In this article, we’ll be looking at exactly how armor functions and how it interacts with POE Currency additional physical damage reduction.

What Is Armor?

Armor is a defensive stat in Path of Exile that is typically found on the gear that you can equip and is also granted by the Determination aura.

Therefore, if your budget is sufficient, try to buy POE Currency to get or craft more excellent weapons, claws POE Items or other items. In this way, you can defeat various monsters and bosses more easily.

Armor Function
Firstly, we need to mention that if you have armor, the physical damage reduction shown on your character sheet is completely redundant. That’s because the physical damage reduction provided by armor is scaled based on the total damage of the hit compared to the total armor of the defender.

For example, if you have ten thousand armor and you take a hit of 1000 damage, the armor would prevent 66% of the damage. But with the same 10,000 armor when you take a hit of 2000 damage, the armor only prevents 50% of the damage.

Notice that the armor in this example prevented less damage against the larger hit. For this reason, armor is much more effective against numerous smaller hits rather than a few larger hits

Armor Calculation.

Let’s take a look at the calculation for damage reduction from armor. This equation represents the physical damage reduction provided by armor, where AR is the total armor of the defender and damage is the total physical damage of the hit that is taken.

Let’s take the example from earlier. We have 10,000 armor and we’re taking a hit of one thousand physical damage. If we plug the numbers into the equation, we can calculate the damage reduction of 0.66 recurring. We can then multiply this by the original 1000 damage taken to work out the actual damage we are mitigating, which is 667 damage or reduction of 66%.

But what about when we take a much larger hit? Let’s say we still have ten thousand armor, but this time we’re taking a hit of five thousand physical damage.

Plugging those numbers into the equation, we can see that the damage reduction is much lower this time because our armor is lower comparatively with the damage of the hit that we are taking. We mitigate 1429 of the original 5000 damage or a reduction of about 28.5%.

Armor Only Works VS Physical Hits.

It’s really important to mention here that by default. Armor only prevents physical damage from hits.

In Path of Exile, many of the enemies will deal multiple types of damage in a single hit. When this happens, armor will only interact with the physical damage portion of the hit.

For example, if an enemy dealt a hit of two thousand physical damage, but 50% of their physical damage was converted to lightning damage, the hit would deal 1000 physical damage and 1000 lightning damage. The armor calculation would then apply to the 1000 physical damage that was taken from the hit.

Armor VS DoT.

Armor doesn’t interact with damage over time in any way. So, physical damage taken from things like Bleeding will not be reduced because it deals with physical damage over time.

What Is Additional PDR?

So, what about additional physical damage reduction? This is a stat that is typically found on gear (which you can get by using specific POE orbs), such as strength and strength hybrid body armors and shields. It’s also found on endurance charges and the buff that’s provided by Summon Chaos Golem.