I’ve noticed that I always end up building with Magic items whenever I play around with Gear Builder, and it was basically inevitable that I’d get to the position of having a bunch of one of the new stats.
Honestly, I have yet to see a reason to use one of them. Starting with Armor Piercing because it’s the most relevant; it feels like it’s always either Power or AP with gear outside of Acid stuff, and why would I go with Armor Piercing, which is a situational damage boost based on the enemy’s health and blocking, while Power is a flat boost to all attacks regardless of what the enemy has? I get that AP can go through blocks, which is handy, although with what I’ve heard about the B-Team hoping to get its blocking counter removed, I don’t see a reason to run it except as a side-effect of the armor I actually care about. It’s like Intensity all over again! That jaundiced fist haunts my nightmares!
Resistance seems like it’d be fairly helpful, since while just as, if not more situational (AFAIK, not sure if it affects blocks too), you’re going to want to charge up attacks more, and getting some protection while doing so seems good to have, although it might not warrant its existence for builds with high defense already. I’ve heard good things about it though, which is more than what I can say for AP and especially Regeneration.
Finally, there’s Regeneration. The general consensus I’ve seen on the stat can be summed up as “Regeneration is the uncle you don’t talk about.” It’s weird in that it’s a stat that you absolutely need to build an entire set around, although when you use a set based on it, it hardly does anything noticable. I know that it has to have limited effectiveness so that we don’t get people doing 300+ damage per attack while regenerating 75 HP a tick, but regenerating 4 extra HP a tick is too little. It seems hard to balance as well, since you really don’t want the former scenario, but also not the latter situation.
Anyway, I wasn’t going for any particular build on this Warlock other than an effective one. I wish I wasn’t hellbent on getting Blasted for most of my set, because it makes me immediately rush for any Akursius Keep charts I get, only for the stat armor pieces I get with Blasted to be the entirely-useless Alitheia set.
Armour pierce is pretty useless right now for both pvp and pve, because there are just simply very few times that your opponent is actually blocking.
Resistance is quite good, since it works with both blocking and during certain attacks like crash. Also if you’re blocking, it either first halves the damage because of blocking, and then multiplies the damage based on the resistance amount, so it gives quite a bit of defense.
Regen is alright, but it’s not really useful on builds that don’t use vitality since it gives way more regen to builds with better base health.
so if you really want to use one of the new substats, go for resistance since that would help you the most.
armor pierce, resistance, and regen are all USELESS for pvp and pve forget running any of them
ap: you can invest 160 ap for approximately 7 more damage against someone with 2k-3k hp. Why? Just go power. You wanna damage through block? What’s the point, blocking’s only 50% reduction anyways. Just go power.
resistance: you get blocking power. Do you block? Even if you do, are you gonna hold g the entire fight? Why would you use this instead of defense? Or any other useful stat?
regen: At 254 regen you heal about 90% more. This sounds great until you realize your healing is still like 15 per tick anyways in combat and you can easily take 500 damage in 5 seconds.
What was Armor Piercing even intended to be? It seems like the only thing that concept could ever amount to is a conditional damage increase, which will never be preferable over Power due to Power being unconditional.
Technically it could have block breaking effects, but the base blocking power in this game is simply too weak to make blocking worthwhile, and if it’s made to counter builds built around blocking, then that sucks even more because it means its a whole armor stat dedicated to countering a very rare type of player.
The only times I ever see blocking used is in PVP clips to parry an attack that the player isn’t able to dodge (because of endlag or something,) sitting in a block is already a death sentence regardless of whether or not the opponent has Armor Piercing.
