…and yes, you can. With just armor oriented gear and idols. No skills, no “on hit” effects, no buffs, no class-specific passives.
I took Forge Guard for its many Armor oriented bonuses, but it turns out it wasn’t needed. The flat armor from Sentinel-specific Body Armor, Helmet and %Armor from Relic plays a role, but that can be replaced with class-specific source of Armor.
Everything else is class independent
Armor cap is somewhere between 55820-55965 Armor, if LE Tools is correct:
Armor cap is actually 85% (hard cap). 84%, which is what you got, is a soft cap due to the formula.
There is also another soft cap at 81% or 82%, which is when you reach the amount of armor that is realistically feasible and after which investment to increase is much bigger.
You are correct. I forgot about the whole average/min/max thing in LETools. My bad. I just saw the planner and you reaching 84% with the average values.
It would be interesting to know if the formula actually allows to eventually reach 86%, just for fun. I have a suspicion it doesn’t and 85% is actually the limit of the function.
Is there anything that adds directly to DR% that might let you get past it, though?
For example, I can go to 116500 Armor if I slap T7 affixes everywhere, spend passive points and add 10 recent hits (stacks of Stalwart). But LE Tools will always cut off the number at 85%. I assume the game does the same, so the answer is no.
As for going past 85% DR, stack other sources of DR
PS: I forgot about the passive Iron Reflexes in Forge Guard (which is bugged and currently doesn’t work). Converting dodge rating into Armor pushes this close to 200k armor
And there’s still more. Spec into the 100% armor buff in Forge Strike, and then start channeling Rebuke or Smelter’s Wrath for another 75% armor while channeling. Those aren’t shown in LE tools.
Well, I assume the game has the hard cap so that, even if you do get a higher value, it cuts off. I was curious mostly about the formula itself, if it allows higher values.
Anyway, good job on reaching it, even if theoretical. I don’t know if the devs intended this to happen already (at least in theory) or if it’s due to recent changes.
Could you tell from your planner which increases come from 1.1+ or 1.0+?
Would it have been possible to reach this theoretical max in previous versions?
LETools planner doesn’t let you change the version, but if you load a planner from a build with a different version, it lets you tinker with it just the same. For example, this build from 1.0.3. You think you can reach the cap as well (you can change the mastery and it will retain the version and the older tree)?
Even if you don’t feel like it, I have to congratulate you for the ingenious way you got there and simply for the fun of it. Well done
One approach is like you said, load an old version planner and re-add everything.
Another approach is open my link and then go to individual pages for every affix and every item and check if they were present in 1.0, there’s a version history if you scroll down.
Meanwhile I found out that it isn’t as class agnostic as I believed, because when I switch to a Rogue, you cannot add the STR affix on rogue-specific body armor and helmets, so it seems the STR is class specific to primalists and sentinels.
However, if I change to a unique item, for example Urzil’s Pride, now I can add the STR affix. I wonder if that’s an LE Tools bug, or if it works like that in the game too
I expect it works that way in the game as well. It’s only the specific class armor that has the restriction. Since the unique doesn’t fall into that category, it doesn’t have them.
I think this is intended, as, in theory, the class specific gear should give you more than a general one, even if it’s a unique.
I doubt it holds up that well in practice, though.
So Rogue can reach the armor cap too, but it’s way more difficult. I had to use “Armor while Channeling” blessing and one item (body armor) with double exalted affixes (T7 + T6).
Found a similar question (1 month old) asked on LE discord and Mike replied that class-specific affixes should make the item class-specific, so STR on helmet is a bug in LE Tools, and therefore Rogue has no way to reach the cap without using double or triple exalted gear.
