[ellestil]

Has anyone done any definitive study on how much damage is reduced per amount of armor gained? I was killing some time in Wardship the other morning and just for kicks I started watching how much damage I was taking against a fighter Bloodhowler. This was in a Paladin replenishment stance (+hp and mana regen).

So let's say I was taking an average of 100 damage. I then used our temporary armor buff (30secs) which increased my armor. The damage coming in was still averaging 100. So I got a crit off and stacked our chain armor buff on. The damage went down about 1-2 points. Those two stacked together increase my armor by a few hundred points, and yet, the benefit wasn't very noticeable.

I let those buffs wear off, then I used our judgement that decreases the mobs strength. Now the damage coming in was 90-92. I noticed a much bigger effect of lowering the mobs str vs increasing my armor rating.

So, this made me ponder exactly how big of a roll our gear was playing into our ability to mitigate damage (any tank class). If greatly increasing my armor with buffs barely lowered the damage I was taking, then I can only assume that upgrading your armor has a very small gain to it. Sure you will still upgrade your armor, but how much benefit are you getting from it?

Also, why is it when I mouseover my armor class tooltip on the character sheet window, that the values listed there differ from the values listed under your defense rating in the same window. For example, if you mouseover your armor class number, it may say "Mitigates 26.7% of melee damage". But if you mouseover your defense rating number, it says "Mitigates 28.6% of melee damage". Why two different numbers?

So in summation, idk if armor increases by buff or gear are working like they should. Anyone know what the deal is?