VP was never the problem

"I don't believe in .math, armor don't work every one says it so it is true, our only way to survive is instant VP leave VP alone
I don't hear you, I don't read you, let us cry on this topic now get out"

Armour is not a bad mechanic. The people saying it's garbage are generally the same crowd of people that say melee is bad yet never play melee.

However, armour is without a doubt the worst of the four main defensive mechanics; block, dodge, armour and evasion. The main reason for this isn't because it's a bad mechanic, though. It's because it requires more investment than other defenses do, and mitigates a smaller source of damage. Block and dodge can mitigate all damage besides secondary damage, evasion can mitigate all attack damage, but armour can only mitigate physical damage.

Dodge requires a single node for basic investment. If you want to go for a high dodge setup you only need a 4 nodes of investment, as well as a 2 link for Vaal Grace linked with increased duration for a total of 74/64 dodge chance. Very little investment if you're already over on the right side of the passive tree, which is the majority of builds anyway.

Block requires a bit more investment, but not enough to make you feel like it's a waste. You can get all the block you need by slotting in a Red Nightmare jewel into the socket next to the Marauder start and by playing a Gladiator. Gladiator grants other bonuses to builds that would want to go max or high block chance anyway.

Evasion and armour both scale pretty badly compared to the other two mentioned. Both only mitigate damage from a specific source, attack damage and physical damage respectively. There are some very powerful unique items, such as Queen of the Forest, that make scaling evasion feel more worthwhile than armour in my opinion. Avoiding attacks is also more favorable than mitigating physical damage in my opinion. Flat physical mitigation from sources like Endurance Charges and a basalt flask is strictly better than investing in armour is, due to the fact than any build can easily fit in either or both.

Personally I think armour is fine, I think both armour and evasion should be harder to scale passively than block and dodge but far easier to get on gear. Which aside from block on shields, is already the case. People always point the gun and say "Yeah but against 10k physical hits armour is useless", which might be the case, but when the fuck are you ever realistically going to be hit for 10k physical damage? Especially from sources that aren't telegraphed.

Armour is fine, in my opinion. It does what it should do well, and that is mitigate physical damage. If you're using armour as your only form of defense then no shit it's going to suck, but the same can be said about literally any defense. There's a reason people always say to layer your defenses,
and to stack as many of the four main defenses as you can.

The game's tooltip needs to change for armour to estimated physical damage prevented instead of estimated % reduction. Then maybe people will understand that it does work correctly and has about constant returns (linear scaling).

If you're near Vaal Pact, you're near Acrobatics. Considering this thread is supposed to be discussing the state of Vaal Pact I thought that it would be a no brainer. Acrobatics is only 5 passives away from Vaal Pact. I also said "which is the majority of builds anyway", which obviously implies that it isn't every build. It's not like me saying that everyone starts off near Acrobatics, it's like me saying a lot of players are close enough to it, which they are.

Edit: During Harbinger league, Acrobatics was the 3rd most used Keystone, and was supposedly very close behind 2nd place. From all of the classes and their most used keystone, nearly 25% of classes had Acrobatics as their most used keystone. That only takes into consideration most used, though. Any Shadow can very easily go down to Acrobatics, especially anything going crit. A few Slayers could easily travel over to Acrobatics, as well as some Ascendants. Overall I think it would be fair to say close to 30% of the builds were either using Acrobatics, or were close to it, which is a lot as far as I'm concerned.

Block requires less investment if you count having a shield with 25% block chance on it, or a measly 15% from dual wielding weapons. It requires more investment if you want to make a viable defense out of it, I'd say something like 50/50 or higher would suffice. You don't see people using a shield that don't invest into block further mention their block chance because it isn't really all that relevant. Perhaps my idea of investing into block is different to yours, if so then I guess you're right to some degree. I probably should have been more specific by what I meant.

I was also intending to mention Dreamfeather, not really sure why I didn't, but Queen of the Forest is a better choice to mention if I were to only mention one item, since it isn't a weapon and thus is able to be used by far more builds. Queen of the Forest is pretty commonly used bu pretty much everything on the right side of the tree that isn't using a Kaom's Heart or a Belly of the Beast already. I'll give you that one, though.

I highly doubt that a Colossal Bonestalker could crit for 10k pure physical damage. I'd like to see you prove me wrong, but I doubt you can. The only map modifiers that would affect a Colossal Bonestalker would be increased critical strikes/multiplier and increased damage, though a rare monster could have more modifiers that increase damage as well. If you included elemental damage then I 100% agree, it could easily crit for over 10k total damage, but we're only talking about physical damage here.

"

BaKouneT написал:

"I don't believe in .math, armor don't work every one says it so it is true, our only way to survive is instant VP leave VP alone
I don't hear you, I don't read you, let us cry on this topic now get out"

Look armor works,and VP can go FUCK itself,i hate this passive with passion. Problem is this however,the clear meta is so damn dominant,you don't need armor. The only place where armor matters,but sadly doesn't work are the big hits. Thats my problem with it.

Snorkle_UK

i get you,but well,what i wrote above...