still got 1 shotted. It's really a nice video, especially for people who still learn defensive system and "how not to keep dying" lol, I just hope you show the stats in PoB since it's showing other details.

[@drpain4]

Super helpful that you break it down and show the math behind armour damage mitigation. Especially citing your sources and showing the where you get it from. Thank you

[@wtfwasthat16]

For the ward video you can just put in the clip where Chris and GG forgot that was a defense layer added in an interview a coupl eleagues ago. super short and easy to understand Great vid as always!

[@MartoRoss]

This makes me go back in time.. I rly wish that Engineering Eternity some day come back... Excellent content as always my man

[@BuzzaB77]

Love the new formats / potential series of this and the off meta Monday. Hope you can keep them up I'm learning the most from your vids by far of anyone making Poe tutorials.

[@Smite_Sion]

This is why Transdence is such a good keystone if you can overcome the downside. The ele res becomes before armour, reducing the hit by x% amount and then the armour making reducing most of the hits by 90% because they are smaller.

[@VoidsLab]

Good stuff! Would have loved to see you mention The Infinite Hunger Boss with it's Corrosive Hunger debuff "nom-nom-nom" 🤢 which will eat away one's physical damage reduction.

[@jeffm7006]

I really liked the tip about focussing on evasion in Act 1. Worked a treat! Rhoas that would have given me a hell of a thump with ES or Armour are now missing me completely. ("Stupid beast" as Einhar would say lol) Looking forward to the next lesson on Tuesday :)

[@stianstensen]

I have diffuculty learning, but from you i learn

[@knicklichtjedi]

I did not know that flat -Phys Taken comes first in the formula. I deemed the already small values useless even at the end, but that makes them even more meme-tier. -7 Phys Damage sounds even not good in the very first Act, so I'm curious why they either decided to put it first in the formula (which is understandable for consistency’s sake) or why it's such small numbers like 7. If it were like 100 or so, I could see a point in using those items early on. Immortal Flesh with -50 is okay-ish if you have enough Ele Res.

[@G33KST4R]

it bothers me so much that armor doesn't mitigate bleeds. Like if you stab a tank, why would the tank commander inside start hemorrhaging??? The bleed should be based on the mitigated hit, not the full hit that you were going to take.

[@bobbermcbobbing6743]

"Oh no, I've been stabbed in the neck, why doesn't my armour stop the bleeding?" If the bleed has hit at all, then it's already punctured your armour so it wouldn't make sense for your armour to reduce the bleeding. That's why we have avoid bleeding and cannot bleed, after being stabbed, you're just so badass that your body instantly cauterises the wound to stop it from bleeding

[@G33KST4R]

@@bobbermcbobbing6743 the armor "absorbs" the brunt of the force behind the blade or arrow. it's the difference between being cleaved into causing massive bleeds or just being nicked by the tip of the blade after it peirces through the armor.

[@Anikthias]

Awesome video! I'd love to see more content like this exploring fundamentals, maybe the topic of auras and the strength of aura effect in context?

[@gokulsivakumar4930]

I d appreciate more if you could explain damge over time, damage over time multiplier and fire DOT and fore DOT multi and how are they calculated

[@4LB4TR0SS]

Looking forward to this series

[@towb0at]

Honestly this is really a pit full of content. Next we might see what is life, what is mana and what is energy shield. A 30 minute video about the armour stat is really summing up the ultimate PoE experience lol

[@Theta40]

It is appreciated that you used the Juggernaut to represent armour. 🙂

[@megaalphavulcan8036]

This man just made a 29 minute video about armor. There ain't no way in hell I'm not learning *something* from this.

[@haha71687]

How do you know the damage of the hit you took? Is there some sort of a combat log?

[@MrBendybruce]

Silly question. I have some unique gloves that have 100% conversion from physical to cold. Does that mean armor is an irrelevant stat when equipping gloves like this?

[@ellstream584]

What did you say around 13:23? "And phyisiusele especially", Cannot understand it :P //new player

[@SpeedpekaVEVO]

so question, if answerable at all; what would be the go to defensive layer(s) be, and what kind of numbers for those layer(s) am i looking for? i had a character from 2 leagues ago (didnt play last/current league i guess), and without flasks it had 23k armor, 20k evasion. 100% spell suppression, & 54% chaos res. it was also a EA ballista totem build, all of that tied together made me feel really tanky with plenty of dps (because of dps uptime from the ballistas). this build was probably my second or third favorite build, being tied or maybe slightly ahead of a VD build i had, and my alltime favorite being my quad herald BV elementalist from several leagues ago. my point being, how could i make a current BV build feel as tanky as that one? (probably cold BV tho because i love freezes, and wich already makes it feel tankier)

[@OldGoat-cw8he]

So I know I am late to this video but I have a question. I have 54k armor without a granite or basalt flask. Is that enough for endgame stuff? I know my RF Juggernaut isn't a bossing build but I am having an impossible time beating Exarch and Shaper. I can run unidentified corrupted t16 maps with little to no effort. I can't get a voidstone to save my life. 84 fire res, 83 lightning and cold and 80 chaos and 4300 life. Is it me? I can deal with honesty if it's literally I am not good enough. Just want to know if I need to do something different. Oh also lots of spell block, tempest shield, skitterbots and traps.

[@afternoondelight6322]

@subtractem what do you suggest for CoC if enlighten 4 is unavailable??

[@RustyPro676]

subtractem, got a question do you remember what you did in order to play more classes, more skills to learn new stuff when you were starting out with the game? I got trouble motivating myself to expirement within the game for some reason...

[@gureteun9563]

What I always do is just look at the list of all skill gems or uniques on the wiki, you will probably find something that sounds interesting and start experimenting from there.

[@SeitzAl1]

with a lot of the stuff like prototype, transcendence etc, i really think they need to address the amount of degen in the game now and give those builds a better way to deal with degen. i tried playing a int stacking LS assassin with prototype this league and ended up abandoning ship and selling all the gear after repeatedly getting brutalized by storm striders and mana siphoners with no counterplay, despite having >40k armor, a good ES pool and great recovery

[@DrQuestern]

Thanks for the video! I've learned a lot

[@gordon1882]

excellent excellent video!

[@TooFarJohn]

Just what I need to start my day.

[@epyjacek]

Isn't the forbidden rite hit chaos damage?

[@kidze73]

can Champion use Transcendence keystone??

[@lordcasper3357]

I know that you can't convert your physical or cold DoT into another damage type but can you convert the physical DoT you take for example from blood rage into another damage type?

[@4X10S]

most of damage conversions work only for hits there are few uniques that can convert some of it like Apep's Supremacy shield with; You take Chaos Damage instead of Physical Damage from Bleeding, so with CI you'd take 0 damage or even with 75% you'd get a good defence layer but it's a rare thing in poe and wouldn't work with blood rage since it's dot and not bleeding, maybe there's something that counters it other than high regen but i can't remember it

[@Kyoth3]

Interesting, so when I spent a bunch of resources to fit in determination along with grace and getting 14k armour without flasks was rather futile? I basically have 38k eva and 14k armr normally and like 19k with flask. Hmm so what should be the ideal number for hybrid eva/armr builds like my VLS.

[@OGuardadorDeRebanhos]

14k paired with evasion, specially for mapping isn't bad. Let's say you have 5k life on top of that. If you have 0 armour, a 5k hit would kill you. With 14k armour you would take 33% less damage, or 3.8k. 5 * 1k hit would kill you with 0 armour, but with 14k you would only take 270 each, or 1.3k dmg in total. It is a huge difference in survivability and the build feels much more comfortable adding that extra layer, specially for mapping. Can't help with a minimum comfortable threshold and surely will depend on a lot of other factors and layers that you may have, people that play this build may have a value in mind. I can say that as many things, it has diminishing returns, so while 'more is always better' is true, the investment may become a bit prohibiting.

[@thehob3836]

For the minute chance it occurs, Subtractem what on earth is doom? Why is it that no one talks about it? There are gems specifically for doom and I cant find any but the most basic basic info on it!

[@subtractem]

Good idea for a topic! It's a relatively new mechanic based around cursing. Can read the wiki page if you're curious but I'll put it on the list.

[@thehob3836]

@@subtractem Thank you and I will definitely give it a more in depth look. I actually started thinking about doom after rewatching your most recent bane guide looking for inspiration for a build.

[@lenandov]

I preeshate you Your vids are helpful

[@HewManaty]

this might be random but what is the book you're chewing on in you profile pic? thx

[@subtractem]

Excession by iain m banks

[@GrimReapiN]

Can you do shock next

[@szymond2302]

What is armour? Baby don't hurt me

[@JezzyHsu]

Armour - the thing that allows me to play as crappy as I do, without using up all 6 portals :D

[@RavenGhostwisperer]

Basically: the character sheet always lies to you

[@touchthesun]

Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil.

[@jhuggz193]

I’ve gone cross eyed

[@Demortixx]

How the hell do you get a million armor

[@alewis514]

Armor is one of the base defenses that is not explained very well in the game. Evasion is pretty straightforward - the character sheet shows estimated chance to evade attack hits and that's not very far from the truth. If you have 90% chance to evade listed in there you'll dodge an overwhelming majority of attack hits. Energy Shield is even simpler, it's just a second hit points pool that says exactly how much damage it can soak. Its regen mechanics can be quirky (divine shield, ghost shroud, aegis aurora etc.) but nothing too complex. Ghost dance for example - recharge 3% of your evasion rating as ES when hit. If you have 100k evasion and get hit - you get 3000 ES back. Armor though? The character sheet tells you absolutely nothing lol. 90% phys dmg reduction? No, not really. "Rule of 5" is more decent way of estimating your armor effectiveness. Take your armor number and divide this number by five. That's the magnitude of incoming hit you are mitigating by half. If you have 35 000 armor (typical for just using Determination + Banner and not investing other things into Armor), then you halve the incoming damage on a 7k physical hit. So you take 3,5k bitch slap to the face. Pretty rough eh? It's not anywhere close to that 90% damage reduction shown on the screen. With 35k armor hits below 5k are not a major concern, but hits above 7k will chomp away more than half of your life / ES pool in one go. 10k or above magnitude is likely oneshot. I find the armor system to be very complicated, needlessly so. It should just work like a flat physical damage reduction, but no more than 90 percent. A damage thereshold system you can find in games like Gothic II or Fallout: New Vegas. For example 1000 armor will prevent 1000 damage. Against 500 hit it will prevent 450 (90% cap applying). Against 2500 it will reduce it to 1500. Against 8000 it will reduce it to 7000 (barely any reduction). Simple to understand, simple to gauge.

[@TheKadanz]

That's the issue with this unbalanced league, blue mobs can hit you for a ton of damage and one shot you even if you got decent armor. It's stupid; hope they revert these changes next league.

[@moreon340]

modified by "drinking flasks" seems inaccurate these days. Modified by "flask effects" would be more precise. Thanks mageblood.

[@alcodark]

wow ty for this...i always thought i could just have like 50k armour which will show 90% reduction....i even dropped 2 armour flasks coz i could already hit it... guess i was wrong

[@jsing5022]

*WARNING* 13:56 Flashbang *WARNING*

[@TheXstraNinja]

Doppelgänger Guise is a great way to get physical mitigation without armor and makes any you do get much more effective. Pair it with divine flesh and degens aren't much of a problem anymore.

[@securatyyy]

The way Armour just stops working vs big hits makes no sense to me.

[@Demortixx]

And here I thought 60k armor was alot

[@lordjefferson1234]

Don't make me math, you wouldn't like me when I math.

[@Darti7]

GigaPog

[@jaysol1128]

New player. Ty for the information. This confirms this game is not for me. I always felt like I was missing something while I was gearing and found true what is said about evasion. But this kind of ruins the game for me that I can’t go my own way and it still be viable. I have to invest in other areas that don’t interest me to progress. I find the big/huge skill tree pretty useless and gimmicky since a lot will not work end game. I don’t want to spend hours calculating and researching what others have done just to be able survive. Made 5 characters, my second was a shadow and I just flew through the first 3 acts, while marauder was rerolled 3 times and was still very dependent on his gear vs anything chosen from the skill tree. I’m just saying what’s the point of all these options if they’re not going to be viable.

[@pxprimary3790]

I think we should all agree it's spelled "Armor" ... and while we're at it "Nife" along with any other words that have extra letters just for funzies!

[@subtractem]

y use big word when smol work good

[@StoneDeceiver]

Armour is correct.

[@pxprimary3790]

@@StoneDeceiver Yes, Armor is correct

[@hiddenmaster6062]

It really is annoying when you see guides devote so much resources to an impractically small amount of amour. Like wowwy, 20% damage reduction by a rating of 2.1K armor. Would be a shame if someone hit me above my rating like all of the god damn time.

[@cypressstick9396]

Disclaimer: Math.

[@sparkiekosten5902]

So armour sucks? Evasion is the way to go?

[@subtractem]

No not at all, you just need a lot at the high end so you can't casually invest into it. Modern PoE is about layers of defense instead of only investing into 1-2 or stats.

[@sparkiekosten5902]

@@subtractem ok

[@Rienai]

Armour : Helps you survive the acts, then its just a number

[@subtractem]

Basically the opposite actually. That was more true in the past but a lot has changed since the defense rework.

[@afternoondelight6322]

@@subtractem hey for your CoC build is it even possible to do without a lv 4 enlighten? Last thing I need but console doesn't have any :[