Why is Armour SO BAD in Path of Exile 2?

Zizaran chimes in on the state of armour and overall defence in Path of Exile 2.

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#pathofexile2

[foowii]

Ridiculous that mages can tank any hit and warriors are like paper.

[NaquadahEOD]

"Try to die less than people building armor do."
Fucking ouch brother. That hurt.

[minhocho]

One thing i never understood was how evasion can evade all elemental hit while armor cannot mitiagte elemental hits.

[stephenknox]

The base mechanic of armor should be useful, without needing a combination of uniques, annoints, and keystones. It isn't.

[Elinyaa]

I can totally get behind "Armour is not supposed to make boss slams tankable", but one of the problems PoE2 currently has is: Even some white mobs have "boss slams" (or at least close to it), because part of the endgame is still bizarrely balanced around the dodge roll... that or "just be ranged lol"

[blazedehart]

4:50 I don’t think that finding specific unique items should be required to make armor useful though.

[maltekobarg]

Hot take: pre nerf Juggernaut Unbreakable (8% of Armour applies to Elemental damage from hits) should be either baseline for Armour or a bottom left notable.
Armour reducing Ele dmg should not be locked behind a mandatory unique or a single acendency again (4th vow) and needs to just be baseline for how much extra hits you will take.

Fortify, Endurance charges, Unbreakable, Remove Overwhelm and a buff to Armour scaling and you will still be better of with ES Witch, Archmage or Deadeye. But these are the scale of buffs we need.
Phys shift is kinda awful if it just ends up with Pathfinders being 3 times tankier than 100k Armour Juggernauts again.

[awzap]

Armor passive skills need to fix this, so mages just can't use armor too, lol.
Basically, why does every ES node give you 60% or 30% es, but armor basically gives you 1% ehp for each notable.

[ivayloindzhov]

Okay, so as a relatively new player (a bit under 5k hours played), this is the logic I find in both PoE 1 and 2:

1. I want to play an evasion character? I stack evasion and pick up an evasion keystone (Acrobatics / Phase acrobatics).
2. I want to play an energy shield character? I stack energy shield and pick up an energy shield keystone (Chaos Inoculation).
3. I want to play an armor character? I use 3 specific uniques, look for 5 specific item mods, use endurance charges, fortify, and one ascendancy of one class, oh and 2 or 3 keystones.

So...why must armor be so much more complicated? I sincerely do NOT understand.

[Warsign]

75% armour and 65% block warrior, max resist and i was one shot by 2 white mob spear chucking mobs while casting HOTG. T10 map.

[treeNum]

Armour is mechanically way inferior to ES or evasion that works with all hit damage types, not only phys. I don't get why armour doesn't work on all damage types. Specially being focused on melee that have to tank a lot of hits.

If we compare it to Evasion is bad, if we compare to ES it is terrible.

[didasek]

You are not allowed to disagree with Kripp

[I_Am_Empyrean]

I completely disagree. The armour formula is convoluted and unintuitive. There is nothing in the game that actually explains the armour formula, you are given a percentage and that's it. That percentage isn't even remotely accurate towards what your armour is doing. Additionally, your armour should be protecting you from big hits. There's no reason a character that trades damage for armour should be getting one shot by a physical attack, ever. Especially when wearing heavy armours decreases your movement speed and therefore your capability to dodge those slow and heavy hits. I can't be the only one that watched temporalis blink builds and asked myself why there aren't more abilities in the game that allow you to reposition. If there's no readily available movement abilities, then defenses should be more effective at mitigating damage. I think that's fair.

[owlmostdead]

Armour is complete garbage, I know it. I’m running T14 with my first character, a warrior titan and even for mapping armour is terrible. Random mobs will break your armour and one-shot you, even with almost 30.000 armour and “87% reduction”. GGG just can’t do melee or math.

[Warintello]

Nothing in this video addresses anything Kripp said. He actually said everything about how PoE1 armor works. Armor is still bad especially with how HP works in PoE2. Armor is only good in the first game because you're forced to move damage into other elements and have like 4+ layers of defense above it.

[gregorycoleman]

You SHOULD be able to facetank when mace skills take a year to use lol. Warriors should be able to trade with bosses. If you build super tanky

[Lolatyou]

7:20 Who is able to get 5K health? You literally have to have perfect gear, max out strength just to hit 4K

[silviomedeiros]

How do you even communicate to the player that armor is not intended to reduce damage from boss attacks? It's so completely opposite of what a player thinks when he thinks of armor. This whole system should change.

[PrzemP]

Tanker should be a viable archetype, if you invest in defense you should be able to tak big hits.

[BrandonsUsername]

Why cant poe2 just take Last Epoch's armour system 1 for 1. It mitigates ALL hits by an amount with diminishing returns. Hell, add a mechanic that you get +1 maximum res per X (10k?) armour and you're cooking.