how does armor mitigate damage?

tintin_milou

Hi everyone, thanks for your help in advance!

I am a NB and two of my class abilities "ignore" a certain percentages of target's armor. I just know the simplest armor concept - the higher the armor (number), the more incoming damage is reduced. I would like to know more quantitatively about armor and damage reduction.

Specifically, if my ability outputs x damage, and my target has armor y, how is the damage reduced?

A related question - if I just "look" at the enemy (NPC), how do I tell whether the enemy has high armor value or low armor value? Is it as obvious as, "oh he is an evil mage wearing a robe, then low armor value?" What about not so obvious monsters such as clannfears? atronachs? various daedras that don't wear armors?

Thanks again!

Cody

the appearance of an armor piece changes as it is further improved. learn what each type of armor looks like at each level(example, normal level, fine level, superior level,etc) if you want to be able to figure out how good an enemies armor value is. that's for players. for NPCs their armor really does not make that much of an impact:/. for example, go to chedynhall in cyrodill, there are a lot of heavy armored imperial troops there, they go down about as fast as a medium/lightly armored bandit(with the exception of the boss) now I don't know the exact formula when it comes to damage mitigation. you may have to look that up.

Cody

for enemies that DONT wear armor, I THINK they just have either a set armor value by default, or they DONT have any armor value, but just have a lot of health.

SBR_QuorTek

Believe at some point that armor will actually have real values.. meaning light armor you can really get sacked... heavy armor can really get sacked after a long while... and maybe medium armor somewhere in between.

Maybe they will do something about some of those issues at some point.

Aeratus

tintin_milou wrote: »

Specifically, if my ability outputs x damage, and my target has armor y, how is the damage reduced?

The factors are as follows:
1. the raw damage output,
2. the level of the damager, and
3. the armor amount of the opponent being damaged.

Armor works by mitigating the damage by a percentage, which ranges from 0-50%, where 50% is the hard cap. The percentage mitigated by a certain armor point depends on the level of the damager.

The formula is ( Armor value of defender - 100 ) / (level of attacker) = Mitigation %

(http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/112047/actual-mitigation-of-armour-spell-resists)

For example, if you are level 40, and the opponent has an armor of 500, that means he mitigates (500-100)/40 = 10% of your damage. So if your attack is worth 100 damage, you do 90 damage to him.

If you are level 20, and the opponent has an armor of 500, that means he mitigates (500-100)/20 = 20% of your damage. So if your attack is worth 100 damage, you do 80 damage to him.

Also to consider is that you can't reach the hard cap 50% without the soft cap limitations. As a general rule, when your armor is soft capped (i.e., overcharged), you mitigate about 30% of the damage coming from mobs that are the same level as yourself.

forthewinn2

Ok so in veteran content(no one cares about lv1-50) average npcs have around 650-700 armor this means they take roughly 90%damage from physical attacks(this is 90%of the tooltip value for physical attacks).

If you were to use surprise attack (which reduces target armor by 40%) that mob would take around 94-95% damage from physical attacks.
Now if you were to use mark target on another mob (ignoring 75% of targets armor) it would take 98.5-99% damage from physical attacks.
However if you stacked mark target and surprise attack together(and used them both on the same mob) that mob would take 100% damage from your physical attacks.

Now the difference between 'reduce targets armor by x%' and 'ignore x% of targets armor' is that reducing the targets armor means that the target takes more damage from all physical sources however 'ignore targets armor' means that only you deal more damage to the target.

Now if you want to tell how much armor an npc has by looking at them(it's probably 650-700 armor) I'm afraid you cant(unless you have hacks or are psychic) because npc armor doesnt vary much at all. So a mage npc will normally take the same amount of physical damage as the rogue standing next to him, however the mage will have a higher spell resistance and take less damage from spells.

Basically npc spell resistance can vary a bit(I recently fought some veteran mobs who had zero spell resistance XD) but their armor doesnt change a whole lot, so I typically find 90% physical damage is a good rule of thumb for how much damage veteran mobs take.

tintin_milou

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

That was a very clear explanation! If indeed about 90% of damage goes through typically, I might not have to use NB's "Mark Target" to add more damage, but use it for other benefits such as gaining health when target is killed.