Greetings everyone. I saw a few people talking about how armor works and what kind of damage mitigation they could get for their armor. For this reason I am pleased to present the following graphic.
What I did was harass a lonely troll while I changed my armor values in order to find out what kind of damage mitigation I could expect to get. What I learned from this is that the percentage of damage mitigation you get from your armor value is close to .0015 times your armor value. This has some interesting implications that I note in the following graphic.
With higher costs, proportionally to resource respective resource pools, on skills like Inner Rage it is tempting to go for infused on gear. Let's say that we choose to take infused over reinforced. In the case of the image we would gain 336 health and 127 stamina. That is fine, but in the terms of patch 1.5 those stats would be very tiny. What we gain by not having infused is 1459 extra armor. By finding the % damage mitigation of 1459 armor we can theory craft a little bit. Let's say that we test our 1459 armor (2.2% mitigation) against a certain mantikora. The monstrous physical damage of that specific creature is so great that 2.2% damage mitigation can cause net resource gains compared to the resource gains from having infused.
Let's briefly think about skills.
What skill should we use? Well, it depends the fight. Major Ward from Hardened armor can give us about 7.7% damage mitigation. Heroic Slash can give an enemy Minor Maim and prevent 15% of the enemies damage. At a steep cost, Ring of Preservation can reduce the damage we take by 8% with a minor ward buff. These could all stack with each other and prevent quite a bit of incoming damage, but remember you only have so many skill spots so pick what is best for the content you are doing and has the best group synergies. Don't forget that diminishing returns on mitigation effect the tank more than the rest of the group.
Finally, I must comment on the implications of switching from infused to reinforced. Many people put good effort into building their dream setup. As you see, I've put effort into re-crafting gear I already have because I now want to use the reinforced trait. This only cost me a 100k or so which is a ton of gold to some people, but small potatoes compared to the following.
I know that I've heard one goal of the ESO R&D is to have players feel good with the end game gear that they achieve. It would be hard to find a single thing that has made players collectively feel worse than the current situation with randomly rolled traits on uncraftable gear. It is rare to complete VDSA or an Undaunted pledge and have someone excited for getting just what they needed and this is because of the random trait roles and random armor type roles. It is about time that this system is changed and that players can progress their gear and game play with trait changes.
I invite everyone to comment and especially point out errors that I may have made.
Check out Tanking with the LT - champion points and block cost reduction!
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/158960/tanking-with-the-lt-champion-points-and-block-cost-reduction-for-tanking.
Edited by Personofsecrets on July 9, 2015 2:10AM Don't tank
"In future content we will probably adjust this model somewhat (The BOP model). It's definitely nice to be able to find a cool item that you don't need and trade it to someone who can't wait to get their hands on it." - Wrobel