Defence: Order of Calculations

Missile Reflect



Dodge



Block



Armour



Damage Reduction



Damage Absorption



Health

Firstly we need to cover the order of calculations regarding defence which will help explain why some defensive stats fair so poorly while others, so well. The order is as follows:Missile Reflect gets procced as this is obviously the logical choice. You'd be a bit annoyed if you had a high chance to reflect missiles and you kept dodging out of the way of them instead. It should be noted that for some reason despite just about everything else in this game stacking additively Missile Reflect stacks. Anyway its not on many items and its just kinda nice to have there aren't a huge number of mobs out there that use missiles I wouldn't go making a build out of it.Next we have dodge. This is nice and simple. You dodge something, no damage. Your dodge chance is your dodge chance. The hard cap for dodge is 75%. Its a miracle, Torchlight 2 actually did something simple.The Formula is just:Chance of being hit = 1 - Dodge ChanceAgain block we've already discussed and works very similarly to dodge. The formula is identical. Not much to say here.Next Armour, Ok, back to the land of complexities. So armour, in essence reduces the amount of damage you take from a source by between the amount of armour you have and 50% of your armour value. So if you get hit by 20 damage and have 10 armour you will take between 10 and 15 damage. The type of armour used is the type of damage dealt. Simple. Except its not that simple because nothing in this game is ever that simple.The complexity occurs when you have complex damage types. Lets use an example. Say you have have an axe that does 10 Physical damage and 10 Fire Damage and another axe that does 20 Physical Damage. Lets also say you have 0 Focus for this example to keep things as simple as possible. The point is the 2 axes do the same damage. However lets say you're using them against monsters that have 10 of every type of armour. If the game just naively applied the armour formula as I just described you would end up with a situation where weapons that did mixed damage did less damage than their pure counterparts because in our example the 20 Physical Damage axe would only be tested against the physical armour while the axe with 10 and 10 would be tested against both the Physical armour and the Fire Armour resulting in the pure Physical axe having a Damage range of between 10 - 15 and the split damage axe having a damage range of between 0 - 10.In order to prevent this the game uses proportionality to work this out. Basically first the game adds up all of the damage an incoming attack will do. It then divides each component by the total damage to get the proportionality of that component. This should be some number between 0 and 1. It then multiplies the corresponding resistance by that number before doing the armour calculation. Lets do an example:I am hit by a monster that does 30 Physical Damage and 60 Ice Damage. I have 100 Physical Armour and 50 Ice Armour. Firstly the game adds the damage of the incoming attack together and then divides each component. 30/90 = 1/3, 60/90 = 2/3. Then we multiply my respective armours by these amounts. 100 * 1/3 = 33.333, 50 * 2/3 = 33.333. Finally we apply the armour formula individually and see that the first part of the attack will deal between 13.333 and 0 damage and the second part will deal between 33.333 and 16.667.Now that all of that explanation is out of the way I now get to explain why that incredibly interesting and complex system is largely useless. It really does hurt. Damage Reduction is appliedarmour is. Obviously this reduces the amount of damage you take up to a maximum of 75%. However ittherefore decreases the effectiveness of armour by that much too. I'll give an example:Imagine you get hit by a hit for 1000 Damage and you have 200 Armour. Now lets say for a moment that your armour rolls for the maximum amount and saves you the full 200 damage its capable of. So you take an 800 Damage hit. Now lets say you have the cap of 75% damage reduction which is recommended for late game elite difficulty. This reduces the hit you just took to a paltry 200 Damage. However now lets look at the same scenario but remove the armour from the equation. You take the 1000 damage and this time it goes straight through. Now your damage reduction kicks in and reduces it to 250 damage. Notice how that 200 armour actually only ended up saving you 50 damage even when it max rolled? This is why armour isn't very good. Not to mention the fact that its tied to vitality and is hard to stack without sacrificing other much more useful stats. I wish they had thought about this more before choosing this order of damage.I should also mention here that the two melee classes, the Engineer and the Berserker, have an innate 25% damage resistance. This stacks additively.After this is Damage absorption effects like the Engineer's Forcefield. Incidentally this is why Forcefield is so strong while Aegis is so weak. Forcefield benefits from all these effects before it takes a hit meaning it stays strong for a long time. Aegis on the other hand requires a hit to go through everything before it even has a chance to proc. In short, never take Aegis.Finally, after all of this you take damage, or maybe the hit never gets here because you have so many defensive stats. At least