It seems that since armour is a bit meh as a defence, shredding it does almost nothing for your damage. Yet it would be great if it wasn’t just default that every build must aim for crit.
Has anyone found a build that uses armour shred effectively?
I hadn’t thought about it before, but you’re right: crit and armour shred do basically the same thing. That is, making your hits hit harder. The difference is that armour shred you have to stack up on an enemy, whereas crit just… works.
Ailment stacking is definitely a thing (see Bleed and Poison builds), but the difference is that Bleed and Poisons, once stacked, will be doing tons of damage. With Armour Shred, you still need to hit and hurt the enemy in some other way. So, your limited resources (affixes, passives and skill points) need to be split multiple ways:
- Shred chance
- Shred effectiveness (maybe)
- Attack/Cast speed (to stack ailments effectively)
- Raw hit damage
Not sure what the solution would be here. First thing that comes to mind is that the first stack of Armour Shred could be much more effective than further stacks? That would at least remove the need to stack shred chance and attack speed.
In terms of builds, I use it on my Forge Guard minion master. He’s a work-in-progress (please don’t judge me), but this is what he currently looks like: Forge Guard, Level 76 (LE Beta 0.8.1e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
The plan is that he does almost zero DPS himself, stacks defences and lets the minions do all the work. In a way, the shred works kind of as a minion buff, rather than a monster debuff.
Gameplay is essentially dumping all my mana into Forge Strike, then quickly regen mana (via Time and Faith passive) which also shreds armour (via weapon affix and Vengeance skill nodes). It’s relatively effective in Echoes; rubbish versus bosses 
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If anyone is using it boardman21 would. I use some armor shred that is a part of passives/skills but there are better stats for gear/crafting imo.
Boardman21 build compendium
The most effective builds that use armor shred are builds that do physical damage (as armor protects 2x as much against these as other elements)
ALso remember that armor can go negative and when you apply it to an enemy although it does have Diminishing returns it is a “More” damage modifier up to 80% for Physical builds and 40% for other elements
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The most impact amour shred has on my melee minion Necro. Especially on bosses you can see your damage ramp up really quickly. Since Armor shred has no cap you can apply a ton of stacks.
I absolutely will use it if I can get it easily and have the suffix slots to spare on a very fast hitting build. Something like a hammer/smite/DO build that hits a stupid amount, sure, I’ll go for 1 or 2 affixes, or a Necro minion build like Raw suggested.
If I had a slow, hard hitting build i might not as it probably wouldn’t feel good to me despite the individual hits getting more use from it.
I’m using it on one of my flurry rogues and found that physical resistance shred does a better job for me. Armor shred does help though.
Yeah, phys shred is a bit more effective. On a boss, to get 40% increased damage you’d need to get 20 stacks of phys shred. In a lvl 100 zone to get 40% increased phys damage from armour shred you’d need 25 stacks, or ~140 stacks to get 40% increased non-phys damage.
Where does the big difference between the 25 and ~140 stacks come from (phys vs non-phys from armor shred in the lvl 100 zone)? I thought armor protects half as much from non-phys, which would make it appear it’d be in the line of 25 vs 50 stacks.
It does, but if you’re getting 40% more damage on non-phys that means it’s giving 80% more damage on phys which is the % you want on the below:
40% required ~25 stacks, 80% requires ~140.
The diminishing returns, I see it now thanks, 
in patch 8.2 I came back to check armour shred, and it seems far, far better. The build I was testing it on had elemental hits, so the change from armour protecting against 50% of elemental hits means that as a defence, it is more satisfying, and to offensively shred it is more satisfying.
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Am finding similar results… Armour seems far *more powerful as a defence mechanism since the last patch and the shred effects now seem to visibly counter it more noticably - I feel its too early for me to say for sure but I think its an improvement.
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