Diablo 4 Armor Systems: Damage Reduction
PvP Damage Reduction:
- Inherent damage reduction granted against other Players in PvP.
- Stacks with all other sources of Damage Reduction.
Damage Reduction from Bleeding Enemies:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies that are Bleeding.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Burning Enemies:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies that are Burning.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Close Enemies:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies in melee range.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies far away from you.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Enemies Affected by Damage Over Time:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies that are affected by any Damage Over Time effect. This includes Bleeding, Burning, Poisoning, and Shadow Damage Over Time.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Elites:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from Champions, Elites, Bosses and Players.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Poisoned Enemies:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies that are Poisoned.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Enemies Affected by Shadow Damage Over Time:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies that are affected by Shadow damage over time.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Enemies Affected by Traps:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from enemies that are affected by a Rogue's Trap Skills.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction from Vulnerable Enemies:
- Reduces incoming damage taken from Vulnerable enemies.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction while Fortified:
- Reduces incoming damage taken while your Fortify is greater than or equal to your current Life.
- Stacks with the damage reduction inherently received from being Fortified.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction while Injured:
- Reduces incoming damage taken while you are below 35% Life.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
Damage Reduction with an Active Barrier:
- Reduces incoming damage taken while you have an active Barrier.
- As this stat increases, additional bonuses become less effective.
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Armor affixes
- +x Armor
- +x% Total Armor
- +x% Total Armor while in Werebear Form
- +x% Total Armor while in Werewolf Form
- +x Mount Armor
Iron Barb Elixir
| Name | Requires | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Weak Iron Barb Elixir | Level 5 | Increases Armor by 50, Thorns by 25, and Experience by 5% for 30 minutes. |
| Iron Barb Elixir | Level 35 | Increases Armor by 200, Thorns by 100, and Experience by 5% for 30 minutes. |
| Strong Iron Barb Elixir | Level 50 | Increases Armor by 300, Thorns by 150, and Experience by 5% for 30 minutes. |
| Potent Iron Barb Elixir | Level 65 | Increases Armor by 400, Thorns by 200, and Experience by 5% for 30 minutes. |
| Heady Iron Barb Elixir | Level 80 | Increases Armor by 500, Thorns by 250, and Experience by 5% for 30 minutes. |
| Iron Skin Elixir | Level 36 | Increases Armor by 900 and Experience gained by 5% for 30 minutes. |
You may only have one Elixir active at a time.
| Name | Jewelry | Requires Level |
|---|---|---|
| Crude Skull |
| 15 |
| Chipped Skull |
| 20 |
| Skull |
| 40 |
| Flawless Skull |
| 50 |
| Royal Skull |
| 60 |
Diablo 4 Armor Systems
I’m happy to talk about the armor system. In Diablo 4, armor is the major way for players to mitigate incoming damage, especially physical damage.
The major way for people to acquire armor is through the five armor slots. They are Helm, chest, pants, boots, and gloves. And mostly for Fantasy reasons, we made Helm, Chest, and Pants to provide the most armor value. Well, boots and gloves provide the smallest amount of armor value.
The armor value of the item depends on the item’s power. In Diablo 4, we use the item power value to represent the power of the item. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve talked a lot about how item power works.
The item power value is based on the Monster Power and we need a value to represent how powerful this is like when you start getting more challenging content in the later World. You’ll get more and more powerful items and we need something to evaluate that. We use the item power to represent that power and you can see that on the items.
If you like, you can compare the two items. If the item has a higher item power, that means that item most likely going to be more powerful than the lower item power. But not always the case, it might be specific affixes or things that are especially powerful for your build.
The armor value actually directly tied to this item power on the armor items. It’s actually skating linearly with the item power. The higher the item power, the more armor value that item provides.
We have some baseline for how much damage mitigation the player has. Because of this, when you loot higher power items, you naturally gain a higher amount of armor. Therefore, it’s guaranteed you always have a certain amount of damage mitigation against physical damage. And so armor works differently in Diablo 4 than it did in Diablo 3. Particularly for Elemental resistances.
In Diablo 4, because of the mechanical, we made sure the item the player has a certain amount of damage and mitigation against the physical damage. But then, we found out some monsters are doing non-physical damage. And that caused trouble for the player. For example, there’s a dungeon boss that only deals Shadow damage. And that caused some serious balance problems for the encounter team, because people who have a reasonable amount of Shadow resistance, that boss is not that hard. But some people, when they
have zero Shadow resistance, the boss is almost unbeatable. They will always get one shot for this boss. And players at low levels, they might not have access to as much Shadow resistance.
So to solve this problem, what we did is we made some change to the armor system. So armor not only absorb or mitigate incoming physical damage, we also make it absorb a certain amount of non-physical damage. For whatever percentage the armor of the physical damage, it also absorbs half of the that amount of non-physical damage. For example, your armor absorbs 60 physical damage, so your armor will also absorb 30 percent of all the non-physical damage.
So fire damage, shatter damage, so on? Exactly. And because of this,
people know getting some amount of mitigation against non-physical damage. So that shadow boss is still challenging for people with zero Shadow resistance, but it’s in a much more controllable way.
And as players level up, and they get access to higher World tiers. Those worlds is actually have a penalty to your Elemental resistances. So you’re going to have to really make sure that you’re keeping up on those resistances. When you get to higher world, we we added more penalty for the players to make the higher World more challenging.
We put some 20% penalty from World tier 2 to World tier 3 for the resistance. So you you gain 20 less resistance. And from World tier 3 to World tier 4, we put even higher penalty. it’s 40. So it will be a lot more challenging than world history. But players have access as they’re getting up into those higher levels. They’re also getting access to more sources of Elemental resistance.
We added the elementary resistances into in-game system, like a skill tree, like item affixes, like a paragon system. You can acquire those resistance through more and more weight. We actually expose more and more weight for you to be able to acquire armor and resistance at the end game.
So I think you brought some charts to show in more detail how the mitigation works.
Damage Reduction from Expected Armor
We have talked about all the all the basic or how armor works. I want to dive a little bit deeper into actually how armor affect players gameplay experience from level to level.
The first thing I want to talk about is at each level. We have a expected armor for player and based on that. We calculate what’s the damage reduction player can get at each level. And we balance the monster damage above that. From this chart, you can see at the beginning you based on the expected armor value. You can only get a little above 10 damage reduction. But it goes up pretty fast and either at the late game. You can get over 40 Damage reduction.
From the armor value, it makes sense quantity wise. Because at the beginning, you have only this light leather pants, it absorbs a very small amount of damage. But at a later level, you get this epic played armor that absorb a lot more. Because of this , the damage reduction going up. It means that we need to make the monster deal more and more damage to mitigate this damage reduction for the player.
And this is next I’m gonna talk about.
Damage Reduction Contribution Per Armor
We have another graph here. You see, it’s opposite to how much damage reduction we expect for player to get from Level. It’s from lower to higher. But actually the time, reduction per armor is going down with the level. So per point of armor that I have.
This is the chart that shows how much damage reduction that one what single point of armor gives me. At the beginning, you can see from this chart , every 100 armor kind of absorb about the five percent of the damage reduction. But it goes down pretty fast early, and slow down at the end. And at the end, you can see it like each one 100 armor can only absorb one percent damage reduction.
We make it work this way, because we want to make sure that designers have room to add more armor bonus at engage at the end game. we try to avoid the situation like at the beginning, you get to a pretty good amount of armor. Then you totally forgot about this. Like early on we talk about, we added a resistant penalty to a four word tier. Here that’s actually for a very similar purpose. Because of this penalty, even though you have a pretty good resistance either early game. You still need to look for more resistance at a late game.
Armor Damage Reduction(Armor = 2000)
When the challenges starts, they need to find a lot of other way they can look for. Like for sorceress class, they can look for energy shield. For Druid and Barbaren, in the local 45 power and for Rogue class they look for more touch hands. So not only they build on the armor and resistance to mitigate the damage at the late again. Because the challenge becomes so tough, the world becomes the monster is so harsh. They need to find the multiple way to be able to survive in this harsh world.
So far I have been talking about all of this is the one player fighting the monster. So next I’m gonna talk what if you fight against a different level Master. If a monster higher than you or lower than you.
So this chart shows a player with 2000 armor what happened how much damage reduction is actually absorbed.
For that 2000 armor, when they fight against different level monsters, and you can see the higher the monster level is, the less damage reduction this 2000 armor actually absorb. And you can see, at the lower level they’re actually already like reached the damage reduction cap. We set it for armor, which is 85 percent. But when you for 2000 armor, usually the player can come across this amount of armor. Around the level 30, if you see this level 30 character, when you fight allow a 100 monster, the 2000 armor can actually only absorb five percent of the incoming damage. This is pretty minimum. So that means, when you run a player for them to challenge a higher level monster, not only the monster deal more damage, they also penetrate more of your of your armor. So I’m gonna need more armor as I level up.
During level of a campaign, while you’re doing campaign, how you do the open world content it’s not a big issue. Because the monster skill with you. But when you do the end-game content, like a Neymar dungeon or Hell tier, a lot of times you are forced to fight to fight higher level monster. And in those cases, you will take like this building punishment to. You need to find a way to mitigate the more damage.
Some people like they build up their offensive power. They try to finish the combat faster. So that, they can take less damage. While other people, they find all the way like beside going through a paragon system skill tree, item ethics is and the Legendary Power, all the ways to mitigate that punishment.
We also added damage mitigation to monsters in Diablo 4.
Damage Reduction
The most important way to reduce incoming damage is Damage Reduction. This stat comes in a certain percentage and it does exactly what it says: reduces all incoming damage by that many percent if the conditions are met. You can get damage reduction from:
- As a primarily melee class Barbarians get 10% base Damage Reduction
- Every class gets an extra 92% Damage Reduction in PvP
- Chests can roll a variety of Damage Reduction stats, such as Close Damage Reduction or Distant Damage Reduction
- Skills
- Passives
- Legendary Aspects
Similar to Resistances, Damage Reduction stacks multiplicatively. That doesn't mean that Damage Reduction becomes less effective as you stack it. If you get a new effect that gives you 20% Damage Reduction, you will take 20% less damage than without this effect, simple as that. What it does mean, is that it's impossible to become invincible just by stacking Damage Reduction.
The only time when Damage Reduction stacks additively is when something stacks with itself. For example when you put multiple ranks into a Damage Reduction passive, or when using Rogue skill Dark Shroud, which gives up to 5 shrouding shadows and a stacking Damage Reduction value for each shadow you have.
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