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168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Diablo 4's itemization systems can be confusing at first glance, especially for newcomers to the ARPG genre. Figuring out the best ways to improve your character's damage output and survivability can be a tricky task. While improving your damage can vary based on your class and build, upgrading your defensive layers is a straightforward process.
Every build in Diablo 4 will come across two vital defensive layers: armor and resistances. Both layers appear to behave the same, but that couldn't be further from the truth. This guide will cover how armor and resistances work in Diablo 4, providing examples of how each stat is calculated while showcasing some additional defensive layers to help your character stay alive in this game's toughest activities.
How Armor And Resistances Work In Diablo 4
Armor and resistances act as damage mitigation sources for every build. Armor is a stat intrinsic to all armor pieces in Diablo 4, reducing all incoming damage. This includes direct damage, physical damage, and bleed damage over time (DoT for short). Elemental damage is also mitigated by your armor rating but not as effectively. Since armor mitigates all incoming damage, it's arguably the single strongest damage mitigation source in Diablo 4.
But armor isn't an end-all solution to damage mitigation. Elemental damage is only mitigated by half of your armor rating. If you want to further reduce incoming elemental damage, you'll need to rely on resistance modifiers. Resistances come from jewelry and certain item affixes, reducing half of that resistance's listed damage type. For example, Shadow Resistance will decrease the amount of Shadow damage and Shadow DoT damage you'll receive by half of your Shadow Resistance value.
Armor And Resistance Example
While the relationship between armor and resistance seems complicated, it's much simpler once you start looking at examples. Let's cover three common scenarios: taking a physical hit, a fire damage hit, and a poison damage-over-time source.
Against physical damage, your armor will mitigate all incoming damage. Let's say that you take 100 physical damage and have the equivalent of 40% armor. You'd mitigate 40 damage, so you'd take 60 physical damage in this example. Resistances have no impact on physical damage, so they aren't considered in this calculation.
Against an elemental hit, your damage mitigation is split between your armor and resistance values. Let's say that you take 100 fire damage and have 50% armor and 40% fire resistance. The game will cut both values in half—25% armor and 20% fire resistance, respectively—and then reduce the incoming damage by that amount. You should take 65 damage.
Figuring Out Percent Mitigation Values
Hovering over💧 your armor and resistance ratings in your character sheet will display their mitigation values as percentages, making it mꦅuch easier to deduce how effective your DR sources are. Bear in mind that armor and resistance values are effectively halved when applied to elemental damage sources.
Against elemental DoT effects, your damage mitigation is once again split between your armor and resistances. In this case, we're taking 100 poison damage per second and have 50% armor and 40% poison resistance. The game will cut both values in half and reduce the incoming damage by that amount. We now take 65 poison damage per second.
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Scaling Armor And Resistance
While scaling your armor and resistances in Diablo 4 is rather straightforward, the way both sources scale is completely different. In general, you'll increase both stats by finding better armor and jewelry, although you can further improve these stats 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:through your Paragon Board and certain item affixes.
Armor Scaling
Scaling your armor is rather straightforward. Your gear's item power determines how much armor it grants. For example, a chest plate at 800 item power will give more armor than a chest plate at 600 item power. This applies to your helmet, gloves, chest, pants, and boots. You can further increase an item's power rating by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:upgrading it at a blacksmith, further improving its base armor value. Skull gems socketed into jewel💟ry will also grant flat sources of armor.
Beyond base armor, you can scale this stat through percent armor affixes and Legendary Aspects. A great example of this is the Aspect of Disobedience, providing a percent armor increase for each instance of damage you deal. This applies after your base armor is calculated, proviﷺding massive damage reduction gains.
Armor has a mitigation cap of 85%. This cannot be exceeded by any means. Tooltips that showcase a higher value are💙 misleading.
As for armor scaling itself, this stat features minimal to no diminishing returns. So long as you're wearing a full set of armor, any investment into increasing your armor will be immediately noticeable. Bear in mind that your armor rating is less effective if you're fighting higher-level enemies, so be careful fighting mons🎐ters that are much higher level than 💖you. The tooltip listed in-game is accurate for monsters at your current character level.
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Resistance Scaling
Scaling your resistance values can be done through jewelry implicit modifiers and item affixes. Jewelry affixes act as your main source of resistance scaling. Amulets boost all resistances on your character, while rings only boost two random resistance types. Unlike armor, implicit magnitudes on jewelry do not become stronger past item level 725, similar to how item affixes work. Reddit user u/ThatJumpyJumpS has an amazing infographic that 🔯shows these exact breakpoints that൲ .
Beyond jewelry implicits, resistances can also be obtained through armor affixes, Paragon Board nodes, and the Intelligence stat. Affixes tend to only buff one type of resistance stat while Intelligence bufꦛfs all five resistance values.
For the scaling math itself, resistances suffer from diminishing returns with investment. Every time you increase a resistance type through a new source, that new value is multiplied by your previous resistance value. For example, if you have 50% Fire Resistance and get an amulet that gives 25%, they don't add to 75%. Instead, the game will multiply both values to give you a Fire Resistance rating of 62.5%. Add another 50%, and now your Fire Resistance is 81.25%. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Higher World Tier penalties are then multiplied on top of this value to give your final resistance rating. In WT4, our previous exജample would get reduced to 48.♚75%.
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Is Resistance A Bad Stat?
In their current state, resistances are a night-useless stat in Diablo 4. This is due to four major factors:
- There are five resistance types you need to invest in, unlike armor.
- Resistances suffer from severe diminishing returns, unlike armor.
- Your resistance value is effectively cut in half before it starts mitigating damage.
- Higher World Tiers effectively clamp your total resistance values.
Before we even talk about the broken math tied to resistances, it immediately has a disadvantage over armor due to how many damage types there are. A build that focuses on resistance scaling will need to increase its fire, lightning, cold, shadow, and poison values simultaneously. The only way to obtain all five stats at once is to invest in Intelligence, a stat that isn't useful for every class.
If you can somehow overcome that issue, you'll then have to worry about diminishing returns. The more you invest in a specific resistance, the less effective each source becomes. It's impossible to achieve a resistance value of 100% because of this, and it's extremely difficult to achieve resistance values that exceed 75 or 80%. If you somehow get a single resistance that high—bear in mind you need to do this for five elements—only half of that listed value is used in damage calculations. 🌳Every single elemental damage calculation in Diablo 4 cuts your resistance rating in half, so even a theoretical 100% Fire Resistance value is only mitigating 50% fire damage.
And even if you find a way to achieve a resistance value that high, the highest World Tier reduces all resistances you have by 40%, doing so multiplicatively. If you have 100% Fire Resistance—which we just established is impossible to do—you would actually have 60% Fire Resistance at World Tier 4, reducing incoming fire damage by 30%. Once again, that's just for Fire Resistance. By comparison, you could simply use the Aspect of Disobedience Legendary and three Skull gems on jewelry to achieve a 70% armor rating for most classes, mitigating more damage across all elemental types with almost no investment. Until Blizzard reworks how resistances are calculated, it doesn't make any sense to spec into resistances in Diablo 4.
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Alternatives To Armor And Resistances
We just established that resistances are a lackluster stat in Diablo 4, but that doesn't mean that defensive stats in general are bad. The opposite is true. Armor is an amazing stat to invest in, as it reduces all damage you receive from all sources. Equipping Skulls onto your jewelry and obtaining percent armor affixes on gear can go a long way towards increasing your armor rating. The Aspect of Disobedience🀅 is also an S-tier Legendary Aspect for virtually every charactꦬer, allowing all builds to achieve an armor rating of 70% 𒐪or higher with Ancestral items.
Another amazing source of survivability is Topaz Gems on armor. At max effect, each gem grants 10% damage resistance while you're affected by a source of crowd control (CC for short). Diablo 4 is incredibly generous with what it considers CC. Some common sources of CC include:
- Being slowed by an Elite.
- Melee enemies that slow your character down, notably bees.
- Hard CC effects like fear and knockdowns.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Unlꦚess your character i💜s always Unstoppable, Topaz Gems are typically the best for your build. You can take this even further with damage reduction (DR) modifiers. This includes any DR affixes found on chest armor, pants, and amulets. While these are multiplicative like resistances, they aren't clamped at higher World Tiers and generally roll with high affix magnitudes. A single pair of pants can roll with three or even four DR modifiers, decreasing incoming damage by 20-33% depending on the circumstance.
Ru𝐆by Gems have no impact on Life affixes. They only aff♐ect base HP.
Finally, you can't go wrong with scaling Life. Life can roll as an affix on helmets, chest armor, pants, and rings. Getting a good Life roll on all your armor pieces can easily double your total HP. You can also temporarily increase your Life pool by using Barrier or Fortify sources, both of which are typically reserved for certain defensive abilities or Legendary Aspects.ꦡ Invest in a little bit of each source, and you should have no issues staying alive in Nightmare Dungeons and other endgame activities.
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