Armor of monsters - How does it work

Lokart

Hi everyone,

I've been running some tests on monsters trying to understand how their armor mecanic works. I've done this mainly because I wanted to know if stacking armor reduction buff (shaprnened, night mother's set, enchantement, Maul bonus, etc) was profitable or not. The fact that each basic hit you make does the same amount of damage helped to make statistics and see what's best. I wanted to share with you my conclusions and see whatever comments you might have on this.

First, I used Swords and Mauls because I wanted to compare these two weapons.
All weapons I used were green of quality.
On some weapons I put a "Sharpened" trait, saying 8% armor reduc/spell pen
On some weapons I put a epic armor reduction proc enchantement (proc is 482 armor reduc)
I also used a sword with the 3 piece Night mother's set bonus (20% armor reduction in case of critical strike)
Being a Dragon Knight, I compared damage before and after applying the Burning Breath skill (40% armor reduction)
Finally, the target was always the same, of course, VT9 Mammoths. I've hit some other mobs (as well as lower levels) but it seemed to always do the same amount of damage. BUT, since I have only tried on random monsters, maybe it's different on dungeon bosses.

The results are compiled into this spreadsheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OM8-LJTAf0nOMdmbVo1-oZCqOdBB6vYaix6OJuo_P_U/pubhtml#

What I was able to determine from this:

- Monsters have 10% mitigation from armor
- "Sharpened" trait does not reduce "armor value" it reduces mitigation, therefore having a 10% sharpened trait reduces it's armor to 0 and having a >10% trait is useless. (Epic is already 12%)
- On the other hand a 10% sharpened trait increases your damage by 10% which is pretty good, but there are some circumstances (see below).
- Monsters at VT9 have ~500 armor, which means that the Legendary enchant armor reduc proc brings it to 0 (or very close).
- The burning breath and Night Mother proc, reduces the "armor value" by the corresponding amount (40% and 20%) which results in a correpsonding ~4% and ~2% bonus dmg.
- It is useless to stack armor reduction when it goes beyond the 10%. For example stacking sharpened 10% and Night's mother's proc is useless. Stacking Armor reduction proc and Burning breath is useless. etc
- 1 Hand weapons have, at legendary quality, 7% mitigation reduction from Sharpened making it a good match for the Night mother's set. Sharpened trait is really a good trait when well used.
- Generally, 2H swords are better than mauls
- Mauls' armor reduction increases your damage by ~1.6%

Now there is still open questions.

- Does this also apply to dongeon bosses?
- Do monsters also have 10% magical resistance?
- ...


Feel free to comment, bring some answers or new questions.

traigusb14_ESO2

Interesting...

I'm always happy to see how things work. As a user of sharpened weapons, it is nice to know what I'm getting.

dodgehopper_ESO

I'd like to know the same thing with regard to players as well.