Second look at armor!

My colleagues Honors and Wrathy have already written about this, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.

The conventional wisdom for a while now has been that 11 armor is equivalent to 1 stamina. Theck, however, has turned this assumption on its head by plotting out the value of armor based on how much of a fight is magical damage. In this post he has a graph basically showing various armor/stamina values–with this as the money quote:

So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.

For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth.

It’s interesting because just about every fight has *some* magical component to them which means that the old 11:1 figure is just about worthless. This kind of throws out the window the ancient understanding of EH as a figure of armor and stamina, with no vacillating in between. Now, serious vacillation is needed.

What this means is that if you’re evaluating two pieces of gear, one with lots of armor and one with lots of stamina, you should choose the piece with more stamina (assuming the excess armor doesn’t exceed the value of excess stamina for the amount of magical damage in that fight). All that means, ultimately, is this is another point in the column of “stamina > all”. Stamina remains the safest bet, sadly.

Well, not totally, armor does have some worth. Just not as much worth as we assumed it had before.