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Basic Theorycrafting: All About Toughness, Part 2

by - 11 years ago

Hello, everyone! My Name is Dannie “IAmDiR23” Ray, and I’ll be here every Saturday explaining all things theorycrafting in an effort to allo everyone to better understand the finer aspects of Diablo 3. Lets hope you haven’t forgotten all the math you learned in school because we will finally have a chance to put it to good use.


On Part 1, we looked at the Toughness Factors that make you stay alive. This time we will look at how the different factors scale, and we will try to get a real good understanding of diminishing returns.

 

By Diminishing Returns, we understand that; the more of a stat we stack, the less returns we get from it. You’ve noticed that is very easy to get to 50-60% Armor Reduction, but then it becomes really hard to keep going up. We only need to graph the Armor formula and see for ourselves.

Armor vs DR

 

So after a certain point, you could think Armor wouldn’t be worth getting. But not so fast, like we’ve seen in articles before, Damage reduction becomes more and more effective as its number rises. 50% reduction allows you to take twice as many hits, while 75% quadruples your Toughness. Once again we graph the formula to get a clearer look.

 

Toughness vs Damage Reduction

 

By now you are probably having a bit of a headache. The more Armor we stack, the less reduction we get per point. But as our reduction rises, the more Toughness we get per point. So what gives? What’s the sweet point to maximize our Toughness? Let me take the two above formulas, and put them together into a nice graph that ties your Armor directly with your Toughness.

Armor vs Toughness

 

Surprised? It’s a straight line, which means that every point of Armor is just as effective as the one before. The same applies for All Resistance, whose formula is Damage Reduction = AR/(AR+350).

Probably confusion is setting in again, are diminishing returns then a lie?

 

Well, the thing is Armor is not the only Toughness factor. Like we see in our graph, we need 3500 Armor to get double Toughness, and 7000 armor to get triple Toughness. But if instead of 7000 armor we would have 3500 armor, and 350 All Resistance. Then we would get Double Toughness from Armor, and Double Toughness from All Res. And so, two times Double becomes Quadruple.

So basically:

7000 Armor = Triple Toughness.

3500 Armor + 350 All Res = Quadruple Toughness.

So as you get more and more Armor, you get less returns than if you had gotten All Resists instead. The same applies for basically all of our Toughness Factors, and that’s how we get diminishing returns. Basically what we should be looking at is percentage increases to our Toughness factors. If one choice will take a toughness factor from 1.5 to 3, we will get 3/1.5= 2 times our Toughness. If the other choice takes us from 2.5 to 4 toughness factor, we are only getting 4/2.5= 1.6 times our Toughness.

This type of Diminishing Returns is what makes items like [d3item name =”String of Ears”] and [d3item name =”Stormshield”] so strong, the combination of the two is likely enough to give you Double Toughness against Melee attacks. When you’ve got really high numbers on Armor and All Res, doubling your toughness is really going to make you hard to take down.

 

But this is probably too much math for the week. Next time we will take a look at healing and we will learn why “Toughness/Health”, is one of the most important and more underrated stats in the game.

 


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


0 responses to “Basic Theorycrafting: All About Toughness, Part 2”

  1. cayce says:

    i doubt this still applies. if you look into leaderboards, people would prefer ar over armor, especially on demon hunter boards. when the grift goes higher with stronger elemental affixes hitting you, you have to overstack ar