Armor: nirnhoned vs reinforced

pizzaow

nirnhoned increases your spell and physical resistances, and reinforced increases your armor... is there any benefit to having increased armor other than resistances?

i.e. do they do the same thing, just in different ways (fixed value vs %)?

BlazingDynamo

Pretty sure they both mean the same thing. Nirnhoned gives slightly higher stats? I could be wrong don't quote me.

Synozeer

I think nirn gives better stats on everything except chest (haven't compared both traits on shields though).

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

On a cp160 armor piece, nirnnhoned gives a flat 301 armor and spell at gold, reinforced gives 16% armor and spell based on the armor piece, so it is easy to figure out if it would be nirn or reinforced that would given you more armor.

All you need to ask is what is 301 16% of (hint, it is 1881) and then if the armor piece has more then that number, use reinforced, if it has less, use nirn.

Though I would never recommend using either, ever in pve or PvP, as 301 armor is only .6% damage reduction in pve and only .5% in PvP.

WrathOfInnos

They do the same thing, but reinforced is better on large pieces. Theoretically nirn would give more armor on small pieces, but those are usually preferred with sturdy trait for reduced block cost.

Betsararie

both garbage

Flameheart

As far as the I remember the tank meta for PvE tanks once was all armor pieces in sturdy and maybe shields in nirnhorned (if one of your sets can be crafted at all and if you don't use 2 drop sets like Ebon/Akaviri, Torug comes to my mind), but all in sturdy is now - after the sustain nerfs - bis imho. If you can't get a "big" armor piece in sturdy, infused is a very good option too for boosting the prismatic glyph effect.

Xvorg

Nirn is the trait you need for TBS and Eternal Hunt (or Morkuldin sometimes).

Period.

Now if you mean weapons, then we are talking

paulsimonps

Unless you are wearing Heavy Armor Nirnhoned would give more, however, neither of these trait are actually good. I mean maybe some reinforced pieces for some Heavy armor builds in PvP but reinforced or nirnhoned Light or Medium armor should NEVER be on anyones build.

HEAVY ARMOR:

MEDIUM ARMOR:

LIGHT ARMOR:

Asardes

As others pointed out both traits are pretty useless:
- in PvP impenetrable is the best, or sturdy if you block a lot, sometimes well fitted if you rely a lot on roll dodging or infused on big pieces if you want to stack resources; any of those will help you mitigate much more damage than either reinforced or nirnhoned.
- in PvE wearing 5p heavy armor, a shield having various set bonuses, class passives and CP in spell shield will put your spell resistance near or at the cap regardless of trait; spell resistance is more important since most incoming damage in PvE is spell/elemental and a large portion of that cannot be mitigated by blocking since it's ground AoE DoT while physical damage is mostly direct so it can be blocked and it's not that widespread. Best traits for tanks are infused on big pieces to take advantage of prismatic glyphs and sturdy to reduce block cost on small ones; divines also works if you are trying to get more recovery from Atronach.

So reinforced and nirnhoned are weak traits only worth researching to be able to craft certain sets.