Gankers will run things like Divines and Infused, sometimes you'll see the occasional brave magic sorc doing the same, but you're mostly right in that if you anticipate on taking any sort of damage to stack impen

As a mostly magicka player. I have never touched the Impenetrable trait. It has always been Infused on the big pieces, Divines on the small pieces. Although the shields I use are already non-crit-able, I have always felt the Impenetrable trait was over hyped. I would never use it on any build that had damage shields.

I cannot speak for stamina players though, as I do not have enough experience with them to have an opinion.

Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy Sturdy

It all depends on your build.

Impen isn't super viable on Magicka Sorcs due to damage shields. As far as Heavy Armor users Reinforced on Chest/Legs is better than Impen. For Medium Armor users it's always best to have around that 2k Crit Resist mark, which in a lot of cases is 5 Impen and 2 Well-Fitted with some CP into Crit resist. If you're roll dodging the majority of attacks your Crit Resist stat doesn't play a huge role and those few Well-Fitted pieces will be very handy.

Then you have the Sturdy discussion. Which is really by preference of the tank. Some like to perma-block others like to mitigate damage from armor, some like a balanced approach.

All in all Impen isn't a "must have" on every build, yet it will vastly improve your survivability in most cases.

Abob wrote: »

mtwiggz wrote: »

As far as Heavy Armor users Reinforced on Chest/Legs is better than Impen.

I was thinking about trying this.

Are you sure it's better than impen on those pieces? Want to be sure before I spend 200k gold on tempering alloys.

Thank you

It isn't. 7 or 8 impenetrable is the best.

I have never done calculations for CP campaign, but for no CP campaign, below is true;

If attacker has more than 30-40% crit chance and 50% crit damage, impen will give higher average reduction than Reinforced on Chest. If attacker has lower Crit chance than 30%, reinforced will give better average reduction of damage.

LeifErickson wrote: »

@danielpatrickkeaneub17_ESO

Hahaha. Love it.

As the foremost authority on bashing impen I agree with most others but I'll keep it above board.

- Crit resist is useful but, to me, I'd rather achieve it via reallocating champion points for 3000 gold instead of spending a half million plus on an end game gold set.
- I believe that if you're gonna go with damage reduction that you'd be better served lowering the base damage than the bonus damage.
- The bonus damage does not occur 100% of the time. Infused, divines and almost every other realistically useful trait are actively used 100% of the time.
- Best defense is often a good offense. If you can burn your opponent down first they cannot crit you.
- Other ways to survive: mist form is fantastic, invisibility and immovable pots, harness magika and similar shields, increase resistance spells like immovable and that Templar one.
- Even I had to admit that light armor was no longer all that effective. Switching to a 5 HA 2 LA set up has helped.


Long story short you're gonna die unexpectedly in Cyrodiil. It happens to everyone. That said, much of surviving in normal gameplay involves not YOLOing into everything. If you're invisible you won't die. If you wait until you're found to pop it you're gonna get pulled out. You have to proplerly anticipate your enemies.

No one armor set up will save you. How you play is every bit as important as what you wear.

And based on the equation I found:
Equation:
Defense CritDmg = target CritDmg - [Crit resistance * {0.035 ÷250}

3505 crit resistance gives you 49% reduction in the crit dmg modifier.

Using both major force/shadow mundas stone as a Templar/nightblade, you can get extra crit dmg up to 101%. In the equation above, this results in 52% extra crit dmg, basically negating impen entirely.

Need to confirm if this is true. @Crown thoughts?

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

In my experience the Impenetrable armor trait is too necessary for PVP - to the point that using other armor traits isn't worth the headache.

Any time I try to mix it up and use other armor traits I get melted by enemy players, which makes me frustrated and I avoid Cyrodiil for a few days. Does anybody have good suggestions for alternative ways to spec a character for defense without using Impenetrable? Even Reinforced, which is straight-up defence, doesn't seem to be as strong as Impenetrable.

short answer NO,
whoever thought making 50% crit chance super easy to achieve( without even sacrificing anything!) really *** the bed big time.

you need at least 5 impen and lots of cp in crit resist

This issue gets argued every few weeks.

It all comes down to the same facts:

• The person attacking you will have a certain % critical strike chance.
• That person will have a certain % extra damage from their critical strikes
• The math on the above is easy enough to do, and can show potential burst on an opening combo that all crits, or the damage modifiers over a lengthier fight based on a certain amount of time or number of attacks.
• If you want to survive a burst of what can very easily be a 1 second death these days, you have to mitigate that damage.
• You have two ways to mitigate this damage, armor/magic resist and impen (crit resist).
• In the armor/magic resist route, you can get up to 50% mitigation of total damage (though most players even in heavy armour are sitting around 35%.
• In the impen route, you have to assume that every hit will be a crit (you care most about those, and it may be the case that they all are crits, so plan for the worst).
• You can also block, resulting in damage reduced by 50%.
• Many attackers have their "extra crit damage" up 200% or more (base is 150%). The theoretical maximum is closer to 208% if I recall correctly.
• Full impen gear with a reasonable amount of CP in crit resist (mid 40's is what I tend to like) is usually sufficient to mitigate enough damage to let you respond when being ganked rather than being insta-gibbed.
• Having a healer with the Transmutation set in your group will help in longer fights.
  
  I've not updated my impen calculations on the public spreadsheet - though I will do so soon. Regardless of what the numbers show, unless you have shields up 100% of the time, or are blocking 100% of the time, you will be crit.
  
  My opinion:
  
  If you're a ganker, do whatever gets you the most damage, as you know you're going to die after killing 1 or maybe 2 (if you're lucky or you're fighting potatoes then a few more) opponents.
  
  If you're in a perma-blocking build, go with block cost reduction.
  
  If you're in a shield stacking build and can do it well enough that your shields never fall, do whatever is best for you (though your shields WILL go down and you WILL be insta-gibbed when they do).
  
  If you're anyone else, go impen.
  
  EDIT: Fixed Formatting

Do you guys really get ganked off of your mount that much?

Forget impen, it sounds like most of you need rapid maneuvers.