The maximum percent armour can reduce damage taken from a hit is 85%.
When a character’s armour is in the negatives, damage taken from hits is increased by the same amount that armour would reduce the damage taken from hits if the armour amount was positive.
Armour Shred has no cap in either stack count or effectiveness count and can reduce an enemy’s armour into the negatives.
–I’m wondering if the increased damage taken from hits from negative armour also has an 85% cap. For example, if you shred a character’s armour so much that the formula results in 90% increased damage taken from hits, would it be capped to 85% like positive armour would?
i believe the inverse curve is identical, with the same diminishing returns.
going by tunk’s formula (which i think is up to date but may be a patch behind… either way is fine because i’m just using it to demonstrate the concept), you would need -13000 armor to reach 80% increased damage taken. at -100 per stack of shred, that means you would have to apply 130 stacks within the span of 4 seconds. some minion builds may be able to reach this number but for most builds it is strictly not possible.
so basically, whether or not there is a hard cap at 85% increased damage taken, it’s not a concern for most players.
Yeah, relating to what you mentioned, I have a minion build that could comfortably reach that amount if I invested enough into Armour Shred affixes. I thought I’d ask before delving into the math to know how far beyond a potential cap I could actually reach, though now that I’ve seen the numbers it doesn’t seem to be worthwhile considering the opportunity costs and diminishing returns. Thanks for the answer and link (this site looks like it’ll come in handy).
glad to help! tunklab is a fantastic set of tools, as is lastepochtools.com.
i think you’re right that the investment required to hit the cap is probably too high compared to the benefits for most builds. it’s worth noting that the default settings on that graph are for a level 100 zone, so until you reach empowered monoliths it will be significantly easier to reach the cap.
if you are playing a necro with skeletons, skele mages, and wraiths or any combo of minions that can hit the same target without bodyblocking each other (which shouldn’t happen as much as of 0.8.2, but still possible), and you fully invest in the minion armor shred node in the necro tree, each hit from your minions will apply 2 stacks of shred. let’s say you have 11 archers, 5 mages, and 9 wraiths all attacking the same target, that’s 25 minions applying 2 stacks per hit. it will reach the cap very easily if the thing survives long enough!
In my case I’m exploring different ways to scale the damage of a hipster Forged Weapons build and I found that I could easily stack Armour Shred to the extreme. My aim is to scale attack speed as much as possible, get as much mana gain from Vengeance usage as I can (28), and spam Forge Strike and Vengeance to produce as many Forged Zweihanders as I can. The Armour Shred chance and Melee Attack Speed suffixes on a weapon alone would allow 20 Forged Weapons to reduce armor by around 12,000. I estimate 20 but I can already get to 15 against a single target with a very suboptimal setup, so maybe more.
Now imagine using Manifest Armor while wearing a helmet and body armor with increased Armour Shred effect, gloves with Armour Shred chance and melee attack speed, the aforementioned weapon stats granted, and its skill tree scaling helmet, body armor, and glove stats plus another chunk of Armour Shred chance. It gets so pointlessly low that I had to do some estimates for the giggles… Just it alone would subtract 290,098 from armor with basic attacks after 4 seconds, and a little more with a faster weapon.
Sure as hell not actually going to do that, though.
